The Offline Report

I was driving to downtown San Francisco to look for a summer job. We listened then to KGO AM 810 radio nearly round the clock. The familiar friendly voices of KGO turned serious before the 9AM talk show hour to deliver breaking news: a middle-aged man had "gone postal" on his ex-coworkers at a city high rise at 101 California street. It was still far away, off in the radio, in the media. I found parking and job-hunted at the restaurants I planned to ask for waitress positions. I kept hearing "101 California 101 California" over the airwaves of passing cars, the way we attuned to same media among strangers back then. (Neighboring cars co-listening to the same radio is depicted in "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood". It was like that. Empathy weaver built-in.) So I meandered down to 101 California and turned a corner to see a scrum of reporters at the corner. Boom michs, TV cameras, people writing into notebooks. Some serious, some relieved after hours of cove

July 6 "After his death, many Chinese lawyers offered tributes. But the authorities kept his funeral brief and limited attendance to 20 people, citing Covid limits, Mr. Pu said. Their real worry, he said, was Mr. Zhang’s legacy."    nytimes.com How Do I Prove That I Can Pay the Rent if I Don’t Have a Monthly Salary?     nytimes.com "In so doing, it favorably cited Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the abortion case overruled alongside Roe last month, for the view that decisions 'involving the most intimate and personal choices a person may make in a lifetime, choices central to personal dignity and autonomy, are central to the liberty protected by the 14th Amendment.'"    nytimes.com “No greater mistake can be made than to imagine that what has been written latest is always the more correct; that what is written later on is an improvement on what was written previously; and that every change means progress.”    medium.com/@ericweiner May 20 New Yor