WRITE TO EMPOWER

Writers may have more than deadlines to worry about. Apparently, em dashes now belong to AI-generated writing. Polished prose. Fragments, too. It’s like saying a good essay can only be written with AI assistance, if not entirely generated by it. Instead of getting credit for good writing, human writers now must prove they wrote their own polished prose. Built a balanced structure. Developed a compelling plot. It’s outrageous that I even now must qualify writers as humans. Wer

A nursing home should never become a place where citizenship quietly fades into the background simply because the body has grown frail.

After more than two decades inside nursing homes, former journalist Aldwin Fajardo-Ponder turns the stories behind the regulations, star ratings and inspection reports into his first book, Would You Leave Your Parents Here? Aldwin Fajardo-Ponder did not set out to become a nursing home administrator. He was a journalist. He had worked in newsrooms in the Philippines and the Pacific, writing for the Manila Standard, The Manila Times and Malaya, and later for newspapers in the

In the Bay Area, we have a habit of treating winter storms as a surprise, even when we have spent months talking about them. We watch the forecast, buy groceries at the last minute, and then act personally offended when a fallen tree takes out the power. This year, we have time to do better. NOAA says El Niño is strengthening and gives it a greater than 90 percent chance of becoming very strong this fall and winter. That raises concern, but it does not tell us which Bay Area

In the Bay Area, homelessness is impossible to ignore and remarkably easy to misunderstand. We see tents beneath freeway ramps, people sleeping in cars, families moving between motels, and men and women carrying everything they own in shopping carts. What we do not always see are the people one missed paycheck away from joining them: the home-care worker sleeping on a cousin’s couch, the senior choosing between rent and medication, the mother hiding an eviction notice from he

The First Amendment is only forty-five words long, but those words carry an astonishing amount of American life. They protect the right to worship—or not worship—according to one’s conscience. They protect the press from government control, citizens who criticize their leaders, protesters who assemble in public, and people who petition the government when it has failed them. These freedoms are often described as if they were permanent fixtures of the country, like rivers or m

The phrase “cottage industry” tends to conjure a charming little scene: someone baking bread in a sunlit kitchen, pouring candles at a wooden table, or sewing tote bags while an aesthetically perfect cup of coffee waits nearby. Social media has made the whole thing look almost suspiciously serene. What it usually leaves out is the flour on the floor, the packaging piled in the hallway, the customer who wants a handmade item by tomorrow, and the uncomfortable realization that

There are certain mornings history refuses to let us forget. September 11, 2001, began with one of those impossibly blue New York skies, the kind that should have belonged to commuters complaining about traffic, office workers nursing bad coffee, tourists taking too many pictures, and people already thinking about lunch before 9 a.m. Then the world changed. We have all seen the images so many times that they have almost become part of our collective memory: smoke pouring from

There is a particular kind of awareness that comes with being brown in America. You notice when you are the only one in the room. You notice when someone pauses at your last name. You notice when a person slows down their speech even though you understood them perfectly the first time. You notice when someone compliments your English and means well, but somehow still manages to remind you that, in their mind, you were not expected to speak it well. None of these things, by th

Gold does not speak, but governments make it say plenty. When a country removes bullion from the vaults of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the metal itself has not changed. It is still heavy, silent, and incapable of earning interest. What has changed is the country’s judgment about where its emergency wealth should be kept—and whom it trusts to hold it. The Netherlands moved more than 78 metric tons of gold from New York to London as part of a reshuffling of its reserv