My wife and I adopted a ‘pandemic puppy’ to make self-isolating less lonely. It didn’t work out like that. — “I think we should get a dog.” This was my wife, Alex, our first night sheltered in place. I was on the couch, in sweatpants, eating a burrito; Alex stood before me in jeans and a black blazer. In the crook of her right arm she cradled a laptop full…

California’s dreaded fire season is once again upon us, but this year it feels more foreboding — Here we are again. The Bay is choked with smoke. San Francisco, viewed from the east, is entirely concealed by it, smothered by a charcoal bog. The Berkeley hills are too. Beyond — everywhere — our world wavers under a hazy drifting skein, eerie as a haunted bridal veil. The…

On pay-to-publish schemes and the limitations of thought leadership — Recently Rolling Stone launched The Culture Council, a private, pay-to-publish program designed for founders, executives, and other entrepreneurial types who, in addition to running businesses, also write. (According to its application page, “Candidates must sit in a senior-level position at a company generating at least $500K in annual revenue, or…

Thoughts for a strange Thanksgiving — News last week of the development of two covid-19 vaccines gave mankind license to do something it hasn’t been able to do for a long time: imagine a world free of the coronavirus — and, implicitly, of chaos. The writer and founding editor of Deadspin Will Leitch put it this…

It’s a paradox. — This essay originally appeared in SFGate. It was published in July. Unfortunately, it remains relevant. Last summer I attended a party at my parents’ house in the East Bay. It was one of those casually sun-dappled affairs full of laughter and hugging that today feel like relics of a distant…

“DAD! Good news. While you were on Twitter, I unspooled the entire roll of toilet paper.” — There’s a theory roundly feared by astrophysicists, NASA scientists, and government leaders alike called the Kessler Syndrome. It foretells the consequences of a collision in Earth’s lower orbit. It posits that — thanks to the many disused satellites, abandoned launch vehicles, Tesla Roadsters, and discarded hunks of space trash that…

The worst fire season in history could usher in a new mental health crisis — Weeks ago, when the fires started, Californians responded with stoicism. We mourned the fire season’s early arrival, bemoaned the prematurely compromised air, grieved for our neighbors whose homes had been lost, and wondered aloud just how the hell 2020 could get any damn worse… but we muddled on. …