“This is my praise song for Farwell Canyon—that glorious Coyote-blessed and bewitched cathedral of salmon—for my enemy who is also my relative, and for the fish we love and share.” Unmissable Julian Brave Noisecat essay on rivers, memories & imagining otherwise. placesjournal.org/article/farw...

You’re laughing. The Mellon foundation is providing grants to gender and area studies programs and you’re laughing.

In the birthplace of Ghana’s cocoa industry, neighbors negotiate the expansion of a harvest path — and with it, an alternative model for development in the populous West African nation. A new essay in Places by Ghanaian architect and researcher Courage Dzidula Kpodo.

One of every thousand American residents has been taken into custody by ICE in the last year.

NEW: The Institute of Museum and Library Services is now accepting applications for its 2026 grant cycle. But this time, it has unusually specific criteria: It “particularly welcomes” projects that align with President Donald Trump’s vision for America.

whatever it may be, your movement needs poets (don't always look like Poets), not grifters, because every movement needs people who patiently examine, life long, how language pricks and punctures and grazes and warms and holds and pushes us toward what we don't know yet how to say--world in process

Really, truly an incredible feeling to read a review of your book that not only Gets It but has devastating reporting of its own — sordid tales of landlords chopping down trees "to reassert control, to unsettle tenants, and to make us leave" averyreview.com/issues/74/sh...

“These political parties, they’re like shipwrecks: metal structures, they’re dead. Street protests, youth politics come into them like shoaling fish, to turn them into living reefs.” www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

The Texas Department of Transportation is annexing properties along I-35 in Austin to make way for an expansion of the interstate. Here are some of the people and businesses being displaced:

People attributed ludicrous censoriousness to “political correctness” and wokeness but here’s the University of Alabama literally prohibiting student publications because their intended audiences are women and Black students - far more absurd and restrictive than any rules at the imaginary PCU

What is the point of this clause: "even suspected criminals"? Why is it in the sentence? @charliesavage.bsky.social @julianbarnes.bsky.social @johnismay.bsky.social

5 immigration judges were summarily fired in San Francisco today, the largest such firing in the city all year. It continues a trend of the Trump admin. targeting immigration judges nationwide. In San Francisco, at least 12 have been sacked this year. missionlocal.org/2025/11/sf-i...

I want to uplift again this brilliant piece of writing and thinking by @shannonmattern.bsky.social - placesjournal.org/article/extr... - I think that everyone who is interested in libraries would benefit from reading it.

Estimates vary, but Muni is currently running between 80% and 90% of pre-pandemic service. We're seeing crowding and pass ups again. Muni needs to be able to respond as demand grows. Passing a measure that does not allow for growth is a bad plan. We'd have to go back to the ballot again in 2028.

Where will I go, now that I'm gone? youtu.be/_CuENt0vkpE?...

@rollovereasy.org Gooooooooooood morning from Dogpatch! Yesterday I met Emily Sneddon, creaton of Fran Sans, a tyoeface based on the destination display signs on the Muni Breda Light Rail Vehicles, which are, as of today, retired. emilysneddon.com/fran-sans-es...

sometimes the word community is used but the word workers would be more accurate

I think often about those pebbles around the stacks at the Poetry Foundation.

man, it sure looks like republicans are using threat of federal government force to try and silence journalists

Careful out there folks! This article comes with risk of electric shock.

"Societies are defined by their libraries — by what we hold, what we lend, what we borrow and return, the knowledge we create, the values we defend."

I wrote about public libraries as spaces of civic solidarity, common knowledge, and public infrastructure — all endangered by commercial and federal saboteurs

A stat we don't talk about enough: Newspapers have lost 77% of their jobs over the last 20 year, more than any of the 532 other industries tracked by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

NEW: For years, the Phoenix nonprofit Keys to Change has run a mail room for thousands of homeless people. Now the U.S. Postal Service is cutting its $24,000 investment, leaving the organization to raise the extra money to keep it open.

"The entire human commons is about to become a Superfund site." The most Gen X (complementary) article I have read in a while. Worth reading if you have the stomach for it. All I can say is that the crash needs more care workers and librarians. (But yes, technologists, please return to blogging.)

Feeling this 💯 in the Bay Area. Thank you @kalxberkeley.bsky.social @gramophoneybaloney.bsky.social @djjohnrichards.bsky.social (plus JJ at #KPOO)

One of the many things @ninalakhani.bsky.social does so well is show the very real, very now cost of climate change at the most human level. This story is devastatingly good: www.theguardian.com/environment/...

This is how you blurb

The editor of Governing magazine has resigned after pressure to censor his work. This is a tragic development for (what was) an excellent magazine. www.politico.com/news/magazin...

While this federal administration has been busy empowering ICE to become, essentially, an extrajudicial militia allowed to disappear people from our streets, the Bay has been organizing. We will not be beaten down.

It's official! 🏛️ 🎉 The SF Board of Supervisors has unanimously declared October 22, 2025 as Internet Archive Day — celebrating our 1️⃣ trillion webpages preserved & our mission to provide universal access to all knowledge. Learn more & celebrate with us tonight! ➡️ blog.archive.org/2025/10/22/h...

Wikipedia is seeing a significant decline in human traffic because more people are getting the information that’s on Wikipedia via generative AI chatbots that were trained on its articles and search engines that summarize them without actually clicking to the site www.404media.co/wikipedia-sa...

We are so grateful to everyone who signed our petition (1,300 OF YOU!) asking our management to agree to a fair contract with basic job protections for us! THANK YOU!!! We keep doing fearless journalism because you make us fearless 😍

The first and only MacArthur fellow identified as a cartographer* is Potawatomi mapmaker Margaret Wickens Pearce. See her atlas of Land-Grab Universities @highcountrynews.org + all her work at www.studio1to1.net (*a handful of geographers have been previously awarded, including some who make maps)

This essay on place making in a pluralist city, valuing memory and identity and acknowledging fracture, but also moving toward a collective rebuilding and repair, is vital reading. It's about Homs in Syria, but no city can design its way out of history: placesjournal.org/article/mapp...

A mapping workshop with refugees from Homs, Syria, asked participants to draw their neighborhoods from memory, bridging gaps between houses to generate a shared image of a city destroyed by war. To rebuild justly, residents will need to understand this pluralist city as others have lived within it.

"Newsom has yet to publicly acknowledge what’s now California’s seventh and largest ICE detention facility."

"The energy of San Francisco is always directed outward, never to return. It would be too much for a city to keep." ❤️ Rod Roland's review (history, memoir) of skateboarding in the new @sfreviewofwhatever.bsky.social

imagine if a family of beavers randomly showed up right now and finished whatever thing you've been putting off

they think they can just erase trans joy and trans freedom. they can't. they can make things a lot harder and more painful. but that joy and that freedom is not theirs to take and it is incumbent on all good people to say so.

Another strong review for this "roving, inveterately curious" book. 👏👏👏

San Francisco and Bay Area folks: This is tomorrow! Join me and @emmettfitzgerald.bsky.social of @99pi.org for a shady conversation at the Commonwealth Club.

OUT TODAY: “Shade: The Promise of a Forgotten Natural Resource” by @samkbloch.bsky.social. The book, published by Random House, expands on an article Bloch wrote for Places in 2019, which has since become a definitive account of the value of shade as a civic resource and a mandate for urban design.

the great darkening has arrived. read my convo with Sam Bloch about his new book Shade: The Promise of a Forgotten Natural Resource for @lareviewofbooks.bsky.social and let us all get shade-pilled 🚫🌴 lareviewofbooks.org/article/its-...

Loved reading this rich (Detroit-centered), insightful story: it has a shout out to my book, Public Things, & puts it into a conversation that is rich & important: “We ultimately lose so much more than an acre-or 500 or 5 million-when public lands are devalued and reduced to financial assets” /1

"We might cheer the retreat of seasteaders and space colonists from civil society, if not for the fact that the wealth used to construct their private worlds belongs to us." From @timothyaschuler.bsky.social: the technofascists ruling our new gilded age threaten to rob us of what we hold in common.

For the past year, I’ve been reporting on Biden's most ambitious freeway fix for @placesjournal.bsky.social. It’s a complex project in Portland, OR that ties racial justice to a freeway expansion and a visionary 'restorative redevelopment.' Can it survive Trump? placesjournal.org/article/reth...

turns out climate change will cost dramatically more than economists predicted, and the cost of addressing it is actually negative. oops! prospect.org/environment/...