Editors’ Picks

In case you were wondering: A few dollars' worth of fireworks can apparently turn driverless cars into very expensive roadblocks. Robotaxis are surprisingly vulnerable to guerrilla activism. Autonomous driving vehicles by Waymo and Cruise — the latter company now defunct and absorbed into General Motors' general autonomous driving initiatives — have been rendered useless by cones, tape, and even just confusing infrastructure. A new tactic to stop a self-driving car in its tracks? Fireworks, baby. 'Cause 'Merica! In a video uploaded by Mission Local, a set of street fireworks is shown hobbling a Waymo that was traveling through San Francisco’s Mission district.  “A Waymo autonomous vehicle got stuck behind some street fireworks in the Mission District on July 4, 2025,” reads a caption...

The Bold Italic's catalogue of now-standard fluff pieces and flippant personal essays hasn't seen an update in well over a month. Y’all know our … Well, let’s say unfavorable opinion on The Bold Italic after its acquisition by GrowSF, a prominent big-money PAC, the once beloved publication that served as a beat for SF’s left-of-center quirkiness has now efficiently devolved into fluff. The Bold Italic is no longer a prestigious and applauded media outlet, but now rather a long list of lukewarm, hollow narrative pieces about loving San Francisco, punctuated by gauzy event coverage. Despite its numerous restaurant reviews, the publication serves up nothing but emptiness. However, keen-eyed readers and haters alike have pointed out something suspicious: The Bold Italic has stopped pub...

The San Francisco Standard has seated Charter CEO Kevin Delaney as its new editor-in-chief after acquiring the aforementioned publication this month. The San Francisco Standard has had a particularly busy few months. Between enacting a subscription model under it’s for-profit business model and publishing a recent opinion waxing supportive of District 4 Supervisor Joel Engardio — who was endorsed by Together SF, the rebranded big money PAC The Standard’s founder, Micharl Moritiz, previously funded — the publication’s true colores continue spilling out like an iridescent oil slick. On Monday, June 30th, The Standard announced it acquired Charter, a publication dedicated to the “future of work” and the evolving tech space, in a bid to expand its “coverage of tech, business, and the evolvin...

The San Francisco Standard, the contentious local media outlet known for polarizing content, was founded by billionaire venture capitalist Michael Moritz. Big money and media influence go hand in hand, especially amid late-stage capitalism (and what’s effectively a modern-day oligarchy). The likes of The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times have fallen victim to their financial overloads, whether those be corporate entities or singular powers, where journalistic and editorial integrity have been compromised. In San Francisco, no publication encapsulates that conflict of interest more than the existence of The San Francisco Standard, founded and funded by billionaire Michael Moritz of Sequoia Capital. The Standard — which went through a seismic rebranding in 2021 after changing its...

SF Blueprint is a rebrand tale as old as time: convince San Franciscians that giving billionaires political influence is what's best for the city. San Francisco’s politics are famous (and infamous) for a laundry list of dystopianism, one of which is how big money and billionaires influence local elections. Millions of dollars were spent by individual donors and conservative political action committees, many of whom and many of which were located out of the city and out of the state, to successfully recall San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin in 2022. His subsequent replacement, Brooke Jenkins, has found herself embattled with controversies, all of which range from hiring unqualified friends to invoking Trump-like intimidation practices, violating the rights of criminal defendants....