Feature Pieces Archives

In the SF Bay Area, Beyoncé Brings Out Blue Ivy Carter — Under a Blue Moon

2Sep

By Matt CharnockNo Comments

Editors' Picks, Essays, Feature Pieces, Hyperlocal News + Stories

In the SF Bay Area, Beyoncé Brings Out Blue Ivy Carter — Under a Blue Moon

Days removed from attending Beyoncé's SF Bay Area stop on her Renaissance World Tour, the profoundness, pyrotechnics, and sheer talent displayed remains in our mind — "deadass." Beyoncé, as a concept, is hard to wrap one’s brain around... let alone Beyoncé as a human being. (The mere fact that the 29-time Grammy-winner belongs to the same species as the world’s other 7.9 billion bipedal apes is an enigma enveloped within a riddle.) But Mrs. Carter — or “Mayor Carter,” as she would later say in the first act of her nearly three-hour spectacle at Santa Clara's Levi's Stadium on August 30th, nodding to her honorary mayor distinction of the SF Bay Area county that was bestowed upon her that same day — walks and breathes among us. Nevertheless, sharing the same space as her, no matter h...

The Co-Founder of an SF PAC Says ‘Covid Is Over.’ It’s Not.

24Aug

By Matt Charnock1 Comment

Feature Pieces, Hyperlocal News + Stories

The Co-Founder of an SF PAC Says ‘Covid Is Over.’ It’s Not.

Sachin Agarwal, who co-founded GrowSF in 2020 with Steven Buss — both of whom now co-own The Bold Italic — wrote in a now-deleted post on X early Thursday that “Covid is over,” never mind that COVID-19 cases have spiked across the country, including right here in San Francisco. Endemecy is an ongoing conversation, becoming standard discourse since the first COVID-19 vaccine, Pfizer-BioNTech’s two-dose MRNA inoculation, was made publicly available in December 2020. The ensuing months (which later turned into years) would see supplemental dose recommendations, strain-specific booster shots, and antiviral drugs like Paxlovid and Lagevrio enter our collective health consciousness. “Long COVID” is real — debilitating, frightening, and all-consuming for between 6% and 8% of all American ...

That Time a Manatee Took a Commercial Plane to San Francisco

28Jul

By Matt CharnockNo Comments

Editors' Picks, Feature Pieces, Hyperlocal News + Stories

That Time a Manatee Took a Commercial Plane to San Francisco

Affectionately named "Butterball," the Amazonian manatee called San Francisco home for over 15 years until his untimely death caused by a rare fish disease. Manatees are enigmatic, majestic, lovingly lethargic creatures. They exist in both ancient and modern-day folklore — Mother Nature’s own “mermaids,” if you will. In fact, sea cows, which became extinct sometime in the 18th century (less than 30 years after they were first discovered by Arctic explorers) were considered “sirens” by settlers and marine scouts. Alas, the current state of the planet's manatees remains bleak. All three extant species of manatees are considered at risk of extinction; the only remaining species of dugong left on Earth is also considered vulnerable to extinction. And with the climate crisis heating th...

SF Street Artist fnnch Cements His Blunderous ‘Creativity’ With New Project

20Jul

By Matt CharnockNo Comments

Culture + Travel, Editors' Picks, Feature Pieces

SF Street Artist fnnch Cements His Blunderous ‘Creativity’ With New Project

fnnch, who has come under fire in recent years for his gentrifying street art and invading queer spaces, has a new disputable art project: crowdsourcing funds for a piece organized around “decommodification." You’d be hard-pressed to find a piece of street art more vilified, despised, and outright loathed in San Francisco than the honey bears painted by controversial street artist fnnch. Back in 2018, when the nameless muralist started plastering his cookie-cutter, toddler-sized bears across San Francisco, locals waxed gracious and favorable when spotting them. They, too, became source material for any local journalist cutting their teeth by producing listicle pieces around lifestyle topics. (Alas, I was part of such an ostensibly destitute cohort.) Time, though, has not been kind to f...

Conservative SF PAC Edited This Racist Headpiece on a City Supervisor

12Jul

By Matt CharnockNo Comments

Editors' Picks, Feature Pieces, News to Know

Conservative SF PAC Edited This Racist Headpiece on a City Supervisor

There’s a reason why we don’t see dunce caps used anymore in popular media — the sheer shape of them connotes racism, hate crimes, and shame. Keeping up with GrowSF’s Twitter account is an exercise in neural deterioration. Aside from the elementary-grade social copy, their account, which scrolls 916 tweets as of publishing, revels in twisted factoids and graphics that were clearly designed with no tasteful queer person in the room. The conservative YIMBY political group was founded by former tech bros Steven Buss — of Twitter fame for blocking thousands upon thousands of accounts — and Sachin Agarwal — who’s an adamant supporter of in-office work models and SF’s status as a guinea pig for self-driving automobiles — and has come under fire for a number of faux paus as of late. When ...

San Francisco Police Corral, Zip-Tie Over 80 Young People in Mass Arrest Near Dolores Park

9Jul

By Matt Charnock1 Comment

Feature Pieces, Hyperlocal News + Stories, News to Know

San Francisco Police Corral, Zip-Tie Over 80 Young People in Mass Arrest Near Dolores Park

Saturday night around 8:45 p.m., SFPD officers in riot gear trapped dozens of teenagers during the annual "Hill Bomb" event near Dolores Park, thereupon processing skaters and spectators for arrest. San Francisco’s yearly Hill Bomb — an event that sees hundreds of predominantly school-age kids zoom down Dolores Street in the same-named skateboarding maneuver — is counterculture, personified. It’s a quintessential San Francisco happening, an important part of SF’s storied history of skate culture. Over the years, the City has adamantly attempted to stop the unauthorized summer event from ensuing. During the pandemic, San Francisco attempted to block the occurrence by installing bott’s dots — non-reflective raised pavement traffic markers used for multiple reasons, including speed c...

People Are Putting Traffic Cones on Self-Driving Cars in San Francisco

7Jul

By Matt CharnockNo Comments

Feature Pieces, Hyperlocal News + Stories, News to Know

People Are Putting Traffic Cones on Self-Driving Cars in San Francisco

Dubbed “Week of Cone,” San Franciscans fed up with robotaxis are putting cones on them — leaving the cars useless. We're obsessed. Self-driving cars are occupying a larger part of our daily lives on this entropic space rock. That’s a fact; it’s a reality. However, how that future existence is being rolled out by companies like Waymo and Cruise is nothing short of disastrous. They crowd streets and cause traffic. These cars can get between emergency crews responding to mass shootings. They hit cars; strike pedestrians; kill. San Francisco is rife with hundreds of these autonomous headaches that are by no means ready for their prime-time spotlight. And residents of San Francisco are getting fed up with them — now going as far as to put, coincidentally enough, traffic co...

Why Are There So Many Dead Bumble Bees Around San Francisco This Summer?

26Jun

By Matt Charnock2 Comments

Editors' Picks, Feature Pieces, Hyperlocal News + Stories, Nature + Climate Crisis, News to Know

Why Are There So Many Dead Bumble Bees Around San Francisco This Summer?

SF residents have noticed more dead and dying bumble bees than usual. Why? It’s a layered answer. Bumble bees are like the black labs of the aerial insect world. They’re bigger than their honey bee cousins, boasting immense, furry thoraxes and generally more robust, they-hit-the-inverbate-gym-five-times-a-week body types. Unlike honey bees, bumble bees — which San Francisco is home to five resident species of, with at least another four being infrequently documented — aren’t great at producing honey. What they lack in honey yields they more than make up for in their ecological importance as keystone pollinators; bumble bees, on average, are three to four times better pollinators than any species of honey bees. Bumble bees are social creatures; they’re surprisingly intelligent; they...

The Pandemic Allowed Me to Move Into My First Micro Apartment in San Francisco

15Jun

By Matt CharnockNo Comments

Feature Pieces, Hyperlocal News + Stories

The Pandemic Allowed Me to Move Into My First Micro Apartment in San Francisco

Reflecting on my first "tiny home" in San Francisco is a multi-dimensional exercise, one rooted in gratitude, reality, and nostalgia. I've long been a fan of tiny living. Establishing a more micro everyday lifestyle has long seemed the most pragmatic and realistic way of making a financially solvent career as a writer, sans roommates. But even in San Francisco — which still boasts the one of country’s most expensive rental markets despite seeing rental prices drop some 26% since the pandemic began — even living tiny has a lofty price tag. Before Covid-19, it was common to see $2,000-plus monthly rents for units spanning less than 200 square feet. A 161-square-foot unit a block away from my past address had become famous in 2019 for its astronomically high $2,295 a month rent. It featured...

San Francisco Records Largest Mass Shooting in Almost 30 Years

10Jun

By Matt CharnockNo Comments

Feature Pieces, Hyperlocal News + Stories

San Francisco Records Largest Mass Shooting in Almost 30 Years

At least nine people were harmed during an episode of gun violence in SF’s Mission District neighborhood Friday night — becoming the city’s largest mass shooting since 1993. On July 1, 1993, fifteen people were subjected to gun violence at 101 California Street in San Francisco when 55-year-old Gian Luigi Ferri opened fire across the building’s 34th floor that housed offices belonging to the Pettit & Martin law firm. The failed businessman, who was a client of the firm in 1981, left a trail of empty shells, some from a pair of handguns and others from a semi-automatic weapon. Ferri later made his way down several different floors, continuing his fatal attack… before committing suicide. Ferri — a man who once won a million-dollar judgment, only to then file for bankruptcy years ...