When I ask Rafael Payare which composers he’s feeling particularly drawn to these days, he answers without skipping a beat. “I really love Mahler, Brahms, Beethoven, Schuman, Stravinsky, Tchaikovsky, Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Ravel, Debussy, Wagner, S

For all their fame, tradition, and monumentality, the Olympic Games are fickle. Cities vying to host the summer Olympics have always lined up and competed with one another ferociously, promising stadiums and arenas that would rejuvenate neglected nei

A 320-foot stretch of Pennsylvania Avenue in San Francisco had been a popular dumping ground for years. It wasn’t unusual to see abandoned sofas, TVs, and other appliances amid the wild fennel that flourished along the fence above the Caltrain embank

Since we often look to artists to help us see the otherwise unremarkable—a tree, a stone, a wave—with newfound wonder, it’s fitting that San Francisco photographer Josie Iselin recalls the exact moment she first became captivated by a marine element

I think it was my second day as a Christmas temp that this big woman came out and walked around with me as I delivered letters. What I mean by big was that her ass was big and her tits were big and that she was big in all the right places. She seemed

I WAS HERE BECAUSE I WANTED TO BE. I DIDN’T HATE SCHOOL, I especially didn’t hate learning. The main thing they taught me, yelling into my face, was that I was wasting their time and money. It did take me a few incidents, and growing years, to allow

Precautionary electricity blackouts are now a standard of Golden State living. Designed to help prevent wildfires, the outages also prevent your freezer from freezing, your lights from lighting, and your air conditioner from cooling. In response, cit

You can always tell a first-timer at the Los Angeles Breakfast Club. They’re usually wide-eyed and bemused, and not just because it’s seven o’clock in the morning. On a Wednesday. At the door of the Friendship Auditorium in Los Feliz, the cheery big-

NONFICTION: Page 82 • FICTION: Page 87 • POETRY: Page 91 • ART & PHOTOS: Page 94 ■

It was the Saturday of this year’s Women’s March. I was about to finish a weekend shift at the Los Angeles Times when my wife texted me the sad news: Frieda Caplan had died at 96. News organizations around the world quickly published obituaries on he

The global brand Patagonia grew out of Yvon Chouinard’s first business: forging pitons—the steel blades climbers of the era would drive into cracks in the rock with a heavy hammer to anchor themselves to the wall. Chouinard writes, “My first blacksmi

In the early 1990s, Pulitzer Prize finalist Laila Lalami—then a graduate student studying linguistics in Los Angeles—found herself filling out administrative paperwork at the University of Southern California so she could teach Arabic and French to u

On a Monday morning in downtown San Francisco, the Blue Bottle on Second Street, like all Blue Bottles (and Starbucks and Peet’s and Dunkin’ and independent coffee shops everywhere), is packed. People sitting at blond-wood counters with coffee in pap

High in the Sierragreen summer aspenwhisper to the lake.The snowpack glitters.Over the passesWinnebago thunderout of the wide red flats of Nevada.Huge crooked knuckles,the dark screes loom.Deep in the roadbeds,the bones of the Irish& Chinese workersw

The world goes silver when a storm comes up—a sudden silvery green. Not sure what the verb is for cottonwoods in a princeling wind. Their trunks never seem to stand so still as when the leaves leap and shudder on their stems. Shiver on their stems. T

Quantum computing—magnificent in conception though embryonic in performance—is being touted as the next great information-technology revolution. Enthusiasts are predicting that quantum machines will solve problems beyond the reach of conventional com

On the rainy morning of January 3, 1895, a group of Hopi men waited on San Francisco’s Clay Street wharf for the prison boat to Alcatraz. Wrapped in striped blankets, the 19 Indians stood out, even in a city like San Francisco, filled with people fro

On the morning of January 27, 1974, at approximately 1:25 a.m., police dispatch received a phone call reporting the discovery of a corpse at San Francisco’s Ocean Beach. “I believe there might be a dead person,” the caller said in a calm, male-soundi