Sam Koritz

did The Platters invent ska? 1956 youtube.com/watch?v=e-BFyH…

“I do want an orchestra again... I want to have a place,” Elim Chan told us in an interview earlier this year. Well, now she does as she has just been announced as the next Music Director of the San Francisco Symphony @SFSymphony! 🥳 📸Cody Pickens

from 2024, Price’s last year in office, to 2025, Jones Dickson’s first year, felony filings increased by 36% and misdemeanor cases by 35%.

#AIart️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️

The Undoing Project (2016 @wwnorton) is the story of how Daniel Kahneman & Amos Tversky pioneered behavioral economics. This seemed fluffier than Michael Lewis's Big Short & Going Infinite, but it's still enjoyable & interesting. One thing I noticed this time is Lewis's use of blunt personal descriptions. For example, the title of this book's first chapter, 'Man Boobs', is the insulting nickname given by talent scouts to a basketball player, due to his physique. As Lewis recommends, if you're interested in this subject you should read Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow. #PsychologicalStrategies

'Coyote's epic swim to Alcatraz Island started much farther away than San Francisco, National Park Service says', @CarlosJr62, CNN Alcatraz water dog swam from Angel Island two miles away #dogpride

'Renewable energy just broke a 100-year-old streak; Coal’s century at the top of the world’s power mix is over', by Bryan Walsh @bryanrwalsh, Vox According to Ember’s Global Electricity Review 2026, recently released in time for Earth Day, renewable sources produced 33.8 percent of the world’s electricity last year, compared to 33 percent for coal. Solar module prices have fallen roughly 75 percent every decade for more than 40 years, a pattern so durable it has its own name, Swanson’s law, the observation that the price tends to drop by 20 percent every time the total number of solar panels ever built doubles.

A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891 - 1924, by Orlando Figes, @PenguinBooks Orlando Figes tells the story of the Russian Revolution, emphasizing the things that support his belief that the Soviet Union was created for Russian reasons, rather than being the result of the importation of a philosophy from Western Europe (Marxism). The book begins after the emancipation of the serfs, at which time most Russians are peasants. Even many urban workers are former peasants with ongoing ties to peasant culture, which Figes describes as xenophobic, provincial, violent, traditionalist, patriarchal, illiterate, & innumerate. Many peasants lived & worked on community-owned land. This wasn’t a system of communal labor, with people working together on large farms; rather, a rotating roster of individual families was temporarily allowed to farm small strips of land, often in separate locations. This was inefficient compared with Western European farming systems but was resistant to reform, due to community hostility, & because vital infrastructure, such as roads & grazing grounds, were also communally owned. Unable to modernize their way out of poverty, peasants eyed the large estates owned by the aristocracy. Meanwhile, nationalism was growing in Europe, leading non-Russian ethnic groups to increasingly demand autonomy or #independence from the Russian empire. Additionally, Slavic and Germanic ethnonationalism was growing, along with the expectation of a showdown between these groups. The tsar hoped to galvanize the empire’s Slavs by joining the Great War in defense of fellow Slavs. But the opposite happened, as the war became increasingly costly and painful. At this point, Figes suggests, land seizure by peasants was inevitable, Russia could no longer fight in the world war, & the struggle for power in Russia needed to be settled by military violence. Of the various political parties, only the Bolsheviks combined these three policies; so they were the winners. Figes ends this book – published in *1996* – by warning against post-Cold War Western triumphalism: since the Soviet Union was formed for Russian reasons, there was no reason to believe that the Soviet successor would be a Western-style liberal democracy.

'How the war in #Iran is landing with Republicans, according to a new AP-NORC poll', AP News, @mikecatalini @LinleyAnn Only 1/5 of Republicans back deploying American ground troops vs Iran.

"Hershey’s vows to return to real chocolate after backlash from Reese’s inventor’s grandson; After the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup inventor’s grandson called out Hershey for ‘quietly replacing’ ingredients, the company has announced a return to real chocolate by 2027, " Deseret News, @Deseret #FoodLovers

5/15 #AIart️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️

"Pompeii's House of Dionysian Delights; Vivid frescoes in an opulent dining room celebrate the wild rites of the wine god," by Benjamin Leonard, Archaeology Magazine @archaeologymag “While drinking wine, banqueters would have experienced an altered state of consciousness, and probably would have thought that the god was there.” @MollySwetnamB #mythological

'San Francisco Killed 8th-Grade Algebra. Now It’s Set to Come Back; The San Francisco school board will vote on a plan to restore algebra as an option at all middle schools, more than a decade after it was removed over equity concerns', by Dana Goldstein @DanaGoldstein, NY Times The plan is based on the results of a two-year experiment, in which the district tried several approaches to middle school math. The results were tested by Thomas S. Dee @ProfTDee, a Stanford University economist. The data showed “dramatic gains” in math scores for students who enrolled in algebra and Math 8 concurrently — equivalent to nearly a full extra year of learning. #Educación

#AIart️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️️ @TheAnselAdams d

"To Address Farm Labor Shortage, Trump Administration Turns to Migrant Workers," by Linda Qiu @YLindaQiu, #nytimes The administration is making it cheaper for farmers to hire immigrant farmworkers on temporary visas. Immigration hawks and labor unions alike are opposed, arguing the move will only increase the share of foreign workers and hurt native workers and suppress their wages. Only 0.4 percent of farmers in California reported losing workers directly to farm raids, according to a new survey by the California Farm Bureau and Michigan State University. Under the new changes, the Labor Department adjusted how wages paid to H-2A farmworkers are calculated, effectively lowering hourly rates by between $1 and $7 depending on the state, according to some estimates. The reduction in wages has prompted a lawsuit from the United Farm Workers of America, which represents thousands of field workers. It argues that the rule will adversely harm American farmworkers by lowering their wages as well or pushing them out of the labor pool entirely. “These actions are going to displace domestic farmworkers who have been working in the fields and putting food on dinner tables for decades, and bring a workforce that is even more vulnerable to abuse,” Teresa Romero, the president of the union, said in an interview, noting that H-2A workers are often exploited and trafficked. In 2025, only 182 of more than 415,000 advertised positions received a domestic applicant. The number of certified H-2A visa positions has risen sharply, to nearly 400,000 in the 2025 fiscal year from about 50,000 in 2005. (About 40 percent of crop workers are unauthorized migrants and about a third are American citizens, according to the latest government estimates.) The Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank, estimated that the methodological changes would result in a $2 billion cut to the annual wages of guest farmworkers — and a $3 billion cut for U.S.-based farmworkers.

'Mexico; Migrant tents dismantled as mass deportations don’t materialize', by Julian Resendiz, Border Report @BorderReportcom Government officials have dismantled most tents as the mass deportations they feared have not materialized. #Migrantes

Are We #Smart Enough to Know How Smart #Animals Are?, by Frans de Waal (2016) Frans de Waal initially intended for this book to be an update on recent results of primate cognition #research, but the scope expanded &, eventually, it became a multidisciplinary defense of Charles Darwin’s (1871) claim: “The difference in mind between man and the higher animals, great as it is, certainly is one of degree and not of kind.” Much of the book consists of de Waal describing other scientists’ claims that (non-human) animals aren’t conscious or intelligent because #consciousness & intelligence require such-&-such, and only humans have that such-&-such, followed by scientific evidence that some other animals do, in fact, have those allegedly human-only qualities. Mostly, de Waal is here to defend animal consciousness & intelligence, so his view of their language ability is surprising: evidence for complex language in other animals is almost entirely lacking. But it’s not that important: many #people believe, incorrectly, that humans think in #words – so they assume that creatures without #complex language must be unable to think. In an interesting aside, de Waal says that he speaks three languages & doesn’t find himself thinking in any of them. This reminds me of the discourse of recent years regarding aphantasia & hyperphantasia – the inability vs ability & compulsion to literally visualize. Healthy people living normal lives have significantly different cognitive experiences depending on their place on the visualization spectrum. #Internal monologue is probably another example of this. Sometimes I’ve asked people who speak a language different than the one they used growing up what language they think in, & the answer is rarely quick & confident. Yet #writers often say that they’ve been mentally narrating their lives since childhood. Animals’ lack of complex language is probably one of the main reasons people deny their consciousness & intelligence. Anyone who cares about this subject – especially “anthropodenialists” – should read ‘Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?’

Enforcing payment can increase #access. 'New #BART fare gates generate $10 million annually for a dying rail system', by Rachel Swan @rachelswan, SF Chronicle "When BART staff analyzed the rate of ridership growth at individual stations, they found it increased once the new gates were added.

'California Forever @CAForever hopes Trump and #union deals make its shipyard dreams come true; The hard pivot from a suburban utopia to shipbuilding and #manufacturing seems to be paying off', by Margaux MacColl, #SanFrancisco Standard #Shipyard2026 the Bay Area Council Economic Institute released a report estimating that California Forever would generate $215 billion in private investment, 530,000 jobs, and $16 billion in annual tax revenue over the next 44 years. California Forever, funded by Silicon Valley titans including Marc Andreesen, Reid Hoffman @reidhoffman, and The Standard Chairman Michael Moritz, was initially proposed as a utopia built from scratch on Solano County pastureland For the past year, the group has focused its energy on a hard pivot: building a defense manufacturing hub, complete with a shipyard, and expanding nearby Suisun City (population 30,000) onto California Forever land. The U.S. is responsible for about 0.1% of global shipbuilding, compared with China’s 53.3%, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies. The SHIPS Act, which has yet to be voted on in Congress, would create “#maritime prosperity zones” that offer tax incentives to U.S.-based #boat manufacturers. Last week, Jan Sramek @jansramek positioned the California Forever shipyard, along with the Cal Poly @CalPoly Maritime Academy, as one of these zones

@lionel_trolling Not literature yet but 'Readers Prefer Outputs of AI Trained on Copyrighted #Books over #Expert #Human Writers', Cornell, Tuhin Chakrabarty @TuhinChakr, Jane C. Ginsburg, Paramveer Dhillon @dhillon_p #writerslife

Idk if I'd exactly identify as an AI skeptic as I'm named here, I think it's gonna change work forever. I just don't know that it's capable of making art and literature or doing science unless we drastically lower our standards for what those things are. I guess we already are.