This ‘adversarial’ pattern can prevent surveillance cameras from detecting you
I've gone from writing about SD-WAN to depending on it
This former notorious red-light district is now one of the world’s top AI hubs
Funk music is as unapologetically Black as the musicians who pioneered it
This story originally ran July 26, 2020. At a time when some folks still don’t think Black lives matter, and respond to any assertion that they do with deflections and denialist “All Lives Matter” reactions, I’m reminded of when James Brown’s “I’m Black and I’m Proud” became an anthem and the genre of music we now know as “funk” was born. We, as a people, no longer had to hide Blackness…
I would never!
A cartoon by Drew Sheneman. Related | Cha-ching! Trump creates brave new world of insider trading.
Return of the River Stewards: shelter residents tend to San Lorenzo riverbank ecosystem

Andrew Kim Kawaoka, 70, prunes a tree during a River Stewards Program event on Wednesday at the San Lorenzo River. (Amaya Edwards — Santa Cruz Local/CatchLight Local)
SANTA CRUZ >> With gloves and buckets, river ecologist Patrick Lopez and eight residents of a homeless shelter gathered along the San Lorenzo River on an overcast Wednesday morning. One participant shifted from foot to foot, eager to get started. Lopez began by describing which native and non-native plants they would be working with for the two-hour restoration event.
It was part of the relaunch of the River Stewards program, where people living at the Armory/Overlook Emergency Shelter receive hands-on training in river restoration techniques, and receive a $20 gift card for their participation.
“It’s a really fun thing to do because you get to be outside, and you get to learn new things,” said Serena Thompson, who added that she couldn’t be happier about its relaunch and said she missed the program when it ended.
Before People First and the Coastal Watershed Council relaunched this program on June 24, it was led in partnership with the Downtown Streets Team. The original version of the program hosted more than 50 unhoused volunteers from 2022 to 2025.
Amid the loss of several grants, including one from the County of Santa Cruz, the Downtown Streets Team shut down its operations in October 2025. A survey conducted during the final year of the program found that 48% of River Stewards volunteers eventually went on to gain employment and 37% gained housing after participating, according to a recent press release.
The new iteration of River Stewards is funded by the California Coastal Commission, the Ocean Protection Council, and money from the county’s Measure Q, a voter-approved parcel tax.
(function() { window.mc4wp = window.mc4wp || { listeners: [], forms: { on: function(evt, cb) { window.mc4wp.listeners.push( { event : evt, callback: cb } ); } } } })(); Stay informed on Santa Cruz County’s biggest issues. Santa Cruz Local’s newsletter breaks down complex local topics and shows residents how to get involved. Email address:mc4wp.forms.on('subscribed', function(form) { // gtag.js if(form.id == '6954') { gtag('event', 'subscribe', {'event_category': 'newsletter_prompt', 'event_label':'top_of_story'}); } }); Leave this field empty if you're human:

Serena Thompson poses for a portrait while working at a weekly River Stewards volunteer day on the San Lorenzo River. Thompson, 55, participated in the program when the Downtown Streets Team was running it and missed attending after it was shut down in October 2025. (Amaya Edwards — Santa Cruz Local/CatchLight Local)
Up to eight shelter residents are shuttled to the river each Wednesday and work 9 a.m. to noon.
“Throughout the whole time that they’re working, I’m bouncing around to each of them, making sure that they are feeling supported and listened to. I really value cultivating those connections with them and listening to what’s going on in their lives,” said Lopez, who began working with the Coastal Watershed Council last month. “Some of them are actively looking for housing, and some of them are applying for jobs. Some of them are just happy to be out there, and it’s something that I really take a lot of pride in.”
Lopez guides volunteers through native seed collection, watering, mulching, trash cleanup and invasive species removal. He said so far, the group has removed 2,240 square feet of non-native plants, including Himalayan blackberry and Italian thistle, making room for native seeds that will be planted in the fall and winter.
Evan Morrison, Executive Director of People First, said the only requirements for participation is people must be in the Armory shelter and willing to work in a community environment.
“Coastal Watershed Council provides a great deal of ecological education to the program participants,” Morrison said. “Engaging in this process helps them to build knowledge and work experience.”

From left, Serena Thompson, Patrick Lopez and Dustin Jones get ready to work during a River Stewards program event on the San Lorenzo River south of Soquel Avenue Bridge. (Amaya Edwards — Santa Cruz Local/CatchLight Local)
Lopez said he has heard positive feedback from the volunteers about how proud they are of the work they’re accomplishing.
“Some of the participants are learning identification tools that are helping them nourish themselves. Himalayan blackberry is a big non-native invasive plant that is delicious to eat, and the more seeds that we eat, the better it can be for the whole community and plant society,” Lopez said. “A lot of them wish that we could have the program for multiple days throughout the week, and I wish we can accommodate that. Maybe someday we’ll be able to.”
Many of this year’s participants have volunteered with the previous iteration of the program. Another veteran participant, Andrew Kim Kawaoka, 70, has been living at the Armory for four years. When People First asked for volunteers, Kawaoka was eager to help tend the river. He has a background in landscaping and enjoys nature.
“The levee probably missed us. I think they’re happy we’re thinning out the plants and not letting one plant take over,” Kawaoka said. “They did an amazing job, because I don’t recognize the levee when I worked on it four years ago. None of this was here and now it’s getting the attention it needs.”

Miguel Ramirez volunteers with the River Stewards Program at the San Lorenzo River on Wednesday. During the event, participants were instructed on how to identify native and non-native plants before collecting all the non-native plants into a pile to throw away. (Amaya Edwards — Santa Cruz Local/CatchLight Local)

Herbert Carter tosses a non-native mustard plant into the disposal pile. (Amaya Edwards — Santa Cruz Local/CatchLight Local)
Questions or comments? Email info@santacruzlocal.org. Santa Cruz Local is supported by members, major donors, sponsors and grants for the general support of our newsroom. Our news judgments are made independently and not on the basis of donor support. Learn more about Santa Cruz Local and how we are funded.
Learn about membership Santa Cruz Local’s news is free. We believe that high-quality local news is crucial to democracy. We depend on locals like you to make a meaningful contribution so everyone can access our news. Learn about membershipThe post Return of the River Stewards: shelter residents tend to San Lorenzo riverbank ecosystem appeared first on Santa Cruz Local.
Good Luck Trying to Kill This Jellyfish
This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
Immortality is generally considered the realm of the gods or science fiction, a fantasy that’s actively pursued by tech entrepreneurs in macabre experiments that include injecting “young blood,” cryopreservation, or resurrection in an AI afterlife.
But one ethereal, thimble-shaped jellyfish has already cracked the code.
As associate professor Maria Pia Miglietta, a marine biologist at Texas A&M University, explains, Turritopsis dohrnii has an incredible ability to cheat death.
“Turritopsis is unique, because when faced with unfavourable conditions—and I mean high temperature, physical cutting, starvation, chemicals in the water, you name it—when you try to kill the jellyfish, it doesn’t die.”
“Theoretically it never has to die from getting old, it just keeps hitting the reset button.”
Most normal jellyfish start off life as larvae. They metamorphose into polyps (tiny, stationary soft bodies) that bud off swimming medusas, which grow up to become adult jellies. Eventually, after reproducing, most will stop swimming, crumble a little and then die.
But the immortal jellyfish escapes that fate. It reverts to a juvenile form, and starts its life cycle again. The process is called “cellular transdifferentiation,” Miglietta says. The jellyfish looks like it’s dying and sinks to the bottom. Then—like a butterfly returning to a caterpillar—it shrinks into a ball, and within 24 to 48 hours, buds off a new polyp with the same identical genome, she says.
It’s one of “nature’s coolest tricks,” says reader Raquel López-Aragón, who took part in the Guardian‘s “Invertebrate of the Year” contest. “When this jellyfish gets old or gets hurt, instead of just dying like most animals, it transforms itself back into a baby jellyfish and grows up all over again. It can do this as many times as it wants, which means theoretically it never has to die from getting old, it just keeps hitting the reset button on its life.”
In the lab, where Miglietta studies them, these jellies can theoretically live forever. However, for some in the wild, getting eaten may eventually end that dream run.
“It’s so hardwired in humans to not want to die…and the absurdity of that being in a jellyfish…just entertains me to no end.”
Globally, there are eight accepted species of Turritopsis—but (so far) only one holds the key to eternal life.
Immortal jellyfish are only a few millimetres in size. But, if you know what to look for, they can be found in many places, from the Mediterranean sea, to the Atlantic, from the coast of Japan to Panama and Brazil.
As another reader remarks, the immortal jellyfish does “exactly what it says on the tin…They have the very enviable ability to simply turn back into a juvenile at any sign of stress, which is something that I’m sure we all wish extended to humans.”
With their delicate bodies and veil of tentacles, Lisa-ann Gershwin, a biologist specializing in jellyfish, describes Turritopsis as “exquisite” and “the most beautiful little creature.” But what makes them remarkable is their capacity for reincarnation.
Since ancient times, humans have speculated about eternal life, Gershwin says, it’s one of the things that unites us all: “It’s so hardwired in humans to not want to die. And I think the drive that we have to survive, and the absurdity of that being in a jellyfish—the juxtaposition of those two just entertains me to no end.”
From Texas censorship to UCSC: Silenced anti-ICE art exhibition celebrating dual identity finds a home in Santa Cruz
Earlier this year, Mexican-born, Texas-raised visual artist Victor Quiñonez had his new exhibition, which speaks to being an immigrant in America and to the harm U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has caused, pulled from two different galleries in Texas. It is now set to come in September to UC Santa Cruz, where Quiñonez hopes his art can continue to make an impact in a state and gallery that is more understanding of its impactful message.
Hang Elon Musk Around Susan Collins’s Neck
At the start of 2025, Elon Musk looked as if he was going to become a permanent fixture in American politics. Strutting across the stage, giving the Sieg heil!, the far-right mogul set up shop in the Trump administration’s DOGE dojo and started chaotically pulling the load-bearing beams out of the civil service and heisting the private data of an untold number of taxpayers. In June of this year, however, Musk expressed regret over getting so caught up in the political scene. Ahh, but the ketamine has since hit: In recent weeks, Musk has said that he’s going back to being a GOP bankroller, to the tune of $120 million. And the first beneficiary of his dirty money is slated to be endangered Maine Republican Susan Collins. She should suffer for it.
Part of me wonders if Elon’s willingness to spend his cash is any great concern. His investments seem to often make things more janky than they were before. He turned Twitter into a hellsite dominated by like-minded thugs that is essentially a GOP super PAC. He’s soiled the legacy of Tesla’s founders by creating a “giant rusting dumpster swasticar” that’s recently been compared to the Edsel. He just crashed a rocket into the moon. His most recent foray into political kingmaking—the $25 million he injected into the Wisconsin Supreme Court race—was a Cybertruck-level flop. And he may end up catching a criminal charge for election bribery to boot.
If Collins actually needs Musk’s money, maybe that’s a sign she’s worried that her new Democratic opponent, former state Senate President Troy Jackson, won’t be the same type of cakewalk as Graham Platner, whose Nazi tattoo put his campaign into a permanent “if you’re explaining, you’re losing” doom loop that ended last month with sexual assault charges. Still, Musk’s close-up involvement with Susan Collins should come at a high cost to the incumbent senator.
Here’s one big reason why. The guy who’s pitching himself as the GOP’s next big megafunder has spent much of his time “out of politics” becoming a pioneer in the field of manufacturing nonconsensual pornographic images of minors. Perhaps the one thing that differentiates Musk’s Grok from other AI products is that it’s become regarded as a one-stop shop for the production of child sexual abuse material, or CSAM. This has already spawned a class-action suit against Musk’s firm, xAI. He seems very concerned that his company may be further restricted from promulgating deepfake pornography: xAI attorneys are suing the state of Minnesota over a state law banning apps from generating nonconsensual deepfake nudes of people.
My thoughts on this are pretty straightforward: In a normal country, it is scandalous for a politician to fund their campaign on the proceeds of CSAM and the like. Courtesy of DailyKos writer Oliver Willis, here is a succinct and correct English-language sentence on the matter: “Susan Collins is financed by a man who wants to make it easier to create nude pictures of children.”
Musk is hardly some lone-wolf pervert skulking around Republican politics. These days, the whole party seems more or less bent on proving “pedocon theory” correct. The anti-trans panic promulgated by the right has been slowly transforming into the drive to pass laws that would put the state’s hand down the pants of women and girls all across the country. As reporter Jessica Valenti recently put it, Republicans have lately adopted what could rightly be called an agenda of “upskirt politics”:
If Democrats want a message for the midterms and 2028, that’s it right there. The GOP is the party of Peeping Toms, obsessively watching what women do with our bodies and inventing ever more ways to get a closer look—from Republican AGs fighting court battles just to catch a peek at women’s abortion records to a prosecutor so desperate to see inside a miscarriage patient’s toilet that he had it ripped off the wall.
None of this is new. As TNR contributor Graham Gallagher wrote back in 2022, prominent Republicans were hard-veering into the wilds of antisocial strangeness. “Among the right’s intellectual avant garde and media elites,” he wrote, “there is a growing adoption of habits, aesthetics, and views that are not only out of step with America’s but are deliberately cultivated in opposition to a national majority that the new right holds in contempt.” Two years later, “Republicans are weirdos” became a clarion call among Democrats. Kamala Harris is often accused of abandoning this line of attack, which is not exactly true. Still, there was some internal debate over its efficacy.
To my mind, it’s worth reviving. The GOP has only gotten stranger since 2024. Just this week, Politico’s Kathy Gilsinan wrote at length about the GOP’s widening weirdo problems as the youngest in the party veer in the direction of off-putting, far-right grotesqueries. One anonymous Republican staffer put it like so: “We have a generation of rabid, incompetent idiots.” Sounds like an assembly line of Elon Musks.
There is perhaps no Republican lawmaker who has been treated with more undeserving gentleness than Susan Collins. Beltway reporters tend to fall for her prevarications with incredible ease; it was one of my first lessons in how many intellectual lightweights are out here cosplaying as my industry peers. Even Democrats tend to treat her with kid gloves. As TNR contributor Meredith Shiner noted back in 2020, when the party had the opportunity to showcase Collins’s then opponent, Sara Gideon, at the Democratic National Convention, Gideon was instead assigned to introduce musical guest Maggie Rogers. “The words ‘Susan Collins,’ ‘Supreme Court,’ ‘Brett Kavanaugh,’ and ‘Mitch McConnell’ were never uttered,” wrote Shiner.
Elon Musk is a weird, unpopular scoundrel with perverted tastes who’s had a direct hand in what can only be described as crimes against humanity. That he’s decided to tether himself to Collins gives Democrats a chance to make up for the shortfalls of the past and hammer Collins for what she is now: the candidate in the race with the Totenkopf tattoo (metaphorically speaking). Musk is the ripest of targets, Collins is one of the most deserving people to catch some strays. But these two won’t take themselves down—Democrats will need to take their shots, early and often.
This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here.
Why is a chemical once used in war still sprayed in Santa Cruz County?
For more than 25 years, parents, physicians, researchers and farmworker advocates have warned about pesticide exposure in the Pajaro Valley. So why haven’t Santa Cruz County’s healthcare institutions taken a stand? Local activist Kevin Norton asks why major hospitals and healthcare organizations have remained largely silent on an issue affecting many of their patients — and argues that preventing disease should begin long before someone enters an exam room.
Ransomware gangs skip the CEO, head straight for the 40-something IT manager
Why conservatives love pretending they’re persecuted
Explaining the Right is a weekly series that looks at what the right wing is currently obsessing over, how it influences politics—and why you need to know. Over the last few weeks, the right-wing media and the Republican Party have fashioned themselves as instant experts on the WNBA. Usually, the right is dismissive of women’s sports—which it has derided for years as inferior to men’…
Strait of Hairmooze
A cartoon by Clay Jones. Related | Trump’s new ‘do raises hairy questions about his health…
The first Black woman to lead the CDC will face an uphill battle in restoring trust
Experts say women and people of color are often tapped to lead during crises. Erica Schwartz inherits a CDC reshaped by political battles over science and vaccines. By Barbara Rodriguez for The 19th Dr. Erica Schwartz will be the first Black woman to lead the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, promising that she will show “radical transparency and unwavering scientific…
Planned Amazon data center could become the biggest climate polluter in the U.S.
Trump promotes commercial fishing in protected pacific marine national monuments
Scientists and other environmental advocates warn such activity would threaten coral reefs and other marine life. By Teresa Tomassoni for Inside Climate News President Donald Trump is seeking to reverse significant ocean protections by allowing commercial fishing in three Pacific marine national monuments President George W. Bush established in the early 2000s.
OpenAI acquires presentation startup NextSlide
The DOJ keeps taking the L, and Trump’s sham lawsuits drag on
Injustice for All is a weekly series about how the Trump administration is trying to weaponize the justice system—and the people who are fighting back. This week, we’re reminded that things at the Department of Justice under Donald Trump aren’t just bad. They are also very, very stupid. It turns out having the very worst people behave in the very shoddiest ways is not a recipe for…
RFK Jr. approved
A cartoon by Jack Ohman. Related | Diarrhea bug claims two as RFK Jr. shrugs off the crisis…
