ALT For college students, a school’s state politics can matter as much as its academics
Students are looking beyond the usual admissions rankings and tuition prices to consider whether a campus — and the state its in — reflects the rights and values they need to feel safe. By Nadra Nittle for The 19th For generations, students chose colleges based on factors like their academic reputation, tuition costs or social scene. But in today’s divided nation…
I Like Baseball Now.
Admittedly, I don’t know much about baseball—but I do know that watching the first home run of the Women’s Professional Baseball League on Saturday night was incredibly cool.
You have to watch the New York Heights’ Denae Benites smash it out of the park during a rain-filled game against the Los Angeles Queens:
View this post on InstagramI love the spin and jump from the pitcher, Ayami Sato—the starter for Japan’s national women’s team—in following the hit as she watches the ball sail above everyone’s head. At the same time, Benites runs around the bases and then through a tunnel of her jubilant teammates.
Yes, it’s a historic home run, but it’s also a familiar scene to any sports fan—the celebration from Benites’ team, the disappointment from the Los Angeles Queens (that disappointment didn’t last long though—the Queens responded with six unanswered runs in the last two innings to win). Even though I had never been much of a baseball fan, the long-overdue debut of the WPBL has me excited about the sport for the first time (I even learned what an RBI is!). If you missed the first game, I’d urge you to check out the league’s inaugural season, which runs through mid-September.
Malaysia is reportedly shutting down Balaji Srinivasan’s Network School
War crime clowns
As the Iran war rages on—with no end in sight—things look pretty bleak. Gas prices are skyrocketing, an unknown number of U.S. military members are dying, and everyone is feeling fed up with this latest forever war. But at least we have learned a valuable lesson: Don’t put the world’s most powerful military in the hands of two former TV stars. As President Donald Trump and Defense…
Republican Sen. Bernie Moreno Says Max Miller is Unfit to Hold Office
Shortly after Congressman Max Miller (R-Ohio) went live on X to defend himself against recent reporting by Mother Jones documenting allegations of domestic violence against his ex-wife, Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-Ohio) posted his first in-depth public comment on the matter, saying Miller is unfit to hold office.
“As he has admitted privately, Max Miller needs serious psychological help. He is a danger to my daughter, and I hold my breath every minute he has custody of my granddaughter,” Moreno, whose daughter was married to Miller, wrote. “If there are any basic standards of character required to hold elected office, Max Miller fails them. He should not serve in the House of Representatives. I believe Max Miller needs to seek professional help to end the clear pattern of abuse he has left in his wake. I believe he should not be free to continue endangering others until he does.”
As Mother Jones reported on July 18, Miller’s ex-wife, Emily Moreno, told detectives that Miller had previously held a gun to her head, thrown hot water at her, and shoved her against the wall. She told police about these alleged incidents as they were investigating how Miller and Moreno’s toddler ended up with a broken collarbone. (The investigation into potential child abuse was ultimately “unsubstantiated”—meaning there was not enough evidence to prove neglect or abuse.)
Miller has denied ever hurting women. In his X live video Sunday morning, he blamed the “left-wing media” for reporting on allegations made by a woman with “mental health challenges.”
But Emily Moreno is not the only woman that Miller has been accused of perpetrating violence against. In 2021, Politico cited multiple witnesses in reporting that Miller had thrown a woman down the stairs after she rejected his advances. That woman recently told Mother Jones that the night in question remains “one of the more traumatic nights of my life.”
During the first Trump administration, Miller’s behavior toward women also came under scrutiny when former White House press Secretary Stephanie Grisham accused a fellow Trump staffer of assaulting her. Miller sued Grisham for defamation at the time, stating in his lawsuit that people knew she was referring to him. Miller denied hurting her, too, and the two reached a confidential settlement in the lawsuit. Grisham is now suing Miller for violating the terms of that settlement.
Sen. Moreno is now the first Republican lawmaker to speak publicly about the allegations Miller faces; however, Politico reported earlier this week that some Republicans are “silently sweating” the accusations, with one operative calling the situation, “Graham Platner on steroids.”
Alex Nguyen contributed reporting.
TechCrunch Mobility: Two roads diverged — for robotaxis
Wildfire smoke is now the primary pollutant affecting pregnancy, study shows
Recent studies have linked wildfire smoke exposure to negative birth outcomes such as low birth weight and preterm birth. By Kelcie Moseley-Morris for Stateline A new study examining pollution levels across a 16-year span found that while general pollution levels from sources such as cars and industry have significantly declined, recent increases in wildfire smoke air pollution…
Musical memories to mark Obama’s birthday
This story originally ran Aug. 3, 2025. Black Music Sunday is a weekly series highlighting all things Black music, with over 270 stories covering performers, genres, history, and more, each featuring its own vibrant soundtrack. I hope you’ll find some familiar tunes and perhaps an introduction to something new. Music lovers and appreciators have been speaking out forcefully against…
Jump for history
A cartoon by Clay Jones. Related | Democrats expose Trump’s bigoted plot to erase history at Smithsonian…
A Battle Over Rock Climbing Exposes a Bigger Crisis in America’s Wilderness
This story was originally published by High Country News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
A decades-long debate over how to manage wilderness climbing may be nearing a close. Land-management agencies, including the US Forest Service and agencies within the Department of Interior, released draft guidance in mid-June on the use of permanent anchors—basically metal points of attachment for ropes—in wilderness areas, as directed by Congress’ 2025 Protecting America’s Rock Climbing (PARC) Act.
“A lot of people and user types are vying for the same piece of real estate, and climbers are part of that,” said Erik Murdock, deputy director of programs, policy and government affairs at the Access Fund, a nonprofit that advocates for climbing access and environmental conservation. The new guidance helps secure climbers’ place in the mix, he said. But some wilderness advocates argue that it too loosely regulates uses that violate the Wilderness Act’s intention. Even though climbing has long been a popular activity in designated wilderness areas, and, in many places, it predates their creation, the Wilderness Act generally prohibits permanent infrastructure—and this is where the controversy arises.
“We’re squeezing wildlife into smaller and smaller pockets of protected space…and we have a lot of people waiting in line for more access.”
When climbers scale a rock wall, they periodically place protective devices in the rock face to secure their ropes so they can be safely caught if they fall. They may also do so at the top of a route, so that they can rappel back down. There are a variety of ways to do this, and certain kinds of protection—such as spring-loaded cams that can expand to fit in a crack along the route—are removable. But others are permanent, or “fixed,” anchors. On long stretches without cracks to place gear, for example, climbers might drill bolts directly into the rock to attach metal loops called hangers. Where there are small cracks, they might hammer in a small spike with a loop at one end, called a piton. Or they might install ropes or slings around a boulder, tree, or other object and leave them there to enable a safe descent by rappel.
The rules proposed in June for these permanent fixtures vary by agency. The National Park Service, for example, would require climbers to seek special-use permits or broad permission from a superintendent before drilling new bolts. But climbers on Bureau of Land Management land could place a small number of bolts without authorization. The Forest Service, which manages half of the country’s public-land climbing, directs local offices to work with climbers and climbing groups to create management plans for wilderness and non-wilderness climbing areas. While Murdock and other climbers quibble with some of the details, he said they were “overall workable policies.”
“There are plenty of places in the wilderness where you don’t need a fixed anchor, and typically the ethic has been if you don’t need a fixed anchor, you don’t bring one.”
Others worry that the new guidance could initiate a climbing free-for-all in the country’s last protected spaces. Several Forest Service regional offices have lost many or all of their wilderness staff over the past 18 months to deferred resignations and cuts by the now-defunct Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. They likely lack the capacity to create new plans or monitor new and existing routes that contain permanent anchors, said Dana Johnson, policy director with the Montana-based environmental nonprofit Wilderness Watch. “We’re squeezing wildlife into smaller and smaller pockets of protected space,” she said, “and we have a lot of people waiting in line for more access.”
Johnson’s concerns mirror those of some Biden administration officials. Fears of damaging protected areas through overcrowding and using too many permanent bolts led the administration to propose a national directive in 2023 prohibiting new fixed anchors in all wilderness areas and requiring review of existing climbing routes. Two years later, Congress reversed that course with the PARC Act, which codified recreational climbing—including using, placing, and maintaining fixed anchors—as an appropriate use in wilderness areas.
But the fight over permanent anchors misses the bigger issue, said Zach Lentsch, who owns Wyoming Mountain Guides and frequently takes clients into designated wilderness areas. Hikers, backpackers, and other quiet recreationists also contribute to wilderness overcrowding, he pointed out. Places like Lonesome Lake near the famous Cirque of the Towers in the Wind River Range contain dangerous levels of E. coli from human poop, for example, and banning a narrow use like fixed anchors would never solve that problem. Instead, he argued, agencies should work with all wilderness users to create permit systems to limit use where needed, or require campers to use special bags to contain and pack out their feces.
“If you’re not a climber, it might seem like climbers are going out there willy-nilly and putting ugly hardware into the walls,” he said. “There are plenty of places in the wilderness where you don’t need a fixed anchor, and typically the ethic has been if you don’t need a fixed anchor, you don’t bring one.”
The public comment period on the Forest Service proposal ended July 20, and the Park Service, Bureau of Land Management and Fish and Wildlife Service comment periods end August 14.
Adopt AI or Die?
Of Pascal’s famous wager on the existence of God, Denis Diderot dryly remarked, nearly a century later, “Pascal says: If your religion is false, you risk nothing in believing it true; if it’s true, you risk everything by believing it false. An imam could say just the same.”
It was a clever eighteenth-century comeback to a pious seventeenth-century Catholic. When Blaise Pascal advised that it was a better bet to believe in God, or at least to conduct oneself in a godly manner, just in case he existed, he had a very particular god in mind. But why not Allah, or the god of the Jews, or the gods of the Hindus or the ancient Greeks? What if, in betting on belief over nonbelief, one backs the wrong heavenly father?
It was all a little unfair to poor Pascal. A scientist and philosopher as much as a Christian, his wager, excavated from the semi-fragmentary and only posthumously published Pensées, was probably not meant—as it was later taken—as some logical proof of God’s existence but rather as a considerably subtler and more complicated argument for faith when the existence of a truly transcendent God isn’t provable by reason alone.
Like so many catchy ideas, though, Pascal’s wager has made itself into what we would now probably call—I regret to say—a meme, a little bit of shorthand for a simple idea: better to bet on the divine than against, considering the consequences.
It’s generated philosophical debate over the centuries, including in the 2010s, when, on an online message board called LessWrong, a poster going by the pseudonym Roko posed a thought experiment now referred to as “Roko’s basilisk”: At some point in the future, an artificial intelligence comes into being. It is generally benevolent, except that it decides to torture for all eternity those humans who failed to work to bring it into existence. In other words: invent AI or be cast into hell.
This would be fantastically silly stuff if it were not so near to our contemporary reality, in which a growing number of people, including many of the richest and most powerful among us, seem convinced that some kind of supremely powerful intelligence is about to emerge from our increasingly powerful thinking machines. (As if to prove a point about the fuzzy edges between technology and superstition, Roko’s basilisk has already spawned a Manson family–like murder cult, the Zizians, who were linked to the deaths of six people between 2022 and 2025.) Whether one considers AI models nascent machine gods or just shockingly sophisticated mechanical Turks, the diffusion of impressively capable Large Language Models, or LLMs, which are able to ape if not exactly replicate feats of reasoning, logic, and language, has brought many once science-fictional ideas to the forefront of politics, policy, and philosophy. The founders and CEOs of multibillion-dollar AI companies vacillate between describing their products as a semidivine technology that will usher in an age of “amazing abundance,” in the words of Elon Musk, and describing them as apocalyptic agents of the literal end of the world, requiring careful government oversight and national or international regulation.
What is it, this seeming machine intelligence? God, devil, successor species, industrial technology, or just a clever trick? Robert Wright—journalist, author, foreign policy realist, evolutionary biology enthusiast, and podcaster—wants you to wager on the likelihood of possibilities one through three. After 300,000 years, give or take, of the anatomically modern human species, and three and a half billion or so of prior evolution, we’re facing both a singular opportunity and an epochal threat.
In his new book, The God Test: Artificial Intelligence and Our Coming Cosmic Reckoning, Wright suggests that emergent AI—especially so-called Artificial General Intelligence, or AGI—represents not just a technological breakthrough, but an actual evolutionary outcome, possibly even a terminal one: a great, superseding mind, the next great leap forward for, or from, humanity. Wright is a great fan of the Roman Catholic philosopher and scientist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who, in the first half of the twentieth century, sought to reconcile evolution, paleontology, and geology with Catholic theology, ultimately proposing a sweeping teleology in which the whole universe is drawn toward an ultimate state of unification and complexity. (Not for nothing, these ideas bear striking resemblance to the later science-fictional idea of a “technological singularity.”) Teilhard’s ideas about the “noosphere,” a kind of globally interconnected mind or consciousness, and the “Omega Point,” the final stage of universal consciousness and complexity, suffuse The God Test. Humanity now stands at an inflection point, the most important, literally, in the history of life on Earth, Wright proposes. AI represents a vast, alien, potentially godlike intelligence, and the test of his book’s title is whether or not we can get our shit together as a species and cobble together a sufficiently global, cooperative strategy for shepherding into existence a kindly god and an abundant future. The alternative? Pick your sci-fi dystopia.
Wright is a fascinating and complex character. Liberal (in the classical sense) by instinct and broad in his interests and habits of mind, he is an entertaining interlocutor and a guy I am very sure I would enjoy having a beer with. I first encountered him when I was in college in the early 2000s; I picked up his book Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny in an airport—appropriately; it is very much an airport book, and I mean it in the nonderogatory sense: blithe, entertaining, bumptious, and wide-ranging. I read it on a plane to France, where I was about to spend a semester studying the European Union, which was just then about to embark upon the utopian project of finally putting its continentwide single currency into circulation. Nonzero’s tale of an onward-and-upward evolutionary human trajectory toward greater and greater political integration and social cooperation suited the moment, as did its paean to the power of non-zero-sum human cooperation and organization to achieve mutually beneficial ends.
Wright has described himself as a materialist and an agnostic, and he explicitly rejects arguments for either intelligent design or for some kind of Bergsonian élan vital, but he is very convinced that evolution has a direction and a purpose, and this direction and purpose are deeply embedded in his argument about the likely future of AI. From single cells to multicellular life, to sponges and worms, to fish to frogs to dinosaurs to mammoths to monkeys to us. And then: “In the early 21st century, all of mankind was united in celebration. We marveled at our own magnificence as we gave birth to AI,” to quote The Matrix, a film that Wright himself cites on several occasions. In Wright’s telling, human invention accelerated the processes of natural selection, and we have now built version 2.0 of the conscious, reasoning mind.
This is all marvelous, often lovely stuff, but unfortunately it is mostly hokum. The idea that evolution moves in a direction or necessarily selects for complexity, let alone for consciousness or humanlike intelligence, is nonsense. It supposes that those simple life-forms that are still around are merely vestigial examples of an older, simpler order, and that the complex vertebrates stand atop a vast heap of discarded models. But bugs and crabs and worms and algae and bacteria are still around. Many comparatively simple creatures evolved quite recently, and many complex ones went extinct long ago or evolved into something else entirely. (Plants and other nonanimal life-forms, by the way, are largely and strangely absent from this tale.) Humanity itself once shared the earth with several other upright hominid species, some of them possibly tool and language users. Neanderthals may have made art! Our sense of ourselves as the capstone of an evolutionary journey has an element of recency bias. Who knows what mollusk or saurian minds came before?
Nor are complexity and intelligence traits that necessarily connote consciousness. Eusocial insects are remarkably clever. Termites are architects capable of building self-cooling structures. Ants have invented agriculture and even a form of domestication. It looks a great deal like intelligence, and it is obviously complex, but an ant colony isn’t conscious, and each individual is little more than an automaton. Evolution achieves technology in multiple ways.
This is a key point in thinking about AI and machine learning, particularly about LLMs. Wright is, to his credit, a very good layman’s guide to the basics of the tech, but because AI is a black box—no one really knows what goes on inside these systems—he ascribes to its very humanlike linguistic and visual outputs characteristics that it doesn’t need to have. In a way, this is a form of self-flattery. It is not at all comforting to think that a mere probability machine, with enough computing power and a sufficient quantity of training materials, can produce fluent, lucid, believably human prose—can approximate reason (or at least exhibit extremely high-level logic), solve puzzles, even create novelty and invention—without a hint of recognizably human consciousness: a brain without a mind; a mind without a being. What would that mean for the tales we tell ourselves about our own uniqueness, about our supposed standing at the bleeding edge of what evolution can produce?
The question of whether AI is merely clever, actually intelligent, or truly conscious—whether it is just a highly sophisticated artifact or an actual emergent mind—may seem abstruse and philosophical. Are we just chopping logic here and arguing over imperfect terminology? But the answer would have important implications for Wright’s thesis that the arrival of AI, like the appearance of actual aliens in a well-armed starship, should and must be the catalyst for truly global human coordination, cooperation, and governance.
Wright believes that AI is not just a technological marvel, not even a technological revolution on par with the Industrial Revolution or the harnessing of electricity. In his view, AI represents a cataclysmic leap forward more significant than the advent of agriculture (which was also a more complex, multifaceted, and discontinuous tale than a straightforward and uniform pathway from simple to complicated). AI creates a new kind of being and therefore a new state of being for humankind. As such, it requires a heretofore unimaginable level of cooperation across nations, peoples, and polities. We have a very narrow window in which to establish truly universal and international standards of control and governance to confront a problem almost infinitely more dangerous than any we have faced before.
Now let me be clear: I am extremely sympathetic to Wright’s views on the desirability of international institutions and global governance. The idea that the Westphalian nation-state is the platonic ideal for human political organization, that it represents the best, fixed, and eternal unit for the management of human affairs, has always struck me as silly. The skinny exchange student who saw in Jean Monnet and Robert Schuman’s dream of a “United States of Europe” a beatific vision for an increasingly integrated humankind is not entirely dead in me. The contemporary resurgence of baser forms of nationalism is dark, depressing, and should be fought against. The diminishment of international institutions and forums for cooperation, however corrupt and ineffectual, is a dismal outcome. From Sudan to Gaza to Ukraine and Iran, the prevalence of zero-sum military conflicts—often instigated because of old and ugly forms of nationalism—represents a catastrophe that cries out for cooperation and peace. Don’t get me started on climate change, already disappearing from our political discourse as if the problem just went away.
So I agree with Wright when he says that “the gap between where our species is and where it needs to be is almost comically vast,” but I am not sure that AI—really LLMs, a specific subset of a constellation of techniques and technologies of machine learning—is either the threat or the catalyst that Wright proposes. It certainly does pose some threat. While he focuses on the prospect of the emergence of a truly superior intelligence, Wright also outlines more quotidian problems and abuses, some of which have already arrived. Surveillance. Hacking. Unemployment. The development of new and terrifying bioweapons. Autonomous military machines. But when Wright calls the “artificial intelligence revolution” a “big common threat” to unite humanity, I feel a tingle of well-earned doubt. He writes that “in the absence of wise national and international governance, [the effects] will probably lie somewhere on the spectrum between dangerously destabilizing on a global scale and global-thermonuclear-war-level catastrophic.” Well, if nuclear war is outermost edge of potential catastrophe, I have terrible news. That threat has been around for over 80 years now, and it’s made us neither wiser nor more cooperative.
The problem with both AI doomers and AI evangelists (often, including in Wright, two tendencies coexisting in one body) is that they seem to have forgotten the virtue of intellectual humility; their maximalist claims are a distraction from both the interesting uses and unique challenges of this technology. It needn’t be a god to be a potentially useful leap forward in information retrieval and management, or to help automate workflows in business, analyze big data, fold proteins, or—this is mundane, but my day job is in finance—accurately extract table data from a flat .pdf. It needn’t be a devil to help the Pentagon launch aggressive wars or ICE to track immigrants. It is a tool, and, like so many products of human genius, one that can be used for good or for ill. But no tool will force us to mature as a species and a civilization, no matter the benefit, no matter the threat. That task is solely and exclusively human, and we have a long way to go.
Made in Santa Cruz: Why Art Matters
“Made in Santa Cruz: Why Art Matters” is a new video series, published every other Sunday, exploring the artists who shape Santa Cruz County’s creative landscape. Each episode offers a peek into an artist’s practice, the places and experiences that inform their work, and the ways creativity helps us see our community differently. The series begins with multidisciplinary artist Abi Mustapha.
Coming home to Casalegno’s: Descendants set to reopen historic mountainside market this fall
After two decades with different owners, the Casalegno family is uniting the historic Santa Cruz Mountains country store and family farm, reopening the nearly century-old landmark this fall. Matt and Marissa Kotila hope to preserve the store’s legacy as a community gathering place while building a new chapter centered on agriculture, local food and neighborhood connections.
Meet the 'internet radical' who helped Microsoft get email and AT&T get online
Thousands fill Watsonville for Strawberry Festival
The annual Strawberry Festival drew scores of people Saturday, who browsed among merchandise sales booths, sampled from dozens of food vendors, rode rides, played games and watched live entertainment.
The Festival will run Sunday from 11am–7pm.
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THRILLS Miguel and Emiliano Garcia, 8 and 5, and Aasha Bandam, 6, ride the "Pirates Revenge."
FUN HOUSE Brynn Fernandes, 6, of Watsonville, runs through the Shake Shack, a funhouse on the festival's midway.
SLICE OF LIFE Bladimir Velazquez and Vallerie Valle show off their slices of strawberry pizza.
Sequoia Solinas, 5, of Watsonville enjoys a strawberry-inspired treat.
CROWDED Hundreds of people wait to see the first pie eating contest of the day.
BEST EFFORT Jessie Reed, left, joined several people on stage for a pie eating contest.
DISTINCTION Jessie Reed of Aptos celebrates after downing a large pie comprised of strawberries and whipped cream.
CREATIVE Kenia and Jimena Teodoro, 6 and 8, paint their own strawberry at a booth manned by Pajar Valley Arts.
SWEET TREAT Bladimir Velazquez and Valerie Valle enjoy a strawberry funnel cake.
Stuff the Bus volunteers pack 2,500 backpacks for students
More than 150 volunteers gathered Saturday at Kaiser Permanente Arena in Santa Cruz with a simple mission: make sure thousands of Santa Cruz County students are ready to begin the school year.
Working assembly-line style during the 17th annual Stuff the Bus Stuff-A-Thon, volunteers filled 2,500 backpacks with notebooks, binders, pencils, calculators and other classroom essentials before loading them onto a school bus for distribution across the county.
The backpacks are destined for students experiencing homelessness and housing insecurity, as well as foster youth, through local school districts and nonprofit organizations.
“The event is all about ensuring that students across Santa Cruz County have everything they need to start the school year ready to succeed,” said Santa Cruz County Office of Education spokesman Nick Ibarra.
This year marks the first time the program has included backpacks designed for transitional kindergarten students, reflecting the recent expansion of TK programs across California. Those younger students will receive smaller backpacks stocked with age-appropriate supplies.
According to the latest data, more than 2,800 Santa Cruz County students are considered homeless under the federal McKinney-Vento Act. That includes children living in doubled-up housing, motels, vehicles or unsheltered situations.
Ibarra said the annual drive is especially important in Santa Cruz County, which was recently ranked the nation’s least affordable housing market for the fourth consecutive year.
“Stuff the Bus is about reducing one kind of pressure that families face when they go back to school,” he said. “Taking care of their backpacks and school supplies lets them focus on those other challenges.”
After the backpacks are assembled, they are returned to the County Office of Education, which distributes them to school districts and nonprofit partners that work directly with homeless and foster youth.
In addition to school supplies, each backpack contains resources designed to connect families with services. Those include bilingual housing guides, information about 211 assistance, foster youth programs, dental care resources from Dientes Community Dental Care and basic hygiene items such as toothbrushes.
“This is our favorite event, because we see everyone in the community coming together to help their community,” said Kim Luke, community engagement spokesperson with West Coast Community Bank, which brought seven volunteers.
Funding for the program comes from a partnership between the Santa Cruz County Office of Education and United Way of Santa Cruz County, along with corporate sponsors and individual donors.
Ibarra said the County Office of Education’s staff alone raised about $5,000 through an internal fundraising campaign this year. Overall, he estimated it costs roughly $45,000 to purchase the supplies for all 2,500 backpacks, with United Way helping secure discounts and donations from suppliers.
The Stuff the Bus campaign has become an annual tradition, combining fundraising throughout July with the volunteer Stuff-A-Thon that prepares thousands of backpacks for local students before classes begin later this month.
For information, visit unitedwaysc.org/stb
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LOADING UP Alejandro Guzman, left, and Yamilex Saldana were among seven volunteers from West Coast Community Bank.
GROUP EFFORT Scores of people help place supplies into backpacks.
Why Republicans wasted so much time yelling at Fauci
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. This past week it felt as if the world of Republican politics had taken a time warp back to 2020 and the height of the COVID-19 pandemic as the party hauled Dr. Anthony Fauci into a Senate hearing to repeatedly berate him.
Epic fury
A cartoon by Pedro Molina. Related | ‘Guardian of the strait’: Trump gets even more delusional about Iran war…
Thousands fill Watsonville for Strawberry Festival
The annual Strawberry Festival drew scores of people Saturday, who browsed among merchandise sales booths, sampled from dozens of food vendors, rode rides, played games and watched live entertainment.
The Festival lasts until 8pm Saturday, and on Sunday from 11am–7pm.
CREATIVE Kenia and Jimena Teodoro, 6 and 8, paint their own strawberry at a booth manned by Pajar Valley Arts.
Sequoia Solinas, 5, of Watsonville enjoys a strawberry-inspired treat.
SLICE OF LIFE Bladimir Velazquez and Vallerie Valle show off their slices of strawberry pizza.
FUN HOUSE Brynn Fernandes, 6, of Watsonville, runs through the Shake Shack, a funhouse on the festival's midway.
CROWDED Hundreds of people wait to see the first pie eating contest of the day.
BEST EFFORT Jessie Reed, left, joined several people on stage for a pie eating contest.
DISTINCTION Jessie Reed of Aptos celebrates after downing a large pie comprised of strawberries and whipped cream.