How Citizen Surveillance Ate San Francisco

When a homeless man attacked a former city official, footage of the onslaught became a rallying cry. Then came another video, and another—and the story turned inside out. From Lauren Smiley, one of the great chroniclers of technology’s impact on people’s lives, this is a feature about what it means to watch and be watched on the streets of the world’s troubled tech capital:

In San Francisco there’s always another video. New York and London are known for being blanketed with government-run CCTV coverage, but surveillance here is different: It is as privatized as it is pervasive, a culture of Hitchcock’s Rear Window, at scale.

In the city where Nextdoor’s offices sit right in the gritty Tenderloin, sharing Ring cam footage of porch thieves is a bonding exercise between neighbors who’ve never met. All over town, local nonprofits oversee neighborhood-wide networks of cameras funded in part by donations from crypto entrepreneur Chris Larsen. (“That’s the winning formula,” Larsen told The New York Times in 2020. “Pure coverage.”) Platoons of Waymo self-driving cars circulate the streets like Pac-Man ghosts, gathering up videofeeds that cops snag for evidence. You can watch a resident’s live cam to see who’s on the corner of Hyde and Ellis, right now.

True-crime video has become San Francisco’s civic language, the common vocabulary of local TV news broadcasts, the acid punch line to a million social media posts. The feeds intensified during the pandemic, when commuterless streets erupted with synthetic opioid use and property crime. Since then, the city has found itself hobbled through successive breakdowns—a police shortage, a 34 percent office vacancy rate, a federal injunction severely limiting the city from clearing homeless camps. No one seems to be solving San Francisco’s problems, the feeling goes, so by God, people are going to film the dysfunction and post the footage.

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The Train Wrecked in Slow Motion

In this harrowing essay for Slate, ER doctor Grace Glassman recounts the birth of her third child, a daughter, and the risks involved with pregnancy at age 45. In a piece that is a master class in pacing, Glassman remembers her uncontrollable bleeding post C-section and going into hemorrhagic shock that required life-saving emergency surgery. In reflecting on her experience as a medical doctor, she suggests that only one thing stood between life and death: pure luck.

The anesthesiologist returned. “I don’t get your pressures. They don’t reflect how you look.”

In her defense, I did feel well, even though my blood pressure was abysmal.

“We could put in an arterial line and then we’d know for sure,” she said. She was referring to a small wire with a sensor that gets placed in an artery, a more accurate gauge of blood pressure than a cuff. “But it hurts. I don’t think we’ll do that.”

I disagreed. Just put in the damn line, I thought. She was slight, with brown hair in an unfussy bob. She wore dark tortoiseshell glasses. She moved slowly, catlike, and seemed not too concerned. I worried that she wasn’t more worried. It was the emergency doc in me, always defaulting to the worst possible outcome, I told myself. I reminded myself that this was not my show.

She decided instead to transfuse more units of blood and start pressors, medicines that boost blood pressure. Blood pressure can drop for many reasons—a hemorrhage, an infection, a reaction to medication, a compromised heart. Pressors divert blood to the vital organs, such as the heart and the brain, at the expense of body parts that can be sacrificed, like the arms and legs.

Pressors are the mark of a critically ill patient.

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Last Love: a Romance in a Care Home

A beautiful, moving piece about love in old age. Sophie Elmhirst draws you in from the first sentence and keeps you hooked with her quick-fire sentences. It’s an essay to make you both smile and cry.

It’s not entirely clear when this was. Two years ago, maybe three? Timings, the order of things, time in general, can be confusing. But there are some things we know for sure. Mary is Mary Turrell, nearly 80 years old. She had been living at Easterlea Rest Home in Denmead, near Portsmouth, for a little while, a year or two, perhaps, when the man with the voice arrived. And his name was Derek Brown.

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Sick City

Writer Katie Mulkowsky’s father grew up in Robert Moses’s New York City—specifically, the Bronx that Moses all but destroyed in his quest to remake the metropolis in his image. Now an urban planner, Mulkowsky considers how Moses shaped both her dad’s life and her own:

We lost my dad last year: the denouement in a courageously fought cancer battle that spanned more than two decades. I was 24 when he died—not as young as I could have been, but not old enough to negate a dull, almost-always-there sense of missing something. He was unpretentious, unfashionable, unfailingly reliable. He was corny and funny and sentimental. He was a rare combination of impossibly hard-working and deeply empathetic: a respiratory therapist for many years, he was an asthmatic who helped people breathe. We won’t ever be able to say for certain whether his lifelong lung issues, and lengthy scrimmage with the carcinomas, were caused by his exposure to harmful pollutants alone. But we’d be foolish to say that the environment he was raised in had no bearing on his wellbeing—or that of his dad, or brother, or niece and nephew, or those other 33.3 per cent of Bronx residents who die prematurely, a rate substantially higher than in New York City (26.2 per cent) or New York State (23.4 per cent).

Beyond being a daughter, I’m now a practising urban planner, and was trained by mentors with a keen eye on the link between public space and public health. Thanks to a slew of writers, scholars and activists—like Robert D Bullard, author of Dumping in Dixie (1990), Julie Sze, author of Noxious New York (2006) and Gregg Mitman, author of Breathing Space (2008), particularly Chapter 4, ‘Choking Cities’—it’s well documented that environmental issues have unequal human impacts. Certain populations, based on their location, demographic makeup, level of resources available and underlying political context, feel the effects of industrial pollution more than others. This often has to do with the fact that histories of social and economic disenfranchisement become mapped on to urban space through planning practices like redlining and zoning. Along with the South Bronx, neighbourhoods like Brooklyn’s Sunset Park and Manhattan’s West Harlem today have higher geographic concentrations of polluting infrastructure, such as major highways, power plants, incinerators and waste transfer stations, than their wealthier counterparts do—predisposing some of the city’s poorest and most diverse communities to the worst health outcomes. Knowing this, on a professional and a personal level, has compounded the magnitude of my grief with the exasperation of having seen something coming for a long time.

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Rebuilding Myself After Brain Injury

How does it feel to lose the ability to conjure the right words? Kelly Barnhill explains the long, difficult process of recovering from a brain injury in this moving essay on loss—and resilience.

Healing from any injury is a process of rebuilding cells and tissues and structures — taking that which is broken and making it new again. Healing a brain injury is the process of rebuilding not only tissues and cells and the connections between those cells, but also memory, thoughts, imagination, the fundamentals of language and our very concept of ourselves.

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Ice Cream, Alone and with Others

In this beautiful essay at Ruby Literary Magazine, poet Terry Kirts explores the deep pleasures of ice cream, whether by observing a stranger enjoy a cone or by eating it himself.

It’s just that, of all foods, ice cream seems a communal one, whose flavor is intensified by the visual and auditory exuberance of those you’re sharing it with. Birthday parties, barn raisings, summer socials. “I scream, you scream, we all scream. . .”

I know I will not write about it, except to tell you there are sorrows even ice cream cannot drive off, though I hope there is someone to share yours with every time you eat it.

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A Hiker and a Terrier Climbed a Peak. The Dog Came Home 72 Days Later.

Richard Moore, an avid outdoorsman, vanished this past August while hiking with his dog on Blackhead Peak, a 12,500-foot mountain in Colorado. Miraculously Finney, his Jack Russell Terrier, survived and was rescued 72 days later. For Outside, Frederick Dreier tries to figure out what happened.

The sheriff’s office has yet to publish an official cause of death, but rescuers told Holby that Moore had likely died of hypothermia and exposure. He was lost, stranded on a steep ridge on the eastern side of the peak, far from the trail. He had smashed his glasses and probably could not see where he was going. His body was about 500 yards from the farthest boundary of the search.

Holby has a final theory of how her dog made it through the ordeal, one that she thinks about on lonely afternoons. From her living room in Pagosa Springs, Holby can look out her windows and across the valley to the east and see the scraggly profile of Blackhead Peak rising in the distance.

“I keep feeling as though she was sent to me by Rich,” Holby says, “Who probably told her to go home and take care of me.”

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