The Urban Legend That Won’t Die on This Deadly Bay Area Highway

Susana Guerrero and Madilynee Medina explore Americana folklore with the tale of a ghost that supposedly haunts a San Francisco highway. While some fully believe in the spirit, others cite pranks as the source of the continuing story. With personal experiences to fall back on, Guerrero and Medina provide insight into the tall tales.

When an SFGATE reporter recently walked through the historic town of Niles, locals of all ages said they’d at least heard of the ghost story. Several also mentioned a teen who’d stood in the canyon wearing a white sheet. Carol Williamson, who was born in Niles and graduated from Irvington High School in 1964, told SFGATE that she’d heard of the prank as a kid — but that didn’t stop her and her friends from going out looking for the ghost girl.

“When we were in school … you know, everybody would get in their cars and you would just drive through the canyon and somebody would naturally scream and everybody would scream,” Williamson said. “I never saw anything, but you always wanted to.”

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Percival Everett Can’t Say What His Novels Mean

Maya Binyam’s profile is ostensibly pegged to the release of James, Percival Everett’s latest novel, but the stars aligned in a wondrous bonus: at the Academy Awards the night before, Cord Jefferson won Best Adapted Screenplay for American Fiction, which stems from Everett’s 2001 novel Erasure. None of that bears even remotely on the profile itself, which is an exemplar of what can come when a very smart writer comes to the table with an encyclopedic knowledge of her very smart subject’s very smart work. There’s scenework, and there’s dialogue, but the real joy is how Binyam gets inside Everett by getting inside his prodigious output—teasing out his leanings and pressing him on them. She gets him; he gets her. It seems like a friendship in the making, and I sincerely hope that comes to pass.

When asked if an interpretation was his intention, Everett almost always says yes. He knows that his books depend on an audience to achieve significance, and he seems to encourage that dependence. In 2020, he published three versions of his novel “Telephone,” a move that he knew would emphasize the authority of his readers—and piss them off. (The novel was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.) “He plays with the reader,” his longtime editor, Fiona McCrae, told me. “Part of his subject is our reaction to his work.”

Because Everett refuses to analyze his fiction, he is popularly regarded as a “difficult” author, a distinction he wears with pride. “I am a famously difficult interview,” he told me more than once. He acknowledges that he can be spacey when his interest isn’t held, and he often splices amusing non sequiturs into conversation. (“If you were going to be an animal, which animal would you be?” “Do you think there’s a Sasquatch?”) He believes that awards are “offensive,” and describes them as “invidious comparisons of works of art.” His books have won many. “I’ve never met somebody who gives less of a shit,” the director Cord Jefferson, who recently adapted “Erasure” into an Oscar-nominated film, “American Fiction,” told me.

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The Squatters of Beverly Hills

Apparently all you need is a fake piece of paper to start a new lease on life. For Curbed, Bridget Read reports on the serial scams of those connected to 1316 Beverly Grove Place in Beverly Hills, California, a mansion overrun by fraudsters determined to live the lifestyle of the rich and famous—even if they had to steal it.

“When John A. Woodward IV got the listing in September, the mansion was priced at $4.995 million. It was unfurnished, so Woodward had to borrow old photos from the former broker, but other than that, it was in good condition. He hired a pool guy and a landscaper to keep the place looking nice for tours. There were the usual showings, some offers. Then, a few weeks before he heard from the producer, Woodward got a call from the pool guy. Someone had pulled up with a U-Haul, he said. He assumed there was a new owner and was hoping they might consider keeping him on. Woodward raced over to Beverly Grove to see what he was talking about. When he got there, he found his clicker no longer opened the gate. His keys didn’t work in the front door, either. Someone had even ripped up and discarded his FOR SALE sign. When he realized he was locked out, Woodward called the police. Two beat cops showed up and went inside; when they came back out, they said the people in the mansion were claiming they had a lease. It was a civil matter now, and there was nothing they could do.”

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A Bullshit Genius

Walter Isaacson’s Elon Musk was the latest and most controversial in his series of biographies, but it was also in many ways the apotheosis of Isaacson’s own evolution—or devolution, in Oscar Schwartz’s view. In this deeply satisfying critical essay in The Drift, Schwartz takes stock of Isaacson’s career both on and off the page, creating a compelling argument that mythologizing Musk has long been Isaacson’s inevitable destination.

With Franklin and Einstein, Isaacson was simply rearticulating the achievements of canonical geniuses in the vernacular of his time. Jobs represented a different challenge: because he was still alive, a case had to be made for his inclusion in Isaacson’s coterie of polymaths. Following some two years of reporting, Isaacson wrote a fluent narrative about Jobs that, at least superficially, depicted a man with two sides. Sometimes he is a brilliant, intense, eccentric creative with an uncompromising aesthetic vision. Jobs drops acid and travels to India. He takes a course in calligraphy and later uses what he learned there to help develop the Mac’s font range. He sees a Cuisinart food processor at Macy’s and has the idea to encase his computers in molded plastic. Other times, Isaacson shows Jobs as volatile and cruel. He gets his girlfriend pregnant, then denies it. He betrays old friends (including his Apple cofounder, the true engineering genius Steve Wozniak). He parks in handicapped spaces. He screams at subordinates. He cries like a small child when he does not get his way. But whenever Jobs behaves badly or demands too much of his staff, or loses himself in perfectionistic pursuit of some detail, Isaacson demonstrates how the unwieldy parts of Jobs’s temperament allowed him to create world-changing products. The cruel and authoritarian impulses were established, in other words, as necessary components of his creativity. “His personality and passions and products were all interrelated,” Isaacson writes, “just as Apple’s hardware and software tended to be, as if part of an integrated system.”

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My Never-Ending Search for Adderall

For Esquire, Jason Diamond helps us to understand what it’s like to live with ADHD and to be without Adderall—the medication that allows him to focus and function. The drug has been in short supply since the end of 2022 and Diamond set out to learn why.

My brain moves fast and I’m unable to process thoughts or emotions. Then things get backed up. Sooner or later my heart is pounding, I’m sweating, and I feel like death. That’s not a great way to live. And so, in 2018, after two decades of living without it and with a host of mixed feelings after an overprescribed childhood, I went back on medication for my ADHD. Combined with meditation, exercise, and meds for my anxiety, the Adderall I’ve been prescribed has improved my life. I read hundreds of books a year and write thousands of words every day. I’ve published two books of my own and write for myriad publications. (It is not lost on me that my chosen career is one that requires sitting still for hours and turning my thoughts into words.)

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Freedom of Sex

Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Andrea Long Chu delivers a characteristically provocative essay that skewers the anti-trans movement, including people she calls trans-agnostic reactionary liberals, or TARLs. She also asserts that trans advocates could, and should, make their cause more expansive:

The TARL will typically acknowledge the existence of a group of fully developed adults whose medically verified gender dysphoria is so persistent and distressing that the argument for compassionate care outweighs the Hippocratic prohibition on harming a perfectly healthy body. The basic strategy here is to create a kind of intake form with exactly two boxes on it. Every trans-identified person is either a participant in a craze or certifiably crazy. (Checking both boxes is permitted.) There is a touch of genius to this approach. It draws a bright line between the kids who say they are trans and the kids who really are while pathologizing all of them as either delusional or dysphoric. This line is as old as gender medicine itself, which for decades was careful to distinguish impersonators and fetishists from the “true transsexual.” So in most cases of gender variance, the TARL informs parents that it is perfectly healthy for boys to wear dresses and for girls to climb trees regardless of their biological sex, which need not be altered after all. He reassures them that the risk of suicide among trans-identified youth has been inflated by cynical activists trying to blackmail the public; what he means by this is that he does not think most kids are suicidal enough to be trans. In those rare instances of true misery, he advises the practice of “watchful waiting,” preferring to see the patient through the often-irreversible changes of puberty to adulthood, when her childhood experience of gender incongruence will finally acquire the weight of medical evidence. If only she had said something sooner!

This is obviously not a vision of justice; it is a response plan for an epidemic. This should not surprise us. The very simple fact is that many people believe transgender is something no one in their right mind would ever want to be. The anti-trans bloc has in general targeted children because Americans tend to imagine children both as a font of pure, unadulterated humanity and as ignorant dependents incapable of rational thought or political agency. This has allowed the movement to infantilize not just kids but all trans people, whom it only wishes to shepherd through the ravages of mental illness and the recklessness of youth. If the liberal skeptic will not assert in mixed company that there should be fewer trans people, he still expects us to agree on basic humanitarian grounds that at least there should not be more. It is quite possible, for instance, to believe that cancer patients should have access to aggressive treatments with potentially life-altering effects while also sincerely believing that, in a perfect world, no one would have cancer.

We will never be able to defend the rights of transgender kids until we understand them purely on their own terms: as full members of society who would like to change their sex. It does not matter where this desire comes from. When the TARL insinuates again and again that the sudden increase of trans-identified youth is “unexplained,” he is trying to bait us into thinking trans rights lie just on the other side of a good explanation. But any model of where trans people “come from”—any at all—is a model that by default calls into question the care of anyone who does not meet its etiological profile. This is as true of the old psychiatric hypothesis that transsexuality resulted from in utero exposure to maternal sex hormones as it is of the well-meaning but misguided search for the genes that “cause” gender incongruence. It is most certainly true of the current model of gender identity as “consistent, insistent, and persistent,” as LGBTQ+ advocates like to say. At best, these theories give us a brief respite from the hail of delegitimizing attacks; they will never save us. We must be prepared to defend the idea that, in principle, everyone should have access to sex-changing medical care, regardless of age, gender identity, social environment, or psychiatric history. This may strike you as a vertiginous task. The good news is that millions of people already believe it.

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The Gender Refugees

When the Andersons fled Iowa City in 2022, they joined a growing group of American families escaping states that have become hostile for transgender communities. How many more will there be, and what about the people who can’t leave the places they feel threatened?

According to a June 2023 polling report by the think tank Data For Progress, 8 percent of transgender adults have moved out of communities or states because of the uptick in anti-trans legislation, and another 43 percent have considered doing so. GoFundMe data provided to ELLE found a 520 percent increase from May 2022 to May 2023 in fundraisers helping transgender residents looking to relocate from the state of Florida, which has enacted six anti-LGBTQ+ bills into law in 2023, including bans on gender-affirming care.

After the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services announced in February 2022 that it would begin investigating any reported instances of transgender children receiving gender-affirming health care, which Governor Greg Abbott deemed “child abuse” in a letter to DFPS, Kimberly Shappley began to fear what would happen to her own 11-year-old transgender daughter, Kai, who went viral for protesting anti-trans legislation in Texas when she was just 10 years old. “I just kept thinking that if they take our kids, no matter how mad people are, nobody is going to be able to come help us,” Shappley says. “And if they [did] come for our kids, do I have the money that it would take to fight this in court?”

In August 2022, the family sold their home in Austin and moved to Connecticut. Kai feels much safer, but the adjustment hasn’t been easy. “We’re homesick,” Shappley says through tears. “We didn’t leave Texas because I had some great job offer. We didn’t leave Texas because we had family we wanted to be closer to. We fled the government of Texas. We are refugees in our own country.”

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