In Defense of San Francisco

Everyone is always posting about how third spaces are dead, and that we’re living in an era of unprecedented social isolation and anomie. Well, in SF we have a third space, and it’s called Dolores Park. If you live in a city with at least one bookstore and one music venue, they probably host these things called events? Where you can meet people? An... See more

Here’s some extremely obvious advice for anyone living in San Francisco (or any city, really) that feels lonely: go outside, strike up conversations with strangers, and accept every invitation someone extends to you until you become BFFs and/or your social calendar is full for the next 3 months.

I ultimately think that the people who are histrionic about safety in San Francisco—they just hate cities! They hate the fact that they have to interact with other people, people who are visibly poorer than them and different from them, when they go out into the world. They hate the fact that homeless people exist and that they have to see them, in... See more

The internet-ification of our lives is not a response to the hostility of the built environment to communal life but a continuation and intensification of that hostility.