Jill Cowan

Today, we’re starting with a dispatch from my colleague Thomas Fuller, who is based in the Bay Area:

Five months ago, we brought you the story of the rancher in Mendocino County who inadvertently started the largest wildfire in California history when he hammered a stake into a wasp’s nest.

I was surprised to learn last week that his home nearly burned — again — in the latest round of wind-driven fires in Northern California. Flames from the Burris fire, which was extinguished Nov. 3, scorched the sloping fields around the rancher’s wood-shingled home, coming very close to engulfing the wraparound porch.

“It took great effort on firefighters’ part to defend that structure this time,” said Tricia Austin, a fire prevention specialist with Cal Fire in Mendocino County. “Without the engine providing protection it very well could have been lost.”

Parts of California burn every year. And sometimes the very next year they burn again.

The Burris fire, which neighbors say ignited at or near a facility that makes compost, burned 703 acres and destroyed some sheds and minor structures but no homes.

Wildfire experts say fires frequently return to areas that have burned recently, underlining how no part of the state can let down its guard. The Kincade fire in Sonoma County, which forced hundreds of thousands of people to evacuate in October and was extinguished last week, burned through areas ravaged by the 2017 Tubbs fire and the 2015 Valley fire.

Ron Milliken lives across Highway 20 from the rancher, Glenn Kile, who started what became the Mendocino Complex fire in 2018, by far the largest the state’s history.

Milliken evacuated last year. And he evacuated again this year when the Burris fire ignited on the morning of Oct. 27.

It was 4 a.m. when he and his wife smelled smoke, but at least there was enough time to make a pot of coffee before they had to flee.

This article originally appeared in

Flames Return to Where California's Largest Wildfire Started

(California Today)

On Oct. 29, 1969, in a windowless room at the University of California, Los Angeles, a message was sent to the Stanford Research Center from a very large machine.

It was supposed to be “login,” but only the first two letters transmitted. So the message was, simply, “lo.”

“We had no idea — we had nothing ready, because all we wanted to do was to log in,” Leonard Kleinrock, one of the men who sent that message, told me last week. “But we couldn’t have asked for a more succinct, more prophetic, more powerful message than, ‘lo.’”

The message was the first ever sent between two computers. It was transmitted on a network called Arpanet. And from it, the internet was eventually grown. Of course, that’s a vast oversimplification of the momentous technological feat that this was.

On the day that I met Kleinrock in that same windowless room — which has been largely preserved as a kind of minimuseum documenting the birth of the internet — lawmakers in Washington were grilling Mark Zuckerberg about Facebook allowing hate speech and disinformation to flourish on its platform, which reaches billions of people. Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, was there to defend his company’s project developing a kind of digital money.

Kleinrock, 85, said he first got interested in electrical engineering when, as a child in New York City, he made himself a crystal radio.

When UCLA offered him a job teaching engineering, he left his position as a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to move out west.

Moving around the room and gesturing to decades-old equipment or diagrams hung on the walls, Kleinrock was clearly practiced at explaining packet switching and queuing theory. After more than five decades, he’s a comfortable, genial lecturer, even in one-on-one conversation.

But the story of how that message ended up being sent has been told by people who understand computers better than I do. What I wanted to know was how he now sees the world he helped create.

What, if anything, would he change about the way the internet has evolved? Did he have any regrets?

Kleinrock said his feelings were complicated.

He noted that in a news release issued by UCLA announcing Arpanet’s deployment, he is quoted as accurately predicting that “we will probably see the spread of ‘computer utilities,’ which, like present electric and telephone utilities, will service individual homes and offices.”

He said he thinks the network will become even more invisible than it is now, which seems likely.

But what he and his researcher colleagues missed, Kleinrock said, was the social side of the network. And he missed the ways in which that capability would, he wrote in an email later, “impact every aspect of our society.”

A few years ago, as hacking and spam and other undesirable uses of the internet proliferated, he said he often told people that the internet was in its disobedient teenage years, that it would grow out of its immature period.

“What’s happened is, it’s now more mature, and what’s going on?” he said. “We have nation-states putting boundaries around their national networks. We have organized crime, pilfering, money laundering, and we have extremists shouting things on a network.”

And if everyone’s talking at an equal level, he said, it’s natural that extreme ideas would command the most audience.

Kleinrock said he blames two things. One, he said he and the internet’s early builders could have headed off if they’d anticipated the need for it: strong user authentication as well as strong file verification.

That wasn’t something researchers built in because at the time, he said, they were trying to encourage wider adoption of the network so they could continue their research — not build barriers.

The second, in retrospect, may have been more inevitable: the commercialization of the internet.

He said that in 1994, the first piece of spam reached the network: A pair of lawyers sent a message offering their services in winning a green card lottery.

“They were advertising their services on our research network — how dare they?” Kleinrock recalled. “So we sent the email back to them and said, ‘Stop, shame on you.’”

But it was too late. Kleinrock likened it to a kind of fall from grace.

“We didn’t see the dark side emerging because of our culture, which was a bunch of good people working together,” he said. “We didn’t imagine we would reach a point where there would be a profit motive. We didn’t take out any patents. We didn’t try to own the IP.

“This was an engineering challenge.”

Still, he said, not everything is bad.

He still marvels at the fact that, at one point, his 99-year-old grandmother and his granddaughter could be on the internet at the same time. And they’d be able to use it to talk to each other.

And he said that, at least in terms of privacy and security, it’s possible to make the internet better.

“The citizenry has to get involved, the government has a role,” Kleinrock said, “and the scientists have a role.”

The Internet at 50: 'We Didn't See the Dark Side Emerging'

On Thursday, officials around California marked the 30th anniversary of the Loma Prieta earthquake, which killed 63 people, injured thousands, collapsed a span of freeway and crumbled buildings.

Some, like Mayor London Breed of San Francisco, participated in drills as part of a statewide effort to get kids prepared.

And then, early Friday morning, residents in the Los Angeles area received a real-life reminder of the threat when a magnitude 3.7 earthquake struck Compton, the U.S. Geological Survey said. There was no significant structural damage reported.

Also on Thursday, there was praise for the release of a new earthquake early warning app.

Alex Padilla, California’s secretary of state — who as a state senator wrote the 2013 bill starting the process of developing the app — said that the United States had for too long lagged other countries in adopting a system that could save lives. But he was pleased that’s no longer the case.

“When the next big earthquake strikes, every second of advance notice will matter,” he said in a statement.

The Compton quake, however, was not the Big One, and was too small to trigger a warning on the app.

Meanwhile, movement has been detected for the first time on the Garlock fault in Southern California, which experts say is capable of producing an 8.0 quake. But they cautioned it’s impossible to say whether that movement portends a temblor.

Compton Earthquake Rattles the Los Angeles Area

On Monday, more details emerged about the victims and gunman in a shooting that turned the closing hours of the Gilroy Garlic Festival — usually a time for locals to reconnect and for tourists to get a taste of a unique tradition — into a scene of chaos and panic.

As has become routine in mass shootings, details trickled out in the hours that followed the first, often confusing, reports. Here’s a quick update on what we’ve learned.

The Victims

Three people were killed and 12 were injured in the shooting, which authorities said Monday would have been more deadly had officers not responded in less than a minute.

Two children were among the dead: Stephen Romero, a 6-year-old from San Jose, California, who was remembered as a sweet, playful boy. The San Francisco Chronicle reported that his uncle called him “El Romantico,” because of his polished manners, penchant for pressed shirts and cologne, and his love of music by The Weeknd.

Multiple outlets reported that the Santa Clara County coroner’s office identified the second child as Keyla Salazar, 13. According to The Mercury News, she was anticipating turning 14 and hoped to become an animator.

The Rochester Democrat &amp; Chronicle reported that the president of Keuka College confirmed that Trevor Irby, 25, was the third person killed. He was a biology major who graduated from the school in the Finger Lakes region of New York a couple of years ago.

The Gunman

Gilroy authorities identified the gunman, who was killed by police not long after he started shooting, as Santino William Legan, a 19-year-old resident of the town.

Police said that Legan’s motive was still unknown and that the targets appeared to be random — although officials said it was too early in the investigation to say for sure.

Separately, Chief Scot Smithee of the Gilroy Police Department said a 20-year-old man was taken into custody. But authorities said they determined he wasn’t involved in the shooting.

The Weapon

Authorities said it was a semi-automatic rifle that Legan had purchased legally in Nevada.

Although California’s gun laws are among the strictest in the nation, some experts say the situation highlights how those rules could be undermined by more lax regulation in neighboring states.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/30/us/gilroy-garlic-fest-shooting.html" id="a0a92141-409c-31ba-ae0f-1ca18a83285f">The New York Times</a>.

California Today: Updates on the Gilroy Shooting

If you haven’t been to the Kern River, you may not know that it’s a stunner.

Make the harrowing drive up Highway 178 east from Bakersfield, California, and you’ll be rewarded with views of tall, green trees, glittering water and giant boulders that look like sculpture.

On parts of the river, the rocky rapids make white-water rafting a summertime draw, and lower down, where the water appears calmer, campgrounds are a destination for families looking for an affordable getaway.

But that, rescuers and experts have long said, is where you can get into trouble.

“The problem is that the speed with which people drown is just so fast,” Zac Boyd of the Kern County Fire Department told me. “Once they’re in the water, the life expectancy drops.”

A spring of heavy rains and cooler-than-normal temperatures means the river has been rushing. Since Memorial Day, local officials said, at least four people have drowned in the river, and an 11-year-old girl remains missing after being lost in the currents more than a month ago.

Still, Boyd said his department, as well as the Kern River Conservancy and the patchwork of public safety agencies that operate in the area, have worked hard to prevent accidents. They’ve recorded a public service announcement and partnered with rafting outfitters to provide loaner life vests.

But Boyd said he’s found the most effective tack is simply approaching campers to tell them about danger.

Maybe you believe you are a strong enough swimmer to keep your head above water. Or perhaps you think that tying a rope around your children’s waists as a tether will prevent them from being dragged off by unseen currents.

Boyd — were he to meet you at, say, a campground in Keysville — would politely disabuse you of those notions. “It’s something that a sign can’t do,” he said.

(There are also signs, including a famous one that has been periodically updated with the river’s death toll since 1968. It’s up to almost 300.)

It’s tough to draw a line back to those prevention efforts, but officials say that despite this year’s high water they have been less busy than they anticipated. And the number of deaths has been lower than in past high-water years.

Back in 2011, I reported for The Bakersfield Californian on what was among the river’s deadliest summers. Using coroner’s reports, my then-colleagues and I counted 15 drownings that year.

In 2017, Sgt. Zack Bittle of the Kern County Sheriff’s Office told me, the grim count was 16. In June of that year, the lower Kern River, where most swimmers take their chances, was flowing at about 5,400 cubic feet per second, according to Army Corps of Engineers gauge data.

This year, the river reached about the same flow in mid-June and has dropped since. But summer is far from over, and Bittle warned there is still a risk: Even this week’s flows of roughly 2,500 cubic feet per second can be treacherous.

So, with all that in mind, Boyd said his advice for enjoying the river is pretty straightforward:

— Wear a life vest if you’re anywhere near the water — even if you’re just wading or sitting on rocks with your feet in the water. The rocks are slippery.

— Watch your children — don’t let them splash in shallows.

— Don’t try to anchor yourself to the shore with ropes, and don’t use pool toys.

— If you want to enter the river, go with a trained guide.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/26/us/kern-river-drownings.html" id="9542a219-1467-3cc7-acdd-e4b9ae41d25d">The New York Times</a>.

The Kern River Can Be Deadly. Here's How to Stay Safe.

Last month, Jason Bentley, music director of the Santa Monica, California, public radio station KCRW, said he will step down from that post and sign off as the velvet-voiced host of the station’s flagship music show, “Morning Becomes Eclectic,” on Aug. 30.

He’s held both roles for a decade.

“The influence of the show goes beyond the listening at that particular time,” Jennifer Ferro, the station’s president, told me recently. Bentley, she said, has been “a huge tastemaker.”

For starters, he’s the music supervisor for “Top Gun: Maverick,” the forthcoming sequel to the 1986 movie, starring, once again, Tom Cruise, and directed by Joseph Kosinski.

It’s a return of sorts for Bentley; he’s done music supervision on other films, including “Tron: Legacy,” which was also directed by Kosinski.

But Bentley said he’s also looking forward to trying new kinds of projects and taking a little time to decompress after years of a daily grind.

I talked to Bentley about his time on the show, the art of curation and music he loves. Here’s our conversation, edited and condensed:

Q: Tell me about how you got into music — how you knew discovering new music was something you wanted to do.

A: Well, like a lot of people, my parents had a great record collection.

I was always fascinated with radio as a medium from a very young age and had a mock radio station in my bedroom with call letters and a DJ handle. It’s a funny thing to look back on.

It wasn’t really until going to college that I was able to get involved in college radio. That just opened my world up really wide. I got interested in underground dance music, house music at the time, which was not mainstream at all.

So for me, a guy who grew up on more mainstream rock and ’80s New Wave and disco, this was like a secret world that I discovered, and I just became obsessed.

Q: How do you see the function of a DJ — somebody who’s curating in the world of Spotify algorithms?

A: It just can’t be replaced. It’s sort of a handcrafted feel, and people can tell you’re engaged.

The goal is to find that moment to connect with people. It could be something as simple as the weather, or it could be that we’re coming out of NPR news coverage or a press conference and some politics of the day.

I remember coming out of the Trump inauguration with Bowie’s “The Man Who Sold the World.” I don’t have to say anything — I just have to play a song, and everyone can go from there.

That’s the art of it. I don’t see it yet with streaming-service algorithms.

Q: What do you listen for in a new song? Can you describe what it is that makes you say, “This one’s going to be big?”

A: I think one important thing about being a legitimate curator is certainty and having a point of view. Maybe you’re not right, at the end of the day, but that’s OK.

Q: I know this may be like asking you to pick a favorite child, but do you have any favorite discoveries? Or any artists where you felt like you were way ahead of everybody?

A: It is hard to say — let’s see. Two days ago, we had an artist named Weyes Blood. I first saw her at the Masonic Lodge at Hollywood Forever, and that’s probably 200 or 300 people. Then her next show was the Troubadour, and then she’s just announced at the Fonda. So we’re seeing that trajectory.

And she also has just been added to the Kacey Musgraves tour, which would be huge for her.

Then there’s Yann Tiersen. Supporting his recent album, “All,” has been an absolute pleasure. It’s a weird record, but it feels like a magical and spiritual journey.

I guess something else I think of is my relationship with Danger Mouse over the years. I think his career has sort of been parallel, and he’s someone I admire and can call a friend.

Q: Any favorite performances?

A: It was pretty awesome to open our new studio with James Blake. That was totally magic and momentous for us.

Oh, and we are issuing a curated selection of our favorite sessions. It’ll be a tribute to our basement era.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/25/us/jason-bentley-morning-becomes-eclectic-kcrw.html" id="cbfbf2b5-c0cd-35c7-aa52-2375adc4e54c">The New York Times</a>.

Here's What's Next for the LA Music Tastemaker Jason Bentley

This week, my colleagues Thomas Fuller and Ivan Penn wrote about how Californians — especially the many living in fire-prone rural areas — are bracing for what is likely to be another intense and costly wildfire season. In fact, we’re already paying.

I asked Ivan to tell us a little more about skyrocketing insurance costs. Here’s what he found:

Almost two years ago, the California Department of Insurance got a letter complaining about insurance companies’ treatment of consumers as it relates to wildfires.

The letter, penned by Jamie Court, president of the nonprofit advocacy organization Consumer Watchdog, seemed prescient, given the devastating wildfire last fall that killed 85 people and destroyed the town of Paradise. Court called on the department to help protect homeowners facing inadequate coverage and high costs after the previous years’ fires.

“California residents who have seen homes turned to ash are concerned that they may now get burned by their own insurance company,” Court wrote in the October 2017 letter.

It turns out that at least some customers living in wildfire-prone areas still can’t get the coverage they need at reasonable prices.

On Monday, my colleague Thomas Fuller and I reported that across the state people are scrambling to prepare for the peak of wildfire season, from utilities inspecting and trimming trees throughout their service areas to consumers buying generators and home battery systems. Others have been left to fret over whatever might befall them because of troubles with their insurance company.

The state insurance department does not keep track of the number of homeowners who have lost their insurance because of wildfire risks, but the number of complaints it received on the issue has increased steadily over the past eight years, to 276 last year from 41 in 2010.

David McGiffert, of Topanga Canyon in Los Angeles, received a letter from his insurance company, Allstate, just weeks ago, stating that his policy would end in September after more than 20 years as a customer. Other companies want five times the $1,800 a year he pays for his current policy.

“I don’t have any idea what we’re going to do,” McGiffert said. “Our house is our equity. It’s what we have to leave our children.”

In his letter to the insurance department, Court emphasized the need to ensure that homeowners have adequate replacement coverage, but he also called for a review to resolve a “decades-old problem” still facing consumers like McGiffert, a 77-year-old retiree from the film industry.

“Fortunately, existing law provides the options to allow the insurance commissioner to fashion a complete short-term and long-term remedy,” Court stated in the letter.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/24/us/california-wildfire-season-insurance.html" id="7d806344-2b82-31bf-ac85-2778ac27d4fc">The New York Times</a>.

Why More California Homeowners Are Losing Their Insurance

That’s 108,178 admitted freshman out of a pool of 176,695 applicants across the system’s nine undergraduate campuses.

Another 28,752 transfer students — including a record 26,700 from the California Community Colleges system — were offered spots at UC campuses, out of 41,282 applicants.

“Yet another year of record-setting admissions underscores the tremendous interest in the world-class education at UC,” Janet Napolitano, the university’s president, said in a statement.

The data was released as UC, one of the world’s most vaunted public institutions, grapples with questions about how to best serve the full spectrum of young Californians amid widening economic inequality and debates about the value of a college education.

On top of that, this year, the University of California was swept up in the college admissions scandal, which laid bare just how elite the system’s most competitive campuses have become.

Last month, I talked with Napolitano about changes to admissions processes meant to head off any admissions fraud in the future.

She described the university as a kind of public trust. And as such, Napolitano said, its administrators must implement policies that both “mitigate against the undue effect of privilege,” as well as work to put a UC education within reach of as many residents of the state as possible. The university has faced criticism for admitting too many students from out of state in the past.

This week, officials announced an increase in the freshman admission rate for Californians (by 3 percentage points, to 62%) and highlighted what was by at least one measure the most diverse class ever: 40% of admitted freshmen were from historically underrepresented groups, meaning they are African-American, Chicano or Latino, or American Indian.

Asian-American students were the largest ethnic group among freshman admissions, representing 35% of the class, followed by 34% Chicano or Latino, 22% white, 5% African-American and 0.5% American Indian.

About 44% of the freshman admissions from California would be first-generation college students, and 40% are low income.

But that’s all across a huge system, and the stats aren’t reflected at the most competitive campuses. For example, just 26% of freshman admissions to UC Berkeley were from underrepresented groups.

As my colleague Jennifer Medina reported last year, the bulk of the fast-growing Latino population — particularly first-generation college students — is headed to less academically lauded campuses, like UC Merced.

That raises as many questions about how to make UCLA and Cal more like UC Merced as it does about how Merced can become more like its older siblings.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/23/us/uc-admissions-2019.html" id="fd96c7a7-84c7-3684-a82e-69cc1d904a61">The New York Times</a>.

On Monday, the University of California introduced its largest crop of students admitted for the upcoming academic year.

Who Got Into the University of California?

A little while ago, we asked you about your best California road trips.

We got tons of great recommendations for routes that crisscross the state. But, of course, heading along the coast north of the Bay Area and Wine Country were frequent recommendations.

As Norm Gilbert — a reader who sent us a detailed email that formed the backbone of our guide — put it:

“This trip can be done in a few days or a few weeks or longer. For the longer trips, just stop more, stay over night, wine taste, have spa treatments, eat in some of the world’s best restaurants and see some of the most spectacular views of nature you can imagine.”

Sona Patel, a California-based editor for The New York Times, put together our expandable (and shrinkable) itinerary — with help from our wine critic, Eric Asimov, as well as our California restaurant critic, Tejal Rao.

The itinerary: Start in San Francisco.

San Francisco to Bodega Bay

Head north on Highway 101 toward the Pan Toll campground in Mount Tamalpais State Park, via Panoramic Highway for camping or a hike. “This is the back way to Mt. Tam that only the locals know and use,” Gilbert said. Make your way to the top of Mt. Tam for spectacular views.

Once you get down the mountain and head north on Highway 1, pass through Stinson Beach, Bolinas and Olema. Head a little farther north to the small-but-charming Point Reyes Station, where you can stop for cheese at Cowgirl Creamery or a pastry at Bovine Bakery. (Thanks to Ken Broad of Mill Valley for that suggestion.)

Dan Saltzstein, a former Travel editor at The New York Times, offers these suggestions for a meal along the way: Cafe Reyes, which serves wood-fired pizzas. (Try the Palomarin, with mushrooms and white anchovies), as well as fresh oysters (on certain nights) and local beers and wines on tap. Side Street Kitchen, for breakfast and lunch. They offer a veggie “hash” (roasted potatoes, vegetables, chimichurri rojo and a perfectly soft-boiled egg), chicory cold brew coffee, and beer, wine and cider.

There’s plenty to do nearby, if you’re willing to drive a little more.

Some of Gilbert’s favorites are the Point Reyes Lighthouse, which is about 20 miles from Point Reyes Station, observing tule elk at Tomales Point and the nearby Hog Island Oyster Company, where you can learn to shuck and BBQ oysters.

Continue north to Bodega Bay, the filming location for Alfred Hitchcock’s 1961 movie, “The Birds,” where you’ll find hiking trails. Fred Euphrat, who lives in Occidental, suggested the Shorttail Gulch Coastal Access Trail, a half-mile path leading to a small rocky beach on the bay.

Although it’s about 10 miles away from Bodega Bay, a few readers suggested Wild Flour Bread Bakery in Freestone, for a post-hike treat.

Stay in one of the inns at Bodega Bay.

Bodega Bay to Mendocino

In the morning, hit Highway 1 north again and head to Salt Point State Park, before a visit to The Sea Ranch, “the California architectural monument of the 1960s.”

If you’re in the mood for an oceanfront picnic, consider Gualala Point Regional Park.

Then, head north just 10 miles past Mendocino for a day in Fort Bragg, where you can take a ride through the redwoods on the Skunk Train to Willits. Fred recommended going a bit farther to Caspar to visit the Jug Handle State Natural Reserve, which boasts a 2.5-mile Ecological Staircase Trail that “explores three wave-cut terraces formed by the continental glaciers, rising seas, and tectonic plates that built the Coast Range.”

Eric Preven, a reader who lives in Studio City, recommended Princess Seafood Market &amp; Deli and Django’s Rough Bar Cafe for eats.

Stay in Mendocino at Brewery Gulch Inn or Glendeven Inn &amp; Lodge.

Mendocino to Sonoma

If you’ve made it this far, it’s time to start driving south. After all that hiking and exploring the outdoors, you may be in need of a little vacation from your vacation.

Head to Harbin Hot Springs in Middletown for a soak or massage. The Valley Fire in 2015 burned thousands of trees and 95 percent of the retreat center’s structures, but it has been slowly rebuilt.

Wine Country to San Francisco

This is the part where you get to spend most of your time wining and dining. Here’s where Asimov and Rao jumped in.

On both of their lists was Scribe Winery. Here’s what Rao had to say about it:

“Scribe’s wines taste brighter and more vivid at the winery itself, a sprawling, sunlit, 19th-century home with views of vineyards. The tastings are leisurely and include some food, set at private tables, making the whole experience much closer to a dreamy al fresco lunch than an educational walk-and-talk wine tasting. Be sure to call ahead and make a reservation.”

Here are Rao’s other recommendations:

Box Car Fried Chicken and Biscuits, in Sonoma, where she said, “the lunch rush line can get a little long and sweaty, but it’s one of those rare, truly well-warranted lines for simple food made exactly right. Order puffy, tender, golden biscuits and crisp, fried chicken — in whatever combination appeals — and then find a table out back in the shade.”

And El Molino Central, also in Sonoma, where she said, “the chilaquiles made with softly scrambled eggs and the restaurant’s own fried housemade tortillas are an ideal way to start the day. If you’ve got more time, spend it with more of the menu, like the red mole enchiladas or the cochinita panuchos.”

Here are Asimov’s recommendations for wineries that might be a little less touristy:

In Sonoma, there’s Pax Mahle, who Asimov said, “makes excellent wines under his own label while nurturing talented young winemakers in his Sebastopol facility.”

And Ridge Lytton Springs, which he said, “makes terrific zinfandels and perhaps the best American cabernet sauvignon, Monte Bello.”

Finally, if you have time to take a quick trip to Napa Valley, Asimov recommended Corison for its Cabernet Sauvignons, made in a boutique operation; Frog’s Leap, which he said is a wide-ranging producer that has long been a Napa Valley leader in thoughtful farming without irrigation; and Stony Hill Vineyard, which he said is doing some of Napa Valley’s most interesting work and was a pioneering chardonnay-maker.

Linger in and around Sonoma for as long as your time and budget allow, then make the drive back to San Francisco.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/19/us/california-road-trip-bay-area.html" id="5e7a35e9-0d73-3e9d-ac6c-1821d1028c05">The New York Times</a>.

Everything You Need to Know for a Road Trip Up the California Coast

Today, Laurel Rosenhall, a reporter for the nonprofit news site CalMatters, catches us up on state lawmakers’ efforts to curb police shootings. Earlier, I talked with her about this year’s legislation, which she’s been tracking in a podcast called “Force of Law.”

This is part of a collaboration between The New York Times and CalMatters.

Here is Rosenhall’s update:

California is on the brink of passing a law meant to reduce police shootings. That may not sound very surprising given the politics of this blue state, where Democrats hold every statewide office and about three-quarters of the seats in the Legislature. Or given the toll of police shootings on its people: California police officers kill someone, on average, every two to three days — a rate that’s higher than the national average.

Lawmakers shelved a bill last year to set a tougher standard for the police to use deadly force. It was inspired by the death of Stephon Clark, who was shot by the Sacramento police in his grandparents’ backyard after officers mistook the cellphone he was holding for a gun. Its failure was in part attributed to the sway police unions have in the Capitol.

This year, as legislative leaders urged civil rights advocates and law enforcement groups to negotiate, tensions have flared. Demonstrators marched in Sacramento after prosecutors cleared the officers who killed Clark. Politicians attended the funerals of two officers from the Sacramento region who were killed. And new legislation to regulate the use of force spurred emotional public testimony — from Californians whose family members have been killed by the police, lawmakers who served in law enforcement and a sheriff’s deputy who was shot by a man who killed her partner.

Eventually, the negotiations yielded a compromise that supporters say will give California one of the nation’s toughest statewide standards for the use of deadly force. The Legislature passed the bill this month, and Gov. Gavin Newsom has said he intends to sign it.

The bill says the police can use deadly force only “when necessary in defense of human life.” That means there has to be an imminent threat of death or serious injury to the officer or another person. It’s a steeper standard than prosecutors apply now, which says the police can shoot when doing so is “reasonable.”

Importantly, the bill also says the authorities must look at an officer’s conduct leading up to a shooting, including whether the police tried to first de-escalate the situation or use less lethal weapons. It’s an unusual provision and a reason the bill has widespread support from civil rights groups.

“I couldn’t be more proud,” Newsom said last month when I asked what he thought of the compromise. “California will lead the nation.”

In the course of negotiations, lawmakers made concessions to law enforcement that prompted them to withdraw their opposition — but also caused Black Lives Matter to drop its support.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/18/us/police-shootings-california-legislation.html" id="7d11288c-eb37-3dd6-a4e7-7c4f3646fff9">The New York Times</a>.

Jill Cowan

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