Good morning, and welcome to the Essential California newsletter. It’s Monday, Oct. 31, which means it’s Halloween — a holiday purpose-built for the city of make believe. I’m Jon Healey, senior editor of the Utility Journalism Team, and I am writing from South Pasadena, where tonight I will definitely not be visiting the boyhood home of Michael Myers.
The news coming out of California these days certainly has the feel of Halloween (the unsettling day, not the unsettling movie). Take, for example, Friday’s brutal attack on Paul Pelosi, husband of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, at their home in a tony San Francisco neighborhood. The details that have come out since that morning have been chilling; for example, the Associated Press reported Sunday that the man accused of the attack carried zip ties into the home — so he appears to have planned something other than a friendly chat with his representative in Congress.
(The San Francisco Chronicle explains how Paul Pelosi and an alert 911 dispatcher got police to the house in time to stop the attack from being even worse.)
Meanwhile, the Elon Musk era has begun at San Francisco-based Twitter, prompting some progressives to panic, or at least to reconsider their Twitter habits. They fear that Musk, a professed “free-speech absolutist,” will allow hate speech, harassment and intimidation to rule on the platform.
Many conservatives, on the other hand, felt Twitter’s moderation policies were biased against them and welcomed Musk’s arrival as a potential return to balance.
Musk said Friday he won’t change content policies or reinstate banned users until he has convened a “content moderation council” with diverse viewpoints.
Nevertheless, on Sunday, Musk retweeted a wild, anti-LGBTQ conspiracy theory about the attack on Pelosi that was advanced by the Santa Monica Observer, a font of fake news. The Times’ Anita Chabria responded with a column warning that Musk is driving Twitter straight into the gutter.
“Within 24 hours of Musk taking over the site, the use of the n-word increased 500%, according to the Network Contagion Research Institute — though Musk claims its moderation policies have not yet changed,” Chabria wrote. “Hate has found its home, in the middle of our public square.”
Meanwhile, supporters of affirmative action at USC and other private colleges in California are feeling horror-movie levels of dread over a pair of Supreme Court cases set for oral argument on Halloween. The lawsuits, brought against Harvard University and the University of North Carolina, could lead to the same sort of race-blind policies at private colleges (and other institutions that receive federal funds) as California voters imposed on the UC system through Proposition 209.
The result, predicts UC Davis law professor Aaron Tang: less diversity in admissions. He suggests working to improve primary and secondary schools by raising the quality of their staffs.
“If we cannot bring disadvantaged students to schools with great teachers,” Tang writes, “we can offer financial incentives to encourage the teachers to go to them.”
Here’s a fright that strikes closer to home. If you haven’t read Jessica Roy’s account in The Times of how identity thieves turned her life upside down, you should do so now that it’s available to nonsubscribers.
“It will be entirely your problem, and no one — not the police, not the government, not the financial institutions — really cares or will help you much,” Roy warns. Come for the nightmare, stay for the advice Roy gives on self-protection and solutions.
Did you hear the one about the Comedy Store being haunted? The Times recruited Zak Bagans, host of the Travel Channel’s “Ghost Adventures,” to investigate.
And if all of the anxiety-inducing news of late is costing you sleep, the Washington Post reports on an experimental technique that can ease debilitating nightmares. It involves tying a happier ending to the sound of a “neutral” piano chord, then playing that chord repeatedly after you start dreaming.
I’m partial to the C major seventh chord, but your happy-trigger tone may vary.
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