Latest posts by Peter Lawrence Kane

Two weeks after Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez‘s surprise victory over a low-profile yet powerful 10-term incumbent, she’s become a symbol of the bottom-up, post-Bernie transformation of the Democratic Party. It feels premature, but it’s not. Having beaten the reasonably progressive machine pol Joe Crowley in the June primary, she’s now running in an overwhelmingly Democratic district that encompasses […]

The San Francisco Botanical Garden has long been a respite-within-a-respite, an urban idyll in Golden Golden Park that enchants visitors with its Moon Viewing Garden and the magnolias that bloom every February. Through next Monday, July 16, it’s also once again home to 12 musical instruments, all part of Flower Piano. For the fourth summer […]

As the famed cocktail bar has done every six months, Trick Dog expunged its entire roster of cocktails to make room for an entirely new theme. Starting today and running through Dec. 31, Trick Dog unveiled “The Joy of Cocktails,” a collaboration between their team and 16 San Francisco chefs, representing restaurants like Cala, Liholiho […]

On the Fourth of July, San Jose resident Joey Chestnut set a new world record in competitive eating by downing 74 hot dogs in 12 minutes at Nathan’s on Coney Island. According to the New York Daily News, the previous record, Chestnut’s own, was 72.  The 34-year-old, 230-pound Joseph Christian Chestnut — we can call […]

What makes an alley an alley? As with the Supreme Court’s definition of pornography, you know it when you see it. Whether lined with dumpsters and standing puddles or full of feral cats gnawing on fish skeletons, an alley is obvious. They’re narrow, often too narrow to allow street parking. Mostly, the rears of buildings […]

“Seacuterie” is one of those portmanteaus that will either strike you as hopelessly clumsy or a springboard to a plate full of things you’ve never tried before. (It can be both, but it’s probably going to elicit a stronger reaction.) At Cafe Boho in the Marina, you ought to trust that it wouldn’t be on […]

Early on in Lost, an expedition deep into the jungle shows the location of the Black Rock. It’s a masted 19th-century slave ship, of course, and not some big onyx stone. It’s full of dynamite, a 200-foot tsunami had carried it miles inland more than a century before a French biologist found it, and it […]

In just the last week, the percentage of California that the U.S. government considers to be “abormally dry” or in one of the four categories of drought has gone from just under 70 percent to more than 85 percent. That’s up from about 22 percent this time last year. Put another way, less than 15 percent […]

Based on Jonathan Safran Foer’s 2009 book of the same name, Christopher Quinn’s documentary Eating Animals penetrates the deliberately opaque meat-industrial complex. The film does an excellent job of condensing multiple horrors — the hideous color of hog lagoons, the grotesque proportions factory-farmed poultry are bred to reach, the creepiness of “ag-gag” laws designed to […]

I used to be a fan of retaining old signage when a legacy business went under — particularly in the Mission where sensitivity around the disappearance of (mostly Latinx) culture runs high. It seemed kind. Pig & Pie hung on to the Discolandia sign on 24th Street, and Top Round Roast Beef kept it after […]