Latest posts by Peter Lawrence Kane

The relationship between personal wealth and personal wellbeing is a tenuous one. If anything, there’s increasing evidence that happiness is relative, not absolute, and even at the uppermost economic strata, anxiety and misery pervade. The status-obsessed 0.1 percent spend inordinate psychological energy comparing themselves to the incalculably wealthy 0.01 percent, against whom they come up […]

Some 20 months after Tony Taccone announced his departure from the Berkeley Repertory Theatre and shortly after his critically lauded revival of Angels in America, the organization’s board of trustees announced that Johanna Pfaelzer had been chosen to replace him as artistic director. Pfaelzer, currently the artistic director of New York Stage and Film (NYSAF), […]

“I’m just one step below everybody else,” an unhoused San Francisco resident named Dennis says. “I got a job, but I’m still homeless — because living’s expensive.” “Give me a place to be, at least where I’m alive,” says another individual named Antoine, expressing frustration with the mindless cruelty of the city’s encampment sweeps. “You […]

Dave Hartley, the bassist for The War on Drugs, wasn’t even aware that the rock band of which he is one-sixth had won a Grammy. “We were in New Zealand, in the morning, I guess,” he says. “We all woke up and we were sort of conscious that the Grammys were taking place.” Hartley and […]

As grandiose inscriptions go, “Dedicated to the Supreme Architect of the Universe” almost can’t be beat. It sounds like a translation of something that might accompany the eye in a pyramid on the back of the one-dollar bill. Indeed, the phrase is Masonic in nature, but not the Scottish Rite of Freemasonry. Instead, it adorns […]

As anyone who’s ever been thwarted by its hypnotic blades knows, the trickiest part of any mini-golf course is the windmill. You stand there, hovered over the tee, putter in hand, trying to line up your very Circadian rhythm with the metronomic quality of the windmill, and feeling the rising irritation of the group behind […]

Six weeks after a fire that shut down the Los Gatos restaurant, Manresa has announced it will reopen on Wednesday, Sept. 19. The July 16 blaze came four years after an even more serious fire that began in the same place and left David Kinch’s three-Michelin-starred dining destination closed for a full six months. Fortunately, the […]

“There is, you will agree, a certain je ne sais quoi — oh so very special — about a firm, young carrot.” So says the delightfully absurd character Uncle Monty in one of the most widely quoted lines from the cult British film Withnail & I. He also happens to “find the cauliflower more beautiful […]

Unlike Chicago or even Los Angeles, S.F. isn’t a city saddled with huge tracts of postindustrial turf, lying fallow since the decline of American manufacturing. (And as with future housing developments in Hunters Point, some of what we do have might be contaminated with radioactive schmutz.) But that’s not stopping the craft-beer industry. A couple […]

Given the atrocities climate change has already begun to visit upon us, the time is right to go meat-free. Along with choosing not to fly in planes or reproduce, it’s probably the best thing individuals can do. (Major, societal action is still urgently required to avoid catastrophe.) But like a moratorium on babies, compulsory veganism […]