🌻 sf is back
throwing parties + Taipei time
Dear reader,
Today I left one of my three favorite cities in the world and landed in another.
I’m writing this en route from San Francisco to Taipei, where I’m visiting until March 8 (hence the lateness/briefness of this week’s letter). If you have recommendations or want to meet up, shoot me an email—I’ll be around. The only thing I’ve seen so far is my Uber driver’s newscast about Trump’s chip tariffs, but more Taiwan observations and traveloguing will be coming to the newsletter soon!
I recall the exact day I realized I had to move back to the Bay. It was a quintessentially icy New York December, and my building’s WhatsApp group had spent the last two weeks 311-ing the city to get our miserly landlords to turn up the heat. I was beyond sick of the ten-step walk between the couch, desk, bed, and kitchen in my 250 sq. ft. studio, so I flew to San Francisco early before an onsite week at work. I’d gotten used to the ritual of that 5.5 hour flight. From my window seat on the plane, I watched the bay emerge from the clouds, then get bigger and closer as the plane descended. The city was bathed in sun and haze, the blue sky fading oh-so-gradually to a dusty pink. Brooklyn did not feature nearly so many pastels. I had missed the West Coast openness of land and space.
When people ask why, I generally cite good, practical reasons for moving to SF—friends, work, whatever—but the feeling of “home” is very much a visceral one. Each time I arrived in the city, my heart rate would instantly start to slow.
At the beginning of this year, I called San Francisco the “happeningest place in the world,” a city so exciting that it’s exceptionally hard to tear myself away from, as costly and challenging as it is to stay. My first contact with the Bay was doing undergrad at Stanford. Though I arrived shocked and skeptical of how much money and power is concentrated here—a feeling I may never fully acclimatize to—I ended up equally surprised to be enthralled by the optimism and ambition that suffuses the city. It turns out that I like listening to people toss around their wild visions for reinventing society—playing with whole new ways of relating to each other, governing a city, making art, and sharing information. I appreciate the insistent tolerance for weird people and weird ideas; the fact that, as one fifth-generation San Franciscan put it, this place has always been a “city of transplants,” misfits, and refugees. Romance and irreverence, creation and destruction. And this feels taboo to say now, but I even love that people here don’t wait for permission—they enact the world they want to exist.
That freewheeling ethos gave us speech rights and the iPhone, some of the greatest American writers of the 20th century and the biggest companies of the 21st. Deadheads, Google, The Third World Liberation Front. There were good and bad effects (I hate that I need to make a statement as anodyne as this), but that’s the thing about having personality, right? You take the crazy (good) with the crazy (bad): it all comes from the same tangled root.
That’s what makes it sadder that tech and culture don’t talk to each other much these days. Intellectual life is thriving, but only in silos. The divide between art and commerce, and between “old SF” and “new SF,” feels sharper than ever. That tension is understandable—from both sides, really—but it also makes life worse. Our software is less tasteful, our cultural life deader, and our politics nastier; San Francisco won’t become a world-class city on SaaS billboards and cybertrucks alone. (Converts make the best Catholics, etc. I wonder if I’m just in a honeymoon phase, or appropriating nostalgia for something that never was.)
Anyway, my grand solution was to throw a party. On Thursday, Clara Collier and I convened every Bay Area writer/editor/magazine-maker we could think of1 and squashed them into The Interval, the bar operated by the Long Now Foundation. (The Interval is ground zero for the counterculture-cyberculture fusion, complete with two-story sci-fi library and Brian Eno installation behind the bar.) In true San Francisco fashion, the event began at 6pm sharp.
We refused to blast group chats or advertise on socials, but ended up filling the space handily by word of mouth. I begged the bar staff to increase the limit; there was a shivering line out the door nearly the whole time. We hosted rationalist bloggers, Marxist zines, and local journalists. A colorful spread of print publications about “capitalism” and “tarot” and “scientific progress” and “whatever.” Three (!) generations of WIRED editors. Our goal was to gather folks who might otherwise never meet each other. I saw it as a minor social experiment: can you trap a bunch of idealists of vastly different cultural-political-aesthetic stripes in a room and have them fight? Or the more prosocial case: it’s only by colliding different weird ideas that even stranger and better weird idea-babies will be born.
Not that I would know2, but I think the party went well—without any fighting, for better or worse. When the night ended and I finally looked at my phone again, my notifications were slammed with texts: I can’t come but I’m so sad to miss / I came but got stuck in the line outside / I had so much fun when is the next / why didn’t you tell me tfti. The solution to all four categories is that we simply must host more things, more places, more often. (If you have venue or concept suggestions do let me know!)
Here are a few photos from Thursday. I feel buzzy and warm just thinking about it!
The Bay Area is starving for more good parties. Please invite me to yours.
All the best,
Jasmine
We still forgot/missed sooo many people.
I’m generally not a good host IMO because I radiate and impart all my anxiety onto unwitting guests. On Wednesday night, I had this awful stress dream about being an hour late to my own party, none of my friends or cohost showing up, and a horde of non-literary strangers hogging the open bar. Devastating!
great party, great venue, great case for SF as a city and scene
The Interval is great vibes.