Category Archives: listory

July 18, 2012, 5:14 am

Si monumentum requiris

My usual short bike ride in San Francisco — about 25 minutes starting from my home near Dolores Park — is to head northwest via the Wiggle to Golden Gate Park, on to the Concourse between the California Academy of Sciences and the De Young Museum, and loop back home. Along the way, there’s a series of monuments which I read as an index of our civic preoccupations from, say, the last quarter of the 19^th century, into the first quarter of the 20^th.

At the gateway to the gateway to the park, so to speak, the east end of the Panhandle, a robed bronze figure, massive but reserved in her grief, holds up a palm branch in memory of President McKinley.

Just inside the park proper, on the right, McLaren Lodge, headquarters of SF Park and Rec, remembers John McLaren, father of the park. It’s a heavy Romanesque affair in tan stone — I believe there’s a meeting room inside…

March 21, 2010, 7:31 am

Madame Speaker.

By Ari Kelman

I’ve been saying for many months that if healthcare reform passes, I believe that Obama, for all of his myriad flaws, will be the best President of my lifetime and one of the ten best in the nation’s history. And before you ask, sure, I know that “one of the ten best Presidents” is not an especially august honor (I mean, I think Taft and Fillmore are on that list), and also that Obama has plenty of time to do enough atrocious things to make him one of the ten worst as well. Which reminds me, Eric, Kathy, and I were recently musing that LBJ is both the fifth best and fifth worst President in American history. But that’s a story for another day.

What I really want to talk about today is Nancy Pelosi. I have the sense that she’s wildly underappreciated: both as a powerful symbol — she’s the first female Speaker of the House, after all — and for her effectiveness. I don’t actually…