Monday, March 30, 2026

Civilian Casualties

Top story: “New U.S. Missile Hit Iranian Sports Hall and School, Analysis Shows” (NYT)

  • The Pentagon used missiles untested in combat in a deadly attack that struck civilian sites near a military compound on Feb. 28, according to visual evidence examined by The Times and weapons experts.

  • Local officials cited in Iranian media said this strike and others nearby in the city of Lamerd killed at least 21 people.

  • The Times verified videos of two strikes in Lamerd, as well as aftermath footage from the attacks. Times reporters and munitions experts found that the weapon features, explosions and damage are consistent with a short-range ballistic missile called the Precision Strike Missile, or PrSM (pronounced like “prism”), which is designed to detonate just above its target and blast small tungsten pellets outward.

  • The sports hall, at the time of the strikes, was being used by a female volleyball team, according to Amir Saeid Iravani, Iran’s representative to the United Nations. Photos and videos posted to a social media account linked to the school show the premises were regularly used by children. The sports hall has also for years been publicly identified as a civilian-use facility on readily available digital mapping platforms, including Google Maps, Apple Mapsand Wikimapia, according to a review by The Times.

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Sunday, March 29, 2026

No King, No War

Saturday marked the third “No Kings” rally across the country and many thousands of people came out to demonstrate against the authoritarian Trump and his illegal war.

The Times reported these five takeaways:

  • The war seemed to galvanize younger voters.

  • Trump’s immigration crackdown remains a focus.

  • Dueling protests unfolded near Mar-a-Lago.

  • Midterm candidates came out in force.

  • Democrats found fresh fuel for their ‘No Kings’ slogan.

Read the entire piece for details.

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Saturday, March 28, 2026

The "Martinez"

 




As editor of the city magazine 7x7 that launched in 2001, I commissioned lots of stories on local history.

One of those was the origin of the martini, perhaps America's favorite cocktail. As near we were able to determine, a gold miner who had struck it rich headed to San Francisco when he stopped at a bar in Martinez, where the bartender served the drink.

The miner loved it, called it the Martinez, and headed for the Barbary Coast, then the most raucous part of a raucous town. He described the drink to a bartender there, where the modern name apparently emerged.

In the startup business we would call that a founding myth, and this one is generally accepted as true.

After all, history belongs to whoever is paying for the next round.

We published all sorts of fascinating tidbits during my brief tenure at 7x7, which was named for the 49 square-mile footprint of San Francisco. The 49ers refer to the gold miners, the football team and a 49-mile scenic drive for tourists.

As it turned out, free martinis were one of the main benefits of editing 7x7, though not for a celebratory reason. We launched the magazine one week before the 9/11 terrorist attacks. As the tourist trade here collapsed, we struggled to publish, deferring our salaries and accepting "trade' instead of cash from advertisers.

That trade basically meant all the free food and drink we could have wanted in San Francisco's best restaurants and bars -- night after night. As we navigated our way through this debauchery, it often felt as if the Barbary Coast was alive and well once again, at least for our merry band of staffers.

Despite the odd circumstances, I worked with a great group of editors, writers and designers, and it was a good chance to learn the city's rich history first-hand. Among the people I met was a young city council member named Gavin Newsom.

A week or so after our meeting, I received a hand-written thank you note from Newsom. Alas, soon after that, I had to leave 7x7 in order to earn an actual paycheck again.

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Friday, March 27, 2026

All Other Things

For one semester at the University of Michigan I was an Econ major, but I got hung up on the Latin phrase meaning “all other things being equal,” which kept showing up in every economic model we studied.

When I somewhat rebelliously wrote a paper arguing that in real life all other things never stay equal, my professor was not amused and gave me a D. That was the end of my would-be major in economics.

I understood, of course, the concept of modeling and the need to control for random factors that could affect the outcome, since I’d also been a math major for a minute. But similar concerns about reality’s messiness compared to math’s formulaic purity derailed my academic trajectory in that subject as well. Quod Erat Demonstrandum if you will.

In the end, I found that I was better suited to working with words, so it was journalism for me, which of course is completely obsessed with the real world and all of its messiness. But wouldn’t you know it, the two subjects that have come up over and over again in my journalism career are economics and math.

Both are necessary today when trying to understand what is happening with Trump’s chaotic foreign adventurism. He tries to bully countries he considers weaker, but that will only backfire in the end. He has got both the math and the economics of what he is doing wrong.

His back and forth statements on the Iran War seem to be mainly about controlling the world’s oil. So was his adventurism in Venezuela and his future plan for Cuba. But the damage from his bombings to critical infrastructure in the Middle East will destabilize the energy markets for many months (maybe years) to come.

Meanwhile, his poll numbers continue to plummet.

Of this I am certain: all other things are most definitely not equal out there in the global economy. I may have gotten a D in Econ for telling the truth but Trump gets an F for lying.

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Thursday, March 26, 2026

Doubling

(From 2007)

There’s restlessness to the air tonight. The weather here is unsettled. As usual, the beginning of my workweek was intense. If weeks had an emotional cycle, Mondays often are times of uncertainty. By the end of the week, Fridays, I usually feel highly energized, engaged by my work, hopeful about the future.

But Mondays are times when problems can seem suddenly overwhelming, when my chosen path in life -- to swim uphill -- just requires more energy that I can muster.

At such times, my mind tends to revert to some very old patterns, most of them mathematical. My childhood propensity, whenever I felt anxious, to start doubling numbers (i.e., 1, 2, 4 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024, 2048, 4096, 8192, 16384, 32768, 65536 -- that’s usually as far as I could go at age 8 without hesitating), has recently returned to haunt me as I drive alone along the highway, much to my chagrin.

I thought I’d eliminated this particular ghost over a decade ago.

Usually, something in my universe is not quite right; otherwise my mind doesn’t race away into this mathematical wasteland -- this hopeless attempt to control the uncontrollable. Somehow the center of balance in my world has suddenly shifted.

What’s disconcerting is how I know these things without knowing anything about the particulars. Sometimes, I find out a detail that helps justify these distractions; other times, the person or factor responsible chooses to remain silent, leaving me to no choice but these crazy calculations, which never end and lead to no conclusion.

My dear Chinese friend invited me to a ramen restaurant in San Mateo tonight, and somehow we revealed our inner calculation nightmares to each other. She gave mine a name (Doubling) and then discussed hers. She squares numbers to rectify her proclivity, even after eight years in this country, to translate miles back to kilometers, and Fahrenheit back to Celsius.

After thinking it through, maybe I’ll adopt her particular mathematical obsession in place of my own. I think I like hers better; it’s more practical. She may move to the Bay Area this summer, and if so, I extracted a promise that she will teach me, at long last, the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus, crashing against which ended all notions that I might be math major four decades ago.

Ramen took me back to Koenji, Japan, where I rather wish I was right now. The weather here is so unsettling; the skies are alternating dark and light; an uneasy wind blows. I wish I knew why I am so uncomfortable in my own skin tonight.

My Grandma believed she was psychic, and most of the rest of us believed her. I have always hoped I am too, though actually I don’t want to be. I hate premonitions,, when they come to me, and when they turn out to be correct.

But not always are they real.

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Wednesday, March 25, 2026

My Tax Auditor at First Sight

The first time I went to the local IRS waiting room to meet the person who would be auditing me I imagined my auditor would be a monster, someone like George Harrison’s “Taxman.”

However, my actual auditor turned out to be a lovely young woman fresh out of college and more than willing to share with me the ins and outs of the auditing process.

Over the course of that first audit, which lasted several weeks, I gradually learned how to comply with the arcane rules I had clearly violated while trying to juggle a full-time job, two part-time projects and some random income as a freelance writer.

One of my main problems was that I couldn’t persuade her that my workspace was a legitimate home office, because it was also used as the kitchen, dining room, and playroom by my three young children.

Also, I had not kept a written record of my many lunches and business meetings or of my frequent travel as I juggled work assignments. The agency clearly had not yet figured out how to handle a multitasker, as the word had only originated recently (1966) and was not yet commonly applied to human beings.

By the end of that first audit, my auditor ruled that I owed Uncle Sam enough in additional taxes and penalties that it automatically triggered audits for the two subsequent tax years, focusing on the same set of issues.

But I wasn’t about to suffer the same fate two times in a row, let alone three. Besides, I had come to like my auditor and as we parted after that first go-around, she told me,”You know, you can request me to be your auditor for the next one if you want to, you have a right to do that.”

So when I showed up for my second audit, I requested to be assigned the same auditor and the IRS granted my request. This time, I showed up with a complete printed register of all of my lunches and meetings, tons of receipts (all numbered consistent with the register), and a more convincing argument that my home office was legit as it now consisted of a desk in the corner of my bedroom.

There were no toys or dinner plates on my desk when the auditor paid her visit for the mandatory inspection, but there was a plate of cookies.

That second audit ended much better -- in a virtual tie -- I didn’t owe the IRS anything beyond what I had paid when I filed my tax return.

In due time the third audit commenced. By now, I was determined to reclaim some of the money confiscated by the agency back in that first audit. I again requested the same auditor. By now I looked forward to renewing our acquaintance and continuing to demonstrate that I was a fast learner.

She seemed pleased to see me again too. This time around we had long conversations during which she told me about her dream to get out of the huge, frustrating government bureaucracy and get a job at one of the Big Six accounting firms.

We’d become friends by now, and our conversations were distracting enough that she only had time to give a cursory check of the impressive documentation I had prepared of my business meals and meetings, global travel, and an extensively outfitted home office that transformed what had previously been my bedroom into a distinctly professional workspace.

In the end, my lovely auditor gave me some welcome news: My arguments and documentation were persuasive. The IRS would be issuing me a refund -- almost identical to the excess taxes, penalties and fees assessed me back in the first year of our auditing relationship.

So in the end it was one win for the IRS, one win for me, and one draw. Net-net, nothing was lost, nothing was gained, except one new friend.

And I had even developed a bit of a crush on my IRS auditor. Enough so that I almost wished that I could be audited by her again.

Almost.

HEADLINES:

  • Florida Democrats Win Special Election in Mar-a-Lago’s District (NYT)

  • Trump news at a glance: president touts ‘strong talks’ with Iran that Iran says have not happened (Guardian)

  • Around 2,000 U.S. Paratroopers to Be Sent to the Middle East (NYT)

  • U.S. awaits Iran’s response on peace summit as Israel watches warily (Axios)

  • The Back-Channel Diplomacy Behind Trump’s U-Turn on Iran (WSJ)

  • Less than 48 hours before the US-Israeli strike on Iran began, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke by phone to President Donald Trump about the reasons for launching the kind of complex, far-off war the American leader once had campaigned against. Read our exclusive. (Reuters)

  • Pentagon Adopts New Limits for Journalists After Court Loss (NYT)

  • GOP senators see path to ending DHS shutdown after Trump meeting (Politico)

  • Afghanistan Frees American Detainee Amid Mounting U.S. Pressure (NYT)

  • Everyone but Trump Understands What He’s Done (Atlantic)

  • Prosecutor admits government lacks evidence of misconduct by Fed chair (WP)

  • Gabbard plans to shift coveted, CIA-backed high-tech fund to her office (Politico)

  • How to get Big Tech to pay your energy bills (WP)

  • A Difficult Question for Teachers: What to Say About Cesar Chavez? (NYT)

  • There Were Warnings (Atlantic)

  • CERN hails test on transporting antimatter as a scientific success (AP)

  • Pakistan Mulls Over Ramping Up Its Media Narrative War (TechJuice)

  • Ukraine Spent Big to Shield Energy Industry From Drones. Is the Mideast Next? (NYT)

  • Thousands of people are selling their identities to train AI – but at what cost? (Guardian)

  • Silicon Valley airport tests ‘José,’ an AI-powered robot to ease travel snarls (BI)

  • ICE Agents Swab Passengers’ Hands To Test For Immigrant Residue (Onion)

 

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Tuesday, March 24, 2026

CIR's First Home

When we opened up the Center for Investigative Reporting in 1977, our office suite was on the top floor of the magnificent old Broadway Building in downtown Oakland.

There was a definite 1930s feel to the place, as if we were private detectives from a bygone era. Early visitors fed that impression, including a woman who wanted us to follow her husband because she suspected he was cheating.

(We politely declined.)

Instead, we did long stories about corporate crime, environmental degradation, political corruption and other journalistic topics.

When I recently posted about CIR’s origin — “49 Years Ago: CIR is Born” — I didn’t have a photo of the headquarters building. I also made a math error in that post, originally labeling it 50 years, which I rapidly corrected on Substack. That math error is a first for me and this newsletter.

One of my co-founders, Dan Noyes, kindly sent me this old photo, so this gives me the chance to update that post and correct the record on both counts.

Now on to the news...

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