The dark side of startup life in Silicon Valley.

An extended version of this story is available as an ebook.</em></p>

Leland Yee was a career San Francisco politician known for championing open government and gun control. For the last few years, he was also the main target of an elaborate undercover investigation, during which he traded political favors for cash, tried to sell $2 million worth of weapons to a medical marijuana kingpin and worked closely with well-known Chinatown gangster named Raymond “Shrimp Boy” Chow.

An extended conversation on the problem of whether to “drop out or take over” conducted on Alan Watts’ houseboat, the S.S. Vallejo.

“More than a café, the shop is a carpentered-together, ingenious mechanism—a specialized tool—designed to keep Carrelli tethered to herself.”

Investigating San Francisco’s OneTaste, which promises personal and professional success through the practice of orgasmic meditation.

On the dysfunctional community colleges of San Francisco.

With the first on the scene of the Asiana Airlines Flight 214 disaster.

The writer, entering her thirties single and adrift, heads to San Francisco to spend time with Kink.com’s Princess Donna Dolore and attend a gangbang “where all the men were dressed as panda bears.”

A profile of Max Wade, a Marin County teenager on trial for stealing Guy Fieri’s Lamborghini and using it in the first drive-by in the history of Mill Valley, California.

How a burgeoning tech workforce swallowed San Francisco.

“I am talking here about a time when I began to doubt the premises of all the stories I had ever told myself, a common condition but one I found troubling.”

Visiting his daughter in San Francisco, the author longs for food delivery in Manhattan.

The people behind San Francisco’s Summer of Love.

How the CIA, under a program called MK-ULTRA, used a San Francisco apartment to dose johns with LSD.

She was the biggest tipper the waiters at some of the country’s most gourmet restaurants had ever seen. She treated casual acquaintances to elaborate vacations. Few saw the tiny bungalow where she lived amongst hundreds of boxes of unopened jewelry, and none knew the source of her wealth. When her multi-decade embezzlement scheme was revealed, the artisans and waitstaff whose lives had been changed by her generosity were left to sort out the pieces and consider their own relationship to her scam.

The fatal allure of the Golden Gate Bridge and why it doesn’t have a barrier to thwart potential leapers.

Murderous editors, allegations of insanity, connections to the Church of Satan, illegal predatory-pricing schemes, and more than $21 million on the line—the crazy alt-weekly war in San Francisco has it all.