Julie Caine

Chris Bucchere, the bicyclist charged in the death of 71-year-old pedestrian Sutchi Hui, pled not guilty today to charges of felony vehicular manslaughter.

I spent most of my childhood up in the air. My dad, Steve, was a pilot. He loved to fly.

“I just loved the feeling of being up in the air,” he told me. “Kind of above the machines on the ground, that were just kind of crawling along and picking their way. Because you could go anywhere.”

For some people, the daily commute will get a little easier this week. Monday morning, a new ferry service between the Oakland, Alameda, and South San Francisco opened. In San Francisco, regular service resumed on the MUNI’s N Judah and J Church lines, after ten days of repair work at some of the city’s busiest transit junctions. Statewide, however, things aren’t so bright. A new poll shows that voters are losing faith in plans for a high-speed rail system in California.

In the era of Mike Daisey making up facts for his stories about Apple factory workers in China, or the uproar over the motives behind the recent KONY video, we have to start asking ourselves how real these real world videos really are. What’s going on outside the frame of a YouTube video? What’s true? And, who decides?

Northern California and Southwest Louisiana might seem like they’re worlds apart. But they’re actually intimately linked––by food, by language, and by music.

Cajun and Creole people left Louisiana for California in the 1940s, and later in the 1960s--looking for work and opportunity in shipyards and on military bases. Many of those jobs have disappeared, but the sounds of the squeezebox have helped keep the community together. In fact, California is now home to one of the biggest Zydeco music and dance scenes outside of Louisiana.