The San Mateo County Community College District is attempting to recover from a long nightmare. It hasn’t been a painless process by any means.

If you have been in an airplane, you should know what to do in an emergency. Something along the lines of “put your oxygen mask on first before helping anyone else.” Flights are unpredictable. It is a prayer before takeoff and hoping for the best situation.

A couple of years into being a parent, I became a dad. Not that I wasn’t a dad from the day my first child was born, but as soon as my oldest was able to open doors, flip switches and turn on faucets, I realized that I had become a “dad”: a guy who constantly went around the house closing ca…

This week, I have been traveling around Italy with my classmates in the Italian program at Burlingame High School. Never having been to Italy, I expected the biggest shock to be surrounding the food, architecture or fashion, but what I didn’t expect was the fulfillment of trying to communica…

Nine months into the 2025-26 fiscal year, state tax revenue is running several billion dollars ahead of projections in the budget that Gov. Gavin Newsom signed last June.

Up and down the Peninsula this Saturday (and across the nation) people will be participating in the latest round of “No Kings” events.

Gas prices are rising. We all know why. War in the Middle East is once more the culprit, made even worse by California’s high gas taxes and restrictive refining rules, among other anti-petrol factors.

By tomorrow, some of this may change, who knows. News cycles are moving too fast for everyone, but here we go.

To maintain strict operational security (OPSEC) during a time of war I won’t tell you what time I usually take our dog, Holly, out for a walk.

Stanford’s growing presence in Redwood City has been fascinating to watch. Stanford’s first foray into the city began with the purchase in 2005 of four four-story buildings between Broadway and Highway 101, buildings that had been constructed as the headquarters for ISP/web portal Excite@Home.

I recently realized more than half the songs on my current in-rotation playlist were recorded before 2000. As someone born in 2008, this statistic briefly shocked me, but it’s not out of line with general Gen Z trends.

Last week’s news that Peninsula Lively Arts, formerly known as Peninsula Ballet Theatre, will be shutting down in June calls into question our community’s commitment to the arts.

California is not only the nation’s most populous state; it’s also the nation’s most economically, ethnically, culturally and even geographically diverse state.

Take a look at the website for Connect Bay Area, the organization pushing for regional sales tax increases to pay for transit systems, and this headline pops up: “Stronger Muni for All.”

It just kept coming, showing utterly no sign of halting whatsoever. The Waymo vehicle appeared to be on a collision course with our aging Honda sedan. It was more than a bit unnerving.

A now-removed set of locally distributed social media posts that included AI-altered images that violated at least one community platform guideline got me wondering how much of the content we’re served on social platforms really deserves a harsher eye than most of us give it. 

Who knew your most vital productivity hack could be done in about seven hours or more?

I was saddened to discover that University Art, the fabulous art supply store located on El Camino Real in Redwood City, is closing. Although we are by no means artists, for years my wife and I shopped there for picture frames, foam core, glue, colored pencils and markers. We had countless a…

Many times I’ve been asked by family members, friends, peers, interviewers and teachers why I dedicate so much of my time to mental health advocacy. From a meeting on Monday for my school’s National Alliance on Mental Illness chapter club and co-leading a Zoom call with the county’s Behavior…

In the early stages of a contentious discussion this week by the San Mateo County Board of Supervisors on regulating e-bikes and e-motos, Supervisor Ray Mueller said he hoped a model ordinance by the county would provide a “unifying voice” and “one clear message to the community.”

For all intents and purposes the tall, grizzled black locust tree that dominates our backyard has become a quasi-part of the family.

I bought my kids some San Francisco Mint gold coins last October as a keepsake, something they could hold onto for a long time and give to their kids.

When I first joined the Air Force in 1979 we were in the midst of the Iran hostage crisis and I was quite the “chairborne ranger,” itching for a fight against our enemies.

For most of my life I’ve loved movies. Although I didn’t get to the movies often as a kid — my dad didn’t care for them, although my mom did — once I hit high school and started dating, movies were where we mostly went.

I’ve been going through a pretty bad writer’s block the last two years. A solid piece will eke itself out occasionally, but as someone who could once churn out pages of prose and lines of poetry in minutes, I’ve been opening new Google Docs with a sense of dread. 

Turmoil within the California Democratic Party over this year’s election for governor and fallout from the party’s naked grab of congressional seats could have long-term effects, undoing two important political reforms — the top-two primary system and redistricting by an independent commission.

As many of you undoubtedly have tolerated, I have ranted often in this very locale against the ongoing efforts of short-sighted regional “leaders” to wrest management of Caltrain from SamTrans.

Former Burlingame mayor and longtime community volunteer Terry Nagel heads a list of deserving individuals chosen for 2026 induction into the San Mateo County Women’s Hall of Fame this month.

This weekend, I’ll be supporting two International Women’s Day events in the Bay Area. On March 7, Asians Are Strong hosts its annual Asian Women Are Strong summit at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco. On March 8, Christine Rimer is hosting the San Francisco Peninsula SheBuilds Lovable D…

Women are meant to be homemakers. Not all of them, but many. Most of my childhood outside of school was spent with family, especially my mom. My dad worked two jobs: a gardener by day and a janitor for local banks at night. When I was a year old, my parents went house hunting and my mom foun…

My father used to tell us kids that we shouldn’t think of our homes as an investment. Although he was certainly in favor of home ownership when possible, and he well understood that houses can and often do appreciate in value, he observed that to cash in on your home investment you need to s…

What constitutes an event? Are there temporal, spatial bounds, and do we evaluate the event by its intent or its impact? 

The Winter Olympics are about five days in the rearview now, and the review pieces have all been written. But there has to be room for one more right?

For the last year, as the array of announced and potential candidates for governor constantly fluctuated, those who closely follow California politics have waited for the field to stabilize and for independent polling to reveal who really has a chance to win.

Now, here is an example of how useful AI can be. I asked it for a list of things you could have done in the hour and 48 minutes President Trump took to deliver his State of the Union address Tuesday night.

Do you want to be a journalist? Hey, come on down. We’re always open. The profession has never been more ultra-available than it is now.

As an elected delegate to the state’s Democratic Party representing our Assembly district, I spent the past weekend at the endorsing conference meeting candidates up and down the ballot and listening to gubernatorial debates and interviews. It is the governor’s race that I walked away most c…

When I read that guards at the ICE detention center in Dilley, Texas, were going room to room, confiscating and ripping up letters and drawings children incarcerated there had made, I thought of Ruth Mix, the “girl with hair like the sun,” a nickname she earned from the internees at the Gila…

I have to hand it to Menlo Park, they seem to do things in a big way. First was the massive Facebook (now Meta) campus, and then there was all of the other office, hotel and, more recently, multifamily development projects in the part of the city between Highway 101 and the Bayfront Expressw…

A few weeks ago, I ordered a shirt from a popular teenage clothing brand online. When it arrived and I tried it on, it ripped immediately.

Educating California’s nearly 6 million public school students is the state budget’s second largest expenditure, and one that has increased sharply during Gavin Newsom’s governorship.

Signatures are still being gathered for the Connect Bay Area initiative, which would ask voters in five counties to approve a 14-year sales tax increase — a half-cent increase in San Mateo, Santa Clara, Alameda and Contra Costa, and a full-cent increase in San Francisco.

The timing is rather ironic. Next Tuesday, Feb. 24, will be the 30th anniversary of the heralded opening of the BART station in Colma.

Our biggest mistake is thinking, “this is a safe place.” After growing up in San Mateo County my entire life, I was naive as a child, thinking I was safe at all times.

Although some miners undoubtedly got rich during California’s gold rush, the people we remember are those who supplied them: people like Levi Strauss (who made and sold tents and, eventually, denim jeans) and Leland Stanford (who, with his brothers, began with a general store in gold country…

On Valentine’s eve, after Carlmont High School has mostly emptied out, my Associated Student  Body Recognition Commission works in C-Hall, the school’s central hallway, taping string to the ceiling and spacing paper cutouts along the corridor.

By all accounts, the elimination of cellphones at San Mateo High School has been largely successful in ensuring students have been focused on learning in the classroom and away from devices.

It would be interesting to calculate just how unlikely it is that the hottest race of this year’s election cycle would be for San Mateo County assessor-clerk-recorder and chief elections officer. But there you go.

Unionized teachers in the San Mateo County Community College District are not happy. They want more money. They are threatening to strike. That would be precisely what officials of the district don’t need right now.

American exceptionalism taught us to worship the win, but it never taught us how to judge effort, risk and responsibility while outcomes are still uncertain.