What I’m Reading: Livia Albeck-Ripka, in the New York Times (13 October 2026), These California Boat Dwellers Fear the Worst: Life on Land

Shared Article from New York Times

These California Boat Dwellers Fear the Worst: Life on Land

For decades, dozens of people lived rent-free on a bay just north of San Francisco. A few holdouts remained as a deadline loomed to leave the water.

Livia Albeck-Ripka @ nytimes.com

The human-interest and Northern California counterculture – community stories here are a really interesting picture. The overall story of the article, and especially the corrections and additions that have since been posted, make it pretty clear that the first-published write-up of the story was dependent on some overly credulous single-source reporting that got a one-sided and somewhat confused picture of local political and development fights in Sausalito. Still a good read, though:

Chad Wycliffe lives on a bay with a front-row view of the San Francisco skyline. Waves lull him to sleep. He’s surrounded by hills dotted with multimillion-dollar mansions and marinas with luxury yachts.

He doesn’t pay any rent.

His home is a half-century-old sailboat with a faded red jib and barnacles growing beneath it. At 45, Mr. Wycliffe has lived on the water for nearly half of his life.

He first moved to Richardson Bay, just north of the city, as a troubled teen drawn to the thrill of the open water. There, a group of mariners, exiles and artists who called themselves anchor outs lived aboard vessels less than a mile — but worlds away — from ordinary society.

To many, the bay was a refuge. To officials and some Marin residents, however, the collection of boats was more like a floating homeless encampment.

Now, the community, one of the last vestiges of counterculture in the Bay Area, has been all but dismantled. Officials say Richardson Bay will be cleared of the last illegally anchored vessels by Thursday.

Mr. Wycliffe is one of the final holdouts.

. . . Richardson Bay is a shallow arm of the San Francisco Bay in Marin County, one of the most expensive places to live in the country. It’s surrounded by waterfront cities, including Sausalito, a former shipbuilding town that now has a promenade of galleries, white-tablecloth restaurants and gift stores selling trinkets and T-shirts with the slogan Keep Sausalito Salty.

For decades, the sailboats floating on the bay were part of the scene. It was a painting,</q said Jeff Scharosch, a general manager and partner at The Spinnaker, a glass-walled restaurant suspended over the water. But he and some other locals also considered the boats a blight and a hazard.

I used to tell people, Yeah, they look beautiful from afar because you don’t see that they’re barely seaworthy, he said.

Officials said many of the boats were unsafe or abandoned, and that their anchors and chains were damaging the bay’s eelgrass beds, a marine habitat that sequesters carbon. About a decade ago, the authorities began a concerted effort to remove and destroy boats they said were abandoned or derelict.

. . .

Richardson Bay historically has drawn the free-spirited, the outcast and the priced out. After its World War II shipyard closed in the late 1940s, veterans and artists moved into the abandoned vessels and barges.

By the 1970s, hundreds of people lived in a sprawling waterfront neighborhood of makeshift houseboats and homes built from salvaged materials. They had their own newspaper, and an offshore settlement, known as Dredgetown. Many got by on a mix of odd jobs, bartering and scavenging.

Over the years, efforts to clear the waterfront sparked violent clashes, known as the Houseboat Wars, with the authorities. Most of the houseboats were ultimately regulated and brought into onshore marinas.

Some anchor outs, however, remained or moved into the open bay. As economic conditions grew worse in the Bay Area,^[1] the flotilla mushroomed, expanding to nearly 250 boats by 2016, according to official counts. Mr. Wycliffe and other anchor outs said that the water provided solace to those who didn’t conform to life on land.

. . . At the same time, some locals became fed up with the boats. . . .

— Livia Albeck-Ripka, These California Boat Dwellers Fear the Worst: Life on Land
New York Times (13 October 2026).

There’s a lot of really interesting stuff, and a lot of Real Northern California Shit, here, about the formation of the community from counterculturalits, burnouts and enthusiasts, the pressures that have led city governments to try to buy them out, bribe them out, or force them out by corralling, condemning or running off their boats. There’s also an ill-considered sideline into a pretty confused discussion of the local development politics and the fight around Sausalito’s upcoming Measure X referendum, which is basically a YIMBY project to simplify and streamline Sausalito’s zoning ordinance as it applies to the waterfront district, and has really nothing at all to do with the city government’s efforts to discourage and dismantle the anchor out communities offshore; these are associated only in the minds of No on X advocates, who are broadly anti-gentrification, see the city government as generally too pro-development, and see the whole thing as of a piece with a general sort of Keep-Here-Weird politic or aesthetic.^[2] The real story about local government efforts to get rid of the anchor outs is further down in the story, and has to do with long-running concerted carrot-and-stick efforts to get them into marinas, bribe them ashore with a creaky and fiscally unsustainable program to give out housing assistance vouchers (since largely collapsed), to cancel out anchoring permits, condemn and seize boats, etc. etc. There’s a lot of characters, a lot of local politics, and this may be the Most California Possible story of 2026.

1. ^[1][Sic. I can see how you get to writing this line in a story drawing mostly from local advocates for anti-gentrification politics and a burnout countercultural community. But it’s really a pretty weird way to describe San Francisco and Silicon Valley becoming stupendously more affluent and attractive to young professionals, if you think about it! —RG]↩
2. ^[2]It took me forever to get through the thicket of advocacy websites to find out what the measure would actually do. What I eventually found out is that Sausalito currently has a seemingly completely insane 128 page special zoning plan for the Marinship district, which among other things forbids most small-scale business development and requires a citywide citizen referendum for routine land use permits and decisions. Advocates for Measure X want to get rid of that, mainstream decision-making for waterfront properties into the normal city council permitting and approval process, and make sure to restore some older commercial set-asides that used to allow waterfront businesses to do some more direct-to-customer retail sales. Yes on X supporters think that the current system is complicated, costly, has left a lot of the waterfront area of town stagnant or derelict from underdevelopment, and generally strangles any projects to build new, nice things or revivify local business down near the shore. No on X advocates generally believe that the city authorities are trying to grease the skids for large-scale gentrifying redevelopment, want to fill the waterfront area with high-price office buildings and luxury condos, and will cut sweetheart deals with developers and destroy the countercultural and maritime spirit of the town in favor of some vision of soulless luxury yuppie scum corporate hell. This author is of the opinion that city governments and developers often go wrong, but the current zoning situation sounds absolutely bonkers, and that Sausalito like a lot of Bay Area towns is really prone to being seized up with weird hippie moral panics about commercial development that end up turning perfectly reasonable grassroots, artsy and countercultural sentiments into absolutely insane systems of overcorrection, political strangulation and long-term stagnation that profoundly harm the ability to build and sustain cool things in communities that otherwise ought to be the best places on earth for them, and the local zoning ordinance should be abolished immediately, completely, and forever, but if it will not be, it is at least in desperate need of massive simplification and reform in the direction of making development possible. But, and I cannot stress this enough, none of this has anything to do with the guys in the boats out in the bay, which neither the existing zoning ordinance, nor the proposed reforms to the zoning ordinance, has anything to do with!↩

Today is Mr. Featherstone’s birthday. Today is the anniversary of Tilita’s marriage. Insurance is payable, as are the water, gas, and light bills.

Shared Article from libraryofshortstories.com

There Will Come Soft Rains by Ray Bradbury

“Today is Mr. Featherstone’s birthday. Today is the anniversary of Tilita’s marriage. Insurance is payable, as are the water, gas, and light bil…

libraryofshortstories.com

And from the other side of the Iron Curtain, here is Nazim Tulyahodzhayev’s 1984 animated short based on the story (h/t @notjessewalker).

What I’m Reading: Carolina Jiménez Sandoval, I’m in Venezuela. Things Are Worse Than They Look (New York Times Opinion, 30 June 2026):

The twin earthquakes struck just days after I arrived. I held my mother’s hand for what felt like an eternity as the ground shook violently beneath our feet. When we emerged, it was to a changed world — one of collapsed buildings, downed phone lines and missing loved ones. It’s still hard to make sense of the dimensions of the tragedy we are living in.

But in the days since, one thing has become clear: The earthquakes have exposed the toll of years of corruption, institutional dismantling and the abandonment of Venezuelan citizens by their state. This crisis is as much a tragedy of authoritarian rule as it is a tragedy of nature. Venezuela’s natural disaster was unavoidable, but the devastation it has left in its wake was not.

These earthquakes, the deadliest to hit Venezuela in decades, have killed at least 1,700 people, injured thousands more and heaped new devastation onto a country already buckling under a protracted economic and humanitarian crisis. . . . Nearly eight million Venezuelans, including doctors, nurses and other essential workers, have fled the country in recent years. The long collapse of public services — sporadic running water, periodic blackouts and dilapidated, poorly supplied hospitals, to name a few — left Venezuelans utterly unprotected when the earthquakes struck. So did years of government attacks on civil society, which demolished the nonprofits and civilian rescue networks that might have aided the response. . . .

. . . Although the Venezuelan government insists it is doing all it can, it has shared little information and deployed the armed forces in a manner that has often been chaotic, insufficient and, in some cases, an obstacle to other relief efforts. Local rights organizations have warned about the risks of human rights abuses should the response be left in the hands of the military. Ordinary citizens and courageous local and foreign journalists are recording volunteers desperately searching for survivors in the rubble, rescue teams working without proper equipment and relatives fighting to save their loved ones with their bare hands. . . .

— Carolina Jiménez Sandoval, I’m in Venezuela. Things Are Worse Than They Look
New York Times Opinion, 30 June 2026.

Shared Article from New York Times

Opinion | I’m in Venezuela. Things Are Worse Than They Look

Venezuela’s natural disaster was unavoidable, but the devastation it has left in its wake was not.

Carolina Jiménez Sandoval @ nytimes.com

Shared Article from Asterisk 13 (Winter 2026)

Merchants of Certainty

We can’t predict the full impact of climate change. Why did the climate movement stop pushing the world to accept this fact and start trying to deny…

Alex Trembath @ asteriskmag.com

Over the last 40 years, climate science has transformed from a method for navigating uncertainty to a teleological campaign against doubt.

In the conventional understanding, climate change is uncertain. We don’t know how much carbon the human race will ultimately pump into the atmosphere; we don’t know, precisely, how much warming any eventual atmospheric concentration will cause; we don’t know how much this warming will affect sea levels or weather patterns; and we don’t know how well future societies will adapt.

These uncertainties are all the scientific justification we should need to to reduce emissions, invest in more resilient infrastructure, and protect natural systems. We don’t know exactly how dangerous three or four degrees of global warming will be by the end of the century, but we don’t need to know in order to act. There’s a reason that William Nordhaus, who won the Nobel Prize for his work on climate economics, titled his book The Climate Casino: the risk is enough for us to hedge our bets.

More recently, though, this foundational idea of the modern environmental movement has itself been cast as a form of climate denial. In their landmark polemic Merchants of Doubt, the historians Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway executed an ambitious reframing of the science of climate change, alleging that the central obstacle to climate stabilization was campaigns financed by the fossil fuel industries, which used PR tactics to artificially inflate the true uncertainty in scientific climate change data. Scientists and advocates created new scientific bases for climate action, such as the 350 Parts Per Million standard and two-degree temperature targets. Climate impacts were no longer seen as the consequence of centuries of industrialization but rather the criminal fault of a few polluting industries. And climate change, under the new science, is not a future risk but a present catastrophe. Nordhaus, the father of the carbon tax, now regularly comes under fire for his perceived lack of climate ambition (his work has purportedly enabled climate change denial and delay.)

In place of uncertain outcomes, this new generation of climate advocates offered the certainty of present events. Doing so has entailed significant exaggeration beyond the hard facts of climate science, including the overhyping of climate change’s contribution to present-day extreme weather events and the use of implausible warming scenarios that forecast dire future impacts. This transformation has had the intended effect of narrowing the solution set understood as climate action. Climate change under the new regime is not an emergent long-term risk to be managed by smart planning, expanding technological capabilities, and deepening societal resilience. Instead, it is an immediate physical threat, earning illicit perpetrators — so-called fossil capital and the ever-growing army of climate deniers — an increase in climate-related litigation and regulation.

. . .

Climate targets, single-event attribution analysis, and other forms of science activism have completely changed the way researchers, advocates, and journalists talk about the problem of climate change. The United Nations and hundreds of governments have endorsed atmospheric temperature targets. Friederieke Otto was recently named a contributing lead author on the IPCC’s upcoming Seventh Assessment Report. And the camp of climate deniers, a term once reserved for those who, through ignorance or malice, rejected the mainstream science of the greenhouse effect, has come to describe opponents of the Green New Deal and advocates of nuclear energy, which climate activists claim is too speculative for the certain policy prescriptions made by climate science.

But while activists may have taken over climate science, their big-picture results are not flattering. The vast bulk of the global energy supply still runs on fossil fuels. Carbon emissions continue to rise. The Trump Administration is systematically dismantling the climate policy apparatus that has been built up over the last generation, and it is not alone — governments around the world are rolling back climate commitments. There’s little uproar, because climate change remains a low priority for the public. And trust in climate scientists, and in science itself, shows signs of decline. . . .

. . . Reconstituting climate science and policy will require contending with this fractious new informational and political gestalt. For a newly successful climate science to take root in the coming years and decades, we need a renaissance in uncertainty. Uncertainty is not a dirty word — in climate science or anywhere else. Indeed, it is better understood as a kind of epistemic bravery: an assertion that while scientists and policymakers can’t predict the future, a scientifically informed, democratic public is capable of navigating it.

— Alex Trembath, Merchants of Certainty
Asterisk 13: Science (Winter 2026)