The Bold Italic

08/17/2026

I've been EIC of The Bold Italic since 2023 and owned the brand outright for the past year. In that time I've done all the plumbing that no one sees or necessarily cares about: Moved from Medium to Ghost. Redesigned the website. Created a social media scheduler. Added mini games and an events page. And ongoing, I've been going through 4,500 articles, removing their dead links and adding notes about departed businesses. And writing, of course. Monetizing through Meta, the website, grants, donations, and subscriptions. The work has just begun in some ways. In another though, I'm happy this archive of Millennial life in San Francisco has a home.

08/16/2026

Tennessee Grill is a proper old-school diner on Taraval Street, the kind of place with swivel stools, bottomless coffee, and breakfast served all day.
⠀
It has been feeding the Parkside since 1952, back when Harry Truman was still in the White House, from the same corner at 22nd Avenue and Taraval. The name is a holdover from the original owner, who came west from Tennessee.
⠀
Not much has changed since. The look is mid-century diner, the walls are papered with Giants posters, community flyers, and the Lincoln High basketball schedule, and for generations the place has been the neighborhood's unofficial living room. Students, St. Cecilia parishioners, and longtime retirees have shared its booths over eggs and bacon, and it's one of the last spots around where you can still get hot coffee and a morning paper at 6 a.m.
⠀
The diner has passed through a handful of hands, from that first Tennessean to a fellow named Lou, whose "Lou's Special" is still on the menu, to a woman named Min. Then, in 1998, a young immigrant named Kyaw Soe arrived from Myanmar and took his first American job here, cooking and waiting tables. He bought the place from Min in 2017 and has kept nearly everything just as it was, right down to the regulars and the recipes. He did bring a few touches from home, so these days you can order a Burmese tea leaf salad right alongside your chicken fried steak.
⠀
It scraped through the pandemic on takeout orders, and it's still here, still cheap, still gloriously unpretentious.

08/13/2026

The Asian Art Museum lives and thrives in SF because a Chicago millionaire made San Francisco a conditional offer in 1959.

Avery Brundage built a fortune in construction and spent decades collecting Asian art, starting after a 1936 London exhibition convinced him Chinese work was badly undervalued. He assembled one of the great private collections in the Western world.

The condition was simple: he would donate roughly 7,700 objects if the city built somewhere to display them. Voters approved a $2.75 million bond for a new wing at the de Young in Golden Gate Park, and the Society for Asian Art incorporated in 1958 specifically to secure the collection.

It opened on June 11, 1966. Brundage kept giving, and on his death in 1975 left the remainder.

He is a complicated benefactor. Brundage is at least as well known as the long-serving president of the International Olympic Committee, and his record in that role, particularly around the 1936 Berlin Games and the 1972 Munich massacre, remains heavily criticized.

By the 1980s the collection had outgrown the park. In 1987 Mayor Dianne Feinstein proposed moving it to the old Main Library as part of a Civic Center revival, and voters passed a bond in 1994. G*e Aulenti, the Italian architect who converted a Paris railway station into the Musée d'Orsay, reworked George Kelham's 1917 Beaux-Arts library around a skylit central court. It reopened at Civic Center on March 20, 2003.

The collection now runs past 18,000 objects across six thousand years, with roughly 1,200 on view at any time, and recent programming has pushed hard into contemporary and Asian American work.

08/13/2026

$5000 a month is totally a steal

08/12/2026

I check the weather five blocks away, too.

08/12/2026

The Roxie has been showing movies in the Mission since 1909, which makes it the oldest continuously operating cinema in the country.

It opened as the Poppy, built by a jeweler named Philip H. Doll who badly wanted to be in show business and turned out to have no talent for it. He appears to have left town to duck the theater's creditors.

After that it was the New 16th Street, then the Rex, then the Gem, then the Gaiety. It became the Roxie in 1933, probably borrowing from New York's Roxy, which had opened in 1927 as the grandest movie palace in America. Somewhere along the way it acquired a Deco marquee from a car dealership in Oakland and hung its own neon on it. The marquee still has nowhere to put movie titles.

It has been almost everything. In the late sixties and early seventies it ran adult films. It survived the home video boom, repeated rent crises, and the near-total extinction of the neighborhood cinema. Its current executive director's line is that the Roxie has had more lives than a cat and has nearly died many times.

Going nonprofit in 2009 is what saved it. Pixar donated projection and sound equipment. The Little Roxie, a small second screen two doors down, opened in 2003.

And in July 2025 the nonprofit bought the building outright for $5 million, which for a Mission institution in this particular city borders on the miraculous.

Two hundred and thirty-eight seats in the main house. Documentaries, foreign films, festivals, repertory, and a steady supply of things playing nowhere else in the Bay Area.

08/11/2026

The windows at Twin Peaks Tavern are the entire point, and in 1972 uncovering them was a political act.

The bar sits at Castro and 17th, in a building with an intact 1923 Mediterranean Revival facade, right at the mouth of the Castro. It opened in 1935 as an Irish working-class pub, and like most bars of that era it kept the plate glass papered over. The joke at the time was that it kept wives from spotting their husbands drinking.

In 1972, two friends already working in the bar business, Mary Ellen Cunha and Peggy Forster, took over the lease, reopened it for a gay clientele, and stripped the coverings off the windows.

It is hard to overstate how radical that was. Gay bars in America had blacked-out windows for a reason. Same-sex relationships were criminalized, police raids were routine, and being seen walking out of the wrong doorway could cost you your job, your apartment, or your family. Every bar in the country was built to hide the people inside it. Twin Peaks became the first known gay bar in America with full-length open plate glass. Patrons could look out at the street. The street could look back in. Nobody was hiding.

That decision helped make the Castro the Castro. The bar became a meeting place for organizers as much as a place to drink, and it earned its nickname as the gateway to the neighborhood. It has also stayed, generation after generation, the room where the Castro's older men are treated as regulars rather than relics.

Forster died in 2008. Cunha died in January 2015, a month shy of eighty. In February 2013 the Board of Supervisors made the tavern city Landmark No. 264, protecting the windows themselves as a character-defining feature.

Inside it is still a wooden bar, a mezzanine, and a mirrored backbar older than Prohibition. No thumping music, so you can actually talk.

08/10/2026

08/10/2026

At Hole in the Wall Pizza in the Sunset, San Francisco. 🙃

08/10/2026

Anchor Oyster Bar has held the same tiny storefront on Castro Street since 1977, a marble counter, a handful of tables, and a case of ice that's still a mainstay in San Francisco seafood.

The room seats about twenty on a generous night. White tile, brass, nautical bric-a-brac, and a counter where you can watch every oyster shucked and every crab cracked. No reservations, so the wait happens on the sidewalk of one of the most storied streets in America, which is better entertainment than most bars.

The menu has barely moved in four decades: oysters on the half shell, crab cakes, Boston clam chowder, shrimp Louie, and a cioppino that quietly ranks among the city's best, served with a bib. Everything is clean, cold, and exact.

It opened the year before Harvey Milk's election, and it has been the neighborhood's special-occasion room ever since, through the plague years, the boom years, and every Castro transformation in between. Anniversaries here span generations of couples.

Restaurants twenty times its size chase what Anchor has: a line out the door for fifty years. And the food is worth the wait.