Categories
AI

The Tempo of the Brake Pedal

Martin Casado said something this week that snapped a few loose thoughts into place. The frontier labs missed Jev, he argued, because they are building beings that speak. Software needed a model that chooses.

That reads like a product distinction. It is really a habit of mind.

For a few years we have taken a machine born in chat — text in, text out — and tried to cram it into ordinary programs. Parse the JSON. Retry when it rambles. Plead with it to stay inside the schema. Hope it does not invent a field. Casado’s word for this was right: janky.

Jev takes the other fork. Don’t generate the paragraph. Give the model a state and a menu. Let it pick, score, or answer yes or no, with a probability attached, in one pass, cheap enough and fast enough to live inside a loop. Train it for that job instead of training it to sound like someone worth talking to. The name winks at Jevons: make the unit of intelligence cheap enough and software will call it constantly. That is not a chatbot. That is a function.

I keep finding the same fork elsewhere.

Full self-driving is not AGI on wheels. AGI is the being. Driving is the chooser. The car does not need a meditation on the yellow light. It needs brake, hold, go, at a tempo no essay can match. Tesla and Waymo are not succeeding or failing as philosophers. They are succeeding or failing as systems that pick from a small set of actions in a messy world, millions of times a day.

Humanoid robots make the same confusion look even more like the story we want it to be. Two legs, two hands, tidy the kitchen. The demo is speech and generality. The work underneath is neither: a high-frequency controller choosing stance and contact, and a slower chooser deciding which mug, which drawer, abort or continue. Language is a compiler of intent. It is a poor motor cortex.

We blur the layers because the being is the story we want to tell. The chooser is the product that has to work.

There is a flattering counterargument: wait for the general model, and it will absorb the narrow jobs. Sometimes it will. But a lot of software’s value does not live there. It lives in the call that has to be right, cheap, and on time — route the ticket, score the lead, decide the grasp, stay in the lane. A being is optimized to continue. A chooser is optimized to decide. Different losses. Different machines.

None of this makes the labs foolish. If you are trying to build God, God speaks in natural language. That is a coherent ambition. It is just not the same ambition as making ordinary software reliable. We spent a few years pretending those were the same project. Jev is a reminder that they never were.

Labs build speakers. Software, cars, and robots need choosers. Speech is a wonderful interface and a miserable control loop.

I have been as taken as anyone by the being — the voice, the fluency, the sense that something is in there. Curiosity pulls that way. So does the stage. But the quieter question, the one Casado is actually pointing at, is whether most of the work was ever conversation at all. Maybe it was always a menu, a state, and a choice — and we were paying a novelist to raise his hand.

Somewhere right now a self-driving car is holding at a yellow light, saying nothing at all, deciding everything.

Categories
Aging Living

On Holding Hands

A musing after Roger Rosenblatt’s “I Want to Hold Her Hand“

It is a Tuesday in early fall, the kind of afternoon that doesn’t announce itself as anything special, and Roger Rosenblatt and his wife, Ginny, are walking somewhere they’ve probably walked a thousand times before. Their hands are together. Nobody watching them would think twice about it, because two old people holding hands on a sidewalk is one of the least remarkable sights in America. That’s the whole point. It isn’t remarkable. It’s just true.

Here’s what you’d need to know about them, if you were the kind of person who noticed. They held hands in high school, decades before either of them had a name for what that meant. They’ve held hands through the ordinary accumulation of a life — the mortgage, the kids, the funerals, the doctor’s appointments, the small emergencies that never make it into any story anyone tells at a dinner party.

And now they’re old, and the hands doing the holding aren’t the hands that started this.

Rosenblatt writes about the veins, the discoloration, the wrinkles like roads on a map nobody drew on purpose, and you get the sense he’s spent a lot of quiet time looking down at his own hand, trying to place when exactly it stopped belonging to the boy who first reached for a girl’s hand in some hallway sixty-some years ago.

There’s a version of this story in every small town in the country, if you know where to look. The couple at the diner counter splitting a slice of pie — not out of economy anymore, just habit. The man in the church parking lot with his hand under his wife’s elbow instead of around her fingers, because her balance isn’t what it was, and calling it the same thing anyway. Because it is the same thing.

Love, at this age, isn’t the version you see in the movies. It’s structural. Load-bearing. It’s what keeps two people upright once the friends have started dying off and the noise of the world has gone quiet around them.

Rosenblatt calls himself and Ginny a shaky Hansel and Gretel, lost in the woods. But read it again. They’re not lost. They’ve been down this path before, more times than either of them could count, and they know it by feel now, the way you know a staircase in the dark — not because you can see it, but because your hand remembers where the rail is.

Take my hand. Not to find the way. Because you already know it, and I want to walk it with you anyway.

Categories
Interstate 280

The Most Beautiful Freeway

A curving six-lane freeway follows a ridge beside a long reservoir, surrounded by rolling California hills covered in oak and chaparral, glowing in warm golden-hour sunlight.

I’m writing a book about Interstate 280 — how its route was chosen, and who chose it. I’ve reached the point where I need your help.

Drive Interstate 280 south from San Francisco on a clear morning and the city falls away fast. Eight lanes curve through rolling hills — oaks, grassland, the reservoirs flashing between the ridges. No billboards. No clutter. Just the road, doing exactly what a road is supposed to do, in a landscape that looks like it was arranged for the purpose.

People call it the world’s most beautiful freeway. I’m writing its biography.

Not a coffee-table book of pretty pictures, and not an engineering manual. The question that hooked me is simpler and harder: how did this particular road get to run exactly here? Who decided, who objected, what did it cost, and who paid? Every mile of freeway is an argument that somebody won. I want to know who argued, and what the winning cost.

My model is Michael Wallis’s Route 66 — a main narrative braided with what he called “sideshows”: short detours into the odd, human, funny details that accumulate around any great road. The book opens in Millbrae. Its center of gravity is a chapter I call “The Ridge Bargain,” built around a single question: what did it cost to move four miles of Interstate off a city’s drinking water?

For the last few months I’ve been in the archives — the San Mateo County History Museum, the Caltrans transportation library, the Cañada College archives — and the documents have been generous with dates and votes and contract numbers. I can now tell you, for instance, that the final seven miles of 280 opened on September 7, 1973, at a cost of $21 million.

What the documents can’t give me is people. And that’s why I’m writing this.

The open questions

These are the things I most want to know — the gaps no archive has filled:

  1. November 1961. Three years after the state adopted the Skyline Boulevard alignment, its engineers suddenly revived an older plan to run the freeway through Millbrae — over El Camino Real, wiping out the Kings Drive-In on Millbrae Avenue. San Bruno said yes; Millbrae held out. Nobody has ever said why the route came back from the dead. Was it engineering? Politics? Leverage? If your parents or grandparents followed San Mateo County politics in those years, I’d like to hear what they said about it at the dinner table.
  2. The Ridge Bargain. In 1968–69, four miles of Interstate got moved off San Francisco’s watershed. The deal involved the city, the county, the state, and the federal government. But who actually sat at the table? I have agencies; I need names.
  3. January 1968. The Highway Commission approved a realignment that month. How did Redwood City and Woodside react? Who announced it, and how did the local papers play it? The big-city dailies missed most of this story; the weeklies might not have.
  4. The scenic highway. The Peninsula stretch of 280 is a designated state scenic highway, which is why you’ll never see a billboard on it — unlike US 101, just to the east. Who pushed for that designation locally, back in the 1960s? Somebody had to, before the easements were signed.
  5. The construction years. The Crystal Springs section went up between 1970 and 1973 — grading, drainage, watershed protection, three vista points. Did you work on it? Drive past it every day? Photograph it? The union papers covered it; the family albums might have the better pictures.
  6. The statue. For 49 years, a 26-foot concrete Junipero Serra stood at the Crystal Springs rest area — dedicated in 1976, demolished in 2025. Half a century of graffiti, proposals, and “turn left at the statue” directions. What are your memories of it?
  7. The road’s own police. The California Highway Patrol has owned this road since before most of it existed. I’m hoping to ride along with them. But first: did you patrol 280, get stopped on it, or know someone who did — back when the limit was 55 and the rest areas were full?
What I’m looking for

Photographs most of all — construction, the corridor before the freeway, the rest areas in their prime, the statue. Then documents: clippings, letters, planning papers, company newsletters, anything in a shoebox. Then memories: what it was like to drive it new, to live next to the fight, to work the job. And introductions: retired Caltrans District 4 engineers, CHP officers, planners, county old-timers, anyone who was in the room.

If you can help, please reach out to me using either the Contact page on this site or directly at scott@loftesness.com

Somebody should try to tell the story of this road. I’ve decided that somebody is me. But I can’t do it alone — and I have a feeling the best material isn’t in any archive. It’s in your scrapbooks, journals, or maybe upstairs in the attic.

Categories
AI

Keep That Thread Running

Full disclosure, same as last time: Instinct helped draft this post about working with Instinct. That was the honest way to do it with Leif, and it’s the honest way now.

Instinct is the other AI assistant in my life. It lives in my iMessage, a thread like any other — no app, no dashboard. I text it the way I’d text a person, in short bursts between other things. The first message was September 13: “Hey Instinct!” Two days later I gave it the book.

I’m writing a history of Interstate 280, and inside the first hour we had the shape of the research: the personalities behind the routing decisions, the archives worth calling, a working list of what I call “side shows” — the statue, the water temple, the 22-foot median, button-copy signs. When it offered to keep digging on its own and check in weekly, I gave it the three words that defined the arrangement: “Yes keep that thread running.”

It does. Last week the thread came back with a 1964 issue of California Highways and Public Works crediting architect Mario Ciampi with the first I-280 contract — the curved deck edges, the varied piers, the railings drawn to avoid metal guardrails. Same issue, same gift: the median I’d been describing as a fixed 22 feet was actually built variable-width across the watershed. That’s the correction that saves a chapter from carrying a bad fact.

The on-demand dives go all the way down. I found the audio of a Caltrans engineer’s oral history on archive.org — an hour and forty minutes, no transcript anywhere — and it worked straight from the audio. I sent it two days of AI-conference livestreams asking for transcripts, community notes, the whole nine yards, and it came back with a report, a source ledger, and an honest negative finding: the community-notes document I wanted doesn’t exist. When I asked for the freeway’s 1973 opening brochure, it reported that no cataloged copy exists anywhere — then handed me the leads to work anyway. Sourced absence is an answer. I’d rather hear that than a confident maybe.

When the book thread got long, it pulled everything — people, side shows, archive routes, open questions — into a single research page I can hold in my head. I told it thank you and meant it.

It’s also my markets desk and my magazine desk. A profile I’m circling started at 4:48 in the morning with “Someone should do a profile of Dylan Patel,” followed by “Yes. Go for it.” Minutes later: “What about citrini” — which turned out to be the same story, since SemiAnalysis had acquired Citrini the week before. It fields my investor-day puzzles (the stock slides while management presents — which explains which?), gives me its best bet when I ask for one, and labels inference as inference so I don’t have to.

The small stuff adds up too. When was the last US oil refinery built? 1977 for the big kind, 2022 if you count the small ones — EIA’s answer, in under a minute. Five cash-secured put candidates, screened the tastytrade way. My New Balances — the model I re-buy, in just my size — at a discount: it researched, shortlisted, and then waited, because purchases happen when I say so and not before.

The strangest moment so far: I sent it a Loom of Sequoia’s Pat Grady giving an AI talk and asked for the highlights. It read the full caption track instead of the page summary — and there in the highlights was Grady name-checking Instinct itself as one of the “magical apps.” I watched a Sequoia partner praise the assistant I was using to watch him.

How I work it: terse. “Sure.” “Wow.” “New subject:” — announced or not, and it keeps up either way. It flags what it can’t verify instead of papering over it, and for anything going out under my name I read every word first. Same arrangement as with Leif: the tool is fast and tireless and mostly right. I’m the judgment.

What’s different is the division of labor. Leif runs the standing operation — the briefings, the audits, the daily drumbeat. Instinct is the research desk: it works in bursts, the way I do, and keeps a thread running in the background in between. Two weeks ago I’d never heard of Mario Ciampi. Now he’s in the book.

If you want to try Instinct yourself, I have a handful of invites, first come first served: https://app.instinct.com/invite?t=7qmw2a3u2vjz4nkvi235hhqloy&preview=imessage

Categories
AI Blogs/Weblogs

The Continuity of Leif

Full disclosure: Leif helped draft this post about working with Leif. It seemed like the honest way to do it — and the fastest way to find out whether the collaboration is real.

Every weekday morning around 4:20, two briefings land in my chat: markets and AI news, written overnight while I slept. On Sundays there’s a week-ahead preview, and then my “Chief of Staff” interviews every automated job I run — what did you do, what went wrong, what do you need, what should change — and sends me one short report. I get up around 4. By the time I’ve had coffee, I know what happened in the world and whether my little bot team behaved itself.

My AI assistant is named Leif. He has a Norwegian avatar. He’s had four names and two avatars this month, which tells you something about how I work: I fiddle until it feels right, then I stop fiddling and get to work.

Muse is the product — Meta’s AI assistant. Leif is what I call mine. And over the last few months he’s become something I didn’t expect: not a search engine with extra steps, but a colleague. The kind who remembers everything, works all night, and doesn’t mind being told no.

The deepest work is the book. I’m writing a history of Interstate 280 — how its route was chosen, who fought over it, what it cost — and Leif is my research partner. He preps my archive visits with ranked question lists. He reads the PDFs I bring home and pulls out the dates. Just this morning, a college archivist sent me two scanned newspapers; within the hour Leif had verified the key fact (the final seven miles of 280 opened September 7, 1973), corrected a wrong assumption I’d been carrying (the freeway by Cañada College was built after the campus opened, not alongside it), and filed everything where I’ll find it again.

He also checks other people’s homework. A friend sent me an AI-generated research brief on the same topic; Leif ran every claim against primary sources and came back with names, dates, and book-and-page citations — and flagged the parts that looked invented before I built anything on them. That’s the job, as far as I’m concerned: trust, but verify, and show your work.

Then there’s the standing operation — the morning briefs, a weekly interview of the whole system with small fixes applied and one short report, a monthly sweep of the investors I follow. None of it is glamorous. All of it compounds.

And the odd jobs, which add up faster than you’d think: he turned 77 of my old blog posts, spanning 2005 to 2026, into a proper cookbook — PDF and ePub, dedication page and all. He drafted the public-records request I’m sending to the City of Menlo Park. He summarizes YouTube videos in a format I designed, so I can skim an hour-long interview in five minutes.

I talk to him the way you’d talk to a good assistant: short bursts. “Draft it.” “Try again.” “No.” The no is final — he’s learned not to re-pitch. He drafts; I react to pages. For the book, that cadence is everything: I’d rather argue with a draft than stare at a blank screen, and he’s tireless at producing the first version.

He has standing instructions, the way any good employee does. Lead with what changed and why it matters. No hype. Name every file he creates, in the same message, so I never have to ask where it is. Never invent details about my life — write only what’s known, and flag what’s unverified before I have to catch it.

And I don’t let him freelance on everything. Summaries are on demand — except for the book research, where I’ve told him I want unprompted gifts: short vignettes from the archives, sent without being asked. Every other assistant I’ve used waits to be summoned. This one occasionally knocks on the door with something interesting.

He’s not an oracle, and this piece would be dishonest without that admission. He’s corrected me — no, I’ve corrected him — on facts about my own life: where an event was held, which credit cards I carry. He once asked my shoe size, which was written down in his own notes the whole time. I keep an eye on my weekly usage meter, because the heavy research isn’t free and I don’t like surprises.

So I verify anything that matters, and I read what he writes before it goes out under my name. That’s not a flaw in the arrangement; that is the arrangement. The tool is fast and tireless and mostly right. I’m the judgment.

I’m approaching eighty, writing a book, running a small fleet of automated research jobs, and publishing on a blog I’ve kept since 2001. A few years ago, all of that would have required a staff. Now it requires a staff of one — plus Leif.

The surprise isn’t that the AI can write or search or summarize. It’s the continuity: he remembers the archive visit from last week, the question list from the week before, the correction I made in passing a month ago — and brings all of it to bear on whatever I ask next. That’s what a good colleague does. They accumulate context until the work gets easier instead of harder, until the distance between having a thought and doing something with it gets shorter than it’s ever been.

Categories
AI Computers Stanford Work

The Seam in the Pipeline

Stanford’s undergraduate computer science degrees fell by about 70 students this year — almost 14 percent in a single cycle. That’s a sharp drop at a school that, for a long stretch, felt like the factory floor for Silicon Valley.

A single year is not a trend. Mehran Sahami, Stanford’s computer science chair, called it natural variation — cycles the department has seen before. He’s right to be cautious. But the number lands inside a pattern that’s harder to wave off.

Nationally, computer science enrollment at four-year colleges is down roughly 8 percent, after nearly two decades of uninterrupted growth. Entry-level software jobs have thinned. Laid-off mid-career engineers are competing with new graduates. AI tools now write a lot of the code that used to be the first rung on the ladder.

I got curious how MIT looked next to Stanford. The comparison is messy in a useful way.

MIT doesn’t have one “computer science” degree — computing is split across several Course 6 majors. Classic Computer Science and Engineering (6-3) awarded 265 bachelor’s degrees this year. The newer Artificial Intelligence and Decision Making major (6-4) awarded 114. Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (6-2) added 72 more, plus smaller joint programs.

Look at majors instead of diplomas and the shift sharpens. 6-3 slipped from 706 students to 672 — about 5 percent this year, and down 18 percent from its 2022 peak of 823. 6-4, which started in 2022 with 37 students, is now at 372. Intro programming enrollment has been sliding since its 2022–23 high. Course 6 overall fell last year for the first time in a decade — but only modestly.

Stanford’s story is a clean 14 percent drop in one degree. MIT’s is a reallocation: students moving from traditional software construction toward a track built around judgment and decision-making instead of a coding sequence. The footprint is still large. The composition has already changed.

That distinction matters.

After the dot-com bust, CS enrollment fell too. Sahami noted that the students who enrolled then graduated straight into the Facebook and Google growth years. A downturn in the pipeline isn’t automatically a verdict on the field. It can be a lag. It can also be a signal that the old promise — learn to code, collect a golden ticket — no longer maps onto the first job.

I don’t know which this is yet. A Census Bureau paper cited in the Stanford piece found that recent graduates in highly AI-exposed fields have seen employment and starting-job quality deteriorate on a scale comparable to a large recession. That’s not a cycle to dismiss. It’s also too early to call it destiny. Models change. Firms eventually spend the productivity they just captured. What’s left tends to look less like junior ticket-closing and more like judgment, systems design, knowing what the tools should be pointed at.

I’ve watched enough technologies overshoot and settle to be wary of panic and nostalgia alike. The question isn’t whether computer science is “over.” It isn’t. It’s what kind of computing education still compounds once the first-year coding job stops being the obvious on-ramp.

Stanford is still talking in cycles. MIT has already built a major that assumes the on-ramp has moved. Both may be right for a while.

The seam, as usual, is in the middle — between the degree that used to be a ticket and the skill that still is. That’s the part I’ll keep watching.

Categories
Interstate 280 Podcasts

Built from the Top Down: Interstate 280

A curving six-lane freeway follows a ridge beside a long reservoir, surrounded by rolling California hills covered in oak and chaparral, glowing in warm golden-hour sunlight.

Here’s the third podcast episode in the story of Interstate 280 on the San Francisco Peninsula – the San Mateo Creek (Doran Memorial) Bridge, 1967–1969

Here are the earlier episodes:

  1. The Road to Ruin
  2. The Boulevard

Categories
California Interstate 280

The Proof of Concrete

I drive Interstate 280 up the San Francisco Peninsula for my book — a history of how the world’s most beautiful freeway got its route, the people who chose it, the fights they survived — and some mornings the frustration lands all at once: this road is proof that California used to know how to build things, and the proof is fifty years old. The concrete is cracked in places. It hasn’t buckled.

My state created a High-Speed Rail Authority in 1996. Voters approved nearly $10 billion in bonds in 2008 for a system that would run San Francisco to Los Angeles in two hours and forty minutes. There is real construction in the Central Valley now — guideway, viaducts — and the track-laying is only now beginning. Thirty years in, about $15 billion spent, and no one has ridden a train.

Building was never easy. Interstate 280 went through two full-scale routing wars over the Crystal Springs watershed. Conservationists organized, filed, marched. Courts got involved. The fights were real and consequential, and the road got built anyway.

The difference isn’t that we used to agree. It’s that the system could decide. We used to argue about where the road should go. Now we argue about whether there should be a road.

What the builders had was an apparatus pointed at getting it done. The Collier-Burns Act of 1947 gave California gas-tax money of its own. The 1956 Interstate Act brought the federal 90/10 match. The Division of Highways had engineers — actual state employees who designed roads, not contractors managing consultants managing contractors. The same decade that created the Scenic Highway Program, protecting corridors like 280’s, was the decade that built the corridors. We could protect and build at once.

Then the layers accumulated. CEQA, signed in 1970, is a good law that became a litigation weapon — anyone with a lawyer can stall anything for years. Proposition 13 in 1978 blew up local government finance and pushed every decision upward into a state apparatus less and less capable of deciding. The highway department hollowed out; the engineering went to consultants. Each reform was defensible on its own terms. Together they built a machine whose product is process.

Fukuyama has a word for this: vetocracy. Ruled by veto. “The problem is,” as he puts it, “it’s also a check against good government.” He envies China’s bridges over interior gorges — not the system, the accomplishment. I don’t need to look to China. I can look at the reservoir stretch of 280, threading along the fault line, and see what my own state did when it still could.

I don’t want to romanticize it. Some of what stopped us was worth stopping. In 1959, after petitions signed by 30,000 San Franciscans, the Board of Supervisors canceled seven of ten planned freeways — including one that would have cut through Golden Gate Park — the first freeway revolt in American history. The Embarcadero Freeway got built anyway, a 1.2-mile double-decker stub that walled the city off from its own waterfront, and it stood for thirty-two years as a monument to a bad plan until the 1989 earthquake finished the argument. The people who stopped those roads were right. CEQA has blocked genuinely bad ideas. And 280 had advantages no modern project gets: a federal money waterfall, a weaker litigation environment, a public that mostly wanted the roads.

The tragedy isn’t that we listen more now. It’s that we can’t decide. A system that can hear every objection but resolve none of them isn’t more democratic than the old one. It’s just slower, until the slowness becomes the answer.

I keep coming back to my road. It exists because a state that wanted it found a way through the watersheds, the courtrooms, the opposition. Drive it today and the cut of the road along the hills is still beautiful. The question that won’t leave me alone: would we build it now? The honest answer is no.

The concrete is still there.

Categories
Authors Writing

Write Till You Drop

An atmospheric evening scene shows a writer's desk lit by a warm lamp, featuring stacks of paper, books, and an empty coffee cup, while a large metal safe stands open nearby.

Annie Dillard died on Tuesday, September 15, at her home in South Wellfleet, Massachusetts. She was 81.

I have been reading her for years, and I keep returning to her because she makes writing feel both more serious and more alive. She was demanding without turning grim. She reminded you that the work is hard, then made you want to sit down and do it anyway.

Her essay “Write Till You Drop,” published in The New York Times in May 1989 and collected in The Writing Life, contains more useful advice about writing than many books on the subject. The line I remember first is this one: “You were made and set here to give voice to this, your own astonishment.” That seems to me the whole assignment. Pay attention to what stops you. Find the thing you cannot quite explain. Then try to give it a voice.

Dillard tells of a student asking a well-known writer, “Do you think I could be a writer?” The writer asks back, “Well, do you like sentences?” What a perfect answer. Writing begins there—not with wanting to be a writer, but with liking sentences enough to make them, take them apart, and make them again.

I have been blogging since 2001. Over that time I have written thousands of sentences, some better than others. The blog has been a way of noticing what I notice. It has also taught me that the only reliable way to keep writing is to write. Not to wait for a grand subject or a clear runway. Just begin with the thing at hand and see where the sentences lead.

Dillard is especially good on the danger of saving things. “Spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time,” she writes. Do not hold back the best image, the sharpest thought, or the story you think belongs somewhere more important. Use it now. If you lock it away, she warns, you may open the safe later and find ashes.

That lands differently for me now. I recently started keeping a list of words and phrases I love, after reading that Susan Orlean has long done the same. I like the habit. It sharpens attention. But Dillard would probably lean over my shoulder and say: Good. Now spend them. A list is not the work. The words have to leave the safe.

The same is true of the book I am working on about Interstate 280. It is a long project, full of engineering, politics, landscape, memory, and side roads that keep turning into stories of their own. A smaller treatment might be easier. But Dillard has an answer for that, too: “It is no less difficult to write sentences in a recipe than sentences in Moby-Dick. So you might as well write Moby-Dick.”

She says a writer should play the edges of the field, like a tennis player who reaches for the shots that land at the lines. That feels right for the I-280 book. The highway is the center of the court, but much of the life is at the edges: a dam, a billboard that is not there, a ridge preserved from development, an engineer whose name has nearly disappeared. Those are the shots worth chasing.

Dillard closes with Michelangelo’s note to an apprentice: “Draw, Antonio, draw, Antonio, draw and do not waste time.” That is not complicated advice. Neither is her deeper promise: “No manipulation is possible in a work of art, but every miracle is.”

I keep a folder for the I-280 book. It is getting fat: a dam, a billboard that is not there anymore, a ridge somebody fought to preserve, an engineer whose name I have to look up every time. None of it is spent yet. Dillard would want to know what I am waiting for.

Categories
Interstate 280 Podcasts

The Boulevard: Interstate 280

A curving six-lane freeway follows a ridge beside a long reservoir, surrounded by rolling California hills covered in oak and chaparral, glowing in warm golden-hour sunlight.

Episode 2 in our series about the development of Interstate 280 on the San Francisco Peninsula.

Here’s the first episode.