The Crisis in the Skies of San Francisco

There is a substantial corpus of writing on the merits and unreliability of California light—its clarity, iciness, fickleness, mood. None of it could account for the light in the Bay Area on Wednesday, September 9th: a dark, ochre stain, like a scrim over the sunrise, that deepened as the day wore on. For hours, it looked like four in the morning. Drivers kept their headlights on; neighbors drew their curtains. There was an ongoing sensation of jet lag. People quickly defaulted to a generational impulse, engaging through documentation. They launched...