Golden Gate Park

July 25, 2026

Today started off with a visit from some family who live locally. I had them over to see our new place while Nick got his haircut. We had coffee in the garden and talked about all sorts of fantastic things, related to nature, and parks in the bay area. I hadn’t seen them in many years, but I had learned recently from my cousin that his sister Margit had written a book about foraging in the bay area, titled Flavors of Home. 

I was thrilled to receive a copy from her directly when she came over this morning, and to nibble the mochi muffins they brought from a pastry shop in Berkeley. I was very happy to learn how like minded we all were, and how much we seemed to share a love of nature. 

In the afternoon, Nick and I took a long scooter ride out to the ocean through Golden Gate Park, which I had done once before with our good friend Coco, when he was in town for work last week, and ever since, I couldn’t wait to show Nick. I counted down every day as I was unpacking boxes, hanging art, and finding homes for things in our new place, thinking to myself, ‘this weekend, I’ll show him the scooters’, and let me tell you, it did not disappoint. 

After whizzing down to the water with smiles plastered on our faces both from the wind and the adventure, we parked by the beach and walked back on foot the length of the park. 

Exploring new places is one of our all time favorite activities. When we lived in New York together, we made a habit of walking through a new neighborhood every night as we were learning the city. We’d go after dinner, and on the weekends we often took a full day to walk a new neighborhood. 

Today we talked about AI. He made fun of me for my new obsession with reducing our exposure to microplastics, and I broached a topic that had been on my mind since we saw the SF mime troupe’s show in the panhandle park a few weeks back. 

The show itself bore an uncanny resemblance to our lives. There was a professor turned AI start-up techie, and a ‘flower lady’ who sold flowers on the street corner as her way of trying to make the world a more beautiful place, perhaps. The play proclaimed that AI was a con, and identified it as a threat to our society, drawing analogies to religious cults and condemning the character of many AI company founders, who are believed to be megalomanic and destructively greedy. 

I don’t know, but I suspect that much of the anger directed towards AI is related to billboards on the street which actually suggest (I am not kidding) replacing humans with buxom AI chat bot ladies. While I disagree that AI is a con, and I do believe in its value to humanity, I will admit that there were many aspects of the performance that struck a nerve, and hit a little close to home. 

I identified with the flower lady. She was anti-protest, preferring instead to mind her own business, avoiding conflict and staying out of politics. After following the 2016 election closely, and witnessing the collective mental health of my friends, family, and colleagues suffer from keeping up with the news throughout President Trump’s first term, I stopped engaging with politics, and I stopped watching the news entirely. 

I focused on the things I enjoyed, and I recovered my happiness and joy for life. However, lately, I have felt a bit embarrassed by my insistence on ‘staying out of it’. I don’t identify as an activist, not because I don’t appreciate what they do, and how important they have been for winning the rights we take for granted in this country, but frankly, because I am scared. 

One of my favorite teachers in high school gave me the book Assata: An Autobiography, (1987), which is a book about Assata Shakur, an activist and black panther party member in New York. I read it, and remember thinking to myself even at the time, as an immortal high schooler, that I had no idea how someone could be so brave. Perhaps my teacher knew I needed exposure to this kind of woman. Perhaps he hoped her story would stick somewhere in my soup brain. 

While I am not yet at the point where I am willing to go to jail for my beliefs, I have started feeling a bit more brave. This is not because my beliefs have changed, but I think the things I love in this country feeling under threat has made me feel like I owe it to my students to stand up for what is right. 

On our walk today, Nick and I talked about the policy changes around funding cuts, made by our current president that have made it impossible to achieve the same degree of impact and scientific advancement inside of academia as is promised in industry. We talked about the pain this causes us, as firm believers in the value of our nation’s schools as one of our most treasured national resources.

Last night, we had had a nice dinner with myself and five of the seven founders of Nick’s company, to say a temporary goodbye to Eric, Nick and Michael’s post-doc mentor and collaborator who was flying back to Paris the next day to be with his family. The dinner was my idea because I love Eric, who is thoughtful and bright, and who is nearly as much fun as his wife, Jasna, who is absolute dynamite. 

At dinner, the conversation of the ongoing brain drain from academia came up. I guess a recent Fields medal winner had recently left his tenured position at Princeton for a job with Open AI.

The general consensus was that fortunately unfortunately, it seems that industry is the only place where these researchers felt they could continue to do their research uninhibited by severe funding constraints. For context, a single run of an experiment can use up enough compute that many of the largest government grants would be exhausted in a single afternoon. Don’t get me started on what this means for the environment.

Everyone at the table agreed that if the company were a success, they would use the resources it granted them to give back to the systems of education in our country. I believe them. I hope they continue to feel this way as the company grows. I said so at dinner, and during our walk today through the park, I said it again. 

I am just one woman, at a table of men whose collective salaries in one year may be more than I make off my art in a lifetime. Yet, here I am, at the table. My small act of activism will be to do everything within my power to continue to hold them to it.