Quick Take:

For Santa Cruz City Councilmember Shebreh Kalantari-Johnson, the ongoing uprising in Iran is personal. She and her...

promoted content

Surf City Lights: Bad Animal’s grand ambitions to become the world’s next great bookstore

Bad Animal downtown Santa Cruz

Blessed by Beat poet and San Francisco bookseller Lawrence Ferlinghetti, downtown’s Bad Animal — a high-end Thai-inspired restaurant and wine bar living inside a deeply thought-out bookstore that’s the brainchild of Andrew Sivak — deserves its own attention as an emerging Santa Cruz cultural touchstone on par with Bookshop Santa Cruz and its now-defunct predecessors Logos and The Literary Guillotine. Wallace Baine turns the pages here.

AMBITIOUS EATS, TOO: Hanloh’s Thai cuisine electrifies at Bad Animal

Button CTA to become a Lookout member

Fairgrounds’ future looks fraught — lies, deception and personal vendettas are poisoning beloved institution

The Santa Cruz County Fairgrounds.
Some evacuees displaced by the CZU Lightning Complex fire continue to stay in recreational vehicles at the Santa Cruz County Fairgrounds. Credit: Kevin Painchaud / Lookout Santa Cruz

In a Community Voices opinion piece, longtime journalist Jon Chown says he has never seen as much overt lying, deception and personal attacks as went on at the Feb. 28 meeting of the Santa Cruz County Fair board of directors. He argues that the whole house needs sweeping or the fair risks disappearing. Read the op-ed here.

PREVIOUSLY: Still putting up fair holiday lights, Dave Kegebein talks about his stunning firing — and future plans

Santa Cruz METRO PROMOTED CONTENT ROADBLOCK (Protecting Monterey Bay one wrapped bus and ride at a time)

Test your newsy knowledge with this week’s Lookout news quiz

Lookout News Quiz

How closely do you follow news from Santa Cruz County and beyond from Lookout’s correspondents? Take our new weekly quiz from Wallace Baine and find out.

NEED TO BRUSH UP? Get in the know by signing up for our other newsletters and breaking news alerts

Over the past decade, Christopher Neely has built a diverse journalism résumé, spanning from the East Coast to Texas and, most recently, California’s Central Coast.Chris reported from Capitol Hill...