With book bans having been enacted in 37 U.S. states — the vast majority of them having to do with the lives of people of color and LGBTQ+ people — a group including educators and advocates will convene Oct. 6 at the downtown Santa Cruz public library to attempt to address the rising threat.
City Life
Posted inRecreation & Sports
Everything you need to know to attend the Santa Cruz County Fair, running Wednesday through Sunday
Wallace Baine and Lily Belli bring you the details of this year’s Santa Cruz County Fair, which opens for business at noon sharp on Wednesday and runs through Sunday.
Posted inLatest News
Fast food workers to get wage hikes in last-minute deal on bill that featured prominently in Santa Cruz County
A deal announced Monday by labor groups and the fast food industry would give workers a $20 minimum wage and pull a measure off the 2024 ballot. The Legislature has until Thursday to approve it. The agreement is detailed in changes to Assembly Bill 1228, a proposed law that the fast food industry had lobbied heavily against in Santa Cruz County
Posted inWatsonville / Pajaro
More than just the fair: Cultural events take center stage in Watsonville’s big upcoming weekend
Beginning with next Friday’s Fiesta Mexicana at the downtown plaza, continuing Saturday with a celebration of music and culture at the Mello Center and winding up Sunday with a Mexican Independence Day festival, next weekend is shaping up to be an excellent time to visit Watsonville. And the Santa Cruz County Fair is happening, too.
Posted inCity Life
Urban density is coming to downtown Santa Cruz. This group wants to stop the city from getting taller.
Santa Cruz’s downtown expansion plan is aimed for the lots that currently host Kaiser Permanente Arena, Ace Hardware and Firefly Coffee House. The city has capped building heights in the area at 12 stories. That is still too tall for some. A group called Housing for People is circulating a petition that asks residents whether they want to be able to vote on projects that propose to reach taller than existing height limits on local land.
Posted inCity Life
Nina Simon’s new path: A daughter’s story of love, told in the form of a murder mystery
Nina Simon, former director of the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History, put her life and nonprofit leadership on pause in 2020 to care for her mother after a cancer diagnosis. What “started out completely like a fantasy or a distraction” evolved into “Mother-Daughter Murder Night,” a mystery novel she’ll discuss Tuesday at Bookshop Santa Cruz.
Posted inLatest News
Judge in Tushar Atre murder case rejects defense effort to challenge surveillance-footage search warrant
The attorney for one of the defendants, Stephen Lindsay, argued Wednesday that Santa Cruz Sheriff’s Office investigators made misleading statements in a search warrant for surveillance footage from a Las Vegas gym. Prosecutors say that footage matches the appearances of Lindsay and another suspect with those of figures captured in surveillance footage from near Atre’s Pleasure Point residence around the time Atre was killed in October 2019.
Posted inCity Life
Whether your jam is Fleetwood Mac or Mitski, Streetlight is the place to listen in on new albums
Downtown Santa Cruz’s Streetlight Records is hosting a listening party for Fleetwood Mac’s “Rumours Live” album on its release day next Friday, and you can hear Mitski’s latest, “The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We,” there, too, before it hits shelves.
Posted inCity Life
Amy Ettinger’s terminal cancer diagnosis is gut-wrenching news for Santa Cruz’s literary community
In a personal essay in the Washington Post, longtime Santa Cruz journalist and author Amy Ettinger, 49, revealed her terminal cancer diagnosis. It’s “one of the bravest and most forthright things I’ve ever read about the experience of facing death at a young age,” Wallace Baine writes.
Posted inCity Life
With death of Linda Burman-Hall, Santa Cruz loses one of its great artistic souls
Linda Burman-Hall, founder of the Santa Cruz Baroque Festival and a professor emerita at UCSC, “was an intellectual voracious mind and lover of an astonishing range of musical traditions,” Wallace Baine writes.