Dolly Parton died on August 25, 2026, at age 80 – and San Francisco is mourning her like family. On this episode of PST, host Emily Dreyfuss talks with the people who felt her impact most directly here: Zulema Rubalcava of the SF Department of Early Childhood on the local chapter of Dolly's Imagination Library, which has sent nearly 10,000 SF kids free books since launching last August; Angela Vincent, who's thrown Dolly tribute nights at local bars since 2020; Jacob Stensberg, artistic director of the San Francisco Gay Men's Chorus, on their Pride tribute show and Dolly's quiet, decades-long support of the LGBTQ+ community (including funding the 1989 Oscar-winning AIDS Quilt documentary); and Margaret Belton on what it feels like to grieve a stranger who felt like family.

For more information and episode transcripts, visit: https://sfstandard.com/pacific-standard-time/

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San Francisco just opened its first brand-new elementary school in decades – Mission Bay School. But nearly 100 neighborhood families couldn't get in. Why? Because in SFUSD, even a brand-new school down the street doesn't guarantee your kid a spot.

In this episode of PST, host Emily Dreyfuss sits down with SF Standard reporter Ezra Wallach to break down San Francisco's infamous school lottery, which is the enrollment system that determines where your child goes to school. Together they explain how it works, who gets priority, and why 31% of SFUSD families don't get their top school pick.

They also dig into the history: how San Francisco's school choice system grew out of desegregation efforts in the 1970s, why it hasn't actually integrated schools, and why the district has been promising to fix it since 2018, with the latest timeline now pushed all the way to 2028.

For more information and episode transcripts, visit: https://sfstandard.com/pacific-standard-time/

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San Francisco is failing survivors of alleged sexual assault – and the numbers prove it. SFPD cleared just 14% of rape cases last year, which is half the national average and the lowest rate of any major county in California. 

SF Standard investigative reporter Anya Schultz joins host Emily Dreyfuss to break down what she found after months of digging into how the city handles rape investigations. The picture is alarming: roughly 80% of alleged rape cases are currently sitting inactive; the Special Victims Unit has lost half its investigators since 2019; and police failed to publish legally required rape kit data until Schultz's reporting forced them to comply.

Schultz also shares the story of one alleged victim – an engineer in her early 20s who supposedly did everything right. When her rape kit came back as a DNA match, she expected action. Instead, the investigator emailed to say the DNA "wasn't conclusive evidence a crime occurred.”

This episode covers what's driving SF's dismal clearance rates, what survivors are experiencing when they report to SFPD, and what local city supervisors are doing in response.

Content warning: This episode contains extensive discussion of sexual assault.

For more information and episode transcripts, visit: ⁠https://sfstandard.com/pacific-standard-time/⁠

Support this podcast from The San Francisco Standard by becoming a subscriber: ⁠⁠https://sfstandard.com/subscriber⁠

San Francisco is blanketed in AI billboards that make no sense. And most of us have just... stopped reading them. But a few people are fighting back.

This week on PST, host Emily Dreyfuss talks to three of them. Harris Alterman and Dave Ross are two New York comedians who've been plastering parody AI ads in the NYC subway ("Payroll, now in pill form." "UnderwAIr. Panties that think.”). Then, there’s Tucker Bryant, a San Francisco conceptual artist who rented a real billboard in the city's SoMa neighborhood and used it to advertise a fake chatbot – one powered not by artificial intelligence, but by himself, an “average individual."

The result is a conversation about tech satire, cognitive surrender, the psychological toll of living inside someone else's hype, and what it means to crave actual human connection in a city increasingly decorated with gibberish. Plus: Emily's theory on how AI billboards hit every dimension of sociological alienation – and why that's more serious than it sounds.

For more information and episode transcripts, visit: https://sfstandard.com/pacific-standard-time/

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A 22-story condo tower proposed on top of a Safeway grocery store in San Francisco’s affluent Marina District has become a flashpoint for the city’s YIMBY vs. NIMBY housing war. And a photo from a recent community meeting there showed exactly who's on which side.

SF Standard reporter Kevin Nguyen joins host Emily Dreyfuss to break down the 800-unit project, why neighborhood opposition no longer has the power to kill it, and how developer Align timed their proposal to sidestep Mayor Daniel Lurie's new Family Zoning rules.

Then, New York Times housing reporter (and Bay Area native) Conor Dougherty zooms out to explain how California's decade of state-level housing laws has stripped local governments of the control they once had – and why that might finally mean buildings actually get built.

For more information and episode transcripts, visit: https://sfstandard.com/pacific-standard-time/

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After six years and a bureaucratic maze involving PG&E, BART, and the Historic Preservation Commission, Jollibee has officially opened its doors on Market Street in San Francisco. In this episode of PST, host Emily Dreyfuss breaks down the full story, and what it reveals about the real cost of doing business in San Francisco.

First, SF Standard food editor Lauren Saria gives a primer on Jollibee: the cult Filipino fast food chain known for its Chickenjoy fried chicken, sweet spaghetti, and the legendary peach mango pie. Lauren shares why the opening feels like a cultural milestone and not just a regular debut.

Then we welcome Katy Tang from the SF Office of Small Business. Her team is in charge of enforcing the types of permitting reforms that initially plagued Jollibee. She specifically addresses the number of city-and voter-approved efforts that now help reduce headaches for small businesses, which comprise the majority of SF's commercial landscape.

“We don't want a reputation that we are a difficult place to get permitting done,” she said. “We really want to encourage innovation and creativity. It's a constant state of improvement.”

For more information and episode transcripts, visit: https://sfstandard.com/pacific-standard-time/

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Is streaming television broken? Netflix is hemorrhaging second-season viewers, prices keep climbing, and the service that once felt like magic now feels like a monthly bill you forgot to cancel. Host Emily Dreyfuss — who loves television so much she actually has a TV tattoo on her arm — brings in Bloomberg’s media and entertainment editor Lucas Shaw, to diagnose what's wrong with the streaming era.

Emily and Lucas get into why Netflix's second-season viewership is collapsing, whether engagement actually matters to these streaming platforms if users aren’t canceling, and the uncomfortable truth that streaming (with its ads and rising prices) is becoming the new cable. They also tackle the bigger cultural question: what happens to shared experience when everyone's watching something different? Is monoculture dead? Also: who really runs Hollywood now — Silicon Valley or the studios?

For more information and episode transcripts, visit: https://sfstandard.com/pacific-standard-time/

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Is a liberal arts education still worth it in the age of AI? Or is college about to become obsolete?

Host Emily Dreyfuss is saving up to send her two kids to a liberal arts school like Wesleyan University, where she and her husband met. But as AI promises to replace everything from coding to essay writing, she's starting to wonder: do liberal arts schools still make sense to attend?

This week, Emily sits down with two Wesleyan insiders to make the case for liberal arts education. First, she talks with President Michael S. Roth about what concerns him about AI, why small classes are the new live events you can't miss, and why schools like his will thrive while big lecture-hall universities struggle. Then Emily goes inside the classroom with Lauren Silber, Wesleyan writing professor and head of its Writing Center, who launched a first-year seminar called “Writing in the Age of Gen AI.” Silber shares what a campus survey of 700 students revealed about how Gen Z actually uses AI and why she believes AI might actually save the liberal arts degree.

For more information and episode transcripts, visit: https://sfstandard.com/pacific-standard-time/

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Cindy Cohn spent decades at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) fighting for digital rights, including taking on the NSA's mass surveillance program. Now, as AI reshapes the internet, she's sounding the alarm again. In this episode, Cohn joins host Emily Dreyfuss to talk about why the copyright lawsuits against AI companies are the wrong fight, why privacy harms are the real threat but are much harder to litigate, and what it would actually take to protect your rights in the age of ChatGPT and Claude. She also explains why the government and corporate surveillance are not separate problems, and why the number-one buyer of data broker information in the U.S. is the federal government itself. If you use AI tools and care about your privacy, this conversation is essential listening.

For more information and episode transcripts, visit: https://sfstandard.com/pacific-standard-time/

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What does it actually take to build a humanoid robot in America – and why can't we do it yet?

Host Emily Dreyfuss's 79-year-old mother has been joking for years that she wants a robot companion, inspired by viral humanoid robot videos and Korean dramas. So Emily welcomes robotics reporter Kylie Robison to find out if that's even possible. Kylie is a host and writer at Core Memory who recently wrote an article titled, ‘This Is Why America Can’t Have Robots And Other Nice Things.’ 

On the show, Kylie breaks down actuators – the small motorized parts that let robots move – and explains why China dominates their global production. She and Emily then dig into two Bay Area startups, West Mag and Atlas Motion Systems, racing to bring actuator manufacturing back to the U.S., with OpenAI reportedly not too far behind. And they touch on whether NVIDIA's "physical intelligence" bet might mean humanoid robots are closer than we think.

For more information and episode transcripts, visit: https://sfstandard.com/pacific-standard-time/

Support this podcast from The San Francisco Standard by becoming a subscriber: ⁠https://sfstandard.com/subscriber