Millions of consumers will feel the pinch when rates already expected to rise will jump even further. Federal subsidies, set to expire at year’s end, are partly to blame.
Covered California officials on Thursday announced the first double-digit rate increase since 2018, saying it represents a “confluence” of factors putting upward pressure on the market.
Rising health care costs, the expiration of enhanced federal subsidies and policy-driven market uncertainty together are fueling the hike, Covered California Director Jessica Altman said.
Insurers in recent years have expected health care costs to increase by about 8% each year. That makes up the bulk of next year’s increase. But Altman said about 2% of the rate increase in the state’s version of the Affordable Care Act marketplace is based on federal financial assistance that expires at the end of the year.
President Donald Trump’s signature spending and tax reform bill — the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” — left out funding for enhanced premium tax credits used by more than 90% of Affordable Care Act enrollees nationwide. Congress enacted these subsidies during the COVID-19 pandemic to ensure people had health insurance. Since then, Affordable Care Act enrollment has nearly doubled nationwide from 12 million to 24 million people.
“We’ve never been through a loss in affordability like the expiration of the enhanced tax credits,” Altman said.
Ariana Brill, a certified health insurance agent who helps people enroll in Covered California, said if the enhanced subsidies aren’t renewed, consumers’ pocketbooks will be hit twice next year.
“We’ll see rates go up. We’ll see assistance go down. And the net premium, the consumer’s take home price, is going to go up considerably,” Brill said.
Open enrollment typically starts on Nov. 1, but Brill said clients are already calling her with concerns about increases. A majority of her clients, about 2,600 of them, will have to pay significantly more for health care if Congress doesn’t extend the enhanced subsidies, she said.
If that happens, Brill said she expects some people to switch to less comprehensive, lower-cost plans to make ends meet. Others will drop coverage altogether.
“For most people, affordability is a huge part of their decision making. Very few of us have the luxury of buying things without looking at the price,” Brill said.
State officials recently took steps to ease the potential loss of federal subsidies for the lowest-income Covered California members. The state will spend $190 million to maintain subsidies for people earning up to 150% of the federal poverty level (individuals earning about $23,000 or families of four earning about $48,000).
Still, that investment is far short of the $2.1 billion the state stands to lose.
Covered California’s previous estimates indicate that 600,000 people could drop coverage as a result of lost subsidies and rising costs. That, in turn, could make health care even more expensive, experts say. That’s because younger and healthier people tend to forego coverage first, leaving sicker and more costly people behind. To meet their needs, insurers have to charge more.
“With those lower utilization people leaving the marketplace, which leaves only the high cost users in the pool, it drives up premiums for those who are left,” said Matthew McGough, a policy analyst for KFF’s Affordable Care Act program who co-authored a recent study looking at 2026 premium increases.
More people seeking health care and higher prices are already the primary factor driving annual rate increases, McGough said. Some of that can be attributed to the aging population and widespread use of costly pharmaceuticals like Ozempic and Wegovy to treat diabetes and other chronic health conditions.
But insurers nationally and in California have pointed out other factors contributing significantly to increased costs. These include tariffs on drugs and medical devices, enrollment and eligibility changes included in Trump’s budget package, and inflation. Most insurers are assuming Congress won’t extend the enhanced premium tax credits.
Nationally, the median premium increase for next year is 18%, according to the KFF analysis. Loss of subsidies accounts for 4%, McGough said.
“It’s definitely a significant factor this year and that along with the general environment of uncertainty are what is pushing these rates above what we’ve seen in the past few years,” McGough said.
Supported by the California Health Care Foundation (CHCF), which works to ensure that people have access to the care they need, when they need it, at a price they can afford. Visit www.chcf.org to learn more.
The critique of President Trump’s power play in Washington, D.C., this week was immediate and intense because it was so obvious: Last year the District of Columbia’s violent crime rate dropped to its lowest point in the 21st century. Trump can’t honestly use crime trends to justify his seizure of the district’s Metropolitan Police Department or the deployment of National Guard troops and federal agents.
But he did it anyway, because he can. As a federal district excluded from any state, D.C. enjoys home rule only to the extent that the U.S. government permits it. Trump’s references to bands of “bloodthirsty criminals” roaming D.C. streets were not merely false, but unnecessary.
Trump also said he’d consider sending troops into cities that don’t have Washington’s special status, calling out Oakland, Los Angeles, New York, Chicago and Baltimore. Whether he can do that depends in part on the outcome of a trial this week over Trump’s use of National Guard troops in L.A. earlier this summer. A ruling is expected shortly.
Of the cities Trump cited, only Baltimore is among the nation’s top 10 for violent crime, according to FBI statistics, although Oakland is included in some analyses. But it’s probably more than coincidence that all four of Trump’s named cities are in so-called blue states that voted against him in three presidential elections.
Besides Baltimore, Trump didn’t mention the American cities most plagued by violent crime, including murder, perhaps because they are in states that supported him in 2024: Memphis, Tenn. St. Louis. Kansas City, Mo. Cleveland. Detroit. Little Rock, Ark. Milwaukee. New Orleans. Birmingham, Ala.
Dishonesty about urban crime, and using it to score political points, is a Trump specialty. During his 2016 campaign, he burrowed directly into the American psyche by dredging up images from the violent 1980s and 1990s. The worst crime of that era had long passed, having peaked in 1991, followed by a historic plunge that continues today despite occasional spikes.
Still, Trump rode ancient crime fears to victory and spoke at his first inaugural as if the nation were still locked in an era of “American carnage.” So, yes, Trump is a maestro at uttering crime falsehoods and tapping latent crime fears to enhance his power.
But he’s not alone.
Stoking crime fear for political gain is commonplace in American politics and is a tactic used freely by Democrats, Republicans, police, prosecutors, prison guards, and in fact pretty much anyone running for public office or pushing (or opposing) a ballot measure that could redirect public spending toward or away from law enforcement.
News outlets are in on the game. Programs that ordinarily wouldn’t report on anything as mundane as a committee hearing on a bill to lengthen criminal sentences often air stock footage of crooks ransacking store shelves. The constant replays turn an otherwise boring story into a fear-driven special report.
Failing drug store chains blame their poor performance on exaggerated or purely imagined waves of shoplifting. Mayors and police chiefs feel pressure to respond by deploying more police, prosecutors promise longer sentences, lawmakers approve tough-on-crime bills — even if shoplifting has not, in fact, jumped, and even if it’s revealed that bad business decisions are the true reasons for the chains’ failures.
In California, where post-lockdown crime rose and fell variously in different cities but did not amount to a sustained statewide uptick, Democrats made a show of several “retail theft” hearings last year and the year before, and championed a package of tougher-on-crime bills that were geared more toward winning a strong turnout in congressional elections than in actually affecting crime rates. Voters passed Proposition 36, which chips away at historic reforms by turning repeat low-level property misdemeanors into felonies.
Officers with the Los Angeles Police Department perform police activities and duties at an active crime scene outside a Superior Grocers in the LAPD’s South Bureau in Los Angeles, on Dec. 7, 2024. Photo by Mark Abramson for CalMatters
Yes, property crime is real and has serious negative consequences. Violent crime remains an ongoing problem not only in Oakland but in almost every California city, even though they’re not even close to the same category as high-crime Memphis or Little Rock.
Those who argue that there is no crime, or that the crime that exists is no big deal, are playing as fast and loose with the facts as Trump. But calling crime one important urban challenge among many just doesn’t have the same cachet as calling it an emergency of historic proportions, or calling it a figment of the imagination. It neither defunds the police nor justifies more police hiring.
In his remarks on Washington, D.C., Trump cited several other falsehoods widely embraced across jurisdictions.
On bail, for example. Trump threatened to somehow override Illinois’ successful no-money-bail law on the argument that “somebody murders somebody and they’re out on no cash bail before the day is out.” The clueless statement repeats false tropes in California about no-cash bail. In fact, accused murderers are almost never released before trial — and when they are, it’s generally because they had money to bail out. No-cash-bail jurisdictions use a defendant’s risk to the community, rather than wealth or poverty, to make pretrial release decisions.
But that hasn’t stopped critics from complaining, despite the numbers, that no-cash-bail increases crime. In a contest between numbers and fear, numbers rarely prevail — as Trump knows well. His solution to numbers that don’t support his positions is to claim they are rigged, and to fire the people who calculated them, as he recently did with the chief of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Or to just cite random numbers, as he did when he claimed his program to reduce drug prices will bring costs down by 1,500% — which would mean that instead of paying for medication, Americans will get cash whenever they get their prescriptions filled.
Or to just ignore them, as he is doing with D.C.’s falling crime rate.
No one does it quite so brazenly, or with such swagger, as Trump. But many do it. Americans who don’t want their criminal justice policies and budgets to be guided by deception should be cautious and skeptical when they hear claims from any of their elected or law enforcement leaders, not just their president.
Women continue to lag behind men in certain science, technology, engineering and math programs.
Ten years ago, it seemed everyone was talking about women in science.
As the economy improved in the years after the Great Recession, women were slower to return to the workforce, causing alarm, especially in vital fields like computing. State and federal leaders turned their attention to women in science, technology, engineering and math, known by the acronym STEM.
Over the next few years, they poured millions of dollars into increasing the number of women pursuing STEM degrees. But the rate of women who attain those degrees has hardly improved, according to an analysis of colleges’ data by the Public Policy Institute of California on behalf of CalMatters.
“The unfortunate news is that the numbers haven’t changed much at all,” said Hans Johnson, a senior fellow at the institute who conducted the analysis of California’s four-year colleges using data from the 2009-10 school year and comparing it to the most recent numbers, from 2022-23. The share of women who received a bachelor’s degree increased from roughly 19% to about 25% in engineering and from nearly 16% to about 23% in computer science. In math and statistics, the percentage of women who graduate with a degree has gone down in the last five years.
“It’s not nothing, but at this pace it would take a very long time to reach parity,” Johnson said.
Girls are also underrepresented in certain high school classes, such as AP computer science, and while women make up about 42% of California’s workforce, they comprise just a quarter of those working in STEM careers, according to a study by Mount Saint Mary’s University. Fewer women were working in math careers in 2023 than in the five or 10 years before that, the study found.
“It’s a cultural phenomenon, not a biological phenomenon,” said Mayya Tokman, a professor of applied mathematics at UC Merced. She said underrepresentation is a result of perceptions about women, the quality of their education, and a lack of role models in a given field.
Science and technology spurs innovation and economic growth while promoting national security, and these jobs are often lucrative and stable. Gender parity is critical, especially as U.S. science and technology industries struggle to find qualified workers, said Sue Rosser, provost emerita at San Francisco State and a longtime advocate for women in science. “We need more people in STEM. More people means immigrants, women, people of color as well as white men. There’s no point in excluding anyone.”
Chloe Lynn, 20, a UC Berkeley undergraduate student, points to a poster she presented summarizing her mathematics research in Berkeley on Aug. 5, 2025. Photo by Florence Middleton for CalMatters
She said that recent cuts by the Trump administration to California’s research and education programs will stymie progress in science, technology and engineering — and hurt countless careers, including the women who aspire to join these fields.
Over the last eight months, the federal government has made extensive cuts to scientific research at California’s universities, affecting work on dementia, vaccines, women’s issues and on health problems affecting the LGBTQ+ community. The administration also ended programs that support undergraduate students in science. In June a federal judge ruled that the administration needs to restore some of those grants, but a Supreme Court decision could reverse that ruling.
More recently, the administration halted hundreds of grants to UCLA — representing hundreds of millions in research funding — in response to a U.S. Justice Department investigation into allegations of antisemitism. Now the Trump administration is asking for a $1 billion settlement in return for the grants. A California district judge ruled on Tuesday that at least some of those grants need to be restored.
‘The cultural conversation has changed’
In the past five years, attention has shifted away from women in science. Nonprofit leaders and researchers across the state say that many lawmakers and philanthropists turned away from women in STEM during the COVID-19 pandemic and focused more on racial justice following the police killing of George Floyd.
Since 1995, women have been outpacing men in college, and women are now much more likely to attain a bachelor’s degree. The unemployment rate for men is higher, too, and men without college degrees are opting out of the labor force at unprecedented rates.
On July 30 Gov. Gavin Newsom issued an executive order saying the state needs to do more to address the “growing crisis of connection and opportunity for men and boys.” It’s not a “zero-sum” game, he wrote: the state can, and should, support everyone.
But some state investments for women’s education are lagging.
In 2018, the Legislature agreed to put $10 million each year into a new initiative, the California Education Learning Laboratory, to “close equity and achievement gaps,” including the underrepresentation of girls and women in science and technology. But two years later, the state imposed large-scale cuts to the initiative due to the pandemic. As the state faced more fiscal challenges in 2024, lawmakers cut its budget to about half its former size.
This year, Newsom proposed cutting the Education Learning Laboratory altogether. After negotiations with the Legislature, Newsom agreed to fund the initiative through next year, at which point it’s set to close unless new funding is secured.
Gov. Gavin Newsom addresses the media during a press conference unveiling his 2024-25 January budget proposal at the Secretary of State Auditorium in Sacramento on Jan. 10, 2024. Photo by Miguel Gutierrez Jr., CalMatters
“While I think women are faring better in college generally, I would be skeptical that we can say ‘mission accomplished’ in terms of achieving parity for women in STEM undergraduate degrees,” said Lark Park, the director of the Education Learning Laboratory, which uses public money to provide grants to schools and nonprofits. “I think we’ve just gotten distracted and the cultural conversation has changed.”
Private and corporate foundations fund numerous nonprofit organizations that support girls and women in STEM, but grant recipients say some money has moved toward other, more popular topics or less controversial ones. “Funders focus on trends and they’re very trendy in how they give,” said Dawn Brown, president of the EmpowHer Institute, which offers education programs to girls and women across Los Angeles County.
One of her programs provides a free, five-week summer camp to girls, including a trip to Catalina Island, where they learn about environmental science and climate change. Since Trump took office, some corporate funders have pulled back support for the organization’s programs, which may be perceived as supporting “DEI,” she said. “The words ‘women,’ ‘girls,’ ‘climate change’ — those are banned words.”
Supporting women in math
When Chloe Lynn, a rising junior at UC Berkeley and a double major in applied math and management science, started taking higher-level courses, she noticed a trend in her math classes: fewer women. “I’ll be one of three girls in a 30, 40-person class,” she said during an interview at the university’s division of equity and inclusion.
UC Berkeley has a center dedicated to promoting diversity in STEM, known as Cal NERDS, which features cozy study spots, a high-tech makerspace and various multi-purpose meeting rooms. The center receives much of its funding from the state but has a few grants from the federal government, some of which are currently on hold.
On a Thursday last month, Lynn was one of 10 students who came to present their summer research in one of the multi-purpose rooms. More than half of the presenters were women or non-binary, and the rest were part of other underrepresented groups in STEM, including Hispanic, Black and LGBTQ+ students. She stood in front of a large poster, waiting for people to stop by and ask about her work.
“Say you’re at an auction, and say there’s n bidders and k identical items,” she said as another student approached. Over the next two hours, fellow mathematicians, classmates, friends and family stopped by, listening as she explained her formula for allocating resources in an optimal way. Some understood her work and asked questions about her variables, formulas or 3-D models. The rest nodded in admiration.
Chloe Lynn at her home in Berkeley on Aug. 5, 2025. Photo by Florence Middleton for CalMatters
By the end of the event, many students had abandoned their own posters in order to learn about their friends’ research. In her free time, as the vice president of UC Berkeley’s undergraduate math association, Lynn has been trying to build this kind of community among other female math majors by organizing events where students can meet each other. Her end goal is graduate school, either in applied math or industrial engineering. Women are also underrepresented in those graduate programs.
“Creating an inclusive and uplifting community is so important for anyone that’s underrepresented,” she said after finishing her presentation.
How STEM helps people
The lack of women in STEM has nothing to do with their abilities. In fact, women who major in STEM at California State University campuses are more likely than men to graduate, according to data from the college system, and in biology, women are overrepresented. Over 64% of biology bachelor’s degrees awarded in California during the 2022-23 school year went to women, according to the analysis from the Public Policy Institute of California.
Brown said some female alumni of EmpowHer have said that college advisers push biology over other science, engineering or math courses, claiming that it’s “easier.” Better advising could create more parity, she said.
Rosser, who trained as a zoologist before becoming a college administrator, said women’s shift toward biology was a slow process, beginning in the 1970s. “Women are particularly attracted to STEM when they can see its usefulness, particularly to help people,” she said. Biology is often “an entryway to the health care professions,” she added, many of which are predominately female. She recommends that professors promote the application of their research as a way to increase the percentage of women in these fields.
In her studies at UC Berkeley, Lynn said she’s struggled with the relevance of her research. “There’s a lot going on in the world right now and I feel called to help,” she said. “Even though I did theory research this summer, I’ve been thinking about ways to apply this theory to real-world applications I care about.” In particular, she wants her research to help her community in the Bay Area, where she grew up.
“Say you’re an architect and you’re in charge of reinforcing San Francisco’s concrete structures in the event of an earthquake,” she said. “You want to minimize cost in San Francisco, and that’s going to help you choose which building you’re going to reinforce.”
It’s just another resource allocation problem, she said, so it could be solved with a similar formula.
“It does hit close to home,” she said. In fact, the UC Berkeley campus lies on a fault line.
Tanned, rested and presumably ready after a summer vacation break, state legislators will return to the Capitol next week for the final month of their 2025 session.
The session’s final weeks will be dominated by bills aimed at registering blue California’s dislike of and opposition to President Donald Trump. The most prominent will be Gov. Gavin Newsom’s plan to redraw boundaries of California’s 52 congressional districts, giving Democrats five more seats to counter efforts in Texas to create five more Republican seats.
Despite the Capitol’s fixation on national political maneuvering — tinged by Newsom’s likely bid for the White House — there are pending matters that hit closer to home. None is more important than what’s been kicking around for at least six decades, a project to bolster California’s north-to-south shipments of water by bypassing the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.
The project has gone by several names and morphed from a “peripheral canal” carrying water around the Delta to twin tunnels beneath the Delta and, most recently, to a single tunnel called the Delta Conveyance Project.
Newsom’s administration believes it needs just one more thing to get the greenlight, legislation to exempt the project from the California Environmental Quality Act’s ponderous process, thereby denying critics the legal tools to delay the work.
Newsom had hoped he could clear the CEQA hurdle with a “trailer bill” attached to the state budget approved in June, taking advantage of the bulletproof and expedited budget process.
“For too long, attempts to modernize our critical water infrastructure have stalled in endless red tape, burdened with unnecessary delay,” Newsom said. “We’re done with barriers. Our state needs to complete this project as soon as possible, so that we can better store and manage water to prepare for a hotter, drier future. Let’s get this built.”
Northern California legislators opposed to the tunnel persuaded their leaders to stall on using a trailer bill, but Newsom and tunnel advocates, such as the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, will try again during the session’s final weeks.
Tunnel backers contend that it would make California’s vast water system, which taps Northern California rivers to supply water to relatively arid Southern California via the California Aqueduct, more reliable by bypassing the environmentally fragile Delta.
That’s true as far as it goes. But opponents say the diversions of Sacramento River water into the tunnel would deprive the Delta of the water it needs to be a healthy habitat for fish and other wildlife.
The debate has essentially raged along those lines since the State Water Project was first constructed in the 1960s. During his first governorship a half-century ago, Jerry Brown won legislative approval for what was then a canal, only to have it overturned by voters via a 1982 referendum. Since then versions of the project have proliferated and been debated but none has advanced to the current stage.
Newsom is trying to sweeten the deal by offering the Delta $200 million to offset the project’s impacts. But whether Newsom can get what he wants from the Legislature remains uncertain, because Democratic legislators, who are a supermajority, are divided roughly along geographic lines.
“The Legislature rightly rejected the governor’s ill-conceived plan to fast-track the Delta Tunnel Project in June and should reject it again,” the Legislature’s Delta Caucus declared last week. “Delta communities that will be devastated by this unaffordable and unnecessary project cannot be bought off with $200 million. In fact, no amount of money can compensate for the destruction of thousands of acres of prime farmland and the loss of fisheries and historic tribal resources.”
The division is so sharp that Republicans, although small in number, could be decisive.
The reason for this part 2 about VPNs in China is that so many good responses to my inquiries about VPNdom in China came pouring in just after the first post went out. Also, there is such a wide variety of different viewpoints and experiences that you cannot expect there to be a single standard out there. One thing has become very clear to me, and that is that the Chinese government wants to keep people on their toes and resort to a lot of self-policing. This is common government policy in China, not just with regard to the internet, but to many aspects of social and political life.
For an up-to-date comprehensive primer about VPN usage in the PRC, I recommend that you read carefully this article: "Are VPN's Legal in China?" Not really. It's a tricky business. You can be heavily fined and get in real trouble if the internet police catch you with one, especially if you use it to read / write something the CCP disapproves of.
It's a catch-22. If the government catches you using an expensive, good VPN that will enable you to read most of what's on the global internet, you could be in deep do-do with the authorities. If they catch you using a cheap VPN, it's pretty much useless because you can't use it to go to the places you want to go to. The government won't mind, and they will monitor everything you do on the internet.
To give you an idea of what VPNdom is like in China, I will compile half-a-dozen or so of the most interesting communications I received. Two things to keep in mind:
1. All of my informants are elite, privileged, highly educated, and many of them are foreigners. They are in no way representative of the vast majority of the Chinese population, most of whom have no idea of what a VPN is.
2. When it wants to, for whatever reason, the government can shut down the whole internet completely, as it did during the worst times of the dynamic zero COVID lockdowns, and as it did during the white paper protests in November 2022.
As with part 1 of this series, I will not reveal the identity of my informants, except for two professional legal experts.
An American scholar at Chinese research institute:
The situation is that with a VPN (and there are many companies offering China-friendly options) one can access everything in China that’s available in the west sans fail. All those apps you mention, including TikTok (Chinese version Douyin), are completely accessible, as are US university email servers.
An American professor at a top tier American university in China:
Access depends on the kind of VPN one is using. For the one we use at XXX Shanghai (Cisco) we can access everything, including YouTube. I suspect most university VPNs will work as well.
An American professor at another top tier American university in China who for many years told me that no matter what VPN he used, he couldnt access Language Log:
Basically I would say that with a good VPN you can access almost anything, but wouldn't go so far as to say everything, at least not in my experience.
As I've asked around, people note that it does depend on how good the VPN is, and I've heard that people may need to switch VPNs from time to time to stay ahead of the game. There may at times be other factors; for example, one person here mentioned even with a VPN she had trouble with some sites, but attributed it to the fact that she is not using an IPhone.
Here on campus our access is unusually good, and accessing things like Google, U-Tube and so forth is not a problem; I wouldn't say there are many sites I can't reach. But there are a few things that I haven't been able to access even from on campus, and unfortunately the Language Log posts have been on this list.
But, as a post-script…. I hadn't tried accessing Language Log posts for a while because it never worked, but I just now gave it a try using our current VPN and – for the first time here – it worked! (There was a post on Taiwanese I had particularly wanted to read.) So, maybe, at least for the moment, things are better than I thought.
in general, most of my correspondents in China have told me that they cannot access Language Log.
A Taiwanese professor at a top university in Hong Kong:
Based on my experience in Hong Kong, I haven’t encountered any difficulties accessing Google or YouTube. However, TikTok and ChatGPT aren’t available without a VPN. (I’m currently using ChatGPT via VPN.) Facebook, Instagram, and Reddit are all accessible here without issue.
From what I’ve heard from my students in Mainland China, they need to purchase high-quality VPNs to reach these platforms. Many even subscribe to several and rotate between them, since VPN access can sometimes be disrupted. Interestingly, they refer to VPNs as “tīzǐ 梯子” (ladders), and they describe it as ‘climbing the ladders’—pá tīzǐ 爬梯子—to see the world. I find that metaphor both poignant and powerful.
A Chinese graduate student visiting her family in China for the summer:
About the internet situation in China: with a good VPN, you can usually access pretty much any international platforms or social media like YouTube, Google, Wikipedia, Instagram, Facebook, Reddit, Snapchat, Discord, etc. I’ve been using VPNs for years, and once it’s connected, the interne
A Chinese language teacher at a top tier American university:
I just checked around about this matter. The answer I received is that, if you have a GOOD VPN, yes, you can see anything on the internet in China. But it has to be a GOOD one.
When I was in China last summer, I didn’t buy a VPN, because it is too mafan ("troublesome"), so I don’t have any personal experience about how VPNs work in China.
A college application adviser / coach in a major Chinese eastern seaboard city:
As for the VPN issue, my VPN can watch YouTube and ANY website. It really depends on what VPN you are using and how expensive your VPN is. My VPN is relatively expensive, over 500 RMB/ year (to ensure the connectivity and keep in touch with you haha!). I guess that student who had a lot of trouble with her VPN is probably using a free or very cheap one.
A Cantonese professor at a top Hong Kong university:
From my experience, if I have a sim card from Hong Kong, and as long as I don't use free wifi on the Mainland, I am able to use WhatsApp, Facebook, receive hku email, and probably browse Youtube, as well. I don't even have to use VPN. But if you don't have a HK sim card, you will need to use VPN to do this all.
An M.A. graduate from Penn:
I have been using a VPN program provided by a Japanese company, which includes numerous nodes, including the US and Hong Kong, and even access to Chat-GPT. However, I have encountered issues when using it on Apple devices with iOS systems. Some foreign websites fail to load properly. Google and Twitter work normally, but other websites frequently display errors. Devices with Windows and Android systems do not experience these issues.
These problems began about two weeks ago and have existed until now. I am not sure if they are related to the Beidaihe meeting, the big military parade forthcoming in Beijing, and so forth.
Donald Clarke, a specialist on Chinese law:
Officially authorized VPNs (there is such a thing) are permitted, but of course they will not be secure. Neither providing nor using an unauthorized VPN is, strictly speaking, legal; people have been punished for both kinds of offenses. Of the two, providing an unauthorized VPN is much more serious; using an unauthorized VPN less so. If you're wondering about yourself, I have never heard of a foreigner being punished for using an unauthorized VPN, even though it is deemed illegal. As a professor from a prestigious university, you run a very low risk.
I'm told that Astrill provides the most reliable service. This is fine if you're just concerned with getting outside the Great Firewall and not concerned about security or confidentiality. Since China has the technical capacity to detect VPN use and block it, any VPN that is not blocked is, I suspect, operating with permission (even if it's not officially authorized). And that makes me wonder why the state would permit it.
This is a good summary of the situation by William Farris, former general counsel for Google for the greater China region (here and here).
In conclusion, using a VPN in China is pretty much hit-or-miss, cat-and-mouse. As with so many things in China, the regulations are inexplicit; they are designed to keep you guessing.
Are VPNs legal in China? Sort of, but not really (at least not for the full purposes of which they are intended). It's part of what is called the gray zone / area, a concept that is also used in diplomacy / warfare.
Bottom line: One of the most strongly blocked websites in China is Language Log. I've heard from many people in China, even those with "good" VPNs and those who love to read LL when they're someplace which has a free and open internet, that it is not available to them in China.
D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser and the city’s top legal official have had it over against Epstein pal Trump's latest attempt to take over the D.C. police department. The District's Attorney General said the order was "unlawful" and that Bowser should reject it. Via the Washington Post:
Bondi ordered the mayor and D.C. Police Chief Pamela A. Smith to recognize Terry Cole, the head of the Drug Enforcement Administration, as the District’s “emergency police commissioner,” empowering him to assume the full powers of the D.C. police chief and issue department policy. She also ordered the immediate suspension of D.C. police policies limiting cooperation with federal immigration authorities.
Bowser (D) and D.C. Attorney General Brian Schwalb, however, called the order unlawful and suggested they will not comply — the first significant sign of resistance from the city’s top officials since Trump exerted control over the police force Monday in an executive order.
Bowser said there is nothing in the law that would support ceding “the District’s personnel authority to a federal official.”
“Let us be clear about what the law requires during a Presidential declared emergency: it requires the mayor of Washington, DC to provide the services of the Metropolitan Police Department for federal purposes at the request of the President,” Bowser said in a statement. “We have followed the law.”
This is the grave of Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne.
Born in 1934 in Sacramento, California, Joan Didion grew up middle class, the daughter of an Army Air Corps officer who was really more of an accountant, so they moved around all the time. Didion was a shy girl and became a great listener and chronicler of what she saw. She never moved from these characteristics. She ended up at the University of California for college, and graduated from Berkeley in 1956. She won an essay contest from Vogue that year, which led to her being hired by the magazine. That started just as a copywriter, but over the next eight years, she rose rapidly, as her incredible writing talent was obvious to all who could read. And unlike today, people did things such as read magazine articles and books. Today, they just scroll for stupid shit on Reddit and Tik Tok.
In 1963, Didion published her first novel, titled Run, River. It’s minor and few have read it, including me. But while writing it, she relied on her friend John Gregory Dunne to edit it. They fell in love and married soon after. Dunne was born in 1932 in Hartford. He grew up wealthy, the son of a leading heart surgeon. He became a writer to overcome a stutter as a child, but being artistic was encouraged in the family anyway, as his brother was Dominick Dunne, the film producer and writer. John Gregory went to Princeton, graduated in 1954, and moved to New York. He met Didion soon after.
In 1964, Didion and Dunne moved to California. Didion became the bard of southern California life in the next decade, while Dunne wrote Delano, one of the greatest pieces of labor journalism ever written, about the United Farm Workers grape strike. But soon it would be Didion who became the real powerhouse of this amazing couple of letters. They became stalwarts of the Los Angeles arts scene. They wrote screenplays together, including Panic in Needle Park, a very good picture which also introduced the world to Al Pacino. She especially would become well-known for her journalism, which she collected in 1968’s Slouching Toward Bethlehem, one of the foundational books of the so-called “New Journalism,” a literary style to nonfiction which included other figures such as Truman Capote, Hunter S. Thompson, and Gay Talese.
In 1966, they adopted a daughter, naming her Quintana Roo, after the Mexican state. This did not go well. The child had psychological issues her entire life and they were not very good parents, as Didion herself freely admitted later in life. I think it would have been nearly impossible to grow up to be a functional adult in that milieu anyway, with all the parties and drugs and stardom around you, the ambivalence of so many of these folks in actual parenting, etc. Then you add in mental instability that probably was just in her anyway. It’s a sad story. She became an uncontrollable alcoholic as she grew up and as you can see from the stone, died at the age of 39, drinking herself to death.
Remember back in the ye olde days when people read books? It’s no coincidence that the decline of reading books and the rise of American fascism happened at the same time. These days, you can’t assign much reading to college students or they really balk. When I took a modern American lit class in college, it was a novel a week and you really did have to do if you wanted to do well. They weren’t long novels, but there were a lot of them. One of them was Joan Didion’s Play It As It Lays, which remains one of my favorite novels thirty years later. To me, this is the peak all-time California book, the ultimate story of malaise and driving in what one could see as a paradise and yet never really was such a thing. Pair it with Nathaniel West’s The Day of the Locust to really get at the myths and realities of LA in our literary history. Didion and Dunne wrote the screenplay for the movie adaptation that starred Tuesday Weld and Anthony Perkins, but I haven’t seen it and no one seems to think it is good, except for Roger Ebert and he usually had a pretty sharp eye, so maybe I should watch it. Hard book to film though. They also wrote the screenplay for A Star is Born, the 1976 version. I haven’t seen that either, which is kind of surprising to me.
Still, I never really got into Didion’t other works much, and I’ve wanted to like them and have read many of them two or three times without really being able to dig them. That’s especially true of 1977’s A Book of Common Prayer, which works in one sense that you have this white woman in a disastrous Central American country and she knows it’s a problem but can’t get out of her own ass enough to care that much about why things are so messed up. But while diffidence is Didion’s thing, it’s hard for me to care much when there was so much as stake in the geopolitical background. Not surprisingly, the real takeaway is the character’s freakout about her daughter running off with the Marxist rebels, a clear analogy for the bad relationship with her own daughter, who was still just a kid.
I feel much the same way about 1984’s Democracy, also with the politics of Central America perhaps a bit too much in the background. But Didion was a smart reporter on social issues, including Central America, which she wrote about extensively. She also wrote bravely about the Central Park Five and the bogus prosecution of these boys for a crime they did not commit, for which of course Donald Trump wanted the death penalty, including after their exoneration.
Just as Quintana Roo’s body was falling apart over her drinking, Dunne had a heart attack and died in 2003. He was 71 years old. She dealt with these losses in her 2005 book The Year of Magical Thinking, which I haven’t read and probably should. It was overwhelming beloved and won all the awards. She turned it into a one-woman play for Broadway, with Vanessa Redgrave playing the lead when it went to the stage in 2007. She went back to memoir to discuss the relationship with her daughter in 2011’s Blue Nights. She spent her last years as a senior figure in American letters, though her final years saw her affected with the horrors of Parkinson’s. She died of that in 2021. She was 87 years old.
Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne are buried in Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine, Manhattan, New York.
Didion was one of the first living writers to be anthologized by the Library of America, beginning with Volume 325 of that august series. If you would like this series to visit other writers collected in the LOA, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Constance Fenimore Woolson is in Rome, in case anyone has some extra Euros in their drawers and needs to offload them….. John Updike is in Plowville, Pennsylvania and Jonathan Schell is in Chilmark, Massachusetts. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.
So sad. It's not easy being the chosen Boy In Waiting when no one likes you. Via The Daily Beast:
A staff mutiny forced the management of a plush British countryside pub to turn away JD Vance, just weeks after the same venue hosted Kamala Harris, according to reports.
The vice president had reportedly attempted to dine at The Bull in Charlbury, Oxfordshire, an early 16th-century countryside pub with a Michelin Bib Gourmand, a prestigious award from the Michelin Guide that highlights restaurants offering excellent food at moderate prices.
However, the staff reportedly staged a mutiny, telling management that they wouldn’t show up to work if the venue accepted Vance’s dinner booking, according to a Popb---- newsletter from Thursday.
The rejection is all the more embarrassing considering that former vice president turned presidential hopeful, Kamala Harris, dined there just weeks before, as part of the pre-wedding dinner for Steve Jobs’ daughter, Eve. She married Harry Charles, a 26-year-old British Olympic equestrian, in the Cotswolds, a sprawling area of natural beauty in south-west England, at the end of July.
J.D. Vance seems to be taking cues from his wannabe-king boss, Donald Trump. But instead of playing golf during the planning of a military strike or dreaming of turning the White House into Versailles, Vance is globe-trotting and demanding royal treatment.
You may be forgiven for thinking J.D. Vance does nothing but take vacations and taxpayer junkets. That is, when he isn’t stoking white-nationalist fascism, cheerleading kicking Americans off their health care or justifying lies designed to gin up hatred against immigrants (never mind that his wife is immigrant-born).
But it’s not just Vance’s seemingly endless string of luxury vacations that makes him look like such an entitled asshole, but the entitled-asshole demands that go with them. Just one week ago, we reported on Vance making the Army Corps of Enginners raise a river for his birthday boating trip.
They laid bare Trump’s cognitive decline, delusional Nobel Prize fantasies, and dangerous willingness to sell out Ukraine for his own narcissistic, God-like-vision of himself....And other nefarious reasons. One example—and only one of many times the three broke out in laughter—is when Cliff asked Malcolm, “how do you say in Russian ‘are you in the Epstein Files too?’”
Be prepared: Malcolm brought his salty navy language, Cliff ported in a bit of profanity from his days growing up in NY and David…Well, David’s a hilarious guy in a Emmy-winning news man’s body, who’s beginning to let loose now that he’s on Substack/Youtube. He wondered aloud if Trump might plan to give Putin a “bl*wjob.” Yahtzee!
Whether literal or metaphorical, David didn’t specify, though past behavior here may just may be prologue
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calmatters_feed) wrote2025-08-15 12:30 pm
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