If guide books ever bothered being honest, they’d look a lot like Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas, Rebecca Solnit’s dark, cartographic poem to the Bay Area. The book — a collection of maps and essays written by both Solnit and others — reads like an alternative field guide to a city known to outsiders primarily through postcards of the Golden Gate Bridge and the fever dreams of Republicans. Solnit’s Bay Area is eminently weirder (and more interesting). It’s the place where Eadweard Muybridge invented cinema and drag queens dress like nuns to raise money for AIDS and Jay Bybee, the architect of the torture memos, presides, on the Ninth Circuit of Appeals. Read More
