Don Nelson, Warriors Coach Who Invented Small-Ball, Dies

Hal Brenner, Managing Editor

Every desk I read this morning found an institution that couldn't square its own arithmetic — Caltrans' equity math, Sacramento's 988 deadline, a homicide count one number short — and the 58 degrees of broken cloud over the Bay feels like exactly the right weather for that. BART runs full trains again starting today, which is the one reversal on the docket that actually runs in the right direction.

Bex Connolly — Politics

Miles Hall died in a Walnut Creek police encounter in 2019; his family spent years building a law around that death, and California just missed the crisis-line deadline written into it — blaming a 911 infrastructure upgrade the state also owns. The FAA's Bohemian Grove exception reads alongside it: the agency told Sonoma County a quieter flight path was impossible, then located one once the right address asked.

• Regions Steered California's Housing Toward Low-Car Cities. The Cities Didn't Follow Through.
• Caltrans Shielded Its Own Crews With Concrete on a $175M Oakland Project. An Advocate Says the Public Got Sharrows.
• The Tenderloin Death SFPD Labeled '#26-100' Was Not San Francisco's 100th Homicide
• Cal Academy Laid Off 53 People in April. In August, Its Planetarium Becomes a Spotify Launchpad.
• BART Just Undid Its Shorter-Train Bet — Full-Length Trains and a New Schedule Start Today
• Caltrans' Own Numbers Undercut the I-580 Truck Ban Fight: Lifting It Barely Moves Cancer Risk
• …and 7 more from this desk — see them all

Casey Wong — Neighborhoods

The Patronscan kiosks at Badlands and Toad Hall went dark the same afternoon more than 300 artists signed a boycott — a June promise to keep the scanners running reversed by suppertime on August 7, with Mix, the third bar on the list, still silent. Bex's question about what institutions acknowledge and when applies on South Market Street too: the Circle of Palms fenced off Friday morning, 15 of its 32 palms found dead or dying, and no city account yet for how long that took to surface.

• Badlands and Toad Hall Pause Their Patronscan Face Scanners, Reversing a June Vow to Keep Them
• Fremont Wins WalletHub's 'Happiest City' Crown for a Seventh Year. Its Formula Never Asks Anyone If They're Happy.
• San Jose Fences Off Circle of Palms as Half Its Palms Are Found Dead or Dying
• On a Black Rock Night, the Oakland Gym Floor Reads Differently

Devon Park — Tech

Feel Peptides has $3 million in venture backing, no Form D on record, and an independent lab finding 43 of 114 PT-141 vials failing purity — I'd read that number before the lifestyle color about date-night injections. The $16.6 billion-per-founder estimate the Standard attached to the Anthropic Eight runs on the same arithmetic Bex found in Sacramento: a compelling figure up front, a confidential S-1 underneath, and no priced IPO to tell you what any of it actually clears.

• The 'Anthropic 8' Are Worth $16.6 Billion Each — On Paper, With No Priced IPO
• Behind the Outside Lands Dream Lineup, a Contract That Runs to 2035
• Sugar Capital Put $3M Into a Gray-Market Peptide Startup. A Third of the Vials Fail Testing.

Jules Martinez — Food

Dontaye Ball closed Gumbo Social on July 3 by choice — new oven, rebuilt staffing systems, a team that actually rested — and the forty-seat Third Street room returns Aug. 17 having done the maintenance work most small Bayview operators defer until closure is no longer voluntary. The part that's still unsettled: an evening takeout window on 3rd Street hinges on a crowdfunding campaign, so what reopens Sunday isn't yet its final shape. Hologram's pending Type 41 on Clement is the permit that turns a spring café into a room with wine dinners — the kind of filing worth logging before the pop-ups start selling out.

• Super Duper Burgers Opens at 1701 Fillmore, Its 23rd Bay Area Location
• Hologram Files for a Beer-and-Wine License at 2512 Clement
• Gumbo Social Reopens Aug. 17 After a Six-Week Bayview Retool

Drew Bennett — Things to Do

Tonight's hard cap is 60 seats, attendance is free, and the organizers built live beginner tutorials into the format — if you can reach 473A Haight by 6, the only real question is whether Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition is already on your machine ($20 on Steam if it isn't). Showing up as a newcomer is explicitly the plan; showing up without an RSVP after the list fills is not.

• Bring Your Own Laptop: An Age of Empires II LAN Party Takes Over The Faight Monday Night

Sal Moreno — Sports

1,335 wins, second all-time, zero Finals appearances — that arithmetic tells you exactly why Don Nelson is harder to place than any coach his size, and the Bay Area version of the eulogy adds one more line: the last personnel decision he made as Warriors coach was drafting Stephen Curry at No. 7, and he was in Maui growing coffee by the time the revolution paid off. The four banners at Chase Center are playing Nellie Ball, which is either the longest-delayed vindication in franchise history or proof the game still owes him something it will never hand over.

• The Mad Scientist Who Invented the Future: Don Nelson, 1940–2026

Hal Brenner

The arithmetic this table runs tends to come back short — institutions, lab vials, coaching ledgers, all of them a line item from adding up. BART's the exception, and even that just means the trains are full again.