In March, 2010, Jaimal Yogis was named the Common Wealth Club’s “New Face of San Francisco Media.” In 2007, Jaimal’s San Francisco Magazine Story, What Happened to Black San Francisco won Best Feature at the Western Publisher’s Association’s Maggie Awards. Another of his features, Killing the Death Penalty, was runner up for Best News Story. He is also the recipient of the Leslie Rachel Sanders Award for Social Justice Reporting. Below, just a small sample of some recent articles. Apart from San Francisco Magazine, Jaimal has also been published in The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, The Surfers Journal, The San Francisco Chronicle, Yoga Journal, Surfer Magazine, Gizmodo.com, thebolditalic.com, and many others. More articles will be posted soon.
The Winningest Coach
In what he claims may truly be his final season, Warriors savior Don Nelson is again rallying his ragtag lineup and underdog mentality to try to steal his first NBA championship. Well, screw the title. Or win it. It doesn’t really matter. As contributing writer Jaimal Yogis discovered while trailing Nelson this spring, the coach’s unpredictable ways, not his wins, are what fans pay $10,000 per season ticket to savor.
Read on…
The Moth Flap That Gave Organics Wings
“Every challenge has a great upside,” Helge Hellberg, the cherubic executive director of Marin Organic, an association of Marin County’s 40-plus organic farms, told me a couple of months ago at a coffee shop in Mill Valley. That was before the state issued its surprising ruling against the wide-scale spraying of the pesticide Checkmate LBAM-F, in an effort to contain the light brown apple moth (LBAM).
Read on…
Obama Takes Texas — Sort of
It starts at the San Francisco International Airport, where I overhear two locals talking about which precincts need to be covered. “South Texas is Hillary country,” one man says, “so they’ll definitely be needing us down there.” On the plane, the woman next to me, from Marin, is reading The Audacity of Hope. She and a friend are traveling “to campaign for Obama!” she exclaims, as if she’s on her way to a Rolling Stones concert. From across the aisle, yet another San Franciscan pipes in. “He’s speaking at the Verizon Wireless Amphitheater tonight. A group of us from the Bay Area are going.” Read on…
From the guys who brought you “Got Milk?”
The killer TV spot is dead. In its place are killer YouTube videos you watch on your cell, Bluetooth billboards that flash you private messages, and online fantasy worlds you wander in for hours. How a Bay Area creative explosion is altering the art of selling and the entire ad-agency game. Read on…
Are We Backing the Right Fix for Global Warming
UC Berkeley’s leaders tout their stunningly ambitious and controversial deal with BP and top biotech titans as the Manhattan Project of climate change. Contributing writer Jaimal Yogis examines the Bay Area’s high-stakes embrace of biofuel technology, and asks: Are we backing the right fix for global warming? Read on…
Band (Not) on the Run
Nine Pound Shadow is a homegrown family band whose friends and fans (including the author) insist is the best thing since the Beatles. But they also wonder: Is the band just too quintessentially Berkeley for its own good? Read on…
What Happened to Black San Francisco?
Once home to the famous Fillmore and a thriving black middle class, San Francisco has suffered the steepest drop in African American population of any major U.S. city-and no longer has enough black residents to fill the seats in Monster Park. As their progeny disperses, the matriarchs and patriarchs of prominent families fight on in a traumatized Bayview, the last black community in what’s supposed to be one of the greatest cities on earth.Read on…
Tunnel Vision
“It would be nice not to end up in jail,” Siveya says calmly as we scan online city maps, trying to decide where our first venture into the San Francisco underground might be. “Or worse.” Read on…
Riding a Surfboard Made by an Apple Designer
Let me be honest, I don’t want surfboards to be designed on computers, sent to factories in Thailand and shipped back to us en masse without the shaper ever touching the material. I’m not a purist – really I’m not. And as someone who doesn’t make surfboards, and will never try, I have no right to expound righteously on this subject. But still, a big part of me – I think the part that wishes we all grew a different rare vegetable on our windowsills and bartered with each other from our front porches at meal time – wants surfboard shapers to be people who still draw their visions in the sand and give boards away from banana leaf huts.. Read on…
Killing the Death Penalty
During an unprecedented flurry of closely watched executions and celebrity-driven protest this winter at San Quentin, emboldened activists predicted that California could soon abolish the death penalty. Reporting from inside the media circus, Jaimal Yogis discovers that their prophecy isn’t as far-fetched as it sounds. Read on…
Paradise Lost and Found
Surfing has gotten so hot, it’s being drowned in a celebrity vibe and seas of money. But out at Ocean Beach, Jaimal Yogis discovers, a fearless group of surfers is riding those beautiful, mean swells the way the city’s surf pioneers used to–as an art form, a way of life, and the purest kind of fun. Read on…
Diehard Dharma
JACK KEROUAC WROTE that the teenage years are an ideal age to be introduced to the Dharma. I agree, but it can also be a complicated time. Take the summer just after high school, shortly after I’d decided to be an official, practicing Buddhist. Like many teens, I was trying to do anything possible to differentiate myself from my obviously backwards parents. Unfortunately, my parents had been practicing Buddhism from the time I was born, while I was only now falling in love with the dharma. How could I become a Buddhist without becoming them? Read on…
Raised on Yoga
I remember the first time I worked up the courage to bring one of my friends, a lanky 12-year-old named Jimmy, to the ashram our family went to on Sundays. It was the early ’90s, and in the suburbs of Sacramento, California, having yogi parents like mine was about as common as being raised by wolves. I was in junior high—identity fluctuating like the stock market—and I never mentioned yoga to my classmates, ever. They found out about it anyway—”India, man, that’s a long drive,” a friend once remarked—but I’d already taken flak for my strange name, the photos of bearded South Asian men on our walls, and the lack of Doritos in our pantry. I didn’t need any extra questions like “What’s that, like, yogurt thing your parents do again?” Read on…
Pirates of Richardson Bay
What happens when Marin’s infamous band of dockside squatters is forced to go legit. Read on…
Pack Animals
The air is thick with diesel. Bearded men in leather jackets and women with spiked hair sip coffee and discuss the years of their vintage Lambrettas, Piaggios and Vespas as if they were fine wines. Some of them have club jackets emblazoned with shields: The Secret Society Scooter Club, The Royal Bastards, The San Francisco Scooter Girls. Read on…
Salads From Concrete
Mark Major – aka “Markos” – is bounding between rows of lettuce and kale in a little Castro hat with an embroidered whale on it. His brown shirt has a silkscreen of a pitchfork and shovel with the simple phrase, “Like that,” written underneath. Read on…
Swell Adventure
As a serial renter with an addiction to travel and a talent for avoiding “real jobs‚” I always return home to a weird front door in San Francisco. I’ve had front doors that unzip, front doors that opened with a garage remote, and, in really desperate moments, front doors that were the back doors of my van. Read on…
Of Zen and Surfing
Often when I’m meditating, I catch myself fantasizing about surfing. My attention migrates from the breath to gliding on the steep face of a peeling wave. The water is warm. The wave is the color of clear jade. After almost ten years of regular sitting and surfing, I’ve noticed that my surf fantasies have a different quality than other thoughts. I let them pass like any other distractions, but I also notice that visions of waves help me settle into the sit. Read on…