OK let’s talk Elizebeth. The legend.

The codebreaker Elizebeth Smith Friedman was born on this day in 1892. I got curious about her 6 years ago, found one of the wildest true stories I'd ever heard, and wrote "The Woman Who Smashed Codes." 1/

https://twitter.com/jfagone/status/912361182098542592

During Elizebeth's life, she never received anything close to proper credit. Not for her scientific discoveries, not for her puzzle-solving feats in the world wars, not for wrecking a whole crew of Nazi spies… almost nothing. 2/

1/ I wanted to share some @sfchronicle pieces I worked on this year about Covid in California prisons. This isn’t my beat (I don’t have one), but we thought the story was important & our sources taught us a lot. I’m proud of this work. @sfchronicle 2/ The tl;dr of it: CA allowed its prisons to become virus incubators, leading to deaths of prisoners & staff and spreading cases statewide. Why? Mainly because the prisons are too crowded and the Newsom admin resisted calls by experts and judges to release people.

The Covid outbreak at San Quentin prison is bad — 91 prisoner cases, 30+ staff cases — and getting worse by the hour. We talked to prisoners and a corrections officer who tested positive and are none too happy. New story w/ @meganrcassidy: sfchronicle.com/bayarea/articl… @meganrcassidy The state corrections department has lied about how this all happened. sfchronicle.com/bayarea/articl…

Another explanation for the COVID-19 testing backlog in California — hospitals & clinics are using slower, bottlenecked testing pipelines instead of fast academic labs that have capacity to spare

https://twitter.com/amymaxmen/status/1248291539144474626

This is quite a quote that @amymaxmen got from a UC Berkeley scientist who runs a testing lab: "I don’t want to be disparaging, but the people who made the CDC kit simply failed at molecular biology — they created a nightmare.” nature.com/articles/d4158…

Delaware County, where I used to live, has 560,000 people and NO public health department of any kind because Republicans didn’t want one and didn’t think it was important. inquirer.com/health/coronav…

https://twitter.com/MontcoCourtNews/status/1244302895014699010

How can a county of half million people have no health department? That style of GOP government is very simply going to kill people. We have friends there. inquirer.com/health/coronav…

A little FOIA story: Last October, when Trump was talking about “cities going to hell” in California, he made a strange comment that San Francisco was "in total violation” of some sort of waste rule and “we’re going to be giving them a notice very soon.” Sure enough, on Oct. 2, one of Trump’s EPA appointees sent a notice of violation to a San Francisco official, claiming the city was improperly discharging wastewater and sewage. I filed a FOIA for all EPA docs and comms related to the violation. epa.gov/ca/city-and-co…

The thing about the Hannity-Manafort texts is that they reveal exactly the sort of media corruption — at Fox — that Fox & its allies are forever projecting onto mainstream outlets Behind the scenes, Fox was advising Manafort on legal strategy and offering to hook him up with Fox legal researchers. Hannity texts that he wants Manafort’s adversaries to go to jail. Fox information ends up in Manafort’s legal filings. Etc etc.

For years, Tetra Tech & the Navy processed thousands of truckloads of contaminated soil right next door to a busy San Francisco office building, spreading radioactive dust into the air. New from @cdizikes
& me: sfchronicle.com/bayarea/articl…

DOCS & EMAILS: documentcloud.org/documents/5029… I always like reading how other reporters first got into an investigative story so here is a sense of what the journey was like for us. 2/

I wish it worked like this — lies and smears designed to dehumanize you go away if you ignore them -- but I don’t think it does. So I don’t think this is good advice.

https://twitter.com/BradfordPearson/status/1057072522276077571

Chuck Todd, of all people, wrote a good piece about why the press should fight back. "The American press corps finds itself on the ropes because it allowed a nearly 50-year campaign of attacks inspired by the chair of Fox News to go unanswered.” theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/…

Here is one of the craziest San Francisco housing stories I’ve heard. It begins with an atomic bomb. sfchronicle.com/news/article/A… 1/x You have probably seen that image before, maybe in the closing montage of Dr. Strangelove. It’s from an American nuclear test in July 1946, “Shot Baker." 2/x

Readers of “The Woman Who Smashed Codes”: I wanted to share something with you. It’s an email I received from the archaeologist and author Elizabeth Wayland Barber (elizabethwaylandbarber.com). It describes a 1959 meeting with William Friedman that she says changed her life. I’ve been thinking about Barber’s story all week. It says so much about the Friedmans: how they lived, what they valued and found joy in, what they regretted. And their profound influence on others.

I’m starting to upload some primary source docs about Elizebeth Friedman to the Internet Archive. A few a day over the next couple weeks. First doc: The long-classified, 329-page technical diary of her WWII codebreaking unit. Includes ENIGMA SOLUTIONS. archive.org/details/Histor…