Author Chris Carlsson inaugurates the 2nd edition of his unique historical guidebook to San Francisco's overlooked and forgotten histories. Tonight he will read from the new preface to the 2nd edition, "In the Wake of the Pandemic," which puts the recent pandemic in the context of a long history of public health politics in the city. He also analyzes the long history of tech booms in the city, and how likely the much-touted "doom loop" will reach a climax. In addition, a new chapter featuring unusual ecological hikes through San Francisco on unknown back trails through neighborhoods well off the tourist path will also be revealed.

Chris Carlsson, co-director of the “history from below” project Shaping San Francisco, is a writer, publisher, editor, photographer, public speaker, and occasional professor. He was one of the founders in 1981 of the seminal and infamous underground San Francisco magazine Processed World. In 1992 Carlsson co-founded Critical Mass in San Francisco, which both led to a local bicycling boom and helped to incubate transformative urban movements in hundreds of cities, large and small, worldwide. In 1995 work began on “Shaping San Francisco;” since then the project has morphed into an incomparable archive of San Francisco history at Foundsf.org, award-winning bicycle and walking tours, and almost two decades of Public Talks covering history, politics, ecology, art, and more (see shapingsf.org). Beginning in Spring 2020, Carlsson has hosted Bay Cruises along the San Francisco shoreline.

At the dawn of the pandemic, he published a detailed historical guidebook of the city, Hidden San Francisco: A Guide to Lost Landscapes, Unsung Heroes, and Radical Histories (Pluto Press: 2020), republished in an expanded 2nd edition in April 2025. His full-length nonfiction work Nowtopia (AK Press: 2008) offers a groundbreaking look at class and work while uniquely examining how hard and pleasantly we work when we’re not at our official jobs. His latest novel, When Shells Crumble was published by Spuyten Duyvil in Brooklyn, NY at the end of 2023. He published his first novel in 2004, After The Deluge, a story of post-economic utopian San Francisco in the year 2157. He has edited six books, including three “Reclaiming San Francisco” collections with the venerable City Lights Books. He redesigned and co-authored an expanded Vanished Waters: A History of San Francisco’s Mission Bay after which he joined the board of the Mission Creek Conservancy. He has given hundreds of public presentations based on Shaping San Francisco, Critical Mass, Nowtopia, Vanished Waters, and his “Reclaiming San Francisco” history anthologies since the late 1990s, and has appeared dozens of times in radio, television and on the internet.