Katy Steinmetz

The Chinese artist's seven installations on America's most notorious island champion human rights and recall America's dark past

Inside the hospital wing of Alcatraz, which is typically closed to the public, there are two adjacent rooms the size of closets. Together they make up the entire space officials dedicated to treating mentally ill prisoners before the notorious penitentiary was shuttered in 1963. And thanks to the Chinese artist and rights activist Ai Weiwei, for the next seven months those rooms will be very loud.

This paltry psych ward now holds one of seven site-specific installations in four locations around the island that Ai – everyone calls him Weiwei – has taken over for a new exhibit opening Sept. 27. Cheekily titled “@Large”, the installations, which remain on view through April 26, are designed to use the setting of an infamous prison to explore issues of human rights, punishment and the loss of freedom.

In one of the two spartan rooms plays a loop of Tibetan chants, in the other an American Indian song intoned by the Hopi tribe—thumping tracks that resonate in one’s ears like voices might in one’s head. Both are meant to remind visitors of how confined and oppressed those peoples have been at times throughout history. The latter is also reminding America, in particular, about the imprisonment of Hopi men at Alcatraz who refused to send their children away to government boarding schools in the late 19th century. “That was the darkest time,” the National Park Service’s Michele Gee says about jailing the island’s earliest prisoners of conscience. Weiwei calls that particular piece “Illumination.”

There are plenty of impressive things to note about this unprecedented exhibition. One is that the 57-year-old Weiwei designed and built his elaborate pieces without ever setting foot on the island. A vocal critic of the Chinese government, Weiwei has not been permitted to leave the country since being detained for 81 days in 2011 on tax evasion charges that were brought against him after he had conducted a lengthy investigation of government culpability in the shoddy construction of schools that collapsed in China’s 2008 earthquake, killing thousands of children. Another is the installations themselves, like “Trace,” which consists of 176 portraits of political prisoners fashioned out of 1.2 million Legos; or “With Wind,” an intricate dragon that fills an entire room in the form of some 100 hand-painted kites that hang like dominoes from the ceiling.

Less obvious is how logistically complex the project was, which not only involved getting architectural plans and videos and photographs to the artist but also seeking the approval of government agencies going all the way up to the State Department. Though the project was first conceived in 2012, the actual assembly of @Large took just nine months. And the person who should be credited for putting all the works together so quickly (sometimes literally putting them together, after carrying them across San Francisco Bay by rented barge at night) is curator Cheryl Haines. Haines is a fixture in the San Francisco art world and executive director of a non-profit called For-Site, which exists to install ambitious art in unexpected places. And she is the person who suggested to Weiwei the idea of doing an exhibition in Alcatraz while visiting him in Beijing. “Of course it’s difficult for him that he doesn’t have personal freedom and that he’s not able to come,” she says, currently sporting blue hair in an attempt to keep her calm through the storm. “But Ai Weiwei is incredibly adept at understanding the built environment … and he welcomed the challenge.”

Less obvious still may be the fact that agencies of the U.S. government, which to some extent is lumped in with more egregious human-rights violators in the exhibit, would work so hard to highlight the dark underbelly of American history, from the treatment of American Indians to the dire conditions of Alcatraz in its days as a prison. Because of the not-always-great relations between the U.S. and China, the National Park Service, which oversees Alcatraz Island and its facilities, made the choice to seek permission from the State Department before giving a Chinese political dissident one of the nation’s most popular visitor sites to use as a stage. “We knew from the get go that his belief in self-expression and his values are part of his art,” says Greg Moore, CEO of the non-profit Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy that staffs Alcatraz. “Ai Weiwei takes us beyond the gangster years into something that’s not only part of our history but part of our present.”

Also in the hospital wing is “Blossom,” which consists of porcelain flower sculptures snugly fit into existing amenities like bathtubs and sinks. The work, the curator says, might be interpreted as an offering of sympathy to those who are imprisoned or an allusion to China’s Let One Hundred Flowers Bloom Campaign in 1956, a time when free expression was briefly tolerated among citizens, before being abruptly and ruthlessly suppressed again. In the Dining Hall, the single exhibition space that is normally open to the public, Weiwei offers visitors the chance to send an actual token of sympathy to political prisoners who are still incarcerated in various parts of the world—via postcards that are covered in symbols and birds of the prisoners’ respective countries and are pre-addressed. Aides working on the “Yours Truly” installation — some of the 47 trained to guide visitors through the exhibition — will put the cards in the mail once they’ve been written.

Weiwei plays with sound again in Cell Block A, where songs and speeches of the oppressed or imprisoned play out of each cell. Inside is a spare stool for a listener to sit, and outside is the name of the prisoner. Installing the speakers required using a hallway behind the block, as Haines and her team were not allowed to remove so much as a screw on the vents from which the sounds of “Stay Tuned” emanate.

One of the most uncomfortable and eerie no-go zones that visitors will be let into for the exhibition is the gun gallery, a narrow hallway where armed guards once walked above rooms of prisoners, ready to shoot if necessary at a signal from an unarmed guard keeping watch on the ground. This is the walkway from which viewers will see “Refraction,” a sculpture that looks like a metal bird stuck in mid-flap, unable to fly under a suffocating ceiling.

Much of the challenge in getting @Large off the ground, Haines says, was making sure not to disturb even the broken glass in window frames of the historic buildings as the team installed Weiwei’s pieces. (The park did, however, install Plexiglass to protect people from the shards.) Part of the reason the exhibition is opening in September, after the height of tourist season, is that marine birds like cormorants nest there during the summer, and “ecological resources” were not to be disturbed either. Still, the exhibition has led to change on Alcatraz; for the first time there will be WiFi on the island, which the artist wanted so that people could share experiences of @Large on social media. And Moore says that letting people into the specially opened spaces may prove a “pilot” for permanently opening them in the future. There is also hope, Haines says, that the exhibit will lure more locals to join the roughly 1.5 million visitors who boat to the island each year, Bay Area residents who might have some money burning in their pockets that could go to the National Park Service or local arts programs.

The bright colors and delicate shapes of @Large somehow highlight the drab, sad conditions of the prison, like a child holding a bright balloon in the middle of a blackened, post-apocalyptic landscape. “If you look at the actual objects, they’re layered but beautiful,” says Haines, who previously worked with Weiwei on an exhibition in which various artists crafted abstract homes for native animals of the Golden Gate area. Ai chose sweet, cylindrical blue-and-white porcelain houses, and For-Site hung them temporarily in the forest for screech owls.

For this project, Haines spearheaded the fundraising of more than $3.5 million dollars, so that it would not cost taxpayers or the overburdened Parks Service a dime. It won’t cost visitors anything either; access is free for people who book regular tours to Alcatraz through April. If there’s demand, Haines says, they may also organize a special boat just for Weiwei pilgrims.

“With @Large, the conversation has broadened to encompass more types of human rights around the world,” she says. “We keep upping the ante, clearly.”

The latest ruling in the ongoing battle over a northern California surf spot is a blow to venture capitalist Vinod Khosla

A California court issued a milestone ruling Sept. 24 that may restore public access to a beach that requires traveling across privately owned land, the latest turn in a multi-year legal frenzy that has pitted the surfers who cross the property against the billionaire who owns it.

Judge Barbara Mallach of San Mateo Superior Court ruled against venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems, who was sued by the nonprofit Surfrider Foundation after his property manager blocked the public from accessing a beloved seaside spot known as Martins Beach.

At the center of the controversy is a low-slung metal gate that sits at the top of Martins Beach Road, an offshoot of the Pacific Coast Highway that is the only way to access Martins Beach from dry land. The road snakes across 53 acres that Khosla bought for $32.5 million in 2008. For two years, his property manager allowed the public to occasionally visit a stretch of sand where locals have gone smelt-fishing and surfing and picnicking for decades. But Khosla allowed the gate to be closed permanently in 2010 after his property manager received a letter from the county demanding that it stay open every day.

The conflict comes at a time when an influx of tech wealth has sharpened class tension in northern California. “[Kholsa] believes that he can find a way to use his wealth and power to strong-arm the situation,” says Chad Nelsen, environmental director of the Surfrider Foundation.

Khosla doesn’t own a home on the land and says he has no plans to build one. The decision to shut off access to the road was a way to take a stand about what he felt were his basic rights. “This is a case about private property,” Khosla told TIME in an email. “We need to assert our rights and get the courts to clarify them.”

Khosla’s lawyers say they are considering appealing the verdict. “We will continue to seek protection of the constitutional rights of private property owners that are guaranteed by the U.S. and California Constitutions and that have long been upheld by the United States and California Supreme Courts,” his attorneys said in a statement.

Surfrider’s argument rested on a seemingly bureaucratic detail. The organization claimed that under the 1976 Coastal Act, which gave a statewide Coastal Commission jurisdiction over beachfront land, Khosla needed to apply for a development permit in order to close the gate. The commission will often only grant development permits, typically to build a home or another structure, if the public gets an established right of way in return.

“Because they’re in charge of beach development, they’re allowed to do this quid pro quo,” says Arthur McEvoy, a professor at Southwestern Law School in Los Angeles. “They can ask you in trade to dedicate a little easement, if the development threatens to impede public access.”

The tricky matter is that while beaches are widely considered public, people don’t necessarily have a right to cross private property to get there. Cases such as this one set precedents that resonate up and down California’s 840 miles of coastline.

It’s easy to see why Martins Beach is beloved. Its sands wrap around a cove with cliffs jutting out on either end, creating a rare surfing spot protected from the wind and also preventing people from walking to the beach from the north or south. Secluded and full of wildlife, its dramatic rock formations are often blanketed by birds. Seals pop their heads up between surfers and the beach.

For decades, cars that wound their way down the road from Highway 1 paid a small fee to the landowners for parking and frequented a snack shop that has fallen into disrepair. A now-defunct sign advertising $15 parking, the amount Khosla’s employees charged when visitors were allowed, still lays on the ground.

Steve Baugher, Khosla’s property manager, testified at the trial that it was his decision to close the gate. He also testified that he hired security guards to “deter trespassers”; their presence prompted five surfers to defiantly march past them last October to proclaim their right to be on the beach. Known as the “Martin’s 5″ the surfers were arrested by the county sheriff but the District Attorney declined to prosecute–inspiring more surfers to take advantage of this legal limbo and hop the fence with abandon.

In California, public access to the beach is protected by the public trust doctrine, a common law that can be traced back to the English crown proclaiming rights to all submerged lands, in order to let the public use the water above them for fishing and navigation.

“Our culture abhors private beaches, and generally speaking our law abhors private beaches as well,” McEvoy said. “And any landowner is going to want to keep people away from their beach.”

In an earlier case that went Khosla’s way, a group called the Friends of Martins Beach used a different angle to sue, testing a clause in the state constitution that declares that no entity shall “exclude the right of way to such water whenever it is required for any public purpose.” In a 2013 ruling, another San Mateo Superior Court judge said that because Martins Beach had been part of a land grant that settled the Mexican-American war in 1848, a year before the constitution was adopted, the intentions of that document were immaterial.

Beyond the ongoing court cases, two other avenues may force the drama to a close. One is a bill sponsored by State Senator Jerry Hill, a San Mateo Democrat, that would require the State Lands Commission to consider purchasing the road if negotiations with Khosla for public access fail. Meanwhile, the Coastal Commission, which has been fielding the public’s complaints about the closure of Martins Beach, is asking people to write in about how they’ve used the area in the past. That testimony may prove there’s a historic right of access that Attorney General Kamala Harris can sue to restore on the Commission’s behalf. “The Commission is trying very hard to bring it to a close,” says Nancy Cave, a commission manager who was part of negotiations with Khosla’s team that went nowhere. “We are frustrated, too.”

Khosla notes that he is not the first owner of the property to limit access, pointing out that previous owners closed the gate during certain hours and seasons and even inconvenient days. In court, property manager Baugher testified that he received a letter from the county demanding that the gates be open year round and parking be charged at the rate of $2, what beachgoers paid in 1973. Khosla has also accused Surfrider and the Coastal Commission of attempting to “blackmail and coerce him,” charges both deny. Surfrider emphasizes that Khosla has allowed changes that are far from what his predecessors did—like painting over a billboard that used to welcome people to come down from Highway 1 to the beach, turning it into a dark green slab.

Surfrider had hoped that the court would also fine Khosla for failing to apply for a permit but Mallach declined, saying that those who closed the gate had acted in good faith that they had the legal right to do so. Nonetheless, Surfrider championed the decision as a “huge victory.”

“Today’s court decision upholding the Coastal Act is an important victory for Martin’s Beach and ultimately strengthens the public’s right to beach access in California,” Angela Howe, Surfrider’s legal director, said in a statement. “The Surfrider Foundation remains vigilant to protect beach access rights, not only in this case, but also in other cases where the beach is wrongfully cut off from the public.”

To celebrate this annual recognition of commas and periods, TIME explores some ways that punctuation just "aint" the same as it used to be

This Sept. 24, like the previous 10, is National Punctuation Day. ’Tis a time for merrily gargling our hyphens and luxuriating in bathtubs full of em dashes, for braiding parentheses in our hair and giving our suitors octothorpes as love tokens after we dance on clouds of ampersands.

But while we can count on this semiotic orgy coming around every year, we cannot be so sure that the way we use punctuation will be the same from one to the next—even if the ostensible reason for this holiday is to celebrate “the importance of proper punctuation.” After all, the proper among us once wrote today as to-day; they once referred to the 1920s as the 1920’s; and they once marked quotations with diples (>) rather than these guys: (“”).

Here are five modern examples of how punctuation is evolving, with no certain conclusion and whether the traditionalists like it or not.

Emoji are being wielded as punctuation.

Especially on platforms like Twitter, emoji are being used to serve the same key purpose of punctuation: aiding understanding by providing clues to how the surrounding words should be interpreted. Take the text of this real tweet, randomly selected from emojitracker.com:

“Who tf put cheese in my bag today ”

Just as exclamation points can convey excitement or question marks can suggest a lack of certainty, the angry face helps the reader understand that writer was angry about discovering their bag contained cheese of uncertain origin.

There is more freedom from conventions.

Look back at the above tweet. While an English teacher might whip out her red pen and put a question mark at the end of the sentence, we can easily discern the writer’s uncertainty about the cheese-smuggler’s identity by the word who. We don’t need the mark, and space-constrained platforms like Twitter and text messages have made us more apt to drop unnecessary characters—as well as less likely to make the assumption that character-dropping equals ignorance.

Meanwhile, the same marks missing from the ends of sentences or middle of words are settling into non-traditional roles. “Now you have Twitter and email taking older marks and giving them new life as emoticons,” says Keith Houston, blogger and author of Shady Characters, a history of punctuation marks. “People are punctuating in unstandard ways, and they are freed from convention because these messages are ephemeral.”

The apostrophe is losing steam in some circles.

Social media analytics firm Brandwatch scoured Twitter for trends in 2013 and found that the top five “grammatical errors” were: im, wont, cant, dont and id. Meanwhile, corporations like British super-bookstore Waterstones (neé Waterstone’s) have seen fit to erase those marks from their names. Cities are dropping them from street signs. And while some grammarians may cry most foul, others are calling for the apostrophe’s dumb round head.

The advocates behind the “Kill the Apostrophe” website have been joined by author James Harbeck in asserting that, in most cases, rules about apostrophe usage only serve to irritate those people who know the rules and confuse those who do not. “The great question with a lot of punctuation is, Do you really need it?” says Ammon Shea, author of hilarious grammar-police-takedown Bad English. And, he says, there’s often little risk of confusion when theyre absent.

Exclamation marks are becoming harder to avoid, for those who would like to avoid them.

As many have noted, the period that used to innocuously signal the end of a thought—like an orchestra conductor pinching his hand—has taken on a brusque aura these days, leaving the reader of any declarative sentence open to detect apathy or annoyance. This has led to a rise in exclamation marks, because people need something to fill the gaps left by informative cues we get only in face-to-face communication—the raised brows, the wide eyes, the smile. Fearing that we could come across as unfriendly, we tack on an exclamation mark (“Thanks!”) to make sure our fine disposition comes across.

The data supporting this shift is largely anecdotal, but the anecdotes are abundant. “The exclamation mark, once reserved for expressing joy or excitement, now simply marks baseline politeness,” writes New York Magazine’s Melissa Dahl, who goes on to quote a grammarian who describes them as nearly “mandatory” in email. “Dealing with such bare bones language,” says Shea, “you use whatever help you can get.” (If you don’t want this kind of help, there is a handy TIME guide on alternatives.)

Hyphens are being retired, perhaps faster than ever.

Hyphens have, of course, been chucked for centuries, as in the previous example of to-day becoming today. But that shift, Houston says, took about a century and wasn’t finalized until the 1900s. Today, at least some of the hyphen-tossing is happening faster. Take electronic mail, which started as the crazy notion of “E-mail” in the 1970s and became the un-hyphenated, ho-hum “email” among prevailing American media outlets in about 40 years.“The migration to ebook, ecommerce and email is not unexpected,” Merriam-Webster President John Morse previously told TIME. “This transition may come more readily in today’s technological environment.”

We can only wonder what tricksy technology is going to do to punctuation between now and next year’s National Punctuation Day. In the meantime, I need to get back to my em-dash bath.

A TIME correspondent tries out San Francisco's latest startup for her bachelorette party and finds answers to the male stripper problem

The last bachelorette party I went to was just great, full of lighthearted reminiscing and champagne-guzzling—until the strippers arrived. We only ordered one and two showed up, insisting on being paid in cash. The sight of them “getting ready” in the bathroom traumatized one poor lady. And then the two of them proceeded to get so naked and so up in our faces that one attendee started yelling, “I’m Catholic! I’m Catholic!” Visions of their gyrations and motorboating lingered in the house after they left, like a really inappropriate poltergeist.

So when my maid of honor started asking about what I wanted for my own bachelorette party a few months ago, I immediately said “No strippers,” and not in the coy way someone insists that you really shouldn’t get them anything for their birthday. I did not want to see a penis on so much as a straw, let alone a human. And yet, there seemed to be some element missing, an equalizer for the strippers my fiancé would be “forced” to ogle by his groomsmen, and some tangible symbol of the some 3.5 billion men I would be forsaking from this day forward.

Enter ManServants.

Within a certain diameter of Silicon Valley, there really is a startup for everything. This one, founded by former advertising copywriters Josephine Wai Lin and Dalal Khajah, promises a bespoke experience wherein a handsome gentleman waits on you, adores you, and responds gratefully to your every whim. With his pants on. I contacted the ladies behind the venture and they agreed to provide me with a sample ahead of their September launch. (Ordinarily they cost between about $90 and $125 per hour.)

The first step was to build him, kind of like those nerds in Weird Science. You get to pick his name, his wardrobe and his “special skills,” as well as outline tasks he should be prepared to complete with aplomb. My fiancé jokingly said we should call him Spartacus (after Hank Azaria’s character in The Birdcage), and much to his chagrin, the name stuck. I then canvassed the seven ladies attending about what they would like Spartacus to wear and what his special skills should be. It was generally agreed that Spartacus should be of the dapper “tall, dark and handsome” ilk with “soul-penetrating eyes” and “big hands.” Much more interesting, and much harder for the service to fulfill, was the skill set that resulted from everyone’s input. Here is just a selection of their requests:

ABILITIES

• Mixology/ the ability to order just the right drink when girls say, “Oh, I don’t know. Just make me something good”
• Funny, but never at the expense of one of the ladies
• Foot massaging
• Juggling
• Can and will lift heavy things from time to time
• Enormous flirt but only with approved ladies
• Will point out flaws of ladies who are not in group
• Articulate, able to quote apt poetry
• Parkour
• Good knowledge of Texas Hold ‘Em

TASKS

• Carry a giant leaf over the bride as we walk around San Francisco and tell people “No photos please” when they stare
• Serenade the bride in a public place, loudly, even though she will act humiliated
• Propose to the bride so she can politely refuse him
• Surprise us with feats of derring-do

Based on our requests we were sent three “casting options,” which included descriptions and headshots of the ManServants. My betrothed, lying in bed with me when the menu arrived, was none too thrilled with how thrilled I was to be picking and choosing. Afterward I asked him what he was thinking: “When a ‘catalogue’ of servants appeared I wondered what criteria the choice would be made by. I was hoping that singing ability and not pecs would win out. On the other hand, what would that say about me?”

The idea of a stripper, it seemed, was in some ways more comfortable, because it was a million miles away from how I interact with him. Being a stripper, he says, is more “emasculating.” It also invites no comparisons, or at least none that aren’t entirely superficial. And I get it. I wouldn’t be worried about him eloping with Sprinkles the stripper. But if he custom-ordered a woman who could bake and do ballet, a beautiful model with perfect breasts and rapier wit, I’d lose my marbles a bit.

Turns out, despite all the special skills they requested, the ladies didn’t care about his skills very much at all. Without exception, the ladies ignored biographies and instead said they wanted the guy in the blue shirt:

The big day rolled around and suit-clad Spartacus arrived at my apartment, with just the face and
five o’clock shadow we had ordered. He offered a bottle of bubbly as a gift and I introduced him around. Our first question, of course, was about what he wasn’t allowed to do. Spartacus, who, wonderfully, referred to himself in the third person all night, explained that Spartacus could not strip, nor could Spartacus drink. (My inquisitive friend Betty later tried to see if there was a way to get his clothes off without breaking this rule. “What if you had red wine spilled all over your suit?” she asked, holding a glass of wine. “I mean, it’s a nice suit. You’d probably want to clean it.”)

We also asked what instructions he had been given before the evening started and Spartacus answered: “To anticipate your every need.” To that end, he had been outfitted with a tote that included: Ibuprofen, Band-Aids, a Tide stain stick, wine opener, tissues, a lint roller, Evian face spray, two handheld fans, a nail file, Chapstick and Altoids. As we waited for some stragglers to arrive, he dealt us a poker game. In one hand, he misdealt, and his immediate reaction was to hold out his hand for a disciplinary tap. He made us drinks, gave us “apartment pours” and remembered to fill the ice trays, showered us with compliments at every opportunity and never asked for anything.

Spartacus clearly had the task list memorized, at least the ones he was capable of doing in the stretch of one evening. He recited an E.E. Cummings poem to me: “I will take the sun in my mouth / and leap into the ripe air …” We did indeed walk the streets, where he held a paper umbrella over my head at the front of the entourage and told all passersby, “No photos, please.” When some people tried to photobomb us, he politely showed them the error of their ways. Though he didn’t juggle or parkour, Spartacus did come with a dragon tattooed on his neck, because we had told the service we liked this number on George Clooney. He even told us a tale of how he slay the beast by ripping its heart out with his bare hands, his “weapon of choice” it turns out. He took photos of us whenever we wanted. He sang with abandon, sometimes to me.

The novelty and role reversal of the ManServant situation was far better than with male strippers, who may ostensibly be undressing at the ladies’ pleasure but are still controlling what happens and when. I’m sure there are women out there who truly love themselves some Chippendales, but many would also probably agree that they’re one-dimensional and predictable. Spartacus was like a handsome canvas who would paint itself with whatever we could imagine.

At times, it was almost hard to know quite what to do with him. We made Spartacus hop like a bunny and we used his hands as coasters. We made him assign us spirit animals and say that Betty’s was a wildebeest. We asked for and received back massages and hand massages. At bars, he held our bags and pushed to the front to order our drinks. And it was all great. But the funny part is that my fellow ladies, given a man to do whatever they wanted with, weren’t that interested in objectifying or demeaning him or pushing boundaries.

I mean, what would you imagine that a group of men would do with a WomanServant? Probably not much that would bear repeating in mixed company. Given the same chance, my friends chose not to slap his behind or make him dance on them sexily but instead asked him to reveal who he was, how he got the gig, whether he ever had braces, if he had siblings. After getting my permission to break character, which had included an elaborate backstory about his time spent as a gladiator and an avowal that he was a virgin, Spartacus answered everything.

At a bar toward the end of the night, Spartacus bent down on one knee to complete one of his tasks. “Katy, my lady, will you marry me?” he asked, sporting a freshly unwrapped Ring Pop. “I’m sorry, Spartacus,” I said. “It’s not you, it’s me.” He took it well, and at the end of our time together it almost felt like we all parted as friends, even if the ManServants are paid handsomely for their troubles.

Granted, every experience with a ManServant will be different, and it’s really up to the group who orders him to make him as good as he can be. But at the very least, you shouldn’t need therapy when the night is over, even if you might need a hug.

A complaint filed by the National Federation of the Blind in San Francisco federal court alleges that UberX drivers refused service, harassed blind passengers and mishandled dogs

Updated, 6:11 p.m. ET

A chapter of the National Federation of the Blind (NFB) claims that Uber drivers have subjected blind customers to “systemic civil rights violations” by repeatedly refusing to transport passengers who use service animals.

A lawsuit filed Tuesday in San Francisco federal court by the NFB’s California chapter focuses on drivers of the company’s UberX service, a travel option that is lower priced than the company’s signature black car service, through which drivers can use their own cars to transport app users. The suit alleges that blind travelers have been refused service by UberX drivers on a total of at least 30 occasions because they had service animals with them.

The complaint also alleges that such riders were sometimes charged cancellation fees or abandoned in the midst of “extreme weather.”

Uber said in a statement to TIME that their practice is to ban such drivers from using their app:

The Uber app is built to expand access to transportation options for all, including users with visual impairments and other disabilities. It is Uber’s policy that any driver partner that refuses to transport a service animal will be deactivated from the Uber platform.

When asked for additional comment about the specific allegations and their policies, an Uber spokesperson responded that “in general, it’s our policy not to comment on pending litigation.”

President of the NFB’s California chapter Mary Willows said that she and counsel met with representatives of Uber months ago in an attempt to avoid litigation, but were unable to work out an agreement for how the company would address the situation. The lawsuit claims that complaints from blind travelers have gone largely unaddressed by the company and that Uber has sometimes responded by simply denying responsibility for the drivers’ behavior.

“The problem is that drivers are independent contractors, so Uber says they have no control over what they do,” Willows tells TIME. “And our argument is, if they’re working for you, you do have control over what they do.”

Willows says that blind people have encountered similar problems with taxis in the past, but that cab companies have been more expedient in remedying the problem.

Uber’s competitors are also taking note of the rift. After the NFB initiated contact with Uber about the issue, Willows says that the car service Lyft reached out to “make sure they develop a good relationship with us.”

In some cases, according to the lawsuit, UberX drivers who did not outright refuse service to riders with guide dogs nonetheless mishandled the animals or harassed the riders, in one case forcing a guide dog into a closed trunk of a sedan without the rider’s knowledge. When the owner of the dog figured out what had happened and asked the driver to pull over, according to the complaint, he refused.

The suit was also filed on behalf of Michael Hingson, a blind author who uses a guide dog and says he has been deterred from using the service because of its reputation among similarly situated travelers.

“Independence is critical in having equal opportunity in life,” Willows says. “And being able to travel independently is key to it. And any transportation system that inhibits equal travel is a problem.” The complaint alleges violations of the Americans with Disabilities Act. The document can be read in full below.

NFB of California vs. Uber

Retail sales have lagged medical sales since pot shops opened on Jan. 1, fueling concern that projected tax revenues would fall short

Sales of legal retail marijuana have topped sales of medical marijuana in Colorado for the first time since the state’s recreational pot shops opened their doors on Jan. 1, according to tax figures released by the Colorado Department of Revenue.

During the month of July, the state received $838,711 from a 2.9% tax on medical marijuana, meaning that patients spent an estimated $28.9 million at dispensaries. The state meanwhile raked in $2.97 million from a 10% sales tax on retail marijuana, putting those sales at about $29.7 million, according to calculations by the Cannabist.

Though that amounts to a less than $1 million gap between retail and medical sales, this is a small victory for champions of legalization who have argued that the experiment will be profitable for the state, as revenues have lagged behind some expectations.

“Most adults use marijuana for the same reasons they use alcohol. Now that it’s a legal product, they are choosing to access it in a similar fashion,” Mason Tvert, communications director for the Marijuana Policy Project, said. “For most Coloradans, buying marijuana in a retail store will just become the norm. It appears that shift in behavior is already taking place.”

In July, the Denver Post Editorial Board voiced its concerns about the medical market outpacing the legal recreational pot shops up to that point in 2014:

And if that trend holds for the entire year, it will present state officials with a challenge: How to prod a portion of those medical marijuana users into the retail market where they almost certainly belong. Medical marijuana privileges should be confined to genuine patients, particularly now that the retail option exists, and not to those merely seeking a break on price because the taxes are lower.

For the legalization experiment to be a success, it needs to be profitable for the state and lure buyers from the black market, a migration that should be reflected in sales figures. Tvert says that prices of retail marijuana, currently around $35 for 1/8 ounce, are far from finalized. Retail shops depend mostly on word of mouth for advertising; they have had only part of a year for competition to kick in; and they are just now recouping big costs associated with starting their businesses, he says.

Because there is only data about the first six months of sales in an unprecedented market, conclusions about success or failure are impossible to draw. But if retail sales continue to increase, while medical marijuana sales hold steady, expectations of a windfall from legal pot are less likely to go up in smoke.

On Monday, Governor Jerry Brown signed a bill that is the first of its kind in the nation

Updated at 7:15 p.m. ET

California Governor Jerry Brown signed historic legislation Monday, mandating that every smartphone sold in California after July 1, 2015, be equipped by default with a kill switch, a feature that can render the device useless if stolen.

Proposed by state senator Mark Leno and endorsed by a bevy of law-enforcement officials, the new law — the first of its kind in the nation — is designed to curb cell-phone theft in cities like San Francisco, where more than 65% of all robberies involve stolen phones, or Oakland, where it’s 75%.

“California has just put smartphone thieves on notice,” Leno said in a statement. “Starting next year, all smartphones sold in California, and most likely every other state in the union, will come equipped with theft deterrent technology when they purchase new phones. Our efforts will effectively wipe out the incentive to steal smartphones and curb this crime of convenience, which is fueling street crime and violence within our communities.”

Leno, a San Francisco–area Democrat, and other proponents of the kill switch have argued that if manufacturers are obliged to make these changes for the most populous state in the nation, they’re more likely to alter all devices, in anticipation of similar legislation in other states.

Many of the biggest telecommunication companies, such as Apple, Google and Samsung, agreed earlier this year to voluntarily add kill-switch capability on phones after July 1 of next year. However, the companies did not agree to enable the kill switch by default, so much as make it available as a feature. “The bill requires theft-deterrent technology to come standard on all smartphones sold in California, a departure from the status quo where consumers are required to seek out and enable the technology,” Leno’s office said.

The law will apply to all phones sold to consumers online or in physical stores in California, regardless of where the phones are manufactured. The law does not specify exactly how manufacturers must implement the kill switch, though it must allow a phone owner to remotely “brick” their phone and erase data, as well as turn the phone back on if it should be misplaced instead of stolen.

Officials like Leno have said they’re more interested in seeing the system implemented than dictating precisely how it works.

San Francisco district attorney George Gascón, also a proponent of the bill, previously asserted that carriers and manufacturers were reluctant to install the switches because it could encroach on the lucrative $7 billion phone-insurance market. A wireless association that represents major carriers like AT&T and Sprint, known as CTIA, has said hesitance was due to security concerns, like the potential for phones to be killed by hackers.

On Monday, CTIA said in a statement that their members have already gone to great lengths to protect smartphone users, citing actions like the voluntary agreement made earlier this year, as well as education campaigns. And the association insinuated that such mandated changes may yield costs that are passed onto wireless consumers.

“Today’s action was unnecessary given the breadth of action the industry has taken,” said CTIA vice president Jamie Hastings. “Uniformity in the wireless industry created tremendous benefits for wireless consumers, including lower costs and phenomenal innovation. State-by-state technology mandates, such as this one, stifle those benefits and are detrimental to wireless consumers.”

Advocates like Gascón, however, believe that this is a first step toward a new kind of uniformity. “This epidemic has impacted millions across the nation and millions more around the globe,” he said. “But today we turn the page,” he said in a statement. “Seldom can a public safety crisis be addressed by a technological solution, but today wireless consumers everywhere can breathe a sigh of relief.”

Taxis in San Francisco are fighting back through apps, with the city's blessing

Standing on the corner of California and Polk in San Francisco, I took out my phone and ordered a ride from Flywheel, an app that’s competing with rival transportation services like Uber and Lyft by leveraging the thousands of taxis already on the road. Like with those services, once I order a Flywheel ride, a map pops up with a car icon, showing me where my ride is in relation to me and allowing me to monitor the driver as he or she gets closer.

Or at least that’s how it’s supposed to work.

On this particular morning, as I watched multiple Lyfts go by (unmissable with their trademark giant pink mustaches attached to the cars’ grilles), and a couple Ubers (the black cars now identifiable by small logos that must be placed on their windows), my driver’s icon drifted away from me. After some minutes passed, I called the driver, who assured me he was on his way. When he continued to travel not towards me, I canceled the order and got a new Flywheel, which picked me up and promptly delivered me to the company’s San Francisco office, with my bill and a 20% tip paid automatically through the credit card I stored on the app.

Once at Flywheel, Chief Product Officer Sachin Kansal explained what had likely happened with my misguided driver. “He may have been ride-stacking,” Kansal explained, meaning that the driver accepted my order on the app and then took a street hail, thinking he could deliver the latter before I ever knew the difference. But the moment I canceled my ride, the driver’s plan was foiled. He would be blocked from the system until Flywheel investigated the case, and these did not appear to be circumstances that would yield quick forgiveness from administrators. Kansal made sure I knew how swiftly justice would be dealt, because this is not the kind of mistake companies can afford to treat lightly in the midst of the Great Ride App Wars.

San Francisco has been transformed into a city full of smartphone-wielding guinea pigs, willing beta testers who try out new services and shovel feedback to engineers. But while many transportation startups are busy dreaming up new and unfamiliar offerings, Flywheel and similar companies like Curb and Hailo are trying to breathe high-tech life into the old taxis that have been around for decades. That business model comes with limitations as well as certain advantages—the biggest of which may be that the city of San Francisco is proving a willing ally, and that could in turn prove a model for other metros. (Lyft did not respond to an interview request for this article, and Uber declined.)

San Francisco’s Municipal Transportation Agency’s “position is that there is a public good to having a regulated taxi industry,” city spokesperson Kristen Holland said in an email. “We want to encourage the public to take San Francisco taxicabs by making them aware of the e-hail option and letting them know the benefits of taking a San Francisco taxicab.”

Earlier this summer, the city and Flywheel teamed up to get their pro-taxi message across by putting cheeky ads like this on the sides of city buses:

And this:

By getting its app adopted a whole fleet at a time, Flywheel now has its system in 80% of San Francisco’s approximately 1,800 cabs and is aiming for 100%. Both the city and companies like Flywheel have a financial interest in cabs doing well—Flywheel through the 10% cut it takes off the base fare and the city through its medallion system, which will yield an anticipated $10 million in fiscal year 2015. Holland says that the city also supports cabs because they’re a known quantity. The city regulates them and decides exactly how the drivers are trained. Questions about insurance and liability, which have plagued startups innovating new transportation systems, have long been answered when it comes to cabs.

Taxi drivers, many bitter that they have to deal with more onerous regulations than drivers for companies like Lyft, have taken to writing down license plate numbers of cars with pink mustaches and reporting them to insurance companies. While cabs are clearly commercial vehicles, Lyft drivers are often using their personal cars to make money, and some insurers have canceled Lyft drivers’ policies after finding out they had only forked out for non-commercial plans.

Using apps like Flywheel is a way for taxis to fight fire with fire instead of tattling, however justified it might seem. Flywheel’s Kansal says that drivers may double the amount of rides they get in a shift through the efficiency that the system provides, matching people who need rides with nearby drivers. “There are weaknesses that others have. There are regulations that they may be breaking,” he says. “But 90% of our energy is spent on making sure this experience always stays top notch. That the experience that you had this morning never happens again.”

While Flywheel can’t turn cabs into fancy black cars or Lyft Plus SUVs, customers who order a taxi never have to worry about surge pricing, premiums that other companies charge in times of high demand. And while Flywheel can’t innovate at the speed of the other companies, given the limitations of what a fleet cab can be, it did just roll out service to airports in San Francisco, Seattle and L.A—something less established fleets still can’t legally do in many cities due to long-standing airport regulations. The California commission regulating the new services like Uber and Lyft has threatened to shut them down if drivers keep showing up at arrival and departure areas without proper permits.

Kansal believes his company can outfit cabs in a way that allows them to disrupt the companies that disrupted cabs in the first place. The fleet model is “very scalable,” he says, though the app is now densely present only in San Francisco and available in just a handful of other cities, most on the West Coast. (Competitor Hailo is the leader among taxi apps on the East Coast and in Europe.)

But the equation isn’t so simple as making lists of pros and cons for new ride-providing companies and app-enabled taxis. After my interview with Kansal, I tried to hail a car through Curb, a rival app that just rebranded itself after previously operating as Taxi Magic. After failing to get a taxi assigned to me before five minutes passed by I went back to Flywheel. A taxi arrived, and I asked my driver Casey Callahan what he thought of using the platform.

“I have mixed feelings,” he says. “You get a lot of business you wouldn’t normally get, and it gives us an edge against Uber, but they take a kind of big cut.” Ten percent seemed too high to Callahan, and that’s the kind of resentment that can fester. UberX drivers protested angrily outside Uber’s HQ in San Francisco earlier this year when the company started taking a bigger cut of the fare, many drivers threatening to go work for someone else. Callahan said the Flywheel app can also have technical kinks, and it remains painful to pass up a willing street hail once he’s agreed to pick up a Flywheel customer, the temptation to which my driver succumbed.

Callahan described all the driver-luring and price-cutting companies are doing to one-up each other in the Bay Area as “cutthroat capitalism at it worst.” But he said that if cab drivers don’t use technology and whatever else they can to fight back, they’re going to go the way of the dodo and the stagecoach. “This is going to be one more thing that’s gone from the American way of life,” he says.

He says he chose driving for a cab company over the new services partly because he doesn’t own his own car and feels that buying one through a company, as some Lyft Plus drivers do, is the equivalent of being an “indentured servant.” Myriad factors could send a driver one way or the other. Long-time cabbies know how much they can make in a shift, while newer companies continue to play with prices and what cuts they take. There’s also the ethos of the job, like Lyft’s requirement that a driver fist-bump each passenger, while a cool distance in taxis is the norm and Uber black car drivers will open your door. There are hours, incentives, pride, rules about where certain companies can go and who they can pick up. And so on.

For those championing taxis, the question is whether cab drivers who long roamed without competition, facing no penalty if they ditched one fare for another, can give their industry the kind of customer-service makeover it takes to convince a San Franciscan to order a Flywheel instead of something from the long menu of other options.

Oxford's editors have welcomed a new batch of words to their database, validating young people and making life less confusing for old people

Oxford Dictionaries, the arm of the Oxford family that focuses on current English, announced on Wednesday that they’ve added the latest batch of words to their ranks. Put into haiku form, reflections of humanity in 2014 could easily look something like this:

Bro hug. Amazeballs.

Hyperconnected hot mess.

YOLO? FML.

Or this:

Side boob. Cray clickbait.

Second screen. Live-tweet. Throw shade.

ICYMI.

Yes, each of those is a new entry in Oxford’s online database that collects modern uses of words. And that’s just a small sample of the many adorbs (adj., arousing great delight) additions.

For all those who are ready to set their quills to parchment and declare the end of the English language, now that such frivolous terms are getting respect from Oxford, please keep in mind that this is not the Oxford English Dictionary. That arm of the family is more like the serious and intellectual grandfather who constantly withholds his approval from younger generations. In other words, the OED editors require words to have much more historical, significant impact before adding them to that reference.

Caveats made, here is a selection of Oxford Dictionaries’ noobs:

acquihire (n.): buying out a company primarily for the skills and expertise of its staff.

adorbs (adj.): arousing great delight; cute or adorable.

air punch (n.): thrusting one’s clenched fist up into the air, typically as a gesture of triumph.

amazeballs (adj.): very impressive, enjoyable, or attractive.

anti-vax (adj.): opposed to vaccination.

binge-watch (v.): watch multiple episodes of a television program in rapid succession.

bro hug (n.): a friendly embrace between two men.

clickbait (n.): (on the Internet) content whose main purpose is to attract attention and draw visitors to a particular web page.

cray (adj.): crazy, but without that time-consuming extra syllable.

Deep Web (n.): the part of the World Wide Web that is not discoverable by means of standard search engines.

doncha (contraction): don’t you.

douchebaggery (n.): obnoxious or contemptible behaviour.

e-cig (n.): another term for electronic cigarette.

fandom (n.): the fans of a particular person, team, series, etc., regarded collectively as a community or subculture.

fast follower (n.): a company that quickly imitates the innovations of its competitors.

5:2 diet (n.): a diet that involves eating normally for five days out of a seven-day period and greatly restricting the amount of food eaten on the other two days.

FML (abbrev.): (vulgar slang) f— my life! (used to express dismay at a frustrating personal situation)

hate-watch (v.): watch (a television program usually) for the sake of the enjoyment derived from mocking or criticizing it.

hot mess (n.): a person or thing that is spectacularly unsuccessful or disordered.

hot mic (n.): a microphone that is turned on, in particular one that broadcasts a spoken remark that was intended to be private.

humblebrag (n. & v.): (make) an ostensibly modest or self-deprecating statement whose actual purpose is to draw attention to something of which one is proud.

hyperconnected (adj.): characterized by the widespread or habitual use of devices that have Internet connectivity.

ICYMI (abbrev.): in case you missed it.

listicle (n.): an Internet article presented in the form of a numbered or bullet-pointed list.

live-tweet (v.): post comments about (an event) on Twitter while the event is taking place.

mansplain (v.): (of a man) explain something to someone, typically a woman, in a manner regarded as condescending or patronizing.

mud run (n.): an event in which participants negotiate a course consisting of obstacles filled or covered with mud.

neckbeard (n.): growth of hair on a man’s neck, especially when regarded as indicative of poor grooming.

Paleo diet (n.): a diet based on the type of foods presumed to have been eaten by early humans.

second screen (n.): a mobile device used while watching television, especially to access supplementary content or applications.

sentiment analysis (n.): the process of computationally identifying and categorizing opinions expressed in a piece of text.

side boob (n.): the side part of a woman’s breast, as exposed by a revealing item of clothing.

side-eye (n.): a sidelong glance expressing disapproval or contempt.

smartwatch (n.): a mobile device with a touchscreen display, worn on the wrist.

SMH (abbrev.): shaking (or shake) my head (used to express disapproval, exasperation, etc.).

spit take (n.): (especially as a comic technique) an act of suddenly spitting out liquid one is drinking in response to something funny or surprising.

subtweet (n.): (on Twitter) a post that refers to a particular user without directly mentioning them, typically as a form of furtive mockery or criticism.

tech-savvy (n.): well informed about or proficient in the use of modern technology.

time-poor (adj.): spending much of one’s time working or occupied.

throw shade (phr.): publicly criticize or express contempt for someone.

vape (v.): inhale and exhale the vapor produced by an electronic cigarette or similar device.

WDYT (abbrev.): what do you think?

YOLO (abbrev.): you only live once (expressing the view that one should make the most of the present moment).