Food + Beverage

Iced Pumpkin Cookies

Soft, heavily spiced, and glazed only after they are completely cool. Article by Ellie Chan This is a soft cookie, not a crisp one. Dry ingredients in one bowl, creamed butter and sugar in another, a full cup of pumpkin, and the spice list doing the heavy lifting: cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves. The icing is the part people get wrong. It has to go on cold. Glaze a warm cookie and it slides straight off onto the parchment. Let the tray come all the way to room temperature, then spread. COOKIES 2...

Education

Fifty Years on Whole-Person Education

Sofia University in Palo Alto teaches gratitude for credit. Article by Will Cotterall | Photography by Corey Sandler, OC Event Photos and Sofia University Marketing There is a university in Palo Alto where gratitude is worth three credits. The course sits in Sofia University's doctoral catalog: Positive Psychology, Gratitude, Compassion, and Forgiveness. Students trace how gratitude and compassion function across a course of therapy, then apply the same material to their own lives. It carries...

Arts + Culture

Buckets on the Sidewalk

How Elizabeth Gamble's garden became the community's. Article by Will Cotterall | Photography by Karina Pemberton Neighbors walking down Waverley Street found buckets of cut flowers on the sidewalk, set out by Elizabeth Frances Gamble. Her family brought her from Kentucky in 1902, when Waverley was a mud road. One year at Stanford, a degree from Wellesley, and then a lifetime at 1431 Waverley Street. The flowers were one gift among many. She made arrangements for the hospital and helped young...

Food + Beverage

Built for Charlie

A mother's search for her son's future became a cafe with 42 employees and a goal of 100. Article by Will Cotterall | Photography by Audrey Anne Photography Kathleen Foley-Hughes is the mother of twins with disabilities. Charlie had always been a social kid, someone who learned by doing. When he reached Terman Middle School, now known as Fletcher, Kathleen began asking a harder question: what would happen after high school, for a student who wasn't headed to college. The only option in Palo...

Food + Beverage

Coffee Is a Fruit

Ming Wood left Tesla for coffee. The tree inside the shop explains why. Article and Photography by There are three coffee trees growing inside Moonwake Coffee Roasters, and they are not decoration. They are three different varietals, planted the way a vineyard plants different grapes, and they are there to settle an argument about what coffee actually is. "Coffee is not a commodity but a living thing, a fruit, that changes with the season, reflects the environment and care put into it, and...

Beauty

The Kingdom of Sparkle

Photography by Damian Marhefka Photography Inside the private Palo Alto studio where twenty-five years of Indian Origin Couture begin with a conversation.   Jaz arrived at SWATI Couture the way every client does: up the walk of a private Palo Alto Eichler home, past the foyer wall marked with the handprints of the man who invented the computer mouse — Douglas Engelbart, the former owner of the home — and into a studio where delicate hand craftsmanship had produced something else entirely...

Food + Beverage

The Last Table in Palo Alto

Oklava keeps the tea pouring long after the rest of Palo Alto has closed for the night. Photography by Hafsa Tepekule Elif Uzun, co-owner of Oklava, remembers her first Palo Alto evenings ending earlier than she did. She and her family fell in love with the town fast: the energy, the startups, the mix of people and cultures, the sheer range of places to eat, all of it within reach. The days were never the problem. "I remember evenings after we first moved here when everything around us...

Education

The Work of Reading

A former English teacher now reads people and wardrobes with an eye for detail. Article and Photography by In her junior year of college, Abby Young was watching The Rachel Zoe Project on Bravo. She was captivated by Zoe’s work, from personal styling for celebrities to commercial and music video styling. Young was studying communications and literature, but the show made her recognize something familiar: she had already been doing this for years with friends and family, helping them decide...

Health + Wellness

Concierge Clinic For The Underserved

The San Jose clinic where one paying member covers two neighbors Article and Photography by A five-minute drive from the tech campuses, on West Alma Avenue in a San Jose neighborhood called Washington-Guadalupe, Dr. Angela Bymaster sees her patients in extra long concierge appointments.   The clinic is called Healing Grove Health Center. She and her husband, Brett, co-founded it in 2020 along with a community organizer named Maria Marcelo, Honduran pastors Jairo and Lourdes Sarmiento, and a...

Home + Design

The 20 Second Idea

How a Campbell contractor traded nearly thirty years of custom homes for backyard cottages. Article and Photography by   For twenty-seven years, Stan Acton had run a general-contracting business out of a yard in Campbell. Then, one morning in early 2017, he read the new state ADU rules and stopped.   He had founded the shop, called Acton Construction at the time, in 1990. It specialized in custom remodels. That January the state of California had loosened a set of restrictions on accessory...