Nathan Heller:

San Francisco has traditionally been a Dungeness crab of a city, shedding its carapace from time to time and burrowing down until a new shell sets. It has not been an industry town in the sense of New York, which media and finance have shaped for well over a century. It is not like Washington, D.C., or Los Angeles, whose dreams are dominated by one Hydra-headed business. San Francisco has never been dominated by anything, but it's always ended up preeminent in something. Gold, for instance. Free love. Microchips. People do not move to San Francisco as much as swarm to it. Those irked by change rarely stay long.

Lately, the pattern has begun to break. San Francisco is an industry town.

An exchange:

Marge: I'd really like to give it a try!
Homer: I don't know, Marge, trying is the first step towards failure.

Nathan Deuel:

On the radio, a host was talking about a bullet-proof insert available for kids' backpacks. ... On the radio, someone said an A-10 fighter jet had accidentally dropped an inert practice bomb on the parking lot of a bar in Maryland. The barkeep said she knew precisely what time the bomb struck because her outdoor surveillance camera had caught the impact. No one had noticed. Customers were too busy, she said, and the music was too loud.

Monsanto:

The Climate Corporation was founded in 2006 by a highly successful team of software engineers and data scientists formerly with Google and other leading Silicon Valley technology companies. Since that time, the company has built the agriculture industry's most advanced technology platform combining hyper-local weather monitoring, agronomic data modeling, and high-resolution weather simulations to deliver a complete suite of full-season monitoring, analytics and risk-management products.

Sasha Frere-Jones:

When are you implicated in the funding around you? Always?