A Havana cook keeps a rich family's house through revolution, exile and decades of shifting power in Eduardo Machado's "The Cook," running through Oct. 11 at Berkeley Rep. A chauffeur turned Communist bureaucrat, a queer man threatened with "re-education," and a promise kept too well drive a play the reviewer calls bold but uneven, with a quiet power beneath the exposition.

— via Berkeleyside, KQED

Berkeley landlords can currently bank a decade of skipped rent increases and dump them on tenants in one year, spiking rents 50% or more overnight. Measure X caps that at 10% annually, matching state law, while tweaking fees and expanding tenant association rights.

— via Berkeleyside, Cecilia Lunaparra, Soli Alpert and Alfred Twu

Southern Station's calls for service are set to jump 23 percent under new boundaries, and the captain running the meeting couldn't say whether staffing would keep up. A resident's blunt pushback exposed the gap between police commission promises and what's actually being delivered.

— via Mission Local, Sarah Hopkins

San Francisco's $24 million street-ambassador program has expanded to the Outer Richmond, and unhoused people near Ocean Beach say they're being told to move almost daily. A bus driver reports the beachfront plaza once packed with a dozen people now sits empty.

— via Mission Local, Nicholas David

Two Jets defenders went down in one game, and a backup safety filled both spots without missing a beat. Aaron Glenn is banking on that versatility now that Minkah Fitzpatrick is out for weeks against the Packers.

— via NY Post, Brian Costello

A retired cancer researcher wrapped an injured owl in a towel, drove it an hour and a half to Burlingame, and talked to it softly the whole way. Weeks after its release, an owl started showing up in his backyard, staring through his kitchen window, and he's not sure it's a coincidence.

— via Mission Local, Nicholas David

Carson Benge broke Pete Alonso's Mets rookie hits record with a check-swing bunt that traveled one foot in the air. He hit .189 in April and is now hitting .276, and he's got another week to pad the total.

— via NY Post, Mark W. Sanchez

Ohio just became the first state to let residents pay government fees in crypto, instantly converting it to cash so the state never holds volatile coins. A 2019 legal misstep killed an earlier version; critics like Innovation Ohio's Michael McGovern say the revived push still risks state finances.

— via Hoodline, Landon Fisher

Pete DeBoer isn't sugarcoating it: a power play that ranked 30th in the league last season needs to be rebuilt from scratch, not tweaked. His fix starts with breaking players out of fixed spots and forcing more movement, with Matthew Schaefer anchoring the new top unit.

— via NY Post, Ethan Sears

A newly confirmed exoplanet is less than 1 million years old and still gulping gas from its star's disk, breaking a record previously held by 5-million-year-old worlds. The catch: it sits 55 times farther from its star than Earth is from the sun, a distance standard formation models struggle to explain.

— via Hoodline, Josephine Liu

No flowering plants, no ice caps, and forests kept open by trampling dinosaurs: the Mesozoic world looked nothing like the jungles of movies and novels. Five concrete differences reveal just how alien Earth was before that asteroid hit 66 million years ago.

— via Smithsonian — Science

A federal judge just told ICE to back off a man who compared its director to a Nazi war criminal in an email. Agents visited his home twice and warned him to stop, but the court says the email was protected speech and blocked further threats.

— via Gothamist, Arya Sundaram

Joe Paradise's aorta tore from his carotid to his heart to his groin, and doctors warned he might not survive. Nearly four years later, he's sharing the ordeal for Aortic Dissection Awareness Day, alongside other survivors whose stories show how little warning the condition gives before it strikes.

— via Hoodline, Kendra Davis

Midtown traffic will crawl below 4 mph this week as the U.N. General Assembly and daily protests clog the streets. The city's already counting 20 gridlock days through December, and it wants drivers to try the new bike tunnel instead.

— via Gothamist, Louis C. Hochman

Traffic near Golden Gate Park got so bad Saturday that paramedics abandoned their ambulance two blocks out and ran the rest of the way on foot. They arrived in time to deliver a healthy baby girl on the shoulder near Crossover Drive.

— via Hoodline, Nina Singh-Hudson

A decade of measuring gravity's most stubborn constant came down to a sealed envelope the physicist wasn't sure he wanted to open. Blind data, hidden numbers, and 225 years of disagreement over a value physicists still can't pin down.

— via ScienceDaily

The Packers let Minnesota score 29 unanswered points in a Week 1 collapse, and now they head to MetLife still favored over a Jets team chasing its first 2-0 start since 2015. Here's how to stream the FOX matchup free, including a five-day DIRECTV trial.

— via NY Post, Angela Tricarico

The Pasadena Convention Center swapped civic conferences for tattoo guns this weekend, with 17 judged categories and a live Best of Show battle closing out three days of ink. One artist's path traces back to a Long Beach shop billed as the nation's oldest continuously operating tattoo parlor.

— via Hoodline, Ben Levine

State officials are promising a $100 billion SpaceX site and thousands of rocket launches. The deal came together under nondisclosure agreements, with lawmakers loosening regulations along the way.

— via NPR, Drew Hawkins

A judge called Corie Walsh too dangerous to release after her 2-year-old son was found dead in her basement. A forensic psychiatrist says that label isn't permanent, and treatment could change how courts see her risk before trial.

— via NY Post, Fox News

Denver's Halloween scene goes past corn mazes: a subterranean speakeasy that stays midnight-dark all year, a half-mile trail of thousands of hand-carved pumpkins in Littleton, and an aspen grove alternative to I-70 traffic jams. Skip the weekend crowds and book a weeknight for the pumpkins.

— via Westword, Ashley Ragan

A gutted Family Dollar in the Lower Ninth Ward looks empty and tagged with graffiti. Step inside and it's stocked with clothes, toys, books and home goods, all free for the taking.

— via NPR, Debbie Elliott

Cats hold grudges against smells for months, it turns out, and scientists think they've found why: 13 never-before-reported fatty acids in urine that form a stable, individual "signature." Unlike most scent chemicals, these compounds barely break down for at least 24 hours, and cats can tell them apart.

— via ScienceDaily

A widow says a plastic-surgery-sculpted male escort talked her into buying out his $10 million contract, draining $6 million while she was drunk and medicated in a Four Seasons room. His lawyers call it a consenting relationship with the evidence to prove it; a psychiatrist explains why money and grief make such an easy target.

— via NY Post, Michael Kaplan

A photographer calls herself a housewife and immediately flinches at the word. Her new project turns dirty socks, dish piles and toy avalanches into evidence of the labor that supposedly does itself.

— via 3 Quarks Daily, Azra Raza