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The Lives and Lies of ‘Elias Vance,’ an AI Hero for Our Times

“Elias Vance,” a fictional Georgia high school history teacher created by artificial intelligence. (Why is he walking toward the wall instead of the door?)

A while ago, a friend reposted an appealing little essay she’d come across on Facebook. The piece told of a Georgia high school history teacher who’d done his best for more than three decades to show his students the complex reality of the United States’ past.

“… My classroom was a living thing,” the essay said. “History there wasn’t a series of sterile, polished dates; it was loud, complicated, and often painful—just like the country itself. I taught the brilliance of the Constitution alongside the brutality of the Middle Passage. I wanted my students to feel the gravity of our past, to recognize the ghosts that still haunt our halls.”

The piece was attributed to an Elias Vance, and I have to say, he sounds like my kind of history teacher, telling it like it was (and is). But all was not well in his world, he wrote. His teaching had come to the notice of local school officials, who deemed his insistence on teaching the truth “divisive.” Faced with a demand to “soften the edges” of his lessons, to use dumbed-down textbooks and to emphasize America’s “positive heritage,” he walked. Now, he said, he spent his days posting occasionally on “the local community pages”:

“Just brief reflections, sharing the narratives the new books want to omit. I write about the unsung figures, the hard-earned victories, and the complex, tragic, beautiful story of us. The comment sections are a sea of former students—some now parents themselves—and total strangers. They all echo the same sentiment: “Don’t stop, Mr. Vance. We need the truth.”

Of course, when I went looking for more about the heroic Elias Vance, the story immediately fell apart. Our high school history hero proved to be an AI creation (as Snopes later confirmed ). Oh, the irony: an essay extolling the virtue of truth, the necessity of honestly appraising our history, that was a total fabrication.

Is there any harm in that? As my friend said when I pointed out the Elias Vance story was made up, the tale does point to a real issue — the push by Trump and his movement to sanitize, rewrite or deny key aspects of our history. The AI-generated story happens to present the issue in a way with which lots of people will sympathize: those alarmed by our president’s totalitarian impulses; those appalled by the denial of the nation’s legacy of racism and racist violence; those disgusted by attempts to erase the memory of Trump’s campaign to overturn the 2020 election.

It’s true that our history is full of fables and too-good-to-be-true tales of virtue and heroism going back at least to Parson Weems’s invention of the George Washington cherry tree myth. Some of the stories are even based in fact. Abraham Lincoln really did have a nearly universal reputation for honesty. John F. Kennedy really was decorated for heroism for saving his PT 109 crew after it was struck by a Japanese destroyer and sank during World War II.

But it’s important to know the difference between pure invention and narratives based in fact, even when some of the facts may be disputed (some point to Lincoln’s penchant for political calculation as undercutting his “Honest Abe” image; naval experts are still debating the role Kennedy’s command decisions played in the sinking of PT 109).

So yes, in a world where it’s becoming harder and harder to retain a grip on what’s real and what’s not, the “Elias Vance, Honest History Warrior” hoax is damaging. It further erodes the boundary between reality and fiction. It also exposes a related problem: the tendency of large segments of social media audiences, even really smart people, to uncritically accept much of what they read and see.

To be honest, when I first saw the Elias Vance post, I was thinking of reposting it myself. But first I wanted to know more about Mr. Vance. Within a couple minutes of searching him online, it was apparent he didn’t exist. Within 10 minutes, it was obvious the story came from a Facebook account that has churned out multitudes of inspirational, AI-generated stories about people doing good deeds for the less fortunate. It was also clear that the account is just one of many — thousands? tens of thousands? millions? — doing the very same thing.

(The AI services people prompt to produce these stories often name the heroes “Elias Vance.” Why? ChatGPT has an answer, and so does Google’s Gemini service. )

One example relates the story of a 72-year-old high school custodian who dies alone during his overnight shift and posthumously turns out to have been a mentor and benefactor to generations of students. It’s hard to do the story justice, really — ancient, kindly Mr. Vance, who to the teaching staff was merely “the invisible old man in the grey uniform who unclogged the toilets,” was running an all-in-one tutoring, crisis counseling and nutrition support service. He taught calculus, bought clothing for kids in need and was a reassuring ear to students facing crises like how to come out or deal with teen pregnancy. He even talked a student out of downing a bottle of pills to end her life. The story is chock-full of details like this:

“Elias’s daughter, Brenda, flew in from Chicago. She stood by the casket, looking overwhelmed and expensive in her designer suit. She told the funeral director she expected maybe ten people. She told him her father was a ‘distant man,’ a workaholic who cared more about his job than his family. ‘He never called,’ she said, adjusting her glasses. ‘He was always “working late.” I never understood why he loved mopping floors so much.’ “

There are probably dozens of other AI-generated Elias Vance stories floating around out there on social media. He’s a hero in some, a villain in others. Unlike the story of Elias Vance the history teacher, most are pretty obvious fictions.

Maybe the “Elias Vance History Teacher” tale reflects something real about our times, and that’s something that needs to be said. By the same token, though, it’s more important than ever to know what’s “real” in terms of events that have actually transpired and what’s invented to make a point about events. “The Grapes of Wrath” is an amazing and truthful document of its times, but it wasn’t a documentary.

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The End of Burger King Plaza

The stairs from BART’s 16th Street/Mission station and Burger King Plaza.

For most of the last two decades, I’ve climbed these stairs at BART’s 16th/Mission station in San Francisco with the non-reassuring sight of a Burger King at the top of the stairs. The place actually closed and was boarded up a few years ago; a mural replaced the old BK signage. Once you reached the top of the stairs, you were greeted with a more or less chaotic scene: a decrepit, badly kept-up plaza, residents of nearby single-room-occupancy hotels hanging out just to get some outdoor time, and several regulars I’d see every morning who appeared to be dealing drugs.

But recently, I turned a corner to climb up to the street and was shocked to see that the Burger King of Burger King Plaza is no more. The dingy edifice at the top of the stairs had been replaced by a beautiful slice of sky. The old BK and several adjoining businesses — a produce store, a Chinese restaurant, a tough-looking bar called the City Club — have all been demolished. Construction is already well under way on a complex of new apartment buildings that will eventually provide 380 new units of housing.

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The Hitchhiker: Late Night, Amarillo, 1974

Foggy Interstate 40 on the western outskirts of Amarillo, November 2025.

Kate and I stopped overnight in Amarillo, on the plains of the Texas Panhandle, a few nights before Thanksgiving last fall. Fog descended on the area just after we got to our motel on the city’s western outskirts. The misty scene along Interstate 40 demanded an attempt to try to capture it, and the best camera I had for an immediate shot was my cellphone. I’m not unhappy with the result, though as usual I think about what I might do differently next time. For instance, I might make sure to charge the batteries in my “better” camera. Maybe someday I’ll remember to check before hitting the road.

What the picture makes me think about now, though, is the first and only previous time I happened across this stretch of highway during a trip that sounds a little crazy from the safe perspective of now.

It was in late December 1974. I had taken it into my head that during Illinois State University’s holiday break, I’d visit friends in Berkeley and San Francisco. Furthermore, I’d decided to hitchhike from the Chicago area, where my family lived, to Northern California. My concession to winter weather and the possibility of freezing to death while waiting for a ride somewhere along Interstate 80 was to take a southern route that followed the old path of U.S. 66, the “mother : first along Interstate 55 to St. Louis, then Interstate 44 through Tulsa to Oklahoma City, and from there along Interstate 40 to California. About 2,400 miles from door to door.

My mom drove me the first 30 miles or so from our place on the southern edge of Chicago’s south suburbs to Wilmington, a town on the Kankakee River and I-55. She didn’t say anything, or anything that I remember, to try to discourage me. I’m trying to imagine what she was really thinking as I climbed out of the car late on the afternoon of the day after Christmas. By this time, my brothers John and Chris and I had each done at least one long hitch-hiking trip, so maybe she was thinking, “Well, I guess he knows what he’s doing.” Just as likely, she was saying a prayer that I’d come back in one piece.

Looking back from this distance, I don’t remember most of how that trip came together — the relatively brief rides that slowly added up to distance and progress toward my destination. How did I get through Bloomington? Through Springfield? Through St. Louis? I can’t tell you. I’m sure it involved a series of short hops, and I can say for sure I don’t remember a single driver during that stretch.

I do recall riding in the back seat of a 1950s-era Chevy sedan with two couples who liked REO Speedwagon and played it loud. It was near freezing and raining during that part of the drive, late at night, near Joplin, MIssouri. I remember standing along the interstate in Tulsa, late the next afternoon, which had to be about 24 hours after Mom dropped me off.

The next place I see clearly is Amarillo, or rather a spot that was far enough out into the country west of town that I didn’t see any lights except for a gas station just off the interstate.

It was after midnight, moonlit and cold, with virtually no traffic along the highway. Looking out over the countryside, the moonlight seemed to outline ravines stretching off into the distance. The impression that’s always stuck me was of being alone in a vast, silent, mysteriously bleak landscape. I could only guess when the next ride would come.

It couldn’t have been too long. I got to Grants, New Mexico, about 350 miles west, near the Continental Divide, about 7 in the morning, just after sunrise. It was very cold — about 10 below zero. I wasn’t too worried about the chill. I was wearing a big orange down parka that was probably suitable for Everest base camp wear that kept me warm and made me reasonably visible to passing drivers.

I stood on the side of the interstate for all of 10 minutes before a later model Chevy sedan with California plates pulled over. As I climbed in, the driver asked where I was headed.

“Berkeley,” I said.

“I’m going to Oakland,” he said.

All of a sudden, I didn’t have to worry about the next ride for the rest of the trip. What a gift that was. I’m a little embarrassed to say that among the many details that have dropped out of my memory in the intervening half-century is my benefactor’s name. He drove straight through, stopping only for gas and a fast-food stop somewhere in the snowy Mojave Desert. Checking distances now, he drove about 1,000 miles after picking me up in about 20 hours, and he insisted on doing all that driving himself.

He wound up taking me right to my friends’ house in Berkeley’s Elmwood neighborhood, where I announced my arrival to a sleeping household at 2 in the morning. A voice called out from an upstairs window: “OK! We’re coming! We’ll be right down!”

There are stories to tell about the rest of that night and my New Year’s stay in the Bay Area, which included a rainy backpacking trip to Point Reyes. But they’ll keep. For now, I’ll just say that after a week or so in Berkeley, I flew back to Chicago and returned to Illinois State and another semester of underachievement. I had no idea then I’d be heading back west soon enough.

There isn’t a straight line between that moment of arrival in Berkeley and this one, which finds me living only a mile or two from where that trip ended. But in a way that I could never have foreseen standing in the moonlight outside Amarillo so long ago, that night along the highway, was a step on the path to everything that’s happened since.

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The Llano Estacado: ‘As If We Had Been Swallowed Up by the Sea’

Lea County, New Mexico, December 1, 2025.

 “I reached some plains so vast, that I did not find their limit anywhere I went, although I traveled over them for more than 300 leagues … with no more land marks than if we had been swallowed up by the sea …. [T]here was not a stone, nor bit of rising ground, nor a tree, nor a shrub, nor anything to go by.”

That was Coronado in 1541, describing his journey across the Plains in search of nothing that was actually there. Of course, the Llano Estacado — the Staked Plain — is anything but trackless today. I’ve driven through parts of it more than once. But despite all the ranching, farming, fencing, drilling and pumping that’s gone on there and is still going on, it retains a feeling of vast space.

(Here’s an excellent post on a ghost town in eastern New Mexico that talks about the origin of the name Llano Estacado.)

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Road Blog: Away Down the Valley.

7th Standard Road, Kern County.

Above: A sighting just after getting off Interstate 5 to cut over to Highway 99 on our way to the desert and (eventually) the Dallas-Fort Worth area.

The irony of the sign — one of dozens or maybe even hundreds by this time scattered across the southern two-thirds of the Central Valley — was too good to pass up. The area has had about 2 inches of rain in the past week, benefiting from the big storm that swept through the rest of Southern California.

We’re in Barstow tonight after about seven hours on the road today. Thinking we’ll be in Flagstaff tomorrow night.

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Jimmy Kimmel and a Lesson in Sharing Grief

A friend shared the video below of Jimmy Kimmel paying tribute to Cleto Escobedo, a lifelong friend and the bandleader on his show who died earlier this week. “I feel like you’ll appreciate this,” my friend said. “It’s apropos of nothing relevant, but I found it pretty moving.”

It is moving, for sure. Kimmel takes 22 minutes to recount his friendship with Escobedo, which started when he was 9 years old, and how they came to work together on late-night television. The story is both funny and wrenching as Kimmel makes it clear how much he loved his friend and how heartbroken he is at losing him.

I wonder whether honest displays of sadness and grieving and genuine expressions of love like this can have a wider impact on our culture, much of which is dominated by phony, ginned-up histrionics designed to provoke outrage and stir our sense of grievance. Which isn’t to say there isn’t plenty to be outraged by in this world of ours. But we might live in a healthier, more humane world if we learn to talk honestly with each other about all our joys and sorrows, not just the stuff that enrages us.

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The Retirement Chronicles

The Oxford English Dictionary definition of “retirement,” sense 4.a, which is said to have been in common use since the mid-18th century:

“The state or condition of having left office, employment, or service permanently, now esp. on reaching pensionable age; the period of a person’s life after retiring from office or employment. Also: the state of having withdrawn permanently from one’s usual sphere of activity. Frequently in in (one’s) retirement.”

I’m looking that up because — here’s my buried lede — I’ve worked my last day as a staff reporter and editor at KQED in San Francisco, and, having reached my early 70s, the popular notion of what lies ahead is retirement. I don’t think the OED definition quite fits me, though. I refer to the “condition of having left employment … permanently.” As I’ve been telling people, I don’t feel like I’m done with journalism, where I’ve spent nearly all of my adult life. I feel like I’ll always have stories to tell and will find ways of telling at least a few of them. But maybe that’s insecurity speaking, prompted by all the uncertainty I feel about what really comes next.

I’ll leave The Retirement Chronicles there for now. More to come.

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The Chief Medical Examiner’s Sketchbook

San Francisco’s Office of the Chief Medical Examiner is attempting to identify this man, who was found deceased in a vacant lot on 5th Street in October 2024.

It’s not important to say how I got to the website for San Francisco’s Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. But I will say that I was following a line of research on the number of traffic fatalities in the city going back to the 1950s or so. Just part of some history I’ve been gathering.

I forgot about that purported mission when I got to the chief medical examiner’s home page. It features sketches of deceased people the office has been unable to identify. The sketches are arresting because they take people who have been found in the worst of circumstances — dead on the street or in a park restroom, for instance — and portray them as they might well have looked in life and as their friends and loved ones might imagine them. Clearly the artist is attempting more than creating a likeness. The work here is an exercise in trying to restore dignity and humanity to those denied it at the end of their lives.

The man pictured above was found in October 2024 in a vacant downtown lot, lying in a pool of water. The medical examiner’s office released this sketch about three months later, along with a brief description of the case:

The decedent is a white male, approximately 50 years of age with brown hair and brown eyes. He is 5 feet and 6 inches tall and weighs 168 pounds. He was found in an abandoned lot that was filled with water at 348 5th Street, San Francisco. The decedent was found in the water dressed in multiple layers of clothing including an AJAX East Bay sweatshirt, a Kobe Bryant #24 jersey, and a Lakers #8 jersey.

Several news outlets around town duly published the sketch and the medical examiner’s press release, which noted that this was a rare case of it being unable to identify a decedent. Sometimes, publishing the sketches pays off with a relatively quick identification. Late last year, a woman lying unresponsive on a downtown street was identified just a few days after her drawing was posted; in late 2023, it took about three weeks before someone supplied a name for a man who’d been found dead on the roof of a parking garage.

So far, though, the man found lying in the water wearing the Kobe Bryant jersey remains unknown.

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Conor McGregor: ‘P.S. He’s a Wanker’

Conor McGregor, as seen in central Derry, May 2025.

What’s going on here?

Conor McGregor, the former cage-fighting champion and Irish whiskey entrepreneur, has become de facto leader of an Irish anti-immigrant campaign with strong echoes of the U.S. MAGA movement. Further MAGA parallels: McGregor, who lost a civil suit alleging sexual assault earlier this year, has announced he’ll run for the Irish presidency. See: “Conor McGregor, MMA fighter, alleged rapist, Ireland’s next president?“

The first day of our trip to Ireland, back in late April, we ran into the aftermath of a McGregorite anti-immigrant rally in Dublin. It was staged just two days after the anniversary of the 1916 Easter Rising, which opened Irish nationalists’ initially failed, ultimately victorious effort to end British rule. Rally participants wrapped themselves, literally, in the Irish tricolor, and some chanted slogans like “Ireland for the Irish.” In Trumpian fashion, McGregor claimed a vast throng of more than 100,000 people turned out. Having been in the area where the rally was held, there ain’t no way a crowd anywhere near that size was present. Most sources estimated it at about 5,000.

The anti-immigrant gathering was followed immediately afterward by a smaller anti-racist rally and march that began in front of the General Post Office on O’Connell Street, hallowed ground in modern Irish history as the site where the Easter Rising of April 1916 began. We walked alongside the march a few blocks to its end point outside the Garden of Remembrance, dedicated to the memory “of all those who gave their lives in the cause of Irish freedom.”

Why were we seeing a sign mocking Conor McGregor and his followers in Derry, a place where he won’t be running for anything? I think it’s because McGregor’s rhetoric touches a nerve in a place that at least outwardly is still closely linked to the struggle for Irish independence and the associated fight to achieve civil rights for the minority Catholic population.

The city is part of the six counties partitioned from the rest of Ireland in the early 1920s, which remain part of the United Kingdom as Northern Ireland. The very name of the place is contested; in United Kingdom parlance, the town is called Londonderry. It’s famously divided along sectarian and the associated political lines, Protestant/Loyalist and Catholic/Republican. In Catholic/Republican parts neighborhoods, which is mostly what we saw, the ideology expressed in street art is still strongly, even radically, Republican, and embraces other liberation causes (Palestinian nationalism, for instance) and rejects McGregor’s narrow, reactionary, anti-immigrant nationalism.

Newly painted Palestinian nationalist/Irish Republican mural in Derry’s Bogside neighborhood, May 2025.
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Folly

Hussey’s Folly, Dingle Bay, County Kerry, Ireland. May 2025.

“If you ever find yourself in Dingle” sounds like the start of a joke. I don’t know what the rest of it would be, but if you do ever find yourself there, there’s a beautiful walk out from the town’s harbor, past this tower, and then to the cliffs beyond.

The date given for the tower, called Hussey’s Folly, is 1845. That was the first of Ireland’s devastating famine years. The construction was a make-work project, something devised by a local landholder for the poor and hungry to do in return for wages or food. Similar projects, often involving exhausting physical labor like road-building, were carried out all over Ireland as the country starved. Here’s a decent writeup on the “famine roads,” some of which are still used as part of the national road network: www.frrandp.com/2025/01/famine-roads.html.