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San Francisco has long been a desirable place to live — and that's even more true today as the city is basking in the glow of another tech boom. But the influx of new money and new residents is putting a strain on the city's housing market.

The city has the highest median rent in the nation, and evictions of longtime residents are skyrocketing.

Ground zero for San Francisco's eviction crisis is the Inner Mission District. Until recently, this edgy neighborhood was home to a mix of working-class Latinos, artists and activists.

Tom Rapp, an airport building maintenance worker, rents a modest second-story flat that he has called home for 15 years. He says a lot of his neighbors have been evicted over the past couple of years. Then bad news came knocking on his door, too.

"We received an eviction notice at the end of August," he says.

"But we've gotten like three different ones, right?" adds his roommate, Patricia Kerman.

Kerman, a senior on a fixed income, has lived in this flat for 27 years.

The two are fighting to stay in their rent-controlled apartment as their landlord tries to evict them under what's known as the Ellis Act. It's a state law that allows an eviction if the landlord wants to pull the building out of the rental market, usually with a plan to sell the units.

"They found this loophole where they're now able to get people out of their rent-controlled apartments, and it's just becoming an epidemic," Rapp says.

Rapp's landlord was not available for comment.

A recent city report finds that Ellis Act evictions have increased 170 percent over the past three years. Low- and middle-income tenants are unlikely to find another affordable apartment in San Francisco, where the median monthly rent has risen to about $3,400.

Fighting Back

At the steps of San Francisco City Hall, a small group of tenants and community organizers recently demanded that the city do something to prevent more evictions.

Inside City Hall, at a packed hearing of the Board of Supervisors, landlord Andrew Long blamed the evictions on the city's rent-control policies.

"This has caused rents for long-term tenants to be quite low, which is great for them, but it doesn't keep a building up," Long said.

Long said rent control drives small property landlords into the hands of big-money speculators who profit from converting rentals to condos.

But the hearing was dominated by scores of long-time residents who talked about their fears of getting pushed out of San Francisco.

Beverly Upton, director of the San Francisco Domestic Violence Consortium, is facing eviction from a building where she has lived for 25 years.

"Once the advocates and the organizers and the artists are gone, who will be left to care about our city?" she said.

That's a big concern in San Francisco, where traditionally there's always been a balance between the comfortable and the nonconformists, says former Mayor Art Agnos.

"The struggle to keep people who make between $60,000 and $150,000 a year is what we're facing in San Francisco. That's who the struggle is for today," Agnos says. "Frankly, it's all but over for the poor in this city."

More Development To Come

The evictions and the fear they engender come as the city is booming. Construction cranes crowd the downtown horizon. Pricey new restaurants serve the well-heeled tech crowd. Million-dollar condos sell for cash as soon as they come on the market.

So in a city that takes pride in its quirky diversity, there's a palpable sense that the bohemian days of live and let live are slipping away, Agnos says.

"We're not saying wealthy people shouldn't live here," he says. "What we're saying is we're losing the balance and the opportunity that has always been the promise of San Francisco."

San Francisco has endured similar periods when its housing supply has been squeezed, like during the last dot-com boom.

And each time, Agnos says, the city has become that much less affordable.

European regulators have fined eight large banks a total of more than $2 billion over an illegal cartel scheme to fix interest rates. The fine, the largest ever issued in such a case by the European Union, comes after a two-year investigation into banks' collusion. And the inquiry isn't yet complete.

Two American banks — JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup — are included in the list of financial institutions fined as part of a settlement deal. Several banks that cooperated with investigators saw their fines reduced or eliminated.

"Barclays received full immunity for revealing the existence of the cartel and thereby avoided a fine of around 690 million euros [$938 million] for its participation in the infringement," according to a news release from the EU.

Similarly, UBS also received immunity from what would have been a fine of around 2.5 billion euros — about $3.4 billion — in return for its cooperation.

For NPR's Newscast unit, Teri Schultz reports from Brussels:

"EU regulators found traders at some of the world's largest banks joined forces to manipulate borrowing rates, the euro interbank offered rate, or Euribor, and London interbank offered rate, or Libor. A record fine of about $2.3 billion dollars will be shared among eight institutions including Citigroup, Deutsche Bank and Royal Bank of Scotland.

"EU competition commissioner Joaquin Almunia says if the public could hear the conversations between traders found to be manipulating benchmark interest rates they would be 'appalled.'

" 'They discussed confidential, commercial and sensitive information that they are not allowed to share with other market players according to the antitrust rules,' Almunia says.

"Almunia says today's fines are not the 'end of the story,' as regulators continue their investigations."

The daily lowdown on books, publishing, and the occasional author behaving badly.

A Gutenberg Bible from 1455, an autographed and annotated manuscript of Maimonides' Mishneh Torah, and the oldest surviving Hebrew codex are among the ancient texts included in a new digitization project by the University of Oxford's Bodleian Library and the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana. The project, funded by a $3.2 million grant from the Polonsky Foundation, will make a number of "Hebrew manuscripts, Greek manuscripts, and incunabula, or 15th-century printed books" available for free viewing by the public. According to the project's website, "these groups have been chosen for their scholarly importance and for the strength of their collections in both libraries, and they will include both religious and secular texts." In an essay, the scholar Malachi Beit-Ari called the project a "unique cultural and scholarly enterprise which will provide students, scholars and the general public with easy access to these rich hidden treasures." The Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, said in a video interview that the collection is "something that inspires worship," adding that upon seeing the texts, "there is just a lifting of the spirits."

In an interview, the crime novelist Ian Rankin tells The Telegraph that it took "a good 12-14 years, and many books" before his writing began to pay.

Much more lucrative, apparently, is a gig overseeing Apple's compliance with punishment after losing its e-book antitrust case in July. In a court filing last week, Apple complained that its court-appointed monitor, Michael Bromwich, charges $1,100 an hour, in addition to a 15 percent administrative fee. Apple also complained that "Mr. Bromwich has already shown a proclivity to leap far beyond his mandate, and now this Court proposes amendments that would give him power to interview Apple personnel ex parte, something he will no doubt be quick to exploit." Bromwich was asked to monitor Apple after the company was found to have colluded with publishers to fix ebook prices. In a letter to Apple quoted by All Things Digital, Bromwich complained in turn of a "surprising and disappointing lack of communication from Apple."

The mythographer, novelist and historian Marina Warner writes about sea monsters and "the monstrous imagination," which she says "revels in excess and assemblage; tricephalous and multilimbed, with arthropod and reptilian features such as ruffs, tusks, fangs, tentacles, and jaws, many of these primordial monsters are hybrids defying nature. They belong to dark places, those underworlds under land and sea — volcanoes, ocean abysses — because they embody our lack of understanding, and mirror it in their savagery and disorderly, heterogeneous asymmetries of shape."

Imagine how Robbie Travis felt. He waits tables at Libertine, a high-end restaurant just outside St. Louis, and his ex insisted on coming in just a few days after they'd broken up.

Like everyone else, waiters and waitresses have to show up for work on days they'd rather be anywhere else. But it's especially tough to shrug off a bad mood in a job where people expect you to greet them gladly.

"You have to fake it a little bit," Travis says. "That's what pays the bills."

When I've asked servers lately how they were doing, the answers ranged from "hanging in there" to "excellent — no, great!" No one has come out and said they were lousy.

But when I asked what it's like to have to wait on people when they've been distracted by bad news, every one of them had a story.

"I've had plenty of bad days. I've had deaths in the family," says Emily Nevius, a waitress at Longfellow Grill in Minneapolis. "But it's work and you put your work face on."

Similarly, Laura Abusager, who has waited tables in Bloomington, Ill., for the past five years, says she tries to put on a "poker face" when she's dealing with issues in the rest of her life. She feels like her work doesn't suffer, but she says her coworkers can always tell when things are going wrong at home or in relationships.

The customers, too. "I feel like I get better tips when I'm in a good mood," Abusager says, "and when I'm in a bad mood, it's like they can sense it."

Restaurant owners and managers know servers who can be fun and flirty or at least chatty and attentive not only get better tips, but add to the quality of the dining out experience in a way that's crucial to the bottom line. (Indeed, psychological research supports the idea that friendlier waiters get better tips.)

Except for real regulars, customers don't know about their waiter's life and don't want to know about it, says Meredith Berkowitz, Travis' coworker at Libertine.

"We do meetings here where they tell us to leave our problems at home," says Davee Crain, a waiter at Geno's East pizzeria in Chicago.

Performance matters. There's an old cliche about people who wait tables all being aspiring actors, but it's clear that acting is a big part of their day jobs.

"It's an acting job," Crain says. "It's a mask."

Waiters who are having a really bad day can always borrow a trick from Ann Patchett.

"Even if you make mistakes — you forget to put in their orders or you put in the wrong order or you drop their drinks on their heads, which I did once — you can tell them it's your first day," the novelist told a St. Louis audience during her current book tour. "Even if you've been doing it a long time, if you tell them it's your first day, they'll give you a 50 percent tip."