More beer fans are discovering the delights of the Single Hop Series from Hermitage Brewing Company, established in San Jose in 2009. The Single Hop Series is a line of IPA offerings that seeks to inform beer drinkers about hops, one of the essential ingredients in beer that produce many of its aromas and flavors.

Downtown San Jose shoppers have a lot more to look at with the opening of Japanese minimalist shop Muji last week in the plaza next to the Fairmont Hotel. Described by company execs as a lifestyle store, the 4,590-square-foot retail space offers more than 2,000 items, from housewares and clothing to furniture.

Karen Gabay practically grew up with her ballet company, signing on straight out of high school with what was then the San Jose Cleveland Ballet 34 years ago. She was 18, already groomed from performing with a semiprofessional troupe in her hometown of San Diego.

Veggielution’s annual spring celebration, Avant Garden, returns on Friday with local chefs creating dishes from produce harvested on the urban farm, craft brews and, new for this year, San Jose Made vendors.

Last week, the Menlo Park Planning Commission unanimously passed a plan for Facebook’s new West Campus. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and legendary architect Frank Gehry have been collaborating on a design for this new structure over the past several months, and it now looks that their vision will come to fruition.

While most cities in California have seen development stall in the last few years, thanks to the recession and the dissolution of state’s redevelopment agencies (RDAs), Willow Glen has become an outlier, a DIY business community.

Jane Austen’s novels are so noted for their insight into the manners and domestic proprieties of their age that it’s easy to forget how lively, indeed funny, her work is. An element of danger also arises: those idyllic country settings are really battlefields in which lone heroines square off against an array of Willoughbys, Wickhams and Crawfords.

The indian call center has become an unfortunate racist cliche, the place where robotlike workers perform outsourced American jobs, and even for many who don’t partake in churlish vitriol about “stolen” jobs, there is something undeniably surreal about being connected with a service person in South Asia.

More folks seem to be taking up homebrewing as a hobby based on feedback from local homebrew stores. The next step for some is exploring the possibility of joining a homebrew club. The American Homebrewers Association has a database of more than 1,000 registered homebrew clubs, including San Jose’s Almaden Brewers, Affinity Home Brewing Club, the Grain Trust and the longstanding Worts of Wisdom Homebrewers and Silicon Valley Sudzers, as well as Santa Clara’s the HeadQuarters and Santa Clara Valley Brewers.