California
Story Stream
California's Other Dodgers February 28, 2025
The smoke from fire-ravaged Los Angeles has cleared, but a thick pall clouds the funding for fire recovery efforts. While insurance companies, landowners and taxpayers will surely foot most of the bill, it is likely that money solicited by Mayor Kare...
San Francisco, Beautiful Lie February 28, 2025
SAN FRANCISCO – EARLY JANUARYThe question of where Northern California begins is a famously contentious question among Californians. Here there is a dispute between the Bay Area people and my people, the Southern Californians. Southern Californians b...
Stephen A. Smith for President February 21, 2025
In the spirit of full disclosure, I have met Stephen A. Smith, although I doubt that he remembers it. Back in 2011, I was working for ESPN, helping to start a Web site called Grantland. Our offices were in L.A. Live, a sprawling commercial theme park...
Desperado Dadaism February 18, 2025
Lubbock, Texas is almost exactly five hours from Dallas, Albuquerque, Oklahoma City, and El Paso. It’s home to Texas Tech University, the National Cowboy Symposium, and frequent dust storms and tornadoes. In 1951, the still-unexplained “Lubbock Light...
It's Always High School February 18, 2025
The writer Elizabeth Ellen earned my admiration in October of 2022 when, as the Deputy Editor of literary journal Hobart Pulp, she defied the then-reigning orthodoxy of cancellations and speech-policing and published an interview containing taboo, fo...
The Slow Death of the California Dream January 15, 2025
Thousands of Californians have lost their homes and livelihoods to an ongoing inferno. I write this while tracking the flames approaching my property. For many of us, the fires are both a natural disaster and a deathly reminder of the catastrophic co...
Want to Be Happier? January 02, 2025
When Sahil Bloom went out for a drink one evening in 2021, his friend said something that upended his life: “You’re going to see your parents 15 more times before they die.”That calculation—based on his parents’ ages (mid-60s at the time) and his inf...
The Californication of Texas August 12, 2024
When I first moved to Texas in 2006, I spent several months living with my in-laws in Georgetown, a quiet town of about 46,000 people located 30 miles north of Austin. There was a giant house in their neighbourhood that looked different from all the ...
Game Changer August 06, 2024
Following his team’s 80–26 loss to the California School for the Deaf’s Cubs, A. C. Swadling, a star football player from the opposing school, Faith Baptist, called out to each of the victors, channeling the feathery-haired villainy of a John Hughes–...
Richard Nixon’s California Cool June 12, 2024
It’s a canonical image of Richard Nixon, weirdo:Marching on the beach in the most subversive year in American history, 1969, the new president parallels the Southern California surf in wingtips. In a year of cults, communism, and killing celebrities,...
The Outlaw Tales of Peso Pluma June 05, 2024
Peso Pluma can’t decide which tattoo—his second of the day, after an image of the Virgin Mary—he wants emblazoned on his shin. Initially, the wiry 24-year-old Mexican singer, rapper, and record label CEO settles on the cosmic Vivienne Westwood “Love”...
My First Year in Texas April 03, 2024
I’m reflecting on the good, the bad and the surprising of my first year in Texas. I took a huge risk moving my business and my family away from California. How has it gone?I had a tough entry into my new life. Moving is insanely stressful. So much so...
Company Town January 05, 2024
Scotia, California, in Humboldt County, is a tiny place, smaller than a square mile, tucked just below U.S. Highway 101, which runs from Oregon to Southern California. Most people on the 101 drive right by. “It would be a good place if you were in wi...
