The California Sunday Magazine

“In 2019, President Trump pardoned Army Lieutenant Clint Lorance, who was serving a 20-year sentence for ordering the murder of two Afghan civilians. To Lorance’s defenders, the act was long overdue. To members of his platoon, it was a gross miscarriage of justice.”

“The Life Care Center of Kirkland, Washington, was the first COVID hot spot in the U.S. Forty-six people associated with the nursing home died, exposing how ill-prepared we were for the pandemic — and how we take care of our elderly.”

“For 76 days, 9 million people in Wuhan slept, ate, and waited inside the largest quarantine in human history. Four people reveal what they saw and what happened after the lockdown ended.”

More migrants than ever are crossing the Colombia-Panama border to reach the U.S. Five days inside the Darién Gap, one of the most dangerous journeys in the world.

What the Democratic Party could learn from first-term Congresswoman Katie Porter.

Nicola Gobbo defended Melbourne’s most notorious criminals at the height of a 
gangland war. They didn’t know she had a secret.

“South of San Francisco, in a fertile corner of California that feeds much of the country, working families are sleeping in shelters and parking lots.”

“At Hackensack High School in New Jersey, where her family later moved, [Melina] Matsoukas was into photography and hip-hop. At home, she watched the films of Mira Nair, The Color Purple, All About My Mother, The Royal Tenenbaums, West Side Story, Belly, and her absolute favorite, Julie Dash’s 1991 Daughters of the Dust, an impressionistic movie about three generations of Gullah women on South Carolina’s St. Helena Island. It was also the first feature directed by a black woman to be released widely in theaters. ‘The queen of Black women filmmakers [is] Dash,’ Matsoukas told the website Shadow and Act in August. ‘She was a tremendous influence … on my voice.'”

The long, loving search for Betsy, bovine escape artist.

Journalist Mark Arax sifts through the aftermath of California’s deadliest wildfire to expose the governmental negligence, forest mismanagement, unregulated urban growth, and PG&E’s corruption, that put thousands of people in the path of the blaze.