Search Results for: California
State of Being: Envisioning California
“California, the best of it, is what lives and prospers in a liminal, unnamed space—somewhere between dreams, disappointments, and recalibration.” An essayist describes how California—Los Angeles and San Francisco in particular—moves through you.
Searching for California’s Lost Viking Treasure Ship
Legends say that a 16th century Spanish galleon traveled into what’s now California’s arid interior and got stranded, leaving its hull and cargo buried in the desert for modern treasure-hunters to find. Or not; the story isn’t verified. No one agrees on the details, whether it was Spanish or Viking, in California or Mexico. People still search for it. What’s real? Should people believe any of this?
California Defends Itself

California’s best weapon if war does come might be one beloved by Trump: the lawsuit. The man who would likely do the suing is a relatively unknown Los Angeles congressman: Xavier Becerra. He was not among those who won an election on November 8, but with Harris leaving for the Senate, the state attorney general’s seat was open. Brown chose Becerra, effectively making him the top law enforcement officer in the nation’s largest state.
Becerra, who is of Mexican heritage, wasted no time in letting his constituents know where he stood on the results of the presidential election. “If you want to take on a forward-leading state that is prepared to defend its rights and interests, then come at us,” Becerra said. “I believe with this nomination I have a chance to let California know I got their back.” That kind of confrontational rhetoric quickly led to suggestions that Becerra would become the national leader of the movement against Trump, with The Nation calling him “the most important appointment since the election.”
In Newsweek, Alexander Nazaryan details the many ideological and legal fronts on which California and President Trump clash, and the ways Californians are resisting and preparing for future federal incursions.
California V. Trump: The Fight Begins for Health Care, Immigration and the Future of America
Many Californians reject Trump’s values, policy and thinking about climate change, immigration and equality, and they are sending a clear message: they will resist. With the sixth largest economy in the world that contributes billions to the federal budget and huge amounts of America’s domestic food supply, California wields a lot of power and offers a vision of America’s future. But can it influence federal decisions?
‘We Have a Lot of Firepower — and We Will Persevere’: California vs. Trump

The journalist and historian Carey McWilliams once called California “the great exception.” McWilliams was writing in the 1940s as he tried to make sense of the first 100 years of the state’s turbulent history. But McWilliams’s idea that California is a singular place, a nation-state unto itself, has never felt truer than it does now.
On the same night that Americans narrowly elected Donald Trump, Californians voted overwhelmingly in favor of his rival, Hillary Clinton. They sent 39 Democrats to the House of Representatives out of 53 seats. They elected Kamala Harris, a liberal Democrat whose father is Jamaican and whose mother is Indian, to the U.S. Senate. They gave Democrats supermajorities in the state Legislature. They passed ballot propositions to legalize recreational use of marijuana, raise the tobacco tax, ban high-capacity magazines, relax parole rules for nonviolent felons, increase transparency in the legislative process, repeal the decades-old limits on bilingual education, and extend higher income taxes on the wealthy. Elsewhere in the country, the Democratic Party lay in tatters. In California, it was dominant.
In the first piece in a series at The California Sunday Magazine, Andy Kroll sets out to explore the relationship between California and Donald Trump’s Washington.
California Dreaming
A profile of restaurant chef Jessica Koslow, who owns Sqirl, a hip L.A. restaurant that serves “grain bowls and hashes and salads” that “scream with acid and spice and herbs and the funk of fermentation.” Bull looks at the fetishization of “California food” and the lure of living in Southern California.
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