Search Results for: California

Why Are So Many Inmates Attempting Suicide at the California Institution for Women?

Longreads Pick

Something is driving female inmates at the California Institution for Women to attempt suicide at a rate five times higher than the state and national averages. Prevention is not a priority.

Source: LA Weekly
Published: Jul 20, 2016
Length: 14 minutes (3,592 words)

California Notes

Longreads Pick

Didion’s thoughts about California from when she covered the Patty Hearst trial in 1976.

Published: May 4, 2016
Length: 9 minutes (2,491 words)

High Crime in California Dairy Country

In the California Sunday Magazine, Tessa Stuart writes the gripping story of a criminal who worked the people who work the fields in California’s rural interior, and the detective agency who raced to catch him. The story has all the markings of a Netflix original series, except in place of drugs or gold, the loot is cattle and farmers’ money.

The last deal they did together was far and away the biggest — to the tune of about $450,000. Arno bought 185 head of cattle and wrote Jamie a check for the total. But instead of taking them to his cattlemen clients, Arno drove down to the Tulare County Stockyards and put the cows up at the public auction, where they fetched a price that was $300 less per head than the check he’d written Jamie. It bounced.

Jamie, Rocky eventually learned, wasn’t the first or last dairyman Arno scammed. Arno was buying cows from different cattlemen, taking the money he made at the auction and using it to buy more, or accepting payment for a certain number of cows from a farmer and delivering only a fraction of those promised. “It was a giant Ponzi scheme,” Rocky says. “These guys would start calling him, ‘Hey, dude, where’s the rest of my cows?’ and he’d say, ‘Oh, they’re coming. The truck broke down in Texas or New Mexico or … ’ He’d come up with some cock-and-bull story.”

Rocky found that even as Arno was failing to deliver the dairymen’s cows, he was flying the same dairymen around in private planes on trips up to Oregon or over to Las Vegas on a lark, with fuel and piloting services he also hadn’t paid for. At the time, the dairymen weren’t talking about Arno among themselves; the fear was that if they exposed Arno’s fraud to one dairyman, Arno wouldn’t be able to extract money from that person to pay back the others.

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The Many Deaths of California

When “the big one” strikes California, the state isn’t going to fall into the Ocean the way so many Arizonans who want beachfront property like to imagine. But there are many ways to die. In The New York Times, author Daniel Duane writes about what he calls the Golden State’s “sense of unraveling” and its associated “profound mood of loss.” Drought. Forest fire. Air pollution. Gentrification. Loss of open space. Skyrocketing real estate costs and traffic and sweeping changes in values. The California Duane and many natives love is rapidly disappearing, but it always has been. For everyone who feels conflicted and paralyzed about loving a place that’s being loved to death, Duane offer a reappraisal of California, change, and the way we think about place.

Confusing one’s own youth with the youth of the world is a common human affliction, but California has been changing so fast for so long that every new generation gets to experience both a fresh version of the California dream and, typically by late middle-age, its painful death.

For Gold Rush prospectors, of course, that dream was about shiny rocks in the creeks — at least until 300,000 people from all over the world, in the space of 10 years, overran the state and snatched up every nugget. Insane asylums filled with failed argonauts and the dream was dead — unless you were John Muir walking into Yosemite Valley in 1868. Ad hoc genocide, committed by miners, settlers and soldiers, had so devastated the ancient civilizations of the Sierra Nevada that Muir could see those mountains purely as an expression of God’s glory.

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Welcome to Maternity Hotel California

Longreads Pick

A look at the underground birth tourism industry, in which foreigners visit another country to have a baby. Carlson tells the story of a Chinese couple who paid $35,000 to stay at a maternity hotel in Los Angeles and have their baby and give him U.S. citizenship.

Source: Rolling Stone
Published: Aug 19, 2015
Length: 29 minutes (7,311 words)

The Mechanics of a ‘California Accent’

Regional dialects in English are largely informed by the particular way people in different geographic areas make their vowel sounds. Consonants can inform the sounds of vowels, but are largely static; going from an “F” sound to a “T” sound is a huge leap, whereas vowels are a little bit fluid, bleeding into each other. The entire game is to make sure you have enough difference between vowel sounds so that words can be distinguished from one another. But the specific sounds you make? Not so important, as long as they get the idea across of what word you’re trying to say.

A key change in the California Shift is what’s called the cot/caught merger. Northeasterners and Midwesterners pronounce those words differently, giving the former an “ah” sound and the latter an “aw” sound. “Californians do not,” says Eckert, who is originally from New York. “They have no idea. That vowel is almost completely merged. Think ‘mawwm’ instead of ‘mom.’”

Vowel sounds work like those sliding puzzle games where you have to unscramble a picture by sliding one piece of it at a time. As soon as you move one piece, you’re left with an empty space behind you, which has to be filled by something else. Californians dropped the “cot” vowel sound, pronouncing it like “caught” instead. So something had to fill that space. “The California Shift is this kind of combined change in the pronunciation of short vowels,” says Kennedy. The easiest way to think about it? Look at the words kit, dress, and trap. In the California Shift, “kit” becomes “ket”, “dress” becomes “drass”, and “trap” becomes “trop”.

Dan Nosowitz writing for Atlas Obscura about the linguistics behind the “pop punk voice” employed by bands like Blink-182.

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The Brothers Behind the California Bungalow

Charles Greene (left) and Henry Greene. Photo by Wikimedia Commons

Although they had no way of knowing it, the Hartwigs had bought a remnant of the Cora C. Hollister House, a Craftsman-style bungalow built in 1904 by Charles and Henry Greene, two of Southern California’s most admired and transformational residential architects. “In their 20 years of practice,” wrote the late Greene & Greene historian Randell L. Makinson, “they established an American architecture so fresh that it spread from Pasadena to all of Southern California and then over the entire country as the ‘California Bungalow’ style.” Artists in the truest sense of the word, the brothers created whole environments—livable spaces that harmonized with their surroundings. In the early 20th century, Greene & Greene had a thriving practice in Southern California, designing landmark Arts & Crafts residences like the Gamble and Blacker houses in Pasadena, the town in which their firm was based.

Steve Vaught writing in Los Angeles Magazine. Vaught’s piece follows the the unlikely journey of Greene & Greene’s Cora C. Hollister House, which was erected on Hollywood soil in 1904 and later made its way to the ranchlands of western Canada.

The California bungalow—a residential architectural style that took the country by storm in the early years of the twentieth century and remained popular until 1939—was simple in design. Form followed function, structural elements were exposed, and outdoor living was emphasized.  “Greene & Greene more or less invented the California Bungalow as a distinctive style,” according to Leon Whiteson of the Los Angeles Times

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The Bestseller That Warned Us About California’s Water Problem

When most of us think of California’s irrigated acres, we visualize lush fields growing tomatoes, artichokes, strawberries, and grapes. But in California, the biggest user of underground water, more irrigation water is used for feed crops and pasture than for all these specialty crops combined. In fact, 42 percent of California’s irrigation goes to produce livestock. Not only are water tables dropping, but in some parts of California the earth itself is sinking as groundwater is drawn out. According to a 1980 government survey, 5,000 square miles of the rich San Joaquin Valley have already sunk, in some areas as much as 29 feet.

The fact that water is free encourages this mammoth waste. Whoever has the $450 an acre needed to level the land and install pumping equipment can take groundwater for nothing. The replacement cost—the cost of an equal amount of water when present wells have run dry—is not taken into consideration. This no-price, no-plan policy leads to the rapid depletion of our resources, bringing the day closer when alternatives must be found—but at the same time postponing any search for alternatives.

—From 1991’s twentieth anniversary edition of Frances Moore Lappé’s Diet for a Small Planet, the bestselling book first published in 1971. She argues hunger is “human made,” and highlights the environmental effects of livestock production, noting it takes 2,500 gallons of water to produce one pound of steak.

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California’s Water Crisis: A Reading List

Longreads Pick

Here are five perspectives on California’s water war, from one journalist’s report from the farms of the Central Valley to an ever-resonant essay on water by Joan Didion, written 35 years ago.

Source: Longreads
Published: Dec 11, 2014

California’s Water Crisis: A Reading List

When it finally rains, it pours. With all the focus this week on the “storm of the decade,” it’s easy to forget that California has experienced its most severe drought in the last 1,200 years. In fact, growing up in California, everyone always told me to conserve water — from my parents to my teachers to my camp counselors. We’re in a drought, they would say. As a child, I could never quite grasp what that meant, as I lived in a suburb on the San Francisco Peninsula, seemingly far from the regions that relied on water to live and work, to produce the crops we ate — that I ate.

Here are five perspectives on California’s water war, from one journalist’s report from the farms of the Central Valley to an ever-resonant essay on water by Joan Didion, written 35 years ago.

1. “Zero Percent Water.” (Alan Heathcock, Matter, September 2014)

Alan Heathcock travels to the Central Valley: one of the most productive agricultural regions in the world — and ground zero of the water crisis. In his “tour of destruction,” he meets owners and workers on century-old family farms and orchards, documenting the stories and hardships of a community struggling in one of the worst droughts in the state’s history. As one couple, living on farmland for 38 years, says: “This is our broken dream.” Read more…