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Students Sink Their Teeth Into the Search for a Meat Alternative
That Wagyu porterhouse makes any carnivore salivate, but tasty as many people find it, there’s no doubt that meat exacts a price both on human health and the environment. A number of studies confirm links between red meat consumption and disease, including extensive research in Britain and Germany concluding that vegetarians are 40 percent less […]
Greetings From Atascadero: A Reporter Confronts His Facebook Foes
This is the third installment in our series, Greetings from California, in which intrepid writers file dispatches exploring the untrodden, unappreciated, or just unusual corners of the Golden State. Last year, frequent contributor Glen Martin faced the ghosts of his past when he returned to his hometown of Atascadero, California. (Check out previous letters including […]
Toward a Common Wealth
If you’ve been paying attention to the economic news you’ve probably noticed pundits using an ecological metaphor: Green shoots are sprouting. It’s a nice image. First the blackened earth of economic collapse, then tender leaves of recovery pushing up from below. If they said instead that we were seeing the early signs of infection, that wouldn’t work so well. Economic growth is never portrayed as the vine that strangles, the multiplication of locusts—it’s always the heroic sprout. The metaphor must jibe with an assumption so fundamental that few stop to consider it: Growth is good.
Stalking a Killer
Will Jay Keasling’s team of synthetic biologists and Bill and Melinda Gates’s foundation find a low-cost treatment for one of the world’s deadliest diseases? Jay Keasling carries a picture in his mind of a place he has never seen, of children he has never met. But it is an image that radically changed how he felt […]
The Skinny on School Lunches
How to get kids to eat their vegetables. Elementary students in the Berkeley Unified School District have some strange eating habits. No Pop-Tarts, no cheese-flavored Doritos, not even those little doughnuts with the powdered sugar. They prefer weeditos—their own version of burritos. At recess, the kids run to the garden—all 16 of the schools in the […]
Valley Fever
The Bay Area titans of tech are having a rough week, at least in the press. While news organizations reported on the billions of dollars in taxes that Apple has allegedly avoided paying by maintaining large foreign subsidiaries, the New Yorker’s George Packer pondered Silicon Valley trickle-down socio-economic theory. Indeed, Packer cites a 2011 paper […]
LandPaths Takes a Road Less Traveled to Community Building
LandPaths is a highly successful Sonoma County conservancy-cum-outreach program that fills a variety of needs: maintaining and restoring open space reserves, connecting kids and families to the outdoors through hikes, camp outs and paddle trips, and supporting summer camps and colloquia. Though the group sponsors trips to the Sierra, the main emphasis is on the […]
To Hell and Back: A Paradise Educator Reckons with the Fire
That day started out as any other for Ambrosia Krinsky. She woke up in her Chico home, dropped her four-year-old off at day-care, then drove up The Skyway, the road that connects Chico to the smaller city of Paradise. Even before she got into town, she knew something was amiss: The sky was turning red. […]
The View from the Trenches
By Glen Martin and Photos by Marcus HanschenTwo years into the pandemic, SARS-CoV-2 continues to defy predictions. At the date of this writing, the Omicron variant—as contagious as ultra-transmissible viruses such as measles, if somewhat less severe than earlier COVID variants—continues to spread rapidly. While the surge appears to be ebbing in some areas of the United States, hospitalizations remain high and, nationally, about 2,500 deaths are reported daily.
Q&A: Novelist Glen David Gold Discusses the Challenges of Memoir
The latest issue of CALIFORNIA contains a chapter-length excerpt from I Will Be Complete, the new memoir by acclaimed novelist and UC Berkeley alum Glen David Gold (Carter Beats the Devil, Sunnyside). The book begins with this epigraphic note on its accuracy: “My mother assures me none of this happened.” Gold’s relationship with said mother […]
Wine Is Money: How the Rich Are Changing Napa Valley’s Drink
Stu Smith and his brother, Charlie, put down a $500 option on about 200 acres of land on the slopes of Spring Mountain in 1971, eventually purchasing the property for $70,000. The views of the adjacent Napa Valley were stunning, and Smith, who had developed a passion for wine while completing his undergraduate degree in […]
Editor’s Note: We’re on the Road to…Somewhere
When I was a kid, it seemed like all adults smoked. Cigarette butts littered the sidewalks, the stench of stale tobacco clung to the upholstery, and ashtrays were everywhere. We made ashtrays in art class as gifts for our parents. Back then, people smoked in their offices, their cars, and on airplanes. On airplanes! In […]
