Connecting California

Do you worry about the future of California?
Then you should worry about Salinas. Because if this Monterey County town of 155,000 can’t build itself a brighter future, it’s hard to imagine other struggling places doing the same.
“Rich in Land. Rich in Values. Ripe With Opportunity,” reads the slogan on a city website, and that’s no exaggeration. Salinas might be the richest poor city in California. …

California faces a peculiar overpopulation problem: We have too many superheroes.
Missed this news in The Daily Planet? Fear not—your ignorance is understandable. California is not as closely associated with superheroes as New York City (and its fictional doppelgangers), where Superman, Spiderman, and Batman all base operations.
So it’s easy to miss the menace that hangs over the Golden State: California has become dangerously dependent on superheroes.
This …

California has an official state flower (poppy), an official state insect (the dogface Butterfly), even an official state theater (the Pasadena Playhouse). But no official state sport.
Unless you count the great Californian pastime of overestimating our population growth.
It probably should be enough that we’re the most populous state in the Union. But California’s own collective identity—for good and for bad—is so tied up with our …

Californians are bad at remembering things, especially about California.
Our memories are so gone that our politicians, from Gov. Brown on down, can’t stop reminding us that just a few years ago, we were in a recession and a budget crisis. So now—even with housing prices soaring, unemployment under 7 percent, and the state budget in surplus—they say they must keep higher education and social …

Californians, I regret to inform you that your diploma is being held up. You won’t be able to graduate.
You flunked higher education.
Another state budget, accompanied by an eight-month-long controversy over the University of California, demonstrated once again that we Californians don’t have a clue about what our public universities mean to the state. Because if we did, we wouldn’t make them beg us …

What’s the fastest way from Berkeley to Bakersfield?
Just flip to the second disc of the album.
California’s disparate regions are nearly impossible to connect. But over the past two years, two music bands—with overlapping members—have pulled off the trick, issuing three albums that examine today’s state, thoughtfully and lovingly, from its coast to its inland deserts, from north to south. It is precisely by exploring the …

I hate to play the blame game, but let’s face facts: This drought is all your fault.
You are watering outdoors too much. You kept your lawn when you should have taken it out. You tore out your lawn—and put in hard surfaces that will contribute to the heat island effect, making the drought even worse.
And you, with the beautiful swimming pool you keep refilling before …

After sitting through a matinee of the new earthquake disaster movie San Andreas, I experienced my own dark seismic fantasy: as the Big One hits California, a giant hole opens up in the ground under Burbank, and Warner Bros. disappears into it forever.
I had been prepared—by the foreshocks of advance publicity—for Warner’s San Andreas to be a dumb film full of pseudoscientific nonsense about …

Are you a Kamala or a Loretta?
Attorney General Kamala Harris and Congresswoman Loretta Sanchez—the two leading candidates for the state’s open U.S. Senate seat next year—confront Californians with a choice. But it’s not a choice about competing policies or political visions. Californians don’t have political arguments about what we believe anymore. Harris and Sanchez are both Democrats, and we’re a one-party state (Republicans are dying …

Living in an exceptional place is hard work. Especially when your place needs big changes.
Californians know this well. We feel such an obligation to live up to our reputation as “The Great Exception” among U.S. states, as the writer Carey McWilliams famously called us, that we routinely embrace novel schemes that other American places run from, like a $70 billion high-speed rail project.
People in Tunisia, …