Connecting California, Featured »

All California Is Wine Country–and the Wildfires Make It More So

By | October 23, 2017

A wildfire burns behind a winery in Santa Rosa, California on Oct. 14, 2017. Photo courtesy of AP/Jae C. Hong.The deaths and damage of this year’s Wine Country wildfires are a historic disaster. They are also the product of an epic California success.
That triumph is the growth of the wine industry, which has come to dominate our state’s land, culture, and image. Indeed, it’s now …

Featured, Poetry »

I dream about you during the work week #poem

By | October 20, 2017

I dream about you during the work week with teddy bears in my mouth &
you with a sword impossible to own. The second sentence is love isn’t
loving anyone for less than your entire life if you want your life to last that
long. We come together for the sake of not knowing what else to do. The
words are the ones, along with the sounds, that define …

Connecting California, Featured »

The Delicious Transparency of the Hamburgers

By | October 16, 2017

California could use a concert hall like Hamburg’s Elbphilharmonie.
The signature structure of 21st century Germany sits atop an old pier above a dramatic bend in the Elbe River. Its creative design features performance space for the philharmonic, a dramatically curved escalator, and a dozen different public spaces for people to gather and enjoy spectacular city views.
But what California needs more than this stunning new …

Essay, Featured »

Is India’s Rise Creating a Global Health Crisis?

By | October 13, 2017

A 59-year-old man from India, who was living in Sweden, visited New Delhi in late 2007, where he was hospitalized for an infection and treated with an array of antibiotics. Once he was back in Sweden, in early 2008, he was diagnosed with a urinary tract infection that could not be cured with the antibiotics that are considered a last resort against resistant infections. When …

Featured, Poetry »

My hands are frostbitten, his bear the burns from last summer #poem

By | October 13, 2017

His ardor turned into an antelope-shaped ice sculpture, its taste and shape memorialized
at film festivals all over Spain. Hers fossilized into ambivalent scorn, trapped under a notebook in Arkansas.
Whenever you wish to, you may conjure me. If I were little beside these digital images,
serving as half-erased traces of whatever latest—or oldest—interpretation you attempt to
inscribe in pixilated ink.
Global landscapes are not altered alone, or via …

Featured, What It Means to Be American »

The Religious Roots of America’s Love for Camping

By | October 12, 2017

Summer 1868 passed as an unremarkable season at Saranac Lake in New York’s Adirondack Mountains. The weather was fine, the scenery delightful, and the usual array of 200 to 300 recreational hunters and anglers passed through the small settlement on their way into the wild lands beyond. The summers of 1869 and 1870, however, were an altogether different story. The weather was more or less …

Essay, Featured »

Can American Jews Be White Nationalists?

By | October 11, 2017

Stephen Miller and I have a few things in common.
Both Jewish, we were raised upper-middle class in comfortable, liberal suburbia (he, Santa Monica; me, outside Boston). We both rebelled against the stifling, progressive conformity of our respective communities by embracing a contrarian, at times combative, conservative politics. The September 11 attacks played a major role in shaping our political outlooks, as did attending liberal …

Connecting California, Featured »

My Doubts About Single-Payer Just Show I’m Sick in the Head

By | October 9, 2017

I really should be 100 percent supportive of the effort to establish a single-payer health system in California. Because all the best Californians are for it.
California’s next governor, Gavin Newsom, has made single-payer a central tenet of his campaign. America’s next president, California U.S. Senator Kamala Harris, just sprinkled her stardust on it, declaring that single-payer was the “morally right” and “smart” choice.
So …

Featured, Poetry »

We heard the region was a rainshadow, where mountains/ caught each passing cloud #poem

By | October 6, 2017

 
Jordan Nakamura was born and raised in Hawaii and lives in Los Angeles. His work has been published in The Curator.

Connecting California, Featured »

Could the “Edge City” of Santa Rosa Become a Center of California?

By | October 2, 2017

Adjust your California maps: The little dot marking Santa Rosa needs to be a lot bigger.
Dramatic changes in housing, aging, transportation, and criminal justice are altering the Golden State’s geography, and no place in California stands to benefit more than Santa Rosa.
The charms of this Sonoma County seat have been sung at least since 1875, when the legendary horticulturist Luther Burbank, who created new …

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