What is California?

Rigel Robinson is a member of the Berkeley City Council, representing District 7 (encompassing UC Berkeley).

As the region is growing, as the state is growing, we should be educating more Californians…

Justin Ray is the writer of the “Essential California” newsletter at the Los Angeles Times.

I want to stretch the limits. I want to write about things that you may not have heard of, be that some tria…

Kristina Cho is the creator of the food blog and Instagram feed Eat Cho Food and the author of the cookbook Mooncakes & Milk Bread.

Having the opportunity to live in this incredible neighborhood in Ca…

Louis Virtel is a writer on Jimmy Kimmel Live! and a co-host of the Crooked Media podcast Keep It.

I remain shocked that I could meet a ton of people who are like me here. I really thought that was a …

Ken Layne is the creator of Desert Oracle magazine and Desert Oracle Radio.

I like a mythological landscape, you know? If you can figure out how to live in a landscape like that–at least for my temper…

Stacy Corless is the District 5 supervisor for Mono County and past board chair of the Rural County Representatives of California.

What we’ve seen over the last couple of years in a county like Shasta…

Baratunde Thurston is the creator and host of the podcast How to Citizen, the author of the book How to Be Black, and a founding partner of the news and commentary website Puck. 

The choices that Cali…

Daniel Swain, Ph.D., is a climate scientist in the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at UCLA, the Capacity Center for Climate and Weather Extremes at the National Center for Atmospheric…

Dr. Monica Gandhi is the director of the UCSF Center for AIDS Research (CFAR) and the Medical Director of the HIV Clinic at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital ("Ward 86.")

We’re all angry becau…

What is California? winds up its first season with its inaugural Year in Review episode! Host Stu VanAirsdale is joined by special guests Gustavo Arellano (columnist and podcaster, Los Angeles Times)…

David Mas Masumoto is an author and farmer at Masumoto Family Farm in Del Rey, CA.

Industrial agriculture didn’t care about story. The work that I did—the work that Sun Crest [peaches] sort of launche…

Marcos Breton is the California Opinion Editor for McClatchy, based in Sacramento.

As long as I’m sitting in the chair that I’m in, I want to talk about those things and write about those things hone…

Jaime Lowe is the author of Breathing Fire: Female Inmate Firefighters on the Front Lines of California's Wildfires and a contributing writer to The New York Times Magazine.

For a long time, a stereo…

Elaine Howle is the California State Auditor.

I don’t particularly like that characterization [“scathing audit”] What our audits are intended to do is—as I’ve said to staff and at legislative hearings…

Sonja Trauss is the founder and executive director of YIMBY (Yes In My Back Yard).

“NIMBYism is something that arises instinctively in response to a proposed change. People just do it. They want it. …

Miriam Pawel is the author of The Browns of California, The Union of Their Dreams, and The Crusades of Cesar Chavez.

Part of what I think is important about my work is that I try to translate Californ…

Erika D. Smith is a columnist for the Los Angeles Times.

I do think there’s a lot of geography tied to people’s values and interests. I’ve enjoyed exploring different parts of the state and getting to…

David L. Ulin is the editor of the Library of America's Joan Didion: The 1960s and 70s, the editor of Air/Light literary journal, and the former books editor for the Los Angeles Times. 

I think [Joan …

Michael Tubbs is the former mayor of Stockton and the author of the upcoming book, The Deeper the Roots: A Memoir of Hope and Home.

Stockton is representative of where California intersects—or where C…

Karina Longworth is the creator and host of the podcast You Must Remember This and the author of the book Seduction: Sex, Lies and Stardom in Howard Hughes’s Hollywood.

I definitely have memories of b…