Trending Topics
Six Months After the End of the World 
Suzanne Guldimann, July 11, 2025 0  
For many, the devastation created by the Palisades Fire felt like the end of the world. Six months later, most of the fire debris has been removed, but stark reminders of the damage remain, as residents and local governments...
The Fire Followers 
Suzanne Guldimann, July 11, 2025 0  
As communities struggle to rebuild and recover from the devastation of the Palisades fire, nature is also in the process of regenerating.  When Topanga Canyon Boulevard reopened at the end of May, drivers were met not with bare hillsides...
Amusement Piers 
Suzanne Guldimann, June 13, 2025 0  
A pier is a folly, a highway to nowhere. Whether lined with fishermen or filled with the cries and clattering of a roller coaster, whether thick with the aromas of hotdogs and fries or freshly gutted fish, they are...
California Mustard: Beauty or Bane 
Suzanne Guldimann, May 30, 2025 0  
A beautiful but unwelcome tide of golden blossom is sweeping over the Santa Monica Mountains this year. The late—and light—rainy season has resulted in few native wildflowers but an abundance of mustard, an opportunistic invasive that thrives even in...
19 Jul 2025
Books & Such

These Truths 

Jimmy P. Morgan, July 14, 2023 0 5 min read  
In the introduction to her marvelous single volume political history of the United States—These Truths: A History of the United States (2018)—historian Jill Lepore shares a documented moment which illustrates the very nature of the founding of our country....
Books & Such

The Wager 

Jimmy P. Morgan, June 30, 2023 2 7 min read  
In the early twentieth century, nearly one quarter of the earth’s land mass and nearly one quarter of the world’s human population was, in one way or another, under the dominion of the British Empire. Building the largest power...
Books & Such

Behaving Badly II 

Jimmy P. Morgan, June 16, 2023 0 8 min read  
After penning biographies of four individual Supreme Court Justices—Sandra Day O’Connor, Antonin Scalia, Sonia Sotomayor, and John Roberts—CNN’s Senior Supreme Court Analyst Joan Biskupic has now produced a scathing indictment of the current Court and its 6-3 conservative majority;...
Books & Such

Behaving Badly 

Jimmy P. Morgan, June 2, 2023 0 9 min read  
In The Shadow Docket: How the Supreme Court Uses Stealth Rulings to Amass Power and Undermine the Republic (2023), constitutional scholar Stephen Vladek argues that since the mid-2010s, the Supreme Court of the United States has been deploying their...
Books & Such

Beans II 

Jimmy P. Morgan, May 19, 2023 0 7 min read  
In the fictional town of Chamisaville in the Southwestern United States, during the Great Depression of the 1930s, Cipriano García—stark naked save for a pair of boots on his feet and a rose in his hand—stood next to the...