We all owe our lives to someone’s vision and someone else’s blind spot, but it’s seldom quite so literal: I owe my existence to that tumor and the sight lines that developed around it.
It was a momentous decision, not only for Lawrence and the university but also for science—and, arguably, for the rest of us. For while Lawrence would have found success at almost any institution, Berkeley was one of the few whose ambitions...
He wanted to be on air. So between the church programs, the vitamin programs, the chunks of time bought up in fifteen-minute slots, Art came on to announce what was up next. The station signed off at midnight, but by eleven o’clock no one...
California as land’s end, world’s end: It collapses underneath the weight of such a reading, as it must. It reveals the limits of our history—demographic history, social history, history of technology, our sense of this place as final...
We lift our glasses to the river that has been for a very long time not a river, the river that is reenchanting Los Angeles, the river that will soon power an enormous waterwheel, which will turn right here where we are standing.
It was just over a hundred years ago that “Through the Looking-Glass,” the second of Lewis Carroll’s two Alice books, was published, yet Carroll’s fantasy adventures into a little girl’s dream worlds have a wider, more responsive audience...
