In our time, politics and culture are increasingly oriented to the national scale on the one hand, and the immediate neighborhood on the other. A book, The Increasingly United States, by Daniel J. Hopkins, highlights this. However, in my view, besides […]
I always thought of Dick Dale as a local phenomenon, but his recent death got national coverage. The most thorough and best article was one in The New Yorker, a magazine which might well have turned up its nose during […]
I was young in the early Sixties, when the cultural rivalry between Los Angeles and San Francisco was strong and active. Jack Smith, for Los Angeles, and Herb Caen, for San Francisco, used to feud regularly in their newspaper columns […]
It has often been proposed to split California into two states. In the past, these proposals generally agreed on dividing Northern California from Southern California; the cultural differential between the two was strong in the Kennedy years. The reader may […]
While my wife and I were on a road trip recently, we had a rented car where we had not taken the time to learn how to operate the Sirius XM satellite radio system. So we had a country station […]