From 1803 until 1890, a French worker who wanted to change jobs had to carry a small booklet, the *livret d'ouvrier*. Each employer wrote in it the date the worker was hired and the date they left, and a worker […]
In 1569 the Duke of Alba, governing the Netherlands for Philip II, asked the States General for three new taxes. The first, the Hundredth Penny, was a one-time levy of one percent on all property. The second, the Twentieth Penny, […]
In 1976 a double-hulled canoe named Hōkūleʻa sailed from Maui to Tahiti, about 2,500 miles, without a compass, a chart, or a sextant. Its navigator was Mau Piailug, from Satawal, a coral island in Micronesia about a mile long with […]
In California's housing arguments, two words get used as if they were interchangeable. A politician who wants more homes calls themselves pro-housing, and one who wants to permit more projects of every kind calls themselves the same thing. Opponents of […]
Before it was Silicon Valley, the Santa Clara Valley had another name. Promoters in the early twentieth century called it the Valley of Heart's Delight: miles of prune, apricot, peach, and cherry orchards between the bay and the hills, among […]
Two identical houses sit side by side on a street in the Bay Area. Same lot size, same 1950s floor plan, same view of the same hills. One owner pays about $2,000 a year in property tax. The other pays […]
Five Centuries Under One Crown laid out the mechanism in the abstract: once a municipality commissions a hazard report on a tree, the report itself becomes the […]
Before getting to what's actually on it, the ballot itself deserves a harder look than it usually gets. California's initiative process was built in 1911 as a check on a legislature the Progressive movement considered captured by the railroads — […]
Ask most Californians to name the law that actually decides what gets built in their state — a subdivision, a transmission line, a warehouse, a corner grocery's expansion — and the California Environmental Quality Act is unlikely to come up. […]
In August 2026, California's Governor's Office announced it had identified a psychological condition afflicting a large share of the state's population, and that it was standing up an apparatus to manage it. […]
Somewhere in the American South, or on a chaparral hillside in California, there is very likely a live oak — one of a handful of evergreen *Quercus* species that share the name for their wide, low, spreading crowns — that […]
[An Industrial Park from a Bloated Government](/posts/an-industrial-park-from-a-bloated-government) already traced what California's government has become in plain fiscal terms: a general fund that roughly doubled in a decade, a single-year surplus larger than most states' entire budgets, a swing into tens […]
California voters decide on November 3 whether to rewrite how the state's signature environmental law actually works in practice, and the honest answer to what it would do for social liberty is not a clean yes or no. Proposition 45 […]
A kid is still on the swings when the first truck backs in. Nobody closed the gate, nobody posted a notice on the bulletin board by the restrooms — the crew just arrives, cones off the strip of brush along […]
Imperial County, California, sits over a groundwater basin that took millennia to fill, in a region already contesting every acre-foot of Colorado River allocation it has left. In early 2026, a developer proposed a data center there just under a […]
In September 2021, Gavin Newsom signed two bills that did something California zoning law had not done in the better part of a century: they told a single-family homeowner that the city could no longer stop them from adding a second unit, or a third, or a fourth, to their own lot […]
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