The longest car ever built

In the late 1980s, Jay Ohrberg had a dream. One of Hollywood’s top car customizers, he had built KITT from “Knight Rider,” Herbie from “Herbie the Love Bug,” and the “Back to the Future” DeLorean. Now he aimed for a place in the record books with the longest car ever built, a Cadillac limousine that stretched 100 feet,…

Read More

The beer made from 45-million-year-old yeast

In the early 1990s, a California professor stunned the scientific community by reviving 45-million-year-old yeast — and using it to make beer. Raul Cano, a microbiologist at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, found the spores in the gut of an ancient bee encased in tropical amber and spread it on a growth medium to see…

Read More

The ‘A-bomb sunrises’ of 1950s California

In the 1950s, Angelenos would sometimes see two “sunrises” — one from the sun and another from atomic bomb tests in the Nevada desert. Between 1951 and 1962, 100 detonations were conducted above ground at the site northwest of Las Vegas, some so brilliant that they could be seen from points across the California coast. People…

Read More

From carpentry to Han Solo: Harrison Ford’s unlikely path

In 1970, Sérgio Mendes, a Brazilian musician, employed a shaggy-haired young carpenter (above right) to build a music studio in his backyard in Encino. The worker was an aspiring actor, but had taught himself carpentry to support his young family. At the time, there was little to suggest that Harrison Ford, then 28, was destined…

Read More

The masquerading cell towers of the American West

A single pine in the middle of the Mojave Desert. Palm trees adorned with strange red beacons. A trio of cacti with green hues that seem just a little bit off. Since the 1990s, disguised cell phone towers have become a staple of America’s urban environment. Unlike power and landline companies, cell phone providers cannot…

Read More

Signs point to a roaring 2020s in post-pandemic California

Lockdowns, mask mandates, defiance from churches, anti-mask protests, hotels requisitioned for the poor, a devastating winter surge. California’s coronavirus pandemic of 2020 has been, in many ways, eerily similar to the influenza pandemic of 1918. As the state’s Covid-19 cases and deaths plummet, many journalists and academics have been predicting that the similarities will persist…

Read More

The curiously lopsided population of California

Half of Californians live below this red line. 👇   That may be hard to believe, but it’s more or less accurate, demographers say: Roughly 20 million people reside north of a line running through Los Angeles, and the other 20 million are squished underneath it. In the second half of the 19th century, the…

Read More

San Francisco submerged

The poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti once likened San Francisco to a place that “drifts anchorless upon the ocean.” The metaphor comes to life with the city’s signature fog, which pours over the hills in slow-motion waves of white. On the ground, the experience can be dreary, “like living inside a great gray pearl,” as Herb Caen…

Read More

California’s 5 most wondrous forests, according to field atlas” author Obi Kaufmann”

The Oakland painter and poet Obi Kaufmann calls to mind a tatted-up, modern day John Muir, only with half of the beard and serious watercolor skills. Like the 19-century Scotsman, Kaufmann has become recognized for his explorations of California’s natural world in so-called “field atlases” that blend graceful prose with paintings of maps and wildlife.…

Read More

The Hawaiian princes who brought surfing to California

In the summer of 1885, three Hawaiian princes, on break from their studies at a Bay Area military school, paddled into the ocean off Santa Cruz on 17-foot redwood planks. The strange exercise was recounted in the pages of the Santa Cruz Daily Surf: “The young Hawaiian princes were in the water, enjoying it hugely…

Read More

Vintage-style photos showcase the women of skateboarding

Jenny Sampson, a Berkeley photographer, had been taking pictures of skateboarders for years. Then one day in early 2017, during a visit to a skate park in the Bay Area city of Emeryville, a new phenomenon caught her attention: about half a dozen young female skaters holding their own in a subculture traditionally dominated by…

Read More

John Muir biographer: He was no white supremacist

Donald E. Worster is a professor emeritus of history at the University of Kansas and the author of “A Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir.” Below is an essay he wrote in response to a Sierra Club initiative to reckon with comments by Muir that the group said “drew on deeply harmful racist…

Read More