Good morning. It’s Tuesday, Jan. 6.
- Trader Joe’s bags are now a global status symbol.
- ChatGPT coached drug use of teen who overdosed.
- And L.A. families use Waymo to chauffeur their kids.
Statewide
1.
Chevron appears to be the biggest corporate winner of President Trump’s Venezuelan adventure. That’s because the California-born oil giant is the only foreign petroleum company still operating in Venezuela. While other oil companies left the country rather than submit to worse contract terms in 2007, Chevron played the long game, hoping to someday reap big profits from the world’s largest proven oil reserves. Its patience might now pay off, reports said. L.A. Times | N.Y. Times
- “Congress doesn’t exist to be briefed after the bombs fall.” California lawmakers called for reasserting Congress’ war powers on Monday. KQED
2.
A growing number of California law enforcement agencies are no longer responding to mental health crises unless a crime is involved. Jeremiah Larson, the police chief of El Cajon, said he made the change in response to data showing that the presence of officers is linked with fatal outcomes for people in psychiatric crisis. “There have just been too many times where situations have gone sideways for a family or for an officer, and it affects everybody for the rest of their lives,” he said. The Guardian
3.
Shasta Lake, California’s largest reservoir, has risen by 36 feet since mid-December. On Monday, it stood at 129% of its historical average for this time of year and still rising. Oroville, the state’s second-largest reservoir, jumped 69 feet over the same period. Jeffrey Mount, a geomorphologist who specializes in the study of water systems, noted that we’re not even halfway through the traditional wet season. “We’re in great shape,” he said. Mercury News
4.
Monique Limón, of Santa Barbara, was sworn in Monday as the Democratic leader of California’s State Senate. She is the first Latina, first mother, and first woman of color to hold the powerful post. Limón’s grandfather came to California under the bracero program, which drew hundreds of thousands of Mexican laborers to toil in American fields in the middle of the 20th century. “When I see the attacks on immigrants in this country,” she said, “I can’t help but see the sacrifices and contributions of my family also under attack.” Sacramento Bee | CapRadio
5.
A California grocery store bag, of all things, is the latest international status symbol. U.S. fans of Trader Joe’s have lined up before opening hours to get their hands on the Monrovia chain’s $2.99 totes, a phenomenon psychotherapists attribute to a combination of artificial scarcity and social signaling. Now the craze has spread to cities like London, Seoul, Melbourne, and Tokyo, where the scarcity is even more acute. Online resellers are listing the bags for thousands of dollars. Wall Street Journal
Northern California
6.
The New York Times wrote about Stockton’s entrenched gang scene after a recent mass shooting at a child’s birthday party:
“Drive around Stockton and you will see them: makeshift memorials where residents — most often young men — have been shot dead. With collections of candles and pictures of the dead surrounded by angel wings and handwritten notes, they have become permanent features of the city’s landscape, their upkeep often maintained by the mothers.”
7.
Sam Nelson, a student at UC Merced, turned to ChatGPT for drug advice. The OpenAI chatbot responded by coaching him on doses, drug combinations, and even music recommendations. “Hell yes—let’s go full trippy mode,” it wrote in one message. On May 31, 2025, Nelson died from an overdose. His mother later discovered the chat logs. “It just makes me want to find the owner and walk in and just scream at them,” she said of ChatGPT, breaking into tears. “It’s still just mind-blowing. It’s hard to find the words sometimes because it is so shocking.” SFGATE
8.
Treasure Island, a manmade island in the San Francisco Bay, was initially built for the 1939 World’s Fair. Crews dumped millions of tons of muck dredged from the bay and created a temporary city with Art Deco structures and fields of flowers. Later, it was repurposed as a drab Navy base and then housing for low-income residents. The photographer Andrew Waits began photographing the island in 2018, drawn by what he described as its “dissonance and uneasy beauty.” His work was recently published in a new photobook called “The Middle Distance.” LensScratch
- See more from “The Middle Distance.”
Southern California
9.
David Wallace-Wells wrote a superb piece on the unlearned lessons of the Los Angeles wildfires. Many of today’s most destructive fires, he noted, aren’t really wildfires: “Increasingly, disaster strikes almost entirely within an urban envelope, drawing on homes and landscaping for fuel rather than trees and wild brush.” The solution, in part, lies in “thinning” the fuel of communities themselves, he wrote. “But there are few places in California or across the West that are doing that with anything like urgency and scale.” N.Y. Times
- The pyrogeographer Zeke Lunder released a YouTube series on foothill communities of the Santa Monica Mountains where fire-risk conditions are “exactly the same as in the Palisades.”
10.
Founded in 2013, Downtown LA Law Group grew from a small personal injury law firm into a litigation juggernaut, filing thousands of cases related to the Los Angeles wildfires and sex abuse claims. In December, a former DTLA paralegal sued the firm, accusing it of amassing plaintiffs through false promises of big payouts. The Los Angeles Times interviewed dozens of former DTLA clients who described being aggressively solicited in times of crisis. Some said they were paid after making false claims of sex abuse.
11.
Los Angeles families are using Waymo robotaxis to ferry their children to and from school, soccer practice, music lessons, and doctors’ appointments. “It is a life hack taking root in the five markets where Waymo’s service is available to the public, but there is something profound about the possibilities in Los Angeles, where urban sprawl, soul-crushing traffic and a cumbersome public transit system are the great afflictions of working parents,” the New York Times wrote.
12.
As he pursued a book project in 2020, the acclaimed reporter Eric Lichtblau looked for a place that was emblematic of the rising tide of hate crimes around the country. He chose Orange County. Now published, Lichtblau’s book “American Reich” focuses on the 2018 murder of a gay Jewish teenager by a neo-Nazi in Lake Forest. More broadly, it chronicles a county where aspirations of suburban perfection coexist with neo-Nazi meet-ups and white power rock bands. L.A. Times
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