New America Media asked young reporters in the Central Valley to capture how the drought has affected their communities in this powerful photo essay. Six photographs are presented here, each paired with thoughts from its subject or photographer.

Like Mark Twain, Hunter S. Thompson arrived in San Francisco as an obscure journalist, thrived on the city’s anarchic energies, and departed as a national figure. His literary formation played out in San Francisco during what he called ‘‘a Main Era—the kind of peak that never comes again.’’ That peak helped Thompson invent not only Gonzo journalism, but also himself. This article traces Thompson’s literary formation with special attention to three editors--Carey McWilliams, Warren Hinckle, and Jann Wenner--who helped transform Thompson into what he described as “one of the best writers currently using the English language as both a musical instrument and a political weapon.”

The late 20 th and 21 st century tech boom-related gentrification of San Francisco has rapidly and violently displaced longtime city residents, particularly in the predominantly Latino neighborhood of the Mission District. While some may characterize this gentrification as more economically than racially consequential, the negligible overlap between Latino and techie demographics means that the possible disappearance of Latino San Francisco is very real. This essay uses the famed murals of the Mission District as the lens through which we can see Latinos’ complex and historical presence in this California city, and then interrogate how they can continue to play a part in its future.

This autobiopic piece chronicles Scheper-Hughes’s early voluntary service with the Peace Corp in Brazil, followed by her early academic career and coming to Berkeley, and then her ongoing engagement and activism in standing up for, and standing with, others. This welled up into community activism and advocacy for the homeless together with Berkeley Catholic Workers, eventually resulting in a café inside of Berkeley’s People’s Park in 1989, providing rationale for Scheper-Hughes’s own well-known applied anthropology and activism, which has made her famous as one of today’s leading anthropologists.

Ethnic enclaves serve as segregated ghettos, negotiated spaces, tourist attractions, and vibrant shopping and residential districts for many of Los Angeles’s diverse communities. The enclaves are products of both historical racial discrimination and self-segregation driven by mutual, ethnically-specific interests. Enclaves serve as negotiated spaces by offering social services and familiar sorts of businesses where transactions are conducted in familiar languages and manners. Increasingly, ethnic enclaves are also tourist attractions where cultural festivals, restaurants, and other experiences exist in part to appeal to visitors from the larger culture. As part of the process of exploring these neighborhoods in Los Angeles and Orange counties, Eric Brightwell paints and draws maps of them. Included in this article are hand-drawn and painted maps of Historic Filipinotown, The Byzantine-Latino Quarter, Little Tokyo, Koreatown, Chinatown, Little Italy, Little Armenia, The Far Eastside, Little Seoul, Little Arabia, and Little India.

This article reveals new thinking about the meaning of shari’a (roughly translated as Islamic law) in the everyday lives of Muslims. Proposals to ban shari’a , adopted across the United States and overseas, beg the question, “what is shari’a ?” Varied individual Mulsim responses to that question appear in this article. Research is based on two years of fieldwork and more than 100 semi-structured interviews conducted by a University of California-based research team. Themes of daily guidance, family, social justice, equality and inequality, Islamic living, excessively legalistic codes, and more emerge from the narratives of identity and of learning religious values and unlearning media-driven stereotypes.

Non-Californians rarely refer to the Golden State as a sacred place or religious landscape. Yet, California fascinates, in part, due to its religious extravagance–think Jim Jones, Heavens Gate, the Crystal Cathedral, Harold Camping’s predicted end of the world, the Grateful Dead. Everything is here, and then some. This essay looks at California as an epicenter of religious expression and a global microcosm for hybrid religions, new religions, and experimental religious practices. The essay analyzes migration, the California/Mexico border, genders/sexualities, race/ethnicity, commercialization, embodiment/disembodiment, and the natural world as lenses on California’s religious landscape.

A personal essay on the author’s transition from editor of Popular Science magazine to science reporter for Al Jazeera America, the television channel. He finds that the new role—and good science reporting generally—provides a lens through which to see most major news stories dominating the headlines in a clear, thoughtful, and unbiased way.

On a tour of the Ivanpah Solar Power Facility in California’s Mojave Desert, the author discusses the risks and potential benefits of large solar farms like this one. The article is accompanied by stunning black and white photographs of the Ivanpah facility by Jamey Stillings.

The author, a resident of Los Angeles's Koreatown, travels to Seoul in order to compare the Korean culture where he lives with the culture of South Korea's capital. There he finds that, while he has spent years in Koreatown dreaming of the Korea he would one day experience, South Koreans have developed their own California dreams, which manifest in the clothes, advertisements, and businesses seen all around Seoul, as well as in the conversations he has with Koreans. Even the establishments in Korea’s forward-looking capital city that preserve the Korean past, such as a 1970s-themed music bar, present their own versions of the Californian dream.

San Francisco-based Swensen’s ice cream is one of many American fast food joints that has proliferated across Asia’s expanding markets in the past decade, gaining popularity among a young generation in the East even as these outlets retreat from their home territory in the West. American ice cream parlors and diner-style cuisine have established a foothold across the Pacific, carrying with them tastes and images evocative of a bygone era. Fragments of nostalgia for the California Dream seep to the surface in Bangalore, India, a city filled with echoes of the long vanished past.

Stamen Design, a studio specializing in live data visualizations and interactive mapping, overlooks the busy corner of Mission and Sixteenth Streets in San Francisco, builds “objects to think with.” This article is a portfolio of some of their San Francisco-related mapping work: Crimespotting, an interactive map of crimes in San Francisco and Oakland; Parks.stamen.com visualizes the stories and images that pour out of parks, open spaces, and natural areas in the city and state; Surging Seas highlights what will be lost as rising sea levels take back land, put property underwater, and disproportionately displace different communities; and Creative Commons-license map tilesets, including the whimsical “Watercolor,” let people create their own map styles and imagine different ways of seeing the city.

Carolyn Finney and Rue Mapp talk with Boom editor Jon Christensen about their work with people, diversity, and nature in California. They discuss the mistaken perception that African Americans are disconnected from nature, and the opportunities and challenges in putting agencies such as the National Park Service in dialogue with diverse communities.

Young likens camping to a pilgrimage to nature but notes that, after more than a century of increasing popularity, the number of campers is declining. Although camping remains among the top five outdoor recreations in the United States, the rate of participation by Americans sixteen and older is down from its peak in the late 1990s. Automobile, trailer, and motorhome camping at developed locations and at primitive”locations has decreased approximately 7 percent overall. He argues this is due to modern camping, with its gadgets and more comfortable accommodations, not offering a meaningful break from everyday life, and also to efforts to rewild cities so that urban dwellers no longer need to escape to find nature.

An interview with writer Rebecca Solnit, about San Francisco’s ongoing upheaval during the tech boom. Topics covered include tech commuter shuttles (aka Google Buses), Silicon Valley, San Francisco’s history as a place where culture flourishes, and how the city is becoming an expensive bedroom community for tech workers who commute to jobs in Silicon Valley.

The authors consider the current tech boom in the context of previous booms that have swept through San Francisco. They ask what can be learned from the busts that followed those periods of rapid growth and wonder what will happen when the current boom ends, and when and how the end might come.