Eight thousand years of human civilization and here we are: still trying to bring the rain back with an animal sacrifice.

On the fake, and real, causes of California’s water crisis.

In 1911, a Native American man, the only member of his community to survive a genocide, encountered the new Anthropology department at the University of California, Berkeley.

They are not new, these most ancient of divinities.
Our clamor woke them from the subdivided soil.
They rise to rule us

Woke feeling nauseous—my wife’s soft breathing
beside me. Outside the immense Sierra dark and silence,
a sky still glittering with a strew of stars

We wrote our names all over the city because we felt invisible. And it was fun. I existed when I did graffiti.

i open the screen door slowly
n wait for Abuela n her red walker
to begin the procession
from the back door out to the street

We always say “Nobody knew,” and that means that everyone who knew was a nobody.

… the trick that has helped me squint at the bleakness and see them more clearly is to admit, with every breath, that you have no idea what you are looking at.

Half a history of, and accessible meditation on the philosophy of, science and half memoir of the author’s grappling with depression, this pleasantly easy read captures something of “emptiness.” It shows how Buddhism still has much to add in the West’s ongoing struggle to reconcile its extremes of naive, Christian eternalism and cynical, “scientific” nihilism.

… the Sonora passed through the Golden Gate and steamed out upon the broad Pacific, heading south, carrying five hundred passengers, thirty-eight thousand letters, and a consigned shipment of gold totaling $1,595,497.13.

The fascinating and brilliantly told story of one ship pivotal to the California Gold Rush: its historic sinking and equally historic recovery.