A Gold Rush ghost town embalms the risks that haunt all California settlements.

Inherent Vice evokes the possibility of a different California, one in which the hippies beat the cops

Gabriella Coleman’s history of the Anonymous collective is as much about her complicity in the group’s attention-seeking tactics as it is about the group itself.

While the Bay Area flourishes, small towns in the interior are stripped for parts.

In Downtown Los Angeles, the homeless rub elbows with finance capital, but the developers want new neighbors.

The new film Dear White People runs up against the well-noted limitations of “The Talented Tenth” vanguard.

The most magical innovation of the app economy is making the female workers it depends on mostly invisible.

Freeways are a metonym for Los Angeles anomie and sprawl. Thom Andersen’s 2010 film Get Out of the Car shows how the city transcends them

The Silicon Valley initiative to split California into six pieces was a stunt, but the water issues it drew from are real

By imagining nerds as a race of their own, Silicon Valley tries to disguise its white supremacy

As Mexicans reach a breaking point in their tolerance for the drug war, the Mexican government reaps the legacy of presidencies lost to guns and drugs.

Yelp's self-interest, rather than any objective set of criteria, is what determines a "real" review.

At the level of identity, genitals are made neither in the womb, nor in surgery, but in the mind

The Kansas City Royals' Kauffman Stadium is in a suburban sports complex that is perfectly modernist, which is to say, perfectly designed to quash riots.

Barbara Johnson showed that while deconstruction had ignored feminism, it was nonetheless inherently a form of feminist critique

Tracts conceived by crusaders seeking to eradicate the foreskin were published by pornographers seeking to avoid censors