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Requiem for The New York Times Chris Hedges

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Requiem for The New York Times – by Mr. Fish

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NEW YORK: I am sitting in the auditorium at The New York Times. It is the first time I have been back in nearly two decades. It will be the last. The newspaper is a pale reflection of what it was when I worked there, beset by numerous journalistic fiascos, rudderless leadership and myopic cheerleading of the military debacles in the Middle East, Ukraine and the genocide in Gaza, where one of the Times contributions to the mass slaughter of Palestinians was an editorial refusing to back an unconditional ceasefire. Many seated in the auditorium are culpable. 

I am here, however, not for them but for the former executive editor they are honoring, Joe Lelyveld, who died earlier this year. He hired me. His departure from the Times marked the paper’s steep descent. On the front page of the program of the memorial, the year of his death is incorrect — emblematic of the sloppiness of a newspaper that is riddled with typos and errors. Reporters I admire, including Gretchen Morgenson and David Cay Johnston, who are in the auditorium, were pushed out once Lelyveld left, replaced by mediocrities.

Lelyveld’s successor Howell Raines – who had no business running a newspaper – singled out the serial fabulist and plagiarizer, Jayson Blair, for swift advancement and alienated the newsroom through a series of tone deaf editorial decisions. Reporters and editors rose up in revolt. He was forced out along with his equally incompetent managing editor. 

Lelyveld came back for a brief interim. But the senior editors who followed were of little improvement. They were full-throated propagandists – Tony Judt called them “Bush’s useful idiots” – for the war in Iraq. They were true believers in the weapons of mass destruction. They suppressed, at the government’s request, an expose by James Risen about warrantless wiretapping of Americans by the National Security Agency until the paper found out it would appear in Risen’s book. They peddled for two years the fiction that Donald Trump was a Russian asset. They ignored the contents from Hunter Biden’s laptop that had evidence of multimillion dollar influence peddling and labeled it “Russian disinformation.” Bill Keller, who served as executive editor after Lelyveld, described Julian Assange, the most courageous journalist and publisher of our generation, as “a narcissistic dick, and nobody’s idea of a journalist.” The editors decided identity, rather than corporate pillage with its mass layoffs of 30 million workers, was the reason for Trump’s rise, leading them to deflect attention from the root cause of our economic, political and cultural morass. Of course, that deflection saved them from confronting corporations, such as Chevron, which are advertisers. They produced a podcast series called Caliphate, based on invented stories of a con artist. They most recently ran a story by three journalists — including one who had never before worked as a reporter and had ties with Israeli intelligence, Anat Schwartz, who was subsequently fired after it was disclosed that she “liked” genocidal posts against Palestinians on Twitter — on what they called “systematic” sexual abuse and rape by Hamas and other Palestinian resistance factions on Oct. 7. It also turned out to be unsubstantiated. None of this would have happened under Lelyveld.

Reality rarely penetrates the Byzantine and self-referential court of The New York Times, which was on full display at Lelyveld’s memorial. The former editors spoke — Gene Roberts being an exception — with a cloying noblesse oblige, enthralled with their own splendor. Lelyveld became a vehicle to revel in their privilege, an unwitting advertisement for why the institution is so woefully out of touch and why so many reporters and much of the public despise those who run it.

We were regaled with all the perks of elitism: Harvard. Summers in Maine. Vacationing in Italy and France. Snorkeling in a coral reef at a Philippine resort. Living in Hampstead in London. The country house in New Paltz. Taking a barge down the Canal du Midi. Visits to the Prado. Opera at The Met.

Luis Buñuel and Evelyn Waugh skewered these kinds of people. Lelyveld was part of the club, but that was something I would have left for the chatter at the reception, which I skipped. That was not why the handful of reporters in the room were there.   

Lelyveld, despite some attempts by the speakers to convince us otherwise, was morose and acerbic. His nickname in the newsroom was “the undertaker.” As he walked past desks, reporters and editors would try to avoid his glance. He was socially awkward, given to long pauses and a disconcerting breathy laugh that no one knew how to read. He could be, like all the popes who run the church of The New York Times, mean and vindictive. I am sure he could also be nice and sensitive, but this was not the aura he projected. In the newsroom he was Ahab, not Starbuck.

I asked him if I could take a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard after covering the wars in Bosnia and Kosovo, wars that capped nearly two decades of reporting on conflicts in Latin America, Africa and the Middle East.

“No,” he said. “It costs me money and I lose a good reporter.”

I persisted until he finally told the foreign editor, Andrew Rosenthal, “tell Hedges he can take the Nieman and go to hell.”

“Don’t do it,” Andy, whose father was the executive editor before Lelyveld, warned. “They will make you pay when you come back.”

Of course, I took the Nieman. 

Halfway through the year Lelyveld called.

“What are you studying?” he asked.

“Classics,” I answered.

“Like Latin?” he asked.

“Exactly,” I said.  

There was a pause.

“Well,” he said, “I guess you can cover the Vatican.”

He hung up.

When I returned, he put me in purgatory. I was parked on the metropolitan desk without a beat or assignment. On many days I stayed at home and read Fyodor Dostoevsky. At least I got my paycheck. But he wanted me to know I was nothing.

I met with him in his office after a couple of months. It was like talking to a wall.

“Do you remember how to write a story?” he asked, caustically.

I had not yet, in his eyes, been suitably domesticated.

I walked out of his office.

“That guy is a fucking asshole,” I said to the editors at the desks in front of me.

“If you don’t think that got back to him in 30 seconds you are very naïve,” an editor told me later.

I did not care. I was struggling, often through too much drinking at night to blot out my nightmares, with trauma from many years in war zones, trauma in which neither Lelyveld nor anyone else at the paper took the slightest interest. I had far greater demons to battle than a vindictive newspaper editor. And I did not love The New York Times enough to become its lapdog. If they kept it up, I would leave, which I soon did.

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I say all this to make it clear that Lelyveld was not admired by reporters because of his charm or personality. He was admired because he was brilliant, literate, a gifted writer and reporter and set high standards. He was admired because he cared about the craft of reporting. He saved those of us who could write — a surprising number of reporters are not great writers — from the dead hand of copy editors. 

He did not look at a leak by an administration official as gospel. He cared about the world of ideas. He made sure the book review section had gravitas, a gravitas that disappeared once he left. He distrusted militarists. (His father had been a conscientious objector in World War II, although later became an outspoken Zionist and apologist for Israel.) This, frankly, was all we wanted as reporters. We did not want him to be our friend. We already had friends. Other reporters.

He came to see me in Bosnia in 1996 shortly after his father died. I was so absorbed in a collection of short stories by V.S. Pritchett that I lost track of the time. I looked up to find him standing over me. He did not seem to mind. He, too, read voraciously. Books were a connection. Once, early in my career, we met in his office. He quoted from memory lines from William Butler Yeats’ poem, “Adam’s Curse”:

…A line will take us hours maybe;

Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought,   

Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.   

Better go down upon your marrow-bones   

And scrub a kitchen pavement, or break stones   

Like an old pauper, in all kinds of weather;   

For to articulate sweet sounds together

Is to work harder than all these, and yet   

Be thought an idler by the noisy set

Of bankers, schoolmasters, and clergymen   

The martyrs call the world.

“You still have to find your voice,” he told me.

We were the sons of clergymen. His father was a rabbi. Mine was a Presbyterian minister. Our fathers had participated in the civil rights and anti-war movements. But that is where our family similarities ended. He had a deeply troubled childhood and distant relationship with his father and mother, who suffered from nervous breakdowns and suicide attempts. There were long periods when he did not see his parents, shuttled off to friends and relatives, where he wondered as a child if he was worthless or even loved, the subject of his memoir “Omaha Blues”.

We rode in my armored jeep to Sarajevo. It was after the war. In the darkness he talked about his father’s funeral, the hypocrisy of pretending that the children from the first marriage got along with the family of the second marriage, as if, he said, “we were all one happy family.” He was bitter and hurt.

He writes in his memoir of a rabbi named Ben, who “had zero interest in possessions,” and was a surrogate father. Ben had, in the 1930s, challenged racial segregation from his synagogue in Montgomery, Alabama. White clergy standing up for Blacks in the south was rare in the 1960s. It was almost unheard of in the 1930s. Ben invited Black ministers to his home. He collected food and clothing for the families of sharecroppers who in July 1931 after the sheriff and his deputies broke up a union meeting had engaged in a shoot-out. The sharecroppers were on the run and being hunted in Tallapoosa County. His sermons, preached at the height of the Depression, called for economic and social justice. 

He visited the Black men on death row in the Scottsboro case — all of them unjustly charged with rape — and held rallies to raise money for their defense. The board of his temple passed a formal resolution appointing a committee “to go to Rabbi Goldstein and ask him to desist from going to Birmingham under all circumstances and desist from doing anything further in the Scottsboro case.” 

Ben ignored them. He was finally forced out by his congregation because, as a member wrote, he had been “preaching and practicing social equality,” and “consorting with radicals and reds.” Ben later participated in the American League Against War and Fascism and the American Committee to Aid Spanish Democracy during the Spanish civil war, groups that included communists. He defended those purged in the anti-communist witch hunts, including the Hollywood Ten, spearheaded by the House Un-American Activities Committee. Ben, who was close to the communist party and was perhaps at one point a member, was blacklisted, including by Lelyveld’s father who was running the Hillel Foundation. Lelyveld, in a few torturous pages, seeks to absolve his father, who consulted the FBI before firing Ben, for this betrayal.  

Ben fell victim to what the historian Ellen Schrecker in “Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America” calls “the most widespread and longest lasting wave of political repression in American history.”

“In order to eliminate the alleged threat of domestic Communism, a broad coalition of politicians, bureaucrats, and other anticommunist activists hounded an entire generation of radicals and their associates, destroying lives, careers, and all the institutions that offered a left-wing alternative to mainstream politics and culture,” she writes.

This crusade, she goes on, “used all the power of the state to turn dissent into disloyalty and, in the process, drastically narrowed the spectrum of acceptable political debate.”

Lelyveld’s father was not unique in succumbing to pressure, but what I find fascinating, and perhaps revealing, is Lelyveld’s decision to blame Ben for his own persecution. 

“Any appeal to Ben Lowell to be prudent would have instantly summoned to his mind the appeals made to Ben Goldstein [he later changed his last name to Lowell] in Montgomery seventeen years earlier when, with his job clearly on the line, he’d never hesitated about speaking at the black church in defiance of his trustees,” Lelyveld writes. “His latent Ezekiel complex again kicked in.”

Lelyveld missed the hero of his own memoir.

Lelyveld left the paper before the attacks of 9/11. I denounced the calls to invade Iraq — I had been the newspaper’s Middle East Bureau Chief — on shows such as Charlie Rose. I was booed off stages, attacked relentlessly on Fox News and right-wing radio and the subject of a Wall Street Journal editorial. The message bank on my office phone was filled with death threats. I was given a written reprimand by the paper to stop speaking out against the war. If I violated the reprimand, I would be fired. Lelyveld, if he was still running the paper, would not have tolerated my breach of etiquette.

Lelyveld might dissect apartheid in South Africa in his book, “Move Your Shadow,” but the cost of dissecting it in Israel would have seen him, like Ben, blacklisted. He did not cross those lines. He played by the rules. He was a company man.

I would never find my voice in the straightjacket of The New York Times. I had no fidelity to the institution. The very narrow parameters it set were not ones I could accept. This, in the end, was the chasm between us.

The theologian Paul Tillich writes that all institutions are inherently demonic, that the moral life usually requires, at some point, that we defy institutions, even at the cost of our careers. Lelyveld, while endowed with integrity and brilliance, was not willing to make this commitment. But he was the best the institution offered us. He cared deeply about what we do and he did his best to protect it. 

The newspaper has not recovered since his departure.    

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Things Worth Remembering: ‘A Game Most Like Life’ Charles Lane

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It feels like only yesterday I called up my friend Douglas Murray with a strange idea: What if you wrote a column for us about poetry?

We had no idea if anyone would be interested in it. I still wasn’t sure many people would be interested in The Free Press itself. But I knew I didn’t want this institution we were building to focus solely on what was wrong with the world. As I wrote at the time: “If ours is an era of building and rebuilding, what things are worth saving?”

In the two years since this column began, the world has changed so much. We have a new president. One war has started—and perhaps is now ending. Another still rages.

The Free Press has covered it all. And so has Douglas himself, reporting from Israel and Ukraine, and speaking across the globe. Meantime, he has written nearly 100 editions of Things Worth Remembering—an unbelievable feat. Somehow he also found time to write a forthcoming book about the future of the West.

Given how much is on his plate, for the time being Douglas is stepping back from this incredible column he’s helped to build. He’ll continue to be a beloved contributor to, and friend of, The Free Press. And fear not: Things Worth Remembering will carry on every Sunday.

Over the years, fans of this column have said to me: “If I had to choose one thing worth remembering, it’d be. . . . ” It made me realize most writers have a poem they return to when they feel lost, a song they replay, or a snippet of some great book that materializes again and again. So we are expanding the column to bring in new voices and choices. I think you’ll love what they have to say.

Today, on Super Bowl Sunday, we start with our deputy editor, Charles Lane, who knows exactly what Americans should remember on this important date: a speech given multiple times, in the late ’60s, by the greatest football coach in the world, Vince Lombardi. It touches on a lot of things we care a lot about at The Free Press: courage, hard work, and excellence. I hope you like it as much as I do—don’t forget to leave your thoughts in the comments.

Happy Super Bowl Sunday, everyone!
—BW

“I sometimes wonder whether those of us who love football fully appreciate its great lessons,” said Vince Lombardi, in what friends and family called “the speech.”

The greatest professional football coach of the twentieth century, Lombardi tried and tested various versions of this talk as an in-demand public speaker during the late ’60s. The text quoted here is from “a representative version” of the speech, which his son Vince Jr. compiled and published in 2001. Lombardi’s words are undeniably magnificent, even to those who might have no interest in tonight’s Super Bowl.

Lombardi acknowledged that his was “a violent game,” suggesting that it would be “imbecilic” to play it otherwise. But this “game like war,” he believed, was also “a game most like life—for it teaches that work, sacrifice, perseverance, competitive drive, selflessness, and respect for authority are the price one pays to achieve worthwhile goals.”

Lombardi’s is not quite the household name it was—time does that to fame. To the extent he is remembered today it is often as the originator of a ruthless coaching doctrine—“Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing”—that someone else actually coined.

Still, every year the Super Bowl restores him, at least for a moment, to popular awareness: The winning team tonight will take home the Vince Lombardi Trophy, a brilliant 20.75-inch–high, seven-pound prize made out of pure sterling by Tiffany silversmiths.


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February 8, 2025 Heather Cox Richardson

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Yesterday the National Institutes of Health under the Trump administration announced a new policy that will dramatically change the way the United States funds medical research. Now, when a researcher working at a university receives a federal grant for research, that money includes funds to maintain equipment and facilities and to pay support staff that keep labs functioning. That indirect funding is built into university budgets for funding expensive research labs, and last year reached about 26% of the grant money distributed. Going forward, the administration says it will cap the permitted amount of indirect funding at 15%.

NIH is the nation’s primary agency for research in medicine, health, and behavior. NIH grants are fiercely competitive; only about 20% of applications succeed. When a researcher applies for one, their proposal is evaluated first by a panel of their scholarly peers and then, if it passes that level, an advisory council, which might ask for more information before awarding a grant. Once awarded and accepted, an NIH grant carries strict requirements for reporting and auditing, as well as record retention.

In 2023, NIH distributed about $35 billion through about 50,000 grants to over 300,000 researchers at universities, medical schools, and other research institutions. Every dollar of NIH funding generated about $2.46 in economic activity. For every $100 million of funding, research supported by NIH generates 76 patents, which produce 20% more economic value than other U.S. patents and create opportunities for about $600 million in future research and development.

As Christina Jewett and Sheryl Gay Stolberg of the New York Times explained, the authors of Project 2025 called for the cuts outlined in the new policy, claiming those cuts would “reduce federal taxpayer subsidization of leftist agendas.” Dr. David A. Baltrus of the University of Arizona told Jewett and Stolberg that the new policy is “going to destroy research universities in the short term, and I don’t know after that. They rely on the money. They budget for the money. The universities were making decisions expecting the money to be there.”

Although Baltrus works in agricultural research, focusing on keeping E. coli bacteria out of crops like sprouts and lettuce, cancer research is the top area in which NIH grants are awarded.

Anthropologist Erin Kane figured out what the new NIH policy would mean for states by looking at institutions that received more than $10 million in grants in 2024 and figuring out what percentage of their indirect costs would not be eligible for grant money under the new formula. Six schools in New York won $2.4 billion, including $953 million for indirect costs. The new indirect rate would allow only $220 million for overhead, a loss of $723 million.

States across the country will experience significant losses. Eight Florida schools received about $673 million, $231 million for indirect costs. The new indirect rate would limit that funding to $66 million, a loss of $165 million. Six schools in Ohio received a total of about $700 million; they would lose $194 million. Four schools in Missouri received a total of about $830 million; they would lose $212 million.

Lawmakers from Republican-dominated states are now acknowledging what those of us who study the federal budget have pointed out for decades: the same Republican-dominated states that complain bitterly about the government’s tax policies are also the same states that take most federal tax money. Dana Nickel of Politico reported yesterday that Republican leaders in the states claim to be enthusiastic about the cuts made by the Department of Government Efficiency but are mobilizing to make sure those cuts won’t hurt their own state programs that depend on federal money. Oklahoma governor Kevin Stitt told Nickel that governors can provide advice about what cuts will be most effective. “Instead of just across the board cutting, we thought, man, they need some help from the governors to say, ‘We can be more efficient in this area or this area, or if you allow block grants in this area, you can reduce our expenditures by 10 percent.’ And so that’s our goal.”

Yesterday, Tim Carpenter of the Kansas Reflector reported that Senator Jerry Moran (R-KS) is concerned about the Trump administration’s freeze on food distributions through the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). USAID buys about $2 billion in U.S. agricultural products a year, and farmers are already struggling with rising costs, low prices, and concern with tariffs.

Their spokespeople urge the continuation of USAID: the senior director of government affairs at the American Farm Bureau Federation said that “USAID plays a critical role in reducing hunger around the world while sourcing markets for the surplus foods America’s farmers and ranchers grow.” Moran added: “Food stability is essential to political stability, and our food aid programs help feed the hungry, bolster our national security and provide an important market for our farmers, especially when commodity prices are low.”

Meanwhile, federal employees are telling the stories of the work they’ve done for the country. Yesterday, a public letter whose author claimed to be an employee of the Federal Bureau of Investigation whose job is at risk in Trump’s purge of the agency wrote an amalgamation of the FBI agents being purged: “I am the coach of your child’s soccer team,” the letter read. “I sit next to you on occasion in religious devotion. I am a member of the PTA. With friends, you celebrated my birthday. I collected your mail and took out your trash while you were away from home. I played a round of golf with you. I am a veteran. I am the average neighbor in your community.”

But there is another side to that person, the author wrote. “I orchestrated a clandestine operation to secure the release of an allied soldier held captive by the Taliban. I prevented an ISIS terrorist from boarding a commercial aircraft. I spent 3 months listening to phone intercepts in real time to gather evidence needed to dismantle a violent drug gang. I recruited a source to provide critical intelligence on Russian military activities in Africa. I rescued a citizen being tortured to near death by members of an Outlaw Motorcycle Gang. I interceded and stopped a juvenile planning to conduct a school shooting. I spent multiple years monitoring the activities of deep cover foreign intelligence officers, leading to their arrest and deportation. I endured extensive hardship to infiltrate a global child trafficking organization. I have been shot in the line of duty.”

“[W]hen I am gone,” they wrote, “who will do the quiet work that is behind the facade of your average neighbor?”

Less publicly, Joseph Grzymkowski expressed on Facebook his pride in 38 years of service “with utmost dedication, integrity, and passion. I was not waste, fraud, and abuse,” he wrote. “Nor was I the “Deep State…. We are the faces of your Government: ordinary and diverse Americans, your friends and neighbors, working behind the scenes in the interest of the people we serve. We are not the enemy.”

Wth his statement, Grzymkowski posted a magazine clipping from 1996, when he was a Marine Analyst working in the Marine Navigation Department for the National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA), located in Bethesda, Maryland—now known as the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) in Springfield, Virginia. That office provides maritime intelligence for navigation, international obligations, and joint military operations.

On January 6, 1996, a historic blizzard dumped snowfalls of 19 to 31 inches on the East Coast. Stranded alone in the station when his relief couldn’t get through the snow to work, Grzymkowsky stayed at the radio. “I realized there were mariners who needed navigation safety messages delivered, and I wasn’t about to jeopardize the safety of life or cargo at sea simply because we were experiencing a blizzard,” he told a journalist. “One doesn’t leave a watch on a ship until properly relieved, and I felt my responsibility at the watch desk as keenly as I would have felt my responsibility for the navigation on the bridge of a ship.”

For 33 hours, he stayed at his desk and sent out navigation safety messages. “I had a job to do and I did it,” he recalled. “There were ships at sea relying on me, and I wasn’t going to let them down. It’s nothing that any other member of this department wouldn’t do.”

Notes:

https://grants.nih.gov/grants-process

https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R43341/45

https://report.nih.gov/nihdatabook/report/20

https://www.nih.gov/about-nih/what-we-do/budget

https://www.unitedformedicalresearch.org/nih-in-your-state/alabama

https://www.nih.gov/about-nih/what-we-do/impact-nih-research/serving-society/direct-economic-contributions

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/07/us/politics/medical-research-funding-cuts-university-budgets.html

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/02/06/trump-usaid-money-american-farms/

https://kansasreflector.com/2025/02/07/kansas-moran-davids-sound-alarm-on-delay-of-usaid-food-aid-to-starving-people-worldwide/

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/02/07/republican-state-doge-budget-013596

https://southfloridareporter.com/a-trump-policy-change-will-restrict-billions-in-funding-for-medical-research-programs-at-universities/

https://docs.google.com/document/d/12HuhGA67_QPIibLa6nB32BtepQR3zQE_DvDTDGrZ5dU/edit

Grzymkowski article is from a 5th Anniversary Special Edition (1996–2001) of NIMA’s Edge magazine, an authorized, internal information publication published for the National Imagery and Mapping Agency personnel and its customers.

https://msi.nga.mil/

https://msi.nga.mil/whats-new

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The Pot of Gold at America’s Western Edge A.M. Hickman

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The boughs of the pomegranate bush clattered in the morning wind, branches drooping with heavy, frost-bruised fruits. The bush lilted her morning greeting to the rows of olive and grapefruit and palm, nodding to the yerba santa and the blue oaks. My own eyes seemed to be covered in a golden gauze as I rose to survey the variegated domain of fertile hills sprawling out before me. Everything was yellow with the spicy nicotine and ocher diamonds of the impossible California skies.

For those who have never been to California before, picture this: a heady sabbatical in Tuscany with Dr. Seuss. Everything in this westernmost state seems to ebb and flow in brief fits and starts through manicured vineyards, blossoming pastures, ranch roads, and hazardous gravel switchbacks slung high above dusty, half-filled reservoirs. It is America’s shimmering Eden, her promised land, the trophy of our young Republic that stands proudly as proof that every ounce of westerly motion was worth it.

To the pioneers, it was the end of the road. It was as far as a wagoneer could travel, cresting high over the infamous Donner Pass, if they had not yet succumbed to madness or scrofula, nor to hunger, smallpox, or cannibalism. Catching sight of the Pacific Ocean, the good earth bowed for the pioneers and did her curtsy. God Himself was the conductor of this symphony of holy life and sun-kissed valleys and endless deep-green ridgelines—and at the end of His great rhapsody, a frontiersman would build his fence lines and furrows and aqueducts.

In some sense, California is the mother of the very particular, feverishly intense, and unstoppable optimism that makes the United States what it is. All Americans are Californians at heart. We are, at our best, a fanatically optimistic sort of people—who might push for a half-year’s time across rough country just to see if the rumors of gold might be half true.

And in the case of California, the rumors were true: There was a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. From the earliest “salad days” of these western farmers to the oil booms, the mining frenzies, the rise of Los Angeles and San Francisco, and later, the heady madness of Silicon Valley’s technological revolution. The incredible winnings of California’s early settlers course through the blood of Americans the whole country over, whether they have each seen California for themselves or not.

It all began the first moment that the pioneers caught sight of the poppies along the Sacramento River.


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