Twenty years ago, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzengger signed into law, Assembly Bill 32, officially named the Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006., it was the first law in the world to establish leg...

She won an Oscar for her first film, ‘On the Waterfront,’ and sparkled opposite Cary Grant in ‘North by Northwest.’

I passed up a grad school deferment, and got a different education instead.

OPINION: Instead of spending massive amounts to build new detention centers, the federal government should just reopen Manzanar, contributing columnist Joe Mathews writes.

Casablanca-to-Tangier Is Thriving While Bakersfield-to-Merced Languishes

When We Dispose of Our Own Trash, We Learn How to Govern Ourselves

As the ‘Great Gavini’ Readies His Disappearing Act, Our Columnist Takes Stock of All the Rabbits He Pulled From His Hat

The AI End Times Are Coming. What If We Governed the State Like There Was No Tomorrow?

The Hit Show From India Explores Power, Public Health, and the Gap Between Policy and Implementation

A Dispatch from Vienna, Where Our Columnist Went to Church With the Governator and Kamala Harris

The illusion that we are all somehow above-average drivers is quietly slowing the adoption of autonomous vehicles that could save tens of thousands of lives each year.

The Iran war has helped Pakistan showcase its unique set of skills and increased its status in the world order.

This Republic Stands for Crooks, Fraud, and Hypocrisy

AI and drones are changing the scope, scale and speed of battle.

AI promises to help us find common ground. But democracy was never meant to resolve our disagreements.

If Indigenous land and water dispossession is ignored, climate adaptation strategies risk reproducing inequalities and worsening acute climate vulnerability.

And for Registering So Many New Voters. And for Making It Easier for Them to Vote. And for Checking Their Signatures So Scrupulously. And for Improving on 19th-Century Conventions

ICE on the Streets? An Olympics That Could Bankrupt Us? Sharks in the Water? Let’s Ignore Them

A Sweet Sinecure Has Become a Perilous Position in Poisonous Times

His “Magnifica Humanitas” encyclical calls AI innovation to account.

US cities are turning to randomly selected residents to help resolve divisive policy debates

With 61 Names on the Ballot, Is the Best Choice No Choice at All?

The transition from small hunter-gatherer societies into complex civilizations gave rise to the first Axial Age. Today, the planetary polycrisis of climate chaos, mass migration, increasing warfare an...

Teacher Li, a new species of dissident, is paving the way.

History shows that bad leaders can successfully undermine democracy — but the story always ends the same way.

Who Knew that Accuracy and Care in Elections Undermined Democracy?

In a workplace augmented by AI, the new frontier of human value lies in interpretation, negotiation and trust-building.

A bill letting governments charge for public documents would let them base the cost on the time it takes to review and redact the information. It doesn't limit them.

In which I talk with L'Express about the opportunities for Middle Powers, and France in particular, to chart a new sort of non-alignment in the emerging eco-ideological Cold War

I so loved the trucker humor and Norris’ hand-to-hand combat that I declared it the best movie ever made. Today, I still hold to that verdict.

Gubernatorial hopeful Eric Swalwell isn’t from the same California as you and me. That’s because he is from Dublin, a city on the eastern edge of the Bay

When U.S. policymakers visit China, they encounter a curated performance, not a country. A different approach to engagement is possible – but it requires abandoning the comfort of the guided tour.

Our gravest AI risk isn’t runaway superintelligence but our cultural readiness to surrender collective judgment to algorithmic systems.

The Position Is Dangerous for California, the Country, and the World

A rules-based order for those in between the ‘hyper-scalers and hegemons.’

On the automated bureaucratic machinery that killed 175 children

The beings people often meet while using psychedelics resist tidy explanations.

A Planetary Publication. Of, By, and For Everyday People Governing Themselves. Click to read Democracy Local, by Joe Mathews, a Substack publication with hundreds of subscribers.