California Dreaming

The citrus industry of Palestine has often been associated with the myths and ideals of the Labor Movement and its Zionist-Socialist ideology. The Jaffa orange, like the young pioneer and the collective kibbutz, was emblematic of a colonizing meta-narrative that marginalized or even denounced the private entrepreneurs—both Arabs and Jews—who were the true founders and proponents of the flourishing citrus industry in Palestine. California Dreaming reveals that these private entrepreneurs regarded the California citrus industry as their primary model of emulation. Utilizing an innovative multidisciplinary approach, Nahum Karlinsky vividly reconstructs the social fabric, economic structure, and ideological tenets of the Jewish citrus industry of Palestine in the early twentieth century. Also accentuated is the role of Palestinian-Arab citrus growers, whose industry predated that of their Jewish counterparts, and the complex relationship between the two national sectors that operated side by side.

California Dreaming is a multi-genre collection featuring works by Asian American artists based in California. Exploring the places of “Asian America” through the migration and circulation of the arts, this volume highlights creative processes and the flow of objects to understand the rendering of California’s imaginary. Here, “California” is interpreted as both a specific locale and an identity marker that moves, linking the state’s cultural imaginary, labor, and economy with Asia Pacific, the Americas, and the world. Together, the works in this collection shift previous models and studies of the “Golden State” as the embodiment of “frontier mentality” and the discourse of exceptionality to a translocal, regional, and archipelagic understanding of place and cultural production. The poems, visual essays, short stories, critical essays, interviews, artist statements, and performance text excerpts featured in this collection expand notions of where knowledge is produced, directing our attention to the particularity of California’s landscape and labor in the production of arts and culture. An interdisciplinary collection, California Dreaming foregrounds “sensing” and “imagining” place, vividly, as it hopes to inspire further creative responses to the notion of emplacement. In doing so, California Dreaming explores the possibilities imagined by and through Asian American arts and culture today, paving the way for what is yet to be.

California has historically provided a fertile breeding ground for radical modes of architectural thinking, practice and building, which from the 1920s onwards was sparked by the presence of eminent émigré architects. It was also central to the birth of ‘cool’ mid-century Modernism – all in parallel with the intense concentration of design and experimentation in the film, aerospace and tech industries. This AD issue explores the influential formal tropes generated in the nexus between Los Angeles and the Bay Area, as well as the thriving theoretical preoccupations that have brought California's architects global attention. Between Hollywood and the Silicon Valley, this unique context has nurtured and become the platform for those who not only build buildings around the world, but have also founded and directed schools and educated emergent generations of architects. Contributors: Frances Anderton, Jasmine Benyamin, Blaine Brownell, Courtney Coffman, Heather Flood and Aaron Gensler, David Freeland and Brennan Buck, Craig Hodgetts, Max Kuo, Eva Menuhin, Nicole Meyer, Jill Stoner, and Grace Mitchell Tada. Featured architects: Atelier Manferdini, Ball-Nogues Studio, Faulders Studio, FreelandBuck, Hood Design Studio, Oyler Wu Collaborative, Preliminary Research Office, Stereobot, and Synthesis Design + Architecture.

California Dreaming is a multi-genre collection featuring works by Asian American artists based in California. Exploring the places of “Asian America” through the migration and circulation of the arts, this volume highlights creative processes and the flow of objects to understand the rendering of California’s imaginary. Here, “California” is interpreted as both a specific locale and an identity marker that moves, linking the state’s cultural imaginary, labor, and economy with Asia Pacific, the Americas, and the world. Together, the works in this collection shift previous models and studies of the “Golden State” as the embodiment of “frontier mentality” and the discourse of exceptionality to a translocal, regional, and archipelagic understanding of place and cultural production. The poems, visual essays, short stories, critical essays, interviews, artist statements, and performance text excerpts featured in this collection expand notions of where knowledge is produced, directing our attention to the particularity of California’s landscape and labor in the production of arts and culture. An interdisciplinary collection, California Dreaming foregrounds “sensing” and “imagining” place, vividly, as it hopes to inspire further creative responses to the notion of emplacement. In doing so, California Dreaming explores the possibilities imagined by and through Asian American arts and culture today, paving the way for what is yet to be.

California's unfunded public pension liability, when measured correctly, is two to four times larger than official government estimates. In total, California's 86 defined-benefit public pension plans are underfunded by roughly $430 billion, representing California's greatest financial challenge since the Great Depression. The failure to fully fund the pension promises has allowed the current generation to receive public services that they are not fully paying for, pushing the pension problem onto future generations. California Dreamin': Resolving the Public Pension Crisis explains how six reforms would solve the state's pension problem in an equitable, responsible, and moral way: preserving pension benefits already earned, providing competitive pensions going forward, and granting the flexibility needed so that future generations are not paying for deals they did not make.

California matters, both as a place and as an idea. What famed historian Kevin Starr has called “the California Dream” is a vital part of American self-understanding. Just as America was meant to be a place of renewal, even redemption, for Europe, so too California was intended as a place of renewal for America. Therefore, California—place and idea—provides a fertile ground for scholars to think deeply about what it means to articulate “the promise of American life.” This book follows in the train of George Marsden’s classic The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship—believing that people of faith have a contribution to make to scholarship—and of Jay Green’s more recent book, Christian Historiography: Five Rival Views—believing that scholars of faith should engage in moral inquiry. In this book, eight authors inquire into the moral questions that emerge from studying California.

This compelling book tells the history of the past two decades of efforts to reform mathematics education in California. That history is a contentious one, full of such fervor and heat that participants and observers often refer to the “math wars.” Suzanne M. Wilson considers the many perspectives of those involved in math reform, weaving a tapestry of facts, philosophies, conversations, events, and personalities into a vivid narrative. While her focus is on California, the implications of her book extend to struggles over education policy and practice throughout the United States. Wilson’s three-dimensional account of math education reform efforts reveals how the debates tend to be deeply ideological and how people come to feel misunderstood and misrepresented. She examines the myths used to explain the failure of reforms, the actual reasons for failure, and the importance of taking multiple perspectives into account when planning and implementing reform.

James Alliston, a famous New York writer, moved to Los Angeles after Karen, the woman he loved, left him; tired of James's ongoing existential crisis. He has not written anything for too long, standing in a perennial "creative block". Abandoned by the wife with whom he raised his daughter Elizabeth until the age of three, under the advice of his best friend and literary agent, Andy Jackson, he decides to move back to Los Angeles to start a new life. Known already from the literary and film scene, his return to the city will be an opportunity to re-establish old past, sometimes even unwanted relationships. An old acquaintance in particular will be a great opportunity for James to make new friends with Stacy: the first girl he really loved, before getting to know Karen. Meanwhile, Andy, his literary agent, is in the midst of a marriage crisis in which his wife threatens to take away everything he owns. The arrival of Lucy, a young and beautiful aspiring actress, will not simplify the situation. Meanwhile, James will have the opportunity to meet Allison, a young girl with piercing blue eyes, who will unexpectedly change the cards at table putting at risk the newly created relationship with Stacy: a young and charming woman, kind and sweet, for the which he will start to feel completely unexpected feelings. In the second episode of California Dreaming, a series created by the award-winning novelist Andrew J. Smith and sponsored with the help of California Dreaming Production, will be full of twists, sensual and romantic backgrounds, which will enjoy in the reader's mind a exciting series to read in one breath.

James Alliston's life has changed completely since his wife Karen left him, with a divorce behind him and a three-year-old girl to grow up, under the advice of his best friend and literary agent, Andy Jackson, decides to move in Los Angeles, the city where he grew up, to reappropriate his life and to try to rediscover his literary creativity, lost for years now. His arrival in the city will be for him a beginning and a chance to redeem himself from his past that still torments him. Stacy, a sweet and gentle woman with a sunny smile, with whom she had a serious history before getting to know Karen, his current ex-wife, will help him step by step to rebuild his self-esteem lost in these years, following his marriage bankruptcy. James, will be forced to keep a secret to the woman that concerns Allison, a young and fresh sixteen year old, arrogant and self-confident at the same time, which could compromise the trust and feelings that were born recently between James and his old flame, Stacy . Meanwhile, his agent, in full marriage crisis with his wife, will be entangled in comical sexual trials that will see him as a protagonist. Meanwhile, Glenn, Stacy's ex-husband will make a big announcement that will leave everyone speechless, making his engagement with Penelope official, and asking her to marry him. James, will try slowly to leave behind the past and just when he decide to do so, a call from Karen will plunge back into distant memories that he believed he had forgotten. In the fourth chapter of California Dreaming, a series created by the award-winning international writer Andrew J. Smith and produced by California Dreaming Production, we’ll see James Alliston, the famous and sexy novelist in various scenes of sensual and funny, but at the same time must have the courage to make difficult decisions or compromise the future of his daughter, Elizabeth. This will be a "New Beginning" for the fun and entertaining writer, James Alliston.