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      Readers Share Why They Love Living in the Golden State

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      The view from Richmond, the diversity of Los Angeles and the stunningly green hills in spring are a few reasons to call California home, readers say.Mount Tamalpais State Park can offer a clear view of downtown San Francisco.Peter DaSilva for The New York TimesNothing is a better pick-me-up than the sweet emails I receive from readers about why they love living in their corner of California.We’ve been publishing these notes for more than two years, and together they offer delightful tributes to all parts of our state. We’re adding more, lightly edited, to our collection today.You can email me your own California love letter to CAtoday@nytimes.com. Enjoy.“Recently, I had the opportunity to share with my friend’s teenage daughter my favorite spot in California. It’s a peaceful nook in the foothills of Richmond where I used to go to reflect when I was her age. Despite Richmond’s negative image in the news, I loved growing up there. I would go to our backyard and gaze out over the city of Richmond, then across to Mount Tamalpais, the tip of the Golden Gate Bridge, and finally to the panoramic view of San Francisco. To me, those views represented endless possibilities, and they inspired me to explore the world.” — Olga Villanueva, Berkeley“I grew up in Washington State — a beautiful place, but gray and rainy most of the year. Each summer, my glamorous aunt would come up for a visit — with her acerbic wit and great stories about San Diego. Occasionally, she would also bring my towheaded surfer-boy cousins, who were older than the rest of us, and cooler than anyone I had ever met. My entire life, I talked about moving to California when I grew up. I did, and was lucky to get a room in the beautiful Hollywood Hills home of a friend for my first months (what I would call a very soft landing). I have been in my beloved city for over 25 years now. The weather is perfect, the diversity of the city is valued and unique, and the landscape is like a dream.” — Jeff Jumisko, Los Angeles“As a native Californian who has lived here my entire 72 years, I wouldn’t want to live anywhere else. The natural beauty is unbeatable — we have it all. Ocean, lakes, farmlands, deserts, stunning mountains, wild rivers and the vast Central Valley. Rolling hills that are stunningly green in spring, and golden in summer; majestic heritage oak trees; diverse evergreens; towering mighty redwoods. In Sacramento, the flowers take turns on center stage through the seasons, with gorgeous camellias, tulips, azaleas, dogwood trees, colorful crepe myrtles and abundant roses.” — Diana Halpenny, Sacramento“My introduction to California came in 1965 when I was en route to Japan, and ultimately Vietnam, compliments of the United States Marine Corps. As a young man who had grown up in rural Arkansas, I was apart from my wife and young son for a questionable cause. While housed in bachelor officers’ quarters on Treasure Island, I heard for the first time Tony Bennett’s “I Left My Heart in San Francisco.” The song was special as I heard it innumerable times on Armed Forces Radio along with many other homesick Marines. Some 35 years later, my wife and I moved to Santa Monica, and five years later, San Francisco, where we overlook the Bay Bridge from our apartment.” — George Proctor, San FranciscoWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      U.S.C. President Censured by Academic Senate After Weeks of Turmoil

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      Carol Folt had been under fire for canceling a valedictorian’s speech and calling in the police, who cleared an encampment arrested dozens of protesters.The University of Southern California’s academic senate voted on Wednesday to censure Carol Folt, the school’s president, after several tumultuous weeks in which the administration canceled the valedictory address of a Muslim student, cleared a protest encampment within hours and called in police last month to arrest dozens of protesters.The academic senate, which consists primarily of faculty members, also endorsed calls for an investigation into the administration’s actions. Its resolution, which passed by a wide margin after a several hourslong meeting on Wednesday afternoon, cited “widespread dissatisfaction and concern among the faculty” about the decision making of Dr. Folt and Andrew T. Guzman, the provost, who was also censured.The vote represented only a fraction of the university’s 4,700 faculty members, and the senate stopped short of taking a vote of no-confidence in the administrators, which would have been a harsher rebuke. Despite criticism, Dr. Folt has maintained considerable support from the university’s trustees, and some faculty members have quietly sympathized with her.Still, the vote was “significant” with “far-reaching implications,” said William G. Tierney, a professor emeritus of higher education at U.S.C., who has written about the response to campus protests across the nation.“The petition from the faculty was thoughtful and the discussion was serious,” said Dr. Tierney, a past president of the senate who has criticized Dr. Folt’s handling of the protest and who confirmed the vote. “No faculty wants to rebuke their president and provost. But this was warranted.”Christina Dunbar-Hester, the acting president of the university’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors, who watched the meeting, said that faculty members have been particularly frustrated by a lack of communication from administrators and the speed with which the Los Angeles Police Department was called on protesters who were not violent.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Democrats lost the White House in 1968 amid anti-war protests. What will 2024 bring?

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      When student Lauren Brown first heard the commotion, including firecrackers, she assumed the sounds were coming from nearby frat houses. Then, at about four in the morning, she heard helicopters. Later, she awoke to news and footage of a violent attack by pro-Israeli protesters on an encampment set up to oppose the war in Gaza.“It was hard to watch,” said Brown, 19, a freshman at the University of California, Los Angeles, whose dorm was near the encampment. “And I wondered where the police were. I saw posts from people talking about them being teargassed and maced and campus security was just watching.”Eventually, a large police contingent did arrive and forcibly cleared the sprawling encampment early on Thursday morning. Flash-bangs were launched to disperse crowds gathered outside and more than 200 people were arrested. Afterward, campus facility workers could be seen picking up flattened tents and pieces of spray-painted plywood, and throwing them into grey dumpsters.Similar scenes of tumult have played out this week at about 40 universities and colleges in America, resulting in clashes with police, mass arrests and a directive from Joe Biden to restore order. The unrest has unfolded from coast to coast on a scale not seen since the Vietnam war protests of the 1960s and 1970s.The president has cause for concern as the issue threatens his youth vote, divides his Democratic party and gives Donald Trump’s Republicans an opening to push allegations of antisemitism and depict Biden’s America as spiralling out of control.There are inescapable parallels with 1968, a tumultuous year of assassinations and anti-war demonstrations that led to chaos at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Democrats lost the White House to Republican “law and order” candidate Richard Nixon.Now, there are fears that history will repeat itself as anti-war protests again convulse university campuses, and the Democratic National Convention again heads to Chicago. Biden faces Republican “law and order” candidate Donald Trump in November’s presidential election.Bernie Sanders, an independent US senator from Vermont, told CNN this week: “I am thinking back and other people are making this reference that this may be Biden’s Vietnam.”Drawing parallels with President Lyndon Johnson, whose considerable domestic achievements were overshadowed by the Vietnam war and who did not seek reelection in 1968, Sanders added: “I worry very much that President Biden is putting himself in a position where he has alienated not just young people but a lot of the Democratic base, in terms of his views on Israel and this war.”The Gaza war started when Hamas militants attacked Israel on 7 October last year, killing about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and taking about 240 hostage. Israel’s retaliatory offensive has killed more than 34,600 people in Gaza, mostly women and children.The ferocity of that response, and America’s “ironclad” support for Israel, ignited protests by students at Columbia University in New York that rapidly spread to other campuses across the country. Students built encampments in solidarity with Gaza, demanding a ceasefire and that universities divest from Israel. The demonstrations have been mostly peaceful, although some protesters have been caught on camera making antisemitic remarks and violent threats.University administrators, who have tried to balance the right to protest and complaints of violence and hate speech, have increasingly called on police to clear out the demonstrators before year-end exams and graduation ceremonies. More than 2,300 arrests have been made in the past two weeks, some during violent confrontations with police, giving rise to accusations of use of excessive force.View image in fullscreenBiden, who has faced pressure from all political sides over the conflict in Gaza, attempted to thread the needle on Thursday, saying: “We are not an authoritarian nation where we silence people or squash dissent. But neither are we a lawless country. We’re a civil society, and order must prevail.”The president faces opposition in his own party for his strong support for Israel’s military offensive. Hundreds of thousands of people registered versions of “uncommitted” protest votes against him in the Democratic presidential primary.Yaya Anantanang, a student organiser at George Washington University in Washington, told the Politico website: “My message is that we do not support Biden. We do not capitulate to the liberal electoral politics, because, quite frankly, the liberation of Palestinians will not come through a Democratic president but by organizing and ensuring that there is full divestment within all of these institutions.”Such views ring alarm bells for those who fear that even a small dip in support from Biden’s coalition could make all the difference in a tight election.Kerry Kennedy, the daughter of Robert F Kennedy, who was gunned down while running for president in 1968, urged the protesters to support Biden despite their misgivings. “We need their votes now,” she said. “They might not love Joe Biden’s policies but the choice is not between Joe Biden and their ideal. The choice is between Joe Biden and Donald Trump, who’s going to institute the Muslim ban on day one.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionRepublicans, meanwhile, are seeking to exploit the unrest for political gain. They have accused Biden of being soft on what they say is antisemitic sentiment among the protesters and Democrats of indulging “wokeness” in America’s education system.Chris Sununu, the Republican governor of New Hampshire, said: “The crisis you’re seeing on college campuses is a result of the colleges themselves not having and pushing the right education, the right discussion in the classrooms, in the right way. They play this woke game where they don’t want to touch an issue.“They create a vacuum of information. The students get bad information and propaganda. They’re effectively being used by terrorist organisations overseas to push an anti-American, anti-Israeli message, which is just awful. It’s not a difference of opinion. It’s complete misinformation.”Images of disarray on campus have played endlessly on Fox News and in other rightwing media, feeding a narrative of instability and lawlessness under Biden while conveniently sucking political oxygen away from Trump’s own negatives.On Tuesday, for example, the Republican nominee was in court for his hush-money trial; Time magazine published an interview in which Trump set out an extremist vision of an imperial presidency; and Florida introduced a six-week abortion ban after Trump helped overturn Roe v Wade. But TV screens were dominated by the protests.Ezra Levin, co-founder and co-executive director of the progressive movement Indivisible, said: “All of those stories – any individual one would have been possibly disqualifying for a presidential candidate in a previous election – received a fraction of the coverage of the protests against [the Israeli prime minister Benjamin] Netanyahu’s massacre of Gazans.View image in fullscreen“That’s problematic for those of us who want to see Joe Biden re-elected and want to see Democrats win because every day that we spend talking about this immoral war that US tax dollars are supporting is a day we’re not talking about the dangerous, creeping fascism presented by the Republican party.”Still, Democrats hope that, with the academic year soon drawing to a close, students will head home for the summer and the energy will disperse. Donna Brazile, a former interim chair of the Democratic National Committee, doubts that the issue will be decisive in November.“We’re going to have an October surprise every month, and we cannot predict which of the many surprises will actually drive the election.” she said. “A month ago, it was abortion was going drive the election. Now it’s the campus protesters. Next month it’ll be something else.”Brazile also defended the students’ right to protest as past generations have against the Vietnam war, South African apartheid, the Iraq war and, during the most recent election campaign, police brutality. “I’ve been on several college campuses and the majority of them are quite peaceful,” she said.“These are students who are using their first amendment right to advocate for change in the Middle East, and everyone has to be clear that there are rules. Just a handful have gotten out of control because if you violate the rules or break the law, you you have no right to do that. That is forbidden.” More

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      University of California Workers May Strike After UCLA Raid

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      The largest employee union in the University of California system said on Thursday that it was preparing to ask some or all of its members to authorize a strike over the treatment of pro-Palestinian protesters at the University of California, Los Angeles.The announcement by United Auto Workers Local 4811, which represents some 48,000 graduate student teaching assistants, researchers and other student workers across the state, came hours after police officers arrested about 200 demonstrators at U.C.L.A. for failing to leave.U.A.W. 4811 intends to file unfair labor practices charges that, in essence, accuse U.C.L.A. of discriminating against pro-Palestinian speech and unilaterally changing policies protecting employees’ free speech without bargaining, said Rafael Jaime, the union’s co-president and a Ph.D. candidate in the university’s English department.The group said the university failed to protect union members who were among the pro-Palestinian student protesters when counterprotesters attacked an encampment that had stood since April 25.Mr. Jaime said he was at the encampment Tuesday night as counterprotesters tore down barricades and shot fireworks at pro-Palestinian demonstrators, and that he was hit by pepper spray. Campus police on site did not intervene, and reinforcements from the Los Angeles Police Department and California Highway Patrol did not arrive for hours. No arrests were made.The lack of response was quickly denounced by local leaders and Gov. Gavin Newsom, as well as by students and faculty members.“The university was nowhere to be seen for hours and hours,” Mr. Jaime said. “They just stood there and allowed our co-workers to be brutalized.”On Wednesday night, dozens of police officers in riot gear arrived to disperse protesters who remained at the pro-Palestinian encampment. Mr. Jaime said officers shot projectiles into the crowd of protesters and forcefully arrested students. He said he did not know how many union members had been arrested.and forcefully arrested students, including union members.Arresting some 200 pro-Palestinian demonstrators while not arresting any counterprotesters who assaulted them, he said, amounted to prioritizing anti-Palestinian speech over pro-Palestinian speech, which violated the rights of university employees to free speech.Mr. Jaime said that the union could call a strike authorization vote as early as next week, but he emphasized that it was too early to say whether a strike would include union members across the University of California system or just at U.C.L.A.Officials at the University of California Office of the President said in a statement that the union could not legally engage in a work stoppage and expressed frustration that the union would “exploit” the situation.The statement said that “the University of California is deeply alarmed, concerned and disappointed that our UAW-represented academic employees would choose this moment of crisis to take a vote to engage in an unlawful work stoppage.” Officials added that the university “values these employees and asks them to join it in supporting our communities at this time.”The union’s members do much of the day-to-day work across the vast University of California system, which serves nearly 300,000 students, has some of the nation’s top researchers and is often referred to as the “crown jewel” of the state. The academic workers grade papers, lead discussion sessions and conduct research.But the university employees often struggle with the cost of living in some of the nation’s most expensive housing markets. In 2022, the union’s members — then split into two locals — walked off the job for six weeks in one of the largest strikes by university-based workers in national history. The union called for a cease-fire in Gaza in October, making it part of an early wave of unions declaring support for Palestinians. More

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      New Progressive PAC Targets 8 Key House Races in California

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      Democrats nearly pulled off the impossible in the 2022 midterms.In the final weeks of the campaign, with an unpopular president in his first term, polls forecast a red wave that would sweep the country and flip control of the House and the Senate — prompting alarm from Democrats and predictions from Republicans of a decisive victory.But that wave never materialized, a mirage of bad polling and inflated expectations. Democrats came close to maintaining a national trifecta, but Republicans eked out a thin majority in the House — prevailing in a handful of seats in New York and California, each by just a few thousand votes.Now, a new coalition of progressive groups in California has formed a super PAC aiming to bolster Democratic candidates in a state that the party sees as crucial to winning control of the House this fall.The super PAC, Battleground California, says it aims to spend $15 million this year on eight competitive House races, seven with Republican incumbents — in Northern California, Orange County, the Inland Empire east of Los Angeles, the Central Valley and Los Angeles — as well as the seat left open by Representative Katie Porter, a Democrat who is not running for re-election after a failed Senate campaign.It is an ambitious effort, one that seeks to establish a durable progressive machine in California — advised and supported by local activists and community organizations — to lift swing district Democratic candidates through an extensive field operation, including marathon door-knocking campaigns aimed at driving turnout among minority groups.“Trusted messengers from the community are a very critical element,” said Steve Phillips, a co-founder of the California Donor Table, the group leading the Battleground California PAC, adding that those residents are not only more trusted by voters but are better able to provide feedback on what messages work and what messages don’t.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      A Small Campus in the Redwoods Has the Nation’s Most Entrenched Protest

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      Pro-Palestinian protesters have occupied the administration building at California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt for the past week and forced a campus closure until May 10.When university administrators across the nation worry about the potential fallout from campus protests, they may have Siemens Hall in mind.The building, at California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt, includes the campus president’s office and has been occupied for a week by pro-Palestinian protesters who barricaded themselves inside and fought off an early attempt by the police to remove them. Protesters have since tagged walls and renamed it “Intifada Hall” by ripping off most of the signage on the brick exterior.Inside, they painted graffiti messages like “Time 2 Free Gaza,” “Pigs Not Allowed,” and “Land Back,” according to a video posted by the local news site Redheaded Blackbelt. They occupied and defaced the office of the president, Tom Jackson Jr., spraying “Blood On Your Hands” across one framed wall hanging and “I Will Live Free or Die Trying” on his door.The school, more than 275 miles north of San Francisco, among the ancient coastal redwoods dripping with fog mist, is the site of the most entrenched of the campus protests across the country. It has gone well beyond the encampments on student quads elsewhere; at Cal Poly Humboldt, protesters took over the power center of the campus and have rejected increasingly desperate entreaties from officials for them to vacate the premises.The university has shut down the entire campus, first for a couple days, then a week and now through May 10, one day before its scheduled commencement. After the Siemens Hall takeover, protesters set up dozens of tents on patches of grass around the hall, and demonstrators took over a second building to use its bathrooms and hold meetings. University officials estimate the damage to be in the millions of dollars.To those outside Northern California, the show of force at Cal Poly Humboldt, in the college town of Arcata, has been a surprising turn in a region more typically associated with a hippie pacifism and marijuana farms. But beneath the good-vibes image, locals say, a culture of protest and resentment toward authority has percolated at the 6,000-student campus.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Museums to Visit in California This Year

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      A special section of The New York Times on museums highlights art across the state.A Yuri Suzuki installation at SFMOMA’s “Art of Noise” exhibition. The work, titled “Arborhythm,” collects, remixes and broadcasts sounds from the streets of San Francisco from the balcony of the museum.Jim Wilson/The New York TimesHappy Monday.The New York Times published a special section on museums over the weekend, with more than two dozen articles about how institutions across the country are striving to offer their visitors more to see, do and feel.I highly recommend browsing the full series. One of the articles covers the ways that museums are making better use of their outdoor spaces; another highlights a museum dedicated to the history and science of nuclear weapons; and there is a profile of a joint show mounted by two museums, one on each side of the U.S.-Mexico border.There’s also a long list of American museums to visit this year, including several on the West Coast, as well as a guide to new and exciting museum programs for children.And, of course, there is a lot going on in the art world in California. Here are some of the highlights:The Broad in Los Angeles will open a sweeping exhibition on May 25 covering 20 years of work by Mickalene Thomas, an artist who was exploring the Black female figure well before it became so popular.“It’s difficult to understand, from where we are now, how radical her work was when I first showed it,” Susanne Vielmetter, a Los Angeles gallerist who gave Thomas one of her first solo shows in 2007, told my colleague Robin Pogrebin. “I cannot think of a single artist who at that time was making portraiture of female Black figures from a perspective of female desire.”The artist Mickalene Thomas in front of her work “Portrait of Maya No. 10” (2017).Mickalene Thomas/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; Amy Harrity for The New York TimesAn unusual collaboration among 10 large public universities, including U.C.L.A., will bring shows focused on democracy to campus museums across the country. It’s part of an effort to reduce political polarization and increase student voter turnout.From May 4 through Aug. 18, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art will be showcasing visual and technological artifacts from the world of music, including early listening devices and iconic album covers, in its “Art of Noise” exhibition. But, as Chris Colin explains, what the show really explores is humans’ relationship to music.At the Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens in Los Angeles County, a new installation by the artist Betye Saar manipulates light to simulate the stages of nightfall. It’s one of many shows across the country in which artists are playing with darkness.Museums dedicated to the natural sciences have long been associated with dark spaces and nature dioramas, but that may be changing. At the Natural History Museums of Los Angeles County, a new area will soon be opened that features a theater, a cafe and new seating and exhibition spaces. “There is nature in L.A., and we believe that if you have a better understanding of what’s in your backyard and your neighborhood, you’ll have a much better appreciation of life on our planet,” Lori Bettison-Varga, the museum’s president and director, told The Times.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      How a New Trial for Harvey Weinstein Could Again Test the Legal System

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      A new jury would hear from only one or both of the women whom he was convicted of assaulting, in what analysts say will be a much narrower and weaker case.As one of Harvey Weinstein’s key accusers took the witness stand during his trial in New York, she broke down in tears, sobbing uncontrollably. After a brief break, she still could not compose herself. The trial was adjourned for the day. Hyperventilating, the woman was ushered out and her piercing screams bellowed out from a back room.The episode was one of many tense moments in the highly publicized, weekslong trial of the former Hollywood titan in 2020. Now, they may happen all over again.On Thursday, New York’s highest court ruled that the trial judge who presided over the sex crimes case in Manhattan erred when he let several women testify that Mr. Weinstein had assaulted them, even though their accusations were not part of the charges brought against the producer. The appeals court ordered a new trial.But the original trial in 2020 against Mr. Weinstein was about much more than one man’s guilt. It had morphed into something more, as his accusers sparked the global #MeToo movement: Prosecutors were trying to prove not only that Mr. Weinstein was a sexual predator, but also that the justice system was both willing and able to hold powerful men accountable for their treatment of women.The new ruling may do little to change the public’s perception of Mr. Weinstein, who is still notorious and behind bars and was sentenced to 16 years in prison for sex crimes in California.For some, however, it raised new doubts about the legal system’s ability to hold influential people like him responsible.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More