California changes things. Southern California, with its (mostly) perpetual sunshine, especially seems to work decisive alterations in whatever moves westward—objects, people, ideas. Eerily blending laid-back sociability and psychotic road rage, the region’s spirit, with its profit-driven aesthetics and its fashion-based, bipolar politics, makes every aspect of American life that it engulfs the same only different, pepped up with additives but lacking a few... More >>>