Joe Mathews on California's generic governor's race

Ivo Jeramaz grew up in the same Croatian soil as his uncle Mike Grgich — the man who made the Napa Valley Chardonnay that beat the French at the Paris Wine Tasting of 1976, which recently turned 50. Jeramaz later followed his uncle to California, where he carries that legacy forward as winemaker at Grgich Hills, navigating an industry under pressure. He is still connected to that afternoon in Paris, holding fast to the belief that the land, farmed right, tells you everything you need to know.

With eleven days to go before the June 2 primary, Joe Mathews examines how California's race for governor has become strangely disconnected from the state itself. With almost all the campaigns built around generic national talking points and anti-Trump messaging, Mathews explores the growing nationalization of state politics, the issues candidates avoid, and why the actual mechanics of governing California barely seem to be part of the conversation.

William Riggs is a professor of engineering and management at the University of San Francisco and an expert on transportation innovation. He says San Francisco — now ground zero for America's autonomous vehicle future, with more than 1,000 Waymos on its streets — is exposing a strange contradiction: Society tolerates the deadly carnage caused by human drivers while holding self-driving cars to an impossible standard, even as the data increasingly suggests the technology will save lives.    

Kate Washington spent years giving everything to everyone else — caregiving, motherhood, a failing marriage — until she was empty. Her answer was cold water: 50 dunks in California rivers, creeks, and swimming holes before her 50th birthday. The author of "Midstream: A Life Remade in 50 Swims," she shares her story about joy and water as an act of reclamation.

Dillon Osleger has spent a decade rebuilding what America has been quietly erasing — the trails, wagon roads, and Indigenous paths that once knitted California and the West together. As a geologist, trail builder, and public lands advocate, he brings both scientific precision and moral urgency to the cause. His new book, "Trail Work," makes the case that losing these paths means losing ourselves.

Julia Turner and Julia Wick have spent their careers covering Los Angeles — and like anyone who's lived here long enough, they couldn't always figure it out either. So they did what journalists do. They started digging. L.A. Material is their newly launched independent digital newsroom, and their obsession is simple: making sense of a city that resists it.

Peter Richardson, author of the new book "Brand New Beat: The Wild Rise of Rolling Stone Magazine," discusses the pioneering music magazine's San Francisco decade — between 1967 and 1977 — when the Bay Area's counterculture reshaped music and the journalism that covered it. From Haight-Ashbury to the Fillmore, Hunter S. Thompson to Annie Leibovitz, the magazine documented a social revolution while simultaneously creating it.

Ann Carlson discusses her new book "Smog and Sunshine: The Surprising Story of How Los Angeles Cleaned Up Its Air." Smog was once as much a symbol of L.A. as palm trees — a bane to public health and a national punchline on Johnny Carson's "Tonight Show." An expert in environmental law, Carlson chronicles the decades-long battle that transformed the air from toxic to breathable, and what today's rollbacks threaten to undo.

Severin Borenstein, a professor at UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business and an expert on the economics of energy, explains how the Iran war is disrupting global oil markets and why California faces especially sharp price impacts. Beyond the crude oil disruptions affecting everyone, the state's refinery shutdowns, import constraints, and gasoline surcharge create unique vulnerabilities as supply chains scramble to adjust.

Miriam Pawel, author of the definitive Cesar Chavez biography, "The Crusades of Cesar Chavez," reflects on the recent shattering of the Cesar Chavez myth — and the harder questions beneath it: what was known, what was ignored, and why movements so often need saints. In this wide-ranging conversation, Pawel explores Chavez's charisma, control, contradictions, and the challenge of holding both his historic achievements and the harm he may have caused in the same frame.