California, it’s going to be OK. This is our moment

Don’t embrace the California-as-disaster-epic narrative. Three times in the early 1990s, the cover of Time magazine trumpeted the Golden State’s demise: “California: The Endangered Dream.” “California: State of Shock.” “Los Angeles: Is the City of Angels Going to Hell?” Not to be outdone, Newsweek weighed in with “California: American Dream, American Nightmare” and a few years later with “California in Crisis,” complete with a cartoon showing the state literally breaking apart and falling into the Pacific Ocean. “California deserves new attention as the ‘reinvention state’ rather than a ‘resistance state,’” he writes. “Even under Trump, there’s still a good chance that as California goes, so eventually goes the country, and eventually much of the world.” Fallows, a noted American chronicler who grew up in Redlands, offers counternarratives to some of California’s bigger black eyes. Fallows sees the “declinist alarmism” about California as coming from the same mindset that argues America is a failing state The downtown view from Griffith Observatory I recently read Chip Jacobs and William J. Kelly’s book “Smogtown,” an excellent history of L.A.’s long but surprisingly successful battle against air pollution.