Before Monica Ganas began teaching California, she lived it. A native of the state and a 30 year veteran of the entertainment industry and now a professor at Azusa Pacific University, Ganas explained how her personal background inspired her book, Under the Influence: California’s Intoxicating Spiritual and Cultural Impact on America. “I think I’ve been trying to make sense of my personal experience for a lot of my life,” she joked. It wasn’t until she left the state that she began to see its strangeness, and the way it impacts the country. Ganas stopped by Zocalo’s offices to explore California culture — from the glamor of movies to the ordinariness of traffic, from car obsession to spiritual diversity.
Archive for August, 2010
Monica Ganas on the Meaning of California
Posted By Zócalo On August 16, 2010a creature to run from
Posted By Zócalo On August 15, 2010 Read MoreLiving Off the Grid
Posted By Zócalo On August 15, 2010Nick Rosen was in New York in 2003 when the lights went out for 50 million people across the northeast. “It got me wondering about the silent, invisible electricity grid — we all depend on it, but we never think about it,” he said. Going off the grid wasn’t an entirely new idea for Rosen, author of Off the Grid: Inside the Movement for More Space, Less Government, and True Independence in Modern America. He’s the owner of “an old shepherd’s hut in a beautiful part of Spain,” he explained. “So I knew you can live very comfortably without the grid.” Below, Rosen chats about who goes off the grid, why it’s an especially American thing to do, and what we can learn from their lives.

Words
Phones: Why texting can be better than calling.
Books: What they say matters more than how we read them.




