Searching for Water in CA's Central Valley

The Public Sphere

This week, we’re talking about A Kingdom of Dust, by Mark Arax. This long-form article was published in California Sunday Magazine in late January. It’s a long winding lyrical account of the largest grower of almonds, pistachios, and pomegranate in the country. You would probably recognize the Wonderful brand from the bottles of pom juice you seen in the grocery store or Fiji water.

This is a story of a tycoon of American agri-business, the rights to California’s scarcest resource, water, the company town of Lost Hills and the workers who live there, and the role of philanthropy in providing what are usually public services.

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• Brian Schatz, "California’s Housing Crisis Is So Bad, Families Are Squatting Abandoned Homes Just to Survive," MotherJones (March/April 2018).
• Clair Potter, "How to learn from Conservatives," Public Seminar (April 18, 2018).
• Ronan Farrow, "Inside Rex Tillerson’s Ouster," The New Yorker (April 19, 2018).
• Mark Arax, "A Kingdom from Dust," California Sunday Magazine (January 31, 2018).
• "Drought by the Numbers," KCET.org .
• Map of the Central Valley.

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