Explainers

Only hard options remain for dealing with California’s wildfire crisis. From controlled burns to burying power lines to breaking up PG&E, what are the odds?

In California, wildfire season is nearly year-round. CalMatters explores why, and what could help fireproof the state.

In the last days of California's 2019 legislative session, hundreds of bills landed on the governor's desk. We're tracking the most consequential.

President Trump has threatened to roll back Obama-era standards, jeopardizing a decades-old exemption that lets California make its own clean air rules.

California's population is about to hit 40 million. Here's who we are, where we're going and why the census is so important to us.

A new California law aims to reduce police shootings and the use of deadly force by law enforcement. Here's a deep look at the issue in the Golden State.

Updated May 30, 2019 Welcome to death watch. The legislative kind. We’ve tracked which bills California lawmakers have rejected as the Legislature hit the half-way point for making new laws for this year.  May 31 is the deadline for bills to pass the house in which they were introduced, a critical hurdle in the legislative […]

With fresh political attention on mental health, advocates are hoping California embraces humane and effective ways of averting some problems and solving others.

Tragedy strikes, California responds. But how did a state once the epitome of the gun-slinging wild, wild west wind up with more gun control laws than another state in the country?

We track key data on California wildfires: land consumed, lives lost, growing firefighting costs.