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The days of small-batch whiskey and gin being delivered to your doorstep are almost over. An extensive lobbying effort to kill a proposal that would allow craft liquor distillers to keep shipping their products to California customers underscores how wealthy and powerful interests influence policy among lawmakers, writes CalMatters’ Ryan Sabalow. During the COVID-19 pandemic, […]

The next time you’re driving along the highway, you may spot truckers cruising by, chatting on their cellphones. That’s not necessarily a bad thing when it comes to your safety or their mental health, writes Gagandeep Singh for CalMatters. Gagandeep spoke to truckers about their cellphone use on the road, where they drive long hours […]

California Republicans have a choice in their quest to snap a 20-year losing streak in statewide elections: Moderate their positions on certain issues to appeal to more voters, or lean further to the right to rile up support from the base.  Assemblymember Carl DeMaio, the San Diego Republican with a YouTube channel and his own […]

California built its health coverage system over decades, expanding Medi-Cal and helping millions of residents get insured. Now that progress is reversing. Facing state budget shortfalls and new federal restrictions, California is dismantling the very system that at one point almost covered everyone.  In a new documentary, CalMatters goes inside one clinic in Los Angeles […]

State lawmakers are returning to Sacramento today for the final month of session, which ends on Aug. 31. In the next few weeks, Democratic legislative leaders will attempt to hammer out deals between themselves, Gov. Gavin Newsom and other stakeholders on bills related to climate policy, speeding up urban development, wildfires and more, write CalMatters’ […]

A federal court dealt a blow to the Trump administration’s mass detention of unauthorized immigrants in a new ruling that held many of them should have had opportunities to be released while awaiting deportation decisions.  The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals determined that the federal government for more than 30 years has treated people detained […]

AnaMaria Ávila Bugarin had racked up tens of thousands of dollars in bills to prove what seemed obvious to most of the people around her: She didn’t have dementia.  So the 76-year-old showed up impeccably dressed for her final exam with a neuropsychologist, according to court records. Tearful and distraught, she explained how a quarrel […]

Why turn to artificial intelligence rather than a friend? For young people, it often comes down to not having to worry about what a peer or a parent thinks. That’s one takeaway from a new report by San Francisco-based Hopelab and the Harvard Graduate School of Education, which surveyed 30 people between 14 and 22 […]

Compared to the rest of the country, California has been a pioneer in regulating potentially harmful uses of technology. But how does it compare to the rest of the world? That’s a question we’re increasingly interested in answering at CalMatters — and that we try and answer today, with a wide-angle look at how laws […]

Do you smell smoke? Inside California prisons, there are people assigned to do just that. As CalMatters’ Cayla Mihalovich explains, California’s 31 prisons have outdated, malfunctioning or inoperable fire alarm systems. But replacing all those systems, which include various detection devices, control panels and network connections, would cost $1.5 billion. To get around shelling out […]