A Diego Rivera mural titled “The Allegory of California” hides in a private staircase inside the City Club of San Francisco. It depicts a woman often referred to as the Spirit of California and the bounty she offers up: a cornucopia of working men and their promise of progress.

When Franklin Delano Roosevelt fought to establish the minimum wage in the 1930s, he intended it to be a living wage. In his 1933 speech on the National Industrial Recovery Act, he said, “No business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country… and by living wages, I mean more than a bare subsistence level—I mean the wages of decent living.”

European aristocrats used to spend several years abroad as part of their education. Can the practice be democratised and updated for a globalised world?

Revolution harkens images of fighting and violence, often depicted in graphic and elaborate scenes in paintings and movies. But every revolution has a planning stage, a period where people come together to share ideas and debate strategy. Hollywood doesn’t make a lot of movies about this part, but all that planning has to take place somewhere. For centuries, a lot has happened within the sanctity of coffeehouses, a hot beverage in hand.

The rhythmic crunch of dry grass as I walked, the California sun on my shoulders, dogs barking further up the trail – these are the sensations that made me fall in love with hiking during the pandemic. I started with sojourns around the block just to get away from my studio apartment in downtown Los Angeles during lockdown, but soon traded in those little concrete-encased strolls for steeper five-mile hikes with ocean views in the city’s famed hills.

It would be too simple to say that religious people drink coffee because it’s not alcohol. When coffee was first commodified, all three Abrahamic religions had to contend with how this new beverage fit into each faith’s ideal way of life. Each religion had their opponents and proponents but most eventually accepted the beverage.