Bryan Ida, a Los Angeles-based artist who grew up Palo Alto and graduated from San Jose State University, will never know the exact emotions his grandfather was feeling in that moment, but he knows where he was headed: nearly 700 miles inland to Topaz Internment Camp in Utah, as one of 112,000 Japanese Americans – both first-generation and American-born – who were relocated from their homes on the West Coast and imprisoned within internment camps for no reason other than their heritage.

The only thing better than crashing Amy Baldwin and April Lampert's date night with a recorder last week was cracking open an adult beverage and listening back to it later. In person, the creators of the Santa Cruz-based 'Shameless Sex' podcast, which has dropped every week since last June, are just as they are on air: unscripted, open-minded, intelligent, and freaking hilarious. Only hotter.

Tim Blake, founder of the Emerald Cup, was an 18-year-old Soquel High student when he started dealing bud, just as the industry began to bloom in California. During the last bloody years of the Vietnam War, large quantities of hash from Asia, and pot via Oaxaca and South America, started pouring into cities along the West Coast. By the mid-'70s it was an organized marketplace, he says, with 100,000-pound loads arriving 10 to 15 times a year on freighters from as far as Thailand.

Nearly half of the humans on this sweet planet-three billion and counting-live in Earth's coastal zones. But between 2000 and 2010, new building permits were issued at a rate of 1,355 per day in shoreline counties across the U.S. Increasing coastal development is setting the stage for a precarious future. Indeed, we've already begun to see its impact.

For more than 14,000 years, humans have had a close relationship with wild salmon. Along the Pacific Coast, natives harvested thousands of adult salmon each fall from their spawning grounds in local rivers and streams, a catch that nutritiously fed their families throughout the year. While many cultures in the Pacific Northwest and Alaska are still deeply wedded to the salmon resource, California's grasp has grown increasingly slippery, with only a small percentage of its historical natural breeding population remaining. California's salmon legacy goes far beyond its estimated $1.4 billion fishery: the fish also provide a vital transfer of nutrients and energy from the ocean back to the freshwater ecosystems where they were born.

Northern California’s apocalyptic weather dance has begun.

Is the campaign against Ectasy youth a response to an epidemic— or an overreaction?

Read the latest features and columns from the South Bay's Metro Newspaper, and find information on upcoming events, lifestyle, the arts and more.