Greetings from Sunny California

by Sara Mayeux

Ahoy, readers! Many thanks to TNC for including me among his stable of guest bloggers this summer—it's an esteemed line-up and I feel a bit like the kid in Rookie of the Year to have been drafted to join it. I've written elsewhere about my admiration for this blog's incorporation of history, and the impressive quality of its commentariat—so while I'm certainly looking forward to broadcasting my thoughts to the world this week, I'm looking forward even more to learning from all of you.

At my usual Internet home, I track news about criminal justice issues, from mass incarceration and prison overcrowding, to the use of jails as default mental health hospitals, to the democracy-distorting practice of prison-based gerrymandering. I'll touch on some of those things in the next few days—and I hope to do a couple of posts on immigration, as well—but I'm also excited to fully exploit this blog's license to eclectic coverage, to inject some Pacific Coast flavor into The Atlantic, and especially to engage in the insightful conversation about race, history, and my home region of the South that has been a running sub-theme here.