Didion says that the Reagans maintained, in their years in Sacramento and Washington, the sheltered, disconnected lifestyle of "actors on location," living in housing provided by the studio.

Didion takes as her central image a campaign stop in which Dukakis, for the benefit of news cameras, tossed a baseball with an aide on the tarmac of an airport runway, an event duly reported as news by a number of journalists "all of whom believed it to be a setup and yet most of whom believed that only an outsider, someone too 'naive' to know the rules of the game, would so describe it."

Didion states that, when Bush toured Israel and Jordan, the Jordanian government was instructed to provide a camel for the background of every photo opportunity.First appeared in 1988 in The New York Review of Books.

Didion recounts the history as a Californian opera, and Hearst as an emblematic Californian character in her lack of self-analysis or sense of connection to history, and she illustrates this point with a quote from a survivor of the Donner Party: "Don't let this letter dishearten anybody, never take no cutoffs and hurry along as fast as you can."

Didion notes that everyone involved was motivated by unrealized fantasies, from the criminals who killed for a stake in a flop to prosecutors and reporters hoping that this obscure, sordid crime could itself be turned into a glamorous Hollywood production.First appeared in 1989 in The New Yorker under the title "Letter from Los Angeles."

Describes southern California's annual season of wildfires, the role of the Santa Ana winds, and the way in which fire is a part of the rhythm of a Californian view of the world.First appeared in 1989 in The New Yorker under the title "Letter from Los Angeles."