In 2025, California updated driving laws affecting seniors, job ads, and ID requirements. Driving instructor Bill Allenbaugh of Bill’s Defensive Driving School updates us on the latest changes for California drivers.

The pandemic created the urgency for many East Bay families to set up an estate plan. Richmond Estate Planning Attorney, Sara Diamond answers questions about wills, trusts, powers of attorney and advance health care directives.

A crazy-fast growing market for non-animal milk suggests a market in shake-up mode, so what's a milk drinker to do? Here's a primer on the landscape.

Some parents are banning smartphones. I am not.

Oakland author Melanie Gideon, who recently graced the pages of O magazine, is getting rave reviews for Wife 22, her amusing (and sexy!) first novel for adults. We’re pleased to publish an excerpt from Chapter 9.

If the refrain "everyone is doing it" bothers you, check in.

Should parents enable their children's experimentation with marijuana and alcohol by providing them with vices?

Want a better night's sleep? Put down the phone.

Some parents are banning smartphones. I am not.

A new law would treat larger day cares the same as smaller ones when it comes to permits and zoning.

A Cal psychologist has a simple prescription for race relations.

Two East Bay moms provide plethora of ideas for getting out of the house.

Should you get a petting zoo? No way. Tips on celebrating and keeping your sanity.

Local independent bookstores weigh in on their favorite back-to-school books for kids and adults.

A former Los Angeles Times Book Review editor, Steve Wasserman returns to his roots in Berkeley to leave his mark on independent California publishing.

The horrors of American torture at Abu Ghraib are revealed.

Writer Phyllis Grant of Berkeley shares life lessons from the kitchen and a recipe in her essay, “Recipe,” one of 28 pieces collected in a recently published anthology, The Cassoulet Saved Our Marriage: True Tales of Food, Family and How We Learn to Eat. Two San Francisco authors and editors, Caroline M. Grant and Lisa Catherine Harper, put together the collection, which includes submissions from several Bay Area writers.

Berkeley writer Monica Wesolowska recently published the memoir Holding Silvan: A Brief Life, which explores the love and ethics behind forgoing medical intervention for her newborn son. This poignant and lyrical book chronicles the author’s painful and lovely days with her baby.

An excerpt from a superbly illustrated new memoir by the 86-year-old painter, a fixture in the Berkeley arts scene since the 1940s and pal to many a famous Beat poet.

Former Monthly editor Julia Park Tracey gives us a peek into the life and times of her spirited great-aunt in the Roaring Twenties with this first installment (edited and published by Tracey) of the Doris’s decades-spanning journals.

Oakland author Melanie Gideon, who recently graced the pages of O magazine, is getting rave reviews for Wife 22, her amusing (and sexy!) first novel for adults. We’re pleased to publish an excerpt from Chapter 9.