| How do you tell the story of the biggest crisis on the West Coast when every typical journalistic avenue seems to have run its course?  Illustration by Anuj Shrestha The staff writer Jay Caspian Kang introduces his new column for The New Yorker by writing about the epidemic of homelessness, a story that he’s been covering closely for the past few years from California. He describes the failure of a government-run encampment known as the San Rafael Service Support Area, in Marin County, and examines the limitations faced by journalists who have been bringing such stories to the public. “It has occurred to me while covering homelessness that changes in attitude won’t lead to resolutions, and that our opportunities for meaningful change are often constrained to decisions that seem inconsequential,” Kang writes. “This, I believe, is not only true of the homelessness crisis in California but also of many seemingly trenchant problems in this country.” Kang describes his column as an attempt to explore the “moments when the usual stories do not quite fit the reality they are trying to describe.” He adds, “The job, then, isn’t that of a columnist who might bring you the news in bold strokes but, rather, one of a tinkerer, who takes bits of information and makes a case for why something—a system, a process, a narrative—has stopped working.” From such a diagnosis, perhaps, we can take the first step toward truly confronting the complicated problems that we face. —Ian Crouch, newsletter editor | 
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