When John Muir, a wilderness mystic and founder of the Sierra Club, wrote, “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe,” he was reflecting on his profound relationship with California’s pristine alpine wilderness. But Erik Davis posits something further. In his kaleidoscopic history of spiritual California, The Visionary State, Davis proposes that Muir was also making room for an innovative, new “rootless tradition.” California dreaming, it seems, has it own dream logic.

Bruce Lee, who was born 65 years ago this past Sunday, believed in evolution (lowercase “e”). While posters of his bare upper body have adorned three generations of college dorm room walls and his legacy is obvious in Hollywood action movies, few Americans are aware that Lee founded the art of Jun Fan Gung Fu, which later became Jeet Kun Do, or JKD. Lee designed JKD to be a philosophy of fighting (rather than a style) based on the belief of blending styles and changing techniques as needed.