Anastasia Flores photo by David Bacon

Today we begin looking back at Capital & Main’s best stories of the year. They survey a California whose middle class professionals are forced to drive for Uber, while, in one of the state’s wealthiest counties, those hardest hit by the economy find themselves living in rooms with cardboard walls.

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• Ambassador Recalled: Airbnb’s Chip Conley’s Mexican Misadventure

Rex Weiner’s account of what happens when right-wing business money + New Age/Burning Man good vibes combine to take over land whose natives eke out a living fishing and farming in a challenging eco-system.

• Robert Reich’s Seriously Funny Crusade to Save Capitalism and America’s Middle Class

Danny Feingold followed political commentator Robert Reich on one leg of a promotional tour for his book, Saving Capitalism, and produced a two-part account of this fascinating man who believes America’s future lies in saving capitalism from itself.

• Porter Ranch: Nosebleeds and Dead Hummingbirds

Judith Lewis Mernit looked at neighborhoods thrown into turmoil by a natural gas disaster — and on the civic paralysis that followed.

• Aging in the Fields

David Bacon’s two-part series reported on an inflexible retirement system and how it affects aging farm workers who cannot apply for Social Security benefits. They are unable to retire from the grinding physical labor of picking our crops.