Introduction I am extremely pleased to speak at this special Presidential Session of the Pacific Coast Geographers meeting hosted by Jim Allen, this year's President of the APCG. Given his stellar record of published work that has had an important public impact, beginning with We the People (1988) and continuing with The Ethnic Quilt (1997) and Changing Faces, Changing Places (2002), he could as easily be making this presentation. He has consistently undertaken work that has at tempted to reach out to a public readership, and like all of us who have attempted to go beyond our academic roots he has struggled with the problems of careful scientific work and making that work attractive to a wide audience. That public audience is often not in terested in our arcane numbers and wants a big picture—a theme I will reprise later in this presentation. All writers want their work to be read and discussed and even to