California Sun Podcast

Lettie Teaque, a longtime Wall Street Journal wine columnist, created a buzz recently with a column about how the Napa Valley may have jumped the shark with respect to pricing and gentrification. It's a look at $10,000 weekends, $1,700-a-night hotels, and $200 tastings that are becoming de rigueur. What might all this mean for our future perception of Napa Valley and its wines?

At 3:15 pm on April 29, 1972, as the verdict came down in the Rodney King beating, Los Angeles exploded with another in a long history of race riots. Everyone knew what might happen, but nothing prepared the city for what came next. Ryan Gattis captured the horror and power of that in his 2015 fictional account "All Involved." The award-winning Los Angeles author talks to us from the perspective of this 30th anniversary of what is still the apogee of domestic civil unrest.

Long Time Silicon Valley journalist John Markoff unearths the roots of a tree, whose branches include, among others, Ken Kesey, Steve Jobs, and Elon Musk. Markoff's new book, "Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand,” examines a Zelig-like character in both California's 1960s counterculture and the ethos of Silicon Valley. Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog remains a cultural bible, from which we are still singing hymns.

Thomas Walsh and Karen Maness are the co-curators of "Art of the Hollywood Backdrop: Cinema's Creative Legacy," an exhibit opening at Boca Raton Museum of Art on April 20. It showcases a collection of monumental scenic backdrop paintings that were an essential part of the filmmaking era that included movies such as "North by Northwest," "The Sound of Music," and "Singing in the Rain."

Vanessa Hua, a Bay Area native and graduate of Stanford and U.C. Riverside, has focused her extensive writing on issues of immigration, identity, diversity, and parenting. Moving seamlessly between short stories, novels, journalism, and her San Francisco Chronicle column, she offers important insights into the Asian American experience. The author of the forthcoming novel "Forbidden City" shared some of her own history.

Susan Sorrells has been called the “Queen of the Desert” and among a "shortlist of the most interesting people in California.” The Smith College graduate spent time in Liberia with the Peace Corps, worked for California Sen. Thomas Kuchel in Washington, D.C., and lived for four months in the Soviet Union during the Cold War while considering a career as a diplomat. She ultimately returned to California to claim her birthright, the entire town of Shoshone — a small, once-bustling mining town, whose cluster of historic buildings flanks two sides of a highway that slices through the Mojave on the way to Death Valley. Sorrells shared the story of her journey and how she is using the town to advance a new kind of ecotourism.

Libby Schaaf is about to complete her second and final term as mayor of Oakland. Unlike a lot of other political jobs, as Willie Brown once said, mayors are judged by results. When Schaaf took office in 2014, Barack Obama was still president. Today, she presides over a very different city. Homelessness, a new baseball stadium, the creation of a whole new neighborhood, police reform, and the potential for gentrification were not as front and center then as they are today. In this week's podcast, she talks about the changes and how she thinks she’s fared.

Frances Dinkelspiel is working hard to counter the decline of local reporting. The co-founder of Berkeleyside, Oaklandside, and their parent organization Cityside believes it is more important for us to know what's going on in our neighborhoods than what’s happening 6,000 miles away. The longtime Bay Area author and journalist shares her journey and what’s at stake for our communities.

Peter Hartlaub and the San Francisco Chronicle are inseparable. Peter delivered the Chronicle as a paperboy in the 1980s, went to work there as a journalist in 2000, and 22 years later, continues to put his imprimatur on the paper and the institution. Currently the culture critic, Hartlaub has helped bring the Chronicle into the multimedia age, has unearthed its voluminous archives, co-hosts its Total SF podcast, and has the paper's ink in his blood.

The work of Sebastian Mallaby, a financial journalist and author of the new book "The Power Law," shines a light on how Silicon Valley really operates. The names you know — Zuckerberg, Jobs, Dorsey, Brin & Page — are not really the gatekeepers of the future, he argues. The future of technology rests in the hands of people you’ve probably never heard of, such as Arthur Rock, Alan Patricof, John Dore, Don Valentine, and Marc Andreessen. They control what companies get to start up, what technology gets to market, and what your future will be like. Like so much else, it’s about following the money.

Erich Schwartzel has covered Hollywood for the Wall Street Journal for almost a decade. This week, the author of "Red Carpet: Hollywood, China, and the Global Battle for Cultural Supremacy" joins the California Sun Podcast to talk about how two big stories — Hollywood and the Oscars, and our eyes on China — may have more in common than we thought. The economic decline of Hollywood and the rise of China’s film history are directly related and certainly will impact the California economy.

Alice Waters is among the most influential restaurateurs of the last half-century. Her legendary Berkeley restaurant Chez Panisse gave birth to farm-to-table cuisine and gave California a global culinary presence. She has nurtured talent that has spread to restaurants around the world. Chez Panisse is now preparing to reopen post-pandemic, and Waters has just touched down in Los Angeles with a new restaurant in the Hammer Museum. She shares with us a remarkable food journey that began back in 1964.

Mark Fainaru-Wada was a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle when he co-authored "Game of Shadows," the definitive book about Barry Bonds, BALCO, and baseball's steroid scandal. An award-winning ESPN reporter since 2007, Fainaru-Wada talks about the ongoing debate over Bonds’ rightful place in Cooperstown and in baseball history.

Marty Nemko is one of the premier career counselors in the Bay Area. The long-time host of “Work with Marty Nemko" on KALW in San Francisco, a long-time regular guest on KGO, and a contributor to Psychology Today, Nemko shares his thoughts on our post-Covid world of work in California. Topics include: why so many don’t want to go back to the office, the hatred of long commutes, and lack of work structure at home.

Elizabeth Weil has had a 25-year relationship with California. She’s written about it for years, and her most recent piece, “This is Not the California I Married," appeared recently in the New York Times Magazine. She’s lived through many California disasters, including fires, droughts, earthquakes, and floods. But today she sees fire differently. Both in how we fight them and how we prepare for them. Right now, she says, "the state is hurting, and we need to take care of it."

Sammy Potter and Jackson Parell, two Stanford University students, put their pandemic year to good use. While many of us watched too much Netflix, they took the ultimate outdoor adventure. In 295 days, they completed the calendar year triple crown of hiking — a 7,400-mile journey across the Appalachian, Pacific Crest, and Continental Divide trails, ending in the hills of northern California. They share their story.

Prof. Susan Handy teaches in the Department of Environmental Science and Policy at U.C. Davis. With degrees from U.C. Berkeley, Stanford and Princeton, her research focuses on the relationships between transportation and land use. Handy talks about how all the federal infrastructure dollars coming to California, which everyone seems excited about, may not be the best thing for traffic, climate, or land use policy.

Peter Thiel is considered by many the "godfather" of Silicon Valley. His influence, as a venture capitalist, a political contributor, and a leading alumnus of what has been called the PayPal mafia continues to shape the culture of the valley. He mentors new leaders, uses his wealth to reshape politics, and strikes fear into those who oppose him. This week we talked with Max Chafkin, a Bloomberg editor and author of the new Thiel biography "The Contrarian," about the entrepreneur's influence in California and beyond.

Mayor Darrell Steinberg knows the levers to pull to operate state government. He was a member of the Sacramento City Council, a member of the State Assembly, and a longtime leader in the State Senate, where he rose to president pro tempore. However, no job was as tough as his current one as Sacramento mayor. Today, amid climate change, Covid, homelessness, drug use, traffic, crime, racial politics, mental illness, and even potholed streets, being a big city mayor is a uniquely challenging job.

Bob Calhoun reminds us that while we may be alarmed by rising numbers of homicides in the Bay Area today, the region's history has been far worse. Calhoun, the writer of the popular SF Weekly column "Yesterday’s Crime" and author of the new book “The Murders That Made Us,” shares how the Bay Area has been shaped by its most grisly crimes.