California Sun Podcast

Gene Slater, a long-time advisor on housing for federal, state, and local agencies and the author of "Freedom to Discriminate: How Realtors Conspired to Segregate Housing and Divide America," discusses the outsized historical influence of California's real estate industry. It helped set the stage for many of today's social problems, including homelessness, housing shortages, racial and educational inequality, and the prizing of personal freedom over what’s best for the community.

Mariam Pawel, a Brown family biographer and New York Times essayist, has some final words on the recall vote and what’s next. She looks at whether any of it matters in the long run, how might it change California politics, will anyone but consultants benefit, and what happens with the critical issues still facing the state.

Woody Hastings and Jenny Blaker didn’t like the idea of a new gas station in a rural area of Cotati, in Sonoma County. Their efforts launched a growing statewide movement to stop the construction of new gas stations and the expansion of existing ones. Both longtime environmental activists, deeply concerned about climate change, they see the once iconic gas stations at the last stop in fossil fuel pipeline.

Lizzie Johnson, a former San Francisco Chronicle reporter, covered fifteen of California’s deadliest fires. However, none reached the level of death and destruction that she witnessed in Paradise on Nov. 8, 2018. Within two hours of the fire's ignition, the town was engulfed in flames and hundreds were trapped in homes and cars. In her reporting, and in her new book "Paradise: One Town's Struggle to Survive an American Wildfire," Johnson shares the minute-by-minute events and aftermath of the fire.

Daniel O'Connell, a labor scholar, and Scott Peters, a professor of global development, talk about the historic battle, from the 1930s to the present, between rural farmers and agribusiness in California's Central Valley. In their new book, "In The Struggle," they examine what they see as the unjust and oppressive structures of the valley by looking at the many academic leaders and activists who have exposed misdeeds by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the California Farm Bureau, and the University of California.

Mizgon Zahir Darby, a longtime leader in the Bay Area's Afghan community, helps give voice to the large diaspora of Afghans living in California. She says they are in mourning over recent events. Families may never be able to go home again, and they are thinking about refugees that may soon arrive. Listening to her tells us the personal stories that bring these events home.

Jaime Lowe connects us with the female inmates who are battling California's wildfires. In her new book "Breathing Fire" she takes readers inside the fire camps where inmates are paid $5 a day and pay a physical and emotional price for putting their lives on the line to protect us.

Rick Doblin, Ph.D., is the founder and executive director of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, based in San Jose. He received his doctorate in Public Policy from Harvard’s Kennedy School, where he wrote his dissertation on the regulation of the medical uses of psychedelics and marijuana. Doblin has devoted his life to the development of both of the drugs and a legal framework for the beneficial uses of psychedelics in the treatment of mental illnesses, including PTSD and long-term depression. Rick is also a licensed psychedelic therapist. Ismail Ali, who joins him in this week's podcast, directs legal and legislative policy for MAPS and is the former board chairman of the Students for Sensible Drug Policy.

Katie Hill, once a congresswoman and now a private citizen, has seen a lot of politics in her 33 years. In 2019, in the course of ten months, she lived through what some have experienced in an entire career. Now back home in her Southern California district, she candidly shares her personal and political story, as she contemplates her second act.

Matt Haney grew up in the Bay Area. He is a graduate of UC Berkeley and Stanford and is now a supervisor for San Francisco's 6th district, which includes some of the poorest and wealthiest parts of the city. He talks about San Francisco's lack of long-term planning, its resistance to change, the stubborn consistency of so many of its problems, and the sense that in a city so economically successful there must be a better way.

George J. Sanchez, a USC professor and author of the new book "Boyle Heights: How a Los Angeles Neighborhood Became the Future of American Democracy," shares his appreciation for his birthplace, the Boyle Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles. He sees it as a rare living example of the great melting pot of ethnic and cultural diversity that was supposed to define America.

Rosecrans Baldwin, a novelist and journalist, adds his unique voice in trying to make sense of what he calls the “city-state” of Los Angeles. He talks about L.A. as welcoming but somehow detached from the rest of America. While Baldwin argues that no single story can possibly represent all of L.A., in his new book "Everything Now," he adds to the canon of LA. writers trying to define 5,000 square miles and 88 cities.

Steve Wasserman was born and raised in Berkeley, but launched his literary life in Los Angeles, first as deputy editor of the Los Angeles Times then as the long-time editor of the Los Angeles Times Book Review. He then sampled a rich life among the New York publishing elites. In 2016, Wasserman and his 15,000-book library came home. He talks to us as the publisher of Berkeley's Heyday Books, an imprint dedicated to social justice and California's rich history and natural abundance.

In January, Colleen McCain Nelson was named executive editor of the Sacramento Bee and the regional editor for McClatchy’s California news outlets, including the Fresno Bee, the Modesto Bee, the Tribune in San Luis Obispo, and the Merced Sun-Star. A journalist since high school, she talks to us about the value of local news, the future of printed newspapers, and how we can keep tabs on our state and local leaders.

Mick LaSalle, author of his new book "Dream State," shows how movies have historically captured the essence of California. For almost a century, the movies have defined the California dream and projected it out to the world. The long-time film critic for the San Francisco Chronicle talks about the mythology of California and the big screen, the future of movie stars, and Hollywood navel-gazing.

Justin Zhu was fired from Iterable, the successful marketing startup he founded. The reasons given to him included his use of LSD, inappropriate attire (even by Silicon Valley standards), and giving secrets to a reporter. Unstated, he believes, were issues of race. His story provides a glimpse of what it’s really like in the world of startups — the hours, the egos, the money, and the power of self-delusion about changing the world

Denise Hamilton is the editor of the just-published anthology "Speculative Los Angeles." In the past writers like Harlan Ellison, Ray Bradbury, and Philip K. Dick represented the dark fantasy life of the city. Now a new generation of writers takes on that dark life for the 21st century.

Joel Selven, a music journalist and author of the new book “Hollywood Eden," tells the story of the young artists and musicians who came together at the dawn of the 1960s to create the sound of the California dream. It's the story of how West Los Angeles's University High School class of 1958 — which included Jan & Dean and Nancy Sinatra — helped create an image of the West Coast as an idyllic land of sand and surf.

Michael Storper, one of the world's leading economic geographers and a professor at UCLA’s Luskin School of Public Affairs, goes deep into the history and resulting contemporary problems facing Los Angeles and the Bay Area. He explains why some cities grow economically, while others decline.

The writer Ron Brownstein takes us back to 1974 Los Angeles, a period he views as a cultural and political hinge point. It was during that year — as Brownstein details in his new book, "Rock Me on The Water" — that Los Angeles reached its creative peak, transforming movies, music, television, and politics, and forever cementing the upheaval of the 1960s into our culture.