Davisville

The Explorit Science Center in Davis, which suspended operations this year after the death of a major donor, has begun to form plans for how it might return. It has a $50,000 pledge from one of its founding families — the nonprofit started in 1982 —  and, says Explorit board President Ken Kaplan, a rough-draft idea for the center to evolve into an “education hub” focusing on science, nature and te...

With all the anxiety loose in the land, this discovery is timely and practical: Amber lighting reduces your stress. That’s the gist of recent research at the University of California at Davis that touches on psychology as well as lighting and design, and today on Davisville we talk with two of the people involved in the work: Sreenivasan Meyyappan, an assistant project scientist in the Center for...

You’ve got information. People need to hear it. It’s useful ... and it’s dull. This circumstance is a common problem for people who work in communications, such as today’s guest, Mark Deamer. One way to draw the disinterested is humor, if you get the balance right, which is why we open this week with Floppy and Cow . They’re a couple of screwball characters — well, Cow is deeper than that — that M...

Greater Sacramento will gain a promising new source of news and information when Abridged, part of Sacramento public TV station KVIE, officially debuts on Sept. 16. Benjy Egel (pictured), who grew up in Davis and formerly wrote about food for the Sacramento Bee , is Abridged’s senior food editor, and he describes the new journalism project today on Davisville . The venture employs several journali...

About 7 percent, and maybe as much as 10 percent, of rentals in Davis are currently vacant, says Davis real estate broker and manager Kit Boschken on this week’s Davisville . That's highly unusual for Davis, especially in August. The rate was under 1 percent a few years ago. Why is the rate this high now? Kit lists several reasons on today’s program, where she’s joined by her husband Steve and the...

This interview was recorded in January 2013 Few journalists have had as much impact in Davis as Joel Davis, who died in April at 62. In 2005 he wrote his book Justice Waits about the kidnapping and murders of two UC Davis students, John Riggins and Sabrina Gonsalves, in December 1980. His book helped sustain interest in solving the crime, ending in the conviction of Richard Hirschfield for first-d...

Vince Guaraldi’s music continues to have a wonderful afterlife, thanks to the successful recent releases of the Peanuts soundtracks that Guaraldi recorded before he died at 47 in 1976. Today we update the story with Derrick Bang, who wrote the book about the San Francisco jazz pianist and writes liner notes for the Peanuts soundtrack producers Jason and Sean Mendelson . Bang believes there’s likel...

The ordinary jobs that come to the Davis Book Menders include wear-and-tear repairs, like fixing torn pages or tattered covers, but some damage is unusual — like the books that displayed tire treads or evidence of use as a trivet. Whatever the problem, the menders can fix it, says Karen McCluskey, a member of the group … with some exceptions, such as the book they bagged and discarded because it s...

The San Francisco Mime Troupe wants to entertain and challenge audiences with live satire, but Michael Gene Sullivan, the writer, director and an actor for this year’s show — Disruption: A Musical Farce — says he aims for more than two-dimensional hilarity. “I’m very much against the pie-throwing satire of ‘here’s my enemy, I set him up, create a straw man, make fun of him, set fire to him,’ ” he...

This year’s top graduating senior at the University of California, Davis is Avantika Gokulnatha. She just earned a degree in genetics and genomics, she’d like to help make aging more manageable for people, she values her art classes in the campus Craft Center, and she prizes research. “Research has always been what I define to be American,” she says, and on today’s Davisville  she explains what sh...

Davis needs hundreds of additional homes for people with very low incomes, says Bill Pride during today’s Davisville , and other Yolo County cities have similar needs. As executive director of a new nonprofit, Yolo Community Builders, Pride wants to respond to that demand by building more tiny housing units throughout the county, inspired by the innovative Paul’s Place in Davis, for people who wou...

The large tariffs on U.S. imports ordered by President Trump in April have created huge uncertainty and anxiety, amplified by Trump’s frequent course changes and by tariffs imposed on the U.S. in retaliation. Small businesses can’t wait for uncertainty to clear, however. They have to make frequent decisions in real time. Today on Davisville a few businesses downtown tell us what they think of the...

The Davis school district might have to close up to three public schools over the next decade for reasons that include declining birth rates, high housing costs, and changing job patterns. Adding more homes for families in Davis could blunt that trend, but Davis voters generally resist population growth. So, people in Davis need to start talking about what they want to do, while there's still time...

Last year’s idea for a new “civic information hub” in Yolo County has grown into Yolo Local , a budding project to create a new source for local information and news. This spring the project is surveying people throughout the county to get insights on the types of information people want to access about local civic life and events, but don’t necessarily know where to find it, as the old ways of di...

You might have seen the famous photo of a U.S. helicopter incongruously perched atop the roof of a Saigon building, with people lined up on a sloping ladder, backlit by the sky, hoping to board. The image illustrates the final hours of the evacuation of U.S. citizens, South Vietnamese allies and others from what was then South Vietnam on the day its capital, Saigon, fell to the North Vietnamese ar...

If you go this spring to the Gibson House, a 19th century mansion-turned-museum in Woodland, you can see portraits of people who lived in Yolo County in the 19th century. There are a lot of stories in those paintings, and in the painters, all of whom worked in Yolo County. One of the six artists exhibited is Calthea Campbell Vivian, described as “one of the leading artists of the West” in her time...

Advances in technology, say today’s guests on Davisville , make it possible to create a community microgrid in new parts of Davis that would deliver clean, resilient, solar-powered energy to its customers for less than Pacific Gas & Electric charges. To accomplish this, Davis would need to form a municipal utility, and a developer building on vacant land would need to sign on. If the community mic...

The Trump administration is hammering away at the federal government by eliminating jobs, cancelling programs, freezing spending and generally creating confusion. Today on Davisville we look at one part of the fallout in Yolo County -- the effect of the spending freeze on local nonprofits -- by talking with Jessica Hubbard, executive director of the Yolo Community Foundation. Yolo has about 200 no...

Several changes are pending in downtown Davis. To counter problems with public safety, the district is adding volunteer ambassadors and hopes to gain a police officer assigned to patrol the area on foot or bike; it plans a “rediscover” event for people who have concluded downtown is no longer for them; it’s tracking the effects of reduced parking, new downtown housing, potential changes from a new...

You’ll hear a lot of enthusiasm from today’s guest on Davisville — also love for Yolo County, curiosity for the world around her, the importance of “bringing youth perspectives to the table,” talking up civic engagement, appreciation for friendly neighbors, what she notices as she splits her days between Davis and West Sacramento, and respect for officeholders who will help you regardless of wheth...

So — climate change. How do you come up with a plan that actually makes a significant difference, and that people will follow? Maybe even want to follow? For Davis and Yolo County, but really, for any city, any county. Our guest today, Richard McCann, has some ideas about this. He’s a Davis energy consultant and founding partner of M.Cubed Consulting. On Feb. 9, he’ll talk in Davis about “effectiv...

This week on Davisville we hear from Wendy Weitzel and Bob Dunning (in photo at the new KDRT studio), colleagues who exited the Davis Enterprise in mid-2024 and recreated their work on Substack. We talk about their readership and fast success, which has held up during the intervening months and has roots in their skills as local journalists with deep knowledge of Davis. We also get an update from...

The December holidays are the weekend of the year, when normal routines loosen up. Today’s Davisville arrives in that spirit — no civic issues today. Instead I reconnect with a friend I hadn’t talked with in decades, Teresa Ozoa. She and I were two of the 13 cast members in our high school’s production of 12 Angry Jurors, a play where most of the 12 believe the accused is guilty, and one juror str...

Today we talk about a post-pandemic effort to figure out, seriously, what would make public transit more attractive to more Californians, so that more of us actually use it. Our guest is Kari Watkins, co-director of the Transit Research Center and associate professor in Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of California at Davis. She’s a member of a state committee you probably do...

This fall’s annual movie show with Derrick Bang arrives with a few extras. To note his 50 years as a movie critic, he reads — and critiques! — the first paragraph of the first movie review he wrote, in 1974 for the California Aggie at UC Davis. We also hear from a film director who worried Derrick might not like his film. Plus we get Derrick’s usual take on movies to see and avoid this holiday fil...