Davisville

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...

This week’s subject is narrow, but contains a question worth considering. It involves one of the ways that ideas emerge and ultimately shape public life in Davis. This specific path involves the Davis citizen commissions that advise the City Council on subjects including city spending, planning, police accountability, and several other areas. A commission can take up a topic for various reasons, i...

Sahaya International, a Davis nonprofit, took shape after a chance meeting when founder Dr. Koen Van Rompay (pictured), a researcher at UC Davis, was in India for an AIDS conference. Since then Sahaya has grown into a group of friends and donors, many in Davis, who give money to help people in developing countries by relying on local knowledge, trust, and long-term connections. Sahaya celebrates i...

Each weeknight at 9, people gather in Central Park near 4th and C streets, some to receive surplus food, some to hand it out. This is the Davis Night Market (pictured), a small-budget volunteer venture created in 2019 to feed people and reduce food waste. We talked with two of its co-founders in January 2020, and the market has since grown to five nights a week. “The food is kind of the carrot to...

Today’s show is for people interested in the current election but sick of the usual political noise. The guests are two highly experienced political analysts, Dan Schnur and Richard Zeiger, who will teach an Osher Lifelong Learning Institute class at the University of California Davis this fall called “An Election Like No Other.” On Davisville today we talk about why this presidential election is...

Emese Parker (pictured), an author and certified nurse practitioner specializing in women's health, began offering Davis Women's Circles this summer. Each has a theme -- one session focused on the perfect mom myth vs. the good-enough mother, and others include the mental load of mothering, rage and guilt, plus "some fun topics coming up this fall." The circles are for mothers, or soon-to-be mother...

Late summer offers a few particular attractions in Davis. The heat fades a bit, if only because the days are shorter, and evenings outdoors are mild. It’s an inviting season to look at the full moon if it’s up, and to think about another year passing. And swat some mosquitoes. Here on Davisville , early September is a natural time to talk with someone who has spent a lot of time outdoors: Jean Jac...

Davis has two local tax measures on the ballot this fall and today we talk about the one for the library, Measure T. (We looked at the other one, sales tax increase Measure Q , last month.) Measure T would raise about $1.1 million a year to pay for operations at what will eventually be Davis’ two public libraries — the existing one in north central Davis, and the new one in south Davis due to open...