California Sun Podcast

Diane Power Zimmerman's great grandfather bought the property that would become the Nut Tree. Her grandparents founded and ran the roadside oasis that opened in Vacaville in 1921. Turning to a lighter note this week, we look at what was once the iconic stop on car journeys from San Francisco to Sacramento and Tahoe. The Nut Tree, in its heyday, reflected the intersection of midcentury design and S...

When L.A. Times reporter Gale Holland and videographer Claire Hanna Collins met Mckenzie Trahan in 2018, she was 22 years old, seven months pregnant, and living in a tent above the 101 Freeway. Their recently published reporting project on Trahan, who had been living on the streets of Hollywood since she was 13, reminds us that stories about the homeless and the mean streets of our cities are more...

Journalist Jim Hinch tries to look objectively at what is and isn't working with respect to our state's policies surrounding the nexus of housing and drugs. In a recent story in Zocalo , Hinch notes the fact that 50% of America's unhoused population lives in just three states — California, Oregon, and Washington. In this week's podcast, he compares and explains policies such as "harm reduction," "...

Gary Kamiya, a long-time San Francisco writer and journalist, in a recent article in the Atlantic, zeros in on the tectonic political shifts resulting from San Francisco's voters' recall of three school board members and the district attorney. While few cities have personified the progressive vision more than San Francisco, Kamiya says there seem to be limits to its progressive agenda.  Is it a ha...

David Koepp, one of our most distinguished and prolific screenwriters, turns to the novel for his latest work, " Aurora ." Springboarding from our fear of over-dependence on technology, he creates a story sure to scare PG&E, Southern California Edison, and utility companies everywhere. Soon to be a major motion picture from director Kathryn Bigelow, Koepp redefines what "being prepared" really mea...

​​Alexa Koenig is using Silicon Valley tech for the prosecution of war crimes. As the executive director of the Human Rights Center at the University of California, Berkeley, she is proving how the device that each of us has in our pockets and which gives us the ability to bear witness to the world might be used to help secure international justice. At a time when atrocities from Ukraine to Uganda...

In his new book " Inspired ," Matt Richtel gets to the heart of why so much of the future seems to happen in California. In this week's podcast, he discusses where creativity comes from and why it gives the state a competitive advantage. Like opposable thumbs, the ability to imagine the future is what makes us human. It is the source of our creativity, our anxiety, and our fulfillment.

Fernando Guerra, the founding director of the Center for the Study of Los Angeles at Loyola Marymount University, discusses the aftermath of the primary election and the power of the homeless issue to reshape L.A. and its politics. The nation turned its eyes to Los Angeles this past week, and Guerra helps us better understand the city.

Gustavo Arellano, Los Angeles Times columnist and host of The Times podcast, provides a personal and provocative view of Los Angeles and Southern California politics. He talks of his ongoing feud with Los Angeles County Sheriff Alex Villanueva, the endless ads for mayoral candidate Rick Caruso, and the future of young Latino power brokers. With California's June 7 primary election only days away,...

Filmmaker John Waters has long been a fixture in San Francisco. After a very rough week, a conversation with him gives us a few moments of levity courtesy of his sometimes twisted worldview. The 76-year-old writer, director, and curator of bad taste has made a career of showing us the weirdest of human behavior. In films including "Pink Flamingo," "Mondo Trash," and "HairSpray" and books such as "...

Carolyn Chen, a sociologist and professor of ethnic studies at UC Berkeley, argues in her new book " Work Pray Code " that Silicon Valley has become a "techtopia" where workplaces and charismatic leaders now provide for employees' every need. The workplace has become their community, their place of worship, and resulted in the elimination of boundaries between work and life. Remote work may have c...

Long-time tech journalist Tripp Mickle explains how Steve Jobs's personality defined Apple. He was both a founder and a legend. But his successors, Tim Cook and Jonny Ive each had their own very different ideas about the company's future. Their battle was so fundamental that it deconstructed the company culture built under Jobs. Mickle tells the story in his new book " After Steve ." However, the...

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 o...

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...

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...

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 Calif...

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 potent...

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 T...

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 D...

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 o...

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...

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.