The California Report Magazine

It’s been nearly seven months since the Eaton Fire tore through Altadena, killing 30 people and hollowing out a once vibrant community. For many survivors, the fire has impacted their mental health, as many try to navigate rebuilding their homes and their lives. Reporter Steven Cuevas lives in Altadena, and he’s been talking to therapists who are finding ways to support their community at the same...

Luis Rodriguez credits reading and writing for keeping him resilient his whole life. He’s best known for his 1993 memoir Always Running: La Vida Loca: Gang Days in L.A., which chronicles how he joined a gang at age 11, found himself homeless and using heroin, and wound up in the juvenile justice system. He went on to write 17 books of poetry, fiction, and non-fiction, and he served as poet laureat...

In May, the Golden State Valkyries kicked off their inaugural season. Even though they just started playing games in front of Bay Area fans, the team is said to be valued at $500 million dollars, the most of any franchise in the WNBA. And the team just had their first player named to the All-Star team: Forward Kayla Thornton was named as a reserve. These days the WNBA is on fire with record viewer...

You can hear elements of hip-hop, R&B and even jazz in Tokimonsta’s intricate drum loops, synths and bass lines. On her latest album, Eternal Reverie, the Grammy-nominated producer found inspiration in a Brazilian record, and created music tinged with the memories of a close friend. For our series on California composers, Reporter Clare Wiley brings us this profile of Tokimonsta and the devastatin...

Summer is the heart of the baseball season. But recently the country’s oldest professional sport has been going through some changes. It’s not just the moves to speed up the pace of play. These days, along with training in the weight room or the bullpen, players are also spending time with their team’s sports psychologist. KQED’s health correspondent April Dembosky goes behind the scenes at the Sa...

88-Year-Old Audio Engineer Sandy Stone Survived Transphobic Backlash and Made History Audio engineer Sandy Stone got her start working alongside Jimi Hendrix, the Grateful Dead and Crosby, Stills & Nash. When she joined the California lesbian music label Olivia Records, some feminists wanted to kick her, and all trans women, out of women’s spaces. But Stone went on to become the first openly trans...

In California, music and winemaking seem to go together. Visit any of the state’s countless wineries and you can hear all kinds of music, from jazz and folk, to classical and Americana. But one artist on the Central Coast takes that connection especially seriously: he spent years making an album full of sounds from a vineyard. Reporter Benjamin Purper takes us to San Luis Obispo to learn more abou...

Meet the Woman Reuniting Eaton Fire Survivors With Lost Treasures The fierce Santa Ana winds that whipped the Palisades and Eaton fires into deadly infernos also spared precious things you’d think would have been the first to burn: old family photos, children’s art work, postcards, even pages of old sheet music. Those things sometimes blew across neighborhoods, and people are still finding them as...

In the 1960s and early 1970s, California was at the forefront of movements for racial justice, LGBTQ and women’s rights, and protests against the Vietnam War. But at the same time an anti-tax revolution began to take shape, led by an unlikely political figure: Howard Jarvis. This week, as we mark the 47th anniversary of the passage of Proposition 13, we’re featuring a special episode from our frie...

A Ford Factory Changed Milpitas, Then It Bacame a Mall  The Great Mall of Milpitas, in Santa Clara County, wasn't always a mall; it used to be a massive Ford auto factory. The San Jose Assembly Plant opened in 1955, after relocating from Ford's outdated Richmond location. The new factory put Milpitas on the map, transforming a sleepy agricultural town into a thriving city. The factory’s opening al...

Sitars and Symphonies: LA Composer Reena Esmail Fuses Indian Ragas with Western Rhythms We continue our California composers series with Reena Esmail. Her childhood in Los Angeles had two soundtracks: the Western classical music her parents loved, and the old, scratchy Bollywood tapes her paternal grandparents would play over and over. Those multicultural influences shaped what would become the dr...

In Rising Voices of  El Cerrito's Young Poets, a Message About Resilience As our series about Californians and resilience continues, we hear from El Cerrito’s poet laureate, Tess Taylor, and students at Harding Elementary School. They wrote about what resilience means to them for a recently published anthology called “Gardening in the Public Flowerfest.” For One Vietnamese Family in LA, This Broth...

An Historic Altadena Church, Lost to the Eaton Fire, Begins the Long Journey to Resurrection  The Eaton Fire reached deep into the sanctuaries of Altadena’s faith community. It lost over a dozen places of worship: Baptist, Episcopalian, Jewish, Methodist, Muslim, and Evangelical Christian. There’s a lot of talk now about how and when people can rebuild their homes in Altadena. But how to rebuild a...

This week marks 33 years since four police officers were acquitted in the brutal beating of Rodney King in Los Angeles. That verdict exploded into days of rioting and unrest across the city. It also ignited a national conversation about police brutality, as well as race and inequality in the criminal justice system. This week we're featuring an episode from Uncuffed, a podcast made by incarcerated...

J-Sei Home Closes After 30 Years, Leaving Bay Area Japanese Seniors in Need The 1960s and 70s were a pivotal time for community activism – with the civil rights and anti-war movements, the Black Panther Party, and student protests that established ethnic studies programs on college campuses. That activism led to a decades-old critical lifeline for Japanese American elders: culturally sensitive sen...

California has grand plans to turn a stretch of abandoned railroad tracks into 300 miles of walking and biking trails, connecting the rolling hills of Marin County with the redwood forests near Eureka in Northern Humboldt. If completed, the Great Redwood Trail could become the longest rail-trail in the nation. But some Indigenous communities and other groups are not on board. Reporter Sam Anderson...

It’s been a few months since wildfires devastated Los Angeles, and some people are just now starting the long process of repairing and rebuilding their homes. But mixed into the soot and ash can be some hidden dangers, including lead, asbestos, arsenic and lithium. These toxic materials were used to build those homes and got blown across LA. Scientists from the California Institute of Technology h...

For more than 80 years, the Zorthian Ranch – nestled among the oak trees and steep canyons of Altadena – has been a home for artists, musicians and creatives seeking a different way of life. At this working ranch, people also tend animals and live close to the land, often growing their own food and generating their own energy. But it was almost completely destroyed by the Eaton Fire, and more than...

This weekend, Muslims around California will celebrate Eid al Fitr to mark the end of Ramadan. People observing the holy month have been fasting from dawn to dusk. And although fasting is a big part of Ramadan, so is the food people eat to break the fast each night. Small shops like Besan’s International Market in San Bruno are key to observing Ramadan. Not only do they supply the ingredients for...

This month marks the anniversary of the resolution of a landmark student strike at San Francisco State, on March 21, 1969. Patrick Salaver helped organize the protests, demanding the university better reflect and support students of color and admit more non-white students. The protests also led to the creation of the nation’s first-ever college of ethnic studies – a template for colleges and unive...

We’re taking a long train ride on the California Zephyr. The Amtrak line winds through Emeryville, Sacramento, Truckee and then heads east toward Chicago. Parts of the trip are spectacularly beautiful, with scenes of the Rocky Mountains, Donner Lake and the Truckee River. This route also holds so much rich California history – a portion of it is close to the first transcontinental railroad. Starti...

For many Californians, winter means snow. But alongside the skiers, snowboarders and snowshoers awaiting the latest weather forecasts, there’s another group of snow obsessives in our state: snow scientists. They measure California’s snowpack every day in order to better predict our statewide water supply for the coming year. Some of the most cutting-edge work in this field is being done by a tiny...

Some of the homes lost in the Eaton Fire included fireplaces with distinctive hearths made of handmade tiles. These Arts and Crafts-era tiles were created by local artist Ernest Batchelder a century ago. For many Altadenans, these tiles are all that is left of their homes. Now a group of volunteers is working quickly to save as many of these tiles as possible before bulldozers clear the lots. They...

‘Buzzkill’ Examines the Crisis of Disappearing Honeybees and Other Pollinators  The Central Valley’s almond industry is hosting what some beekeepers call the Super Bowl. Commercial beekeepers from across the country take an estimated 90% of the nation’s honeybees and load them into trucks in time to make a narrow pollination window for those Central Valley almond trees. But it’s gotten harder and...

February 19 is the Day of Remembrance, the anniversary of when President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which led to the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II. Some survivors of those prison camps are feeling like the rhetoric about immigrants and mass deportations today is hitting too close to home. In response, some survivors are mobilizing to protect vulnerable immigra...