‘#Oakland’s finest at Festival at the Lake 1994,’ writes @noblesaa in an Instagram post about the Festival at the Lake. (Courtesy of @noblesaa)
I moved to Oakland about a month ago, and I love it.
One of my favorite things to do is go for a run around Lake Merritt. The views of the city over the water are beautiful, and it really feels like the heart of the city.
Lake Merritt has been a witness — and some would say a big player — in the city’s ongoing story of race and space. Earlier in the year, the lake went viral when a white woman called the police on two black men for barbecuing there. Black Oakland responded with a massive “BBQ’n While Black” event, which reminded some people of a Lake Merritt summer event that was the place to be in the 1980s and 1990s: Festival at the Lake.
KQED’s Sandhya Dirks talked to the people who were there to reminisce about Festival at the Lake and what the lake means to people today.
Irish coffee was the signature offering at Brennan’s, a bar closing Saturday, Sept. 15, just short of its 60th anniversary. (Dan Brekke/KQED)
KQED’s Dan Brekke is our resident Bay Area historian (see his fantastic piece on the mysterious East Bay Walls), and if I were a Bay Area institution, Dan is the man I would want to write my eulogy.
Brennan’s in Berkeley, which closed this weekend, received that honor. It’s worth a read even if, like me, you’ve never been to Brennan’s and now, never will.
British actor George Arliss starred in the play and film versions of ‘The Green Goddess.’ (Flickr: National Library NZ on The Commons)
They tell you to never meet your heroes, you’ll just be disappointed.
For Sasha Khokha, the amazing host of the California Report Magazine, that hero was Green Goddess Dressing. She grew up thinking of it as “hippie salad dressing” that she got at the health food store.
But now she knows that it was inspired by a 1920s play and film called “The Green Goddess” featuring a lot of British white guys playing Indians. Not great.
Amika Mota with her 3-month-old daughter in Oakland. Mota was a firefighter in prison but can’t get a similar job on the outside because she’s one of 8 million Californians with a criminal conviction on their record. (Marisa Lagos/KQED)
It’s been a good year for supporters of criminal justice reform in California. Several major pieces of legislation — ending cash bail, opening up police records and making it harder to prosecute teens as adults, to name a few — passed the state Legislature and await Gov. Jerry Brown’s signature.
But for the 8 million Californians (that’s one out of every five people in the state) with a criminal conviction on their record, there are thousands of other laws that make their lives very hard.
A new report shows just how hard things can be for Californians with criminal convictions, and some advocates are hoping the report acts as a call to push for even more reforms.
The Golden Gate Bridge and San Francisco Bay are seen from above in San Francisco, California. (Josh Edelson/AFP/Getty Images)
Here’s a wild solution to the Bay Area’s affordable housing crisis: turn the region into one giant megacity.
Instead of leaving it up to the region’s 101 cities to try and solve — or ignore — the housing issues in their communities, a megacity in theory could direct resources where they need to go across the region.
It could bypass local NIMBYism and finally make a dent in the housing problem. While it’s at it, it could build a truly regional transit system that connects us all in a way that makes commuting easier and better for the environment.
Or, communities could still find ways to block development and public transit in the major cities might actually get worse with resources diverted to other parts of the region.
Whatever the result would be, it’s highly unlikely that it would ever happen. But it’s a fascinating thought experiment.
What It’s Like to Work for a Coding Startup … In Prison
Sep 09, 2018
Stay caught up with the best of KQED’s reporting each week by subscribing to the Q’ed Up podcast.
San Quentin State Prison is known as a pretty progressive place, at least as far as prisons go. It has a lot of programming and activities available to inmates, and there’s even a podcast produced inside.
But I had no idea there was an honest-to-goodness coding startup operating there too. The Last Mile Works is staffed by inmate developers who work on websites and apps for clients on the outside, including major companies like Airbnb.
KQED cartoonist Mark Fiore visited San Quentin to learn more about The Last Mile, and he produced this amazing longform cartoon all about the program and the prisoners who work there.
Oakland resident Noelle Kaplan (L) and her wife Stacey (R) with their daughter Sage at her first birthday party. The Kaplans moved to Oakland in part because they wanted to be somewhere with a lot of other queer families. (Courtesy of Noelle Kaplan) San Francisco’s massive Pride celebration every June is one of the biggest parties of the summer in the Bay Area. But Oakland — and its growing LGBTQ population — has its own thing going on.
Sunday is Oakland Pride, and it’s bound to be a much more relaxed and family-focused affair. While the San Francisco parade is always led by Dykes on Bikes, the Oakland parade will have Tykes on Trikes out front. There will also be a Family and Children’s Garden, which is expected to attract 1,500 LGBTQ families.
Here’s everything you need to know before you head out to Oakland Pride, and here is the shirt I’ll be wearing come Monday.
A KQED investigation found that the yoga community is struggling to rein in sexual misconduct and abuse in its ranks. (Mark Fiore/KQED)
I love when I get to practice yoga. It’s the rare chance for me to slow down and relax my body and mind.
But for many women in California, yoga has been a place of sexual abuse. Over the course of a monthslong investigation, KQED’s Miranda Leitsinger heard a range of allegations from inappropriate massage to a violating touch in class, from drugging to unlawful sex with a minor.
She also found that the yoga community is struggling to rein in this sexual misconduct and abuse in its ranks. It’s a powerful investigation that’s worth your time.
Detail from one of Rita Cecaci’s Raiderettes programs from 1962. (Pendarvis Harshaw/KQED)
I love sitting down with friends or family and flipping through an old photo album (or, more often, scrolling through someone’s photo album on their phone).
KQED Arts’ Pendarvis Harshaw did just that with Rita Cecaci, one of the first Oakland Raiders cheerleaders from back in 1962. That story would’ve been enough, but looking through Cecaci’s photo album, Harshaw got a front row look at life in Oakland in the second half of the 20th century.
An image of the San Francisco Bay Area taken by Samantha Cristoforetti, an Italian crew member aboard the International Space Station. (Samantha Cristoforetti via Twitter)
Working in local news, I have a firm grasp on what I consider the Bay Area: the nine counties of Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, Napa, San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Clara, Solano and Sonoma.
But that’s just one way to define the Bay Area, and it’s far from a consensus opinion. Turns out, people have a lot of thoughts about what the Bay Area is, and it’s a fascinating discussion that gets to how each of us define ourselves, the place we live and our culture.
Plus, Bay Curious made this amazing jingle to help you remember the nine Bay Area counties.
There are three main theories that explain the origin of the mysterious hole dug into Mount Shasta, and each theory tells a different story about the region’s history. (Cat Schuknecht/KQED)
What would you do if one morning you woke up and there was a 15 foot wide, 60 foot deep hole dug into the side of a massive volcano in your town?
That’s what happened to the people of Mt. Shasta back in 2009, and they’ve been guessing and debating who dug the hole and why ever since. The theories include people searching for a lost continent, people looking for Native American artifacts and people looking for gold.
A view of the California State Capitol in Sacramento. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
While federal lawmakers in Washington, D.C., can rarely seem to come together to pass much legislation of note, the California Legislature has been busy this week. The two-year legislative session ended on Friday night with a flurry of votes on big, consequential issues including:
Wildfire reform: Provides $1 billion for fire prevention over 5 years and allows utilities including PG&E to pass on some costs from the 2017 wildfires to ratepayers.
Net neutrality: Prohibits internet providers from blocking, speeding up or slowing down internet traffic and charging more for faster service, among other things, mirroring Obama-era rules that were repealed by the Trump administration.
School start times: Bars middle and high schools from starting before 8:30 a.m. Would go into effect in 2021 at the earliest and wouldn’t apply to rural schools.
Criminal justice: Numerous criminal justice reform bills passed which would, among other things, end cash bail, increase access to police misconduct files and body cam footage, make it more difficult to charge kids as adults and prevent people who did not have a direct connection to a killing from being charged with felony murder.
Longtime leaseholder of the Grand Lake Theatre Allen Michaan has purchased the building from his longtime landlord, and plans to file for historic status. (Gabe Meline/KQED)
I love seeing movies in a theater, especially one that has some character and history. One of my favorite memories from my first summer living in San Francisco is seeing the premiere of the HBO movie “Looking” at the Castro Theater, and since moving to Oakland, I’ve quickly fallen in love with the Grand Lake Theater.
This column from KQED Arts’ Emma Silvers perfectly captures the magic of movie theaters and how happy we should be when they get the support they need to survive.
Back-to-school time is usually a period of happy stories about the promise of a new school year. But KQED’s Vanessa Rancaño has been all over some much less optimistic news coming out of Oakland Unified School District.
The news that the district was cutting some high school sports got a lot of attention, but what received far less — and yet will impact many more students — was the district’s decision to end a free dinner program that provides evening meals to some 3,000 low-income students in the district.
We started with a mystery and we’ll end with a mystery.
This one has to do with the strange stone walls that dot the region’s landscape from down near San Jose north through the Berkeley Hills. People have theorized about the provenance of these walls for more than 120 years.
Were they built by aliens? Or visitors from a lost continent? Or are they just a bunch of boring rocks?
KQED’s Dan Brekke has spent years looking into all the wild theories that have popped up to explain the “East Bay Mystery Walls” for Bay Curious and, I promise, his story is worth your time.
Commemorating 50 Years of the A’s in Oakland
Aug 26, 2018
Stay caught up with the best of KQED’s reporting each week by subscribing to the Q’ed Up podcast.
Edwin Jackson and Khris Davis show off their African American Heritage Night baseball caps with MC Hammer (L–R) at the Coliseum. (Courtesy of Oakland Athletics)
If you live in Oakland, you might notice elephants all over the city, decked out in different costumes and outfits or covered in eclectic colors and designs. They’re depictions of Stomper, the Oakland Athletic’s mascot. This year, there are 50 of them scattered throughout the city, created by different artists, to celebrate the baseball team’s 50th year in The Town.
There’s a lot of baseball history in Oakland. In his latest piece, KQED columnist Pendarvis Harshaw looked at this rich history — who are the notable players from Oakland, what they’ve meant for the sport and the city’s African American community.
Harshaw also checked out an exhibit commemorating the A’s 50 years in the city at the Oakland Public Library. There, he met library historian Dorothy Lazar and posed this question: Is it possible to tell the story of America’s pastime without mentioning the black community in Oakland? Lazar’s answer was an immediate ‘no.’
House Minority Speaker Nancy Pelosi at KQED’s TV studios on Wed. Aug. 22, 2018 (Sheraz Sadiq)
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi sat down with KQED a day after a guilty verdict was handed down to President Donald Trump’s former campaign manager and a guilty plea came from his former lawyer. Pelosi said Trump has “engendered a culture of cronyism and corruption in D.C.,” but warned that any effort at impeachment would need to be bipartisan. Pelosi also addressed the indictment of San Diego Republican Congressman Duncan Hunter on campaign embezzlement charges.
Pelosi said the litany of legal developments doesn’t change her view that Democrats should focus on the issues that matter to their constituents. She says Democrats shouldn’t be running on impeachment promises. And she pushed back on recent calls for her to step down as leader of the House Democrats.
“They attack me because they’re scared of me,” she said, ticking off her list of legislative accomplishments, including the Affordable Care Act. “I eat their lunch.”
Cal Fire firefighters monitor a back fire while battling the Medocino Complex fire on August 7, 2018 near Lodoga, California. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
Anger mounted this week after news came out that the company Verizon limited the data speeds to and from a crucial mobile command center for Santa Clara County firefighters battling the Mendocino Complex Fire. The firefighters were forced to negotiate with Verizon for higher internet speeds while they tried to perform their intended function as a communications hub for incident commanders.
Verizon acknowledges that it limited data speeds to the command center. The company blames the issue on a “mistake” in communicating with the fire department and says full-speed access should have been restored because the agency was responding to an emergency.
California lawmakers approved a bill that would radically change how California treats people accused of crimes by ending the state’s cash bail system and giving judges more power to decide who is safe for release. If Gov. Jerry Brown signs the bill, California would become the first state to completely end bail for suspects awaiting trial.
The state assembly approved the bill after months of negotiations between supporters and opponents of the measure. The compromise appeased some concerns that judges and law enforcement had raised. But many of the criminal justice reform groups that pushed the Legislature to take up bail reform now oppose the bill, saying it gives too much power to judges and will result in more people staying in jail while they await trial.
Bay Curious listener Robin Duryee says she loves looking for unusual things when she’s walking around the city. The retired nurse has lived in San Francisco for 43 years. On a recent trek from BART, she spotted adorable knitted animals near City Hall: chameleons with leopard spots, brown fuzzy otters and giraffes licking branches with long pink tongues.
Duryee posed this question to Bay Curious: What’s the story behind the knitted creatures on the trees in Civic Center?
The West Oakland Teacher Everyone Knows
Aug 19, 2018
Stay caught up with the best of KQED’s reporting each week by subscribing to the Q’ed Up podcast.
McClymonds teacher LuPaulette Taylor in her classroom, where she teaches AP Literature, English and a college preparation class. (Vanessa Rancaño/KQED)
You know that teacher that was always there for you? That teacher that didn’t stop supporting you when the bell rang? The teacher that turned things around for you and made you love learning? Dr. LuPaulette Taylor is that teacher.
Taylor or “DT” as she’s known, has been teaching for nearly 50 years, most of those at McClymonds High School in West Oakland, the same school she graduated from in 1966. She’s been such a mainstay at McClymonds that she’s taught three generations of some families.
That longevity and dedication is even more impressive when you realize that only 15 percent of teachers at McClymonds stay on for a third year, the worst retention rate in the district for a non-continuation school.
“You don’t ever get to just teach, and you don’t get to leave the kids here if you’re doing what you’re supposed to,” Taylor says. “You take them home with you mentally and you try to figure out, ‘What else can I do?’ ”
Dawn Bohulano Mabalon was a professor of history at San Francisco State University, co-founder of the Little Manila Foundation, and a board member of the Filipino National Historical Society. (Courtesy of Gena Roma Photography)
Dawn Bohulano Mabalon dedicated her life to chronicling the rich Filipino-American history in California and the U.S. She died unexpectedly last week from an asthma attack, just days before her 46th birthday while on vacation in Hawaii.
She doggedly told the stories of her Filipino-American community, centered in her hometown of Stockton, and used those stories to advocate for that community at the local, state and national level.
“This Friday, she was supposed to be … presenting in Washington, D.C.,” said Dillon Delvo, who co-founded Stockton’s Little Manila Foundation with Mabalon. “She brought our people to the table. She forced herself in, brought in her own chair, put it in the middle of the table, and said ‘We’re here.’ ”
Redding Fire trucks at the incident command center for the Mendocino Complex in Ukiah. (Sonja Hutson/KQED)
Imagine spending weeks battling a massive wildfire in your own backyard. And then when that fire gets mostly in hand, turning around and going to fight the biggest wildfire in state history.
That’s what members of the Redding Fire Department are doing right now. While the Carr Fire, which burned through the city last month, is mostly contained and isolated to remote areas outside of the city, some Redding firefighters are three hours away fighting the biggest wildfire in state history, the Mendocino Complex.
The bus deck, with AC Transit stalls, at Salesforce Transit Center in downtown San Francisco. The facility is pictured Aug. 12, 2018, and opened for its first full-scale commute Aug. 13. (Dan Brekke/KQED)
I love quality public transportation as much as the next person, but I can’t imagine getting up at the crack of dawn just so I could ride the first bus into a new bus terminal.
But that’s exactly what a small group of enthusiasts did this past weekend. They started at the Fruitvale BART station and hopped on the AC Transit O bus heading into San Francisco and the brand new Salesforce Transit Center.
Plenty of people are pumped about the new Transbay Terminal — police had to turn people away from an open house last Saturday that was packed to the gills. But I think these folks take the cake when it comes to public transit passion.
There’s a great episode of The Bay podcast looking at the demise of the first Transbay Terminal and what the fate of the new transit center might be.
When Kelly Johnson realized that he couldn’t make it to his favorite Peet’s in The Fillmore, he knew it was time to go.
“I reached a point where people were coming and dragging me down to Peet’s, and I was just gasping for breath,” Johnson said. “There was nothing left of me.”
Johnson — who started the San Francisco Dance Theater on Fillmore Street in 1960s, led the Berkeley Symphony starting in the 1980s and finished his career as a concert pianist — decided to end his life under California’s End of Life Option Act, which allows terminally ill adults to be prescribed aid-in-dying medication under certain conditions.
Johnson let filmmaker Arash Malekzadeh chronicle his final weeks, and the resulting film is a beautiful portrait of a beloved member of the community going out on his own terms.
How Cannabis Helped a Berkeley Boy Go From 100 Seizures a Day to None
Aug 12, 2018
Stay caught up with the best of KQED’s reporting each week by subscribing to the Q’ed Up podcast.
Sam Vogelstein and his mom Evelyn Nussenbaum stand outside the investigative pharmacy at UCSF holding a six month supply of Epidiolex. (Lesley McClurg/KQED)
Rarely can you trace the development of a prescription drug back to a single patient.
But when Evelyn Nussenbaum heard that cannabidiol, or CBD, a compound found in the cannabis plant, had been shown to prevent seizures in rats, she went on a mission to see if it could help her epileptic son, Sam.
The mission took her to an underground epilepsy collective, to homemade CBD that stunk up her friend’s house, to London where a British pharmaceutical company agreed to let Sam try a CBD-derived multiple sclerosis drug they had and back to the United States where they convinced the FDA to let Sam enroll in a one-person drug trial.
Later this fall, Epidiolex, the drug Sam used, will hit shelves as the first FDA-approved prescription medication derived from marijuana.
An illustration depicting Derick Almena in Alameda County Superior Court on Aug. 9, 2018, during a sentencing hearing. (Vicki Behringer/Courtroom Artist)
Just about everyone was expecting this week to end with Derick Almena and Max Harris being officially sentenced to nine and six years in prison respectively, for their role in the deadly Ghost Ship warehouse fire that killed 36 people in 2016.
But a day after relatives of people who died in the blaze offered heart-wrenching statements to the court and slammed the proposed sentences as too lenient, Alameda County Superior Court Judge James Cramer rejected the plea deal that had been agreed to and set the stage for a possible criminal trial.
Earlier this week, KQED’s Sukey Lewis and Anne Wernikoff embedded with a Cal Fire strike team as they battled the massive Mendocino Complex Fire.
The strike team’s shift started before dawn and lasted 24 hours. On this day, they spent much of their time doing controlled burns in hopes of reducing the amount of fuel that could feed the growing wildland fire.
A display with crystal ball at the annual San Francisco Psychic Fair. (Carly Severn/KQED)
“Society’s skepticism or outright disbelief does not justify denial of free speech to the believers.” So said the California Supreme Court in a 1985 case that ruled all bans on fortunetelling in the state unconstitutional.
Fast forward a few decades and professional fortunetelling is big business, pulling in $2 billion in revenue a year nationwide. In San Francisco, psychics have to get a permit from the Police Department before they can set up shop.
A collection of photos submitted by women running for office this year as part of our series, “The Long Run.” (Images courtesy of candidates)
When KQED asked our audience for stories of women running for political office this year, we got nearly 50 responses from across the state.
They cover the spectrum when it comes to age, background, career, what office they’re seeking and more. Take a minute to meet just a few of the record number of women running for office this year.
The Lasting Trauma of the North Bay Fires
Aug 05, 2018
Stay caught up with the best of KQED’s reporting each week by subscribing to the Q’ed Up podcast.
Aftermath of last years fire in Santa Rosa. (Danielle Bryant)
Last October an explosion jolted Danielle Bryant awake in the middle of the night. She and her husband jumped in their car and fled their Santa Rosa home with only the clothes on their backs.
For the past year, Bryant has struggled with many symptoms of trauma: sleeplessness, nightmares, irritability and loss of appetite. What she is experiencing is common after a life-threatening event.
Listen to learn more about the continued journey for fire victims.
A rent-controlled apartment complex at 3100 College Ave. in Berkeley. (Melati Citrawireja/KQED)
With Proposition 10 on the November ballot the debate over rent control again at the forefront of housing discussions. But what happens if the proposition is passed and the Costa-Hawkins Rental Housing Act is repealed? Well, then the debate might really get started.
This week Guy Marzorati took a deep look into what rent control expansion could mean for local governments, and how this plays into the ever-growing housing issues in the state.
Ken and Kate Hoffman have two 200-pound tortoises — not the easiest creatures to quickly move in a wildfire. This one, named Goliath, likes to have the back of his shell scratched. Tortoises have nerve endings in their shells and can feel a rub or scratch. (Sam Harnett/KQED)
When Ken and Kate Hoffman saw embers from the Carr Fire falling on their yard, they knew it was time to leave. It took them seven hours to pack up their menagerie of animals, which included the two 200-pound tortoises.
Sam Harnett chronicles their struggle to get their animals our of harms way and the motivation behind rescuing tortoises (the couple has over 80 tortoises that they have rescued from across the country).
“These beautiful cars have so much character,” says photographer Scott Maddern. (Courtesy of Scott Maddern)
An exhibit coming to the Peninsula Museum of Art in Burlingame is seeks to highlight wildfire damage and remind people that survivors are still trying to recover. The photos in this show were taken after the North Bay fires struck last Fall, showing charred earth and skeletons of vehicles.
The show is inspired by Bay Area photographer Richard Misrach. In 1991 he took photos of right after the Oakland Firestorm hit, capturing the melted and charred remains of homes in Oakland and Berkeley.
Though the two projects focus on different fires, the themes are the same.
“A lot of these disasters, you know, when they’re over, people forget and they’re on to the next thing,” Hyzen says, adding that wildfires are becoming such a common occurrence in California, it’s easy to lose track of the ones that passed.
Profits from ‘Art out of Ashes’ sales and fundraisers will be going to the Sonoma County Resilience Fund.
(L-R) Jeremy Fish’s Bronze Bunny, Sirron Norris’ Bad Hombre, Fnnch’s Honey Bear
If you’ve spent time in San Francisco you’ll have noticed an array of public art sprinkled throughout the city. This week KQED Pop highlights some of the more prolific artists like Jeremy Fish, Sirron Norris and fnnch.
From otters to the abstract, the city is home to an array of images, some tucked away in alleys, some plastered across the sides of buildings. Check out the story to learn more about the blue teddy bears or giant poppies that make up the backdrop of this city (“treasure maps” to the murals included).
Separation is Separation, Whether at the Border or in Prison
Jul 29, 2018
Stay caught up with the best of KQED’s reporting each week by subscribing to the Q’ed Up podcast.
Arvaughn Williams speaks to an audience in San Francisco about the impacts of having an incarcerated parent, and how this disproportionately affects young black men. (Courtesy of Thai Chu of Listen for Change)
Arvaughn Williams sees similarities between his dad and the parents separated from their children at the U.S.-Mexico border: parents going to any extreme to make a better life for their kids, but then winding up apart from them.
Williams and his dad were often apart when he was growing up because his dad was incarcerated off and on throughout his childhood.
“Circumstances may be different but the story is the same,” Williams says, comparing his separation to those happening now at the border. “The outcome is no different until someone decides to say enough is enough.”
A vigil for Nia Wilson at MacArthur BART in Oakland, July 23, 2018. (Aaron Jamison (IG: @heru32))
Last Sunday, Nia Wilson and her sister Lahtifa were waiting at Oakland’s MacArthur BART station for their train. They were in a well-lit area, at a reasonable hour and both were stabbed. Nia didn’t survive, but her sister did.
In this raw commentary by KQED Arts’ Pendarvis Harshaw, he goes beyond the headline and delves into what he calls the war on black women in the United States in 2018.
The Wilson sisters were just two of the many casualties in the war on black women. Many other women read their story and now walk down the street in a deeper fear than before. And yet they continue to walk down the street, to catch the train, to pursue happiness, in spite of the world we live in.
UC Berkeley and Berkeley City College are less than half a mile apart. But City College estimates students spend about $4,800 more every school year on non-tuition costs than UC Berkeley estimates. (John Morgan/Flickr)
Every time I think about how much my rent costs in the Bay Area, I think back to my senior year in college in Columbia, Mo., where I paid $333 a month for an entire basement room with a private bathroom in a three-story, three-bedroom apartment just off of downtown.
That kind of bargain isn’t an option for most kids going to school in California, and it turns out the housing estimates many schools give out to new students aren’t that accurate.
Many schools rely on a single statewide average of non-tuition costs that doesn’t include variations for housing costs in different cities. These bad estimates can throw off not only students’ budgeting, but also their financial aid packages.
Wildfires typically tend to race uphill and creep slowly downhill. But this fire season is hardly typical.
As wildfires continue to rage across the state, and this wildfire season shows no sign of going quietly into the night, I’m starting to learn more and more about wildfires in general.
For instance, did you know that one of the first things that wildland firefighters learn is that fires burn much faster uphill? Rising heat, shorter distances and uphill winds all combine to make uphill fires bad news.
But in recent years, downhill fires have been burning fast as well. For now, the trend is anecdotal, and it hasn’t been measured by researchers, but it’s still concerning.
“It makes us really have to reevaluate our strategy,” said Cal Fire division chief Chris Anthony.
Cars cross the Golden Gate Bridge in heavy fog on July 13, 2018. (Anne Wernikoff/KQED)
I used to walk to and from work when I first moved to San Francisco in the summer of 2016. My morning walk would be warm and pleasant, but in the afternoon, the wind would be brutal.
This week, Bay Curious dove deep on the science of not only our windy summer afternoons, but also our city’s famous fog. And because they know science can be hard sometimes, they made a cartoon explainer to make it easier to understand.
Plus, they get to the bottom of why that famous fog is named Karl.
Why California’s Best Strategy Against Wildfire Is Hardly Ever Used
Jul 22, 2018
Stay caught up with the best of KQED’s reporting each week by subscribing to the Q’ed Up podcast.
Here’s what’s been happening in our neck of the woods.
California fire officials say planning more burns safely could reduce catastrophic risks posed by wildfire.
With climate change, wildfires threaten disaster and chaos in more California communities, more often.
But experts say it’s possible to avoid catastrophic harm to human and forest health by setting planned burns before human error, lightning or arson choose when fires start.
Cal Fire now intends to triple the amount of prescribed fire on lands the state controls. That follows a May executive order from Gov. Jerry Brown to improve forest management.
It’s a small step toward addressing a major deficit. According to one report, an area the size of Maryland — including state, private and federal land — needs maintenance or planned fire to become healthier.
A Rohnert Park police squad car. (Sukey Lewis/KQED)
Brian Masterson, who has served as the director of Rohnert Park’s Public Safety Department for nearly a decade, is retiring next month.
The announcement comes as Masterson’s department faces increasing scrutiny over an asset and marijuana seizure program. In April, the city launched an internal investigation into a suspicious traffic stop that took place in December.
In June, KQED reported about a series of questionable seizures made by Rohnert Park Public Safety officers during traffic stops conducted 40 miles north of the city along Highway 101.
In the letter announcing his resignation, Masterson did not directly address the internal investigation or the scrutiny of his department.
Those active in the Tech Workers Coalition came out to support Salesforce employees who are speaking out against the company. (Sam Harnett/KQED)
A number of tech worker organizing groups have formed in the Bay Area in recent years. Some are trying to get workers more plugged into the communities they live in and impact.
Others focus on organizing service workers on tech campuses scrambling to get by as the industry’s wealth transforms the region.
So what does it come down to? Tech workers want more control over what their companies are building and how they are run.
Aerial view of the rebuilt section of Highway 1 across the Mud Creek slide. This section of the route, near Gorda at the southern end of Big Sur, was closed in May 2017. (Caltrans District 5 via Twitter)
A section of Highway 1 wiped out by a monster landslide near the southern end of Big Sur reopened Wednesday after 14 months of re-engineering and construction.
Caltrans announced Tuesday night that the final phase of the $54 million project — which restored the broken highway just south of the community of Gorda and 25 miles north of San Simeon — went faster than expected.
California is the only state in the country where it is legal to lane split. (Craig Miller/KQED)
If you’ve ever driven in California, you’ve probably had a motorcycle drive between you and another car. It’s called lane splitting, and a 2014 study found that 80 percent of California motorcyclists do it on freeways.
One of the biggest misconceptions is that when motorcyclists are lane splitting, they’re breaking the law. But they’re not.
So why is California the only state in the country where it’s legal? And is it safe? Bay Curious investigated.
Breaking Baseball’s Color Barrier in Oakland
Jul 15, 2018
Stay caught up with the best of KQED’s reporting each week by subscribing to the Q’ed Up podcast.
It’s been a busy week overseas. Here’s what’s happening in our neck of the woods.
Baseball card featuring Artie Wilson. (Society for American Baseball Research)
We all know about how Jackie Robinson broke Major League Baseball’s color barrier when he played for the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947. But what we don’t often think about is that there were dozens of minor leagues operating all over the country, and they all had color barriers of their own.
One of those barriers was in the Pacific Coast League, and in 1949, it was broken in Oakland when Artie Wilson suited up for the Oakland Oaks. Wilson was a 5-time all star in the Negro Leagues, and some say he was even better than Robinson. While playing for the Oaks, Wilson faced the same bigotry and racial hatred that Robinson did on the other side of the country.
In 1951, Wilson made his big league debut for the New York Giants, but he eventually told the Giants manager to send him back to the minor leagues so the team could bring up a young star in the organization: Willie Mays.
I had never heard of Artie Wilson until I listened to KQED’s Brian Watt’s interview with Gaylon White, a baseball historian and author of “Singles and Smiles: How Artie Wilson Broke Baseball’s Color Barrier.” It’s a great interview full of fascinating details and stories from baseball’s past.
Parking sign for an ATM near East Palo Alto Government Center. (Tonya Mosley/KQED)
One of the most popular places in East Palo Alto isn’t a restaurant, a park or a community gathering space. It’s a Bank of America ATM. It’s the only major bank presence in East Palo Alto, a city of nearly 30,000 residents.
KQED’s Tonya Mosley explains that the lack of banking options is a holdover from the region’s racist past, when segregation and redlining were pervasive. Now, residents are fighting to get more banks into their city.
Wildland firefighters, like this crew heading into New Mexico’s Gila National Forest, in 2012, are equipped and operate differently from urban firefighters. (USFS Gila National Forest, CC BY-SA)
It seems like every week there’s a new fire (or two or three) burning through the region or the state. And while all wildfires might look alike to most of us, Stephen Pyne knows they’re not.
Pyne teaches about fire at Arizona State University, and he says that we need to stop fighting all fires the same:
Every major fire rekindles another round of commentaries about “America’s wildfire problem.” But the fact is that our nation does not have a fire problem. It has many fire problems, and they require different strategies. Some problem fires have technical solutions, some demand cultural calls. All are political.
The Hetch Hetchy Reservoir in Yosemite National Park supplies water to San Francisco and other Bay Area cities. (Lauren Sommer/KQED)
About 85 percent of San Francisco’s water comes from the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir in Yosemite National Park, and it goes on quite the journey. Along its more than 150 mile trek, the water goes through a hydroelectric dam that generates electricity to power San Francisco schools, Muni light-rail vehicles and more.
So how long does that all take? Bay Curious explains, with the help of a very curious 8-year-old.
An ad for a “smart” vibrator could not compete for attention with workers washing a building at Van Ness Avenue and Jackson Street in San Francisco. (Patricia Yollin/KQED)
Then I read the story and found it even better than the headline. It’s about a new “smart” vibrator — effectively a cross between a sex toy and a fitness tracker that produces data synced to a smartphone app — and how hard it is to advertise something like that.
The company had to be so careful with what words it actually used on its ads that no one KQED’s Patricia Yollin talked to on the streets had any idea what product the ads were trying to sell.
Oakland is Ready for its Close-up
Jul 08, 2018
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A few days ago, I was driving through Oakland and talking to a couple of friends who live on the other side of the country. We’re in a long distance book club together, and we were talking about what we should read next.
One of my friends lives in Arkansas, and she suggested this new book called “There There.” It’s about Native Americans living in Oakland, and it’s written by Tommy Orange — a Native American who grew up on Oakland. It also happens to be a New York Times bestseller, and Vox called it the “novel of the summer.”
Add in “Sorry to Bother You” and “Blindspotting” — two movies coming out this summer set in Oakland and produced by Oakland natives — and it becomes clear: Oakland artists — especially artists of color — are having a moment, and the whole country is taking note.
‘Quilted Reimagined American Flag Series III: Don’t Live Matter?’ 2016 by Kelly Burke. The orange and yellow stripes signify caution. The 50 shades of red stars represent pain and suffering. Look closely and you can see the names of specific incidents written on the cloth.
When we think of political art, I don’t think many of us think of quilts. But maybe we should.
From Betsy Ross to Cleve Jones and the AIDS Memorial Quilt, political quilts are nothing new. And now you can add anti-gun violence quilts to the list.
“Guns: Loaded Conversations,” now on display at the San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles, was inspired by the shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando in 2016, but the pieces in the exhibit go far beyond one shooting.
Even if you look up in a redwood forest, you can never really see the top. (Kathryn Whitney/California Academy of Sciences)
I love hiking among the massive redwoods in Big Basin Redwoods State Park and seeing huge whales swim in the bay. But I had no idea that it was no accident that these natural giants took root in California.
Turns out, the state’s ocean currents and famous fog create more food for blue whales and more water for our redwoods. Take that, Texas.
Midcentury modern chairs sit behind rows of skinny tables in the Capitol press conference room, 1190. (Katie Orr/KQED)
At first glance, the bulky yellow, brown and tan chairs that fill the room at the state Capitol where governors make their big announcements just seem impractical. They’re heavy and hard to move, and apparently they really hurt when they smash against your fingers.
But they’re also a classic midcentury design and could be worth some serious money. They were created by renowned designers Charles and Ray Eames, and they could fetch hundreds of dollars each, according to one appraiser.
With 45 chairs in the room, that could add up to more than $20,000. Not bad for government chairs.
Sunnyvale resident Nancy C. Silva expresses shock at the second goal by Brazil. “I’m heartbroken,” she said. “We’re still proud of our team, we’re always here to support.” (Anne Wernikoff/KQED)
I’m not a huge soccer fan, but I can understand the excitement of watching the World Cup – seeing the best in the world compete at the highest level. And if you’re going to watch a soccer match, it makes sense to watch it at a soccer stadium, even if you’re in California.
So when Mexico took on Brazil this week, more than 7,500 people came from across the state to watch the match at Avaya Stadium in San Jose before dawn. How cool is that?
From a Football Star in Michigan to Dead on the Streets of San Francisco
Jul 01, 2018
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It has been a long, sad week. Here are some stories you might’ve missed.
Perry Foster lived in early 2016 on Division Street between Harrison and Bryant streets. He was from Grand Rapids, Michigan, where he was still a legend among high school classmates as the football star who led his team to an undefeated season and a state championship. Foster died on April 11, 2018. (Dan Brekke/KQED)
When KQED’s Dan Brekke first met Perry Foster, Foster was living in a tent on San Francisco’s Division Street. His clothes caught Brekke’s eye, and his thoughtfulness and frankness about his situation impressed him.
Two years after that fleeting meeting, Brekke learned that Foster had died on the streets. This is also when he learned that the frank, thoughtful homeless man he talked to for 30 minutes in 2016 had once been a star football player in Michigan.
Brekke ended up talking to friends and family who knew Foster when he led his high school football team in Grand Rapids to a state championship and starred for two seasons at Eastern Michigan. He learned that he struggled academically and ended up leaving school after two years — making stops in Atlanta, Chicago and Southern California before ending up in San Francisco in 2008.
He learned that Foster was gay, a fact which created distance between Foster and his father. He learned that in his 10 years in San Francisco, Foster was arrested several times, jailed, shot, stabbed, placed into transitional housing in Tenderloin hotels at least twice, evicted, beaten and hospitalized repeatedly.
And he heard the love and admiration that people had for Foster — people who knew him as the star football player and people who knew him as a frank and thoughtful homeless man.
Foster’s story is one of many KQED told this week as part of the SF Homeless Project, a media collaboration focused on housing affordability, and I highly recommend reading and listening to the others.
Felicia A. Elizondo at a hotel in Chicago in 1969. (Courtesy of Felicia A. Elizondo)
Along with being an opportunity to party and celebrate our queerness, Pride Month, which just wrapped up, is also an important time to remember the people who struggled to create a more welcoming and accepting world for LGBTQ people.
Felicia A. Elizondo, aka Felicia Flames, is one of those people. She came to San Francisco’s Tenderloin in the early 1960s, when it was the center of the city’s gay scene. As she puts it:
We were jotos, sissies, queens, queers, lesbians, male hustlers, female impersonators, intersex. We were lost souls trying to understand what future was in store for us. We were out when being queer was against the law.
Moving to San Francisco allowed Felicia to find her true self as a transgender woman, and she is part of the generation who helped pave the way for today’s LGBTQ community.
Looking through the metal fence from the U.S. side into Tecate, Mexico on June 28, 2018, before sunrise. The metal fence does not divide the U.S. and Mexico all the way, barbed wire is used as well. (Ariana Drehsler)
All week long, several KQED reporters have been down at the California-Mexico border, reporting on the ongoing family separation and detention situation that has infuriated many in the state.
They’ve talked to people trying to cross the border, and they’ve talked to officials about how they’re enforcing the administration’s policies.
And for one night, they explored the border the same way so many people do: late at night, under the cover of darkness, with little knowledge of where they were going or what they would find. It’s truly powerful reporting.
There will be 12 statewide measures on Californians’ November ballots. (FREDERIC J. BROWN/AFP/Getty Images)
With four months to go before Election Day, California voters now know what statewide propositions they’ll be voting on this November.
There are measures to raise funds for housing and homelessness, as well as to roll back limits on rent control. Voters will also get to decide if California should be split into three different states, if the state should observe daylight saving time year-round and if a 2017 gas tax should be repealed.
Measures on lead paint cleanup, local taxes and internet privacy won’t be on the ballot, following last-minute negotiations in Sacramento.
The Painted Ladies in San Francisco. (soomness/flickr)
One of those statewide measures appearing on the November ballot could remove limits on rent control that have been around for decades. But would that actually help solve the state’s affordable housing crisis?
I’m going to be honest — I did not fully understand what rent control even was until this week’s Bay Curious broke it down for me. It’s a complex issue that doesn’t have a clear right or wrong answer, which makes this explainer a great place to start your research.
Finding California’s Natural Beauty 100 Feet Underground
Jun 24, 2018
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It’s been a long week. Here are some of the stories you might’ve missed.
Black Chasm Cavern is a 2-million-year-old cave in Volcano, California. (Bianca Taylor/KQED)
There are so many of California’s natural wonders that I still haven’t visited, and now there’s another I have to add to my list: Black Chasm Cavern in Volcano.
This 2-million-year-old cave dives 165 feet underground, and cave enthusiasts come from around the world to see it. It’s a mile long and includes five lakes and 18 different chambers, including one that hosts weddings and concerts, and inspired a scene in “The Matrix Reloaded.”
This was just one of the places featured on the California Report Magazine’s annual Hidden Gems special, which highlights off-the-beaten-path sites and spots across the state. This year, they visited a restaurant where you can kiss a dead moose, an underground labyrinth beneath Fresno, a top-notch jazz venue in Half Moon Bay that started in a guy’s living room and a museum in Chatsworth dedicated to 20th century pop culture.
Thea Wickelgren, left eats lunch with her mom, Emily Wickelgren, at the Arden Fair Mall in Sacramento. (Elizabeth Castillo/CALmatters)
A new bill making its way through the state legislature would prohibit restaurants from serving anything other than water or milk with meals marketed for children. That means no pop, no juice, no chocolate milk.
Kids could still get a sugary drink with their meal; they’d just have to ask for it. California would be the first state in the country with such a law. I never drank pop as a kid, so that might be why this doesn’t seem like that bad of an idea to me.
Amy Rothbauer, a bartender at St. Mary’s Pub, poses with the box of Narcan that she keeps behind the bar, next to the first aid kit. (Laura Klivans/KQED)
As the opioid crisis continues to devastate communities, some Bay Area health educators are getting more creative in their approach to saving lives. One group has started training bartenders and club and festival workers to use Narcan — the brand name for naloxone, a drug that reverses opioid overdoses.
“We, who are of the after-hours community, who live this beautiful life that’s very undersung, can actually make a difference for people,” said one San Francisco music production company executive, whose entire staff has been trained.
Queen Calafia as portrayed by Disney outside the discontinued cinematic ride, Golden Dreams in 2007. (Yesterland.com/Werner Weiss)
I had never, until this week, stopped to consider where the name “California” came from. Turns out it’s from a sixteenth century best-selling romance novel about an island, called California, protected by beautiful black woman warriors and ruled by Queen Calafia.
I know that thanks to the latest Bay Curious, which dives deep on the story behind more than 70 place names in the Bay Area. A couple of my favorites:
San Ramon isn’t named after a saint. It’s named after a sheepherder called Ramón. The town added the “San” later on to fit in.
Hercules is named after “Hercules powder,” a type of dynamite manufactured there starting in 1881.
Pacifica is named Pacifica because it’s by the Pacific Ocean.
There’s a great interactive map where you can find the story behind your town’s name. It’s a lot of fun.
Lynn Segerblom’s stars and stripes flag flying on one of the two tall flagpoles at the entrance to UN Plaza in San Francisco. (James McNamara)
There is almost always more to story when it comes to big moments in history, and the same is true for the creation of the rainbow flag, now synonymous with gay pride.
Gilbert Baker is often credited with designing and creating the rainbow flag, but this year – the flag’s 40th anniversary – two other people are getting their due.
Lynn Segerblom and James McNamara worked with Baker to create the original rainbow flag, and Segerblom will be marching in this year’s San Francisco Pride Parade.
KQED recently unearthed this footage of a 1968 gay costume ball in San Francisco.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OAlDxd_xrM4&t
If this is your kind of thing, you should also check out the KQED Arts series, “Changing Face of Drag,” which profiles five different drag performers who are pushing things far beyond “RuPaul’s Drag Race.”
What Can Science Offer Hollywood?
Jun 17, 2018
Stay caught up with the best of KQED’s reporting each week by subscribing to the Q’ed Up podcast.
Marvel Studios’ “Black Panther” follows T’Challa who, after the death of his father, the King of Wakanda, returns home to the isolated, technologically advanced African nation to succeed to the throne and take his rightful place as king. Pictured (L-R) are Nakia (Lupita Nyong’o), T’Challa (Chadwick Boseman) and Shuri (Letitia Wright). (Walt Disney Studios)
The season of summer blockbusters is in full swing. From the rollicking space adventure of “Solo,” to the universe-spanning “Avengers: Infinity War,” characters are dodging blasters, collecting stones of power and falling in love as their world hangs in peril.
It’s a lot of popcorn, and whole lot of fun. It’s also a chance to lose yourself in new imaginary worlds.
And in Hollywood, it’s not all about getting the science right; it’s really about how science can inspire the twists and turns in a great story. KQED Science editor Danielle Venton spoke with the man who helps ignite that inspiration — Rick Loverd, program director of the Science & Entertainment Exchange, a project of the National Academy of Sciences.
Loverd helped “Black Panther” movie makers conceive the city of Wakanda, for example, finding architects, city planners and anthropologists to contribute to a document the crew used as a reference for the history, culture and layout of Wakanda.
“While we’re happy to help at anytime,” Loverd said, “we’re most excited by those projects where a screenwriter calls us up and says, ‘Hey, I just had an idea. It involves time travel and I’d love to talk to a scientist.'”
Rosa Hernandez and Sylvia Rojas, co-owners of Colectivo Sabor a Mi Tierra. (Lisa Morehouse/KQED)
In the Central Valley town of Madera, a family business called the Gateway Market sells hats, water coolers, buckets and bags to hold picked fruit. All supplies that local farmworkers need. Some farm labor contractors hand out paychecks here, which workers cash right at the counter.
And tucked into a corner of the market is a restaurant, Colectivo Sabor a Mi Tierra, co-owned by Sylvia Rojas and Rosa Hernandez. The two women have forged an alternative path to farm work while offering the many indigenous Mexicans in this part of the Central Valley a taste of Oaxaca.
For the series California Foodways, Lisa Morehouse tells us how this restaurant helps satisfy a longing for home.
Mayor-elect London Breed speaks at Rosa Parks Elementary School on June 14, 2018. (Raquel Maria Dillon/KQED)
San Francisco Mayor-elect London Breed started her first full day with a celebratory press conference at her former elementary school and fit in an exclusive interview with KQED, where she talked about how she’ll tackle the city’s most pressing challenges.
“The city has more layers of process and bureaucracy than we can stand. What I need to do is learn patience, and that I can’t get everything done in a day,” Breed said. “It’s just a natural part of my personality. If I see a pothole for example, I want the pothole fixed like now. We have so many challenges like that in the city. It’s not as if someone’s sitting around doing nothing. There’s just a lot of work to be done.”
Elly Diaz crouches near the remains of her house, which was leveled in the Redwood Valley Fire. PG&E equipment started the fire, officials determined recently, raising questions about the utility’s liability and future. (Marisa Lagos/KQED)
After the June 8 announcement by state fire officials that equipment owned by PG&E, California’s largest utility, was involved in nearly all of the deadly fires that swept through the North Bay last fall, a battle over who will pay for the damage — and what that means for the company’s future — is reaching a fever pitch.
Investigators still haven’t said what caused the biggest and deadliest of the October blazes, the Tubbs Fire. But the initial findings raise questions about who will foot the bill for the more than $11 billion in damage caused by the fires. And they are fueling a debate over whether state laws need to change to protect the utility from financial ruin and customers from future disasters.
Stephen Curry carries the Larry O’Brien NBA Championship Trophy. (Samantha Shanahan/KQED)
Confetti was in the air once again in downtown Oakland on Tuesday as hundreds of thousands of Golden State Warriors fans lined the parade route to celebrate back-to-back NBA championships.
Tons of fans attended the festivities to celebrate the 2018 Warriors championship, the team’s third in four years.
The parade began at Broadway and 11th Street in Oakland and traveled north before continuing along Lake Merritt. Unlike previous years, there was no rally following the parade. Instead, this year’s parade was slower moving and many of the players — including Stephen Curry, Kevin Durant, Nick Young and Jordan Bell — got off their double-decker buses to interact with the screaming fans.
The Tacky Dishes That Mean the World to One California Couple
Jun 10, 2018
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Sandi Genser-Maack and her husband, Lynn Maack, love TEPCO dishes. They’re the type of ceramic dishes you’d find at a diner. A lot of people think they’re tacky and ugly, but Sandi and Lynn love them. They go antique hunting for them; they had a newsletter called the TEPCO Tribune and even started the TEPCO Collectors Club.
From 1930 to 1968, the TEPCO factory in El Cerrito churned these plates out by the bunches, but in 1968, a kiln fire destroyed the factory.
The factory might be gone, but these plates — as ugly as some might think they are — are still bringing people joy and bringing people together.
San Francisco Supervisor London Breed (L) and former state Sen. Mark Leno (R) remain locked in a close battle to become San Francisco’s next mayor as votes continue to be counted using the city’s ranked-choice voting system. (Adam Grossberg and JoeBill Muñoz/KQED)
I love working election night — the excitement, the fast pace, the potential for big surprises — but one of the least exciting races for most of the night during this past week’s California primary election was the one for San Francisco’s next mayor.
Supervisor London Breed had a big lead in first-place votes all night, so it was quite the shock when late in the night, the San Francisco Department of Elections put out a result showing former state Sen. Mark Leno with a 1,000 vote lead. It all had to do with the city’s ranked-choice voting system, which allows the top candidates to earn second- and third-place votes from their opponents.
All week, San Francisco has been counting more and more ballots — tens of thousands of them — and as of Saturday afternoon, Breed had clawed her way to a nearly 500 vote lead over Leno. There are still tens of thousands of ballots left, so we’ve still got at least a few more days of this wackiness to look forward to.
“Quetzalcoatl” by Robert Graham in San Jose’s Plaza de Cesar Chavez. The Aztec god is often depicted as a coiled snake, but people of all ages complain the sculpture looks like something else, something scatological in nature. (Rachael Myrow/KQED)
There’s a statue at the south end of San Jose’s Plaza de Cesar Chavez that a lot of people think looks…like poop. Specifically, a pile of dog poop.
But it’s not! It’s actually Quetzalcoatl, the Aztec god of wind and wisdom, and he’s often depicted as a coiled snake. The story behind how this statue came to look like it does is fascinating, and it involves a well-known artist, city bureaucrats, homelessness, a debate over public art and, maybe, an act of revenge.
Sirhan Sirhan was convicted of murdering Robert F. Kennedy in 1968. He is serving a life sentence in prison. (Wikimedia Commons)
Political assassins have a way of becoming household names. John Wilkes Booth and Lee Harvey Oswald are two of the most famous men in American history.
But it seems like we hear a lot less about Sirhan Sirhan, the man currently in prison for killing Robert Kennedy 50 years ago this week in California. That lack of notoriety was one of the reasons I was so interested in the story of Sirhan’s brother, Munir, who’s been living in the same house in Pasadena for the last 50 years waiting and wishing for his brother to come home.
Urias Escudero of San Jose cheers as the Warriors secure their win over the Cleveland Cavaliers on June 8, 2018 at the Warrior Watch Party at Oracle Arena in Oakland. (Samantha Shanahan/KQED)
I covered the Golden State Warriors championship parade last year, and folks in Oakland were worried that it might be their last parade before the team moves across the bay to San Francisco in 2019. But Steph, KD and the rest of the Warriors will be marching through downtown Oakland at least once more.
They beat the Cleveland Cavaliers in Cleveland on Friday night to sweep the NBA Finals, and a packed house of fans in Oakland got to watch the final game at Oracle Arena. The parade is on Tuesday, and more than 1 million people are expected to attend.
Are You Ready for California’s June 5 Primary?
Jun 03, 2018
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Here’s what you need to know about California’s June 5 primary election. (Katie Brigham/KQED)
Fewer than 20 percent of mail-in ballots in California have been returned just a few days before Tuesday’s primary election. That means a lot of folks might still be trying to make up their minds on the races and propositions up for a vote. Here’s a quick rundown of some of the top contests:
Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom still leads the pack in the race for governor, while fellow Democrat and former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa is battling it out with Republican businessman John Cox for second place in the top-two primary.
The top candidates in San Francisco’s mayoral race are all Democrats, but on San Francisco’s heavily skewed political spectrum, Board of Supervisors President London Breed is seen as more moderate, Supervisor Jane Kim is viewed as the most progressive, and former Supervisor and State Sen. Mark Leno is somewhere in between. Unsurprisingly, homelessness is the issue voters most want to hear about from the candidates.
Regional Measure 3 would raise bridge tolls on the seven state-owned bridges in the Bay Area by $3 by 2025 to raise funds for 35 transportation projects aimed at long-term reduction of traffic congestion.
San Francisco Propositions Cand D are in competition with each other. Both would levy a tax on commercial rents in San Francisco. Proposition C would put that money toward child care and early education programs, while Proposition D would use the money to pay for affordable housing and homelessness services. But only one can pass.
It’s not uncommon for people to tell adult tourists to avoid the Tenderloin because of the open drug use that often happens on its streets.
Now imagine being one of the more than 3,000 kids that’s estimated to live and go to school in the neighborhood. How do you keep those kids safe?
Dozens of “corner captains” with Safe Passage put on their bright green vests each day and patrol the streets of the Tenderloin, escorting the kids from corner to corner, street to street, making sure they can walk safely through their neighborhood.
A new campaign called “Avoid the Spark” aims to teach U.S. consumers how to properly store and dispose of batteries.
I never know what to do with old batteries. I know I’m not supposed to just throw them away, so I usually end up shoving them all in a drawer together.
Turns out, that’s a bad idea. According to the folks behind “Avoid the Spark,” a new public education campaign designed for people like me, leaving batteries in a drawer together could lead to a potential explosion. Yikes.
Sarah Stroe with her paternal grandparents, Mara and Angelo Stroe, in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park in the early 1990s. (Courtesy Stroe Family)
The California Report Magazine is asking people to write in with a letter to the first person in their family to move to California and how their dream has — or hasn’t — held up.
This week, Sarah Stroe wrote to her grandparents, Jews who left Europe after World War II. As a descendent of European Jews myself, her letter resonated with me, especially her final line:
My California dream is a California that embraces its history as a safe haven for immigrants, that loves and celebrates difference and takes pride in the ever-changing and mixing landscape of Californians.
You can write your own letter here, and maybe it’ll make it on air.
Gregory Stevens, former associate pastor for First Baptist Church in Palo Alto, has reactivated his Twitter account. (Rachael Myrow/KQED)
Never in my life have I been surrounded by as much wealth as I have while living in Palo Alto. Houses almost always cost at least seven figures, and it seems like everyone either works at Stanford or Google.
All that wealth just became too much for one now-former Palo Alto pastor who took to Twitter to call his town “disgusting” and an “elitist shit den of hate.”
The 28-year-old associate pastor, Gregory Stevens, says people in Palo Alto like to think of themselves as liberals and progressives who care about social justice, but they fail to walk the walk.
“In a liberal’s mind in Palo Alto, it’s civility that you’re supposed to have, and not a passion and a fire for equality, for equity and for justice,” he explains.
How Young is ‘Too Young’ to Know You’re Transgender?
May 28, 2018
Stay caught up with the best of KQED’s reporting each week by subscribing to the Q’ed Up podcast.
Unlike the North Korea summit, all of this stuff definitely happened.
Gracie (7) poses for a picture in her room surrounded by princess and Minnie Mouse imagery. (Lauren Hanussak/KQED)
Gracie is like a lot of seven-year-old girls: She likes pink, dresses and Frozen. She’s also transgender.
She started socially transitioning at age four — her family started calling her Gracie, changed her pronouns, let her wear girl clothes outside of the house and changed the gender on her birth certificate.
KQED’s Jon Brooks spent some time with Gracie and her mom as part of a deeper dive into a controversial issue in the transgender and medical communities: When should kids be allowed to start socially transitioning?
One group follows what they call the “gender affirmative” model. Basically, if a kid is insistent that they’re not the gender everyone says they are, adults should listen to them and support them.
On the other side are researchers who cite disputed research that shows the majority of young kids who say they’re transgender don’t stick with that identity through adolescence. They advocate supporting a kid’s ability to express themselves how they wish, while avoiding more lasting changes like pronoun or name changes.
At the center of this debate are kids like Gracie. Her mom says that since she’s started transitioning, she has become much happier.
Artists Natasha McCray-Zolp and Shameel Ali stand with ‘300 Shots Fired,’ as part of the ‘Art of Peace’ exhibit.
Art is regularly used as way to make a statement on social issues like gun violence, but I’ve never seen an exhibit quite like “Art of Peace.”
It features art made out of hundreds of confiscated and dismantled guns provided by the Alameda County District Attorney’s office to local artists like Natasha McCray-Zolp who, along with her husband, created a bicycle with handgun pedals and a shell-casing seat.
“It dawned on me that I was looking down two double barrel shotguns,” McCray-Zolp said about the process of making her piece. “And I thought, you know, these quite possibly could have been pointed at somebody in this way before.”
These sheep are next in line for a buzz from first-time shearers at the UC Cooperative Extension Sheep Shearing School in Hopland. (Tiffany Camhi/KQED)
“We’re dancing instructors,” says John Harper, head of the UC Cooperative Extension Sheep Shearing School in the Mendocino County town of Hopland. “It’s like ‘Dancing With The Stars’ on steroids, but with sheep.”
Apparently there’s a worldwide shortage of sheep shearers and hundreds of thousands of sheep just in California that need their wool shaved off. Enter Harper’s sheep shearing school, which has been training new baaaaaarbers for about 25 years.
Maria Mendoza-Sanchez sits on a couch in her Oakland home on Aug. 16, 2017, hours before she, her husband and son leave Oakland for Mexico City. Her daughter, Melin Sanchez, 21, cries as she watches her mother with concern. (Deborah Svoboda/KQED)
Being a working parent of four kids in the Bay Area is hard enough. Now imagine that your kids live in Oakland, while you and your spouse live in Mexico, legally barred from reconnecting with them in the United States.
That’s the life Maria Mendoza and her husband Eusebio have been living for the last nine months since they were deported as part of the Trump administration’s crackdown on undocumented immigrants.
Their two oldest daughters are putting their educational ambitions aside to take care of their younger siblings, while Maria and Eusebio try to send what little money they can and do their parenting over daily video chats.
I’ve always had a soft spot for professional sports mascots and the people who make them come alive.
We have a strong mascot culture in Minnesota where I grew up including the home run hitting TC Bear, the do-it-all Goldy the Gopher and the high-flying, slam-dunking Crunch.
So even though I had never seen Sadiki Fuller perform as the Warriors’ mascot Thunder in the late 90s and early 2000s, I felt an immediate respect and admiration for the man while reading Pendarvis Harshaw’s heartfelt tribute. Like many mascots, his presence wasn’t just felt on the court or field hyping up the fans, but in the community where he brought joy and mentorship to so many.
You Can’t Tell Kids to ‘Just Say No’ to Legal Weed
May 20, 2018
Stay caught up with the best of KQED’s reporting each week by subscribing to the Q’ed Up podcast.
Here’s what we all missed while obsessing over the royal wedding:
In the television hall of fame, there needs to be a special wing dedicated exclusively to horrible anti-drug PSAs. Even if we control for the overall improvement of TV ads in the last few decades, I can’t imagine these things stopped many kids from smoking pot.
But even if the PSAs didn’t work, adults could always fall back on the law: if kids did drugs, they would go to jail. But that won’t work for marijuana anymore as the legal age for recreational pot in California is 21 and older.
So how do you talk to kids about the potential risks of marijuana use when it’ll be legal for them to use in just a few years. KQED’s health editor Carrie Feibel went back to (middle) school to see how educators are teaching kids about legal weed. Turns out, legalization hasn’t changed the curriculum too much, but the scare tactics and guilt trips of earlier decades (and PSAs) are long gone:
In a nutshell, the focus now is on facts, not fear. Also conspicuously absent are simplistic dictates like “just say no.” Instead, teachers spur students to examine data, speculate on motives, discuss risks, and deliberate on their own goals and values.
Has legalization changed how you talk to your kids about drugs? Tell me about it on Twitter, and you could be on next week’s episode of Q’ed Up.
Election Day Pt. 1 (also known as the June 5 primary) is almost here, which means it’s a good time for a refresher on ranked choice voting. Several Bay Area cities use ranked choice voting (RCV) including Oakland, Berkeley and San Francisco, which has a pretty hotly contested mayoral election coming up.
Here’s the short version of how it works:
For offices decided by RCV, voters rank their first, second and third choices. Through a complicated system of algorithms, if no candidate gets 50 percent-plus-one after counting all the first-place votes, the last-place candidates are eliminated one by one, and their voters’ second-choice votes are redistributed.
I don’t have a TV, so I didn’t realize that mega-companies Wells Fargo, Uber and Facebook have all been running apology ads during prime-time recently.
These companies definitely have good reason to apologize to their customers, and the ads are very well produced with music, platitudes and lofty promises. But are they enough to earn your forgiveness?
Members of the Nazarene Church stand in front of the John Rains House in Rancho Cucamonga, 1902. (Courtesy of San Bernardino County Museum)
To me, Rancho Cucamonga sounds more like something you’d yell when jumping into a swimming pool than a town’s name, but there it is, nestled into the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains.
The name comes from the Kukamongan Native Americans who established a settlement in the area in 1200 A.D. and the “ranchos” of the secularized Spanish mission system of the 19th century.
Aside from its name, the town is also known as the home of the oldest commercial wine facility in the state and as the birthplace of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos. Wine and Cheetos: a match made in Rancho Cucamonga.
Spectators watch a sideshow at Foothill Boulevard and 55th Avenue in East Oakland on June 21, 2015. (Jay Area/YouTube)
I have never heard of or seen a sideshow, so this week’s Bay Curious about the history and culture of sideshows in Oakland fascinated me.
As some of you may know, sideshows are part-car show, part-block party. They started in the 1980s and have deep roots in Deep East Oakland’s African-American community and hip-hop culture. They were a chance to show off cool cars and share great music.
But a lot of people now associate them with violence and crime and Oakland has cracked down on sideshows. Like most things, sideshows are a lot more complex than they may appear on the surface, and this story is a great place to start if you want to understand those complexities…and listen to some sweet music.
Move Over UberX, UberAir and Flying Cars On the Way
May 13, 2018
Stay caught up with the best of KQED’s reporting each week by subscribing to the Q’ed Up podcast.
The newest concept for commuting could have us taking to the skies.
1. It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s Uber.
In 1985, the science-fiction film “Back to the Future” we were first introduced to the time-travelling, high-flying DeLorean. Back then, the idea of a flying car seemed pretty far-fetched. Even now, more than 30 years later, it doesn’t seem very plausible. But, buckle your seatbelts, flying cars could … maybe … someday … become a reality.
And the company who wants to take us to this above-the-road, seemingly traffic-free world is none other than San Francisco-based ride-sharing giant Uber.
This week, the company revealed a concept design for a flying taxi at its Elevate Summit in Los Angeles. If this wasn’t enough, the company announced it plans to launch a pilot flying taxi program, hello UberAir, in L.A. and Dallas in 2020, with a more widespread commercial service to take flight in 2023.
So how do you feel about hitching a ride on UberAir?
A frame from the 1906 film “A Trip Down Market Street Before the Fire.” The movie was shot shortly before the April 18 earthquake and fire devastated much of the city. (Library of Congress via YouTube)
This week Dan Brekke goes down the rabbit hole of 1906 traffic-related fatalities after an article waxes poetic about a San Francisco before automobiles clogged the streets.
One key data point: San Francisco recorded 95 vehicle-related death the year of the Great Earthquake — an incidence of fatality about six times higher than that seen in the city today. The most surprising finding: Streetcars accounted for 60 deaths and was by far the deadliest means of transportation in the years just after the turn of the 20th century.
One other discovery about traffic mayhem, 1906-style: The local papers seemed to relish publishing the most gruesome details of street deaths, with extended discussions of victims dismembered or crushed beyond recognition.
Beginning band class at Westlake Middle School. (Nastia Voynovskaya)
In December we reported that Oakland Unified School District had to cut $9 million from its budget. While any budget cut to educational programs is a unfortunate, the district already had less allocated to its programs than other Bay Area schools.
According to the latest available data from the Rand Corporation, Oakland Unified School District (OUSD) spent $13,813 per student during the 2016-17 school year. (In comparison, across the Bay in affluent Palo Alto, the school district spent $17,941 — over $4,000 more — per student.) Moreover, in December 2017, OUSD approved $9 million in mid-year budget cuts, nixing dozens of non-teaching staff positions and reducing budgets for supplies, teacher benefits and other areas.
The budget cuts were predicted to hit harder mid-year, but local music nonprofits are stepping in to support the underfunded music programs. SFJAZZ, Women’s Audio Mission, Oaktown Jazz and Oakland Public Conservatory are expanding music education programs in Oakland classrooms, making sure students get consistent exposure to the arts during the budget crisis.
A view of the top of the California Capitol building in Sacramento. (Robyn Beck/AFP/Getty Images)
Could a survey be the new tool to help combat sexual harassment in the state Legislature? Leaders in the California Assembly and Senate hope so.
In the wakeofmultiplescandals, resulting in resignations and investigations, staffers were encouraged to take part in the survey gauging workplace culture in the Capitol. Along with the survey, the Joint Subcommittee on Sexual Harassment Prevention and Response has been formed, two first steps in a long process to fix a broken system.
We Need to Talk About Our Relationship with Technology
May 06, 2018
Stay caught up with the best of KQED’s reporting each week by subscribing to the Q’ed Up podcast.
Back in 1993, KQED ran a 5-part series called “Virtual World” all about how the “information superhighway” (aka the internet) was affecting society. Twenty-five years later, our Silicon Valley bureau decided to take a look back at that series, and it turns out, we’re still asking a lot of the same questions:
And the answers haven’t changed much either. The technology may be far more advanced today (one woman back in ’93 was extremely worried about voicemail), but the issues it presents to society are pretty much still the same.
Jeff Marshal sits in his single-room occupancy hotel room, or SRO, in the Tenderloin. The neighborhood has the most SROs in the city, which have helped stave off gentrification. (Samantha Shanahan/KQED)
While the rest of San Francisco (and most of the Bay Area, really) has been rapidly getting more developed and expensive, the Tenderloin has pretty much stayed the same for decades. As I learned in this week’s Bay Curious, it turns out there are four big reasons behind that:
Nonprofits bought up a bunch of land cheap back in the day and run affordable housing programs there now.
In 1985, they passed zoning restrictions that prevent buildings over 13 stories high to block luxury condos.
The Tenderloin has one of the highest number of SROs of any neighborhood, and the city has made it tough to get rid of them.
Much of the neighborhood is a historic district or rent-controlled, providing anti-development protections.
The story also goes into the history of the Tenderloin, which I knew very little about, and raises the big question: can the Tenderloin get safer and cleaner without forcing people out?
Parents and students at a Fremont school board meeting debating sex ed on Wednesday, May 2, 2018. (Sandhya Dirks/KQED)
Here’s the short version of a complicated story that’s been playing out for months:
The Fremont Unified School District Board of Education voted early Thursday to scrap the sex ed program for fourth through sixth graders. Controversial content included addressing the emotional aspects of sex and sexual activity; the possibility that as adults, people may have more than one sexual partner; and inclusive LGBTQ lessons, like on transgender individuals and gender fluidity.
Up until the vote, sex ed had been taught in Fremont schools to fifth and sixth graders since the 1980s, and to fourth graders since 2011. The board approved the update to sex ed in seventh through ninth grades — which they were essentially required to do to comply with the California Healthy Youth Act.
This story has so many layers and voices in it, and it hits on everything: sex, race, education, culture. There’s also a fantastic episode of The Bay podcast about this that I highly recommend.
Frank Fat in front of his namesake restaurant, which turns 80 next year. Fat died in 1997, but his family has carried on his legacy. (Courtesy of the Fat Family Restaurant Group)
The story of Frank Fat’s restaurant in Sacramento is almost painfully American. It’s got an immigrant coming to this country and opening a thriving small business. It’s got the wheeling and dealing of backroom state politics. And it has a dark racist underbelly.
It’s obviously more complicated than that, and Bianca Taylor does a great job of telling Frank Fat’s story, including cameos from Willie Brown and Earl Warren.
Mike Mika and his kids Ellis and Emerson, from Berkeley, look for Avengers comics at the Escapist Comic Bookstore in Berkeley on Saturday, May 5, 2018. (Caroline Champlin/KQED)
I had to work on Saturday, so I couldn’t take advantage of Free Comic Book Day, which was a real bummer. They literally give away free comic books. How awesome is that?
But thankfully, I was able to live vicariously through this photo essay of folks in Berkeley making the most of this epic holiday.
Sean Hannity’s First Radio Job Was in California. It Didn’t Go Well.
Apr 29, 2018
Stay caught up with the best of KQED’s reporting each week by subscribing to the Q’ed Up podcast.
And here’s what’s happening in our neck of the woods.
Fox News host Sean Hannity speaks during the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in 2016. (SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images)
I try to avoid cable news as much as possible, but there was a Sean Hannity story this week that I was glad to have heard.
It turns out that the Fox News host got his start on-air back in 1989 at KCSB, a community radio station in Santa Barbara. As reporter Valerie Hamilton explains, Hannity was causing waves even on that first show.
Flood waters inundate Sacramento in 1862. Scientists warn that events like the Great Flood of 1862 could occur every 50 years by the end of this century. (Sacramento History Museum)
Fun fact: Back in the winter of 1861 and 1862, it rained for 43 days in California. The governor of California had to attend his inauguration by rowboat.
Not so fun fact: A new study out of UCLA this week says a biblical flood like that could happen as often as every 50 years going forward. And just for good measure, extreme droughts are expected to happen more often too.
A screenshot from KCRT of Richmond Mayor Tom Butt walking out of a City Council meeting on Tuesday. (KCRT Television)
Sometimes, city council meetings are interminable experiences that you can’t wait to get away from. Other times, something bonkers happens.
Tuesday was a bonkers kind of night in Richmond. As KQED’s Ted Goldberg witnessed, Mayor Tom Butt exchanged some heated words with Councilwoman Jovanka Beckles and then just up and left the meeting.
“Ursa Mater” aka “Mama Penny Bear” on the Playa at Burning Man. “It’s battle tested,” says Robert Ferguson. “You’re out in the desert in wind, blowing sand, heat, rain. And people are at it, 70,000 of them. At the end of the day, it comes home intact, you know you have something that’s going to be able to be in the public eye.” (Courtesy of Lisa Ferguson)
But if you need a Burning Man pick-me-up, go visit the giant “Mama Penny Bear” statue in downtown San Jose. It’s literally a 12-foot bear made out of hundreds of thousands of pennies that’s part of a unique deal between Burning Man and San Jose to relocate art from the desert festival to the city’s streets.
Yasmine Nayabkhil, 12, speaks before cameras and reporters in support of an anti-bullying bill at the Sacramento capitol on April 23, 2018. The Council on American-Islamic Relations organized the event. (Farida Jhabvala Romero/KQED)
This week, hundreds of California Muslims went to Sacramento to ask lawmakers to support legislation that would help prevent bullying of Muslim students, which is on the rise.
Many of them were students, and I was blown away by these young people who told KQED’s Farida Jhabvala Romero and lawmakers about the harassment they’d faced.
“I did get my hijab pulled off a few times, and to them it’s just pulling off a headscarf, but to us it’s pulling off our identity,” said Shad Alnashashibi, 15. “To them it’s nothing, but to us it’s almost everything.”
Yasmine Nayabkhil, 12, said she was picked on and called a “terrorist” in elementary school after she decided to start wearing her hijab, or head scarf. She sometimes ended the day in tears. “It obviously didn’t make me feel good inside. It made me feel really hurt, especially since I’ve known these kids in my class for over five years,” she said.
The Newest Weapon in San Francisco’s Fight Against Opioids
Apr 22, 2018
Stay caught up with the best of KQED’s reporting each week by subscribing to the Q’ed Up podcast.
Terry Morris, director of the 6th Street Harm Reduction Center, demonstrates how to test a drug for the presence of fentanyl with a fentanyl test strip. (Laura Klivans/KQED)
It would be hard not to know that there’s an opioid epidemic in our country. One of the most deadly opioids is fentanyl, a synthetic opioid that is often mixed with other drugs, killing unsuspecting users.
KQED’s Laura Klivans has been doing a lot of reporting on fentanyl in San Francisco, and her most recent story looks at a new tool being used to fight the drug — a simple test people can do at a needle exchange to see if their drugs are laced with fentanyl.
But it’s not just about testing drugs. Its also an opportunity for the people using the drugs to talk to professionals and just maybe make some changes in their lives.
House Speaker Paul Ryan (L) and House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy talk to reporters following the weekly House Republican Conference meeting at the U.S. Capitol April 17, 2018. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
California’s most famous current politicians are mostly Democrats — our governor, both our U.S. senators and most of our representatives in Congress, including former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi.
But the next Speaker of the House could be a California Republican. Kevin McCarthy is the odds-on favorite to take over the job from Paul Ryan if the Republicans hold onto a majority, and that’s music to the ears of many of McCarthy’s Bakersfield constituents.
KQED’s Alex Hall went to a Little League game in Bakersfield to talk to voters who are just giddy at the thought of Speaker McCarthy.
A guy holding a 420 sign. (LARS HAGBERG/AFP/Getty Images)
I can’t remember the first time I heard 420 in connection with marijuana. It’s one of those things that feels like it’s always been one-in-the-same.
But someone had to invent it, and it turns out, those someones were a group of friends at San Rafael High School back in the early 1970s. This newest Bay Curious episode goes into the weeds on the Bay Area roots of 420 (see what I did there?).
Bart Levenson will soon be checking out of Room 432 at the defunct Konocti Harbor Resort and Spa, where she has been staying since her home burned down in the 2015 Valley Fire. (Sukey Lewis/KQED)
We’ve all read so many stories about the survivors of wildfires — that are happening more often and more viciously than ever before — that it can be easy for them to lose their ability to make us stop and listen. But this story from KQED’s Sukey Lewis did just that.
The Konocti Harbor Resort in Lake County had been shuttered for years when the devastating Valley Fire hit the area in 2015. The fire wiped out 1,280 homes, and all those people needed somewhere to go.
The old resort opened its doors to fire survivors and has continued to house people as new fires have hit the region year after year, leaving more and more people in need of a place to start over.
Beyonce’s entrance as the headliner at Coachella 2018’s first weekend. Her performance had been delayed for a year because of pregnancy. (Larry Busacca/Getty Images)
Yup, you read that right. There’s a Beyoncé mass coming to San Francisco this week.
The mass on Wednesday at Grace Cathedral was already in the works before Beyoncé’s mesmerizing performance at Coachella last weekend, but the timing sure doesn’t hurt.
The mass is the brainchild of Reverend Yolanda Norton, a professor at the San Francisco Theological Seminary, who teaches a weekly class called “Beyoncé and the Hebrew Bible.” Norton says it’s not about turning Beyoncé into a god, but rather taking lessons about self-love and body positivity that Beyoncé preaches in her songs.
“She is someone who holds her head up high, who loves herself,” Norton says. “And those are things that we are given agency and license to do when we understand our connection with God.”
She Performed 50,000 Abortions and Went Toe to Toe with Jerry Brown’s Dad
Apr 15, 2018
Stay caught up with the best of KQED’s reporting each week by subscribing to the Q’ed Up podcast.
Here are a few of the stories that caught my eye this week.
Inez Burns at a family wedding, standing third to left, 1966.
There aren’t many things that can get people as riled up (or uncomfortable) as talking about abortion. Nearly 50 years after the Supreme Court legalized a woman’s right to have an abortion in Roe v. Wade, the debate continues to rage in courts, state legislatures and the streets.
But this story is much older than today’s pro-life vs. pro-choice discussion. KQED’s Chloe Veltman takes us back to the early 20th century to meet Inez Burns, the woman who performed 50,000 illegal abortions in San Francisco and caught the attention of then-district attorney and future governor, Pat Brown.
Facebook is being criticized over how it handles user data. (Joel Saget/AFP/GettyImages)
People have been in a tizzy for weeks about Facebook playing a bit fast and loose with its users’ data. But here’s the thing: everybody does it.
Facebook might be in the spotlight (and in front of Congress) for its privacy faux pas, but it’s pretty much impossible to use the internet and not have your data spread around. But KQED’s Lisa Pickoff-White does have a few suggestions if you want to limit how much of your data is an open book.
Horchata, a male northern elephant seal pup, was rescued this March near Half Moon Bay. Beachgoers with dogs crowded the animal and began pouring water on it, which is never recommended. Though the beachgoers were well-meaning, Horchata had to be rescued by trained responders and brought to The Marine Mammal Center for rehabilitation. Veterinarians diagnosed Horchata with malnutrition and maternal separation. Horchata is steadily gaining weight and beginning to learn how to eat fish. (Bill Hunnewell/The Marine Mammal Center)
Seal pups are adorable. I mean, just look at them! But it’s crucial you look from a distance.
Turns out, if a mama seal sees a human or a dog getting too close to her seal pup, she’ll just up and abandon the pup. One vet’s rule of thumb for seal pup photography: if you don’t have to zoom, you’re too close.
Liam O’Donoghue’s Long Lost Oakland map highlights pieces of the city’s history that no longer exist. (Courtesy of Liam O'Donoghue)
Oakland, like the rest of the Bay Area, is changing fast. Buildings that are there one day can be gone the next.
“Over the many years I’ve lived there, I’ve watched buildings get torn down, I’ve watched new buildings go up. Part of this project is about sort of understanding the disorientation of living in a city where so much is changing so fast,” says Liam O’Donoghue, the creator of the Long Lost Oakland map.
The map shows buildings, plants and animals that used to exist in Oakland, but don’t anymore. The map is beautiful, the history is fascinating and the lessons to be learned could be priceless.
Two scooters from Southern California startup Bird on a sidewalk near Fifth and Brannan streets in San Francisco. (Dan Brekke/KQED)
I never thought I would live to see the day when electric razor scooters were the cause of so much discord and debate among grown adults.
Electric scooters distributed by dockless bike companies LimeBike, Spin and Bird, are seemingly everywhere. Some people love them, but a lot of people, including many who are on the city’s payroll, aren’t huge fans. It reached the point this week where the city impounded 66 of the scooters off the streets.
If you want to hear more about these scooters and what people think of them, check out this episode of KQED’s The Bay podcast featuring our scooter expert, Dan Brekke.
The Forgotten Men of the Point Reyes Life Saving Service
Apr 08, 2018
Stay caught up with the best of KQED’s reporting each week by subscribing to the Q’ed Up podcast.
There was a shooting at YouTube, teachers are striking in Oklahoma and President Trump ordered National Guard troops to the border. But that’s not all.
The original Point Reyes Life Saving Station (1889-1927) at which the four surfmen would have served. (Point Reyes National Seashore Archives)
One of my colleagues, Carly Severn, has a knack for doing these stories about bizarre places she stumbles upon. This week, she takes us to the Life-Saving Station Cemetery in Point Reyes.
It’s the final resting place for four members of the Life Saving Service, or what we know today as the Coast Guard. Their motto was, “You have to go out, but you don’t have to come back.”
The four graves belong to four young immigrants who died out on the brutal seas of Point Reyes.
“I don’t see this as a depressing story. It’s definitely bittersweet to me,” Carly tells me. “[The four men] traveled thousands of miles by water, worked in the water and then died for it as well, saving lives. And I just find that really poignant, but not depressing.”
A screen grab image captured from Nasim Najafi Aghdam’s YouTube page. The page has since been taken down. (YouTube)
I wasn’t working on Tuesday, so I missed a lot of the details of the woman who shot three people and then killed herself at YouTube headquarters in San Bruno. But KQED’s Sam Harnett and Tonya Mosley were on it from the start, and Sam put together this really helpful timeline that explains what happened in the lead-up to the shooting.
Gov. Jerry Brown turns 80 on Saturday. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
There must be something in the water that California politicians drink. Sen. Dianne Feinstein turns 85 this summer, just a few months before she hopes to be re-elected to another six-year term in the U.S. Senate. And Gov. Jerry Brown turned 80 on Saturday, extending his reign as the oldest governor in state history.
To celebrate, KQED’s politics editor Scott Shafer went to a senior community in San Francisco to get some advice for Brown from his fellow seniors on how to enjoy old age. In the words of one octogenarian, “No matter how gooda shape you’re in, once you’re 80, you are one old ‘motha.'”
Four-level interchange of the 110 and 101 freeways looking northwest, 1956. (AUTOMOBILE CLUB OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA ARCHIVES)
I’ve recently become obsessed with cars, highways and the way they’ve shaped our society. I have a lot of time to think about this during my daily one-hour commute each way, which will eventually add up to seven years of my life spent driving to and from work—let that sink in.
KPCC’s commuting and mobility reporter Megan McCarty (yes, that’s her real title) traces the origins of California’s freeway system back to the mid-20th century and how it set the course for the world we live in today. The piece comes to a bit more of an optimistic conclusion than I think most of us have about traffic and congestion, but it’s well worth a read.
A human-size hamster wheel is up for sale by Kink.com at the San Francisco Armory.
I’ve never been a big garage sale guy, but I was definitely intrigued by the sale going on at the San Francisco Armory this weekend.
The fetish porn site Kink.com is having a four-day sale as it moves out of the Armory, where it once made more than 100 films a month. They stopped filming there last year and sold the building earlier this year, meaning it’s time for a garage sale!
Among the more unique items available for purchase are a giant hamster wheel, a torture rack and several old dentists chairs. But there’s also a bunch of gym equipment, some nice rugs, handsome furniture and works of art.
A Black Lives Matter protester holds a sign as he marches on Interstate 5 during a demonstration on March 22, 2018 in Sacramento. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
By now you probably know the details. Stephon Clark, an unarmed 22-year-old black man, was shot 20 times by police in his grandparent’s backyard in South Sacramento on March 18.
His death has prompted protests and outrage. And it’s also made relatively conservative Sacramento the unlikely epicenter of a national conversation. The city has long had issues of race and class bubbling below the surface, but now, they’ve boiled over on the national stage.
Assemblywoman Cristina Garcia, D-Bell Gardens, faces allegations that she groped and harassed legislative staffers. (California Assembly)
In an exclusive interview with KQED’s John Sepulvado, Assemblywoman Cristina Garcia talked extensively about the allegations of sexual misconduct against her. She’s been accused of sexually harassing and assaulting legislative staffers.
Garcia strongly denied harassing or assaulting anyone, but she didn’t deny referring to the first openly gay speaker of the California Assembly as a “homo.”
Garcia, who has been a vocal leader in the #MeToo movement and was featured in TIME Magazine, says the allegations of sexual misconduct are coming from her political opponents:
I think this is about shutting me up. Making sure that my advocacy stops. Making sure that I don’t ensure that my community has a voice. And it’s not just shutting me up, or shutting people like me up. Whether it’s on the #MeToo movement, whether it’s on environmental justice or whatever injustices that are out there, I have been very vocal. I’m not afraid to take on fights. I do the work that other people don’t want to do. I think you know I’ve been very critical. I want to make sure we have a high standard. I want to make sure we’re running with ethics. I have been fighting against corruption. I think along the way my work speaks for itself and why I’ve accumulated some enemies. But I think more than anything, over the last few years, I’ve started to be effective. I’ve started to get things done.
There’s a lot in this interview, and I highly recommend reading the whole thing.
The face of a great white shark. (Dan Kitwood/Getty Images)
I’ve lived in California for almost two years, but I have spent very little time in the Pacific Ocean.
But for those of you who do like to swim, scuba and surf, you’ll be happy to know that even though there are a lot of sharks off of the California coast, your odds of being attacked are pretty low. You’re more likely to win an Oscar, be born with 11 toes or get hit by a car.
The Bay Curious podcast dove deep on sharks this week, including the shark behavior that one expert says reminds him of Burning Man.
Colorful nicotine-filled pods, pictured on the right, are inserted into the Juul e-cigarette, which educators say looks deceptively like a flash drive, making it harder to identify. (Juul Labs)
Apparently, the new cool thing to do for teens these days is smoke a flash drive. Not an actual flash drive, but rather a Juul, an electronic cigarette that looks just like a flash drive you’d plug into your computer.
They take a hit, sucking on the device as they would a cigarette. Then, “they blow into their backpacks … or into their sweater when the teacher isn’t looking,” said Elijah Luna, 16, a sophomore at Vista del Lago High School in Folsom, Calif., about 30 miles east of Sacramento.
One substance abuse counselor in Virginia said she’s never seen a tobacco product become so popular so quickly. She predicted it would become “the health problem of the decade.”
PG&E workers repair power lines in Santa Rosa’s devastated Coffey Park neighborhood following the Tubbs Fire in October 2017. (Elijah Nouvelage/Getty Images)
Right now, utility companies are financially responsible if their equipment is found to have caused damage, even if the company wasn’t negligent. But that could change.
Utility company lobbyists have been working overtime in Sacramento trying to convince state leaders to allow utilities to pass any increased costs onto rate payers. That means if, for example, Pacific Gas & Electric was found liable for the Northern California wildfires and forced to pay damages, it would actually be their customers who would pay.
At the same time, some lawmakers, including some representing the North Bay, want to make it impossible for companies to pass on those costs. It’ll definitely be something to watch as the legislative session unfolds.
California Kids Can’t Get into California Colleges — and That’s a Problem
Mar 25, 2018
Stay caught up with the best of KQED’s reporting each week by subscribing to the Q’ed Up podcast.
We have a budget, a new national security adviser and no control over our Facebook data.
As California’s population grows, and increasing numbers of high school grads meet college eligibility requirements, more and more qualified CSU and UC applicants have to compete for limited space. (Charlie Nguyen/Flickr)
When I was applying to colleges, I was ready to get out of my home state of Minnesota. I love Minnesota, and there are some great schools there, but it wasn’t enough to keep me from wanting to leave.
In California, it’s the opposite: students want to go to schools here, but there’s not enough space. Tens of thousands of eligible students last year were turned away from University of California or California State University schools.
This isn’t just sad news for these kids whose dreams of going to a great California school are dashed. Once they leave, the odds of them coming back to work and live here drop, meaning California could see a legitimate brain drain if something doesn’t change.
Video games often get a bad name for being socially isolating for kids. But for many, they can actually be their biggest social connection to the outside world. Deep, lifelong friendships can be made between gamers, even though they may never meet in person.
This is why I think it’s so cool that some in the gaming industry are taking steps to make games more accessible to people with disabilities. KQED’s Rachael Myrow talked to folks who are trying to make things easier for visually-impaired gamers.
San Francisco mayoral candidates Angela Alioto, London Breed, Richie Greenberg, Jane Kim and Amy Farah Weiss at a debate in the Castro Theater in San Francisco on March 19, 2018. (Samantha Shanahan/KQED)
KQED’s senior politics editor Scott Shafer had been talking for days about the potential for things to get interesting at the San Francisco mayoral debate he was hosting at the Castro Theater. And he was right.
Five candidates were invited. One of them couldn’t make it. And then one who wasn’t invited, Amy Farah Weiss, literally fought her way onto the debate stage.
Things kept going from there with an active and restless crowd heckling and booing the candidates throughout the night as they talked about the big issues facing the city: affordable housing and homelessness.
Flowers left at Veterans Home of California in Yountville in memory of the three victims of the March 9, 2018 shooting. (Alyssa Jeong Perry/KQED)
California Highway Patrol Sgt. Ed Clarke was one of the first people inside the room where a veteran shot and killed three women at the Yountville Veterans Home in Napa County on March 9.
He told KQED’s Ted Goldberg what it was like to spend hours in that room into the next morning cataloging the scene:
“People would call in, the messages would play out loud like an old type of message machine, and I remember one veteran calling in and he’s just talking saying how tragic this is and how he wanted to thank everyone there for the work they had done,” Clarke said.
“You’d just hear the various offices and the cellphones of the women who were killed, just ringing, and knowing that these were people who loved them who were calling in probably just holding out hope that the information being released was not accurate,” he said. “That’s certainly something I’ll never forget.”
I was in the car with my boyfriend when April Dembosky’s story about marriage counselors came on. She went to a conference to hear a bunch of therapists talk about their own relationships.
There are a lot of good nuggets in there, but the best one came from Marion Solomon, a psychologist who sees couples in West Hollywood:
“If your partner is under stress, that’s the time to get strong and to get my cortex in line and say I can’t be upset when he’s upset,” she said. In other words, “a good marriage is a partnership where only one partner goes crazy at a time.”
Students from Oakland Technical High School stand up against gun violence on March 14, 2018, one month after the school shooting in Parkland, Florida, killed 17 people. (Samantha Shanahan/KQED)
Thousands of young people across the Bay Area and the country walked out of their schools this week to protest gun violence and to remember the 17 people killed at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida last month.
But what stood out to me most — among the chants, the impassioned pleas for action from Congress and the moments of silence — was hearing from students in Oakland who told KQED’s Vanessa Rancaño that they’ve been dealing with gun violence for a long time, and no one has planned walkouts for them.
About 200 demonstrators protesting Proposition 187 march along Senter Road in San Jose on Oct. 25, 1994. The march began in Morgan Hill and ended at St. Joseph’s Cathedral in downtown San Jose. (Patrick Tehan/Mercury News)
I moved to the Bay Area in June 2016, so I’ve only ever known California as an uber-liberal place that is literally being sued by the federal government for trying to protect undocumented immigrants from deportation.
But it hasn’t always been like this.
I had heard of Proposition 187, which passed in 1994 and denied undocumented immigrants access to publicly funded services before being struck down by a federal court. However, I didn’t realize how much the debate around it changed the state’s relationship with immigrants until this story from KQED’s Farida Jhabvala Romero.
Two men eat lunch and converse at Local Union 271, a farm-to-table restaurant on University Avenue in Palo Alto, on Aug. 25, 2016. (Photo via Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images)
There are people living in Palo Alto making $400,000 who see themselves as middle class. As someone living on a journalist’s salary, that sounds bonkers. But as someone who lives in Palo Alto, it makes a little more sense.
Everything (especially housing) in Palo Alto is so expensive and so many folks at Stanford and working in tech are so wealthy, that I can see how the definition of “middle class” can get warped. KQED’s Tonya Mosley wrote a fascinating story that gets into all of these complexities of what it means to be “middle class” in one of the richest parts of the country.
Being on the sidewalks of Oakland can sometimes be a messy spot for the gnomes. This particular one was recently visited by a local dog. (Brittany Hosea-Small/KQED)
I generally hate gnomes. They’re small, creepy and generally off-putting. But the story of how thousands of tiny, hand-painted wooden gnomes were sprinkled across Oakland’s utility poles is genuinely heartwarming.
In the newest episode of the Bay Curious podcast, they track down the mystery man behind the gnomes and learn why the heck anyone would paint and post thousands of gnomes around town. It’s guaranteed to make you smile.
Flames ravage a home in the Napa wine region in California on Oct. 9, 2017. (Josh Edelson/AFP/Getty Images)
I first heard about the deadly fires burning through Northern California last October on Monday morning, Oct. 9. By that time, they’d been burning for hours.
KQED reporters Marisa Lagos, Sukey Lewis and Lisa Pickoff-White have spent the last five months going over thousands of 911 and dispatch calls along with interviewing dozens of survivors and emergency personnel. They found large systemic problems with the state’s emergency response procedures:
Early electrical fires took resources from the later, bigger fires, and PG&E’s decision not to shut down power lines slowed response.
They also found stories of heroism, like this one about California Highway Patrol helicopter pilots who saved dozens of people off of Atlas Peak in Napa County on the first night of the fires.
Dana Hemenway with her SF State, CSU East Bay and UC Santa Cruz parking permits.
I hate driving an hour each way to get from my home on the Peninsula to work at KQED and back each day. And I know that my commute can barely be considered bad in the Bay Area.
Take Dana Hemenway. She’s a San Francisco-based artist who drives about 380 miles a week between her four jobs — three adjunct teaching gigs at SF State, CSU East Bay and UC Santa Cruz, plus working as a visual artist out of a studio in San Francisco.
Those jobs — and all that driving — allow Hemenway to pay the bills, but it doesn’t leave much time or money for anything else.
“This lifestyle that I’m doing right now is only sustainable for so long,” she says. “I could not have a kid in this budget. I could not have any long-term financial security in this budget. Giving to retirement is fairly limited in my situation. And those kinds of bigger life things you’d want to attain seem next to impossible in this current situation.”
Berkeley and ASU researchers calculate land loss from sinking land (blue), sea level rise (yellow), and the two phenomena together (red). (Roland Burgmann/UC Berkeley)
We’ve all heard about how sea level is rising due to climate change. But did you know that the ground — that supposedly stable stuff we rely on to stay in one place — is also sinking?
Yup. According to a new study, this problem, known as subsidence, is especially bad in Foster City, Union City, San Rafael and the land around SFO. Combine this with sea level rise, and things aren’t looking good.
AS KQED Science reporter Molly Peterson succinctly put it: San Francisco Bay is a bathtub. Sea level rise means the bathwater is rising. Subsidence means the tub is sinking too.
One anonymous “curse letter”, returning a nail to Bodie. (Carly Severn/KQED)
Here’s how it goes: people visit Bodie, a Gold Rush ghost town in the Sierra Nevada foothills. They pick up a rock or a nail to take home with them as a memento.
Then it all goes wrong. Bones are broken, jobs are lost, fish die. The Curse of Bodie wreaks havoc until people send back what they stole.
But there’s something even weirder going on. You have to check out this week’s Bay Curious podcast to learn more. It’s worth it just to hear the letters people write while they’re “cursed.”
Eleni Kounalakis served as U.S. ambassador to Hungary under the Obama administration. She’s running for lieutenant governor of California. (U.S. State Department)
Even though California has been represented by two women in the U.S. Senate since 1992, the state has never elected a woman as governor or lieutenant governor.
That could change this year. Two women, Delaine Eastin and Amanda Renteria, are running for governor, and Eleni Kounalakis is running for lieutenant governor.
I had never heard of Kounalakis before I read KQED politics reporter Katie Orr’s profile of her this week, and she has an impressive resume. She was ambassador to Hungary under President Barack Obama, and she was a fundraiser and foreign policy adviser on Hilary Clinton’s 2016 campaign.
She sees herself as part of the groundswell of women who are stepping up to run for office after the election of Donald Trump and the Me Too movement.
“I think that people are really pushing back on the idea that they are going to stand by and allow qualified, viable women candidates to be discounted and minimized and just waved away,” she said.
Author Obi Kaufmann’s new book is “The California Field Atlas.” (Paul Collins)
One of the reasons I moved to California was because of the landscapes. I remember the first time I hiked in the foothills of Mount Tamalpais in Marin County. I could not believe the amount of natural beauty around me: towering redwoods, emerald green ferns and the breathtaking vistas of coastal California.
That’s why this piece reported by The California Report’s Sasha Khokha really spoke to me. We are transported to the East Bay’s Mount Diablo as Khokha hikes with Author Obi Kaufmann to find out the story behind his book of unconventional watercolor maps.
Editors hard at work at the first annual Art+Feminism edit-a-thon hosted by Stanford’s Bowes Art and Architecture Library in 2017. (Courtesy of Gabrielle Karampelas)
Is information found on Wikipedia filtered through a male lens?
The answer is yes, with a capital “Y”… or rather make that an all-caps, bold-faced YES! According to the Wikimedia Foundation, less than a quarter of its editors are female. Luckily, there’s a group of Bay Area women working to change that. KQED’s Rachael Myrow dropped in on a “Edit-a-thon” with the group Art + Feminism.
Flames consume a home in Glen Ellen as out-of-control wildfires move through the area on Oct. 9, 2017. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
We’ve heard countless stories from survivors of last fall’s devastating wildfires in the North Bay on the confusion over emergency alerts or, in some cases, the complete absence of any alerts at all. Well, now a new state report on Sonoma County’s emergency and evacuation procedures finds what many had already expected: County emergency staff were uncoordinated and ill-prepared to deal with a huge wildfire.
Find more of KQED’s coverage of the North Bay Wildfires here.
‘You Drive Until You Die’: Driving a Cab in the Age of Uber and Lyft
Feb 25, 2018
The office for Green Cab, which has been downsized from 19 to six members. (Sam Harnett/KQED)
I took a taxi last summer for the first time in a long time. I was visiting Washington D.C., and I’d forgotten that there was this whole industry full of people who know their cities like the back of their hands and don’t need an app or GPS to get us where we need to go.
But in the age of Uber and Lyft, that knowledge doesn’t pay much. KQED’s Sam Harnett talked with cabbies in San Francisco who are really struggling. They say retirement is a pipe dream, some of them are on welfare, and there’s no end in sight.
The “Lady Bird” walking tour group poses in front of the stately blue home from the film. (Allen Young/KQED)
In the same way that ‘Black Panther’ made me well up with pride for Oakland even though I’ve never lived there, ‘Lady Bird’ had me smitten with Sacramento.
And Sacramento is definitely smitten with ‘Lady Bird.’ You can even take a ‘Lady Bird’ walking tour through the city, hitting all the classic spots from the film and some from director and Sacramento native Greta Gerwig’s life.
The quote that really showed me how much this movie could mean to our state capital was from 67-year-old Quincy Brown, Sacramento born and bred: “I think we’re a good cow town. I’m OK with that. But I think this is a great town, and I think even a great city, that hasn’t gotten the credit it deserves. This movie gave us the hug that we needed.”
Children’s librarian Mahasin Abuwi Aleem reads to children at story time at Oakland’s main library. (Andrew Stelzer)
How were the police portrayed in the books you read as a kid? The good guys? Friendly and trustworthy? Unfortunately, the reality isn’t that simple, especially for communities of color that have seen so many of their friends and family members killed by police.
Librarians in Oakland have created a toolkit to help other librarians and educators examine how books portray police and the law.
The toolkit doesn’t review specific books. Instead, it provides questions, like: Does this book explain children’s rights to have a parent or other adult present during questioning? Does it imply that children will always be safe if they follow officers’ instructions? Does the book make a distinction between prison and jail?
Any time my boyfriend takes a long shower or leaves the water tap running, I jokingly yell at him, “We’re in a drought!” He always shoots back that we technically aren’t in a drought anymore.
Supreme Court Associate Justice Clarence Thomas during official portrait session in June 2017. (Saul Loeb/AFP-Getty Images)
The U.S. Supreme Court did something it does all the time this week: it chose not to review a case. The case was a challenge to a California law requiring a 10-day waiting period on gun purchases, even if the buyer had already cleared a previous background check.
This did not sit well with Justice Clarence Thomas. He wrote a scathing 14-page dissent railing against the decision, saying the court doesn’t respect the Second Amendment as much as other civil liberties.
Here’s a taste of Thomas’ displeasure, directed at the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, the federal appeals court that covers California:
The Ninth Circuit struck down a county’s 5-day waiting period for nude-dancing licenses because it “unreasonably prevent[ed] a dancer from exercising first amendment rights while an application [was] pending.” The Ninth Circuit found it dispositive there, but not here, that the county “failed to demonstrate a need for [the] five-day delay period.” In another case, the Ninth Circuit held that laws embracing traditional marriage failed heightened scrutiny because the states presented “no evidence” other than “speculation and conclusory assertions” to support them. While those laws reflected the wisdom of “thousands of years of human history in every society known to have populated the planet,” they faced a much tougher time in the Ninth Circuit than California’s new and unusual waiting period for firearms. In the Ninth Circuit, it seems, rights that have no basis in the Constitution receive greater protection than the Second Amendment, which is enumerated in the text.
I saw ‘Black Panther’ on Thursday night in Redwood City, and I’m more than a little jealous of the folks who saw it across the bay at Oakland’s Grand Lake Theater who got a surprise appearance by director and Oakland native Ryan Coogler.
I was already hyped for ‘Black Panther,’ but I got even more jazzed after hearing this amazing piece from KQED’s Sandhya Dirks about the connection between the Black Panther superhero and the Black Panther Party, which was founded in Oakland just months after the first Black Panther comic came out.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xjDjIWPwcPU
I am not an Oakland native or resident, but I definitely felt a well of pride and emotion when the film’s first scene opened on the streets of Oakland.
United States Bobsled team member Nick Cunningham, of Monterey. (Marianna Massey/Getty Images)
How many of us have told ourselves we need to push ourselves out of our comfort zones? How many of us actually do it?
Nick Cunningham did it. The Monterey native always wanted to go to the Olympics, so when he graduated college, he decided to try out for the U.S. bobsled team.
“I figured it would be a graduation gift for myself to kind of do something outside the box, outside my comfort zone. Just try something none of my friends could ever say that they tried out for and so I went and tried out. And 18 months later, I went to my first Olympics,” said Cunningham.
Now he’s in the U.S. Army as part of the World Class Athlete Program, which literally pays elite soldier-athletes to train for the Olympics. Not a bad gig.
A car parked in the Temescal neighborhood of Oakland, Calif. with a sign asking for a car thief to return a dog sweater. (Sarah Craig/KQED)
This week’s Bay Curious podcast dives into the car break-in epidemic that is gripping San Francisco. Car break-ins in the city are up about 300 percent since 2010.
What I loved about this story is we get to see both sides of the coin: reporter Sarah Craig goes on a ride-along with an undercover cop on patrol for car break-ins, and she talks to a 30-year veteran car burglar who gives her tips on how to avoid coming back to a broken window with all your stuff gone.
Amanda Renteria discusses her campaign for Congress with 23 ABC News in May 2014. (23 ABC News via YouTube)
I instinctively thought it was weird when I saw that Amanda Renteria, a former top Hillary Clinton aide, had filed to run for governor this week. But it only became more strange when I read this piece from KQED’s politics maestro Scott Shafer.
Renteria ditched her current boss, California Attorney General Xavier Becerrea, to run for the job above him.
She had no video announcement or big event to get attention for her candidacy.
The state Democratic convention is literally next week, and she won’t have a spot there because she filed so late.
Four months out from the June primary, she’s got no money, little to no name recognition with voters, no endorsements and no clear path to victory.
A screen shot from a website set up by San Jose using the Balancing Act program to allow residents to try and balance the city’s budget. There is also a mechanism for residents to provide input to the city on how they want city funds spent. (Balancing Act)
I am terrible at sticking to budgets. Every few months, I sit down and make a list of all my expenses and tell myself I’m going to keep track of what I spend. And then I don’t.
So I was doomed to fail when I tried San Jose’s new budgeting website where residents (and bored journalists) can try their hand at balancing the budget of the Bay Area’s largest city. Spoiler: it’s really freaking hard.
But I think it’s a fascinating tool for both understanding the difficult decisions city leaders have to make to balance their budgets and for residents to be able to tell city leaders how they want the city’s money spent.
Fifty years ago, students at what is now San Francisco State University staged a 115-day campus strike that led to the creation of San Francisco State’s College of Ethnic Studies and sparked a nationwide movement to increase minority access and representation on college campuses.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=As_P3DueKrY&t
One of the Most Impactful Laws You’ve Never Heard Of
Feb 10, 2018
The Winter Olympics are underway, the government shutdown (again) and we still can’t stop talking about memos.
A 1937 Oakland and Berkeley “residential security map” created by the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation. (Courtesy of University of Maryland's T-RACES project)
I’ll be honest. Redlining was always one of those things I had heard about but never knew what it was. I didn’t learn about it in school, and I never took the initiative to investigate it on my own.
That has now been rectified thanks to this story from KQED’s Brian Watt and Erika Kelly. It not only taught me that redlining happened when the government denied access to loans and mortgages in neighborhoods with high minority populations; it also educated me on the 40-year-old Community Reinvestment Act, which was put in place to push back against racist redlining and encourage banks to invest in marginalized and low-income communities.
In Oakland’s formerly redlined Fruitvale neighborhood, the CRA has helped build a transit village, fund Head Start programs and establish affordable housing. But advocates worry the CRA could be weakened by the deregulation-happy Trump administration.
How much should we value a follower on Twitter? (Yasuyoshi Chiba/AFP/Getty Images)
My friends in college used to make fun of me because I followed so many people on Twitter. They said my “ratio” was terrible, meaning I followed a lot more people than followed me.
At least I can be proud that of my measly 660 Twitter followers, all but 15 are real people and not bots, according to the company Twitter Audit. I knew having a lot of followers was a status symbol, but I had no idea that people would pay money for more followers.
I think Georgia Tech media studies professor hits the nail on the head when he tells KQED’s Sam Harnett: “People assume when they have a follower on Twitter, that it’s not just a real human being, but that it is someone who is looking at them and listening to them and responding to them, and they can sell products or services to.”
I follow 1,509 “people” on Twitter. I listen to very few, I respond to even fewer, and I’m not buying from any of them.
The mothers of Paul Bright Jr. (L) and Tyler Cornell (R) believe their sons’ CTE comes from years playing Pop Warner football. (Courtesy of the Bright and Cornell families)
I started playing football in fourth grade and played all the way through high school. I was an offensive lineman who spent a lot of time banging my head against my opponents.
So when I read stories like this about guys my age committing suicide and being diagnosed with the degenerative brain disease chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, that has been linked to concussions in football, I get nervous.
I loved playing football, and I still enjoy watching it, but the evidence of its terrifying risks are starting to add up for me.
San Joaquin County Sheriff-Coroner’s Office (Julie Small/KQED)
Imagine having a loved one die and then having the coroner’s office send you someone else’s remains. It’s something that has happened more than once in San Joaquin County where Sheriff-Coroner Steve Moore is under fire for mismanagement and interference into death investigations, as reported by KQED’s Julie Small.
Julie’s most recent piece on the issues in San Joaquin County explores cases of bodies sent to the wrong families and families paying unnecessary morgue charges while other deaths are overlooked. The whole piece is incredible and worthy of your time, but this one sentence produced an audible gasp from me:
At one local mortuary in San Joaquin County, staff said that the coroner’s office has released the wrong body to them often enough that they now ask family members to view and identify each body before cremation or burial.
A visitor to Morgan Brown’s “phone booth” has a private, one-way conversation with somebody gone from her life.
My paternal grandfather died before I was born, but I’ve been talking to him for years. I tell him about my day. I vent to him when I’m upset. I use him as a sounding board to work through my problems.
So I loved this story about a touring pop-up phone booth currently in Santa Cruz (and coming to San Francisco) where you are encouraged to talk with someone who has died.
And I love what the organizer, Morgan Brown, says about how people have interpreted the opportunity: “I’ve had people talk to childhood pets. I’ve had people talk to people who are alive but they’re estranged from. I’ve had people talk to their former selves. You can interpret died or death in any way that you need to.”
Did you know San Francisco’s neon signage was once up there with New York, Los Angeles and Las Vegas? The city used to be lousy with neon. Bay Curious explores San Francisco’s bright history with neon.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xUonRTHi9iY
Stay caught up with the best of KQED’s reporting each week by subscribing to the Q’ed Up podcast.
Oil and Water
Jan 31, 2018
In California’s Tulare County ag and oil often go hand in hand, and environmentalism can be a dirty word. People are proud of the fact that they make the things other people need here. This is where they make the food and energy that fuels the state, and the country. What they don’t make, is a fuss. So what happens when a soft spoken farmer discovers an oil company is polluting one of the wells he uses for his crops?
The Bombs Last Blast
Jan 18, 2018
The dropping of nuclear weapons feels somehow all too possible again.
The shadow of nuclear war fell over Hawaii through a mistaken missile alert. North Korea claims it is test firing bombs. And the president of the United States is boasting on Twitter about the size of his nuclear button.
In telling ourselves the history of the atomic bomb, we can too often think they were only dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But there were other bombs that fell — they just weren’t dropped on people. Not directly. They were dropped on islands.
Islands in the South Pacific. The Marshall Islands.
But that doesn’t mean they didn’t cause lasting and devastating damage for the islanders — and for their descendants.
Off the Hamster Wheel
Jan 03, 2018
For the new year we bring you a story about how the thing you think makes you strong, may actually be your crutch. And about how letting go can make you stronger than you ever knew you could be.
For Matt Miller, cycling was golden. It was his exercise, his commute, and his therapy. When he was in the saddle, troubles seemed to melt away, and he felt free — completely, utterly free.
So when he set out for a cross-country bike tour the summer after graduating college, he thought it would be the adventure of a lifetime. And for a while, it was. But then, something happened that turned his world upside down.
A special episode from our friends at Out There podcast.
The Making and Meaning of a Mock War
Dec 21, 2017
Every fall in the Bay Area, over the course of a long weekend, Urban Shield puts law enforcement and other first responders through real life training scenarios ripped from the headlines.
This year, the headlines were grim. Natural disasters, from fires to hurricanes, and terrorist attacks from Las Vegas to New York. For many, 2017 felt like we were living on the edge of apocalypse.
So training first responders seems like a logical idea.
But there are those who see it differently. Their take: Urban Shield doesn’t make us safer, instead it militarizes the police and now in the age of Trump, that is scarier than ever.
An audio essay on violence, and the slippery slope between the real and the imagined.
The Verdict: A Killing on a San Francisco Pier
Dec 07, 2017
The 2015 death of Kathryn Steinle created a furor over undocumented immigration and sanctuary cities. That’s because the man accused of her murder, Jose Ines Garcia Zarate, is an undocumented Mexican National. He had been jailed and deported several times, but was then homeless on the streets of San Francisco — in part because of the city’s sanctuary policies. Then presidential-candidate Donald Trump and right-wing media got involved, using the tragedy to advance a nativist narrative of dangerous immigrants flooding over the border. Now, over two years later a jury has found Garcia Zarate not guilty of Steinle’s murder.
In this episode of Q’ed Up we go back over the case, dig into the surprising verdict, and examine how a death on a downtown pier became a political lightning rod.
As Weed Is Legalized, Are Marijuana Reparations Possible?
Nov 22, 2017
For a long time, race and racism have surrounded and shaped marijuana policy. First racist stereotypes were used to demonize the drug, then the drug was used to demonize — and lock up — people of color. As the state of California anticipates ganja going legit we ask: Is there a possibility for pot reparations?
Stories They Carried From the Fire
Nov 08, 2017
In early October, many Northern Californians woke to a world on fire. Whole neighborhoods were gone in a single night, reduced to dust and ash.
43 people were killed. Almost 9,000 structures were obliterated.
The world had been transformed by flames.
In this episode of Q’ed Up we bring you stories from the front lines of the fires.
Struggle over Sanctuary: The Kate Steinle Murder Trial
Oct 25, 2017
President Donald J. Trump rose to power on a wave of anti-immigrant, nationalist sentiment. He wove a narrative of “bad” Mexicans, immigrants flooding over the border, bringing with them drugs and guns. And he used the case of Kate Steinle — a 32-year-old white woman shot and killed on a San Francisco pier by a Mexican National — to help sell the story. As the Kate Steinle murder trial begins in San Francisco, KQED reporters unpack the facts and falsehoods surrounding her tragic death.
The Teen, the Marine, and the Green Machine
Oct 11, 2017
He was a young African American Marine from Chicago, who arrived in Camp Pendleton to join the war effort.
She was the teenage daughter of a farmworker who was protesting the fight in Vietnam.
The Green Machine was the coffee shop where they met and where learned they had more than a war in common.
A story of unlikely allies whose friendship was forged in the shadow of Vietnam.
Adopted Country
Sep 28, 2017
A 64-year-old San Francisco woman finds herself before a panel of Guatemalan judges facing 20 years of hard time in a foreign prison.
She had gone to Guatemala decades ago to work with the neediest of children. Now she stands accused of child trafficking.
The saga of Nancy Susan Bailey, on this episode of Q’ed Up.
Into the Flood
Sep 15, 2017
Late summer had felt apocalyptic.
Raging wildfires in the Pacific Northwest, a deadly earthquake in Mexico, catastrophic floods in South Asia — and hurricanes with innocuous names lashing Texas, the Caribbean, and Florida.
But in the face of all of this destruction and despair there were flashes of hope and bravery. Scenes of rescuers hard at work: pulling flood victims into boats and helicopters, providing medical treatment, and bringing supplies to emergency shelters.
KQED’s Alex Emslie embedded with rescuers from California as they searched flooded areas in Texas after Hurricane Harvey. He met men and women who dropped everything to head across the country and into the flood.
Free Speech and the Battle for Berkeley
Sep 13, 2017
What does it mean when Nazis march in American towns? Is it free speech or is it a freeing of hate speech? Forty years ago, Neo Nazis wanted to march on the streets of Skokie, Illinois. A few weekends ago, Neo Nazi’s marched through the streets of Charlottesville, Virginia. Shortly afterword, far right fringe activists planned to hold “free speech” rallies in San Francisco and Berkeley. The far right is trying to rebrand free speech. They are using the birthplace of the Free Speech Movement — Berkeley — to do it.
KQED reporters take you into the mostly peaceful protests in late summer in Berkeley to ask what is free speech? And what happens when the line between speech and violence become blurred beyond recognition?
The Push In Solution
Sep 01, 2017
When Michael Essien became an administrator at Martin Luther King, Jr. Academic Middle School in San Francisco he saw right away that he needed to help teachers get behavior issues under control. If students acted out in class, teachers were sending them to an in-school detention, where they waited for disciplinary action. Pretty soon, any kid who struggled with a lesson was trying to get sent to detention, just to avoid challenging work that might be embarrassing. Essien was seeing too many kids not learning in this dysfunctional system.
Then Essien has an “ah ha” moment, and things start to get interesting. Q’ed Up presents the first episode of the MindShift podcast’s new season, where we find out how Essien and his staff hit upon a way to support teachers in the classroom, so kids can actually learn.
Is This Deal Humane?
Aug 08, 2017
In California, local jails get paid millions to house immigrants facing deportation. In some poor rural counties, it’s a large source of income — one of the few sources — and they depend on it for basic services, like keeping police on patrol.
But some critics say bad conditions and inadequate health care in these jails puts detainees at risk.
Are these places taking the money, and failing to provide proper care for inmates? And is this deal humane?
In every city, there are a handful of committees that are essential to the way government functions. Committees made up of average, unpaid citizens. It’s the people part of that “for the people, by the people” thing in our constitution.
So just who wants to be on one of these committees? From our friends at The Specialist producer Raja Shah went to find out.
Spiral of Losses
Jul 20, 2017
The middle class in America is being squeezed by rising housing costs.
One family is fighting to hold on to their home in one of America’s toughest real estate markets — Oakland, California.
The problem is they’ve got a corporate landlord. And that might be the reason we’re in this trouble in the first place.
Home-Less: Ebony’s Story
Jul 12, 2017
What happens when you’re poor and struggling, trying to go to college in one of the most expensive cities in America?
Sometimes you end up living out of your car. That’s what happened to Ebony Ortega. She works at Starbucks and has a full course load at San Francisco State. What she doesn’t have is a home.
All this leaves her at risk for failing out of college. But there’s one person who may hold the key to getting her back on track. Sometimes our families, those who know us best, hold the key to helping us find ourselves.
Home-Less: The Shape-Shifter
Jul 06, 2017
James de la Nueve: it’s a new name for a fresh start. He really messed up his life in the last few years – kicked out of college, kicked out of the house – and he was ready to start again, and get it right this time.
But he was going to have to do it from the streets. Going to calculus class, studying at the library, all the while pretending, for the sake of his classmates and professors, that he’s not homeless.
“I’m going hard at school,” he says, “but at the same time I have to deal with, just, keeping myself alive.”
James is like a modern day Jay Gatsby, born to a poor family, but striving for greatness. He’s on a mission to transform himself. But the new identities he’s creating – sometimes James himself can’t keep track.
Home-Less: A Place of Her Own
Jun 28, 2017
Brittany Jones rummages through a cramped storage locker in West Oakland. Looking at this stylish 24-year-old, you’d probably never guess this storage unit is the closest thing she has to a home.
She keeps her homelessness hidden, sleeping on friends couches or waiting out the night on the 24 hour bus.
But after Brittany shares her story on the radio all that will change.
Brittany’s story is about how others see us, and ultimately how we see ourselves.
6. The Trials of Marvin Mutch: Like the Weather
Jun 23, 2017
After the governor reversed Marvin Mutch’s parole in 2006, Mutch says he became more reckless, inserting himself into dangerous disputes between groups of inmates and challenging correctional officers at every opportunity.
And a big opportunity presented itself later that year, when officers swarmed San Quentin’s North Block and removed hundreds of inmates from their cells for a mass search. The inmates’ property was confiscated or destroyed.
Mutch helped other prisoners file appeals, and they won thousands of dollars in restitution and replacement belongings.
But his stance would also win him some enemies — correctional officers and administrators who Mutch had challenged, and who were also in a position to change his prison record and taint any future chances of being paroled.
Meanwhile, the California Supreme Court made a series of rulings that changed the parole process, culminating in a landmark decision that forbid the parole board and governor from denying release solely on the “heinousness” of the crime that sent an inmate to prison.
But those changes alone weren’t enough for Mutch to finally win his freedom. He’d need the help of the attorney who fought the state Supreme Court case, the prosecutor who convicted him, and the last-known surviving member of Cassie Riley’s family.
5. The Trials of Marvin Mutch: Hope
Jun 14, 2017
After 20 years in prison, Marvin Mutch believed he’d likely never be released.
But the 1997 arrest of a couple later sentenced to death for a string of abductions, sexual assaults and one murder would lead an investigative reporter turned true-crime author to an alternate theory about Cassie Riley’s killer.
It wasn’t enough to overturn Mutch’s conviction, but the increased attention on his case brought him allies and a new hope for parole.
4. The Trials of Marvin Mutch: To Life
Jun 06, 2017
In 1975, Marvin Mutch was 19 years old and headed to prison after being convicted of the murder of Cassie Riley.
He appealed his conviction, maintaining his innocence and arguing the circumstantial evidence presented at trial was insufficient to prove his guilt. The appeal was denied a year and a half later.
Mutch then hoped for an early parole. When he went to prison, inmates convicted of first degree murder served an average of 10 years. But the meaning of Mutch’s 7-to-life sentence was about to change, with a punitive “tough-on-crime” climate that spread from California to the rest of the country in the 1980s and 1990s.
Parole for lifers like Mutch became extremely rare, and California’s prison population grew by more than 500 percent to a peak of over 160,000 inmates.
Meanwhile, Mutch began to channel his anger at being in prison into advocacy on behalf of other inmates.
But he didn’t give up on getting out, and with the hope of winning parole, he would make a difficult choice.
3. The Trials of Marvin Mutch: The People v. Mutch
May 31, 2017
Headed for trial in early 1975, Marvin Mutch was confident he’d be found not guilty for the murder of Cassie Riley. There was no direct evidence linking him to the killing, and footprints found around Riley’s body didn’t match the size or style of his shoes.
But the prosecution had a strategy that relied on a complex interpretation of indirect — or circumstantial — evidence. That narrative put Mutch at the scene near the time of the murder and implied that he’d come home soaking wet the night Cassie Riley was drown in a shallow creek.
Mutch’s sister, Valerie, was the linchpin in the case against her brother. She had inadvertently told police that Mutch had come home with wet clothes sometime around the day of the murder, but she wasn’t sure which day.
The prosecution took extreme steps to preserve Valerie Mutch’s testimony and made her unavailable to the defense. The truth about Valerie’s role in the case against Marvin Mutch wouldn’t make it to the jury, and it would take decades to finally be revealed.
2. The Trials of Marvin Mutch: Lost Boy
May 24, 2017
Police knew Marvin Mutch’s name by the time he turned 3 years old, around the time he learned to run.
How do we know? Because “little Marvin the Terrible” the “itchy-footed 3-year-old” with “a rap sheet as long as his arm” made the January 6, 1960 edition of the Oakland Tribune for his habit of running away.
But a darker picture lurks behind the newspaper’s glib copy and cartoon. Young Marvin had a reason to run. His mother was in and out of the hospital for mental and physical illnesses, and from an early age, Marvin and his younger sister, Valerie, were left to fend for themselves. Or worse, they were housed in a series of abusive or neglectful foster and group homes. That’s where they both developed criminal records — mostly for running away.
In late 1974, the family moved to Union City, where Valerie and Marvin played surrogate parents to their two younger half-sisters. Their mother was hospitalized, and the children were fending for themselves.
A phone call would change everything and put both Marvin and Valerie on a collision course with Cassie Riley’s murder and the criminal justice system.
1. The Trials of Marvin Mutch: Guilt
May 17, 2017
Anyone driving past the California Medical Facility in Vacaville on Feb 17, 2016, wouldn’t likely have known the triumph one man was celebrating on the side of the road, just outside the prison’s gates.
“The warden was six years old when I came to prison,” Marvin Mutch said, beaming into the sun and wind. “He came out and shook my hand and said, ‘I really mean this, I’m glad you’re leaving.'”
Mutch waited 41 years for this feeling of freedom.
He’s been in custody since he was 18 years old — a state prison inmate since 19 — for a crime he swears he didn’t commit. The timing of his incarceration, along with other factors about his case, placed him on a parallel track with a four-decade evolution in California criminal justice. It took a massive change in the state’s prison and parole systems for Mutch to be released.
He was convicted solely on circumstantial evidence for the murder of 13-year-old Cassie Riley in 1975. Riley’s death has followed Marvin for his entire adult life, a lifetime spent entirely in prison.
Her Nuclear Option
May 10, 2017
As an environmentalist, Heather Matteson was pretty sure she was against nuclear power. It’s how she was raised to think. But when she starts working in the bowels of a nuclear reactor, she begins questioning what she knows and where her allegiances lie. Heather is heading deep into a decades-old conflict but one where old battle lines are changing. The reason is climate change. Environmentalists are being forced to reconsider it, after decades of protesting against it. And the flashpoint for this is the last nuclear power plant running in California, which could soon be shut down. It’s also where Heather works.
Programmed to Survive
May 03, 2017
George Arthur joined the Marines back in the 1980s hoping to follow in his father’s footsteps. But he flunked out of basic training. Living in Chicago, George got married…then had a son who died just a few days after birth. George came west. To escape. But in San Francisco his marriage fell apart and he got deeper into drugs—weed, meth, cocaine… There were fights, a bad motorcycle accident…. it got so dark he found himself hanging by his fingertips from the Golden Gate Bridge. Reporter Michael Montgomery met George randomly on another assignment, got to know him, and here follows his remarkable quest to find a home.
So Beautiful, And So Very White: Welcome to Marin
Apr 26, 2017
Henry Ma’s views on life in Marin County changed after he had two girls. He moved to the county from New York with his wife six years ago, and started to notice something about where he lived when he realized his daughters were the only two Asians at their school.
Henry eventually started taking note of this in his everyday life. Anytime he saw another Asian in his neighborhood, he would do a double take. It made him wonder: if the Bay Area is one of the most diverse places in the country, why is Marin County so white? The answer to that question was important for Henry, who wondered how growing up in this environment would shape his daughter’s views of themselves — and the world around them. KQED’s Ericka Cruz Guevarra looks into how one of the whitest counties in the Bay Area got that way. Her story first aired on KQED’s Bay Curious podcast. Subscribe on iTunes.
Sorry, the Therapist Can’t See You — Not Now, Not Any Time Soon
Apr 19, 2017
Natalie Dunnage lives in San Francisco, a place where you think it would be easy to find a therapist. But when she needed one, she couldn’t find any who took her insurance. Insurance companies say there is a shortage of therapists. What the heck is going on here? KQED’s April Dembosky does her own search across the state to find out if therapy is becoming a hobby for the wealthy, rather than a necessity for the mentally ill.
10. American Suburb: Post Script
Apr 05, 2017
Not all residents of our town of Antioch welcome our examination of race in their suburb. Reporters Sandhya Dirks and Devin Katayama share reaction from Antioch and update us on what’s taken place in the lives of some of the people we’ve met in the series. And the reporters bring us their favorite outtakes.
9. American Suburb: We Too Sing Antioch
Mar 28, 2017
A school counselor and local pastor arranges a middle school graduation celebration for African American students, but protests against the ceremony lead to racist graffiti on the pastor’s church door.
Nowhere are the changing demographics of suburbs like Antioch clearer than in the city’s classrooms. But while the population of students is shifting, many of the educators still remain the same, and black students are far more likely to be suspended or expelled from school. How do young people learn to claim Antioch? And how does the city embrace the new class in town?
8. American Suburb: Rabbit Hole
Mar 22, 2017
It can be hard to get back on your feet when you’re starting from scratch — even when opportunity falls in your lap. We meet Kevin Kunze, who was living on the streets until Doug Stewart decided to do something unusual: He took Kevin home with him to live with the Stewart family. It’s a test for the family, but an even harder one for Kevin.
7. American Suburb: The Field
Mar 15, 2017
Antioch residents are finding it hard to ignore the increasing number of destitute people living on the streets. Last year, the number of people living unsheltered grew by 30 percent in the far eastern Contra Costa suburbs– the rest of the county saw declines. In this chapter Devin joins a group of drifters who’ve set up camp in an abandoned field on the edge of town. They’re honing their survival techniques and dodging authorities… trying to create their own version of suburban life.
6. American Suburb: Reasonable Fear
Mar 09, 2017
More African Americans are now living in suburbs than anywhere else. And some of the country’s most recent controversial police shootings of unarmed black men took place in the suburbs outside St. Louis, St. Paul and Orlando.
In suburban Antioch, police chief Allan Cantando is trying to bridge divides with the new community. To do that, he meets with a class of college students and asks them to role play as cops. Meanwhile, a budding group of community activists who say they’ve faced police brutality are learning how to organize. The challenges of policing and protesting in suburbia, in this episode of American Suburb.
5. American Suburb: How to Change Your Mind
Mar 02, 2017
Iris Archuleta is the daughter of a Black Panther who grew up in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury. She and her husband were part of the first wave of upper middle class African-Americans who moved to Antioch 20 years ago. This is the story of an unlikely alliance between Iris and the Antioch police. Both reject the single narrative here of “poor blacks” and the “inner city” moving out to Antioch. For them, Antioch is actually doing things right, if only their work wasn’t getting lost in a larger negative narrative about the town.
Note:
Correction: This story incorrectly stated where Iris Archuleta went to college. She attended San Francisco City College, Cal State East Bay, and John F. Kennedy University College of Law.
4. American Suburb: Make Great America Again
Feb 22, 2017
A small group of Muslim families were meeting out of garages before they purchased an old dentist office for their new mosque. After the Islamic Center of the East Bay was torched in 2007, the group must decide whether to rebuild in Antioch or leave the city.
3. American Suburb: How to Survive an Exodus
Feb 15, 2017
When African-Americans priced out of Bay Area cities like San Francisco, Fremont and Oakland move to suburban Antioch looking for better schools, more affordable homes and safer streets, they find a mixed blessing.
When church is a refuge, it means either commuting on Sunday morning back to the cities they left behind, or creating new church in Antioch. This is the story of a migration to a new home, and three men’s search for sanctuary once they arrive.
2. American Suburb: Friday Night Lights
Feb 08, 2017
Najee Harris is the country’s No. 1 high school football recruit. Principal Louie Rocha and the Antioch High School football team haven’t had it this good since 1978. It was a nearly all-white team then. It’s not that way anymore. And there have been racial tensions since the city started to change. Now, Rocha has a chance to change that. But only if he can bring the older generation back to cheer for a team that doesn’t look like them … on and off the field.
1. American Suburb: The Tipping Point
Feb 07, 2017
A police chief in Antioch leads a team to investigate citizen complaints. But some say the complaints mostly target newer black residents. Across town, a lawyer is determined to bring down the Antioch Police Department, accusing them of ethnic cleansing. In between, neighbors are fighting neighbors over who can call this place home.
0. Welcome to American Suburb
Jan 20, 2017
Welcome to American Suburb, the first season of KQED’s new podcast, Q’ed up.
Gentrification is changing cities across America, forcing people from neighborhoods they have long called home. Call them the displaced. Now those priced out of the Bay Area are looking for a better life in an unlikely place. American Suburb follows this migration to one California town along the Delta, 45 miles from San Francisco. But is this once sleepy suburb ready for them?
KQED’s Devin Katayama and Sandhya Dirks explore that question, taking us into the ordinary spaces of suburban life to find extraordinary stories about race, poverty and belonging.