The California Report Magazine

Mauricio Hernández grew up in Mexico City dreaming of one day being on TV. As a teen, he crossed the border to California and got a job sweeping the floor of a body shop in LA. And then, something unexpected happened...something that led to moments of surprising fame. Reporter Levi Bridges brings us the first part of his documentary, Mauricio Across the Border. A version of this story was first produced by the KCRW podcast UnFictional. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week, we feature some of our favorite history stories from The California Report Magazine archive. The Forgotten Filipino-Americans Who Led the ’65 Delano Grape Strike Today, grapes in the grocery store don’t seem that controversial. But in 1965, a historic strike in California’s Central Valley set in motion the most significant campaign in modern labor history: the farmworker movement. While the United Farm Workers and Cesar Chavez are widely known, the contributions of Filipino workers and labor leader Larry Itliong are often overlooked. But without them the UFW wouldn't exist. Reporter Lisa Morehouse brought us this story in 2015. Breaking the Silence on Angel Island’s Immigration Station Angel Island State Park is just a short ferry ride away from San Francisco’s wharf. Most visitors make the trip to bike, picnic and catch a stunning glimpse of the Golden Gate Bridge. But hidden in plain sight is a remnant of a time when California wasn’t so welcoming to immigrants. It’s a historic landmark that many Bay Area residents and visitors don’t realize exists on the scenic island: one of the oldest immigration detention facilities in the nation. Marisol Medina-Cadena visited Angel Island for this story in 2018. The Occupation of Catalina Island And now we’re going to head to another island -- one activists occupied nearly 50 years ago in an effort to reclaim it. In August 1972, a Chicano rights group called the Brown Berets camped out on Catalina Island for three weeks. They were demanding that unused land be turned into housing. Reporter Ariella Markowitz grew up on Catalina, but she only learned about this part of the island’s history when she brought us this story last summer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Remember that moment just about a month ago when there was a palpable sense everything might be OK? The economy was reopening. People were packing back into restaurants. Even exhausted health care workers breathed their first deep sigh of relief — as communities across California experienced the first real lull in the COVID-19 pandemic. Then the Delta variant hit California, and rapidly took hold, particularly in unvaccinated pockets of the state. It now appears to be spreading two to three times faster than the original strain of the virus. Plus, author Kliph Nesteroff has written about comedy for years. His latest book, We Had a Little Real Estate Problem: The Unheralded Story of Native Americans & Comedy, takes a look at a community of Hollywood talent that’s been misunderstood, stereotyped, and often thought not to exist at all. And one out of eight new moms in California experiences postpartum depression. Two years ago, the FDA approved the first and only medication designed to TREAT postpartum depression. It’s called brexanolone and most women who get it start feeling better within days. But the drug is outrageously expensive: $34,000. And according to a new KQED investigation, California’s largest insurer makes it extremely difficult to get. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Listener advisory: Some accounts of sexual assault in this story contain explicit details and strong language that some may find upsetting or objectionable. For nearly a decade, Jesús Antonio Castañeda Serna, better known to parishioners as Father Antonio, drew in hundreds of followers from Fresno's Latino community to his charismatic, Spanish-language congregation, earning him the nickname, "el padrecito que hace milagros" (the priest who performs miracles). Now facing up to 23 and a 1/2 years in prison, his accusers – most of them adult men – say he sexually assaulted them during healing rituals he said they needed in order to heal from curses and sexual sins. As he awaits trial, he continues to lead parishioners who swear by his innocence and say Castañeda's alleged victims made up lies to obtain legal status in the United States. TCR's Alex Hall first reported this story in 2020 and she explains where the case stands today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A lot of stories about people who are blind are sensational. They focus on the trauma of losing sight or the triumph of overcoming adversity. But what about the rich ways people who are blind experience the world every day? This week we’re going to explore that beauty in an episode from 2019, when we teamed up with the podcast the World According to Sound. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Fifty years ago, an unlikely musical group evolved out of the Oakland chapter of the Black Panther Party. The band’s mission was to spread the seed of social revolution, and their militant agenda would put them up against the intertwined forces of white supremacy and racist police. Reporter Peter Gilstrap brings us a documentary about the rise and fall of The Lumpen. More: A Trojan Horse of Funk and Soul: The Story of the Black Panthers House Band Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

More than 60 percent of Latinos in some Central Valley counties are still not vaccinated. The numbers are even more dramatic for younger folks, especially teens and those in their 20s -- and for indigenous farmworkers. Now former U.S. Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera, along with famed Ranchera singer Carmencristina Moreno and other musical groups, are trying to get the word out through original songs, radio dramas, and poems in Spanish, English, and Mixteco. Plus, as part of our series remembering Californians who've died from the Coronavirus, we hear from the family of Tony Escobar. Tony, who immigrated to San Francisco from Nicaragua, was 68 years old. For them, it was heartbreaking to see Tony -- a star athlete from Mission High School, salesman and all-around family man -- forced to stop moving. And did you know there are fewer birds now than there were 50 years ago? For her series California Foodways, Lisa Morehouse visits farms in Napa and near Watsonville to learn how farmers can help these birds, and some new research that shows how those birds are helping farmers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For this Pride month, we reprise our 2019 episode looking back at the early days of the queer rights movement, exploring the impact of that activism on young people today, and hear about a place that’s become a refuge for the LGBTQ+ community in rural California. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For thousands of years before contact with Europeans, the Karuk people, like many others, tended their land with fire. The Karuk tribe is one of the largest in California, spanning parts of Humboldt and Siskiyou counties along the Klamath River. When the federal government took over managing the forest, it stripped the Karuk people of their relationship with fire, and that has had profound effects. These days, the forest is overgrown, and thick with dry brush. Last fall, the massive Slater Fire decimated cultural sites and homes. KQED Science reporter Danielle Venton looks at the relationship between the Karuk and cultural burning, and their negotiations with the state of California to get that control back. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For some Asian women who were on the fence about buying guns for protection, the racist violence of the past year pushed them over the edge. Reporter Christine Nguyen tells us about two women from Southern California who are learning to shoot guns, and navigating the stigma around gun ownership within their families. Plus, in Oakland, Maribel Villanueva died from COVID-19 at age 46. She was a single mom and left behind a 10-year-old son, David. Now his aunt and his teacher are trying to fill her shoes. And a Southern California school has been selected to become one of the first Space Force JROTC units in the country, and the only one in California. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When most schools across California shut down last year, teenagers were stuck at home. For some, that meant months alone to reflect on experiences of trauma in high school. But they didn’t all keep that pain to themselves. Instead, hundreds of young people turned to social media to share their stories. Plus, an update on the story of Luna Guzmán, a young transgender woman from Guatemala. She lived through years of brutal abuse and discrimination in her hometown, and dreamed of seeking asylum in California. Now she's finally getting her chance, not in California, but New York. And, we’ve been bringing you tributes to Californians we’ve lost to COVID-19. This week, we hear from Vince Crisostomo, whose father Francisco died from COVID the day before his 87th birthday. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week we bring you an excerpt from a new investigative reporting podcast produced by KQED and NPR. After a new state law unsealed dozens of internal affairs files, reporters began examining cases of police misconduct and serious use of force. The first case involves Katheryn Jenks, who called 911 for help from her home in the small Northern California town of Rio Vista in 2018. But after the police arrived, she was bitten by a police K-9 and wound up inside a jail cell, facing serious charges. We hear part of Jenks’ story, and a preview of upcoming episodes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Arnett Moore is launching a one-man campaign: to get his aunt, actress Juanita Moore, a posthumous star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Juanita receive an Academy Award nomination for her role in the 1959 film, Imitation of Life. As Arnett says, "She's a star without a star." Plus, two violinists fix up a 1971 VW bus and travel the West Coast, bringing music and joy to all they encounter. And host Sasha Khokha heads into the kitchen to watch Nelson German at work. German owns two restaurants in Oakland where he showcases his culinary roots. German is the only California contestant on this season of the reality cooking competition series "Top Chef." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

COVID-19 devastated California’s arts and culture world. But the blow to singers across the state has been particularly harsh, and not just financially and socially. After an early super spreader event in Washington State caused more than 50 choir members to contract the virus, singers in California were forced to confront a devastating truth: this beloved everyday activity, which feels so good and is so healthy, had become...a killer. Singing went underground. But it didn’t go away entirely. Throughout this pandemic, KQED's Chloe Veltman has been following what happened to singing across our state. How it went from almost disappearing entirely, to helping us maintain solidarity, social purpose and a sense of humor through these dark, dark times. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Families put their loved ones in nursing homes because they think they’ll receive better care. They assume someone will keep an eye out. But that’s not always true. Conditions were bad in some California nursing homes even before COVID. When the pandemic hit, things got much worse. More than 9,000 nursing home residents in the state have died from COVID-19. Some facilities didn’t even take basic precautions. The missteps, even the deaths, come as no surprise to advocates for nursing home reform. But as KPCC investigative reporters Elly Yu and Aaron Mendelson discovered, the state also knows these nursing homes are failing patients, and lets them stay in business. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Even though many of us might feel like we’ve got more of a handle on the coronavirus pandemic now, we will all be marked by it forever—especially those who’ve really been in the trenches. Lisa Fagundes is normally a librarian at the San Francisco Public Library. But starting last spring, she and thousands of other city and state workers were redeployed to become contact tracers, calling people who may have been exposed. Our health correspondent April Dembosky asked Lisa to keep an audio diary for us over the last year. Listening through these entries, you can hear – in real time – how the pandemic changes her. How it picks her up, twists her in all directions, and then drops her on the other side. Just like it’s done to all of us. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

So much of what our country is wrestling with right now are questions about power. How do we hold people in power accountable? How can people who haven’t had power claim it? Those questions are at the center of a new podcast from WBEZ called “Art of Power.” Sasha Khokha talks with the podcast's host: author, NPR Silicon Valley Correspondent and California Report alum, Aarti Shahani. Plus another in our series of tributes to members of vulnerable communities and front line workers lost to COVID. This week, Sylvia Morton's daughters remember their mother. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We’ve been asking our listeners to tell us about loved ones they’ve lost. This week, we bring you the first in a series of stories to remember them. Eric Warner died of COVID in San Quentin Prison at age 57. He was born and raised in San Francisco, the son of Filipino immigrants. He was a barber, a boxer, and also a beloved brother. Eric’s older brother Hank brings us this tribute. Plus, LA Unified School District is testing out a pilot program to expand outdoor learning. Reporter Deepa Fernandes visited some outdoor classrooms in Southern California to see how they’re trying to make it work. Those stories and more... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week, we bring you a documentary we first aired in December that generated a lot of response from our listeners, changing life for the person at the center of this story. When she turned 15, Luna Guzmán, like many girls in Guatemala, celebrated with a quinceañera. But it was a secret party, with a borrowed dress, because her family couldn't fathom her as a transgender girl. So she put her soccer jerseys back on and tried to pass as the boy she knew she wasn’t inside. Even as she dealt with brutal violence, she decided to take a terrible risk and leave everything behind in Guatemala, to try to find a life in California: the one place in the world where she could imagine being safe. Host Sasha Khokha followed Luna Guzmán over the last two years, reporting from a migrant shelter in Tijuana, an ICE detention center in San Diego, and a tiny drag bar in Modesto. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It’s one thing to write about COVID from home. It's another to see it, to hear it. KQED health reporters April Dembosky and Lesley McClurg go inside two hospitals near Sacramento: Lesley shadowed doctors in the intensive care unit, and April spent time in the ER. One year into the pandemic, it was clear these clinicians were not celebrating any anniversaries. They’ve seen too much. Too much has changed. For them, there is no post-COVID world. We hear about the little ways, the big ways, and the surprising ways COVID has changed the way doctors do their jobs. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Harvey Shields has worked with some of the Bay Area’s best professional athletes. But since the pandemic hit, Shields has switched gears, and started helping COVID 'long-haulers' recover from their symptoms. Plus, Katherine Kim runs an oral history workshop at the Koreatown Youth and Community Center. Four of the women killed in the Atlanta-area shootings were Korean. That has sparked an intergenerational dialogue with the high school students in Katherine's workshop about how to navigate life as Korean-American women in a climate where there's already so much uncertainty. She brings us a personal commentary. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Marlene Baker lives in Siskiyou County. It’s vast and remote: 6,000 square miles home to just shy of 44,000 people. Marlene has lived with mental illness for years, and that kept her on the streets for a very long time. She racked up minor arrests, cycling through jail and back onto the streets. A similar crisis plays out across California, but rural areas face specific and profound challenges. In Marlene’s case, though, something big happened: A whole bunch of people teamed up to make sure she could heal right there in the community – without getting shipped off to a state mental hospital hundreds of miles away. And, it turns out, her success has helped bring about some bold changes in the way Siskiyou County is confronting its mental health crisis. Reporter Lee Romney has been following Marlene’s story since 2019. She checked in on her recently, and brings us this excerpt from a podcast-in-production she produced with Jenny Johnson called “November In My Soul.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the spring of 2018, former President Donald Trump's first Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, stood near the border wall in San Diego and made an announcement that would have a devastating and lasting impact. The result was thousands of children being taken away from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border and isolated from them for months or years. Most have been reunited, but hundreds of children are still separated, their parents deported without them. KQED Immigration reporter Michelle Wiley brings us the story of one woman who has been traveling to rural Central American towns, sometimes on foot, to try and find some of the parents who are still missing their children. Plus, what can the Biden Administration's new task force do to remedy the enduring harm those separations have caused? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The debate rages on about when California schools should bring students back to campuses after nearly a year since schools shut down in-person classes. Distance learning is taking a toll on students and parents. It’s also taking a toll on teachers, especially those with their own kids at home. KQED’s Vanessa Rancaño asked one Oakland teacher to keep an audio diary for a day, documenting her every move. Plus, California public health officials have given the green light for school sports to start up again. Finally, medical experts and politicians have pointed to the Tuskegee study as a reason why Black Americans have reservations about the coronavirus vaccine. But as KQED's April Dembosky found, in most cases, Tuskegee is a scapegoat. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Adamu Chan and Edmond Richardson met while they were incarcerated at San Quentin about two years ago, and have been best friends ever since. Adamu was released last fall, and they’ve kept in touch by writing letters to each other. We’ll hear part of an episode Adamu helped produce for the KALW Public Media podcast, “Uncuffed.” Then, we mark the loss of literary giant Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who died on February 22nd at the age of 101. Poet, activist, and publisher of many Beat poets of the 1950s and 60s, Ferlinghetti was considered by many to be the soul of San Francisco’s counterculture movement. The Kitchen Sisters, Nikki Silva and Davia Nelson, bring us an audio documentary they produced in honor of Ferlinghetti’s 99th birthday. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In recent weeks, racist attacks against Asian-Americans around the state have intensified. We begin the show with the voices of people speaking out against the violence, and calling for solidarity between communities of color. The anti-Asian violence we’re seeing today evokes a painful time in history for Japanese-Americans. February 19th marks the anniversary of President Roosevelt’s executive order that forced some 120,000 people into incarceration camps during World War II. As part of the Yonsei Memory Project's collaboration with StoryCorps, we’re bringing you conversations that reflect on that time and on its legacy across generations. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Remember live music? We figure we could all use a little joy right now, so as we continue The California Report’s 25th birthday celebration, we’re sharing some of our favorite music stories from over the years. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Some garment workers in LA spend their days sewing masks and gowns for first responders. But many aren’t getting tested for COVID, much less going to the hospital if they get sick. Plus, we’ve brought you so many stories about struggling with the loss of hope, and how much work there’s left to do to really reckon with America’s racist history. But this week having a conversation with someone who creates art from a deep sense of hope, and whose work also focuses on Black joy. Cauleen Smith is an artist and filmmaker who still believes we all have the means to create utopia in our everyday lives. Her immersive installations are currently on display at SFMOMA and LACMA. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We are almost reaching the year mark when it comes to how long many of us have been stuck inside at home. And if you live with roommates, that space can feel smaller and smaller as time goes on. But what happens when roommates have different ideas about what it means to be safe during COVID? That’s the question KQED’s Adhiti Bandlamudi has been wrestling with. She usually reports on Silicon Valley, but today she brings us a first-person account of what it’s like being a Millennial with roommates she never imagined she’d be stuck with in a pandemic. Plus, changes to the state's vaccine rollout, and a 9-year-old poet brings us a message of hope. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In his inauguration speech, President Joe Biden called for bringing unity to what we all know is a deeply hurt, deeply divided country. Right after the president spoke, country music star Garth Brooks sang “Amazing Grace.” KQED’s Arts and Culture Reporter Chloe Veltman spoke to a number of California artists with strong ties to the song about its enduring power. Plus, we drop in on a family excitedly watching the inauguration of Vice President Kamala Harris with their two young daughters who see themselves in her. And we visit a school in Watts — Locke College Preparatory Academy — that has been looking for ways to empower students in the aftermath of the violence in Washington. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The whole world will be watching next week as Kamala Harris is sworn in as our next Vice President. But there’s one person who will be tuning in who says he owes his life to her. Plus, the pandemic has been making things more challenging for schools that serve some of the newest Californians: Guatemalan immigrants who speak a Mayan language called Mam. And reporter Lisa Morehouse joins us to memorialize three Californians who passed away last year, each with a connection to agriculture. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week we bring you four stories; about hope, stewardship, compassion, and community. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

2020 will forever be the year of COVID-19 – and wildfires, police shootings, school over Zoom. So much heartbreak. But all year long, there were people who stepped up, sacrificed so much and kept going. As we ring in a new year, we revisit some of our favorite stories about the people who inspired us in 2020. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The California Report is celebrating our 25th year on the air, so this holiday weekend, we’re digging into our archives to bring you some of our favorite stories from the season. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As we officially head into winter – and hopefully snowy weather in the Sierra Nevada – we bring you the tale of the Donner Party; the version you may not have heard before. You might be familiar with the ghoulish CliffsNotes version of this story: about a band of people traveling over the Sierra in covered wagons, trapped in the snow and forced to turn to cannibalism to survive. But behind the Donner Party legend, there’s another story: one about prejudice, injustice and murder. KQED reporter Carly Severn tells us what happened when those 81 people were stuck in the mountains back in 1846, and how this disaster came to represent everything California wanted to forget. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We’re all bracing ourselves for a surge in hospitalizations, for more people lost to COVID-19, for more closures and lockdowns. So we’re reprising one of our documentaries about another time we all faced a public health crisis. A time when the federal government was slow to respond, so the community had to step in to take care of each other. Lisa Morehouse brings us the story of a woman who became an unexpected source of comfort to people suffering from AIDS in the early 1980s. Her baking business, Sticky Fingers Brownies, provided gooey marijuana-filled brownies to people dying from the disease in San Francisco. Pot brownies weren’t going to save anyone’s life over the long term, but Meridy Volz says they brought some relief, and there wasn’t a lot of relief in those days. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When she turned 15, Luna Guzmán, like many girls in Guatemala, celebrated with a quinceañera. But it was a secret party, with a borrowed dress, because her family couldn't fathom her as a transgender girl. So she put her soccer jerseys back on and tried to pass as the boy she knew she wasn’t inside. Even as she dealt with brutal violence, she decided to take a terrible risk and leave everything behind in Guatemala, to try to find a life in California: the one place in the world where she could imagine being safe. Being herself. Host Sasha Khokha has followed Luna Guzmán over the last two years, reporting from a migrant shelter in Tijuana, an ICE detention center in San Diego, and a tiny drag bar in Modesto. Her story says a lot about how U.S. immigration policy fails when it comes to recognizing people who live outside the gender binary, how the epic backlog of asylum cases in the U.S. can add to their trauma, and how transgender migrants at the border are particularly vulnerable to COVID-19. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This weekend, when so many of us have had to make the difficult choice to spend the holiday away from our loved ones, we’re inviting you to a virtual family gathering, with some of our favorite stories from Thanksgiving 2017. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

KQED Science reporter Lesley McClurg brings us two stories of populations struggling with isolation during the pandemic. First, the story of two older women successfully navigating this tumultuous time with limited resources. Then, youth therapists are hearing about depression, anxiety and even suicide ideation a lot more than usual among kids who haven’t attended school in person since March. Hear one Oakland family’s story. Plus, a new project called Sounds of California commissioned 10 original songs from local artists about Boyle Heights, a longtime immigrant neighborhood East of Downtown Los Angeles that’s been gentrifying. Host Sasha Khokha talks with musician Quetzal Flores, who’s been helping to curate the project. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The California Report is celebrating 25 years on the air, and this week, we’re digging into our archives to give you a break from political news and share some of our favorite food stories from over the years. It’s a feast for your ears! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The rest of the nation perceives California as a giant blue monolith, a liberal and progressive stronghold. But the reality is many of the statewide measures backed by progressives this year, from rent control to affirmative action, didn’t pass. The California Report Magazine recaps the “mixed bag” of statewide election results. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

September 28, 2020. It’s the middle of the night, at the Veterans Memorial Building in Santa Rosa. About 200 senior citizens are outside, sitting on folding chairs or in their wheelchairs. Just waiting. Most of them were in bed just a few hours before, until a massive wildfire came racing toward their retirement community. Many of them had been through this before in the 2017 Tubbs Fire. That fire was a reckoning; with nature, with our state and county leaders, with the companies we pay to take care of our elderly loved ones. And still, three years later, we are leaving hundreds of frail seniors in the literal cold while wildfire threatens their community and the last place in their lives they will call home. The California Report’s health correspondent April Dembosky and science reporter Molly Peterson spent a year investigating long-term care homes around the state to see how they're planning for wildfire, and if it's enough. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dr. Jessica Zitter works at Highland Hospital, a public hospital in Oakland, where she specializes in critical and palliative care medicine. She says having hard conversations about our end-of-life wishes can transform our fears about death into hope about life. We meet several people she's helped guide through the process of talking about death, including a grocery store worker in LA who got sick with COVID, an Oakland man hospitalized with serious lung disease who struggles to face his own mortality, and a son who had to watch his 92-year-old father die of COVID far away from family, alone in a hospital bed. Dr. Zitter is the author of “Extreme Measures: Finding a Better Path to the End of Life.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Got your ballot? Still making up your mind on those California propositions? We’ve got you covered. This week, The California Report Magazine breaks down some of the statewide ballot measures with a few KQED reporters. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

October marks the 25th anniversary of The California Report, and this week, we’re kicking off the first in a series of shows celebrating 25 years on the air. In this first installment, we’ll listen back to stories that showcase some of the ways the state has been a trailblazer. From passing first-in-the-nation climate change initiatives, to legalizing medical marijuana, to galvanizing the immigrants-right movement and marrying same-sex couples at San Francisco City Hall back in 2004, our state is often on the frontlines of progressive change. Host Sasha Khokha is joined by Scott Shafer, senior editor for KQED’s Politics and Government Desk and former host of The California Report. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

California is the land of record-breaking home prices and climbing rents. But it’s also a place where on any given night, more than 150,000 people live in tents and cars, RVs and shelters. So many wild extremes. But what can we do about it? That’s the question a new KQED podcast is tackling. It’s called SOLD OUT: Rethinking Housing in America. It explores how the pandemic has complicated housing for so many people, and looks at some possible solutions. This week on The California Report Magazine, we’ll hear the first episode, and learn about the roots of California’s homeless crisis, as well as recent efforts to house people struggling with homelessness in hotels. SOLD OUT is hosted and reported by KQED housing reporters Erin Baldassari and Molly Solomon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

‘Music Was Our Language’: Grammy-Award Winning Producer Turns Mic on Sister; Dan 'The Can't Stand Up Comedian' Smith; Artists Capture Wildfire’s Destructive Power – and Beauty Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Palliative care expert Dr. Jessica Zitter says that tough conversations about end-of-life options can help inform how we want to live our lives. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

After touring the world with Snoop Dogg and the Black Eyed Peas, Jinho Ferreira served as an Alameda County sheriff’s deputy for eight years. He said he wanted to fight police violence from the inside. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

From Prison Fire Crew To Pro Firefighter; Volunteer Firefighting Couple Find a Silver Lining; How Wildfire Smoke Intersects with Race and Place; An Ode to Big Basin's Redwoods Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices