Helping the Magical Monarch Butterfly; How California's Courts Fail to Disarm Abusers

This week, we have stories of home and history. We start with novelist Susan Straight. She's a professor of creative writing at UC Riverside, and also grew up in the city. Her new book, Mecca, is a story of intertwined characters who all have deep roots in the mountains, deserts and canyons near Riverside and Coachella, and who are all in their own ways, looking for a version of the California Dream. And KQED's Adhiti Bandlamudi takes us to San Jose to explain why the city has had five Chinatowns throughout its history, but doesn’t have one today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

15 Apr 202230min

Many people have been hitting the road for Spring Break, so we wanted to reprise our Hidden Gems show from September 2021. Every year we go on a road trip highlighting some of our favorite secret spots. Come with us as we visit the prehistoric Fern Canyon, a funky beauty salon/museum in the desert, a San Jose shop making pillowy mochi, the majestic Burney Falls and a food truck featuring homestyle chicken and rice in the Central Valley. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

8 Apr 202230min

In 2020, California’s Foster Farms became the site of one of the nation’s deadliest COVID-19 outbreaks at a meat or poultry plant. The California Report’s Central Valley reporter, Alex Hall, spent a year and a half talking to spouses and family members of workers who spent decades at the company’s chicken-processing plants. She found that hundreds of Foster Farms workers tested positive for the virus in 2020. 16 people died and at least 20 others were hospitalized. In this episode that originally aired in October 2021, Hall’s investigation shows that as plants stayed open to maintain the food supply, and workers got sick from COVID-19, or even died, Foster Farms didn’t always give a complete picture of the problem to health officials, state regulators and their own employees. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

1 Apr 202230min

Angela Lynn McConnell grew up in the forested hills of the Hoopa Valley reservation in Humboldt County. She was proud of her heritage. Angela, 26, was a budding journalist, committed to shedding light on important tribal issues. In September 2018, she was murdered. What happened to her is unfortunately too common in Indigenous communities: Indigenous women and girls disappearing or turning up dead. Most of these cases are never solved. But families of the missing and murdered have been coming together to demand justice, and their advocacy has led to a wave of new federal initiatives. Reporter Lee Romney tells us about the roots of this crisis – and how Northern California tribes are taking the lead to come up with solutions. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

25 Mar 202230min

This week, Sasha Khokha talks to Neda Toloui-Semnani, an Emmy Award winning writer and producer about her new book, "They Said They Wanted Revolution, A Memoir of My Parents.” It's pieced together from interviews, diaries and archives, and it dives deep into her family's history, both in the U.S. and Iran. Plus, KQED's Chloe Veltman tells us about the rise in bilingual children’s books, especially in Spanish and English. The stories don’t just highlight diverse characters, but also have a strong social justice focus. And we talk to Jessica Martin, the Healdsburg art teacher who helped create PepToc, a hotline featuring encouraging messages from elementary school kids. The project went viral thanks to social media. While Martin thought the line might get 100 calls a month, it's exploded to 11,000 calls an hour. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

18 Mar 202230min

This week, we’ve got two stories featuring two very different musical artists. Each of them won a singing contest as a teenager that launched their career. One was a singer in 1960s Saigon, who rode the wave of edgy modern music inspired by the California surf sound. The other was a vocalist who got his start in Los Angeles' Central Avenue jazz scene in the 1940s and had a career that lasted over 70 years, Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

12 Mar 202230min

During the pandemic, so many Californians have lost their jobs, and struggled to pay rent. People have been forced to make really difficult decisions. Like choosing between buying groceries, or paying the landlord. Federal, state, and local governments did put some eviction protections in place during the pandemic. And Congress handed out nearly 50 billion dollars to help people catch up on missed rent. But people still got evicted. Most of those pandemic protections were temporary. And now, things are getting worse. But evictions don't affect everyone equally. They're more likely to hit some communities harder than others. And that’s the focus of the new season of the podcast Sold Out: Rethinking Housing in America. We bring you the first episode from KQED housing reporters Erin Baldassari and Molly Solomon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

5 Mar 202230min

This week Sasha Khokha sits down with author Sabaa Tahir to talk about her latest young adult novel, All My Rage. The book is rooted in her own experiences growing up in her family's 18 room motel as the child of Pakistani immigrants and one of the few South Asians in her rural town. She's an award-winning author and her earlier series, Ember in the Ashes, which had a woman of color hero, hit number one on the New York Times bestseller list.  And even though California joined the union as free state back in 1850, that didn’t mean slavery didn’t exist here. As gold rush prospectors flooded the state, enslaved Black people sometimes came too. And even Black people who entered the state free from bondage didn't always stay free. In fact, the passage of California's Fugitive Slave Act in 1852 allowed slave catchers to take free Black people back to slave states, and the law sanctioned the re-enslavement of Blacks freed by their enslavers. In 2020. reporter Asal Ehsanipour brought us the story about the very last slavery case in California -- a story that starts in what was once rural Sacramento.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

26 Feb 202230min