Scientists have determined a mega-earthquake happens every 100 years on average in California. The last time a Big One — like a magnitude 7.8 quake, like the stuff of nightmares — the last time one of those hit Southern California, it was about 164 years ago. Back then, L.A. had a population of just over 4,000 people. The metro area is now over 12 million. So to coach us through earthquake anxiety, we’re getting together today with L.A. Times reporters Rong-Gong Lin II, Rosanna Xia and Alex Wigg...
Jun 15, 2021•28 min
On Sunday, Benjamin Netanyahu lost the prime minister's post after opponents in the Knesset, Israel's parliament, approved a coalition government led, for now, by his one-time protege, Naftali Bennett. Netanyahu will now serve as leader of the opposition. The new government is an unlikely group of politicians and parties from the left, right and center, united only by their opposition to Netanyahu. The vote to oust him may prove easier than the next part: What happens now? Today, we speak to L.A...
Jun 14, 2021•20 min
California has one of the lowest transmission rates in the country. More than 70% of adults have rolled up their sleeves for at least one dose of a vaccine. But many people still refuse to get the jab. Public health officials worry they will be at particular risk of infection from other unvaccinated people once the state reopens. Today, guest host Erika D. Smith takes us to the front lines, where canvassers are making a final push to get holdouts vaccinated in South L.A. before the state reopens...
Jun 11, 2021•29 min
Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti is political royalty in the City of Angels. His father was a former district attorney. The mayor won his last election with over 80 percent of the vote. There were even rumors he would run for president in 2020. Now, amid speculation that the Biden administration will tap Garcetti as the U.S. Ambassador to India, people from Kolkata to Calexico are saying ... huh? Him? Today, we speak to L.A. Times columnist Steve Lopez — who says Garcetti's ambition might actuall...
Jun 10, 2021•19 min
When it comes to serving California's Black, LGBTQ (and Black LGBTQ) communities, Charles Stewart's resume is impeccable. The native of South L.A. worked for Rep. Diane Watson and former state Sen. Holly Mitchell, who's now an L.A. County supervisor. He has previously served as secretary of the city of L.A.'s LGBT Police Task Force, and he was editor at large for BLK, a national magazine for the black LGBTQ community, the first of its kind. Stewart is now retired, but we recently caught up with ...
Jun 09, 2021•25 min
It's been quite the year for the Los Angeles Public Library — and the COVID-19 pandemic is only part of the story. Inauguration Day saw a reading by Amanda Gorman, who got her start with poetry readings via the L.A. Public Library's youth program. And teen punk group the Linda Lindas got worldwide fame after a concert at the library system's Cypress Park branch. Today, we talk to L.A. librarian Kevin Awakuni about how the city's public library has turned into an incubator for making libraries hi...
Jun 08, 2021•19 min
California Rep. Katie Porter (D -Irvine) has been a political rock star ever since the progressive won the 45th Congressional District seat in South Orange County — long a bastion of conservative politics — in 2018. We talk to her about her Iowa roots, the Jan. 6 U.S. Capitol invasion, her attempts at bipartisanship and the color of her favorite marker that she uses for her already-legendary whiteboard lectures during congressional hearings. More reading: Democrats loved Katie Porter when she ba...
Jun 07, 2021•24 min
The Laotian community in California is not large enough to support newspapers or television news programs in Lao, leaving monolingual immigrants especially isolated. So these immigrants have created elaborate phone trees with designated leaders that can spread important information to thousands of people within an hour. In sprawling California suburbs, the phone trees are an attempt to re-create village networks from back home. And it's a crucial service — one that's especially important because...
Jun 04, 2021•22 min
On January 5, 2021, one day before the deadly insurrection at the U.S. Capitol by Trump supporters, there was another breach of a government building — in Northern California. Dozens of people, angered by COVID-19 lockdowns, let themselves into a Shasta County government building. There, the board of supervisors was holding a meeting. Although most of the supervisors were attending remotely, angry residents — including members of a local militia — still let them have it. It was a preview of thin...
Jun 03, 2021•21 min
At just 23 years old, Naomi Osaka is already one of the best tennis players in the world. She was scheduled to play the French Open this month, which is one of the sport's biggest tournaments. But Osaka caused a stir when she announced before matches even began that she wouldn’t be at any news conferences. She cited the “huge waves of anxiety” she feels talking at them. French Open officials weren’t sympathetic and fined her $15,000. Then on Monday, Osaka stunned everyone. She announced she was ...
Jun 02, 2021•16 min
In 2019, the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority estimated it hosted nearly 43 million tourists. Officials were expecting a record year for 2020, and the Nevada metropolis did set one … in the negative direction. Thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic barely 19 million visitors came to town — the lowest total in decades. Today, restaurants and casinos will return to full capacity. If the move is successful, you'll see a flip on the city's tagline. What happened to Vegas won't stay in Vegas. Our...
Jun 01, 2021•19 min
On today's episode, we turn the mic over to the hosts of our Asian Enough podcast, L.A. Times entertainment reporters Jen Yamato and Tracy Brown. They share excerpts from a recent episode featuring actor Sandra Oh, in which Oh talks about her career, the rise in anti-Asian hate crimes and whether she'd ever reprise her role of Dr. Cristina Yang on "Grey's Anatomy." More reading: Follow the "Asian Enough" podcast on Apple Podcasts Sandra Oh won’t return to ‘Grey’s Anatomy’ before it ends: ‘I have...
May 31, 2021•32 min
Our guest host Faith E. Pinho, a Metro reporter at the L.A. Times, speaks with Times culture writer Daniel Hernandez about the cast of characters and cars that have been lining the wide boulevards of Southern California for decades. They look at who is embracing cruising culture and its uneasy relationship with law enforcement. More reading: The lowrider is back: The glorious return of cruising to the streets of L.A. Here are 8 key lowrider moments in pop films and TV, according to Estevan Oriol...
May 28, 2021•21 min
They stand across the West in ruins, ghostly apparitions of one of the darkest moments in American history. Concentration camps, 10 in total, built during World War II to incarcerate 120,000 Japanese Americans for the crime of not being white. But only two are designated as national sites. Manzanar in California and Minidoka in Idaho. Now, a bill in Congress seeks to designate a third concentration camp as a historic site, the Granada War Relocation Center in southeast Colorado, better known as ...
May 27, 2021•28 min
In 1981, Los Angeles Dodgers rookie pitcher Fernando Valenzuela uncorked a full-fledged revolution. Baseball, Los Angeles, Latinos, sports — none have been the same since Valenzuela dominated batters four decades ago. He helped to make the national pastime international, bridged racial divides in L.A. and gave Latinos a hero everyone could embrace. Even if you don’t like sports, even if you’re a Yankees fan or — heaven forbid — root for the San Francisco Giants, you gotta know about the legacy o...
May 26, 2021•20 min
Today, on the one-year anniversary of George Floyd’s murder, we talk to three people who participated in last year’s actions. Joseph Williams is an organizer with Black Lives Matter Los Angeles. Brianna Noble is the owner of Mulatto Meadows, a business in Northern California that seeks to diversify the horse-riding world. And Carrington Pritchett is a student in Bakersfield who is also a freelance photographer. Three radically different backgrounds, one purpose last year and today: honoring the ...
May 25, 2021•21 min
As the Israeli-Palestinian conflict keeps a cease-fire, its proxy wars continue to rage worldwide. One of the latest battlefronts has been in California classrooms. This past March, the California Department of Education approved an ethnic studies curriculum for K-12 students that schools can adopt voluntarily. It seeks to teach students a more diverse take on history. Not only does the move influence the next generation of students, but this could go on to affect school districts across the cou...
May 24, 2021•24 min
Peter Daszak is president of the EcoHealth Alliance, where he leads a team of researchers working to identify emerging diseases around the world, the so-called zoonotic viruses that leap from animals to humans. This year, he went to China with the World Health Organization to track the origins of COVID-19. Daszak says cooperation with China — which theorizes that the coronavirus originated in the wet markets of Wuhan — is important to understanding and preventing future outbreaks. But some vocal...
May 21, 2021•22 min
This last year, we've seen multiple rallies in Los Angeles — organized by Black Lives Matter, against the clearing of a homeless encampment in Echo Park, in celebration of the Dodgers' World Series win. Each one of these events was for a different cause but they ended in the same way: with the Los Angeles Police Department coming in, declaring an illegal gathering and clearing the crowds with tactics that many activists have deemed heavy-handed and violent. Frequently the police also fired hard ...
May 20, 2021•23 min
Together, Brazil and India now have half the COVID-19 cases in the world. We speak to L.A. Times foreign correspondents David Pierson and Kate Linthicum about what the plight of these global powerhouses suggests about the spread of coronavirus around the world.
May 19, 2021•26 min
A junk snack may not seem like a big deal, especially in this current world. But the story of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos — a gnarled, messy, crunchy, bright-red corn puff that debuted in the early 1990s — and its creation has long been told as an inspirational fable from classrooms to boardrooms because of one man: Richard Montañez. His tale was irresistible: he was a former janitor at a Frito-Lay plant who became a high-ranking executive. That is all true. But he credited his rise to his creation of F...
May 18, 2021•24 min
Just five months into the year, the U.S. is on track to break a troubling record. Last year, 44 transgender people were killed in the U.S. and its territories. So far this year, the count is close to two dozen, according to the Human Rights Campaign. Those are just the cases that we know of. More than half the victims were Black trans women, and the region with the highest rate is Puerto Rico. Today, we’ll speak with Marc Ramirez about the rise in transgender violence in Puerto Rico and across t...
May 17, 2021•21 min
Four decades ago, Barry Rosen was one of 52 Americans held hostage for 444 brutal days in Iran. After their release in 1981, Rosen and the other hostages received a rare gift from Major League Baseball: a "golden ticket." Signed by then-Commissioner Bowie Kuhn under the words “In Gratitude And Appreciation,” the lifetime pass entitled each hostage and a guest admittance to any regular - season game. But when Rosen tried to attend a game this year, the New York Mets said they were no longer honor...
May 14, 2021•18 min
The California dream comes with more than its fair share of disasters — earthquakes, wildfires, fire tornadoes, eroding coasts, and so much more. The L.A. Times has a disasters unit to cover them, and our reporters are some of the best in the business. So we invited three of them — Rong-Gong Lin II, Rosanna Xia, and Alex Wigglesworth — to talk about how to prepare for the unpreparable. Think of this as a regular monthly series about calamities, with our Masters of Disasters as your guides....
May 13, 2021•25 min
A populist becomes his country’s president with a historic win. He’s a brash outsider, a relative newcomer, and he promises to drain the swamp. No more politics as usual, he says, because his country is under attack — and he’s here to save it. But this new president begins to upend democracy. Ousts his opponents to consolidate power. Declares he wants to change the country’s constitution to suit him. And trolls his haters on social media all along the way. These are the hallmarks of Nayib Bukele...
May 12, 2021•26 min
California's high-school athletes were bona fide ballers during the pandemic. They trained alone or over Zoom during lockdowns and are now facing off against each other on the field. How these student athletes coped with COVID-19 this past year offers lessons in resilience and ingenuity that all of us can learn. Today, we learn how the football team at Loyola High School in Los Angeles came together to help teammate Josh Morales and his family survive COVID-19. Then, we’ll chat with L.A. Times’ ...
May 11, 2021•25 min
Over the next couple of months, media from across the world will descend on California to cover the possible recall of Gov. Gavin Newsom. There have been only two successful recalls of governors in U.S. history — including the recall of California Gov. Gray Davis in 2003. Why is this famously liberal state so prone to conservative voter uprisings? It’s part of a decades-long trend that has rocked local and state politics, a trend that’s gone on to influence the rest of the U.S. Today, we examine...
May 10, 2021•23 min
Video games have always been a point of division between L.A. Times science reporter Deborah Netburn and her 12-year-old son. Then the pandemic hit, and the gap between them seemed to widen. In today's episode, Netburn takes over the mic to share her journey from ignorance to understanding. And she does it all by playing video games. More reading: Video games came between me and my son in the pandemic. Could they bring us back together?...
May 07, 2021•24 min
Stacy Perman and Josh Rottenberg cover the film industry for the L.A. Times. In February, just a week before the annual Golden Globes ceremony, they published a bombshell investigation about the operations of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association. The findings were ugly: Self dealing. Ethical lapses. No Black members. And the HFPA continued to make a series of missteps. Now, a group of powerful publicists in Hollywood have declared that they’ll keep their clients away from the Globes -- unless...
May 06, 2021•26 min
Few take Cinco de Mayo seriously. For many of us, today is about restaurant specials on nachos and margaritas. Too many white people wearing sombreros and fake mustaches. But for Axios reporter Russell Contreras, May 5 takes him back to growing up in Houston, where a forgotten riot over the police death of a Mexican American in 1978 turned Cinco de Mayo from farce to reflection. He talks about the forgotten, radical roots of the holiday loved by few and celebrated mostly with drinko. More Readin...
May 05, 2021•22 min
