California Sun Podcast

Gustavo Arellano, Los Angeles Times columnist and host of The Times podcast, provides a personal and provocative view of Los Angeles and Southern California politics. He talks of his ongoing feud with Los Angeles County Sheriff Alex Villanueva, the endless ads for mayoral candidate Rick Caruso, and the future of young Latino power brokers. With California's June 7 primary election only days away, Arellano shares a perspective on the candidates, elected officials, and Latino vote that you won't hear anywhere else.

Filmmaker John Waters has long been a fixture in San Francisco. After a very rough week, a conversation with him gives us a few moments of levity courtesy of his sometimes twisted worldview. The 76-year-old writer, director, and curator of bad taste has made a career of showing us the weirdest of human behavior. In films including "Pink Flamingo," "Mondo Trash," and "HairSpray" and books such as "CarSick" he's made us laugh or at the very least taken us briefly out of the day's reality. He’s now written his first novel, "Liarmouth," which continues the John Water legacy.

Carolyn Chen, a sociologist and professor of ethnic studies at UC Berkeley, argues in her new book "Work Pray Code" that Silicon Valley has become a “techtopia” where workplaces and charismatic leaders now provide for employees' every need. The workplace has become their community, their place of worship, and resulted in the elimination of boundaries between work and life. Remote work may have changed this, but the institutions that might pick up the slack have now disappeared.

Long-time tech journalist Tripp Mickle explains how Steve Jobs’s personality defined Apple. He was both a founder and a legend. But his successors, Tim Cook and Jonny Ive each had their own very different ideas about the company's future. Their battle was so fundamental that it deconstructed the company culture built under Jobs. Mickle tells the story in his new book "After Steve." However, the final story is still being written inside Apple’s $1 billion dollar headquarters in Cupertino.

Lettie Teaque, a longtime Wall Street Journal wine columnist, created a buzz recently with a column about how the Napa Valley may have jumped the shark with respect to pricing and gentrification. It's a look at $10,000 weekends, $1,700-a-night hotels, and $200 tastings that are becoming de rigueur. What might all this mean for our future perception of Napa Valley and its wines?

At 3:15 pm on April 29, 1972, as the verdict came down in the Rodney King beating, Los Angeles exploded with another in a long history of race riots. Everyone knew what might happen, but nothing prepared the city for what came next. Ryan Gattis captured the horror and power of that in his 2015 fictional account "All Involved." The award-winning Los Angeles author talks to us from the perspective of this 30th anniversary of what is still the apogee of domestic civil unrest.

Long Time Silicon Valley journalist John Markoff unearths the roots of a tree, whose branches include, among others, Ken Kesey, Steve Jobs, and Elon Musk. Markoff's new book, "Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand,” examines a Zelig-like character in both California's 1960s counterculture and the ethos of Silicon Valley. Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog remains a cultural bible, from which we are still singing hymns.

Thomas Walsh and Karen Maness are the co-curators of "Art of the Hollywood Backdrop: Cinema's Creative Legacy," an exhibit opening at Boca Raton Museum of Art on April 20. It showcases a collection of monumental scenic backdrop paintings that were an essential part of the filmmaking era that included movies such as "North by Northwest," "The Sound of Music," and "Singing in the Rain."

Vanessa Hua, a Bay Area native and graduate of Stanford and U.C. Riverside, has focused her extensive writing on issues of immigration, identity, diversity, and parenting. Moving seamlessly between short stories, novels, journalism, and her San Francisco Chronicle column, she offers important insights into the Asian American experience. The author of the forthcoming novel "Forbidden City" shared some of her own history.

Susan Sorrells has been called the “Queen of the Desert” and among a "shortlist of the most interesting people in California.” The Smith College graduate spent time in Liberia with the Peace Corps, worked for California Sen. Thomas Kuchel in Washington, D.C., and lived for four months in the Soviet Union during the Cold War while considering a career as a diplomat. She ultimately returned to California to claim her birthright, the entire town of Shoshone — a small, once-bustling mining town, whose cluster of historic buildings flanks two sides of a highway that slices through the Mojave on the way to Death Valley. Sorrells shared the story of her journey and how she is using the town to advance a new kind of ecotourism.