Ann Carlson: When L.A.'s air was both a punchline and a poison

Julia Turner and Julia Wick have spent their careers covering Los Angeles — and like anyone who's lived here long enough, they couldn't always figure it out either. So they did what journalists do. They started digging. L.A. Material is their newly launched independent digital newsroom, and their obsession is simple: making sense of a city that resists it.

Peter Richardson, author of the new book "Brand New Beat: The Wild Rise of Rolling Stone Magazine," discusses the pioneering music magazine's San Francisco decade — between 1967 and 1977 — when the Bay Area's counterculture reshaped music and the journalism that covered it. From Haight-Ashbury to the Fillmore, Hunter S. Thompson to Annie Leibovitz, the magazine documented a social revolution while simultaneously creating it.

Ann Carlson discusses her new book "Smog and Sunshine: The Surprising Story of How Los Angeles Cleaned Up Its Air." Smog was once as much a symbol of L.A. as palm trees — a bane to public health and a national punchline on Johnny Carson's "Tonight Show." An expert in environmental law, Carlson chronicles the decades-long battle that transformed the air from toxic to breathable, and what today's rollbacks threaten to undo.

Severin Borenstein, a professor at UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business and an expert on the economics of energy, explains how the Iran war is disrupting global oil markets and why California faces especially sharp price impacts. Beyond the crude oil disruptions affecting everyone, the state's refinery shutdowns, import constraints, and gasoline surcharge create unique vulnerabilities as supply chains scramble to adjust.

Miriam Pawel, author of the definitive Cesar Chavez biography, "The Crusades of Cesar Chavez," reflects on the recent shattering of the Cesar Chavez myth — and the harder questions beneath it: what was known, what was ignored, and why movements so often need saints. In this wide-ranging conversation, Pawel explores Chavez's charisma, control, contradictions, and the challenge of holding both his historic achievements and the harm he may have caused in the same frame.

Caroline Tracey explores the world's threatened salt lakes with a focus on California — Mono Lake, Owens Lake, and the Salton Sea — where irrigation diversions have transformed stunning desert ecosystems into sources of toxic dust. She discusses landmark environmental cases that established California's public trust doctrine and how these seemingly dead landscapes remain vital habitats worth preserving. Her decade of research across four continents is chronicled in her new book "Salt Lakes: An Unnatural History."

Joe Flint, a media reporter for the Wall Street Journal, joins us as Hollywood heads into Oscar weekend — a moment when the world celebrates the glamour of the movies even as the business faces deep uncertainty. Flint looks at the industry's economic upheaval: mergers, mounting debt, streaming disruption, and the growing question of whether the Hollywood model that built California's cultural and economic identity can survive the digital age.

Chef Geoff Davis opened Burdell in Oakland to cook the soul food his grandmothers made — a distinct American cuisine rooted in migration and adaptation rather than Southern tradition. In 2024, Food & Wine named it the "Restaurant of the Year." But it was a 20% service fee at the bottom of Burdell's receipts that recently started a national conversation about labor, class, and whether we've ever really reckoned with the history of tipping.

Valerie Ziegler, a high school teacher in San Francisco, and Joel Breakstone, executive director of Stanford's Digital Inquiry Group, talk about digital literacy in the classroom. Many self-described "screenagers," they say, can no longer tell real from fake. Together, Ziegler and Breakstone are at the forefront of a movement to prepare young people for a world of influencers, algorithmic manipulation, and artificial intelligence, an effort recently profiled in the New York Times.

When California legalized recreational cannabis, Silicon Valley envisioned a new Gold Rush. Tushar Atre — a tech entrepreneur, surfer, and disruptor — thought he could bridge two worlds: venture capital and the black market. On Oct. 1, 2019, he was shot execution-style on his own property, hands bound. Investigative journalist Scott Eden, author of the new book "A Killing in Cannabis," spent four years unraveling what happens when ambition meets an industry that never forgot its outlaw roots.