The California Report Magazine

This week we're featuring two of our favorite stories from the past year.

Meet the Duduk Whisperer: A Bay Area Armenian Folk Musician Revives Centuries of Soul

San Francisco Bay Area-based Khatchadour Khatchadourian is pushing the boundaries of traditional Armenian music. The vocalist and musician plays the duduk, an ancient double reed wind instrument carved from apricot wood, which has cultural ties to the country. Last October, KQED’s Elize Manoukian brought us this profile about how Khatchadourian is preserving culture through sound.

Small Ring, Big Dreams: The Central Valley’s Ba...

Vinyl Album Found in San Francisco Contains Echoes of a Filipino American Love Story

Jess Garcia loves perusing San Francisco thrift stores for treasures. One day, she came across a vinyl record titled "In Baghdad By the Bay: Cora and Santos Beloy," which piqued her curiosity. She rushed home to listen and was amazed at the sweet nostalgic quality of the voices she heard. When she looked for more information on the couple she couldn't find much, but had this feeling there must be more to their story. It turns out this Filipino American couple were "San...

This week on The California Report Magazine:

What Skid Row Taught Acclaimed Violinist Vijay Gupta About Music

When violinist Vijay Gupta joined the Los Angeles Philharmonic at just 19 years old, he was the youngest to ever take a chair in a major orchestra in the U.S. But despite that shining achievement, he was desperately unhappy. Now in his late 30s, Gupta has a new memoir out called Restrung. It explores how, after years of struggling to live up to other people’s expectations, he found his true voice working with homeless people on the st...

‘Podcasting Democracy’ Helps Constitution Come to Life for Teens

As America gets ready to celebrate its 250th birthday, a new project called Podcasting Democracy is helping high school and middle school students engage with the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Participants created a series of audio commentaries connecting how those founding documents still affect their lives today, and how they can use constitutional principles to create positive change in their own communities.The curriculum is free and available to teachers nationwide. It was written by KQED Education’s Rachel Roberson, who along with 17-year-old student Eumari King P...

How a Pacifica Bar Became a Flashpoint for Queer Civil Rights

The San Francisco Bay Area is known as one of the most LGBTQ+ friendly areas in the country but it wasn’t always this way. Back in 1956, the beachside city of Pacifica was the scene of a police raid at a local bar, known to be friendly to the queer community. Hazel’s Inn’s owner, Hazel Nikola had her liquor license revoked and was arrested along with 90 of her patrons. As Ana De Almeida Amaral reports for the podcast Bay Curious, the raid would be a blue...

Connecting With My Father, and My Heritage, in Mandarin

Many children of immigrants grow up hearing a language at home that they never fully learn to speak. For second generation kids in the US, the top three heritage languages are Spanish, Chinese and Tagalog. Mandarin Chinese is the native language of reporter Anna Zou. But up until a few months ago, she could barely speak it.

Central Valley Father and Daughter Train Together For National Boxing Championship

In the rural Central Valley of Avenal, Shavana Trejo is getting national attention for her amateur...

Recent Graduates Reflect on How AI Is Reshaping Their Future

Over the past few weeks, several college commencement speakers who praised artificial intelligence were booed by graduates. As these graduates  enter an uncertain job market, they’re grappling not only with an unpredictable economy but also with the feeling that artificial intelligence is unstoppable. AI can impact whether or not you get your resume in front of a hiring manager or what career you decide to pursue. We hear from some recent California graduates and other students who talk about not whether  AI will impact them, but how...

June is Pride Month, and for this week’s show we’re featuring excerpts from our Love You for You series, which recently won a regional Murrow award from the Radio Television Digital News Association.

Gender-expansive youth are often talked about in the news but we rarely hear from them, in their own words, especially about how they can thrive with loving support from their families and communities. So we’re featuring three conversations between these youth and the people in their lives who love, support, and mentor them. 

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Uncovering Women Miners’ Forgotten Legacy in the ‘Swiss Alps’ of Sequoia National Park 

Mineral King is located in the southern part of Sequoia National Park but its remote location means it gets fewer visitors than other parts of the park. So the campers and backpackers that make the trek are rewarded with a spectacular mountain range with rushing waterfalls. There are only a handful of buildings here, including some historic wooden cabins that belong to a few families who’ve been here long before this was a national park. One of those cabins belongs to Laile Di Silvestro...

Going for a Hike in a California Park? Don’t Forget Your Sewing Supplies

Hiking clubs are nothing new. But a group in Los Angeles is now trying to stretch their creative muscles while making new community. Los Angeles’ Hike and Sew members gather every other week in Los Angeles to get into nature with their needle and thread.  Reporter Clare Wiley joined the group as part of our Community Connections series, highlighting Californians who are bringing joy to their neighbors in big and small ways. 

Motorized Wheelchairs Making Back Country Hiking More Accessible

Cali...

The Story Behind the Bear on the California Flag is Bigger Than One Legend

The grizzly bear on California’s state flag makes it distinctive and recognizable. Many people believe the bear is Monarch, one of the last California grizzlies. Captured in the mountains in 1889, he was held in captivity and displayed to the public for the last 22 years of his life. The KQED podcast Bay Curious wanted to find out if it really was Monarch on the flag, and to sort through some of the other legends around the bear. They sent reporter Katherine Monahan to fi...

California's Governor’s Race Remains Wide Open. Here’s What to Know Before the Primary

From controversies to campaign promises, California’s governor’s race is national news. And with ballots landing in mailboxes already, the race is still a toss-up — with eight candidates vying for the state’s top job. We sit down with KQED political correspondents Guy Marzorati and Marisa Lagos to hear more about the candidates and what we should look for in the final weeks before Election Day. 

In Northern California’s Maternity Desert, a Humboldt Midwife Offers Intimate Births

Despite being...

⁠In East Oakland, a Store Where 1 Item Is Always Free⁠

If you find yourself wandering around Oakland’s Dimond District, you might come across a rather unusual store. The space looks like a hoarder’s attic. It’s crowded with mismatched objects: glassware, old electronics, knitted hats, typewriters and rotary phones. But you don't need money to shop here, you can actually take one item home for free. Free Oakland UP is both an art installation and mutual aid model, offering commentary on waste and reuse. KQED’s Srishti Prabha brings us the story of this space, and what it...

For people living with serious mental illness, there’s more to recovery than clinical treatment. Los Angeles County’s Hollywood 2.0 pilot program puts that idea into practice. Inspired by an Italian city’s holistic and successful approach — centered on friendship and purpose — officials brought the model stateside. For people like Mignon Poon, who spent years unhoused, the opportunity for community has proved pivotal. Reporter Lee Romney takes us inside a program that offers a new model for mental health care.

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This week, we’re revisiting two stories from Lisa Morehouse's series, California Foodways.

California’s fruits and vegetables make a lot of stops on the way from the fields to your table. One of those places is the Oakland Produce Market, which supplies small markets, restaurants and other food providers with the freshest foods. You don’t have to work for a grocery store or run a restaurant to shop here, as long as you buy in bulk. Lisa got up in the middle of the night to meet some of the people who keep the Oakland Produc...

This week, we're revisiting a conversation from September 2025 about resilience with Oakland comedian Jackie Keliiaa. She’s a stand-up, writer, actor, and producer whose work not only reflects on her everyday life, but also her Native heritage. She’s been featured on Comedy Central, Team Coco, Netflix and IllumiNative's list of 25 Native American Comedians to Follow, and she organizes the all-Native comedy show, Good Medicine. Host Sasha Khokha sat down with Keliiaa for a conversation about comedy, identity, and how laughter can help keep us going during hard times. 

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This Northern California Tribe is Reclaiming Mendocino Forest For Future Generations

The Potter Valley band of the Pomo people is the first tribe in California to use a Forest Service grant to create a community forest near Fort Bragg, in Mendocino County. It will soon be a place where the tribe can offer youth camps and community events all year round. KQED’s Outdoors reporter Sarah Wright attended a mushroom foraging event on this ancestral land, which will now remain a forest for generations to come.

New Film Follows Indigenous Teens Kayaking the Klamath River Af...

From Financial Freefall to Stability. How One Man Found a Way to Stay in the Bay

The cost of living in California has only increased in the last year. And between housing, food, utilities and gas, many of us have been forced to get creative with our budgets in order to continue living here. Vanessa Rancaño has this profile of a man in the Bay Area whose decision to stay in California –despite his financial hardships– is also a matter of safety.  

Small Ring, Big Dreams: The Central Valley’s Backyard Wrestling Underdogs

If you...

This San Francisco Post Office Is the Only Address Some Residents Have

In San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood, there’s a unique post office. It’s the U.S. Postal Service General Delivery Unit — a mail service where people who don’t have a permanent address can pick up mail. For the past decade, it’s been a lifeline in a district that’s home to 2,000 unhoused residents, allowing them to receive items like ID cards and Social Security checks. We spend an afternoon at General Delivery with reporter Erin Bump. 

Erika Oba On Weaving Asian American...

The Eaton Fire Ravaged Black Altadena. A Journalist Documents Its Resilience

After the Eaton Fire tore through Altadena in 2025, reporter James Farr went live on radio station KBLA in Los Angeles. His weekly call-in show, Conversations Live: Altadena Rising, highlights the voices of fire survivors, focusing on the people from Altadena’s historic Black neighborhoods, which the fire disproportionately ravaged. He’s given voice to the community as they have moved from processing the shock and destruction of the fire, to navigating displacement, and deciding whether to rebuild. Reporter Steven Cuevas brings us this profile of radio host...

The Eaton Fire Destroyed Altadena’s Lush Greenery. These Volunteers Are Growing It Back

The Eaton Fire was merciless when it came to  Altadena’s celebrated green spaces, destroying or damaging most of the leafy trees that lined the streets in many neighborhoods. Reporter Steven Cuevas tells us how local advocates are scrambling to restore what was lost and save what’s still standing.  

A Post-War Program is Influencing Home Rebuilds in the Pacific Palisades

A year after the Palisades Fire, rebuilding has been slow. But some local architects have been thinking about ways to...

This week marks the fourth anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. It’s a somber anniversary that many Ukrainians here in California are commemorating. In fact, Silicon Valley is home to a large Ukrainian diaspora – many immigrants from Ukraine have come to work in the tech industry as engineers. Some of them have been using their tech skills to bolster the effort to defend Ukraine, and this army of engineers, coders, hackers, and tinkerers has become a vital part of the country’s resistance against Russian aggression. It’s a story that Bay Area investigative journalist Erica Hellerstein stumbled u...

When Cherish Burtson was sent to prison, she says one of the main things that helped her get through her time was reading. She devoured memoirs and books on mindfulness, which helped her manage the challenges she experienced behind bars. After she was released, she began to volunteer with Books Thru Bars San Diego, a group that provides reading materials to people who are  incarcerated. But lately she’s noticed that more titles are being rejected by prison officials. This week, we bring you an excerpt of the KPBS podcast The Finest. It explores prison book bans, which some cri...

When most of us head to the airport, it’s to fly out and leave. But some people go to the airport to stay, sometimes for months on end. People experiencing homelessness have had a presence at the airport since at least 2018, but airport officials say their number has grown. The San Francisco Police Department says it encounters about 35 unhoused people at the airport every day. But helping them find other places to live is complicated. Reporter Erin Bump introduces us to some people at SFO who help them with shelter, food and medical care, and are sometimes just th...

Three years ago this week, Oakland bakery owner Jen Angel lost her life when a “smash and grab” robbery went horribly wrong. Ishmael Jenkins Burch, then 19, was driving the getaway car and was initially charged with murder. We bring you an excerpt from an episode of the Snap Judgment podcast, which explores  what happens when Angel’s community pushes for restorative justice instead of retribution, something they say Angel would have wanted for the accused.

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This weekend marks one year since the deadly Eaton Fire was contained. From the moment the fire first broke out, reporter Steven Cuevas began talking to his neighbors, to business owners, and other people who make up the fabric of this vibrant community, and we’ve featured those stories on our show ever since. Host Sasha Khokha joins Steven  as they  revisit some of those neighbors, including a 94-year-old therapist whose home was saved by her sons, a renter who lost her home of 15 years, and an artist who is working on a community art project as she waits for...

This week we're featuring two stories from our friends at the Bay Curious podcast. 

San Francisco’s Historic ‘Relief Cottages,’ Built After the 1906 Earthquake, Are Hidden in Plain Sight

After the 1906 Earthquake and Fire leveled 80% of San Francisco, more than a quarter of a million residents were temporarily displaced. People who had the means left the city, but many low income San Franciscans didn’t have that option. City leaders commissioned union carpenters to build small cottages to house the refugees – many of whom the city relied upon to help rebuild the city.These “earthquake shacks” gave...

San Francisco Airport’s Fear of Flying Clinic Welcomes Nervous Passengers Aboard

If your stomach drops at the thought of getting on an airplane, you’re not alone. Millions of Americans share a fear of flying. Some psychologists say the way through it is to rewire the brain, by gradually facing the very thing that feels dangerous. But you can’t just hop on a plane whenever you want to practice. That’s where a Bay Area program hosted at San Francisco International Airport can help. For nearly 50 years, they’ve been helping uneasy travelers get back in the air...

This week marks the one-year anniversary of the Los Angeles wildfires, two of the most destructive fires in California history. We bring you an excerpt from a new podcast, The Palisades Fire: A Sandcastles Special, which documents the community-led efforts to fight the Palisades Fire. Host Adriana Cargill highlights the role of the “Community Brigade” – a first-in-the-nation model that allows trained civilians to work alongside firefighters when wildfires hit. The podcast explores whether these kinds of brigades might be replicated in other places as California continues to grapple with more devastating – and more unpredictable – wildfires.

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Luis Rodriguez credits reading and writing for keeping him resilient his whole life. He’s best known for his 1993 memoir Always Running: La Vida Loca: Gang Days in L.A., which chronicles how he joined a gang at age 11, found himself homeless and using heroin, and wound up in the juvenile justice system. He went on to write 17 books of poetry, fiction, and non-fiction, and he served as poet laureate of Los Angeles from 2014 to 2017. As part of our series on resilience, host Sasha Khokha sits down with Luis Rodriguez to talk about his life and work, and what ad...

This holiday week, we’re bringing you two joyful stories from 2025. 

Reena Esmail’s childhood in Los Angeles had two soundtracks: the Western classical music her parents loved, and the old, scratchy Bollywood tapes her paternal grandparents would play over and over. Those multicultural influences shaped what would become the driving question of her work: how do you invite people from different cultures onto the same stage to build a relationship and create music together? Composing is how Esmail has made her mark — by putting Western classical musicians in conversation with Indian artists, building bridges between violinists and sit...

Have you been to every one of California’s 58 counties? Reporter Lisa Morehouse has. For more than ten years, she’s travelled around the state, profiling people at the heart of food and agriculture for her series California Foodways. On this week’s show, for Lisa’s 58th and final story, she takes us to her home county, Santa Clara, to visit a local Chinese restaurant. Over its 55-year history, Chef Chu’s has witnessed fast-paced change in Silicon Valley, and has been visited by luminaries in entertainment, politics and business. Both the family behind it, and the community it feeds...

San Jose is home to the largest Sikh temple – or gurdwara – in the U.S., and for decades, it has been a place of sanctuary and refuge. But lately, another feeling has settled in for worshippers: fear.ICE enforcement has ramped up over the past year, with some of the sharpest increases in California. And Sikhs, many who are from the Indian state of Punjab, worry their sacred spaces could become targets. South Asians aren’t always the first group that comes to mind when we talk about undocumented communities. But according to U.S. Customs and Border Enforcement, 35,000 people...

This year, for the first time since it was established in 1988, the U.S. did not commemorate World AIDS Day on December 1. That’s despite more than 630,000 deaths from HIV-related illnesses in 2024, according to the World Health Organization.

This week, we’re traveling back in time, to visit a queer church that provided refuge and support to San Francisco’s gay community during the height of the AIDS crisis. We’re bringing you the first episode of a new podcast called We All Get To Heaven, which draws on sound from 1,200 cassette tapes – recordings of songs, memorials, and sermon...

The fierce Santa Ana winds that whipped the Palisades and Eaton fires into deadly infernos also spared precious things you’d think would have been the first to burn: old family photos, children’s art work, postcards, even pages of old sheet music. Those things sometimes blew across neighborhoods, and people are still finding them as fire cleanup continues. Reporter Steven Cuevas introduces us to an Altadena resident who has made it her mission to return these fragile paper keepsakes to their owners.

And we got to the Andrerson Valley to visit a Grange hall. These community gath...

For the last few weeks, The California Report Magazine has been sharing conversations between transgender and nonbinary kids and the people in their lives who love and support them — a series called Love You for You.

As we enter Transgender Awareness Month, we shift the lens toward intergenerational stories — young people in their twenties in conversation with transgender elders whose lives trace the long arc of LGBTQ+ activism in California.

These bonus episodes carry heavier histories and more mature themes than the family conversations featured earlier in the series. They offer deeper context to the ongo...

For the last few weeks, we’ve been sharing conversations between transgender and nonbinary kids and the people in their lives who love and support them — a series called Love You for You.

As we enter Transgender Awareness Month, we shift the lens toward intergenerational stories — young people in their twenties in conversation with transgender elders whose lives trace the long arc of LGBTQ+ activism in California.

These bonus episodes carry heavier histories and more mature themes than the family conversations featured earlier in the series. They offer deeper context to the ongoing fight for safety...

Our Love You for You series features conversations between trans and nonbinary youth from across California and the people in their lives who love and mentor them: parents, grandparents, siblings and others.

This week, we’ll explore how parents stretch, adapt, and grow alongside their children, learning in real time what it means to support their trans and gender-expansive kids. 

We’ll hear a conversation between a 12-year-old transgender girl and her mom, that ranges from the joys of dancing and shopping, to confronting the current anti-trans climate. We’ll also meet two gender-expansive siblings, who tal...

Our Love You for You series features conversations between trans and nonbinary youth from across California and the people in their lives who love and mentor them: parents, grandparents, siblings and others.

This week, we’ll hear how grandparents' hearts can be moved by having a transgender grandchild, and how that can expand the worldview of someone who may not be connected to the LGBTQ+ community. We’ll hear from a 10-year-old transgender girl in conversation with her older sister and their grandfather. He lives in a rural California county, where many of his neighbors and hunting budd...

Part 1 of our new series Love You for You features trans and nonbinary youth in conversation with people in their lives who love, support, and mentor them. Gender-expansive kids have been in the headlines a lot lately, but we rarely hear them tell their own stories. Our series highlights kids who are thriving, with complex, multifaceted identities that go beyond gender. This week, we’ll hear from an 8-year-old in conversation with their mom, and a 16-year-old talking to his “Aunty,” his mom’s best friend, who came out as a lesbian at his age.

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