Skateboarding is a mainstay of California street culture, from San Diego to San Francisco and beyond. It’s so popular that L.A. County filled outdoor skateparks with sand earlier in the pandemic so no one could grind on them.
But during the pandemic, skateboard sales surged — and communities long marginalized from the sport are now making their own spaces.
Today we talk to reporter Cerise Castle, who’s covering and participating in this rise, and skateboarders from various parts of America — including Washington, D.C., and the Navajo Nation — tell us why they skate.
An earlier version of this episode was published Nov. 5, 2021.
On this episode of “The Breakdown’s” “End of Year Extravaganza,” NLW is joined by Tom Shaughnessy. Tom is a co-founder at Delphi Digital, where he invests in early-stage innovation in the crypto space.
NYDIG, the institutional-grade platform for bitcoin, is making it possible for thousands of banks who have trusted relationships with hundreds of millions of customers, to offer Bitcoin. Learn more at NYDIG.com/NLW.
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“The Breakdown” is written, produced by and features Nathaniel Whittemore aka NLW, with editing by Rob Mitchell, research by Scott Hill and additional production support by Eleanor Pahl. Adam B. Levine is our executive producer and our holiday theme music is “Spike The Eggnog” by Two Dudes. The music you heard today behind our sponsor is “Dark Crazed Cap” by Isaac Joel. Image credit: tolgart/E+/Getty Images, modified by CoinDesk.
Lydia Davies is from the UK originally, but she has lived all over the world. She was Born in Thailand, and has lived in Southeast Asia, Singapore, Alaska, the Middle East and now in Houston. She has always been into sports - playing, supporting, etc. When she was 16 years old, she signed on to a music label as a singer and pianist, traveling around the world to perform. When she left the music industry, she got really into technology. As she opened a performing arts academy, she ended up building her own website and app for the business.
During COVID in 2020, she starting creating a framework for a golf app, for her and her husband to find people to play golf with. She wanted the app to have mechanics like a dating app, with a social aspect to see who was down to play some golf... worldwide.
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From Prince Philip to Desmond Tutu, from an anti-racism campaigner and member of the Auschwitz Girls’ Orchestra to a war surgeon focused on civilians to an impoverished Ethiopian whose school for the poor educated 120,000 students: our obituaries editor reflects on the famed and the lesser-known figures who died in 2021.
In which an ultra-luxury Mercedes becomes the car of choice for rock stars and despots worldwide, and Ken wants to buy the least fascist doorbell. Certificate #49472.
Banksy is the world's most famous living artist, yet no one knows who he is. For more than twenty years, his wryly political and darkly humorous spray paintings have appeared mysteriously on urban walls around the globe, generating headlines and controversy. Art critics disdain him, but the public (and the art market) love him. With Banksy: Completed (MIT Press, 2021), artist and critic Carol Diehl is the first author to probe the depths of the Banksy mystery. Through her exploration of his paintings, installations, writings, and Academy Award-nominated film, Exit Through the Gift Shop, Diehl proves unequivocally that there's more to Banksy than the painting on the wall.
Seeing Banksy as the ultimate provocateur, Diehl investigates the dramas that unfold after his works are discovered, with all of their social, economic, and political implications. She reveals how this trickster rattles the system, whether during his month-long 2013 self-styled New York “residency” or his notorious Dismaland of 2015, a full-scale dystopian “family theme park unsuitable for children” dedicated to the failure of capitalism. Banksy's work, Diehl shows, is a synthesis of conceptual art, social commentary, and political protest, played out not in museums but where it can have the most effect—on the street, in the real world. The questions Banksy raises about the uses of public and private property, the role of the global corporatocracy, the never-ending wars, and the gap between artworks as luxury goods and as vehicles of social expression, have never been more relevant.
Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at galina.limorenko@epfl.ch.
In this episode we head to the Hideout in Chicago for an evening of storytelling around rats. Jesse Dukes, Curious City’s lead rat reporter shares some stories from a trip we took to Lincoln Park’s rattiest alley. And some Chicagoans share their some of their most traumatic rat encounters.
