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."
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.
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 Camp Amache. At a time when hate crimes against Asian Americans continue to rise, activists say it couldn't come at a more important time. Today, we'll talk with Caitlyn Kim, a Colorado Public Radio reporter who's covering the push to turn Camp Amache into a national historical site. And we'll speak with Bruce Embry, who has been making an annual pilgrimage to Manzanar for over 50 years. Embry's mother was incarcerated there.
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 of Valenzuela’s magical year from so long ago. It influenced many levels of American society in ways that still resonate today. And you gotta call it by this name: Fernandomania. Our guest is L.A. Times sports columnist Dylan Hernandez.
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 life of George Floyd.
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 country. But it didn't come easy. One of the key points of contention? What California students should learn about the fraught history between Israel and Palestine. Our guests are Max Samarov, executive director of research and strategy for Stand With Us, and Samia Shoman, Palestine Teaching Project member and former advisory board member for California's ethnic studies curriculum program.
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 skeptics — politicians, media pundits and a few scientists — don't believe the virus jumped from animals to humans. They think Chinese scientists let the virus loose somehow. L.A. Times staff writer James Rainey takes over the mic to explain why it’s a theory that just won’t go away.
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 foam projectiles. In some cases, the protesters and reporters covering these events were arrested and even shot with these projectiles, with police alleging various offenses. The police contend that the people assembled at these rallies failed to follow orders. Today, we talk to freelance journalist Lexis-Olivier Ray about what it's been like to cover these protests and to L.A. Times reporter Kevin Rector about a federal injunction that would temporarily restrict the LAPD's use of less-lethal weapons.
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.
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 Flamin’ Hot Cheetos. Now, an L.A. Times investigation has cast doubts on those claims, and the internet is, well, aflame. We get some insight into the matter from Times business reporter Sam Dean and our very own senior podcast producer Denise Guerra.
