Category : miscellaneous

Failures, fiascos, and secret successes: A.V. Club critic Nathan Rabin

Colin Marshall talks to Nathan Rabin, head writer at The A.V. Club, the cultural magazine published by The Onion. There, he began a regular feature called My Year of Flops, in which he spent a year writing up movies that performed poorly at the box o...

Trailing the honorable "Chinese" detective: Charlie Chan scholar Yunte Huang

Colin Marshall talks to Yunte Huang, poet, professor of English at UC Santa Barbara, and author of Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and His Rendezvous with American History. In the book, Huang combines a personal narrative of...

Our symbiosis with technology: Wired co-founder Kevin Kelly

Colin Marshall talks to Kevin Kelly, co-founder of and “Senior Maverick” at Wired magazine. In addition to his copious online writing on technology and culture, he’s published such books as New Rules for the New Economy and Out of Control: The New Bi...

Against (wrongheaded) reading: literature professor and psychotherapist Mikita Brottman

Colin Marshall talks to literature professor, psychotherapist, and cultural critic Mikita Brottman, author of The Solitary Vice: Against Reading. In the book, Brottman challenges a host of conventional wisdom and received ideas about the value of rea...

Wet October. Record November Highs. MEI Ends Record Plunge.

AHPS Precipitation (Percent of Normal) For 30 Days Ending November 1, 2010. October was an unusually wet month in coastal Southern California. Many areas recorded more than an inch above normal rainfall, and some as much as 3 inches a...

Capturing the image of capturing the sound: documentarian Nicholas Sherman on field recordist Gordon Hempton

Colin Marshall talks to documentary filmmaker Nicholas Sherman, director of Soundtracker: A Portrait of Gordon Hempton. Hempton, one of the world’s best-known field recordists, has dedicated his life to traveling the United States and the world to cr...

CDFIs And Transit-Oriented Development

In October 2010, the Center for Transit-Oriented Development published a report exploring the role community development finance institutions could play in promoting equitable transit-oriented development. This document is an initial effort to...

For adventurous cinema, whether making or watching: film critic David Sterritt

Colin Marshall talks to film critic David Sterritt, chairman of the National Society of Film Critics and former longtime critic at the Christian Science Monitor. Sterritt’s books, from titles on Jean-Luc Godard and Alfred Hitchcock to more recent one...

Record Temperature in Los Angeles Followed by Record Rainfall.

AHPS Precipitation Totals For the 7-day Period Ending 10/07/10 12z Just a week after Downtown Los Angeles (USC) set a new all time temperature record of 113°F, an unseasonably strong cutoff upper level low set up shop over Southe...

Southern California's radio pointillist: Off-Ramp host John Rabe

Colin Marshall talks to John Rabe, longtime public radio personality and host of KPCC’s Off-Ramp, a weekly examination of Southern California and especially Los Angeles. The show’s interviews and field pieces provide, as Rabe puts it, a “pointillist”...

Highest Temperature Ever Recorded in Downtown Los Angeles. Thundershowers and Rainbows. La Nina and the Southern California 2010-2011 Winter Precipitation Outlook.

Composite Precipitation for Eight Moderate to Strong Transitional La Ninas (Mouse Over Image is Composite Precipitation for 16 La Ninas) Updated October 6, 2010. Replaced 1975 with 2007 in composite of climate division precipitation...

Preserving Affordable Housing Near Transit: Case Studies from Atlanta, Denver, Seattle and Washington, D.C.

Reconnecting America, Enterprise and the National Housing Trust have released a collection of case studies examining what cities are doing to ensure that affordable housing isn't lost as cities pursue transit-oriented development. "Preserving Aff...

Changing yourself by doing it yourself: Boing Boing co-founder Mark Frauenfelder

Colin Marshall talks to Mark Frauenfelder, editor of Make magazine and co-founder the zine which has become the massively popular blog Boing Boing. His latest book, Made By Hand: Searching for Meaning in a Throwaway World, is the story of his quest t...

Life as invention: blogger/entrepreneur/non-conformist Chris Guillebeau

Colin Marshall talks to blogger, entrepreneur, and liver of the unconventional life Chris Guillebeau. Having written his blog The Art of Non-Conformity: Unconventional Strategies for Life, Work, and Travel for “a small army of remarkable people” sinc...

Personal aesthetics and internet culture: Put This On creators Jesse Thorn and Adam Lisagor

Colin Marshall talks to Jesse Thorn and Adam Lisagor, creators of the new men’s style web series and blog Put This On, which explore all facets of the art of “dressing like a grown-up.” Thorn is also the host of Public Radio International’s The Sound...