Nov 6, 2025
Ashlee Vance reports from San Francisco's underground robot fight clubs, where humanoid machines controlled by virtual reality pilots battle in steel cages before roaring crowds. China dominates the hardware, America provides the spectacle, and artificial intelligence makes the robots increasingly lethal. The technology...
Oct 30, 2025
Todd S. Purdum, veteran journalist and author of the new book "Desi Arnaz: The Man Who Invented Television," explains how a Cuban refugee revolutionized Hollywood from his adopted home in Los Angeles. Though underappreciated as a showbiz entrepreneur, Arnaz pioneered the three-camera sitcom format, shifted...
Oct 23, 2025
John Freeman, author of "California Rewritten: A Journey Through the Golden State’s New Literature," talks about how California has become America's new literary center, challenging New York's dominance. He discusses the pandemic book club that sparked his journey, the state's evolving mythology, and how diverse...
Oct 16, 2025
Filmmaker Ari Gold turns the camera on his own family in "Brother Verses Brother," an ambitious one-shot musical that follows him and his identical twin brother searching for meaning through the streets of San Francisco's North Beach, alongside their 99-year-old novelist father, Herb. Gold explains how this experimental...
Oct 9, 2025
Dina Gilio-Whitaker, author of the new book "Who Gets to Be Indian?" explores how California became ground zero for Native American identity fraud — from Hollywood's early film lots to today's casino capitalism and tribal disenrollment crisis. The state's confluence of entertainment industry, counterculture movements,...