Davisville

We have two main threads today: the chaos at Twitter since Elon Musk took over, including why the social platform matters, plus a conversation about social media and whether we’ll ever figure it out. Cindy Shen says we will. She’s a social media expert and professor of communication at the University of California, Davis, and points out that people have always figured out how to get a handle on disruptive technology -- including things we no longer view as technology, such as the printing press.

“Over time, as people become more accustomed to the technology, we don’t see technology as this causal agent," she says. "We realize that humans have agency as well. ... We have a say about how we want to use the technology, maybe to maximize its positive impact and minimize its harms.”

How do we get to this better place? Digital media literacy is a start.

Yiyun Li’s reputation as a writer continues to rise. Her books have earned her several major awards and have taken her to Princeton, where she teaches and serves as director of its creative writing program. In spring 2015, when she was teaching writing at UC Davis, she appeared on Davisville to talk about her work and the short story “A Sheltered Woman” that had won her what was then her latest award. Today we replay that interview from May 18, 2015.

There’s a lot of magic in Vince Guaraldi’s music, especially A Charlie Brown Christmas. This fall Craft Recordings is releasing extended deluxe versions of the holiday classic, and we talk with three of the people involved: brothers Jason and Sean Mendelson, whose late father Lee Mendelson was the executive producer of the Peanuts holiday specials, and Davis author Derrick Bang, who wrote the expanded CD/LP’s liner notes.

We also talk about the soundtrack to It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, which Craft released in August.

Holiday music would be very different if Lee Mendelson hadn’t brought Guaraldi and Peanuts creator Charles Schulz together. We hear about how they met, talk about Guaraldi and the music — and Jason gamely recreates the moment when, as a kid, he was voicing Marcie in the Happy New Year, Charlie Brown TV special and the character gave Charlie Brown a smooch.

It’s 1909, and the Golden Fleece Traveling Players have arrived at the Woodland Opera House to present a melodrama, Daughter of the West. But strange accidents disrupt preparations for the performance — and the ghost of William Porter, who has haunted the Opera House since dying there in a fire in 1892, takes credit for the trouble when he appears to one of the company’s players.

This is a partial synopsis of the WOH’s current play, Ghost of the Woodland Opera House, and here’s the Halloween angle — some of the story is true. Today on Davisville we talk with Matthew Abergel and Bob Cooner, the co-authors of the play, which Matthew is also directing.