Davis has just gone through a local news media earthquake. We’re talking about the Davis Enterprise’s decision to lay off Wary I columnist Bob Dunning (left, in photo), which shocked and/or angered thousands of people in town. In less than a week, Dunning had restarted his column and sports writing on Substack, with enough paid subscriptions to more than replace his salary at the Enterprise. Within days, Comings & Goings local business columnist Wendy Weitzel left the paper voluntarily to also move her work to Substack.
The evolving Davis news and information story has many parts. Today on Davisville we talk with local small business tech entrepreneur Brian Bolz (on right in photo), who helped Dunning and Weitzel get started on Substack, where they quickly found audiences. Bolz discusses how he became involved, plus his goals, what he’s doing, and how he sees the larger picture.
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These days, you can get all the quick takes and snap judgments you want. They seem easier to find than facts, partly because they're catnip to the algorithms and impulses that drive social media. Today’s guest is doing something different with opinions — something more difficult, in my book, and more useful, especially in the long run. Since fall 2022, Claire Schad has been writing opinion columns for the California Aggie, the student newspaper and news organization at the University of California, Davis.
Writing opinion columns will seem like an outdated, narrow pursuit — newspapers in any format have much less influence than they did — but a good column that hits its mark generates ideas, not just reactions. It can create room for nuance, for admitting and engaging different points of view. Writers learn about people and ideas, and how to make ideas useful. How to move them forward.
Claire is graduating in June, and we talk about her experiences today on Davisville.
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Long before he flew four missions on the space shuttle, Steve Robinson was the first DJ of a now-vanished Davis commercial radio station, KYLO, in the late 1970s. Decades later, he’s a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at UC Davis, and director of its Center for Space Flight Research — and he will soon return to local radio as occasional fill-in host for Rod Moseanko, host of the station’s Silver Nine Volt Heart. (The photo shows Steve, left, and Rod in the KDRT studio May 11.)
Today on Davisville we enjoy a serious conversation about space flight, plus hear Steve’s memories of KYLO — including what happened when he told listeners he was running out of records to play — and learn what brought him to KDRT. After he returned Davis in 2012, Robinson said, “I was looking for some good radio,” and found it with Rod’s show. “I thought, ‘this kind of radio is still alive. It was very exciting to me.’ ”
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The Capitol Corridor trains that connect Davis with the Bay Area and Sacramento are evolving as the service recovers from the pandemic. The corridor is adding passenger cars and resuming a full weekday schedule this year, experimenting with a tap-on/tap-off payment system to eventually replace tickets, and proceeding with plans to change access in Davis so that passengers board from an expanded center platform reached via an underpass (or perhaps an overpass) from the parking lot and Olive Drive.
Longer term, the service plans to shift to hydrogen or possibly electric power for its trains. We talk about all this, as well as this year's ridership trends and efforts to improve their timekeeping, on Davisville with Rob Padgette, managing director of the service. Today’s program updates our conversation about the corridor from early 2022. |
In Harboring Happiness: 101 Ways to be Happy, author Dan Brook says happiness is worth pursuing despite all the awful things happening across the globe. He bases this on research and on what he has learned during his decades as an instructor and sociologist (he earned master’s and doctorate degrees in sociology from UC Davis in the 1990s).
So how do you become happier? You probably have to work at it. His suggestions range from “getting more experiences,” and feeling gratitude, to “being around people who make you happy” and converting the fear of missing out into the joy of missing out.
“I’m happy not because I ignore the problems of the world, but in spite of them,” he says. Work to fix what’s wrong, but “being miserable does not help solve those problems.” He elaborates on his ideas during today’s Davisville.
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In winter 2023 we talked with Andy Jones and Margaret Merrill of UC Davis about ChatGPT, a new artificial-intelligence app that was setting off alarms for its advanced ability to "write" reports and articles. On today’s Davisville they report that among the faculty they work with, the sense of panic present then has now eased “quite a bit.” People know more about the limits of chatbots, and are asking more about how and where to use the tools in teaching, instead of just fearing them as a plagiarism machine.
We talk about handling chatbot hallucinations, resisting the biases that chatbots suck into their text databases, and hear a few examples of how UC Davis instructors are using the tools in their classrooms.
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Today’s Davisville is a story about the new — and about getting started in Davis, as well as art, life after the pandemic, ambition, and the weird. We talk with Toni Rizzo and Harry Greer, who along with Stephanie Peel have started the Secret Spot, an arts gallery and music lounge business that opened this month in a former house at 117 D St. downtown. #ConstructiveDiscomfort #RookieRoom #ArtMania! #LockdownArt #DavisSound #ArtAsTherapy #PsychicScream #HelpingOthers The photo shows, from left, Toni, Harry and Stephanie
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Finding information and news about Davis is harder than it should be. The Enterprise still prints and posts local stories, but lacks the scope and heft it had before the rise of internet technology decimated newspapers as a business. Other paid sources of news and information have also retreated, turning what used to be a town commons for communication into a series of walled gardens, with information about local events and news scattered across a variety of formats, outlets, and channels. If the information is present at all.
Autumn Labbe-Renault, the executive director of Davis Media Access (the parent of KDRT), thinks DMA could work with the community to create a new source of information and news about Davis, and eventually Yolo County. The venture has the working title of civic information hub. The idea is in its very early stages, and we talk about it today on Davisville.
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Measure N is the latest Davis schools parcel tax to come before voters — the latest in a string that goes back 40 years. Relatively few school districts in California have such taxes, and few levy as much as Davis does.
The sample ballot for the March 5th election presents the arguments for and against Measure N, plus a list of what the $768 tax supports. For context, today’s Davisville talks with John Fensterwald, an editor at large with EdSource, about how Californians pay for public schools, the pros and cons of parcel taxes, and why Davis receives less money per student from the state than most other districts receive. EdSource, a nonprofit, reports on education issues in California.
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The Artery co-op/gallery/store turns 50 this year. Most of its downtown Davis neighbors from the 1970s are gone, so how has the Artery lasted? Heidi Bekebrede and Adele Shaw, two of its members, list several reasons on today’s Davisville, and some might surprise you — they include the hours (most art galleries don’t open daily), the variety (most don’t display so many artists), members who work in the shop, turnover that brings in new artists, fresh displays, and a town with lots of people interested in the arts. The train station a block away helps too.
We also talk about the store’s name, how they find members, the other meaning of “cute” in Bekebrede’s Cuteware, the way Putah Creek inspires Shaw’s paintings, and how managing a 32-machine laundromat in San Francisco introduced Shaw to first- and second-hand stories of her neighborhood from many decades before. |
