Unrest builds in Cairo as Egyptian army creates barrier around the presidential palace. Plus, a study finds that cell phone companies dodge rules for natural disasters, Alison Martino and her project Vintage L.A. takes us back in time to the Los Angeles of yore, Eddie Izzard joins us to talk about his run at the Steve Allen Theater in Los Feliz and much more.
Egyptian army moves in to restore order after deadly protests in Cairo
In Egypt last night, street fighting in Cairo left at least six dead and almost 500 wounded. Now as evening approaches, opponents of President Mohamed Morsi are pouring around the presidential palace which is ringed by tanks.
Tensions between the Morsi's Islamic Brotherhood supporters and his secular and Christian opposition have been running high since he vastly expanded his powers two weeks ago.
We speak with Noel King, a journalist who's been based in Cairo for 18 months.
Study finds fringe activists have big influence on anti-Muslim sentiment in media
A new study by the American Sociological Review finds that when it comes to a discussing American Muslims, fringe activists dominate the conversation in the media, and that leads to a predominance of anti-Muslim stories.
Christopher Bail, a sociologist who studies the media at the University of North Carolina and University of Michigan, joins the show to discuss the implications of this research.
ProPublica finds that cell phone companies resist rules for disasters
When disaster strikes — earthquakes, hurricanes, wild fires — we reach for our phones. But as many discovered, most recently in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, cell phones are often quick to fail.
That's a problem, especially considering one-third of Americans have no landline.
A new report out from ProPublica finds that cell phone companies have been resisting rules which would make service more reliable in emergency situations.
ProPublica's Cora Currier joins the show to talk about her report.
Long Beach charter school models learning on 'intellectual virtues'
School district officials in Long Beach have given the green light to a charter school called "Intellectual Virtues Academy." The idea came from two Southern California philosophy professors. They believe by exposing students to classical philosophy, the kids will have a better chance to develop critical thinking skills. KPCC education reporter Adolfo Guzman Lopez reports.
Long Beach school district officials gave the green light to a charter school that'll open next year with the mission to teach “intellectual virtues,” a concept with roots in classical Greek philosophy. Two Southland philosophy professors launched the charter school effort; public school teachers and parents have joined in. Their goal is to instill critical thinking skills they believe are woefully underrepresented in public schools.
The study of how people develop life-long intellectual traits is called virtue epistemology. It's become a branch of philosophy research in the last two decades. Loyola Marymount University philosophy professor Jason Baehr has made it his expertise for more than a decade. But just researching and writing about the topic left him unfulfilled - especially after he saw the way public schools value rapid recall, high IQs, and high scores on multiple-choice tests.
“What that stuff leaves out is a more personal dimension, personal qualities like curiosity, and attentiveness, open mindedness, intellectual carefulness, intellectual thoroughness, important for knowledge and learning,” he said.
Armed with a project grant of more than $1 million from the John Templeton Foundation, Baehr organized a one-week crash course on virtue epistemology for teachers during the summer. National and international experts offered a dozen LA and Orange County educators ideas on how to teach students to become lifelong critical thinkers. The group met in October to talk about how it's working in the classrooms.
12th grade English teacher Katherine Lo said the course taught her to push her students harder to question why they were studying the ancient play Antigone.
“The kids at first gave the expected answers, the expected to hear, develop skills, better readers,” she said.
“OK, what else?” she asked the students. There was a long, uncomfortable pause.
“I didn't jump in and rescue them, I waited. One of my students, she's an inclusion student, she has a learning disability; she raised her hand and I called on her, and she said, 'Well, we read so we can feel less alone.’”
Beautiful, Lo thought. The observation prompted a 10 minute student discussion. Lo said students became much more engaged talking about the 2500-year-old play.
Teachers learn about nurturing critical thinking skills in their teacher education courses and in professional development classes once they’ve begun teaching. San Pedro High School English teacher Jaquie Bryant said none of that training unlocked the secret to teaching critical thinking.
“I never quite understood what that was. And I would try some activities but I didn’t have a language or a frame of mind to know what I was doing with my students,” she said.
Teacher Agustin Viyera said he’s begun getting students to think about what it means to be open minded, intellectually courageous, and intellectually humble as soon as they start their day. He shared a video he took of a morning call-and-response ritual that sounds like intellecual boot camp.
The students in the video nearly yell: “Be intellectually aggressive. Be intellectually humble. Be respectful of all people and things. Sit like a scholar. Be an intellectual leader.” Some of them raise closed fists as they recite.
“Every morning part of our routine is to do our pledge to our country, our pledge to our school, and our pledge to ourselves and our classroom. It’s a two part pledge I make my pledge to them, my pledge is to give them my best, to challenge them, to treat them as scholars,” Viyera said.
His third graders, he said, are developing into an intellectual community with a more sophisticated understanding of what makes a good thinker.
U.C. Irvine researcher Elizabeth van Es says what’s kept this type of classroom approach from taking root on a mass scale in public education is that U.S. public schools have a set of institutionalized routines to educate students that don’t leave much room for such out of the box learning.
“Many educators have been advocating for this type of learning for over a hundred years,” van Es said.
That’s one of the reasons philosopher Jason Baehr and others have set out to turn a philosophical idea of intellectual virtues into a brick and mortar, independent charter school.
Baehr, a Biola University philosophy colleague, and former teacher Bob Covolo and others opened the board meeting of the future Intellectual Virtues Academy at a Cal State Long Beach classroom on a recent evening.
“I just want to start off by saying this is exciting and I’m thrilled to be a part of something really valuable,” Covolo said.
Board member Shelly Milsap said she plans to enroll her three school-age daughters in the Intellectual Virtues Academy when they’re old enough.
“It’s not just a philosophical endeavour, I’m an implementer. I come from a business background and it’s really important to me that this doesn’t just maintain an ideas driven concept that’s actually being applied and is accountable and we have action oriented results,” she said.
Long Beach school district officials approved the school to launch a sixth grade class in the fall and seventh and eighth grades in subsequent years. Finding a suitable facility - and raising the money to sustain it - are big concerns, board members said.
Meeting standardized test requirements that require few critical thinking skills should be another big concern for the school, said U.C. Berkeley education researcher Janelle Scott.
“What happens if the teachers are teaching in in the way that more grounded in this model and the students don’t perform on the assessments in the way that they had hoped. Do you then abandon that approach in favor of something more traditional or do you persist?” she asked.
Founders of the charter school maintain that if they teach students to model the thinking skills and traits of the ancient philosophers, mastery of any subject matter will follow.
Urban Air project hopes to transform billboards into living ecosystems
There are more than 5,800 billboards in Los Angeles. You drive by them all the time, maybe not even registering what they're advertising; could be a car, could be a burger. But what if one caught your eye not for what it was selling, but because it wasn't an ad at all?
Producer Leo Duran has this story about one man sees a new possibility for these billboards, and is trying to change how you see them, too.
Sculpture artist Stephen Glassman is on the hunt for the perfect billboard. Driving down Lincoln Boulevard, he passes through Venice until one billboard, three stories high, catches his attention. In particular, he’s attracted to the frame of the billboard.
“It's tall and simple, and it's just got a great kind of symmetry, and it has a lot of space around it. I think it would look quite beautiful,” Glassman said.
He is looking to use the billboards for something other than advertisements; he wants to replace them with a wall of bamboo and streaks of green. The idea is that this picturesque image of nature hovering above the cars will transform what can be a stressful, traffic-filled commute into moments of zen.
To do that, Glassman has started a Kickstarter campaign called Urban Air. He wants people to re-think the world beyond their dashboards, and consider alternate uses.
“When you take that advertising away, what you see clearly is that we have a whole other layer of infrastructure in our landscape that these structures offer. And what can be done with that?” he asks.
Billboards have been used as canvases, before. Two years ago, the Museum of Contemporary Art commissioned 21 artists to display their designs on billboards across Los Angeles.
But Glassman is bringing together a more eclectic group, including structural engineers to help design the façade, environmentalists and plumbers to help measure the bamboo's ecosystem, and even the billboard industry is getting in on the act.
The outdoor ad company Summit Media will donate a billboard on Lincoln Boulevard in Venice to serve as the prototype, in a barren area of telephone poles and radio towers, right next to an IHOP.
To build on this location, he's hopes to rais $100,000 from Kickstarter. The money will go to retrofitting the billboard, constructing the planters, and installing the technology to monitor the ecosystem. It’s a lot of work for a relatively simple concept.
“You want to design for the viewing experience, and billboards are really designed for the drive by experience, so as an artwork, you want that scale of impact,” said Glassman. “That velocity, that context of velocity. You have not very much time to say something very complex…it's just a flower arrangement on a major scale. That's all it is.”
The campaign ends December 11th, and if he's successful, he'll install more permanent versions around Los Angeles.
PHOTOS: Going back in time with Vintage LA's Alison Martino
If the names Bullock's, Dino's Lodge, and the Fish Shanty mean anything to you, chances are you grew up in L.A. during a certain era.
You know just how much Southern California has changed in recent decades, and you probably miss the City of Angels that once was.
Alison Martino shares your sense of nostalgia. In fact, she revels in it. She's the founder of a Website and Facebook page called Vintage L.A. It's a repository of photos, films and other artifacts from the Los Angeles of yore. She joins the show to discuss the project.
Interview Highlights:
What about your childhood led you to be interested in historic L.A.?
“I am a native, born in 1970, and I’ve seen four decades of change. My father was an entertainer, so I was exposed to some pretty interesting places growing up. They took me to a lot of the restaurants and didn’t leave me home with baby sitters. My father is Al Martino, who was in the “Godfather,” played Johnny Fontaine. He was also a pretty big super star in the sixties, he had a lot of hits so I grew up around Capital Records, and through those connections I was able to go to restaurants and see Dean Martin and sit with Sammy Davis Jr. and ever since those days I have fallen in love with that era, and since those days I have never really fallen in love with the new times, so I’ve been in a time of nostalgia my whole life.”
Do you have a favorite story from childhood?
“One of my favorites is I miss all of the Polynesian restaurants around, especially one called the Luau which was on Beverly Hills and Rodeo Drive, which actually had a moat around it. It was great because families could bring their kids and the kids didn’t feel like they were going to grown-up places and they could have fun walking around and looking at the koi fish, and the drinks would come out on fire. Those places are pretty much gone now, and there was another one called the Islander that had tiki torches lit up in flames all year round, and it’s now a Starbucks or something. I also miss Chasen’s a lot, we would see John Wayne and Frank Sinatra in there.”
Can you explain the Chasen’s atmosphere?
“It’s now a Bristol Farms, though they’ve kept some of the booths inside, thank God. It’s very different now. These places weren’t around for fifteen minutes., they weren’t the big hot spots and then they die out a year later. They were institutions for years and years and years, 40, 50, 60 years. I’m surprised so many are gone now. I don’t think that there is another place around, besides Dan Tana’s and maybe Musso & Frank’s that I frequent that are still institutions with red booths and dark lighting and the waiters seem a little older. One of the bartenders at Dan Tana’s has been there since 1963. Some of the new places I’m not so in to going to.”
How did you get into vintage photography?
“I started collecting a lot of photographs through the years, because I worked on a show on E! channel called “Mysteries and Scandals” for five years, about the golden age of Hollywood. Stories on Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, Jane Mansfield, we did them all. But I needed to fill the programs with photographs not just of them but also of the era. So I started to fall in love with that, even more than finding photos of movie stars I was fascinated with the era, the décor, the clothes, especially what L.A. used to look like.
"So I started collecting photographs from everywhere I could find from magazines, scanning form old books, ten fifteen years ago I could to Hollywood Boulevard and they would have these cinema shops I could just go and collect photos from. I have about 30,000 pictures and they are pretty organized. I started this Facebook page and I thought ‘Oh if I have 500 likes I’ll be pretty lucky.’”
What do you think is behind the success of the site?
“I have a take on it, my demographic is huge, I have 12-year-olds that write to me and a 98-year-old man that is on everyday. I think my generation born in 1970 and before that didn’t have the technology that we have now, we didn’t have cell phones some of us didn’t even have answering machines until late eighties, we had to pay attention to what was going on around us. So when I went out to dinner with my family or had to go watch my father at record a session at Capitol Records, I wasn’t distracted by my cell phone or playing a game. I’m not saying that’s terrible for kids, but it’s a different era, we had to pay attention more.
"People write to me and say it seemed like such a different time without the technology. Many photographs I post up of Hollywood Boulevard of businessmen and actresses, all sorts of people who look the time, you know they are all dressed up, are not looking down when they are walking. They aren’t looking down at their phones. That breaks a lot of people’s hearts to see that being the future.”
Could you talk about some of the changes that have gone on?
“There was an amusement park in the middle of West Hollywood that was called Kiddieland. It's gone, obviously, was torn down around 1974 or 1975. Right next door there was Ponyland, you could actually ride ponies around West Hollywood, and now it’s the Beverly Center. That’s a huge change visually. To see an old amusement park with a Ferris wheel and rollercoaster turn into a big stucco building that looks like a prison to me. And Sunset Boulevard has changed so much. Losing Tower Records was just epically tragic. And losing many more records stores and movie theaters, I could go on and on.”
What are some of the great stories that your followers have shared with you?
“A lot of people have a lot of emotional reactions to these photographs. The "wow" factors are those from the 1920s, when people were not alive to see it. The photos from the '60s and '70s get the most reaction because people will say, 'I got married there!' Just yesterday I went to The Rainbow Bar and Grille which used to be the Villa Nova, an old classic restaurant where Marilyn Monroe had her first date with Joe DiMaggio and also where Judy Garland was proposed to by Vincent Minnelli, and upstairs there is the original artwork, they never painted over it. I went up there and took a photo of it and posted it on Facebook and within an hour, somebody posted that his great-aunt painted that. Those are the things that blow my mind.”
So what would you say is better, L.A. now or then?
“Well, I’m still here in L.A. so obviously I haven’t left, as much as a lot of it is gone. But I don’t like the way old historic buildings are ripped down without a second thought, when they could be restored into something. One of the places that is sitting empty right now is the old Robinson’s in Beverly Hills, it’s such an eye sore but I love driving by it everyday. I heard they were going to tear it down, build a bunch of condos, then I heard they might put a Target there, so I don’t know why they can’t just use the structure and just turn the old building into a Target. It would be great to see that old art deco entrance.
"It’s just a shame because a lot of these buildings could be revamped into something. Another restaurant is Scandia, on Sunset Boulevard and Doheny, been there empty for ten years, and I heard it’s going to become a hotel, and I just wish that someone understood. Maybe this page will help people understand that do have money, that want to buy something or purchase some property, maybe they could do something with what’s still there and not take it away from us.”
First AME Church in South LA sues ex-pastor over finances
This week, controversy erupted from the pulpits of one of the oldest churches in Los Angeles. First African Methodist Episcopal Church, the South L.A. megachurch founded in 1872, is embroiled in a bitter lawsuit between church leaders and the former pastor, the Reverend John J. Hunter.
For years, First African Methodist Episcopal Church was a mainstay in the community and politicians of all stripes made it a mandatory pit-stop, but under the leadership of Hunter, allegations of financial impropriety and sexual harrasement marred the church's reputation.
Angel Jennings, reporter with the L.A. Times, joins the show to talk about the conflict.
Survey finds Californians generally more optimistic about the state's future
A new post-election survey by the Public Policy Institute of California shows that California residents are more positive about the direction of the state than they've been in years. However, the results of the annual survey found some stark differences in whose feeling sunny about the future.
From the PPIC site:
Some findings of the current survey:
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Californians show signs of optimism about the state’s future.
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Strong majorities support spending reforms; smaller majorities support lowering the vote thresholds to pass state and local taxes.
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Californians favor a "split roll” property tax but express record-high opposition to taxing services or increasing the vehicle license fee.
John Myers, Political Editor of the ABC affiliate in Sacramento, joins the show to talk about the results of the survey.
PPIC Statewide Survey: Californians and the Future
Eddie Izzard hits LA for series of rare, intimate shows at Steve Allen Theater
Comedian Eddie Izzard has been the headline act at the Hollywood Bowl and he's packed the house at Madison Square Garden, but now you can see him at a tiny, 90-seat theater in Los Feliz.
This week, Izzard kicked off a series of performances at the Trepany House at the Steve Allen Theater, which will run until Dec. 19. Needless to say, fans are happy to have him in L.A. for this rare chance to catch Izzard in such an intimate setting:
Izzard joins the show to talk about why he's performing in such a small space, and to fill us in about his new show, "Force Majeure," which he'll be taking on the road in Europe next year.
Interview Highlights:
For being so popular why are you currently performing at such a small theatre?
“It’s good for developing new material. Its probably a good idea not to go in front of a ten thousand-seater audience, which you could do but it seems like wasting audience members I noticed that the Stones did this, so I sort of stole this idea from them because I am developing new material right now.”
How do you usually come up with this new material?
“Singers always stand in the shower. Woody Allen just did a film on that, so I have this joke about comedians in the shower...we don’t do that. I get most of my ideas on stage. This is not a style I came up with Lenny Bruce and Richard Pryor did this, Billy Connelly was doing it and he influenced me a lot. You are out there and talking and having a conversation with the audience. So I have little ideas I write down and I just zoom out from the ideas.”
How do you prepare for the shows?
“You don’t, you prepare by being confident. Maybe by doing a gig in Geneva in French, like I did last week. It’s a great training, its advanced navy seal of comedy training. If you do it in French surely in English it’s going to be as easy as falling off of a log. It comes from street performing, which I started out as. You react to whatever is going on, noises…it works.”
Sometimes you seem to be writing things down mid-show, are you really taking notes?
“No. Comedy and life I’ve realized, everything is about how to get out of things that don’t work, you mess up and its about how to get out of the mess up. I find that if I just pretend to scribble things on my left hand, its like a Shakespearean aside, that makes me sound very literate, it’s like a stage direction so the audience can hear the stage directions”
Are your shows very different from night to night?
“I’m supposed to record them, but I can’t remember what I say, I know roughly but I can’t remember specifics. It’s exploring, it’s a conversation with the audience. Molten material is the most interesting. If you can keep it fluid, it’s constantly ready to create new material because I tend to flip off and start creating from a fluid series of ideas and you can say oh let’s go this way. Like Alexander Fleming discovering penicillin by an accident. A lot of accidents have happened in life that have helped us create things. And that’s kind of what I’m doing in comedy…Its live and its controlled by my confidence and if I ever lose that confidence then it becomes a very awkward room.”
A lot of your shows seem to appeal to American sensibilities, how do you tweak them to be international?
“I don’t think that’s true. The theory of the universe isn’t American sensibilities, it’s world, it’s progressive sensibilities. The Santa Barbara ‘Clash of the Titans joke,’ that’s not American that’s Greek Gods, the movies are watched all around the world. I choose universal topics. So I talk about the Tour de France, everyone knows what that is. I will talk about Gods and dinosaurs and monarchy and super markets, haircuts, baked potatoes, rabbits, dung, mattresses, all known all around the world. So I’m talking to progressive, positive thinking, open minded, tolerant people who are going to change the world; they are out there. The Monty Python and the Simpsons audience is out there around the world.”
Do you plan out how to end your shows?
“Normally I work out a shape or a free way route that I am doing and I will know when it comes to the end of that. If you are improvising and trying new stuff you’ve just go to look at a clock…when I was in France I was doing it for a couple of weeks and at one show I was tired so I just thought ‘no one knows when it is supposed to end’ so I just sort of said goodbye and walked off the stage and that was that.”
Exclusive clip from Izzard's performance at the Steve Allen Theater on Dec. 5:
Exclusive: Eddie Izzard at the Steve Allen Theater by Take Two Show
Click here to purchase tickets to Izzard's show.
Organized labor mobilizing fast-food workers to unionize
While many in California might see the future as more rosy, the workers serving you burgers at your local fast food joint might not be feeling quite so upbeat. There's more than 2 million of these workers across the U.S.
They work in places like McDonald's and they're among the lowest-paid workers in the country. Most don't belong to unions, but organized labor has taken note and introduced a new approach to mobilize these workers.
Eduardo Porter, economics columnist at the New York Times, joins the show to fill us in about this new effort.
Frank Ocean, Dan Auerbach nab top Grammy noms
Last night the Recording Academy announced nominations for the 55th annual Grammy Awards.
RELATED: Full list of Grammy nominees at grammy.com
The winners won't be announced until February, but NPR music critic Ann Powers joins us today to talk about the nominees.