On Thursday, Take Two explores why it's routine for federal officials to resign amidst problems and scandals, what Lyft's new carpool program is all about and, then, we'll talk to one Hawaiian resident who lives just two miles away from an erupting volcano (slowly, mind you).
Should federal officials resign when problems arise?
Secret Service Director Julia Pierson announced her resignation in light of failed efforts to stop fence jumpers from entering the White House last month, and other lax security measures.
This appears to be the typical move of any chief whose organization experiences scandal or suffers through a series of mistakes, but is it really best for the organization?
Rosabeth Moss Kanter, from Harvard Business School, says yes.
“It’s a good time to resign when things happen on your watch that you either say you don't know about, try to cover up and aren’t doing anything to fix,” Kanter said.
Kanter has written about leaders who have stayed with companies through turmoil, like Cisco and Boeing. Those businesses are now thriving. But Kanter says there is a difference between those situations and what happened with Pierson.
“The difference is whether or not the leader has a credible plan that’s being executed for making a difference and also has credibility because of earlier successes,” Moss Kanter said. “But if you come in ... and you have nothing to show for it, [then] you can’t demonstrate progress.”
Hong Kong leader refuses to step down as protests continue
Pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong continued today, as the territory's leader refused demands from protestors that he resign.
Hong Kong's chief executive, CY Leung, did offer to hold talks with the protestors in an effort to defuse a week of massive street demonstrations. The student leaders of the protest haven't yet responded to the offer.
McClatchy's Beijing bureau chief Stuart Leavenworth is in Hong Kong and joined Take Two for the latest on the protests.
SoCal locals rally in support of Hong Kong protesters
While thousands of protesters gathered in the streets of Hong Kong, locals in Southern California came together, too.
In downtown Los Angeles' Grand Park, hundreds of demonstrators Wednesday night wanted to show their own support for friends and family overseas, KPCC's Josie Huang reports.
Read the full story: Hong Kong protesters get Los Angeles support
Lyft introduces carpooling to its list of services
The percentage of workers who carpool has decreased by half since 1980, according to Census numbers. Now, the ride-sharing platform Lyft wants to make carpooling cool again, but with a twist for the smartphone era. The company has introduced Lyft Line, a program that uses an algorithm to match users based on their routes.
"The idea with Lyft is really creating a realtime matching system that is infinite in its possibilities and routes so that you can go wherever you are to wherever you're going at any time of the day," says Veronica Juarez, director of government relations for the ride sharing program Lyft.
The new program has been met with some pushback. State regulators have sent letters to both Lyft and Uber, which is also testing a carpool service, warning what the companies are doing may be illegal.
Undeterred, Lyft launched its carpool service this week in Los Angeles.
Juarez is hopeful this effort will make it "easier for elected leaders to see the possibility of the Lyft platform and to see that this really could be a solution to a problem that [cities] have."
Residents in Hawaii stuck in 'lava limbo' as massive flow nears village
Hundreds of residents in the Hawaiian town of Pahoa live near a slow-marching lava flow that's been advancing for weeks. Though officials said Wednesday that the flow had stalled, it's expected to resume soon.
At Kaleo's Bar and Grill in Pahoa, owner Leslie Lai said business has actually shot up as people visit to get a "last glimpse" of the area.
"The mayor has set up office right here in Pahoa, so they're there to answer any and all questions," she said. Despite the threat, dealing with volcanos is part of living on the island, she said.
"Everybody has a plan A and a plan B and we're feeling quite comfortable," she said.
Why some volcanic eruptions are more dangerous than others
While palm trees and cool breezes make Hawaii a vacation favorite, this slice of paradise sits on active volcanoes.
Right now, a slow lava flow is making its way to the town of Pahoa, where hundreds of residents and local businesses are keeping an eye on it from just a couple miles away.
Hawaii isn't the only place where volcanoes are erupting. Similar activity is happening in Iceland, Indonesia, Ecuador, Mexico and, of course, there was the recent eruption at Mount Ontake in Japan which killed more than three dozen people.
Some volcanic eruptions are more dangerous than others, says Dr. Rosaly Lopes, senior research scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and an expert on volcanoes.
Molten rock, or magma, comes under pressure, but it's how that pressure is released that determines whether the volcano will create a violent, sudden eruption or not, she says.
"If the magma is very sticky, very viscus, it will explode. If the magma is not very sticky, the magma can come out slowly and then the volcano is not explosive," says Lopes. "So it really is a matter of the amount of gas in the magma and how easily it can come out."
Lopes, who also studies ice volcanoes on Titan, Saturn's largest moon, says there's lots of interesting and lesser-known facts about how volcanoes work.
“It’s actually possible to walk on a moving flow because the crust at the top is a very good insulator and it will protect you," she said. Though temperatures can get up to 1,200 degrees Celsius, the crust cools quickly.
The Wheel Thing: Are pickup truck drivers ready to go green?
The Ford F-series pickup trucks are the best-selling vehicles in America. The top-selling sedan, the Toyota Camry, put up barely half the 750,000 pickups Ford sold last year.
Pickups are big, often ugly, hard to get in an out of, and they are generally guzzlers. In spite all that, we love them.
General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler, the big three American auto companies, are now pushing new models that offer greater efficiency.
Car critic Susan Carpenter says she thinks the companies are on the right track. Ford's new F-150 features a new, much lighter body made of aluminum — not steel. The car is paired with a still-powerful, but more efficient, engine. Chrysler's Ram trucks are now offered with an option to run them on natural gas, and Chevy has a new model of its Colorado with green features as well.
USC opens new $60-million J-school building
The University of Southern California is expanding the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism with a $60-million building.
The building includes a 20,000-square-foot newsroom, a 30-foot digital screen, and a 500-terabyte private cloud for students to store their work.
Many news establishments can only dream of spending this amount on upgrades right now, worrying instead about how to keep the doors open.
But, Willow Bay, who had a long career in TV news before becoming director of USC's journalism school, says she remains optimistic despite the seemingly constant announcements of newsroom layoffs.
"It is certainly true that there have been profound changes, we're living through an era of profound technology-driven change in this business, much of it disruptive; but I can't help but see opportunity," she said.
Amid the news this week of 100 newsroom layoffs at The New York Times or the recent shutdown of The Los Angeles Register print publication, Bay said she tells her students, "you have never had more opportunity as a journalist to go out and research [and] investigate with all the access to information that we now have."
"You've never had more tools to create gorgeous-looking, deeply engaging, powerful news reporting. You've never had more opportunities to find an audience and drive them to your content," she said.
Academy 'Hollywood Costume' exhibit opens, showcases 150 outfits
The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures isn't set to open its doors until 2017, but the first exhibition debuts Thursday — and it's a showstopper.
It's called "Hollywood Costume" and it celebrates the art of costume design in film history.
More than 150 costumes are on display — from recent films like "Dallas Buyers Club" and "The Hunger Games" and all the way back to the silent-film era, with Charlie Chaplin's suit from 1915's "The Tramp."
But, as curator and Oscar-nominated costume designer Deborah Nadoolman Landis will tell you, "It's not about the costumes." The exhibit, which was organized by and first opened at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, is about the movies. The atmosphere is designed in a way to make you feel like you're going to see a film and less like you're walking into a museum.
Visitors are greeted with a full multi-media experience, complete with an original score, screens showing film clips, animations of screenplays, and interviews with directors, costume designers and actors.
It even has its own trailer:
Take Two host Alex Cohen spoke with Nadoolman Landis about some of her favorite pieces in the exhibit and what it was like to put it all together.
On what her reaction was to seeing Dorothy's costume from "The Wizard of Oz" for the first time:
I cried when I saw it. I was so moved by the manufacture of the costume. In 1939, Adrian, the costume designer for "The Wizard of Oz," also designed "The Women." He was, without challenge, the greatest costume designer of the Golden Age of Hollywood.
I really think that Adrian sent one of his costumers or seamstresses in his shop and said, "You be Auntie Em. Please buy the cheapest Dust Bowl cotton on the market, then please wash it on a wash board, then put it through a wringer, then hang it with wooden clothes pins on a line, then do it all again 10 times, ... and then find a treadle sewing machine, be Auntie Em, sew it for Dorothy, and sew it really badly."
If you look at it, none of the seams match. ... And for a costume designer, the significance of this is huge. The same year, Adrian designed "The Women." "The Women" was French couture. ... Dorothy's pinafore was made by Auntie Em.
On how she made Harrison Ford's costume for "Indiana Jones":
The funny thing was that Tom Selleck had been cast in that role, and I had made everything for Tom Selleck, who was 6-foot-5, and then [he] had to leave to go do "Magnum, P.I."
So I had Harrison Ford maybe four weeks before shooting began. At the first day of shooting, only one leather jacket and hat was ready in London, and they were not aged.
And so that evening, Harrison and I went to the bar, I had brought mineral oil, I had brought triple-zero sand paper, and I aged that jacket myself with Harrison looking on. And that's the jacket that he wore the next day in the film.
On how creating the exhibit was like directing a film:
Costumes are created ... to be seen in a specific narrative and visual context. It's a really bad idea to have a costume design exhibition, because costumes are not meant to be seen in person, in 3-D, that's totally wrong!
It doesn't matter how they look in the gallery, because they're not artifacts that really should be evaluated in person. They're so much part of a movie. And to have the idea, the chutzpah, to tear them from the context for which they were originally designed, that's just wrong.
So I had to really create, direct, figure out how to create an entirely new context to display the costumes. ... I had to be the director, because I had to create a new production called "Hollywood Costume" and recast all of these people in new roles, so I feel that I could serve the writer, the director and the costume designers.
The Hollywood Costume exhibit is on display at the historic Wilshire May Co. Building, the future location of theAcademy Museum of Motion Pictures, at Wilshire Boulevard and Fairfax Avenue in Los Angeles. The exhibit runs through March 2, 2015. Purchase tickets here.
State of Affairs: CA bills that made Gov. Brown's cut, fundraising for ballot props, NFL team for LA
In today's State of Affairs: What could be a big blow to government pensions in California, using humor to win votes, and the big money behind California's ballot propositions.
Southern California Public Radio political reporters Alice Walton and Frank Stoltze join Take Two for a weekly look at news and politics in California.
Opposition raises $53 million against Proposition 46
The watchdog group MapLight has released fundraising totals for issues on the Nov. 4 ballot. Proposition 46, which would increase caps on medical malpractice damages from $250,000 to $1.1 million and would also require drug and alcohol testing of doctors, is getting the most attention. Opponents of the prop have raised $88 million. Those opponents include doctors, hospital associations, insurance companies and civil libertarians, who feel the requirement to test doctors invades their privacy, Stoltze said.
Proposition 45, which would allow the state insurance commissioner to reject health insurance price changes. The health industry has raised $38 million against the prop.
AEG asks for extension to nab NFL deal
AEG has asked the Los Angeles City Council for an extension on plans to build an NFL stadium in downtown Los Angeles. The deal, signed two years ago, proposed that Farmers Field would be built near the Staples Center on the contingency that L.A. could woo an NFL team.
AEG is asking for another six months and has sweetened the deal by saying they will also work on building a new hotel, as a way to ease concerns that there aren’t hotels enough in downtown.
The extension is supported by Mayor Eric Garcetti, Council President Herb Wesson and Councilman Curren Price. The City Council still is expected to pass the extension, Walton said.
Judge: Government pensions can be dipped into during city, county bankruptcy
A federal bankruptcy judge dealt a potentially huge blow to government pensions in a ruling that gives the green light to slash pensions when a city or county declares bankruptcy. This doesn't mean too much right now to employees in California but the judge has opened the door by saying if a city or county is in bankruptcy, then as part of the recovery plan, pensions can be reduced for current and future workers, according to Stoltze.
Superintendent candidate uses humor to gain votes
Instead of going negative, one candidate is using humor as a way to gain attention from voters. Marshall Tuck is running for California Superintendent of Schools. His campaign ad features Dax Shepherd and Kristen Bell making jokes about what they may (or may not) know about the election. This tactic is wise as Tuck has never run for public office and faces incumbent Tom Torlakson, Stoltze said.
Correction: In an older version of this post, we wrote that the opponents to Proposition 46 raised $88 million. But Maplight, the organization that first reported that figure, said yesterday the figure is incorrect. Maplight has revised the number to $53 million.
Eye implant paves the way for 'bionic eyes'
An eye implant developed by USC — the first FDA approved implant of its kind — is helping people with a rare type of vision loss regain some sight and is paving the way for more "bionic eyes" to treat other forms of blindness in the future.
Dubbed the Argus II, it was designed to treat retinitis pigmentosa, a genetic disorder that slowly robs a person of sight by destroying photoreceptors in the eye, reports KPCC's Sanden Totten.
Read the full story: USC 'bionic eye' implant offers some blind patients new sight
Dan Harmon, confronting truth and his own demons in the new film 'Harmontown'
Five years ago television writer Dan Harmon had his dream come true when his show, "Community," was picked up by NBC.
While the show went on to gain a loyal following, it was not a smooth experience for him. He was fired after he got into a very public and nasty feud with one of the show's stars.
Rather than get back into the saddle of TV writing, he began to focus on a podcast called Harmontown.
It's there that he started to gain an even more rabid fan base. His live appearances of the podcast, along with interviews from past associates are part of a new documentary called, appropriately enough, Harmontown.
"Harmontown" - Theatrical Trailer (The Orchard)
Host Alex Cohen speaks to Dan Harmon and the film's director, Neil Berkeley.
Students from Japan wow LA churches with gospel music
Every year in several black churches throughout Los Angeles, an unexpected performance happens.
One that knocks parishioners off their feet.
"It ranges from shock all the way to tears," said filmmaker Rosylyn Rhee, about their reaction to the Tokyo Mass Choir. The gospel choir is composed of over 100 Japanese students, few of whom speak English at all or are familiar with the cultural traditions of gospel at all.
sneak preview of SUPERNATURAL from Rosylyn Rhee on Vimeo.
Since 1996, choir director Richard Hartley has helped to train these students in the very basics of the style — a remarkable feat considering the outward expression of gospel contrasts drastically with the culture of Japan.
"They're very concerned about their social status, what they wear, what people think, being correct," says Hartley. However, he said, "I think the music really liberates people. Once they got the okay that they wouldn't be frowned upon if they participated, then it was an avalanche. They were screaming, dancing, clapping."
The students come from all over Japan through the Jikei International network of schools.
"Jikei's often considered like a 'dump school,' where parents will dump their kids who haven't gotten into a higher university," said Rhee. But in performing with the choir, she says there's an important transformation for many of these students.
"The audience is so giving and loving and open with their own expression of emotion which is really so meaningful for them. As cheesy as it sounds, I think they just feel more connected to love and themselves," she said.
The choir, itself, is composed of the school's first year students who will go through several months of "boot camp" with their director in Japan and with Hartley as well. Then they travel to Los Angeles to perform before black churches to showcase their talents and what they've learned.
"They're so moved that their tradition is being authentically honored," says Rhee.
Her documentary about the choir, "Supernatural," is currently in production and is expected to be released in 2015. Meanwhile, the choir will be heading back to L.A. in October.