Notebook On Cities And Culture

Colin Marshall sits down under the cafeteria at Santa Monica College with beloved Los Angeles radio personality Madeleine Brand, now host of Press Play on KCRW, formerly of NPR's Morning Edition, All Things Considered, and Day to Day, KPCC's The Madeleine Brand Show, and KCET's SoCal Connected. They discuss how much easier she has it waking up for noon radio nowadays instead of morning radio; what to call her format, a popular one in Los Angeles, where one host talks to a series of people, each with their own thing going on in the news; the distinctive difficulty of finding subjects that interest a large percentage of Los Angeles; her first decade in Southern California, and her later college years in Northern California as KALX's "Madame Bomb"; Los Angeles' unusually close relationship with the radio; the east-coastification she experienced in her years amid the "visceral humanity" of New York; how the heightening, densifying Los Angeles we see on the way (and imagined in Her) strikes her inner New Yorker; h