Steven Short
The San Francisco Bay Area is blessed with natural beauty, with endless hiking and biking trails. Most of those trails aren’t totally natural, of course. They require human planning and maintenance. That’s why this Saturday, June 5, has been declared National Trails Day--to honor those who make...
As we all know, many of California’s current place names owe their origins to the Spanish explorers of the 1500s. And that’s also true of the name “California” itself. But “California” is not a Spanish word. KALW’s Steven Short traces the unexpected origin of our State name in this...
When you enter the great orange spires of the Golden Gate Bridge, you’ll most likely see lots of tourists taking photographs. Which is one reason the city by the Bay is reportedly the third most photographed city in the world, behind New York and London.
San Francisco’s connection to...
The San Francisco Bay Area is blessed with natural beauty, with endless hiking and biking trails. Most of those trails aren’t totally natural, of course. They require human planning and maintenance. That’s why this Saturday, June 5, has been declared National Trails Day--to honor those who make...
Seeing the moon over the San Francisco skyline is a sublime vision. Maybe it’s that sense of romance that’s inspired so many singers to croon about the city by the Bay. There are so many musical tributes to this place, in fact, that it is perhaps the only city in the country, and maybe in the world...
Where the ocean meets the shore in San Francisco, sand dunes stretch for miles. Those same dunes used to cover all of what’s now the Sunset district, a residential neighborhood known for rows and rows of pastel-colored stucco houses. Before those houses cropped up, a different kind of residence was...
Nowadays, you don’t have to physically sit down with a book to enjoy a good story. You have your Kindles and your iPads. And if you want to hear a story, you could download an audio book onto your iPod, or tune into Crosscurrents. But there’s still nothing quite like a tale well-told, live, by an...
If you've ever been to the town of Larkspur, and seen how peaceful it looks, you might be surprised to learn of controversy in its background. We're not talking about famous desperados or anything that unseemly. But the Town Mother, Georgiana Wright, has developed a reputation over the years for...
A spoonful of sugar may help the medicine go down. But what if the medicine itself were sweet? People with allergies are especially anxious to find assistance this year, because heavy rains have produced more pollen than in the recent past.
Through the centuries, people have taken honey as a...
The monthly Really Really Free Market in San Francisco is like a swap meet without price tags. In the second of his two-part series, KALW's Steven Short reports.
This piece originally aired on November 26, 2008.
Carletta Sue Kay
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