Joan Didion was the writer who made modern California matter to American literature. But over the last twenty years, she also became something else: an icon. The sunglasses, the Corvette, the memes. What if that iconography is exactly what's getting in the way of understanding how good she actually was?

Evelyn McDonnell is a journalism professor at Loyola Marymount University and the author of The World According to Joan Didion. Her book retraces Didion's footsteps: from Sacramento to New York to a gatehouse on Portuguese Bend, just up the coast from where McDonnell and host Aaron McKenzie both live in San Pedro.

Recording from that same stretch of Southern California coastline, McKenzie talks with McDonnell about Didion's method as a reporter — disappearing into the background, listening instead of interrogating — her complicated reckoning with the California pioneer mythology she was born into, and what it means to strip away "the Cult of St. Joan" to find the disciplined, unsentimental worker underneath.

Chapters:
00:00 — Intro
01:28 — Evelyn's Joan Didion origin story
03:20 — Who was Joan Didion?
05:00 — The Portuguese Bend gatehouse
06:16 — Retracing Didion's footsteps, place by place
09:27 — What you learn by standing where she stood
12:32 — How Didion made California literary territory
14:45 — Absorption and alienation
15:25 — Didion's reckoning with the pioneer myth
17:38 — Portuguese Bend, the imagined landslide, and The Year of Magical Thinking
18:44 — The edge of the continent
21:26 — Separating the writer from the icon
24:20 — Julian Wasser and the art of disappearing
27:57 — The girl in Haight-Ashbury, and the piece that made Didion's name
30:04 — The Central Park Jogger case, revisited
30:46 — How does Didion's writing outlast its moment?
33:12 — Where to start if you've never read Didion
35:53 — The moment Didion surprised her
36:44 — December 23rd, 2021
37:14 — What Evelyn learned about herself while writing this book

"The World According to Joan Didion" is available wherever books are sold.

Soundings is produced in partnership with San Pedro Today magazine. More info at aaronmckenzie.net/soundings

Rose George on Every Last Fish: A Deep Dive Into Everything They Do for Us and We Do to Them

For every ten tuna that once swam in the ocean, there is now one. One in five fish is caught illegally. And the fish on your plate may not even be what the label says it is.

Rose George is a British journalist who has spent her career making the invisible visible: first sewage, then the global shipping industry, and now fish. Her new book, Every Last Fish, is a deep-dive into the systems, economics, and human stories behind the global fishing industry – and what the collapse of fish populations means for the ocean, for the people who work it, and for everyone who eats from it.

Recording from San Pedro, California — once the largest commercial fishing port in the United States, now the busiest container port in the Western Hemisphere — host Aaron McKenzie talks with George about the moment the industry crossed a threshold it may not be able to walk back from, the strange economics of a supply chain that sends American fish abroad while importing 90% of what Americans eat, and why she thinks we should all be drinking bivalve cocktails.

Chapters:

00:00 — Intro
01:21 — Welcome & San Pedro context
01:58 — How Rose came to write about fishing
04:22 — The collapse of fish populations: when did we cross the threshold?
06:19 — The fishing industry is not a monolith
08:28 — Sushi, China, and the pressure of the "Big Five" species
11:15 — The illusion of plenty: why 90% of American seafood is imported
14:57 — Mislabeling and the opacity of the global supply chain
16:26 — If you can't trust the label, how do you act on your values?
18:04 — Subsidies, systemic change, and the WTO
21:04 — Tragedy of the commons: who owns the ocean?
24:39 — What World War II taught us about fish recovery
25:10 — Reporting from the boats: seasickness, Captain Tom, and a rough day at sea
28:23 — The best case for bottom trawling, and why Rose isn't buying it
30:32 — "I've never met a fisherman who doesn't love it"
32:05 — Aquaculture, salmon farming, and a three-meter statue of a sea louse
35:41 — What would a truly honest seafood system look like?
36:57 — Fisheries observers: the most dangerous job you've never heard of
38:45 — Causes for optimism
41:45 — What to see when you walk along a harbor

Every Last Fish is available wherever books are sold.

Soundings is produced in partnership with San Pedro Today magazine. Find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.

More info at aaronmckenzie.net/soundings.

Early LA punk rock wasn't what you think it was. It wasn't just alienation, safety pins, and three-chord aggression. And it didn't take its cues from London or New York. It was something older — blues, country, rockabilly, Chicano folk music, rhythm and blues — filtered through a city that the rest of the country had written off as shallow.

Tom DeSavia spent years convincing his friend John Doe of X to help set the record straight. The result was two books — Under the Big Black Sun and More Fun in the New World — oral histories told by the people who were actually in the room: Jane Weidlin of the Go-Go's, Dave Alvin of the Blasters, Mike Watt, Allison Anders, Mike Ness, and dozens of others.

In this conversation we cover how a Tower Records in-store appearance accidentally reunited X for the first time in over a decade; why the Go-Go's were punk rock even after the scene decided they weren’t; what happened when hardcore arrived from Orange County and the South Bay; and why the Minutemen's Double Nickels on the Dime is still being discovered by teenagers half a century later.

The scene produced X, Los Lobos, the Blasters, Black Flag, Fishbone, the Go-Go's, the Minutemen, and Dwight Yoakam…and yet it remained a footnote for decades. This is the story of why, and why it matters.

Under the Big Black Sun and More Fun in the New World are available wherever books are sold.

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In 1956, a trucker named Malcolm McLean launched a ship with fifty-eight containers aboard. He was trying to solve a logistics problem. Instead, he accidentally changed the world

Economist Marc Levinson spent a decade researching containerization and discovered what McLean couldn't see: this simple metal box rewired labor, reshaped cities, enabled globalization, and helped pull billions of people out of poverty. Levinson's decade-long investigation reveals what happens when one innovation has consequences nobody can predict. This episode is about invisibility, unintended consequences, and why the most important forces in our world are often the ones we never notice.

ABOUT MARC LEVINSON:

Marc Levinson is an economist whose research into global trade and containerization transformed how we understand the modern economy. His book "The Box" is the definitive account of how this "tin can" became one of the 20th century's most important inventions.

Subscribe to "Soundings" for more conversations about global systems, commerce, and history through the lens of San Pedro and the Port of Los Angeles.

Howard Sounes: The Real Charles Bukowski vs. the Myth | "Soundings"

Episode Overview

What happens when a writer's greatest creation is himself? In the debut episode of Soundings, Aaron McKenzie sits down in San Pedro with British biographer Howard Sounes to separate the real Charles Bukowski from his famous literary alter ego, Henry Chinaski. Sounes discusses tracking down public records, walking L.A.'s streets, and interviewing the actual people Bukowski turned into characters to reveal the vulnerable, disciplined man behind the "outcast drunk" mythology.

A Few Topics We Discuss…

• The Myth vs. Reality: How Bukowski embellished his past (falsely claiming, for instance, that he was born a bastard) and how his post office years were far more calculated than his chaotic persona suggested.

• A Brutal Childhood: A look at Bukowski's early L.A. life, an abusive father, and a lonely childhood shaped his identity as an outsider.

• The Blue-Collar Writer: Why his focus on the drudgery of low-wage factory and postal work creates a unique literary voice for ordinary people.

• Late-Stage Fame in San Pedro: The turning point when publisher John Martin subsidized his exit from the post office, leading to global success, late-career poetry, and Hollywood deals like Barfly.

• The Perspective of the Exes: Why interviewing Bukowski's former girlfriends provided the most profound, emotionally honest, and funny insights into his character.
• Alcohol and "Don't Try": A candid look at his relationship with drinking, writing sober at the end of his life, and the meaning behind his boxing-inspired epitaph.
• A Life-Changing Biography: Sounes reflects on the intense personal stakes of quitting his stable newspaper job to finish this book.

About The Guest

Howard Sounes is a veteran British journalist and author of over a dozen books. His definitive biography, Charles Bukowski: Locked in the Arms of a Crazy Life, remains a deeply researched look into a polarizing literary icon.

About the Show

Produced in partnership with San Pedro Today magazine, Soundings uses this little corner of Los Angeles as a lens to explore global commerce, culture, art, and history. Each episode features long-form conversations with writers, thinkers, and artists who have something to teach us about how the world works.

San Pedro (home to the Port of Los Angeles and one of the world's busiest harbors) is a place where the local and the global collide. Every container ship that leaves tells a story of global supply chains. Every street corner holds a history of labor, immigration, and culture. Every person who lives here is connected to something larger.

Soundings takes this insight as its ethos: every place is a crossroads. Every person carries a piece of the larger world within them. By starting in San Pedro and looking outward, we discover truths about economics, art, identity, and human survival that resonate far beyond our city limits.

Soundings is hosted and produced by Aaron McKenzie.

Subscribe: Available on all major podcast platforms.