KCBS Radio In Depth

In an effort to get more people involved in a sport that seems quintessentially California, a Bay Area Olympic gold medalist is launching a series of events that's a combination competition, music festival and health expo. As KCBS reporter Holly Quan tells us in this weekend's In Depth, she's using beach volleyball as a way to get people to pay closer attention to their own lives. 

The South Bay's Kerri Walsh Jennings is one of beach volleyball's better known names but despite the popularity of the sport especially during the Olympics, not many players can make a career of it year round. 

The event in San Jose at the end of the month mixes athletic competition with health and wellness--helping regular people and weekend warriors with paying closer attention to how they spend their time. 

"If you are in the present moment, if you are firmly planted where your feet are, mindfully, do you know how powerful you are?  If you're living in the past, you're probably sad," said Walsh Jennings to Quan.  "If you're living in the future, you're for sure anxious.  But if you're in the moment you can deal with anything so much better. You're so much more powerful and in tune with yourself."

The NFL and the world of politics have more in common than you might think. That's what one of the nation's leading political journalists discovered, as we hear from KCBS Radio reporter Doug Sovern, host of the latest episode of In Depth.

KCBS Radio's Jeffrey Schaub takes In Depth on the road this week, meeting with Political Science Professor David McCuan on the campus of Sonoma State University in Rohnert Park, Calif. Prof. McCuan also serves as Chair of the Department of Political Science at Sonoma State. Given political developments this week, the first topic of conversation started with: "anonymous," -- was the op-ed published in the New York Times a game-changer for politicians? "... certainly, the op-ed changes the dynamic," McCuan said of the Trump Administration. "You're less than sixty days out from the mid-term elections, which is turning into for Democratic challengers attempting to grab the House, it's turning into a referendum on the President. And, the President keeps fanning the flames in terms of outing anonymous and what happens, it's going to be difficult for anonymous to remain anonymous and that will be a game-changer in any administration. If anonymous is outed and we find out who this person is, it also will linger this type of narrative. It will continue the story for a bit. And that's going to drag us in to this mid-term election period and Democrats are trying to build some type of narrative as a referendum on the President. Democrats have a message problem in terms of exactly what they're talking about. But their message so far is a referendum on the Presidency." Another big political story worth discussing: the Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court confirmation hearings. And, analyzing the hearings isn't JUST about Kavanaugh; McCuan points out that political up-and-comers, Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA), among them.

Summer vacations are over, children are returning to school, and another Labor Day is upon us. For many, it is a time to pause and reflect on the nation's workforce and the state of labor today. What have the most recent decades meant for the labor movement? If earlier generations bore witness to a strong union tide, what has become of it? "It's been a hard time for labor unions," said this week's In Depth guest, Jesse Rothstein, professor of public policy and economics at the University of California, Berkeley, with affiliations in the Department of Economics and the Goldman School of Public Policy. He is also the director of the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment (IRLE); the co-director of the California Policy Lab; and the co-director of the Opportunity Lab. He previously served as Chief Economist at the U.S. Department of Labor and as Senior Economist with the Council of Economic Advisers, Executive Office of the President, both in the Obama Administration. He discusses with this week's In Depth host, Rebecca Corral, a change in culture, how legal decisions have impacted the labor movement, and whether there has been an overall "change in norms" as they pertain to labor. It's impossible to discuss the state of labor in the United States without also considering wages--including lower end wages--where there has been some growth, thanks to minimum wage increases. How does a tight labor market factor into the equation? Over perhaps the past four decades, there have been some wage increases, especially in the late '90s, but otherwise lower end wages haven't "gone much of anywhere." And, of course, that's particularly the case in the public service sector.

It's that time of year; millions of American students of all ages are going back to school. And that means a lot of conversations about issues large and small, everything from how we pay for education to what we expect the process to produce. One thing almost everyone can agree upon is that education means learning of some kind. And, when people try to learn they sometimes struggle. It was twelve years ago that a financial analyst by the name of Sal Khan started helping a young cousin who was having trouble with math. It was distance learning and personalized learning, delivered one-on-one over the Internet. Pretty soon, other family members "wanted in" and that led Sal to making videos of his tutorials and posting them online. Then, things really blew up. Today, it would be hard to find a student, teacher or parent who hasn't heard of the Khan Academy, a nonprofit started by Khan that offers video lessons free over the Internet. Many of the lessons are still delivered by Khan himself. Susan Leigh Taylor and Stan Bunger talk with him.