Leila Day

There are many ways to support your candidates- or propositions-of-choice before voting on November 6. You can obviously give your time, by volunteering to call potential voters, or handing out leaflets. And campaigns will always welcome the contribution of your hard-earned cash.

It’s a rare sensitivity to normal, everyday sounds, like typing, or footsteps, or even breathing. And it’s being increasingly diagnosed. Researchers believe Misophonia begins in adolescence, but it can carry into adulthood. It can cause the people who believe they’re suffering from it to feel enraged, panicked, and inescapably overwhelmed.

KALW’s Leila Day spoke with a teenager who believes she’s suffering from Misophonia in this story of a family’s struggle with sound.  A note for our readers: we’re only using the girls’ first name to protect her identity.

Gabrielle Douglas, who brought home the gold in the gymnastics individual all-around competition a couple of weeks ago, is one of the many Olympians coming home to great fanfare this week.

While the world will remember Gabby's phenomenal skill and poise, a few people decided to focus on something that had nothing to do with her competition...her hair.

A handful of negative tweets about the Olympian’s hairdo initiated a heated debate online about vanity, ethnicity, and hair texture that carried over to mainstream media.

Private homeowners are trying to give graffiti artists a legal, public canvas. KALW's Leila Day spoke with a Bernal Heights couple that hired local artist Get Up to come tag their house.

Listen to their conversation above. 

Just 47 miles north of San Francisco, a country road winds through the small town of Glen Ellen, where a sign directs you to Jack London State Historic Park.

Bob Ruether is a docent at the park. He guides me along trails lined with ancient manzanita trees, where everything is still. It’s like walking through a painting. The air is damp from an early morning rain. Down a hill a group of teenage boys from a halfway house pull out sandwiches and sit at a bench with their teacher.