Off-Ramp® | Marc Haefele: Wallace Hume Carothers and the tragic backstory of the inventor of nylon 

Tonight, as you brush your teeth, you’ll be scrubbing them with the same material that goes into stockings, combs, parachutes, spaceships, car engines — the list seems infinite. That stuff turned 75 this year, but it’s tragic human back story is rarely told.   It was a decade when chemistry was the most exotic of […]

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Off-Ramp® | Fifty years later, Off-Ramp’s Marc Haefele remembers the ‘March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom’ 

What an odd lot we were, the Lower Eastsiders who boarded a chartered train for Washington on August 28, 1963 … fifty years ago next Wednesday. First, there were the grandmothers with the food: Fay Lucia, a blonded Italian lady in her 50s from the projects, who brought a huge lasagna; and Nicolasa Benitez, the […]

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Off-Ramp® | Philip K. Dick’s editor – Off-Ramp’s Marc Haefele – praises Amazon’s ‘The Man in the High Castle’ 

Off-Ramp commentator Marc Haefele reviews “The Man in the High Castle,” a ten-part series from Amazon based on Philip K. Dick’s novel of the same name. Marc edited Dick in the later 1960s when he worked for Doubleday. Back in 1961, Putnam decided to roll his career-future dice publishing an alternate-history book as a major […]

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Haefele on Off-Ramp

Listen to Marc Haefele on 89.3 KPCC’s Off-Ramp Off-Ramp takes a look at news, arts and culture in Southern California. It is hosted by John Rabe John Rabe is KPCC’s Production & Promotions Director, a post he assumed in July of 2017 after 35 years behind the mike. His job is to shape the sound […]

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Haefele on the Los Angeles mayoral race

Shirley Jahad talks to Mark Haefele about the Los Angeles mayoral race. Shirley Jahad: Good afternoon. This is All Things Considered on 89.3 KPCC. I’m Shirley Jahad here with Marc Haefele. He is dean of the city hall reporters. Hi, Marc. Marc Haefele: Hi Shirley. Jahad: Well Marc, we are just on the heels of […]

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Fire ravages builder Geoff Palmer’s newest downtown Italian-aint apartment house

There’s no question, says Off-Ramp commentator Marc Haefele, that developer Geoff Palmer hit the sweet spot with his apartment blocks. Long before downtown LA became hip, he started building the Italian-looking apartment buildings with the  Italian-sounding names: the Orsini, the Piero, the Visconti, and the Medici. And he did it on land that wasn’t considered […]

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