Radio Retort is the name of a wide ranging array of programs, featured irregularly on KZYX, Mendocino County (CA) community radio. Originally, the name was taken from Retort, the Berkeley gathering of about forty writers, teachers, artists, and activists which has been based for the past two decades in the San Francisco Bay Area. Here in Mendocino County, its first project was at KZYX, a follow-up on the Mendocino Institute’s successful conference, Community and Ecology, held in Caspar in 2011. Since that time, first under appellation Talking About California, sometimes An Antinomian Hour, this initiative has brought the voices of leading Northern California thinkers, movers and shakers to Mendocino County, a focus which over time has ventured farther afield.

Since 2015 the program has become a series of short grouplets of programs, beginning with Black Lives Matter, four programs which featured authorities on the interface of race and the law, interrogations of three renowned Professors from the school of Law at UCLA, as well as a history professor from UCLA. In 2017, Cal was joined in KZYX’s Philo studios by Loreto Rojas, a journalist trained in Chile, now a professor at Mendocino College in Fort Bragg. Together they have produced three acclaimed series on the subject of the crisis on the southern border following Donald Trump’s election. Loreto has stayed on with Radio Retort as co-host, again as the subset, Talking about California with programs on the future of the Fort Bragg Headlands, Brown Lives Matter and the green new deal. In addition, she has added her own program Mendo Latino, a source of vital information in this time of COVID.  Radio Retort and Mendo Latino can also be heard on KZYX.org and 90.7 on your FM dial.