If you've been to the Little Italy Mercato on a Saturday morning, you've probably seen the line. Not a polite line, either. A determined one, full of people who found downtown parking and walked past 150 other stalls just to stand in front of one table selling bread. That table belongs to Swells Sourdough, and after four years of farmers markets and pop-ups, owners Pamela and Eric have finally opened their first brick-and-mortar bakery on India Street. The bread is the oldest kind on earth, made the slow way: organic, stone-milled California flour, water, salt, and a ferment that runs 36 to 48 hours. They opened it with a 15-month-old at home, because apparently sleep is optional when you're in the dough business.

This week on Happy Half Hour, presented by Redfin, Pamela tells host Troy Johnson how she got here. Her path runs from baking brownies out of a kids' kit her chef mom brought home from culinary school, to reading the weather on the presidential news channel in Mexico City, to meeting her husband on Instagram after the algorithm noticed she was craving croissants. Swells' very first pop-up was at Lululemon, because you can have gluten and yoga pants too. Pamela also gets into why sourdough was a lifeline after years of stomach trouble. The two talk through the science of cold fermentation, why most supermarket flour has had its nutrients stripped out, and California's upcoming ban on potassium bromate. And she has bad news for anyone romancing a 200-year-old starter: your starter is only as old as the last time you fed it.

Before all that, Troy opens with a crash course in bread history. It covers 14,400-year-old flatbread from Jordan, Gold Rush prospectors who slept with their starters to keep them from freezing, and the smuggled corned beef sandwich that got bread banned from NASA spaceflights. He also shares his best bites of the week, including a lobster pancake griddled in lobster butter, wagyu dumplings, and a bowl from a ramen chef voted Japan's best four years running.

This summary was provided to you by AI. To hear from the humans, listen to Happy Half Hour wherever you get your podcasts.

What does a soccer team have to do with San Diego's arts scene? Quite a lot, as it turns out. When San Diego FC launched, the club could have spent its marketing budget on billboards, bus wraps, and digital ads. Instead, it went into neighborhoods, found local artists and creatives, and started building the club's identity with them. Through its Playmakers initiative, artists have designed limited-edition merchandise, had their work featured on the stadium's jumbotron, and found themselves in front of thousands of fans—and, in some cases, a national TV audience.

For this special edition of the podcast, created alongside San Diego Magazine's September arts and culture issue, host Troy Johnson talks with Sebastián Morúa, SDFC's Senior Vice President of Brand & Innovation, and longtime San Diego native and creative Tony Martinez of Barrio Junto. The conversation gets into why a professional soccer club would make local art part of its business, how Martinez's decades in San Diego's creative community helped shape Playmakers, and the club's early efforts to connect with artists across the county through its Chrome Ball Tour and neighborhood events. The goal, they explain, isn't simply to put a local artist on a T-shirt. It's to let the people who already understand San Diego help define what the new club looks and feels like.

The conversation also gets into the less glamorous—but important—side of supporting artists: money. They talk about how Playmakers pays local creatives, the value of the platform SDFC provides, and what it means to build an ongoing relationship between a professional sports club and the artists who help shape its identity. They also discuss the club's growing music initiative, which will bring local musicians into the fold, and the many ways artists have already contributed to SDFC through merchandise, murals, Parks & Pitches projects, and more. Ultimately, it's a conversation about soccer, art, community, and what can happen when a major sports franchise gives the people already making culture in San Diego a bigger platform.

This summary was provided to you by AI. To hear from the humans, listen to the podcast wherever you get your podcasts.

San Diego has beaches, sunshine, biotech, and enough stucco to wallpaper a small country. But what actually gives a city its personality? The artists, musicians, designers, dancers, galleries, theaters, museums, and all the other creative people making things that give a place its identity. That's the question at the center of this special edition of the podcast, recorded as part of San Diego Magazine's September arts and culture issue, created in collaboration with the Art + Design District and San Diego FC Playmakers.

Host Troy Johnson sits down with Jonathon Glus, former director of the City of San Diego's Department of Cultural Affairs; and Grant Oliphant, president and CEO of the Prebys Foundation. Glus now serves as the Prebys Foundation's senior art & design fellow in residence at the Downtown San Diego Partnership, where he's helping develop the emerging Art + Design District around the Civic Center. Together, Glus and Oliphant bring two sides of the conversation to the table: what it takes to build the physical and cultural infrastructure for a creative city, and what role philanthropy, government, businesses, and artists themselves play in making that happen.

The conversation gets into San Diego's recent fight over arts funding, the city's cultural ecosystem, and why supporting artists means more than simply writing checks. They talk about the Art + Design District's roots in city planning work dating back to 2016, the cultural institutions already clustered around the Civic Center, and examples from cities like Miami and Austin that used major cultural initiatives to help shape their identities.

And, naturally, Troy gets nostalgic about San Diego's old jazz scene, including his best friend's dad's club, The Crossroads, and the unfortunate fate of a very valuable vinyl collection.

This summary was provided to you by AI. To hear from the humans, listen to this episode wherever you get your podcasts.