Executive Producer, Nathan Elliott, talks about his film Black Mark, the riveting story of former NBA star Matt Barnes who was the target of a hate crime while a senior in high school. The film was featured at Tribeca Film Festival and won the HolllyShorts Festival for Best Sports Documentary.

Today's show featuring Executive Producer, Nate Elliott

Black Mark explores the riveting story of former NBA star Matt Barnes who was the target of a hate crime while a senior in high school. The film - which features appearances by Snoop Dogg, former UCLA teammate and Earl Watson, among others - explores how a man of mixed-race, who was never white enough for his Italian heritage, or Black enough for his African American side, struggled to understand his identity. It looks at how Barnes' interpersonal conflict epitomized by his Black Mark both hindered and helped shape the man, the basketball player, and ultimately the powerful media voice he is today.

ABOUT NATHAN ELLIOTT
Nathan Elliott is Canadian entrepreneur, technologist, advertising executive, filmmaker and philanthropist. He is currently the Founder and CEO of FrontRunner Technologies, one of the most disruptive forces in immersive media, retail, and commercial real estate today - the company has brought literal window shopping to life. He also recently co-founded Love-Hate Productions to write and executive produce “Black Mark,” a documentary film and podcast project examining the Black experience in sport. 

The film was featured at Tribeca Film Festival and won the HolllyShorts Festival for Best Sports Documentary. His recent short film, “With Love, Charlie,” - currently on Samsung TB+ was selected by the HollyShorts Film Festival for inclusion opening night, and went on to win several international film awards. He has several other films set for production in 2025, focused on brand entertainment and sports. Nathan writes and speaks regularly on exponential technology, new age content creation, disruptive innovation, brand entertainment, and the future of public space. His work has been featured in the New York Times, Forbes, Bloomberg, Crain's Business, The Globe and Mail, and Women's Wear Daily. 

He is a frequent podcast guest and host, known for his energy and depth of conversation. He was chosen by the CBC as a Top 40 Under 40. Prior to his work as a futurist, Nathan wrote extensively on the topics of social justice, economic development, and energy policy for the Indigenous peoples of North America through his consultancy Insightwest. 

Notably, he was also a Clerk at the Legislative Assembly of Saskatchewan after graduation. Nathan’s work as founder of Huddle Up Foundation charity outfitted thousands of deserving children with winter coats and sports equipment in his home province of Saskatchewan over several years. 

Continuing his passion for philanthropy, Nathan co-founded Re:Store in 2021, a non-profit helping Black owned businesses recover post-pandemic, providing no cost content creation, ad strategy, and online promotion. Nathan currently splits time between Toronto and Venice, CA, where he enjoys writing, golfing and weightlifting.

Former Laker and Clipper Matt Barnes talks on his doc "Black Mark" at the HollyShorts Film Festival - YouTube

Showing at the 20th Annual HollyShorts Film Festival

KUCI host Janeane Bernstein shares insights on the loneliness epidemic and the power of art

Host Janeane Bernstein talks about the magnitude of the loneliness epidemic, what is fueling this crisis, thoughts about the power of art and mental health, as well as a reading from her favorite summer read: Brian Eno and Bette A's book, what art does - an unfinished theory.

Listen to today's show

Featured book:

Visit the Amazon page

What Art Does: An Unfinished Theory Hardcover – March 25, 2025

by Brian Eno and Bette Adriaanse

Why do we need art?

What Art Does is an invitation to explore this vital question. It is a chance to understand how art is made by all of us. How it creates communities, opens our worlds, and can transform us.

Curious and playful, richly illustrated, full of ideas and life, it is an inspiring call to imagine a different future.

Los Angeles favorite and Honorary Mayor of Toluca Lake, Fritz Coleman, shares details about his latest comedy show - UNASSISTED RESIDENCY

FRITZ COLEMAN'S UNASSISTED RESIDENCY

LISTEN to today's conversation with Fritz Coleman

_____________________________________________________________


WHEN:
August 24
September 28
October 26
November 30


WHERE:
Monroe Forum


Los Angeles favorite and Honorary Mayor of Toluca Lake FRITZ COLEMAN takes up a Sunday afternoon residency in the Monroe Forum Theatre here at El Portal! Fritz'z live comedy show for "boomers," covers topics from Zoom school to retirement to becoming vegan to pharmaceuticals to celebrating growing up and growing old!
Fritz' shows incorporate some of his favorite stories and observations about modern life. Go with him as he weaves his eloquent yet hilarious tales over 4 Sundays. The show changes every time so come see it multiple times to check out the new material!



ALL PERFORMANCES:


Sunday, August 24, 2025 @ 3 pm

Sunday, September 28, 2025 @ 3 pm

Sunday, October 25, 2025 @ 3 pm

Sunday, November 30, 2025 @ 3 pm

The El Portal Theatre

Coming up 8/13 at 9am - Samsun Knight talks about his latest book - LIKENESS, a novel about fidelity, love and family

LISTEN to today's conversation with Samsun Knight

“A beautifully rendered short novel full of twisting, complexly twined threads, a fascinating tangle of family connections that explores the parts of ourselves we inherit from our kin—and the parts of ourselves we invent.”

—Dan Chaon, author and National Book Award Finalist, Sleepwalk



Based on the author’s own upbringing, an intimate, riveting novel that challenges conventional understandings of love, fidelity, and betrayal


In LIKENESS (University of Iowa Press, Paperback Original, July, 29 2025), Samsun Knight’s second novel, the author skillfully weaves a story of a long-term open marriage—and its compromises, justifications, joys, and hurts—from two perspectives. For the first half of the novel, we see this polyamorous relationship through the eyes of the wife, Anne. In the second half, we continue to follow its progression through the journals of the “other woman,” Sandy. Gradually, we come to understand both women’s changes of heart and shifts in mindset—toward each other, their arrangement, and Sebastian, the man they love—after they each become pregnant within days of one another by the same man. Drawing insights from his own unconventional family, Knight deftly captures the drama of domesticity, the half-truths we tell ourselves about happily ever after, and the price of what we leave out.


Knight opens LIKENESS with Anne meeting Sebastian in the 1980s. Sebastian, newly separated from his first wife after learning that one of his children wasn’t biologically his, doesn’t believe in “closed love” anymore, something he makes clear to Anne when they begin their relationship. He promises to always be honest with Anne about his seeing other women. Anne replies that it doesn’t bother her, because at that point in their relationship, it doesn’t.


But a few months later, Anne and Sebastian are sharing a coffee when she notices a woman sitting one table over, reading the same novel; and Sebastian, following her gaze, recognizes the woman and introduces them. Anne realizes belatedly that he must be sleeping with her. But despite feeling a surge of reflexive jealousy, Anne continues her relationship with him, reminding herself that bumping into other lovers is just fine print on a contract she’s already signed.


Four and a half years later, Anne is now married to Sebastian and two months pregnant when he tells her: his lover, Sandy, is also pregnant with his child. In a flash, Anne remembers the afternoon in the coffee shop when she saw the woman at the next table, with brown hair that glowed gold in the sunlight. The possibility of children outside of their relationship had never been explicitly negotiated between them; she’d never imagined it would have to be. The next morning, Anne leaves to stay with her mother while she tries to decide whether to burn her marriage down to ashes, and whether to carry the baby to term.


In part two of LIKENESS, Sandy’s journal entries offer a wholly different perspective on this open marriage. Spanning two months at the beginning of 1991, we get an up-close and personal look at Sandy’s everyday life as the overwhelmed single mother of an infant, and also a self-assured woman with a markedly different experience of love beyond monogamy. In between grocery shopping lists and seances with the dead, Sandy tries to assert herself in her relationship as the “outside partner” and demands more help from Sebastian, but finds herself indirectly negotiating with Anne instead, and essentially abandoned. Leaning on her friends, her father, and her wavering faith in the world, she works to find a way to remake her life on her own terms.


Told by two women who share many of the same longings and misapprehensions, and make many of the same mistakes, LIKENESS is a story about love in real life, with all its messiness, surprises, and trade-offs.




About the Author



SAMSUN KNIGHT is a writer and graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he was a Truman Capote Fellow. Likeness is his second novel.

In his other life, he is an assistant professor at University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management and a faculty affiliate at the University of Toronto School of Cities, where he studies quantitative marketing, optimal targeting, and machine learning.


LIKENESS

By Samsun Knight

University of Iowa Press

Paperback Original published on July 29, 2025, $18.00, 128 pages

ISBN: 978-1685970208



Extraordinary Advance Praise for

LIKENESS

By Samsun Knight


“Reading Likeness, I couldn’t help marveling at how well Samsun Knight knows Anne, Sebastian, and Sandy, and how deftly he delineates their many changes of heart. He has an exquisite gift for capturing those moments when a character reaches the edge of their known feelings and steps into terra incognita. The result is a wonderfully suspenseful and deeply pleasurable novel.”

—Margot Livesey, author, The Flight of Gemma Hardy


“Samsun Knight’s Likeness is a beautifully rendered short novel full of twisting, complexly twined threads, a fascinating tangle of family connections that explores the parts of ourselves we inherit from our kin—and the parts of ourselves we invent. Knight is a remarkable writer.”

—Dan Chaon, author and National Book Award Finalist, Sleepwalk


“Likeness is propulsive, hilarious, moving, and profound. It’s also a page-turner about a love triangle and the challenges of finding a stable, if unconventional, relationship. Even more than that, it’s about how hard it is to articulate what we really want from love, parenthood, or even life in general.”

—Maria Kuznetsova, author, Something Unbelievable


“Knight rearranges and refracts what we thought we knew of the domestic drama and gives it new shape. Likeness shimmers like a house of mirrors with its continuously distorting understandings of what love is supposed to be. Tender, infuriating, redeeming, and graceful. I devoured it.”

—Eskor David Johnson, author, Pay As You Go


“David Foster Wallace once said his tastes in reading turned toward the realistic because most experimental stuff was hellaciously unfun to read. The genius of Likeness is to pair experiment with realism, asking really fun questions of old forms, delivering both the story of love and a slant and sly look at how we tell those stories. The power-to-weight ratio here is perfect. Everything’s up for negotiation: monogamy, fidelity, marriage, babies. How do we come to know each other, how do we gather and bind, how do we deepen and endure and go on, what arrangements are we making for love? It’s said that happy love has no history, but Likeness, in its brief and brilliant moment, is a joy to read, and that’s plenty.”

—Charles D’Ambrosio, author, The Dead Fish Museum

UC Irvine receives 2025 Excellence in Mental Health and Well-Being Award Campus is among 71 nationwide to be honored by Insight Into Academia magazine

NEWS


FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

UC Irvine was recognized for its extensive support structures for faculty, staff and students, as well as for its Comprehensive Wellbeing Initiative. Elena Zhukova / UCOP

NOTE TO EDITORS: PHOTO AVAILABLE AT
https://news.uci.edu/2025/08/05/uc-irvine-receives-2025-excellence-in-mental-health-and-well-being-award/

Contact: Sheri Ledbetter
949-230-8962
ledbetts@uci.edu

UC Irvine receives
2025 Excellence in Mental Health and Well-Being Award

Campus is among 71 nationwide to be honored by Insight Into Academia magazine

Irvine, Calif., Aug. 5, 2025 — The University of California, Irvine has received the 2025 Excellence in Mental Health and Well-Being Award from Insight Into Academia, the largest and oldest diversity and inclusion publication in higher education. The national award commends institutions for programs and initiatives that significantly advance the core values of inclusion and belonging.

UC Irvine will be featured, along with 70 other honorees, in the September 2025 issue of the magazine.

“Receiving this recognition is very affirming,” said Marcelle Hayashida, associate vice chancellor for wellness, health and counseling services at UC Irvine. “This presents us with a moment to celebrate the hard work of all our campus partners, communicate our commitment to others, and renew our mission to promote well-being throughout the entire campus.”

Insight Into Academia honored UC Irvine for its extensive support structures for faculty, staff and students, as well as for its Comprehensive Wellbeing Initiative. The campus was also selected for its peer programs for students, basic needs fulfillment and counseling services, in addition to training faculty and staff to discern and respond to mental health challenges.

“We know that institutions are not always recognized for their dedication to their mental health and well-being services and support for their students and employees,” said Lenore Pearlstein, owner and publisher of Insight Into Academia. “We are proud to honor these colleges and universities as role models for other institutions of higher education.”

UC Irvine was one of the few campuses in the U.S. to adopt the Okanagan Charter and become an official Health Promoting University in 2021. Shortly afterward, the school launched the Comprehensive Wellbeing Initiative. It focuses on four areas: diversity, equity and inclusion; the natural and built environment; sustainability; and the culture of well-being – crucial to implementing wellness as an institutional value.

“With a culture of well-being as one of its key pillars, the Comprehensive Wellbeing Initiative emphasizes the link between a healthy campus and a flourishing student body and workforce,” Hayashida said.

For more information about the 2025 Excellence in Mental Health and Well-Being Award, visit https://insightintoacademia.com.

About Insight Into Academia: Insight Into Academia magazine is the largest and oldest diversity and inclusion publication in higher education today. It’s the leader in recognizing inclusive excellence in higher education through its many prestigious awards and in advancing best practices in inclusive excellence and belonging through its website and print magazine.

About the University of California, Irvine: Founded in 1965, UC Irvine is a member of the prestigious Association of American Universities and is ranked among the nation’s top 10 public universities by U.S. News & World Report. The campus has produced five Nobel laureates and is known for its academic achievement, premier research, innovation and anteater mascot. Led by Chancellor Howard Gillman, UC Irvine has more than 36,000 students and offers 224 degree programs. It’s located in one of the world’s safest and most economically vibrant communities and is Orange County’s second-largest employer, contributing $7 billion annually to the local economy and $8 billion statewide. For more on UC Irvine, visit www.uci.edu.

Media access: Radio programs/stations may, for a fee, use an on-campus studio with a Comrex IP audio codec to interview UC Irvine faculty and experts, subject to availability and university approval. For more UC Irvine news, visit news.uci.edu. Additional resources for journalists may be found at https://news.uci.edu/media-resources.