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Alexis Madrigal

Co-Host, Forum at KQED

Alexis Madrigal is a multifaceted media professional and plant enthusiast based in Oakland, California. He is the founder of Oakland Garden Club, a project that explores plants both for their intrinsic qualities and as gateways to broader topics.23

Professional Background

Alexis Madrigal is currently the host of KQED's Forum, a popular radio program in the San Francisco Bay Area.14 His career in media extends beyond radio, as he is also an accomplished writer with a book deal with McD Books.4

Oakland Garden Club

In July 2023, Madrigal launched Oakland Garden Club as a side project.3 This initiative takes the form of a newsletter on Substack, described as "a newsletter about plants as plants and plants as portals".2 The club has garnered significant interest, with over 16,000 subscribers.2

Online Presence

Madrigal maintains an active online presence across various platforms:

  • Substack: He publishes the Oakland Garden Club newsletter here.2
  • LinkedIn: His username is alexis-madrigal-80235b, where he shares updates about his projects.3
  • Twitter: Although he has mentioned "hanging up the cleats" on Twitter, his handle was @alexismadrigal.4
  • Instagram: He is now more active on Instagram under the handle @alexismadrigal.4
  • Mastodon: He has an account on sfba.social, a Mastodon instance for the San Francisco Bay Area.5

Alexis Madrigal's work with Oakland Garden Club reflects his passion for plants and their potential to serve as entry points for exploring diverse topics, combining his interests in nature, storytelling, and community engagement.

Highlights

Sep 2 · linkedin

I came across maize geneticist Barbara McClintock's 1983 Nobel Prize acceptance speech a couple months back, and there's this line in it that I couldn't get out of my mind: "A goal for the future would be to determine the extent of knowledge the cell has of itself,” she said, “and how it utilizes this knowledge in a ‘thoughtful’ manner when challenged.”

Knowledge the cell has of itself. That really stuck with me. Can we even say that a cell has knowledge of itself? How? So, for the past couple of months, I've been reading about McClintock and cellular cognition and what kind of phenomenon life really is. I compressed that into a couple thousand words. This is my most substantial essay in maybe five years? And honestly, it's such a relief to be doing this kind of thinking-by-writing again, even if getting this thing out tortured me for basically the whole summer.

Jul 17 · linkedin

Starting a tiny book publisher isn't about making money, obviously. BUT I am interested in not losing a ton of money and in understanding how Oakland Garden Club could work as a business.

This weekend, I went to the San Francisco Art Book Fair, which was almost impossibly cool. You can read about all the things that I found there about plants at the link down there. There was the Floral Observer newspaper, Alex Arzt's deep engagement with California's feral cabbages, and the gorgeous investigations of Deep Time Press in Berkeley...

But/and I also got a chance to talk with some of the small presses about their business models. Perhaps the most interesting thing I heard was from George Wietor of Issue Press in Michigan. For tiny beautiful books, he told me, they make their money from prints that they sell alongside the books. Books, sadly, compress so much time and effort, but their display value is quite low compared to a beautiful 11x17 print.

BUT I am an optimist, and I think Wietor's point provides some support for my own thesis: that the compressed thinking that goes into books can become the root of a whole set of published artifacts (for us, mostly streetwear, but sure, why not prints?) that will actually make the money to feed back into more books getting published. Is that nuts? Merch-first publishing? I don't think so?

https://lnkd.in/d6pMUb9t

Related Questions

What inspired Alexis Madrigal to start the Oakland Garden Club?
What are some unique features of the Oakland Garden Club?
What is the main focus of the Oakland Garden Club?
What are some popular posts on the Oakland Garden Club newsletter?
How has the Oakland Garden Club evolved since its launch?
Alexis Madrigal
Alexis Madrigal, photo 1
Alexis Madrigal, photo 2
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Location

Oakland, California, United States