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The Italian journalist who — for some reason — excluded Ayo Edebiri in a question about Hollywood and the Black Lives Matter and #MeToo movements has spoken out about the now-viral interview.

Federica Polidoro posted a statement Monday on Instagram defending her work, saying that she has been subject to “violent language, personal attacks, and cyberbullying” following the “question that, for some reason, was not well received by some members of the public.”

“Rather than focusing on the thoughtful responses of Ayo Edebiri, Julia Roberts, and Andrew Garfield, the discussion continues solely on how I should have phrased the question,” Polidoro wrote.

The exchange in question occurred at a press event with Edebiri, Roberts and Garfield at the Venice Film Festival, where their film “After the Hunt,” directed by Luca Guadagnino, made its world premiere. In a video that has been shared widely, Polidoro is heard asking Roberts and Garfield what they thought was “lost during the politically correct era” and what people can expect from Hollywood now that “the #MeToo movement and Black Lives Matters are done.”

After Roberts asks the journalist to clarify who the question is directed to, Polidoro reiterates that her question is for Roberts and Garfield. As the actors share a look, Edebiri raises her hand to respond instead.

“I know that that’s not for me and I don’t know if it’s purposeful that it’s not for me — but I am curious — but I don’t think it’s done,” the star of “The Bear” says. “I don’t think it’s done at all.”

“I think maybe hashtags might not be used as much,” she continues, “but I do think that there’s work being done by activists, by people, every day, that’s beautiful, important work that’s not finished. That’s really, really, really active for a reason. Because this world is really charged. And that work isn’t finished at all. Maybe there’s not mainstream coverage in the way that there might have been, daily headlines in the way that it might have been, eight or so years ago, but I don’t think it means that the work is done. That’s what I would say.”

“The movements are still absolutely alive,” Garfield says in agreement. “Just maybe not as labeled or covered or magnified as much in this present moment.”

In her statement, Polidoro pushed back against accusations of racism, saying she has “interviewed people of every background and ethnicity” over the course of her 20-year career.

“My own family is multi-ethnic, matriarchal, and feminist, with a significant history of immigration,” wrote Polidoro, who in her Instagram bio mentions being a Golden Globes voter and awards season analyst. “In my view, the real racists are those who see racism everywhere and seek to muzzle journalism, limiting freedom of analysis, critical thinking, and the plurality of perspectives.”

Polidoro’s statement also said, “Censoring or delegitimizing questions considered ‘uncomfortable’ does not fall within the practice of democracy. … Journalism’s role is to ask questions, even on delicate topics, with respect and responsibility.”

Hollyoaks viewers are convinced that Mercedes McQueen will have a new romance with one of the show’s most beloved characters in the wake of her son Bobby’s death

Hollyoaks fans are speculating that Mercedes McQueen (portrayed by Jennifer Metcalfe) is on the brink of a new romance following the tragic death of her son Bobby Costello (Zak Sutcliffe).

In recent episodes of the Channel 4 drama, Tony Hutchinson (Nick Packard) was wrongfully arrested and jailed for Bobby’s murder. Bobby, an escaped prisoner, had crossed paths with Jez after discovering that the serial killer had taken the life of his social worker Ian.

Jez Blake (Jeremy Sheffield) went to extreme lengths to hide his crimes, leading to the brutal murder of Bobby in shocking scenes. His body was subsequently run over by Tony.

Mercedes is determined to prove that Chester legend Tony is responsible for her son’s death. However, upcoming scenes reveal that Diane Hutchinson (Alex Fletcher) is organising a fundraiser at The Dog to assist Tony with his legal costs, something Mercedes won’t take lightly.

But bringing Tony to justice might not be the only thing occupying Mercedes’ thoughts. Observant viewers are predicting she will start a new romance with Darren Osborne (Ashley Dawson), reports the Manchester Evening News.

Darren and his wife Nancy (Jessica Fox) have been fraught with worry following their daughter Morgan’s disappearance, causing tension between them.

However, more heartbreak is looming as it’s confirmed Darren is not Morgan’s biological father, revealing his wife’s infidelity.

Hollyoaks fans are convinced that the grieving Mercedes and troubled Darren will find solace in each other and begin an affair.

One fan speculated on X: “Gonna make some theories for what I think will happen in #hollyoaks within the next year: Darren will end up in a relationship with Mercedes.”

Another chimed in: “Bet with the Tony and Nancy stuff, Mercedes and Darren are gonna be a item next #hollyoaks.”

A third responded: “Oh dear god don’t even come up with that.”

“I definitely think Mercedes and Darren are gonna end up having an affair or something #hollyoaks,” another added.

While another declared: “Loving the Mercedes and Darren interaction #Hollyoaks.”

Hollyoaks airs Monday to Wednesday on E4 at 7pm and first look episodes can be streamed Channel 4 from 7am

Exposing years-old concerns about California’s resilience to wildfires, a government whistleblower and other witnesses in a recent state trial alleged that cleanup operations after some of the largest fires in state history were plagued by mismanagement and overspending — and that toxic contamination was at times left behind in local communities.

Steven Larson, a former state debris operations manager in the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services, failed to convince a jury that he was wrongly fired by the agency for flagging those and other issues to his supervisors. After a three-week trial in Sacramento, the jury found Larson was retaliated against, but also that the agency had other, legitimate reasons for dismissing him from his post, according to court records.

Still, the little-discussed trial provided a rare window into a billion-dollar public-private industry that is rapidly expanding — and becoming increasingly expensive for taxpayers and lucrative for contractors — given the increased threat of fires from climate change.

It raised serious questions about the state’s fire response and management capabilities at a time when the Trump administration says it is aggressively searching for “waste, fraud and abuse” in government spending, proposing cuts to the Federal Emergency Management Agency and clashing with state leaders over the best way to respond to future wildfires in California.

The allegations raised in the trial also come as FEMA and the Army Corps of Engineers are overseeing similar debris removal work — by some of the same contractors — following the wildfires that destroyed much of Pacific Palisades and parts of Altadena in January, and as fresh complaints arise around that work, as The Times recently reported.

Steve Larson poses for a portrait at Elk Grove Park on Sept. 1. Larson, who was a former state debris operations manager in the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services, is a whistleblower alleging widespread problems in California fire cleanups.

(Andri Tambunan / For The Times)

During the trial, Larson and other witnesses with direct knowledge of state fire contracts raised allegations of poor oversight and sloppy hiring and purchasing practices by CalRecycle, the state agency that oversaw multiple major cleanup contracts for CalOES; overcharging and poor record-keeping by contractors; toxic contamination being left behind on properties meant to have been cleared; and insufficient responses to those problems from both CalOES and FEMA officials.

The claims were buttressed at trial by the introduction into evidence of a previously unpublished audit of cleanup operations for several large fires in 2018. They were mostly rejected by attorneys for the state, who acknowledged some problems — which they said are common in fast-paced emergency responses operations. They broadly denied Larson’s allegations as baseless, saying he was an inexperienced and disgruntled former employee who was fired for poor performance.

The allegations were also dismissed by CalOES and by Burlingame-based Environmental Chemical Corp., which was the state’s lead contractor on the 2018 fires and is now the Army Corps of Engineer’s lead contractor on cleanup work for the Palisades and Eaton fires, which is nearing completion.

Anita Gore, a spokeswoman for CalOES, defended the agency’s work in a statement to The Times. While acknowledging some problems in the past, she said the agency is “committed to protecting the health and safety of all Californians, including in the aftermath of disasters, and is unwavering in its desire to maintain a safe and inclusive workplace where everyone can feel respected and thrive.”

In its own statement to The Times, ECC said it followed the directives and oversight of state and federal agencies at all times, and “is proud of its work helping communities recover from devastating disasters.”

“We approach each project with professionalism, transparency, and a commitment to delivering results under extraordinarily challenging conditions,” the company said.

Maria Bourn, one of Larson’s attorneys, told The Times that while her client lost at trial — which they are appealing — his case marked a “win for government accountability and the public at-large” by revealing “massive irregularities by wildfire debris removal contractors” who continue to work in the state.

“The state’s continued partnership with these companies when such widespread irregularities were identified by one of its own should alarm every taxpayer,” Bourn said.

A Malibu home lies in ruins after the Woolsey fire. Many questions were raised about the response.

(Al Seib / Los Angeles Times)

Camp, Woolsey and Hill fires

The allegations centered in large part around the state-run cleanup efforts following the Camp fire in Northern California, which killed 85 people and all but erased the town of Paradise in November 2018, and the contemporaneous Woolsey and Hill fires in Southern California, which ripped through Malibu and other parts of Los Angeles and Ventura counties.

FEMA has reimbursed the state more than $1 billion for costs associated with those cleanup efforts.

In a July 28, 2019, email entered as evidence in the trial, Larson wrote to CalOES chief of internal audits Ralph Zavala that he wanted to talk to him about “potential fraud” by Camp fire contractors, including ECC.

“I cannot say for sure, but something sure smells fishy,” Larson wrote in the email. “Either their contract was not in fact the lowest bid or they are creating fraud in the way they collect debris.”

Larson wrote in the same email that ECC was “supposedly the lowest bidder” but was “costing more” than the lower bids, which he wrote “doesn’t make sense.” At trial, Larson and his attorneys repeatedly claimed that instead of properly investigating his claims, his supervisors turned against him.

Other current and former state officials testified that they had raised similar concerns.

Todd Thalhamer, a former Camp fire area commander and operations chief who still works for CalRecycle, testified during the trial that he’d told Larson he believed ECC had low-balled its bid to win the work, then overcharged the state by millions of dollars. He said he had “dug very deep into the tonnage cost that they were charging, how they were charging, how they were cleaning it up,” and believed that ECC had been able to “game the system” by reporting that it was hauling out more of the debris types for which it could charge the most.

ECC denied manipulating bids or overcharging the state, and said that “all debris types and volumes are 100% inspected by and determined by CalRecycle and its monitoring representatives and systems, not by ECC or its subcontractors.”

Thalhamer testified that he’d sent an “email blast” out to top CalOES and CalRecycle officials telling them of his findings. He said that led to internal discussions and some but not all issues being resolved.

Further concerns were raised in records obtained by Larson’s attorneys from the prominent accounting firm EY, formerly known as Ernst & Young, which the state paid nearly $4 million to audit the Camp, Woolsey and Hill fire cleanup work.

According to those records, which were cited at trial, EY found that CalRecycle was “unable to produce documentation that fully supports how the proposed costs were determined to be reasonable when evaluating contractor proposals,” and didn’t appear to have “appropriate controls or oversight over the contractor’s performance.”

EY flagged $457 million charged by the contractors through 89 separate “change orders” — or additional charges not contemplated in their initial bids. It said the state lacked an adequate approval process for determining whether to accept such orders, couldn’t substantiate them and risked FEMA rescinding its funding if it didn’t take “immediate corrective action.”

EY specifically flagged $181 million in change orders for the construction of two “base camps” near the burn areas, from which the contractors would operate. It said the state only had invoices for $91 million of that spending, and that even those invoices were not itemized. EY executive Jill Powell testified that the firm believed such large contract changes were likely to be flagged as questionable by FEMA.

ECC — one of two contractors EY noted as having made the base camp change orders — defended its work.

The company said change orders are a necessary part of any cleanup operation, where the final cost “depends on the final quantities of debris that the Government directs the Contractors to remove and how far the material has to be transported for recycling or disposal.”

Such quantities can change over the course of a contract, which leads to changes in cost, it said.

As for the base camps, ECC said the state had explicitly stated in its initial request for proposals that it would “develop the requirements” and negotiate their cost through change orders, because details about their likely location and size were still being worked out when the bids were being accepted.

“Bidders could not know at the time of bid, which area of Paradise they would be assigned, how many properties would be assigned to the bidder, and therefore the exact size of the workforce that the Government would want housed in a Base Camp,” ECC said.

ECC said it “submitted invoices with supporting documentation in the format requested” by CalRecycle for all expenditures, and was “not aware of any missing invoices.”

“We cannot speak to what EY was provided from the State’s files or how the State provided those materials for EY’s review,” the company said. “Any gap in what EY reviewed should not be interpreted as meaning ECC failed to submit documentation.”

ECC said state officials only ever complimented the company for its work on the 2018 fires. And it said it continues to work in Southern California “with the same professionalism and care we bring to every project.”

SPSG, the second contractor EY flagged as being involved in the base camp change orders, did not respond to a request for comment.

Attorney James F. Curran, who represented the state at trial, said in his closing arguments that the work was not “running perfect” but was coming in on schedule and under budget. He said state officials were not ignoring problems, just cataloging non-pressing issues in order to address them when the dust cleared, as is common in emergency operations.

Curran said many of Larson’s complaints were based on his unfamiliarity with such work and his refusal to trust more experienced colleagues. He said Larson was fired not for flagging concerns, but because of “misconduct, arrogance, communication style problems, and performance problems.”

Gore, the CalOES spokeswoman, said CalRecycle awarded the contracts “through an open, competitive procurement process with oversight from CalOES and FEMA,” and that CalOES worked to address problems with contractors before Larson ever voiced any concerns.

Gore said CalOES hired EY to identify any potential improvements in the contracting and reimbursement process, and changed its policy to pay contractors per parcel of land cleared rather than by volume of debris removed in part to address concerns about potential load manipulation.

She said the agency could not answer other, detailed questions from The Times about the debris removal process and concerns about mismanagement and alleged overcharging because the Larson case “remains pending and subject to appeal,” and because CalOES faces “other, active litigation” as well.

The EY audit also flagged issues with several other contractors, including Tetra Tech and Arcadis, according to draft records obtained from EY by Larson’s attorneys and submitted as evidence at trial.

The EY records said Tetra Tech filed time sheets for unapproved costs, without sufficient supporting information, with questionable or excessive hours, with digital alterations that increased hourly rates, and without proper supervisor approvals. It said it also charged for work without providing any supporting time sheets.

The EY records said the company also used inconsistent procedures for sampling soil and testing for asbestos, used billing rates that were inconsistent between its contract and its invoices, charged for “after hours” work without supporting documentation, filed questionable, per-hour lodging costs, appeared to have digitally edited change orders after they were signed and dated, and relied inappropriately on questionable digital signatures for approving change orders.

Tetra Tech did not respond to a request for comment.

The EY records said Arcadis filed change orders for costs that appeared to be part of the “normal course of business,” filed invoices for work that began before the company’s state contract was signed, and relied inappropriately on digital signatures.

Arcadis referred all questions to CalRecycle. CalRecycle provided a copy of its own “targeted” audit of Arcadis’ work, which found the company had complied with the requirements of its nearly $29-million contract with the state. CalRecycle otherwise referred The Times back to CalOES.

A recovery team searches for human remains after the Camp fire.

(Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times)

North Bay fires

Concerns about cleanup work following major fires in Sonoma, Santa Rosa and other North Bay counties in 2017 — under both CalOES and the Army Corps of Engineers — also arose at the trial.

Sean Smith, a former 20-year veteran of CalOES and a prominent figure in California debris removal operations to this day, alleged in an email submitted at trial that ECC and other contractors hired to clear contaminated debris and soil from those fires over-excavated sites in order “to boost loads to get more tonnage and money.”

ECC denied Smith’s claims, saying it “does not perform excessive soil removal” and that it followed “the detailed debris removal operations plan requirements” of the Army Corps of Engineers, which had its own quality assurance representatives monitoring the work.

In a deposition, Smith also testified that, in the midst of spending more than $50 million to repair that over-excavation, state officials identified lingering contamination at “what would be considered hazardous waste levels.”

“They hadn’t finished the cleanup in all spots, and we found it, and we recorded it,” he said.

Smith testified that those findings were presented to high-ranking CalOES and FEMA officials during a meeting in San Francisco in October 2018. At that meeting, CalOES regional manager Eric Lamoureux laid out all the state’s contamination findings in detail, “but nobody wanted to hear it,” Smith said.

During his deposition, Smith alleged that the “exact words” of one FEMA attorney in attendance were, “We have to find out how to debunk the state’s testing” — which he said he found surprising, given the testing was based on federal environmental standards.

“I don’t know how you’d debunk such a thing,” Smith said.

FEMA officials did not respond to requests for comment. CalOES also did not answer questions about the alleged meeting.

ECC said that Smith, who managed and signed its contracts with CalOES, gave ECC “a very positive performance review” when it completed the Sonoma and Santa Rosa work — describing its work as “exceptional.”

Smith said he quit his post working on those fires after the San Francisco meeting, though he continued working for the agency in other roles for a couple more years. Smith more recently formed his own debris removal consulting firm — which has been involved in soil testing for the state after other recent fires.

CalOES did not respond to questions about Smith’s claims or separation from the agency.

EAGLE-EAYED Coronation Street fans think they’ve worked out another link to the cobbles for DI Costello (played by Daon Broni).

ITV viewers have previously expressed their suspicions about the detective inspector, thinking he is hiding his role in the death of his colleague DS Lisa Swain’s late wife Becky.

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After Friday’s episode of the soap, fans now think Costello has a connection to another character as the gripping storyline continues.

Dee Dee Bailey’s new love-interest Ollie appeared to take an interest in Lisa and viewers have flocked to Reddit to share their theories about his connection to Costello.

Somebody wrote: “So I’ve a new theory about Ollie and I’ve a feeling it’ll soon become popular. I think that he’s either related or connected to Costello.

“If you think about it, they came in around the same time and came to the forefront about the same time. Are both around the copshop alot lately. Both are inquisitive to people lately making sus comments.

“Who’s to say that it’s not a big corruption involving Costello, Ollie, the Radcliffes and Becky along with the infamous Tia Wardley.”

Another fan expressed: “Costello has been in it for over a year since the Joel case. But you could be onto something alright.”

Someone else responded: “I think there might be a twist that Ollie might be related to Costello and there’s a twist that he’s Costello’s son.”

The name Tia Wardley has been hanging over Lisa and her girlfriend Carla Connor for months, in connection to Becky.

In Friday’s bombshell episode, Tia finally arrived on the cobbles to explain herself – just in time for the women’s engagement party.

In the instalment, DI Costello was seen desperately trying to cover his tracks and hiding what he really knows about the mysterious Tia Wardley.

Tia turned up at the Bistro and told Lisa and Carla all about her connection to Becky.

She claimed to have been involved with the Radcliffe brothers and revealed that Becky had helped her escape her troubled life out of the goodness of her heart.

Lisa seemed genuinely touched that the truth meant that Becky had been a good cop – and had helped the woman escape a bad situation.

But after leaving the Bistro, the woman met up with Costello – and the truth soon emerged. The woman was not the real Tia Wardley.

She told Costello: “I gave them the full Meryl Streep. Really milked it. Looked like the blonde one was going to cry.”

And when the potentially dodgy cop questioned whether she actually managed to trick Lisa, the faker added: “They didn’t have a clue what the real Tia Wardley looked like, so yes…”

In addition to the on-screen confession, the credits also named her as “Fake Tia Wardley” confirming that she is definitely not the real woman Lisa and Carla were looking for.

But as Lisa and Carla made their way home from the celebrations, Lisa suddenly felt a chill.

It was then revealed that someone had been watching the couple, leaving the detective feeling completely unnerved.

Coronation Street fans will have to continue watching to find out who was following the pair and to who the real Tia Wardley is.

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Chatbot builder Anthropic agreed to pay $1.5 billion to authors in a landmark copyright settlement that could redefine how artificial intelligence companies compensate creators.

The San Francisco-based startup is ready to pay authors and publishers to settle a lawsuit that accused the company of illegally using their work to train its chatbot.

Anthropic developed an AI assistant named Claude that can generate text, images, code and more. Writers, artists and other creative professionals have raised concerns that Anthropic and other tech companies are using their work to train their AI systems without their permission and not fairly compensating them.

As part of the settlement, which the judge still needs to be approve, Anthropic agreed to pay authors $3,000 per work for an estimated 500,000 books. It’s the largest settlement known for a copyright case, signaling to other tech companies facing copyright infringement allegations that they might have to pay rights holders eventually as well.

Meta and OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, have also been sued over alleged copyright infringement. Walt Disney Co. and Universal Pictures have sued AI company Midjourney, which the studios allege trained its image generation models on their copyrighted materials.

“It will provide meaningful compensation for each class work and sets a precedent requiring AI companies to pay copyright owners,” said Justin Nelson, a lawyer for the authors, in a statement. “This settlement sends a powerful message to AI companies and creators alike that taking copyrighted works from these pirate websites is wrong.”

Last year, authors Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson sued Anthropic, alleging that the company committed “large-scale theft” and trained its chatbot on pirated copies of copyrighted books.

U.S. District Judge William Alsup of San Francisco ruled in June that Anthropic’s use of the books to train the AI models constituted “fair use,” so it wasn’t illegal. But the judge also ruled that the startup had improperly downloaded millions of books through online libraries.

Fair use is a legal doctrine in U.S. copyright law that allows for the limited use of copyrighted materials without permission in certain cases, such as teaching, criticism and news reporting. AI companies have pointed to that doctrine as a defense when sued over alleged copyright violations.

Anthropic, founded by former OpenAI employees and backed by Amazon, pirated at least 7 million books from Books3, Library Genesis and Pirate Library Mirror, online libraries containing unauthorized copies of copyrighted books, to train its software, according to the judge.

It also bought millions of print copies in bulk and stripped the books’ bindings, cut their pages and scanned them into digital and machine-readable forms, which Alsup found to be in the bounds of fair use, according to the judge’s ruling.

In a subsequent order, Alsup pointed to potential damages for the copyright owners of books downloaded from the shadow libraries LibGen and PiLiMi by Anthropic.

Although the award was massive and unprecedented, it could have been much worse, according to some calculations. If Anthropic were charged a maximum penalty for each of the millions of works it used to train its AI, the bill could have been more than $1 trillion, some calculations suggest.

Anthropic disagreed with the ruling and didn’t admit wrongdoing.

“Today’s settlement, if approved, will resolve the plaintiffs’ remaining legacy claims,” said Aparna Sridhar, deputy general counsel for Anthropic, in a statement. “We remain committed to developing safe AI systems that help people and organizations extend their capabilities, advance scientific discovery, and solve complex problems.”

The Anthropic dispute with authors is one of many cases where artists and other content creators are challenging the companies behind generative AI to compensate for the use of online content to train their AI systems.

Training involves feeding enormous quantities of data — including social media posts, photos, music, computer code, video and more — to train AI bots to discern patterns of language, images, sound and conversation that they can mimic.

Some tech companies have prevailed in copyright lawsuits filed against them.

In June, a judge dismissed a lawsuit authors filed against Facebook parent company Meta, which also developed an AI assistant, alleging that the company stole their work to train its AI systems. U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria noted that the lawsuit was tossed because the plaintiffs “made the wrong arguments,” but the ruling didn’t “stand for the proposition that Meta’s use of copyrighted materials to train its language models is lawful.”

Trade groups representing publishers praised the Anthropic settlement on Friday, noting it sends a big signal to tech companies that are developing powerful artificial intelligence tools.

“Beyond the monetary terms, the proposed settlement provides enormous value in sending the message that Artificial Intelligence companies cannot unlawfully acquire content from shadow libraries or other pirate sources as the building blocks for their models,” said Maria Pallante, president and chief executive of the Association of American Publishers in a statement.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Actor Nicholas Braun, best known for his work in the hit HBO series “Succession,” began his Labor Day weekend with a run-in with New Hampshire law officials.

Moultonborough Police Chief Peter W. Beede announced in a Tuesday press release that officers arrested the 37-year-old actor Friday evening on suspicion of DUI-Impairment in the town of Moultonborough, N.H., about an hour north of the state’s capitol of Concord. Braun was also arrested on suspicion of driving at night without his headlights on.

The release did not share additional information about Braun’s arrest. Representatives for the actor did not immediately respond to The Times’ request for comment.

Braun was booked in Carroll County Jail and released on his own recognizance, according to TMZ. The outlet also reported that the actor will be arraigned Sept. 16.

In HBO’s “Succession,” Braun became a fan favorite for his portrayal of Cousin Greg, an outsider who manages to weasel his way into the core family’s business and the bid for aging media mogul Logan Roy’s (Brian Cox) multi-industry empire. He received three Primetime Emmy nominations for the role.

Braun is also known for his work in Disney flicks “Sky High,” “Princess Protection Program” and “Minutemen.” His credits include “The Perks of Being a Wallflower,” “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot,” “Zola” and “Saturday Night.”

This column is the latest in a series on parenting children in the final years of high school, “Emptying the Nest.” Read the last installment, “A Mother’s Plea to Trump.”

My third and youngest child went off to college a week ago, and for the first time in 27 years, my husband and I are living in a house with no kids. It’s a strange and silent place, in which all the beds are neatly made, the floors around them no longer mulched with clothing, charge cords and snack wrappers. There are no discarded once-frozen coffee drinks sweating rings onto wooden tables; no empty Styrofoam takeout containers littering kitchen counters mere inches away from the trash can.

One can walk freely across the family room now, with no fear of tripping over abandoned shoes, balled-up socks or peanut-butter-smeared dishes, and the days remain unpierced by the maddening repetition of overheard TikTok memes and the escalating cries of “mom, Mom, MOM” to indicate an impending celebration or crisis.

My daughter very kindly left me a hamper full of dirty clothes upon her departure and a closet that was essentially an archaeological site of the months’ (years’?) worth of her particular method of tidying her room. My discovery therein of the perfume (in a plastic bag that also included her crumpled prom dress) she had been desperately searching for as she packed for college was sweet but short-lived. Yes, I did tell her to look in her closet and, yes, she did roll her eyes and swear that she did, but it doesn’t matter now.

She is gone, the last of the children who have been the light of so much of my adult life, and I miss her truly, madly, deeply. The sight of her luminous smile and her “nothing’s wrong” grimace; the smell of her floral shampoo and funky basketball shoes; the sound of her singing in the shower and yelling at the dogs to get off her bed.

Those dogs, I hasten to note, are doing the best they can to bridge the void. Sensing that a workday no longer interrupted by my daughter’s frantic search for her jersey/wallet/shoes is no workday at all, Harley has been nudging his toys under my sofa or chair and then whining for me to “find” them while Koda has taken on teenage-affection duty — randomly hurling himself onto my lap for attention only to pull away and vanish once I put my laptop aside and attempt to cuddle.

Still I am bereft and unmoored. The mad scramble to prepare and pack for college is finally over and in its place is … nothing. Well, there is my job, of course. But after 27 years of (often imperfectly) balancing work and motherhood, I feel like a professional juggler who is left with a single ball. For the first time in a very long time, I am the sole proprietor of my day, responsible only for myself.

Already I can see this is going to be a problem.

Not only do I miss my daughter for her own sweet, occasionally maddening self, I miss the structure she, and her siblings, imposed on my life. The school schedule, the after-school schedule, the weekend sports schedule. The doctor’s appointments, the dentist appointments, the haircuts and meal making, the playdates and sleepovers and trips to the playground/zoo/theme park/museum. The bedtimes, the dinner times, homework; the unexpected accommodations for illness, injury and very bad days. Parenthood is many things, but while your children are actual children, it is the clock and calendar.

Which are also now gone. I am still a working mother, but the “mother” part suddenly requires much less work. With juggling no longer required, my job should be so much easier. And yet it’s not. Facing a different sort of day, I find myself struggling to reset. And so I have created a list of Empty Nest/Labor Day resolutions. (And if they sound suspiciously like the advice I’ve given my kids over the years, well, I guess I am mothering myself.)

1. Popcorn and frozen yogurt are not dinner. After three decades of shopping for and preparing reasonably healthy evening meals, I confess I was looking forward to taking a break. But my post-college drop-off “dinner” is clearly not the answer. Eat some fruit and veggies, for heaven’s sake.
2. Put down the phone. Checking for texts or haunting my child’s Instagram is just sad, and perusing Facebook for friends also dropping kids off at college has thus far only led me to endless video feeds. Sure, watching border collies at work and the outtakes from “This Is 40” is great fun, but is it worth an hour of my one and only life? No.
3. Keep setting the alarm. I may no longer need to be up and dressed in time to take or see my kid off to school, but that alarm has been starting my day for five decades now.
4. Get up, stretch and walk around. Despite having a desk job, I never paid much attention to all those pesky ergonomics instructions. I had kids who regularly demanded that I interrupt my work to get up and do something else (which often required actual running). Now I don’t. So it’s up to me.

5. Go outside at least a few times a day. Even with the playground days in the distant past, it is amazing how often your teenage children require your presence outside — if only to walk across the Target parking lot for the third time in a week or examine the dent “someone” put in your car. Find a way to touch grass that doesn’t involve picking up dog poop.

6. Keep up with the calendar. I was certain that, without the presence of so many child-related appointments/events, I could keep track of my husband’s and my schedules in my head. Three missed appointments later, that’s a hard nope.
7. Plan things for the weekends. For years, our weekends were dominated by sports events. More recently, as the empty nest loomed, my husband and I kept them clear on the off chance that our daughter might want to do something with us. Now we are free to do those weekend things we enjoyed as a couple — and I’m sure we’ll remember what they were in time.

8. Carry tissues. I did not cry when I drove away from my daughter at her New York college — I was frankly too tired from the move-in and too worried about the traffic around JFK airport. But when I made my first trip to Ralphs a few days later and saw her favorite potato chips, I burst into tears. Right in the snack aisle.
9. Bite back the wistful advice. When I was deep in the maelstrom of life with young kids, nothing pushed me closer to the edge of insanity than some older mom telling me to “treasure these moments” because “time moves so fast.” “Not fast enough,” I would think grimly as I balanced a crying baby with an exploding diaper and a whiny toddler with an exploding juice box. Now I am that older mom who can’t believe how quickly time passed. But I’ll try to keep it to myself.
10. Be patient. When the last child goes, it’s as big a life change as when the first child arrives (albeit with less spit-up and more sleep). Everything is different and it will take time to adjust. And just when I get used to my calm, quiet house, my daughter will be home for the holidays, leaving shoes and trash and dirty clothes all over the place. No doubt it will drive me nuts. At the moment, I cannot wait.

ALEXNDER ISAK has broken his silence following his blockbuster move to Liverpool.

The Sweden international completed a deadline-day move to the Reds from Newcastle United to become the most expensive player in Premier League history.

1

Liverpool have shelled out a Premier League record £130MILLION to sign the 25-year-old.

Former Real Sociedad ace Isak went on strike in order to force through his move to Anfield and has yet to play this season.

And he’s champing at the bit to get started for the Reds following his successful self-imposed exile.

When asked what drew him to Anfield, he told the Kop club’s official website: “It’s a mixture of what the club is building.

“But what they’re building on top of what the club already is.

“The history of the club,” Isak told Liverpoolfc.com, when asked why Anfield is the place for him.

“Me getting the chance to be a part of this, I want to create history. I want to win trophies.

“That’s ultimately the biggest motivation for me and I feel like this is the perfect place for me to grow even further and to take my game to the next level and help the team as well.

“I feel like this is the next step for me in my career. I’m super-happy that I’ve been given this chance and I’m very motivated to do something well with it.”

Kop chief Arne Slot has handed Isak the historic No.9 shirt, which has previously been worn by club legends Ian Rush, Robbie Fowler and Fernando Torres.

THIS IS A DEVELOPING STORY..

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Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s new Peter Zumthor-designed David Geffen Galleries are alive with sound and activity. Voices echo through the vast, concrete space and a cacophony of drills and electric lifts beep, buzz and blare. A unique colored glaze is being applied to gallery walls, and paintings and photos are being installed throughout.

That gritty whir? It’s the Hilti TE 4-22 cordless rotary hammer drill. “A very fine product,” says senior art preparator Michael Price with a sly smile. He’s been drilling holes in the concrete walls with the large red contraption, which comes with a small attached vacuum that sucks up concrete dust as it penetrates the wall. The work is simple and done in a matter of seconds.

Senior art preparator Michael Price drills into concrete walls to hang art in LACMA’s new David Geffen Galleries. He jokingly calls the Hilti TE 4-22 cordless rotary hammer drill “a very fine product.”

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

Some of the first holes were drilled a little more than a week ago for the installation of a photo sculpture LACMA commissioned for its entrance by Los Angeles-born artist Todd Gray, titled “Octavia Butler’s Gaze.” Last Wednesday, Gray, along with LACMA director and Chief Executive Michael Govan and curator Britt Salvesen, watched the final panel of the 27-foot-long assemblage being hoisted onto the wall and put in place using wooden cleats that fit together much like a jigsaw puzzle.

“This is another thing that concrete makes possible,” says Salvesen, the head of the photography, and prints and drawings, departments, noting with satisfaction how flush the photographs sit against the wall. “The traditional sheetrock drywall used in many museums have been painted and repainted so many times, they’re not exactly pristine when it comes to leveling.”

Gray steps back and looks at the finished product, nodding with quiet pride. The L.A. native attended Hamilton High School and CalArts and felt deeply honored to have been tapped for a permanent commission. He was therefore among the first people to take a hard-hat tour of the building when it was under construction so he could familiarize himself with the space. The new building opens in April 2026.

“I was kind of overwhelmed,” Gray says. “I had never been in an architectural space like this so I was just really curious. But I must admit, I was much more concerned about this wall.”

The wall is big — a blank, concrete slate — and Gray’s piece will be the first work of art guests see when they walk up the broad staircase leading to the new galleries. In Butler’s portrait, which Gray took in the 1990s, the influential writer looks contemplatively off into the distance — whether near or far, one can’t be sure. Her expression is unreadable, at once thoughtful, curious, interested and detached.

A portrait of Octavia Butler, taken by Todd Gray in the 1990s, anchors the 27-foot-long photo sculpture commissioned by LACMA for the entrance of its new David Geffen Galleries.

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

Her face is in a gold, oval frame and the viewer’s eyes follow hers to other aspects of the piece — an assemblage of large and small photos taken by Gray in places around the world, including Versailles, Norway and Ghana. It includes an image of an idyllic-looking path through bright green foliage that leads to a slave castle in Cape Coast, Ghana. There is also a striking image of stars in the cosmos, a lovely fresco from a church in Rome, a picture of traditional sculpture housed at the AfricaMuseum in Belgium and a series of stoic Greek columns.

“A lot of my work is contesting art history, or talking about art history, or photography’s place in history, my history, various histories culturally,” said Gray, explaining why he likes that LACMA’s collection will not be exhibited chronologically, or by medium or region, but rather in a series of interwoven exhibits that connect vastly different art in dialogue. “So it was really a commission made in heaven.”

The new galleries, explained Govan, will focus on “migration and intersection, rather than American art over on one side of the museum and European art in a different wing.”

Gray’s photo sculpture, for example, will be adjacent to a gallery featuring African art and near another with Latin American art.

It will also be directly across from a floor-to-ceiling window. These giant windows are a key part of Zumthor’s design — and a flash point for controversy, with critics arguing that too much sunlight could harm fragile art.

Translucent curtains are being designed for some of the windows, but won’t be used throughout, and not in the entrance across from “Octavia’s Gaze.” For that reason, Gray said he employed a relatively new technique called UV direct printing that was developed for outdoor signage. The process involves intense ultraviolet lights that cure and harden the ink, ultimately searing it into the printing material. These prints won’t fade, Gray said.

Todd Gray, left, oversees the installation of his photo sculpture “Octavia Butler’s Gaze.” The piece used a new UV printing technology to ensure it won’t fade in the sunlight coming in through the floor-to-ceiling windows across from it.

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

Delicate and old art will not be put at risk by light, Govan said. The interior of Zumthor’s building is dotted with boxy, windowless galleries that Govan and Zumthor call “houses.” And like houses, the interior of galleries are being treated to color — not in the form of paint, however.

Zumthor conceived of three colors that he wanted used in the galleries, explained Diana Magaloni, senior deputy director for conservation, curatorial and exhibitions, who has been mixing the glazes and working with a team of four trained artists to apply them. The colors are a reddish black, a Renaissance ultramarine blue and a blackish burgundy that Zumthor hoped would conjure a cave-like dimness. Overall, Magaloni said, Zumthor wanted the color to look as if it were emerging from darkness.

There are 27 galleries and the colors will be divided by section: Nine on the south side are red, nine on the north side are black and the nine in the middle are blue.

The glazing technique was conceived by a friend of Zumthor’s who lives in Switzerland, and LACMA is currently the only organization to employ it, Magaloni said.

Pigments made of minerals including hematite and rocks like lapis lazuli are ground into nanoparticles and suspended in silica, resembling “melted glass,” as Magaloni describes. The glaze is then applied to the walls, a process that must be done at once in order to prevent any impression of brushstrokes, and also because the glaze hardens quickly. Once it’s dry, the team applies a second coat of glaze pigment infused with black carbon nanoparticles. The effect is dark and mottled — it looks as if the concrete has swallowed the color.

“The concrete has all this life in and of itself,” said Magaloni. “You can walk through the building and you can see that those surfaces are not really homogeneous. The material expresses itself with no artifice, and we wanted to preserve that.”

Painting the concrete would erase that life, she added.

A gallery blushing in a deep wine color, with the theme of “Leisure and Labor in the American Metropolis,” is almost ready. Work by George Bellows, James Van Der Zee, Mary Cassatt and Robert Henri adorn the walls, and there is a table ready to receive a Tiffany lamp. Govan points out that such paintings would not have been originally displayed on white walls but rather on walls of richly colored fabric.

“She’s asking you something,” Todd Gray said of his portrait of Octavia Butler.

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

Gray’s piece will also be in dialogue with this room, calling to it from another time and place — asking viewers to turn their gaze to history, slavery, transcendence, salvation, power and so much more.

At this moment in time, when arts institutions are grappling with the implications of the Trump administration’s claim that the Smithsonian Institution presents “divisive, race-centered ideology” and vow to monitor what other museums around the country are putting on display, Gray’s piece feels like a small bit of resistance.

“She’s asking you something,” Gray says of Butler.

The answer is yours to declare.

I’m putting $23,500 into my 401(k) this year. If I do this for 10 years and earn an average 8% return, I’ll have over $340,000 in my 401(k) account. And continuing for 20 years would put me over $1 million.

It’s a big number to save, but I treat it like any other monthly bill. Here’s the system I’m using to make it all happen.

I treat it like a bill, not a leftover

I get paid twice a month, so to hit my $23,500 goal this year, I’ve set up about $1,000 to come out of every paycheck automatically.

Then I just live on what’s left. Some months I feel a squeeze. But other months I’ve totally been able to make it work and can even build a small buffer.

There’s a reason “pay yourself first” is one of the oldest rules in personal finance — because it actually works. If I had to manually save that much, I’d be battling temptation with every single paycheck (and let’s be honest, I’d probably lose that fight some months).

I cut back on things I don’t miss

To be real, I’ve had to make some trade-offs. But now that I’m being more intentional with my spending, I’m actually seeing a lot of positives come from it.

One area I’ve cut back on big time is buying my kids “stuff.” I want to spoil them — partly because I didn’t have much growing up. But now I think twice before jumping on Amazon or heading to Target just to grab something new.

Here’s a good example: this summer, my 6-year-old needed a new bike. My first instinct was to take him to Target and let him pick out a shiny $300 one. I wanted to see the look on his face!

But I fought the urge, hit pause, and decided to look for a cheaper option.

Sure enough, two days later, I met another parent at the park who gave us — no joke — two hand-me-down bikes for free. Both fit my son perfectly, and he couldn’t be happier.

It’s not just kids’ stuff. I’m rethinking every spending category in my life. All the money I’m saving here and there really adds up. And I don’t feel like I’m missing out at all.

I ignore the market and stick to the plan

In 2025, the 401(k) contribution limit is $23,500 (or $31,000 if you’re 50 or older.) So my plan is to contribute the maximum.

Since this is a retirement account I won’t touch for 20+ years, I’m not trying to beat the market or do any fancy investing. My plan is to invest in low-cost index funds, and let time and compounding do the heavy lifting.

And if I can consistently max out my 401(k) each year going forward, the payoff will be huge.

Here’s what my account could look like after a couple decades, assuming an 8% return (slightly under the S&P 500 historical ~10% average annual return):

Data source: Author’s calculations.

Of course, plans change and priorities shift over time. I don’t know if I’ll stick to this exact plan forever. But for now, I’m thinking long term with every dollar I put away.

I’m also building up a Roth IRA

My 401(k) isn’t the only place I’m saving retirement dollars. My wife and I also have Roth IRAs we contribute to every year. Our goal is to have both pre-tax and post-tax buckets of money to withdraw from.

Roth IRAs are especially great if you think you’ll be in a higher tax bracket later. And even if you can’t max one out right now, contributing a little bit each year still adds up.

Better yet, some brokers actually offer an IRA match! For example, right now SoFi Invest® offers a 1% match on IRA contributions (or eligible rollovers). Read our full SoFi Invest® review here to learn more.

One year at a time

So that’s my plan for 2025 — and hopefully for 2026 and beyond. Some years I might be able to max out both my 401(k) and Roth IRA. Other years, maybe not. And that’s OK.

What matters most is that I’m staying consistent, being thoughtful with my spending, and giving every dollar a job.

Ready to start or level up your retirement savings? Compare top brokers and find the right account for your goals.

Gov. Gavin Newsom commuted the sentences of five inmates serving life without parole for murder, saying Friday that they deserve a chance at freedom after transforming their lives.

In all, the governor pardoned 23 people and commuted the sentences of 10 others. Newsom’s office said that many of those offered clemency had experienced childhood trauma and mental health struggles that impacted the choices they made.

Since he took office in 2019, Newsom has granted 247 pardons, which restore some rights to former felons, such as the ability to serve on a jury or obtain a professional license. He has also approved 160 commutations, which reduce sentences so that an inmate can appear before a parole board and potentially be released.

In this round, Newsom pardoned people convicted of assault with a deadly weapon, burglary, attempted murder and drug crimes. His office highlighted that pardons were prompted by what individuals did in the years after those convictions and were at the recommendation of elected officials, law enforcement officers and community leaders.

Among those whose sentences were commuted was Randolph Hoag, who was 28 years old in 1990 when he was convicted in Los Angeles County of murdering his girlfriend’s ex-husband. The Times reported that Hoag, a truck driver, shot Charles Sweed six times in the back before running away.

Newsom said Hoag, now 63, has “demonstrated a commitment to his rehabilitation and self-improvement” and is considered “a high medical risk based on his chronic, serious medical conditions.” Hoag will now be eligible to appear before the Board of Parole hearings, which decides whether a person is a risk to the community after considering input from victims, their families and prosecutors.

“This act of clemency for Mr. Hoag does not minimize or forgive his conduct or the harm it caused,” Newsom wrote in his order. “It does recognize the work he has done since to transform himself.”

Sweed’s sister, Cremae Sweed, became emotional Friday after learning from The Times that Hoag’s sentence was reduced. She said a prosecutor assured her that Hoag would never be released. Her brother, who had a 5-year-old daughter, served in the Marines and owned a tow truck company. Her family was never the same after his death, she said.

“My brother has been dead longer than he was alive, and [Hoag] is still alive,” she said. “He deliberately killed another man, so no, I don’t want him out, and he shouldn’t come out.”

Many of those granted clemency Friday were young adults when they committed their crimes, including Christian Rodriguez, who was 19 when he killed one victim and injured another in 1996. Rodriguez, 47, will now be eligible to appear before the parole board.

“Mr. Rodriguez has worked as both a youth offender and peer literacy mentor, and correctional officers have commended him for his leadership and rehabilitative gains,” Newsom wrote.

Others whose lengthy sentences were reduced included:

• David Fitts, who was 23 when he shot and injured one victim, while his accomplice shot and killed a second victim in 1992. Fitts was sentenced to life without parole in Los Angeles County. Newsom said Fitts, 56, has “dedicated himself to his rehabilitation” and has received commendations from correctional officers for his work ethic and good conduct.
• Karina Poncio, who was 21 when her accomplice fatally shot one person and injured another during a gang-related confrontation in 2000. She was sentenced in Orange County to life without parole. Poncio, 47, earned three associate degrees while in prison and is training to become a certified alcohol and drug specialist.
• Cleveland Lindley, who was 25 when he was convicted of a 1995 armed robbery. He was sentenced in San Bernardino County to 75 years to life for three counts of robbery and another 30 years of sentence enhancements, Newsom’s office said. In prison, Lindley, 55, participated in a service dog training program and was commended by correctional staff for his compassion, maturity and work ethic.

Citing evidence of childhood trauma, Newsom reduced the sentence of Arthur Battle, who was 18 when he and an accomplice murdered a person in a contract killing in 2006. He was sentenced in Sacramento County to life without parole plus a 25-years-to-life sentence enhancement.

Newsom’s office said Battle had adverse childhood experiences, a term used to describe a range of traumatic events that can impact a person’s physical, mental and social health.

While in prison, Battle earned his GED, took college courses and works as an aide to inmates with disabilities. Battle, 37, had his sentence commuted to 21 years to life so he can appear before the Board of Parole hearings.

Stability is a thing of the past at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, which this past week fired its director of dance programming, Jane Raleigh, as well as two other full-time dance programmers, Mallory Miller and Malik Burnett.

A few days later, the center announced its new dance director — a young Washington Ballet dancer named Stephen Nakagawa, who, according to the New York Times, sent a letter to the center’s president, Richard Grenell, lamenting “radical leftist ideologies in ballet.”

Nakagawa also wrote that he was “concerned about the direction the ballet world is taking in America,” that he was upset by the “rise of ‘woke’ culture,” at various dance companies and that he “would love to be part of a movement to end the dominance of leftist ideologies in the arts and return to classical ballet’s purity and timeless beauty.”

If “woke” is a MAGA dog whistle for diversity, equity and inclusion, then restoring “purity” to classical ballet could lead to a regressive whitewashing of the art form.

“With God, all things are possible,” Nakagawa wrote in a social media post announcing his appointment. “I am excited and honored to begin working with the incredible Kennedy Center and this amazing administration.”

The Kennedy Center did not respond to a request for comment about how its dance programming might change now that Nakagawa has taken over, but a person close to the situation, who declined to be identified said, “The [terminated] individuals were given multiple opportunities to come up with new ideas and failed to offer any.”

In interviews following their dismissal, Miller and Burnett said they had attended a meeting with Grenell in which he told them that they needed to prioritize “broadly appealing” programming in order to attract corporate sponsorship. Grenell reportedly used the reality TV competition “So You Think You Can Dance” as an example of what he had in mind.

What Grenell seems to be missing is that, under Raleigh, dance programming at the Kennedy Center was among the best in the nation — with broad appeal. The current season, which had been programmed before Raleigh and the others were fired, included some of the country’s most vaunted and popular companies including Martha Graham Dance Company, American Ballet Theatre and New York City Ballet.

The Kennedy Center also commissioned great work, including Mark Morris’ “Moon,” which staged its world premiere at the center in April. Times classical music critic Mark Swed caught the show at an “unusually quiet” venue shortly after President Trump staged his February takeover of the center.

“‘Moon,’” Swed told me, “served as a marvelous example of how [the] dance series already provides what both its audiences and new administration want. It celebrates American greatness, representing the historic Moonshot and Voyager space missions through wondrous dance, sanguine 1930s swing music and cavorting spacemen. There is even bit of cheerful conspiracy theory with the help of a cuddly alien or two.”

It doesn’t take a MAGA apparatchik to know that’s a winning formula.

I’m arts and culture writer Jessica Gelt, dancing my way to a better tomorrow. Here’s your arts news for the week.

Best bets: On our radar this week

Prince on his 1987 Sign O’ The Times tour at the Palais Omnisports in Paris.

(FG/Bauer-Griffin/Getty Images)

Prince – Sign O’ The Times
The purple one’s 1987 film featuring live performances of songs from his ninth studio album gets the Imax treatment this weekend. Neither a commercial nor critical success upon its original release, interest in the project has only increased as the artist’s stature continued to rise, even after his death from an accidental overdose in 2016. Ranking Prince’s singles in 2021, Times pop music critic Mikael Wood wrote, “Inspired in part by the bad news he saw splashed across the front page of the Los Angeles Times one summer day in 1986, the title track of Prince’s magnum opus addresses AIDS and the crack epidemic in language as haunted and unsparing as the song’s rigorously pared-down groove.” The movie opens Thursday in limited theatrical release; check theaters for showtimes. www.imax.com/prince

“Villagers on Their Way to Church from Book of Hours,” c 1550, by Simon Bening (Flemish, about 1483 – 1561) Tempera colors and gold paint Getty Museum Ms. 50 (93.MS.19), recto

(J. Paul Getty Museum)

Going Places: Travel in the Middle Ages
As we wrap up our own summer excursions, what better time to vicariously explore how it was done in medieval times through this exhibition of Getty Museum manuscripts illustrating the subject, augmented by an interactive component inspired by early 8-bit arcade video games. Times art critic Christopher Knight has described Northern European manuscripts as “one unmistakable strength of the Getty’s collection.” The show opens Tuesday. 10 a.m.-6:30 p.m. Tuesday–Friday and Sunday; 10 a.m.-9 p.m. Saturday; closed Monday, through Nov. 30. J. Paul Getty Museum, 1200 Getty Center Drive. getty.edu

Violinist Anne Akiko Meyers performs Arturo Márquez’s concerto “Fandango” with the LA Phil at the Hollywood Bowl in 2021.

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

Márquez’s Fandango & Shostakovich’s Fifth
Violinist Anne Akiko Meyers performs Arturo Márquez’s Latin Grammy-winning composition with the L.A. Phil, conducted by Giancarlo Guerrero, Tuesday night at the Hollywood Bowl. The orchestra will also perform the Mexican composer’s “Danzon No. 2” and Shostakovich’s popular “Symphony No. 5.” When “Fandango,” commissioned by the L.A. Phil and written for Meyers, had its world premiere in 2021, Times classical music critic Mark Swed called it “substantial. It is based on the Mexican fandango Márquez grew up with in Sonora. His instrument is the violin, and his father was a mariachi violinist. But Márquez’s goal in the concerto was to use his folk and dance roots in a formal classical way, taking as his example such European composers as Manuel de Falla and Isaac Albéniz. In Márquez’s concerto, he allows Meyers to revel in her virtuosity. He writes melodies that sound old and worth keeping. Dance rhythms do what they’re supposed to, making feet tap and nerves tingle.” The gates open at 6 p.m. with the music scheduled to start at 8 p.m. Hollywood Bowl, 2301 N. Highland Ave. hollywoodbowl.com

The week ahead: A curated calendar

FRIDAY
🎭 Masala Dabba
Food, cooking and the titular spice box are central to playwright Wendy Graf’s world-premiere drama about an Indian/African American family directed by Marya Mazor.
7:30 p.m. Thursday-Saturday, 2 p.m. Sunday, through Sept. 14. International City Theatre, 330 E. Seaside Way, Long Beach. InternationalCityTheatre.org.

🎭 NOIR!
A Hollywood thriller is the milieu for a new immersive theatrical experience from the creators of “It’s Alive” and “The Assassination of Edgar Allan Poe.”
7:50 p.m. Friday-Sunday, Sept. 6, 13 and 20. Heritage Square Museum, 3800 Homer St. downtownrep.com

SATURDAY
🎥 Barry Lyndon
The American Cinematheque marks the 50th anniversary of Stanley Kubrick’s visually sublime adaptation of William Makepeace Thackeray’s novel about an 18th century English rogue, starring Ryan O’Neal and Marisa Berenson, with the L.A. premiere of a new 4K restoration.
7 p.m. Egyptian Theatre, 6712 Hollywood Blvd. americancinematheque.com

🎥 Drop Dead Gorgeous
Actor Denise Richards will be in person for a 35 mm screening of the 1999 small-town beauty pageant mockumentary, a darkly comedic cult favorite written by Lona Williams, directed by the State’s Michael Patrick Jann and co-starring Kirstie Alley, Ellen Barkin and Kirsten Dunst.
7:30 p.m. Academy Museum, 6067 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles. academymuseum.org

🎭 Just Another Day
“Wonder Years” dad Dan Lauria wrote this romantic comedy on the enduring nature of love and stars with Academy Award nominee Patty McCormack (“The Bad Seed”) as a septuagenarian couple who meet every day on a park bench to verbally spar and reminisce.
8 p.m. Friday and Saturday, 2 p.m. Sunday, through Sept. 28, with 8 p.m. Wednesday shows on Sept. 17 and 24. Odyssey Theatre Ensemble, 2055 S. Sepulveda Blvd. odysseytheatre.com

🎨 Rising Sun, Falling Rain: Japanese Woodblock Prints
An exhibition exploring the growth of Edo-period ukiyo-e printmaking and the later shin-hanga movement through more than 80 works from the Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts features work by Katsukawa Shunshō, Utagawa Toyokuni, Katsushika Hokusai, Utagawa Hiroshige, Tsukioka Yoshitoshi and Kawase Hasui.
11 a.m.-8 p.m. Friday, 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Saturday–Sunday and Tuesday–Thursday, closed Monday, through Nov. 30. UCLA Hammer Museum, 10899 Wilshire Blvd., Westwood. hammer.ucla.edu

🎨 Martin Wittfooth: Deus ex Terra
The Canadian artist examines the repeating patterns of nature and the ways it serves as both muse and a mirror of the human soul in this solo exhibition.
Opening reception, 7 p.m. Saturday; noon-6 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday. Corey Helford Gallery, 571 S. Anderson St., Los Angeles. coreyhelfordgallery.com/

SUNDAY

The cast of “One Man, Two Guvnors” at a Noise Within: Trisha Miller, from left, Kasey Mahaffy, Ty Aldridge and Cassandra Marie Murphy.

(Daniel Reichert)

🎭 One Man, Two Guvnors
Richard Bean’s swinging ’60s British farce won James Corden a Tony Award and largely introduced him to American audiences. The show, based on “The Servant of Two Masters” by Carlo Goldoni, is directed by A Noise Within producing Artistic Directors Julia Rodriguez-Elliott and Geoff Elliott, with songs by Grant Olding.
Previews: 2 p.m. Sunday; 7:30 p.m. Wednesday-Sept. 5; opening night: 7:30 p.m. Sept. 6; 2 p.m. Sunday, 7:30 p.m. Wednesday-Friday; 2 and 7:30 p.m. Saturday, through Sept. 28. A Noise Within, 3352 E. Foothill Blvd., Pasadena. anoisewithin.org

TUESDAY
🎥 Who Killed Teddy Bear?
The Los Angeles premiere of a newly struck 35 mm print presents Joseph Cates’ uncensored director’s cut of his 1965 neo-noir thriller starring Sal Mineo, Juliet Prowse, Jan Murray and Elaine Stritch with footage seen for the first time in six decades.
7 p.m. Los Feliz Theatre, 1822 N. Vermont Ave. americancinematheque.com

WEDNESDAY
🎭 Am I Roxie?
Written-actor Roxana Ortega’s one-woman comedy is a wild ride through her mother’s mental decline. Directed by Bernardo Cubría.
7:30 p.m. Wednesday-Thursday; 8 p.m. Friday; 3 and 8 p.m. Saturday; 2 p.m. Sunday, through Oct. 5. Geffen Playhouse, 10886 Le Conte Ave., Westwood. geffenplayhouse.org

THURSDAY
🎭 Oedipus the King, Mama!
Troubadour Theater, a.k.a. the Troubies, applies its brand of commedia dell’arte-inflected slapstick to Sophocles’ classic Greek tragedy, infused with the music of Elvis Presley.
8 p.m. Thursday-Saturday, through Sept. 27. The Getty Villa, 17985 Pacific Coast Highway, Pacific Palisades. getty.edu

🎼 Mozart’s Requiem
Conductor James Gaffigan leads the L.A. Phil in the composer’s final, uncompleted Mass, with the Los Angeles Master Chorale, preceded by Ellen Reid’s “Body Cosmic” and Brahms’ “Song of Destiny.”
8 p.m. Hollywood Bowl, 2301 N. Highland Ave. hollywoodbowl.com

Culture news and the SoCal scene

Danielle Wade as Maizy, left, and Miki Abraham as Lulu in the North American Tour of “Shucked” at the Hollywood Pantages Theatre.

(Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman)

If you’re a sucker for puns, you’ll love “Shucked,” the musical comedy running through Sept. 7 at the Hollywood Pantages Theatre. The show, writes Times theater critic Charles McNulty, “never met a pun it didn’t like.” But there’s more to the folksy tale of mixed-up love in a place called Cob County — “Shucked” is a “folksy farcical riot, wholesome enough for widespread appeal but with just enough flamboyant oddity to tickle the funny bone of urban sophisticates.” The actors are also top-notch, including Danielle Wade, who plays the female lead Maizy. Wade, writes McNulty, “sounds like an ingenue Dolly Parton, exquisite to listen to, especially when her heart is in play.”

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s annual Art+Film Gala returns for its 14th year. This year’s honorees are filmmaker Ryan Coogler and Light and Space artist Mary Corse. The elaborate dinner — which always attracts a high-powered Hollywood crowd — is co-chaired by LACMA trustee Eva Chow and Leonardo DiCaprio. It’s scheduled to take place on Nov. 1 and will be the last such event to occur before the museum opens its new Peter Zumthor-designed building next spring.

Tyrone Huntley, an usher at the Hollywood Bowl.

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

Remember the fabulous actor who played Simon in the Hollywood Bowl’s unforgettable “Jesus Christ Superstar”? The one who also served as an understudy for Cynthia Erivo’s Jesus? His name is Tyrone Huntley, and his story is similar to those of countless working actors in L.A. Namely that he also has a day job. Only in Huntley’s case, his day job is working as an usher at the Hollywood Bowl. One day he was onstage in one of the season’s hottest shows, and the next he was showing people to their seats at the very same venue. Read all about it here.

A scene from the 2022 documentary “¡Viva Maestro!”: Gustavo Dudamel smiles as he wraps up Encuentros performance in Palacio de Bellas Artes.

(Gerardo Nava / The Gustavo Dudamel Foundation)

Gustavo Dudamel is still the music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, but he’s already got one foot in New York City, where he is scheduled to become the music director of the New York Philharmonic in September 2026. This week the N.Y. Phil issued a news release highlighting Dudamel’s presence in its 2025-26 season. As the orchestra’s music and artistic director designate, Dudamel will lead six weeks of subscription programs, as well as the season-opening concerts. Next month he will conduct the world premiere of Leilehua Lanzilotti’s “of light and stone.”

Almost two years ago, Holocaust Museum LA broke ground on a $65-million expansion. It is now a less than a year out from opening at its new Jona Goldrich campus, which includes a 200-seat multipurpose theater, a 3,000-square-foot gallery, two classrooms, an interactive theater featuring a virtual Holocaust survivor, a pavilion with an authentic boxcar, a gift shop and a coffee shop, as well as a variety of outdoor community spaces. Designed by architect Hagy Belzberg, it will double the museum’s footprint in Pan Pacific Park.

The Consortium of Asian American Theaters & Artists issued a news release voicing concern “over the recent and evolving casting decisions in the Broadway production of ‘Maybe Happy Ending’,” created and written by Hue Park, with music by Will Aronson. The Michael Arden-directed Broadway adaptation won six Tony Awards this year, including for best musical, direction of a musical and lead actor in a musical (Darren Criss). However, after the award wins, Criss, who is of Filipino descent, took a leave of absence from the show and was replaced by a white actor, Andrew Barth Feldman. “This is not just about one casting decision, even if only momentary. It reflects a longstanding pattern of exclusion, whitewashing, and inequity that AAPINH and global majority artists have confronted for decades in U.S. theater,” the news release said.

— Jessica Gelt

And last but not least

Ojai’s Hotel El Roblar, which first welcomed guests in 1919, has officially reopened. The newest hotel in Ojai is now also its oldest, writes Times Travel writer Christopher Reynolds. See you there!

The Los Angeles City Council stopped short on Wednesday of giving another $5 million to a law firm hired to defend the city in a long running homelessness case, sending the question to a committee for additional vetting.

City Atty. Hydee Feldstein Soto had asked the council to provide a nearly sixfold increase in her office’s contract with Gibson Dunn & Crutcher LLP, taking the cost up to $5.9 million.

The council voted in May to provide Gibson Dunn $900,000 for up to three years of work. Over the following three months, the law firm blew way past that amount, racking up $3.2 million in bills.

“Obviously, we are not happy, and not ready to pay that bill that we didn’t bargain for,” said Councilmember Bob Blumenfield. “We were supposed to have been notified when they were exceeding that amount. It’s written in the contract that we were supposed to be notified at different levels. We were not notified.”

On Wednesday, after meeting behind closed doors for more than 90 minutes, the council sent Feldstein Soto’s request to the powerful budget committee for more review.

Blumenfield, who sits on that committee, did not offer a timeline for taking up Feldstein Soto’s request. However, he said he wants the city attorney to go back to Gibson Dunn to ensure that “taxpayers are better served.”

The L.A. Alliance sued in 2020, saying the city was doing too little to move people homeless people indoors and address the concentration of encampments in Skid Row and elsewhere. The group eventually reached a settlement with the city that required, among other things, the construction of homeless housing beds and the removal of encampments.

As part of the settlement, the city must provide 12,915 homeless beds or other housing opportunities, such as rental vouchers, by June 2027. L.A. also must remove 9,800 homeless encampments, such as tents or recreational vehicles, by June 2026.

Lawyers for the L.A. Alliance contend the city has repeatedly fallen short of the obligations spelled out in the settlement. In May, the group attempted to persuade U.S. Dist. Judge David O. Carter to seize control over the city’s homeless initiatives and turn them over to a third-party receiver.

Gibson Dunn waged an aggressive defense of the city’s actions, issuing hundreds of objections and working to undermine key witness testimony.

Carter ultimately rejected the request to appoint a receiver, but also concluded that the city had breached the settlement agreement in several ways.

Feldstein Soto did not immediately comment on the council’s action. She has previously praised the law firm, saying through a spokesperson that it “delivered exceptional results and seamless representation.”

The city is now planning to appeal portions of the judge’s order. Feldstein Soto said some of the additional $5 million would go toward work on that appeal, with Gibson Dunn representing the city through June 2027, according to a confidential memo reviewed by The Times.

In her memo, Feldstein Soto commended Gibson Dunn for preserving the city’s control over its homeless programs and preventing several elected officials from being ordered to testify.

Blumenfield also offered praise for Gibson Dunn, saying he appreciates the firm’s “good work for the city.” Nevertheless, he also wants Feldstein Soto to look for ways of cutting costs.

“Sending it to committee sends a message — which is, we don’t like what was put before us for lots of reasons,” he said.

Matthew Umhofer, an attorney representing the L.A. Alliance, said after the meeting that he was “heartened that the city didn’t give this misadventure a blank check.”

“I’m hopeful the City Council committee scrutinizes this,” he said, “and asks the important question of whether spending $6 million on an outside firm to avoid accountability is a good use of taxpayer funds.”

The high-powered law firm that racked up big bills working to keep the city of Los Angeles from losing control over its homeless programs is now looking to increase its contract by $5 million.

City Atty. Hydee Feldstein Soto has asked the City Council to increase the city’s contract with Gibson Dunn & Crutcher LLP to $5.9 million, up from the $900,000 approved three months ago, according to a confidential memo she sent to council members.

Gibson Dunn has been defending the city since mid-May in a lawsuit filed by the nonprofit Alliance for L.A. Human Rights, which resulted in a settlement agreement requiring the construction of new homeless housing and the removal of street encampments. The L.A. Alliance alleges that the city has repeatedly violated the agreement.

The Times reported last month that Gibson Dunn billed the city $1.8 million for about two weeks of work, with 15 attorneys charging $1,295 per hour and others charging lower amounts.

By Aug. 8, Gibson Dunn had racked up $3.2 million in billings in the case, according to the city attorney’s memo, a copy of which was reviewed by The Times. Those invoices arrived during a difficult financial period for the city, caused in part by a surge in expensive legal payouts.

Much of the firm’s work was focused on its preparation for, and participation in, a lengthy hearing before a federal judge who was weighing the Alliance’s request to hand control over the city’s homeless initiatives to a third party.

Gibson Dunn was retained by the city one week before the hearing, which lasted seven court days, at eight or more hours per day.

“The evidentiary hearing was more extensive than anticipated, with the plaintiffs calling more than a dozen witnesses and seeking to compel City officials to testify,” Feldstein Soto wrote in her memo.

Feldstein Soto’s office did not immediately respond to inquiries from The Times. But the city attorney has been outspoken in defending Gibson Dunn’s work, saying the firm kept the city’s homeless initiatives from being turned over to a receiver — a move that would have stripped authority from Bass and the City Council.

Gibson Dunn also prevented several elected officials — a group that includes Bass — from having to take the stand, Feldstein Soto said in her memo.

City Councilmember Monica Rodriguez said she would vote against a request to spend another $5 million on Gibson Dunn. That money would be better spent on ensuring the city complies with its legal obligations in the case, which include the construction of 12,915 homeless beds and the removal of 9,800 encampments, she said.

Rodriguez, who also voted against the initial round of funding for Gibson Dunn, said $5 million would be enough to cover “time limited” housing subsidies for at least 500 households in her northeast San Fernando Valley district for an entire year.

“At the end of the day, we’re here to house people,” she said. “So let’s spend the resources housing them, rather than being in a protracted legal battle.”

Matthew Umhofer, an attorney who represents the L.A. Alliance, called the request for nearly $6 million “ludicrous,” saying the city should focus on compliance with the settlement agreement.

“Gibson is a very good firm. Lawyers cost money. I get it,” he said. “But the city has hundreds of capable lawyers, and the notion that they need to spend this kind of money to prevent a court from holding them to their obligations and their promises, it raises real questions about the decision-making in the city on this issue.”

“For a city that claims to be in fiscal crisis, this is nonsense,” Umhofer added.

In her memo, Feldstein Soto said the additional $5 million would cover Gibson Dunn’s work in the case through June 2027, when the city’s legal settlement with the L.A. Alliance is set to expire.

During that period, Gibson Dunn would appeal an order by U.S. District Judge David O. Carter, arguing that the judge “reinterpreted” some of the city’s obligations under the settlement agreement, Feldstein Soto said in her memo. The law firm would also seek to “reform” the settlement agreement, Feldstein Soto said.

Theane Evangelis, an attorney with Gibson Dunn who led the team assigned to the L.A. Alliance case, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Her firm has played a huge role in redefining the way cities are permitted to address homelessness.

Representing Grants Pass, Ore., the firm secured a landmark ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court upholding laws that prohibit homeless people from camping in public spaces.

The firm brought a new, more pugnacious approach to the L.A. Alliance case, issuing hundreds of objections throughout the seven-day hearing and working to undermine the credibility of key witnesses.

A month later, Carter issued a 62-page order declining to turn L.A.’s homeless programs over to a third party. However, he also found that the city had failed to comply with the settlement agreement.

Feldstein Soto said the additional $5 million would allow the firm to carry out its work through June 2027, when the Alliance settlement is scheduled to expire.

Gibson Dunn’s legal team would continue to pursue the city’s appeal while also helping to produce the quarterly reports that are required by the settlement agreement.

Lily Phillips is the subject of a new episode of Stacey Dooley’s show, Stacey Dooley Sleeps Over, where she talks about her decision to leave university and enter the adult content creator industry

It’s every parent’s worst nightmare to learn that their child has become an adult content creator. But that is the reality for the parents of Only Fans star Lily Phillips, 23.

Lily grew up in a small village in Derbyshire and dropped out of university after a few months to join the online platform. In her first 24 hours online, she made £2,000 and has since gone on to pull a number of ‘live stunts’ which has seen her sleep with 100 men in one day, taking her content very much offline as well.

“When I started that, I was like wow – I found a glitch in the matrix and I can make money doing what I love,” she says. Quickly, the conversation comes up about her parents feel about it.

“I described it to them as more like glamour modelling. Obviously, they were concerned at the start – are you safe, as long as it’s only online,” she says, before admitting she hadn’t told her parents about her latest ‘stunt’.

READ MORE: Stacey Dooley reveals staggering amount Lily Phillips really earns a month

The stunts happen in person – rather than online – and Lily will go out and physically recruit people for them. No one is off limits. The content was so shocking that none of it ended up in the documentary.

In a candid chat, Lily got emotional as she spoke with her parents on her regular Sunday catch up, joined by documentary maker and journalist Stacey Dooley. Speaking on Stacey Dooley Sleeps Over, her dad says: “We’ve known for years she’s done OnlyFans and I thought it was just posing in swimwear and lingerie.”

“When she said she was doing Only Fans, we stood back because we want to continue our relationship with our daughter. We were pretty open with it, but when it went to the next step, we were like ‘no no’,” her mum says. Heartbreakingly, her dad says: “If there’s anything we could do to change her profession, we’d do it overnight … It’s the degradingness of it and making sure that she’s safe.”

Her dad says: “Sometimes we think have we done anything wrong with her upbringing, well as far as I’m concerned we’ve had nothing but nice times and love … Is it money? Because if it was money, we’d sell our house. You could have everything you want Lily if you gave it all up now.” When asked how she feels, Lily says she understands and respects how they feel and “that’s that”.

The conversation later gets too much for Lily and she walks away, hearing her parents get emotional over their daughter’s career choice. “I don’t want to be on camera, I just need a moment,” she says. Her mum is also emotional as they both apologise for upsetting her, as her dad says he receives calls from random people saying ‘I hope your daughter dies’.

Lily says she’d do anything to stop her parents being affected by what she does – but talk of money doesn’t come easy for Lily. When pressed by Stacey about how much she earns, Lily eventually confesses to being a multi-millionaire.

“So the subscribers, they’ll give a tenner and she’s got 33,000 so that’s £330,000 a month,” Stacey reveals during one of Lily’s live videos – which all gets too much and Stacey walks out, unable to watch it continue.

Her empire has allowed her to buy her dream car outright and finance isn’t even a word Lily needs to think about. “Does multimillionaire mean lots of millions in the bank? I’d say multimillionaire,” she says rather bashfully, before adding: “I’m so English – I find money so uncomfortable to talk about… I find it a little bit distasteful.”

It comes just weeks after the Channel 4 documentary on her fellow adult content creator Bonnie Blue was criticised for appearing to promote their career choice with young women looking to enter into the industry.

At just 23-years-old, Lily believes she’s slept with over 1,000 men. One of her most viral videos – which saw her sleep with 100 men in one day – earned her a seven figure sum. Despite her parents’ worries, she has no plans to stop doing what she does.

When asked by Stacey if there was a world where she’d stop what she did, she say she wouldn’t. “I don’t see it as that extreme,” she says, appearing to double down on her decision to stay in the industry.

“Is all of this worth it?” Stacey asks Lily, who tells her: “I can’t imagine what else I’d be doing. It gives me so much drive and a reason to wake up in the morning. This is something that isn’t degrading for me – I still have to live my life how I want to.”

Lily’s appearance on Stacey’s show has been hit with furious backlash. One wrote: ‘I’m just losing my conviction towards Stacey’s content and the authenticity of her views… is it just documentary clickbait.” Another said: “Really disappointing, just don’t think Stacey Dooley should be promoting or giving this girl a platform. Lowest derivative entertainment, a real regression in content from Stacey.”

A study, published in 2021, revealed that one in five Britons open to working in adult industry, with 32% of those aged 18-34 saying they were tempted by the money – but is a show like this serving a warning or promoting it as lifestyle choice?

*Stacey Dooley Sleeps Over is available to stream on U.

Like this story? For more of the latest showbiz news and gossip, follow Mirror Celebs on TikTok, Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Threads.

“Long Story Short,” premiering Friday on Netflix, is the sweet, melancholy, satirical, silly, poignant, hopeful, sometimes slapstick cartoon tale of a middle-class Jewish family, told nonchronologically from the 1990s to the 2020s. For all its exaggerations — and unexaggerated portrayals of exaggerated behaviors — it is remarkably acute, and surprisingly moving, about relations between parents and children and brothers and sisters and about the passage of time and the lives time contains. The eight-episode season is bookended with funerals.

On a plane ride home, Avi Schwooper (Ben Feldman), his last name combining his parents’ Schwartz and Cooper, plays new girlfriend Jen (Angelique Cabral) a recording of Paul Simon’s “The Obvious Child,” in which a character goes from a baby to a married man in the space of a verse. “That’s time, right?” he says, setting a theme and a strategy. In the episodes that follow, we’ll see relationships begin and end; children born and grown, not necessarily in that order. Things change, things fall apart, things last.

Created by “BoJack Horseman” creator Raphael Bob-Waksberg — Avi is drawn to resemble him — and designed by Lisa Hanawalt (who inspired and designed the “BoJack” characters and created “Tuca & Bertie”), it has the look of a children’s book, bright, colorful and busy, aggressively two-dimensional, with wobbly bold lines and squiggly patterns. Deceptively sophisticated and wonderfully expressive, it is full of lifelike details, without being made to resemble life.

Avi’s parents are Naomi Schwartz (Lisa Edelstein), intense and serious, and Elliot Cooper (Paul Reiser), laid-back and humorous. Avi, who writes about music, will go on to marry Jen (blond, gentile); Hannah (Michaela Dietz) is their smart, socially isolated daughter. Avi’s sister Shira (Abbi Jacobson), the angry middle child, will start a family with Kendra (Nicole Byer), a Black woman who is Jewish by choice. Younger brother Yoshi (Max Greenfield) is a bit of a lost soul — “sometimes I just feel like the extra one,” he’ll say — diagnosed as an adolescent with ADD, dyslexia and executive function disorder. (“I never gave him enough attention,” Naomi says, rushing to claim the guilt. “Now he has a deficit.”)

Created by Raphael Bob-Waksberg and designed by Lisa Hanawalt, the series has the look of a children’s book, bright, colorful and busy, aggressively two-dimensional, with wobbly bold lines and squiggly patterns.

(Netflix)

Though each episode is a piece in the mosaic, each has its own story to tell: Yoshi selling mattresses that come in a tube; Avi mixed up with self-righteous parents as he campaigns to remove wolves from Hannah’s school (the wolves, by contrast, are drawn realistically); Kendra at work at a birthday arcade called BJ Barnacles; Yoshi on a nocturnal adventure in San Francisco — the show is set around the Bay Area — with a former friend of his sister, attempting to retrieve a lost bag; Shira attempting to make her mother’s knishes; an improvised shabbat in a desert motel. There are inside family jokes (“Is not a schnook,” Cousin Moishe) that will pay off after a while; a school holiday pageant (“Hanukkah, Ramadan, Kwanzaa too / We tolerate them all, but there’s nothing like Christmas,” runs a song in the background). Yoshi has a bar mitzvah; Naomi is honored for her charitable work. Occasional weird inventions are folded in: a “hambulance” delivering ham; food trucks selling potato ice cream and soup on a stick; something called Pacifier Shirt Syndrome, caused by rubbing a dropped pacifier on a short.

Although I suspect this subject is interesting only to (us) Jews, it took a long time for any sort of Jewish specificity to make it to the screen, especially given who built the movie business. (Assimilation was the name of the game for a people blamed for a scapegoated race.) Even now, it doesn’t happen all that much. You could sense it on “Seinfeld,” see it on “Curb Your Enthusiasm” a lot. There are the current Netflix rom-com “Nobody Wants This,” with Kristen Bell in a relationship with Adam Brody’s rabbi, and the recent Adam Sandler-produced “You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah.” And there is the odd Holocaust drama.

But in this moment, with its confounding mix of classical antisemitism, fake anti-antisemitism brandished as a weapon against universities and what gets called antisemitism simply because it’s critical of Israel, it’s not a bad thing to get a relatively straightforward look at a contemporary American Jewish family. Together, the characters represent the spectrum of religious attitudes — from atheist to convert, selectively to very observant — but all are steeped in the culture.

Hannah, whose gentile mother makes her “not Jewish,” wonders if her wanting a bat mitzvah might be “cultural appropriation.”

“Look, if Adolf Hitler saw you, I don’t think he’d be doing the math on technically how halachically Jewish you are,” says her father. “He’d throw you in the oven with the rest of us. … If you’re Jewish enough for Hitler, you’re Jewish enough for me.”

That the show can be a little obscure from time to time — I had to look up “Moshiach” to get one joke — just deepens its world. But anyone who’s ever shared a family joke, or wanted to ask a question of someone no longer around to answer it, or compared notes with a sibling on a parent never fully understood will recognize themself here.

We’re a week away from Labor Day weekend and we have one movie slotted in as a best picture Oscar nominee.

That leaves nine spots and whole lot of sharp elbows as we begin the fall film festival circuit next week in Venice and Telluride.

I’m Glenn Whipp, columnist for the Los Angeles Times and host of The Envelope newsletter. Worst freeway in Southern California? There is only one correct answer, but it’s not the one in our rankings. And that answer is just another reason why, like Sal Saperstein, we dread going anywhere near LAX.

Fall festivals preview

In case you were wondering — but I think you already know — the movie already assured a best picture nomination is Ryan Coogler’s exuberant horror hit, “Sinners,” a film as entertaining and provocative as anything I’ve seen in a theater in the last couple of years. It was my favorite summer movie, even if it did come out in April. Watching it in Imax 70mm felt like an event, the kind of blockbuster moviegoing experience I’ll remember years from now.

The Venice Film Festival starts Wednesday. On Thursday, I’ll be flying to Telluride. The 50th Toronto International Film Festival begins the following week. Dozens of movies will be premiering at these festivals. Standing ovations will be meticulously — and ridiculously — timed. And when the smoke clears, we’ll have the makings of a slate of contenders that we’ll be covering and debating for the next six months.

Here are some of the world premieres at each festival that I’ll be watching most closely, movies that could be made — or broken — by the next time you hear from me.

Venice

Haute couture. Water taxis. Endless Aperol spritzes.

“Frankenstein”: For Guillermo del Toro, Pinocchio and Frankenstein have always been two sides of the same coin, creations made by an uncaring father, released into the world without much care. Del Toro tackled Pinocchio with his last film, which won the Oscar for animated feature. And now he’s adapting the Mary Shellley classic, promising to include parts of the tragic story never before seen on screen. If anyone can make us shout “it’s alive” again, it’s Del Toro.

“A House of Dynamite”: A new political thriller from Oscar-winning director Kathryn Bigelow is an event, particularly because it’s her first film since “Detroit” eight years ago. “Dynamite” deals with U.S. leaders scrambling for a response after a missile attack. I’m hoping to embark on a two-hour ride firmly fixed in the fetal position.

“Jay Kelly”: Famous actor (George Clooney) and his devoted manager (Adam Sandler) travel through Europe, pondering regrets (they’ve had a few) and the times they’ve loved, laughed and cried. Noah Baumbach directs from a script he co-wrote with Emily Mortimer. His last movie, 2019’s “Marriage Story,” earned six Oscar nominations, with Laura Dern winning supporting actress. Time for the Sandman to finally get an invitation to the party?

“No Other Choice”: Park Chan-wook adapts the provocative Donald Westlake thriller “The Ax,” which Costa-Gavras adapted in 2005 — but Park apparently wasn’t aware of that movie when he decided to make his own film. Park has been working on it for years, calling it his “lifetime project,” the movie he wanted to stand as his “masterpiece.” He has made some great films — “The Handmaiden” and “Decision to Leave” among them — so it’s hard not be intrigued.

“The Smashing Machine”: I have seen the trailer for this Benny Safdie drama about MMA fighter Mark Kerr so many times that I feel like I have already seen the movie. The blend of Safdie grittiness and Dwayne Johnson star power is sure to generate buzz, but there are whispers that the film simply isn’t all that good. From that trailer, I’m inclined to believe them … but hope to be proved wrong.

Telluride

High altitude, fleece pullovers, repeated discussions about hydration. Lineup not officially announced until Thursday. These are just “rumors.”

“Ballad of a Small Player”: Edward Berger premiered “Conclave” at Telluride last year and it worked out fine, going on to earn eight Oscar nominations and emerging as a viable, sillier alternative for those looking to vote for something other than “Anora.” Berger’s latest is about a high-stakes gambler (Colin Farrell) holed up in China, desperate for a way out of his debts and past sins. As awards voters loved “Conclave” and Berger’s misbegotten “All Quiet on the Western Front,” attention must be paid.

“Hamnet”: Paul Mescal is everywhere. And now he’s playing William Shakespeare in a drama about the Bard and his wife rediscovering each other after the death of their 11-year-old son, Hamnet. Why not? Especially when the film is directed by Chloé Zhao (“Nomadland”) and has the brilliant Jessie Buckley on board as Shakespeare’s better half.

“Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere”: Bruuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuce! Jeremy Allen White plays Springsteen as he goes lo-fi making his acclaimed album “Nebraska.” History tells us that actors starring in music biopics are rewarded handsomely, and, given what we’ve seen of White on “The Bear,” he seems a perfect choice to play a brooding Bruce.

Toronto

Weather that veers between spring, summer and fall in the course of a week. Poutine. Splashy premieres of movies that have already played at other festivals.

“Christy”: Sydney Sweeney has been in the news lately. Maybe you’ve heard? But she’s about to make a serious awards-season play in this sports biopic about boundary-shattering boxer Christy Martin, a young gay woman fighting to establish an identity that runs counter to her conservative upbringing. Will the work be good enough to rise above the noise around the actor?

“The Lost Bus”: Paul Greengrass, like Bigelow, has been absent from the conversation for a bit. His last movie, the fine western “News of the World,” was swallowed by the pandemic. Now he’s back with a survival drama, one with California roots, as a father (Matthew McConaughey) and a teacher (America Ferrera) try to bring a bus full of school children to safety during the deadly 2018 Camp fire.

For Patricia Sinay, one of the highlights of her life was serving on the California Citizens Redistricting Commission, which spent well over a year painstakingly plotting out the state’s political boundaries.

“I got to witness democracy at its core,” said Sinay, 58, who lives in Encinitas and works as a consultant in the world of nonprofits.

“There were 14 very diverse people who came at this work from different backgrounds,” she said. “Some may have known more than others about redistricting. But by the end we were all experts and focused on the same thing, which was creating fair maps for the people of California.”

Now, a good deal of that work may come undone, as voters are being asked to scrap the even-handed congressional lines drawn by Sinay and her fellow commissioners in favor of a blatantly gerrymandered map that could all but wipe out California’s Republican representation in Congress.

Sinay, a Democrat, is ambivalent.

She understands the impetus behind the move, a tit-for-tat response to a similar Republican gerrymander in Texas, done at President Trump’s behest to shore up the GOP’s chances ahead of a perilous 2026 midterm election.

“I think what President Trump requested is absolutely abhorrent. I think that Texas doing this is absolutely abhorrent,” Sinay said. “I do not support the actions of the current administration. I think that their actions are absolutely dangerous and scary.”

But, she said, “I don’t think this is the best way to stop what the administration is doing.”

Sinay noted Republicans have more gerrymandering opportunities nationwide than Democrats, should political adversaries go that route, and she questioned the cost of California’s Nov. 4 special election, which could run into hundreds of millions of dollars.

“There are too many people right now that are hurting that could use that money in much better ways,” Sinay said.

Other commissioners disagree.

Sara Sadhwani, 45, a Democrat who teaches political science at Pomona College, spoke at Gov. Gavin Newsom’s rally kicking off the gerrymandering effort and testified before the state Senate, urging lawmakers to put the matter before voters so they can give Democrats a lift.

“These are extraordinary times,” Sadhwani said, “and extraordinary times call for extraordinary measures.”

Trena Turner, a pastor in Stockton and fellow commissioner, said she’s tremendously proud of the commission’s work and believes its impartial approach to political line-drawing is a model the rest of America should embrace.

But, she said, “I don’t think we should be playing by individual rules, different rules from state to state,” given what’s taken place in Texas and the threat of GOP gerrymandering in other places, such as Florida.

“The voices that we need to speak up for now are not just our individual congressional districts,” said the 64-year-old Democrat. “We need to speak up for the voices of our nation, for the soul of our nation.”

Neal Fornaciari, a Republican who chairs the redistricting commission, said individual members are speaking strictly for themselves. (Though its map-making function was completed at the end of 2021, the commission remains in existence.)

Commissioners “are exercising their 1st Amendment right to free speech,” said Fornaciari, 63, a retired mechanical engineer who lives in Shingletown, in the far north of California. But, he emphasized, “The commission is in no way involved in this redistricting effort.”

He even declined to state his personal views on the Democratic gerrymander, lest someone mistakenly assume Fornaciari was speaking on the commission’s behalf.

The body was created in 2008 when California voters approved Proposition 11, also known as the Voters First Act. Spearheaded by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, the measure sought to bring balance to legislative races by taking redistricting away from lawmakers, who tended to draw the state’s political lines to suit their interests and minimize competition.

In 2010, voters extended the commission’s oversight to congressional races.

Consisting of 14 members, the panel is divided among five Democrats, five Republicans and four members with no party affiliation. More than 30,000 Californians applied for the positions.

The 14 who landed the job survived a grueling selection process, overseen by the nonpartisan state auditor, which involved detailed questionnaires, multiple essays and face-to-face interviews. The final lineup included a seminary professor, a structural engineer and an investigator for the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.

Over the course of 16 months — and through days sometimes lasting 12 hours or more — commissioners produced 176 maps. They created district boundaries for 52 members of Congress, 120 state lawmakers and four members of the Board of Equalization, which oversees tax collection in California.

Commissioners worked for free, receiving no salary, though they did get a $378 per diem on days they spent in session.

It’s a point of pride that no one sued to overturn the commission’s work, a rarity in the highly litigious field of redistricting.

“Most of the time if you watched our meetings I doubt if you could have correctly guessed all our political affiliations,” Russell Yee, a Republican commissioner, said in an email. “We approved our final maps unanimously. We proved that citizens can rise above political, racial, regional, and generational differences to do the public’s work together in an open and successful manner.”

(All commission meetings were open to the public, with proceedings livestreamed on the internet.)

Yee, 64, the academic director at a small Christian study center in Berkeley, said he was generally opposed to the Democratic gerrymandering effort “because two wrongs don’t make a right. The ends do not justify the means.”

However, while Yee leans against Proposition 50, as the November ballot measure has been designated, he will “keep listening with an open mind.”

Even if voters crumple up and toss the congressional maps Yee and others drafted, none felt as though their labors were wasted. For one thing, they said, the other political boundaries, for state legislative contests and the Board of Equalization, will remain intact. And the congressional lines yielded a set of highly competitive races in 2020 and 2024.

“We’ve shown twice now that independent, citizen redistricting can work well even in a state as populous, demographically diverse, and geographically complex at California,” Yee said.

For her part, Sinay, the nonprofit consultant, is uncertain about Proposition 50.

One thing she wants, Sinay said, is reassurance “this isn’t a permanent power grab” and that congressional redistricting will, in fact, revert to the commission after the next census, as Newsom and gerrymandering proponents have promised. Sidelining self-interested politicians is definitely a better way to draw political maps, she suggested, but ultimately it’s up to voters to decide.

“I will definitely support whatever the people of California want,” Sinay said.

The White House on Thursday issued a press release titled, “President Trump Is Right About the Smithsonian.” The missive arrived in inboxes the day after Trump took to Truth Social to lash out at museums across the country — and the Smithsonian Institute in particular — for being too “woke.”

The president vowed to have his attorneys deal with the Smithsonian in the same punitive and litigious way it has handled colleges and universities that don’t hew to MAGA ideals, and a rep for the White House said that Trump would start with the Smithsonian, “and then go from there.”

The idea that Trump might find some surprising legal loophole to pressure or punish museums that don’t share his appetite for revisionist history, is chilling to many critics, including the the American Alliance of Museums, which recently issued a statement warning of “growing threats of censorship against U.S. museums.”

Trump’s beef with the Smithsonian and affiliated museums is centered on his assertion that its exhibits focus on “how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was, and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been — Nothing about Success, nothing about Brightness, nothing about the Future.”

The follow-up press release cataloged 22 examples of how the Smithsonian allegedly “prioritizes exhibits that undermine our values and rewrite the American story through a lens of grievance and exclusion.”

But the examples given are all about inclusion — the inclusion of voices that have often been left out of a mainstream dialogue about our nation’s history. Rather than seeming radical, the list appears straightforward and kind.

“The National Museum of the American Latino features programming highlighting ‘animated Latinos and Latinas with disabilities’ — with content from ‘a disabled, plus-sized actress’ and an ‘ambulatory wheelchair user’ who ‘educates on their identity being Latinx, LGBTQ+, and disabled,’ reads one entry.

Then there are the entries that simply rankle Trump based on his own politics of grievance.

“The National Portrait Gallery commissioned a ‘stop-motion drawing animation’ that ‘examines the career’ of Anthony Fauci,” reads another.

There are also bald attempts to censor free artistic expression based on its subject matter: “An American History Museum exhibit features a depiction of the Statue of Liberty ‘holding a tomato in her right hand instead of a torch, and a basket of tomatoes in her left hand instead of a tablet’”; and “The National Portrait Gallery was set to feature a ‘painting depicting a transgender Statue of Liberty’ before the artist withdrew it.”

A desire to exclude is apparent, as in this entry: “The American History Museum prominently displays the ‘Intersex-Inclusive Progress Pride flag’ at its entrance, which was also flown alongside the American flag at multiple Smithsonian campuses.”

You can take a look at the full list here. Trump must find something inherently threatening in each example, which can and should be filed under the absurd.

I’m arts and culture writer Jessica Gelt, holding a drawing of Fauci in my right hand and a Pride flag in the other. Here’s your weekly arts news roundup.

The week ahead: A curated calendar

FRIDAY

Tom Wilkinson, left, and George Clooney in the Oscar-winning 2007 drama “Michael Clayton,” screening Monday at the Aero Theatre in Santa Monica.

(Myles Aronowitz / Warner Bros. Pictures)

Friends of the Fest
The American Cinematheque’s third Podcast Film Festival pairs local podcasters with memorable movies, including “Michael Clayton,” “Mississippi Masala,” “Mahogany,” “Carnival of Souls,” “Bottoms” and more.
Through Wednesday. Los Feliz Theatre, 1822 N. Vermont Ave.; Aero Theatre, 1328 Montana Ave. Santa Monica. americancinematheque.com

The Hollywood Bowl’s annual tribute to John Williams returns this weekend.

(Timothy Norris / Los Angeles Philharmonic)

Maestro of the Movies: Celebrating the Music of John Williams
David Newman conducts the L.A. Phil in blockbuster scores from “Jaws,” “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial,” “Superman” and “Star Wars,” as well as dramatic epics including “Far and Away,” “Memoirs of a Geisha” and more.
8 p.m. Friday and Saturday; 7:30 p.m. Sunday. Hollywood Bowl, 2301 N. Highland Ave. hollywoodbowl.com

‘Protest’
Fountain Theatre hosts Bricolage Production Company’s revival of Václav Havel’s 1978 two-person, one-act drama set in Communist Czechoslovakia. Jeffrey Carpenter directs actors Steven Schub and Robert Anthony Peters in this limited three-performance run.
8 p.m. Friday and Saturday; 7 p.m. Sunday. Fountain Theatre, 5060 Fountain Ave. fountaintheatre.com

SATURDAY
Our Lady’s Dowry: Marian Music from Tudor England
Director Bryan Roach and Musica Transalpina demonstrate the evolution of sacred music in England following the Reformation with “Missa O bone Jhesu” by Robert Fayrfax, as well as works by Christopher Tye and William Byrd.
7:30 p.m. Saturday. Sierra Madre Playhouse, 87 W. Sierra Madre Blvd. sierramadreplayhouse.org

Carlo Maghirang’s art installation “ANITO” is on display Aug. 23–Sept. 7 at Los Angeles State Historic Park.

(Carlo Maghirang)

Carlo Maghirang: ANITO
The artist explores ancestral veneration through queer self-portraiture and the repetitive making of “taotao” figurines, reimagined as a collection of modular forms in a triptych installation at the River Station Roundhouse turntable. There will also be performances by dancer and choreographer Jobel Medina, Saturday at 1 p.m., and artist, musician and healer Anna Luisa Petrisko, Aug. 30, 1 p.m.
8 a.m. to sunset. Saturday through Sept. 7. Los Angeles State Historic Park, 245 N. Spring St. welcometolace.org

Lula Washington Dance Theatre: 45th Anniversary Celebration
The distinctly L.A. contemporary dance troupe presents two North American premieres: “The Master Plan,” a tribute to the late saxophonist Pharoah Sanders, and Tamica Washington-Miller’s “And We Can Fly,” inspired by an the African American folktale. The evening also includes a revival of Donald McKayle’s “Songs of the Disinherited,” two Martha Graham solos — “Deep Song” and “Satyric Festival Song” —and Talley Beatty’s “Mourner’s Bench.”
8 p.m. Saturday. The Ford, 2580 Cahuenga Blvd. East. theford.com

Youssef Nabil’s ‘I Saved My Belly Dancer’
The artist’s surreal 2015 video short, inspired by his movie-fueled childhood in Cairo, stars Tahar Rahim and Salma Hayek. The exhibition also features related photographs and contemporaneous Egyptian movie posters.
Through Jan. 11. Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Resnick Pavilion, 5905 Wilshire Blvd. lacma.org

SUNDAY

Elizabeth Taylor on the set of the film “Boom,” which screens Sunday as part of a triple bill.

(Express Newspapers / Getty Images)

Summer camp with Elizabeth Taylor
A trio of films starring one of Hollywood’s greatest stars leans into the sometimes garish glamour and kitschy melodrama of “Secret Ceremony,” co-starring Mia Farrow and Robert Mitchum, “Boom!,” with Taylor’s on-again, off-again husband Richard Burton — both 1968 releases directed by Joseph Losey — and Brian G. Hutton’s 1972 marital skirmish, “X, Y & Zee,” featuring Michael Caine and Susannah York.
2:30 Sunday. Academy Museum, 6067 Wilshire Blvd. academymuseum.org

TUESDAY
Beethoven Under the Stars
The L.A. Phil, conducted by Giedrė Šlekytė, is joined by Japanese pianist Nobuyuki Tsujii, “Nobu” to his fans, for an evening entirely devoted to the great German composer’s work.
8 p.m. Hollywood Bowl, 2301 N. Highland Ave. hollywoodbowl.com

WEDNESDAY

Lawrence-Hilton Jacobs, from left, Glynn Turman and Corin Rogers in the 1975 movie “Cooley High,” screening Wednesday at the Academy Museum.

(American International Pictures)

Cooley High
The Academy Museum presents a 35 mm screening of the influential 1975 coming-of-age drama about two best friends in 1964 Chicago with in-person guests director Michael Schultz, actors Lawrence-Hilton Jacobs and Glynn Turman, and filmmaker Ava DuVernay.
7:30 p.m. Wednesday. Academy Museum, 6067 Wilshire Blvd. academymuseum.org

THURSDAY

Yo-Yo Ma and Angélique Kidjo perform Thursday at the Hollywood Bowl.

(L.A. Phil)

Sarabande Africaine
Singer-songwriter Angélique Kidjo and cellist Yo-Yo Ma continue their collaborative creative musical conversation exploring the many centuries of interaction between African musical idioms and Western classical music. They’ll be joined by multi-instrumentalist Thierry Vaton, Grammy-winning producer David Donatien and genre-blending musician Sinkane.
8 p.m. Hollywood Bowl, 2301 N. Highland Ave. hollywoodbowl.com

Culture news

A cast of immigrants and the children of immigrants are set to stage a live reading of the cult comedy “Superbad” on Sunday. Participating actors include comedian Hasan Minhaj, Cobie Smulders, Melissa Fumero and Harvey Guillén. The event is free, and it will be livestreamed on the website for Immigrant Defenders Law Center, a social justice law firm that has been working with Southern California’s Latino residents threatened by ongoing ICE raids. De Los’ Andrea Flores has the full story.

Giovanni Guida and his grattage on canvas, “Apotheosis.”

(Daniela Matarazzo)

The uncle of an Italian artist named Giovanni Guida recently wrote me an email to alert me to the inclusion of his nephew in the Getty Vocabularies’ union list of visual artists. What is notable about Guida, his uncle told me, is that he is one of the youngest painters recognized in the resource for his use of the grattage painting technique pioneered by surrealist artist Max Ernst. Grattage is made by placing a painted canvas over a textured object and rubbing the paint off with often unexpected results. Since grattage has now been in use for about 100 years, today seemed like a nice day to highlight it, and to say congratulations to Guida.

The SoCal scene

The North American tour of “& Juliet” at the Ahmanson.

(Matthew Murphy)

Swedish hitmaker Max Martin showed up at the Ahmanson Theatre Friday for the opening of the jukebox musical “& Juliet,” which features dozens of Martin’s chart-topping collaborations with the likes of Katy Perry, Justin Timberlake and Britney Spears. A few days earlier, I interviewed Martin and the show’s writer, David West Read, who won an Emmy for his work on the comedy “Schitt’s Creek.” The pair happily broke down the genesis of the musical, which was more than a decade in the making. The most important part of development, said Martin, was that the songs not be shoehorned into a subpar plot.

That didn’t happen, writes Times theater critic Charles McNulty in his review. As an example, McNulty cited a song by the Backstreet Boys called “I Want it That Way,” which was “redeployed in a way that has little bearing on the lyrics but somehow feels coherent with the original emotion.” Overall, McNulty concludes that the show, which reimagines what would happen if Juliet decided not to kill herself after she finds Romeo dead, “establishes just the right party atmosphere.”

Gustavo Dudamel is an extremely difficult act to follow, writes Times classical music critic Mark Swed. The beloved Los Angeles Philharmonic conductor was scheduled to perform two weeks at the Hollywood Bowl this summer but had to cancel his second week with the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra due to the Trump administration’s new travel restrictions. The orchestra filled the second week with “two talented conductors who were Dudamel fellows and are now enjoying prospering careers, Elim Chan and Gemma New,” writes Swed in a review that examines the high and low points of the substitutions. “These concerts give hope and reaffirm that life goes on. All acts, no matter the challenge, must be followed,” Swed writes.

Tami Outterbridge, daughter of artist John Outterbridge, takes a break from sifting through the ashes of her father’s home in Altadena.

(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)

Writer Lynell George pens a thoughtful first-person piece about her experiences with the circle of artists in the orbit of famed artist John Outterbridge in Southern California’s Black Arts Movement. Outterbridge died in 2020, and his home and studio in Altadena were both destroyed in January’s devastating Eaton fire. His daughter Tami soon developed a plan to gather friends to sift through the ashes in search of art — metal, shards of ceramics and glass, the same kinds of materials Outterbridge used in his own potent assemblages.

Exterior of the Eames House, Case Study House #8, in a eucalyptus grove.

(Buyenlarge / Getty Images)

The Eames House reopened late last month after a five-month closure necessitated by smoke damage from January’s Palisades fire. Now that the property has been cleaned and restored, the Eames family has unveiled its adjacent creative studio to the public — making it a space for exhibitions, lectures, podcasts and more. It also launched a new and expanded Charles & Ray Eames Foundation with the goal of building on the Eames design legacy globally. In addition, admission will now be free to first responders as well as residents of the Pacific Palisades and Altadena.

— Jessica Gelt

And last but not least

The X account for Gov. Gavin Newsom’s press office has gone full Trump parody with often hilarious results.

The Trump administration halted construction on a nearly complete offshore wind project off Rhode Island as the White House continues to attack the battered U.S. offshore wind industry that scientists say is crucial to the urgent fight against climate change.

Danish wind farm developer Orsted says the Revolution Wind project is about 80% complete, with 45 of its 65 turbines already installed.

Despite that progress — and the fact that the project had cleared years of federal and state reviews — the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management issued the order Friday, saying the federal government needs to review the project and “address concerns related to the protection of national security interests of the United States.”

It did not specify what the national security concerns are.

President Trump has made sweeping strides to prioritize fossil fuels and hinder renewable energy projects. He recently called wind and solar power “THE SCAM OF THE CENTURY!” in a social media post and vowed not to approve wind or “farmer destroying Solar” projects. “The days of stupidity are over in the USA!!!” he wrote on his Truth Social site this week.

Scientists across the globe agree that nations need to rapidly embrace renewable energy to stave off the worst effects of climate change, including extreme heat and drought; larger, more intense wildfires; and supercharged hurricanes, typhoons and rainstorms that lead to catastrophic flooding.

Rhode Island Gov. Dan McKee criticized the stop-work order and said he and Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont “will pursue every avenue to reverse the decision to halt work on Revolution Wind” in a post on X. Both governors are Democrats.

Construction on Revolution Wind began in 2023, and the project was expected to be fully operational next year. Orsted says it is evaluating the financial impact of stopping construction and is considering legal proceedings.

Revolution Wind is located more than 15 miles south of the Rhode Island coast, 32 miles southeast of the Connecticut coast and 12 miles southwest of Martha’s Vineyard. Rhode Island is already home to one offshore wind farm, the five-turbine Block Island Wind Farm.

Revolution Wind was expected to be Rhode Island and Connecticut’s first commercial-scale offshore wind farm, capable of powering more than 350,000 homes. The densely populated states have minimal space available for land-based energy projects, which is why the offshore wind project is considered crucial for the states to meet their climate goals.

“This arbitrary decision defies all logic and reason — Revolution Wind’s project was already well underway and employed hundreds of skilled tradesmen and women. This is a major setback for a critical project in Connecticut, and I will fight it,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) said in a statement.

Wind power is the largest source of renewable energy in the U.S. and provides about 10% of the electricity generated nationwide.

“Today, the U.S. has only one fully operational large-scale offshore wind project producing power. That is not enough to meet America’s rising energy needs. We need more energy of all types, including oil and gas, wind, and new and emerging technologies,” said Erik Milito, president of the National Ocean Industries Assn., which supports offshore oil, gas and wind energy.

Green Oceans, a nonprofit that opposes the offshore wind industry, applauded the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management decision. “We are grateful that the Trump Administration and the federal government are taking meaningful action to preserve the fragile ocean environment off the coasts of Rhode Island and Massachusetts,” the group said in a statement.

This is the second major offshore wind project the White House has halted. Work was stopped on Empire Wind, a New York offshore wind project, but construction was allowed to resume after New York Sen. Chuck Schumer and Gov. Kathy Hochul, both Democrats, intervened.

“This administration has it exactly backwards. It’s trying to prop up clunky, polluting coal plants while doing all it can to halt the fastest growing energy sources of the future — solar and wind power,” Kit Kennedy, managing director for the power division at Natural Resources Defense Council, said in a statement. “Unfortunately, every American is paying the price for these misguided decisions.”

O’Malley writes for the Associated Press. AP writer Jennifer McDermott in Providence, R.I., and Matthew Daly in Washington contributed to this report.