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The first call to prayer in Malumfashi, northwestern Nigeria, was barely finished when gunmen stormed the Unguwan Mantau area. It was around 5 a.m. on Aug. 19, and the small mosque was full of worshippers, old and young men, all bowed in devotion, when the attack happened.  

It was a moment chosen for maximum shock and helplessness: none of the victims expected to be killed while praying for peace.

Mallam Umar Aramma, a local Qur’anic teacher and a survivor of the attack, says he remembers the silence before the gunshots and then people started running to save their lives.

“Many were instantly killed by gunshots,” he told HumAngle. “Others were rushed to the hospital with wounds, and some died there.”

Local officials first put the toll at 13. Within 48 hours, the figure rose to about 29 as more bodies were recovered from the mosque and nearby hamlets torched in the same raid. 

Since the terrorist attack was reported, grief has mixed with an old debate across northwestern Nigeria, particularly on social media: whether to negotiate with the terrorists who have turned vast rural stretches into locations to be raided. 

The federal government has quietly encouraged some Islamic clerics to explore channels with some commanders. Sheikh Musa Asadussunnah, one of the peace talk proponents, hasn’t explicitly mentioned this in his speeches, but sources confirmed to HumAngle that he has federal backing. 

Earlier this month, the cleric delegation said their talks with the Zamfara warlord Bello Turji secured the release of 32 captives and a symbolic surrender of weapons. The accounts vary on the details and on the federal government’s role, but the message of engagement was clear. 

Opinions have already been divided since the beginning of the engagement. However, the recent attack in Katsina has hardened many hearts against the idea of a peace deal.

For many, failed peace deals are not a distant history. In 2019 and early 2020, former Governor Aminu Bello Masari of Katsina State convened a series of accords with local terror leaders that included public ceremonies, photoshoots, promises of amnesty, and assurances that attacks would cease. 

However, within months, the deals unravelled. 

By June 2020, Masari publicly expressed his disappointment, accusing the gunmen of betraying the terms and resuming raids. “We’ve pulled out,” he said, adding that negotiations had failed to bring “lasting peace.” And the violence continued. 

Zamfara, the epicentre of the northwest conflict, had the same experience. Governor Bello Matawalle’s 2019 amnesty and disarmament plan led to a temporary partial peace. Reports showed that the terror kingpins paused in some villages while expanding operations elsewhere or engaging in rivalry for space control. 

By 2021, major attacks had reappeared; by 2023–2024, researchers tracking the conflict concluded the amnesty had failed in its central objective. Armed groups had diversified revenue streams, deepened cross-border logistics, and used the money to buy arms. 

The pattern persists at the micro level. Recently in Adabka, Zamfara, HumAngle reported that villagers bought peace for nearly three years by funnelling payments to terrorists in a ransom-for-peace arrangement that collapsed this month with fresh abductions and killings. 

The failure of such peace arrangements shows the bigger problem: They are unenforceable, unclear, and can always change due to the next grievance, the next terror group, and the next terror leader in charge. 

But out of desperation, people, at a community level, still do them. 

In recent weeks, since the beginning of the rainy season, some Katsina villages have seen the return of a localised peace deal. Community leaders in Jibia, Danmusa, Batsari, and Safana have explored or entered quiet pacts aimed at protecting farms and markets during the rainy season. 

Even state officials, while insisting they are not negotiating, have acknowledged meetings with ‘repentant terrorists’ to enable access to farmlands. In Safana, local leaders announced a peace accord just days before the Uguwan Mantau massacre. 

Why do peace deals fail? 

Several reports have explained why these agreements keep failing. First, there is no single chain of command. The northwestern insurgency is a patchwork of gangs and entrepreneurial warlords who shift alliances and territorial footprints with the rains, the market for cattle, the gold mining sites, and security pressure. 

Research has shown that a peace deal with one group creates economic and tactical incentives for others to attack. Conflict monitors warned as far back as 2020 that “partial peace” in one state often displaced violence into a neighbour. That remains true today. 

Another problem is that the agreements lack credible enforcement. The Federal Government has not and cannot offer a strong stance large enough to bind dozens of decentralised terror commanders in the region. 

When deals hinge on payments, safe corridors, or promises of non-prosecution, they risk rewarding coercion. When they hinge on community levies, they entrench protection rackets. When they hinge on the word of a single prominent warlord, they fall with his next strategic calculation.

Moreover, the deals often ignore the cross-border economies that keep the war profitable. Arms and motorcycles ride the same trails as cattle. Without plugging the border routes and illicit markets, de-escalation in one cluster is merely an intermission, not an ending. 

Research mapping the terror economy across 2023–2024 shows how quickly groups adapt to bans and roadblocks by shifting to new corridors and taxing new commodities. 

To many Katsina residents, these are not abstract critiques. They are recent history, lived twice. Liman Garba, a young man who lost his father in one of the terror attacks in Katsina, said any peace pact with terrorists will be meaningless as they continue to target civilians. 

“People like us, whose father was killed right inside our home, and our mother and younger siblings were taken away after our father was murdered, we had to pay ₦10 million before our relatives were released. How can anyone say there should be reconciliation when you see the very person who caused your father to leave this world, and who also made you lose millions of naira?” he said.

Masari’s collapse of talks in 2020 is always in any conversation about peace with terrorists. People remember the promises, the ceremonies, and the resumed killings. Aramma, the Qur’anic teacher, told HumAngle that they no longer want any empty promises or failed peace dialogue; they want the state to stop the killings. “We prayed for protection,” he said, “and they met us at prayer.” 

The clerical involvement

The federal government’s openness to clerical intermediaries is understandable. Clerics can go where officials cannot, and carry moral authority in a region where politicians are rarely trusted. Their recent shuttle diplomacy with Turji may have saved lives; 32 people are home because someone talked instead of shooting. 

But the same week those headlines broke, Unguwan Mantau buried its dead. And across the northwest, countless families still pay “farming fees” to armed men so they can plant maize and millet. Tasiu Saeed, another resident of Zamfara, explained the contradiction.

“Reconciliation is a good thing. But to be honest, there is a big problem, because there has been no progress with reconciliation, since the terrorists do not stop killing people, even while talks are ongoing. They are traitors, so the government should focus on fighting them instead,” he said. 

Does that mean talks are futile? Zainab Nasir, a youth leader in Kano, thinks otherwise. She explained that the answer may lie in redefining what “talks” are for. 

According to her, any dialogue with terrorists “can only be meaningful if it is pursued with sincerity, strategy, and accountability.” She explained that the talks “should not be seen as a reward for violence, but as a pathway to lasting stability where both the dignity of the affected victims and the future of offenders are secured.”

However, the record suggests that peace talks are not, on their own, a path to lasting stability. When they are sold as such, they sour public trust. But when they are paired with transparent benchmarks, regional coordination, and blocking revenue streams, they can be a tactical component for lasting peace. 

Back in Unguwan Mantau, Aramma said, since the attack, fear has engulfed people, and men no longer attend mosques in full. “Some do, many others don’t”. The fear is that while you may go there to pray for peace, you may be engulfed in the fire of violence. Aramma said they feel defenceless.

“The police came, took some report and left us asking ‘where is safe to pray?’”

Against this backdrop, the federal government’s symbolic outreach through clerics sits uneasily with public sentiment in the wake of Unguwan Mantau. “People are not rejecting peace,” Tasiu said, “they are demanding a strategy that can outlast a photoshoot.”

Ellie Kildunne’s lovely bit of skill sets up Jess Breach to score her second try for England against USA during the opening game of the 2025 Women’s Rugby World Cup at the Stadium of Light.

FOLLOW LIVE: Women’s Rugby World Cup – England v USA

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Sacramento — The Capitol crowd — from the governor down — should take a deep breath. Stop hyperventilating.

The governor and his aides especially should stop blustering about a barrage of ballot initiatives that they’re dreaming up for next November.

Nobody has lost out in the Capitol yet — just because Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Legislature couldn’t agree on a spending cap and massive borrowing scheme by Friday’s arbitrary deadline.

Not even Schwarzenegger was a loser, despite his best efforts. Even if he is a man of “action, action, action, action,” and was stopped cold by Democrats. This, after telling reporters last Monday that “failure is no option. It just doesn’t exist….

“I never went into a competition in weightlifting … or bodybuilding [wondering], ‘What if I cannot lift this weight?’ … ‘What if this movie tanks in the box office?’ …. Your chances of making it [improve] by saying there’s no safety net, failure is no option. That means it has to happen.”

Fine, but in governing it’s about brains, not brawn. It’s about real give-and-take, not movie scripts. And you’d better have a safety net for the circus.

Schwarzenegger has a colossal safety net: solid public support and total access to a friendly media, including a chain of doting cheerleaders on talk radio. He’s replacing the most unpopular governor in modern history — who, at that, was more popular than the Legislature. And he doesn’t face reelection for three years, if indeed he runs.

The guy has been governor only three weeks, let’s remember.

Last week’s exercise — trying to place a tight spending cap and a record bond issue on the March ballot — may have been Schwarzenegger’s first major test, but it was a test without political consequences for flunking. If the public’s going to fix blame, where will its finger point — the action hero or the disreputable Legislature?

Let Assembly Speaker Herb Wesson (D-Culver City) answer that. “If there was another question on the ballot that said, ‘Do you want to recall the Senate and Assembly?’ ” he told colleagues during Friday night’s floor debate. “Guess what? We’d be selling shirts out of the trunks of our cars right now.”

If anything, Schwarzenegger gained because the public’s ugly image of the Legislature was revived.

But Democrats didn’t lose either. They would have lost by rolling over and cowering as the governor tried to bully them, threatening “severe casualties” in next year’s elections. They’d have looked unprincipled by giving in to his amateur-hour forays to Democrats’ hometowns.

Schwarzenegger spent much of the week doing what he loves: entertaining crowds, hearing their cheers, being lobbed softballs by radio hosts and beating up on Sacramento.

But he should have been in Sacramento more, negotiating with Democrats and Republicans. Republicans must give, as well as Democrats.

Schwarzenegger always has claimed he wants to “listen.” But all he wants to listen to, it seems, is Democrats saying “yes.”

There isn’t much acknowledgment, at least in his public statements, that spending caps come in different shapes and his isn’t the only version that would fit California’s budget.

(Conservatives might be alarmed to learn that Schwarzenegger’s cap would allow a governor to raise taxes during a downturn. To block him would require a two-thirds legislative vote. If Gray Davis had possessed that power, we probably wouldn’t be in this fiscal mess.)

Wesson articulated the Democrats’ philosophical opposition to the Schwarzenegger-GOP spending limit:

“We refuse to impose a cap that will take funding away from developmentally disabled individuals, the programs they need to survive…. We refuse to take $2 billion away from our schoolchildren because we know that the only great equalizer in this life is education, and I’ll be damned if we in the Democratic Party are going to turn our backs on children.”

By his history — if not his recent politics — Schwarzenegger would seem to agree with those sentiments.

Democrats have sent the governor a message: They can work together — can agree on a spending cap — but he needs to negotiate seriously and also force Republicans to bend.

It’s still possible to compromise on a spending cap and a $15-billion deficit bond this week and get it on the March ballot.

But does Schwarzenegger really want to? Or is he being lured by the roar of the crowd and prodded by his outside political consultants — some looking for a big payday — into pitching several ballot initiatives next November?

Schwarzenegger could achieve much in the Legislature — negotiating bipartisan solutions that don’t require him to hit up special interests for tens of millions to finance contested initiatives.

If he’s truly an action-governor, he’ll mute the hostile, partisan rhetoric that has been bellowing from his office and resume bargaining with legislative leaders.

Nobody has failed yet. It’s early. The Capitol needs calm-headed action, from Democrats and Republicans — and leadership from the governor.

The Canada Industrial Relations Board (CIRB) has said Air Canada’s ongoing strike, in which 10,000 cabin crew members have walked off their jobs, is illegal after strikers ignored orders to return to work.

The regulatory board made the call on Monday after it previously declared that workers must return to the job as of 2pm ET (18:00 GMT) on Sunday.

The cabin crew for the Montreal-based carrier had pushed for a negotiated solution, saying binding arbitration would take pressure off the airline. Workers have said that the proposed wage hikes are insufficient to keep up with inflation and match the federal minimum wage.

The attendants are also calling to be paid for work performed on the ground, such as helping passengers to board. They are now only paid when planes are moving, sparking some vocal support from Canadians on social media.

A leader of the union on strike against Air Canada said on Monday that he would risk jail time rather than allow cabin crews to be forced back to work.

“If it means folks like me going to jail, then so be it. If it means our union being fined, then so be it. We’re looking for a solution here,” said Mark Hancock, Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) national president, at a press conference after a deadline by the board to return to work expired with no union action to end the strike.

Air Canada’s CEO Michael Rousseau told the news agency Reuters that he was “amazed” that the union was not following the law, adding, “At this point in time, the union’s proposals are much higher than the 40 percent [hike we have offered]. And so we need to find a path to bridge that gap,” he said, without suggesting what that process would be. “We’re always open to listen, and have a conversation,” he said.

Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney voiced his support for the cabin crews, saying that they should be “compensated equitably at all times”.

Pushing for a resolution, Carney said, “We are in a situation where literally hundreds of thousands of Canadians and visitors to our countries are being disrupted by this action.”

The airline normally carries 130,000 people daily during the ongoing peak summer travel season and is part of the global Star Alliance of airlines.

On Monday, Air Canada suspended its third-quarter and annual profit forecasts as its planes remained grounded.

The union said it would continue its strike and invited Air Canada back to the table to “negotiate a fair deal”.

A government nudge

The government’s options to end the strike now include asking courts to enforce the order to return to work and seeking an expedited hearing.

The minority government could also try to pass legislation that would need the support of political rivals and approval in both houses of the Parliament of Canada, which are on break until September 15.

“The government will be very reticent to be too heavy-handed because in Canada, the Supreme Court has ruled that governments have to be very careful when they take away the right to strike, even for public sector-workers who may be deemed essential,” said Dionne Pohler, professor of dispute resolution at Cornell University’s Industrial and Labor Relations School.

Another option is to encourage bargaining, Pohler said.

The government did not respond to requests for comment.

On Saturday, Carney’s Liberal government moved to end the strike by asking the CIRB to order binding arbitration. The CIRB, an independent administrative tribunal that interprets and applies Canada’s labour laws, issued the order, which Air Canada had sought, and unionised flight attendants opposed.

The previous government, under former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, intervened last year to head off rail and dock strikes that threatened to cripple the economy, but it is highly unusual for a union to defy a CIRB order.

Travellers at Toronto Pearson International Airport over the weekend said they were confused and frustrated about when they would be able to fly.

Italian Francesca Tondini, 50, sitting at the Toronto airport, said she supported the union even though she had no idea when she would be able to return home.

“They are right,” she said with a smile, pointing at the striking attendants.

The dispute between cabin crews and Air Canada hinges on the way airlines compensate flight attendants. Most, including Air Canada, pay them only when planes are in motion.

In their latest contract negotiations, flight attendants in both Canada and the United States have sought compensation for hours worked, including for tasks such as boarding passengers.

New labour agreements at American Airlines and Alaska Airlines legally require carriers to start the clock for paying flight attendants when passengers are boarding.

American flight attendants are now also compensated for some hours between flights. United Airlines’ cabin crews, who voted down a tentative contract deal last month, also want a similar provision.

On the markets, Air Canada’s stock is down 1.6 percent as of 12pm in Toronto (16:00 GMT). US carrier United Airlines – another Star Alliance member, which does not have a striking cabin crew and which serves several major Canadian cities – is up 1.4 percent.

In Nicholas Boggs’ lively and vigorously researched biography of James Baldwin, the great writer’s search for the source of his art dovetails with his lifelong search for meaningful relationships. Black, gay, born without the benefit of money or guidance, repeatedly harassed and beaten in his New York City hometown, Baldwin physically removed himself from the turmoil of America, living abroad for long stretches to find proper distance and see his country plain. In “The Fire Next Time,” “Another Country” and “Giovanni’s Room,” among other works, Baldwin gleaned hard truths about the ways in which white people, white men in particular, deny their own sexual confusions to lash out at those who they feel may pose a grave threat their own machismo codes and their absolute dominion over Black Americans. In his novels and essays, Baldwin became a sharp beacon of hard truths.

Baldwin was reared in an oppressive atmosphere of religious doctrine and physical violence; his stepfather David, a laborer and preacher, adhered to an quasi-Calvinist approach to child-rearing that forbade art’s graven images in the home and encouraged austerity and renunciation. Books, according to Baldwin’s father, were “written by white devils.” As a child, Baldwin was beaten and verbally lashed by his father; his brief tenure as a religious orator in the church was, according to Boggs, a way to “usurp his father at his own game.” At the same time, Boggs notes, Baldwin used the church “to mask the deep confusion caused by his burgeoning sexual desires.”

As a child, Baldwin is marginalized for being too sensitive, too bookish, a “sissy.” At school, he finds mentors like Orilla “Bill” Miller and the Harlem Renaissance poet Countee Cullen, who introduced him to Dickens and the 18th century Russian novelists. When his stepfather loses his job, it is down to Baldwin to support his mother and eight siblings. Taking a job at a local army base, he is confronted with virulent race-baiting from his white supervisor and co-workers.

Baldwin leaves Harlem behind shortly thereafter and falls into the artistic ferment of Greenwich Village in the ‘40s. He shares ideas about art, music and literature with a fellow budding aesthete named Eugene Worth until he jumps to his death from the George Washington Bridge in the winter of 1946. His death “cast a pall over Baldwin’s life,” Boggs writes, “but it would also play a major and enduring role in his development as a writer.” Baldwin, who had developed strong romantic feelings for Worth but never made them plain to his friend, makes a promise to himself, vowing to adjoin his private life as a gay Black man to the public life of an artist, so that “my infirmities might be forged into weapons.”

Beauford Delaney, a respected painter and Village fixture, becomes Baldwin’s lodestar and encourages him to confront his sexuality head-on in his art. What that art might entail, Baldwin doesn’t yet know, but it would have something to do with writing. Delaney would become a lifelong friend, even after he began suffering from mental deterioration, dying after years of hospitalization in 1979.

Baldwin’s life as a transatlantic nomad begins in 1948, when he arrives in Paris after winning a scholarship to study there. More importantly, he meets 17-year-old Lucien Happersberger, a Swiss painter, and a relationship blossoms. Happersberger shares deep artistic and sexual affinities with Baldwin, but Lucien is also attracted to women and becomes a kind of template for Baldwin’s future partners, most notably the Turkish actor Engin Cezzar, that he would pursue until his death in 1987.

Baldwin held these romantic relationships in tantalizing suspension, his love affairs caught between the poles of desire and intimacy, the heat of passion and long-term commitment. The love triangles these relationships engendered became a rich source for his fiction. Boggs asserts that many of the author’s most enduring works, including “Go Tell It on the Mountain” and his breakthrough novel about gay love “Giovanni’s Room,” sprang from these early, formative encounters. “The structure of a not fully requited love was a familiar and even eroticized one for Baldwin,” Boggs writes, “and would come to fuel his art.”

Away from the States, Baldwin was freed “from the trap of color,” but he was pulled ever deeper into the racial unrest in America, taking on journalism assignments to see for himself how systemic racial oppression worked in the Jim Crow South. In Atlanta, Baldwin meets Martin Luther King Jr., who invites him to Montgomery to witness the impact of the bus boycott. Entering a local restaurant, he is greeted with stony stares; a white woman points toward the colored entrance. In Mississippi, he interviews NAACP organizer Medgar Evers, who is busy investigating a lynching. Baldwin notes the climate of fear among Black citizens in the city, speaking to him like “ the German Jews must have talked when Hitler came to power.”

Nicholas Boggs tracked down a previously unwritten-about lover of James Baldwin for his new biography.

(Noah Loof)

These eyewitness accounts would feed into Baldwin’s impassioned essays on race such as “Down at the Cross” and his 1972 nonfiction book “No Name in the Street.” For Boggs, Baldwin’s nonfiction informed his fiction; there are “continuities and confluences between and across his work in both genres.” The throughline across all of the work was Baldwin’s ire at America’s failure to recognize that the “so-called Negro” was “trapped, disinherited and despised, in a nation that … is still unable to recognize him as a human being.”

Baldwin would spend the rest of his life toggling between journalism and fiction, addressing racism in the States in articles for Esquire, Harper’s and other publications while spending most of his time in Turkey and France, where a growing circle of friends and lovers nourished his muse and satisfied his need for constant social interaction when he wasn’t wrestling with his work, sometimes torturously so. Boggs’ book finds Baldwin in middle age poised between creative fecundity and despair, growing frustrated with America’s failure of nerve regarding race and homosexuality as well as his own thwarted partnerships. Despite a powerful bond with Engin Cezarr and, later, the French painter Yoran Cazac, who flitted in and out of Baldwin’s Istanbul life across the 1970s, the picture of Baldwin that emerges in Boggs’ biography is that of an artist who treasures emotional continuity but creatively feeds on inconstancy.

In fact, Cazac had never been cited in any previous Baldwin biography. Boggs discovered him when he came across an out-of-print children’s book called “Little Man, Little Man,” a collaboration between Cazac and Baldwin that prompted Boggs’ search. After following a number of flimsy leads, he finally finds Cazac in a rural French village, and they talk.

The novels that Baldwin penned during his last great burst of productivity, most notably “If Beale Street Could Talk” and “Just Above My Head,” have been maligned by many Baldwin fans as noble failures lacking the fire and dramatic power of his early work. Yet Boggs makes a strong case for these books as successful formal experiments in which Baldwin once again transmuted the storms of his personal life into eloquent indictments of systemic racism. The contours of Baldwin’s romantic engagement with Cazac, in particular, would find their way into “Beale Street,” the first time Baldwin used a female narrator to tell the story of a budding young romance doomed by a gross miscarriage of justice. Boldly experimental in both form and content, “Beale Street” and “Just Above My Head” were, in Boggs’ view, unjustly criticized, coming at a time when Baldwin’s reputation was on the decline. Only novelist Edmund White gleaned something special in his review of “Just Above My Head,” Baldwin’s final novel, finding in his depictions of familial love a Dickensian warmth which “glow with the steadiness and clarity of a flame within a glass globe.”

A literary biography needn’t be an artful accretion of facts, nor should it traffic in salacious gossip and cheapen the subject at hand. Boggs’ even-handed and critically rigorous biography of James Baldwin is guilty of none of these things, mostly because Boggs never strays from the path toward understanding why Baldwin wrote what he did and how his private and public lives were inextricably wound up in his work. Boggs has dug much deeper than his predecessors, including Baldwin’s biographer David Leeming, whose book has been the standard bearer since its 1994 publication. “Baldwin: A Love Story” is superlative, and it should become the new gold standard for Baldwin studies.

Weingarten is the author of “Thirsty: William Mulholland, California Water, and the Real Chinatown.”

What’s the one thing from your childhood that your mom threw away that haunts you to this day?

Ben Stiller has one, a souvenir from what today would be called a riot but back in the 1970s registered as perfectly normal behavior.

I’m Glenn Whipp, columnist for the Los Angeles Times, host of The Envelope newsletter and the guy still holding out hope that those baseball cards are going to turn up in a box someday.

In this week’s newsletter, let’s look at what our Envelope cover star Ben Stiller misses.

Cover story: Ben Stiller has no time to waste

(Shayan Asgharnia / For The Times)

For this week’s cover story, Stiller and I talked a lot about his love for the New York Knicks, a passion kindled early and one that became an “addiction” this year as the team tried to win its first NBA championship since 1973. His dad, Jerry Stiller, took him to lot of games as a kid. Two of Jerry’s friends, Stanley Asofsky and Carnegie Deli co-owner Fred Klein, had season tickets, and they knew all the players and refs and would introduce them to Ben.

Jerry also took his son to baseball games, both the Yankees and the Mets. The Yankees were Ben’s favorite — though his commitment to them was nowhere near his love for the Knicks — and when they won the American League championship series in 1978, Stiller ran out onto the field with his friend Jonathan Harris, as one did in New York. (Or, really, anywhere else … but especially New York.) He even scooped up a chunk of the right-field turf and took it home with him on the D train.

“I had it in my room for two years,” Stiller says.

“And then,” I guessed, “your mom threw it away.”

“My mom threw it away,” Stiller affirms. To be fair to Anne Meara, the sod was old and crumbling and probably had bugs in it. And yet …

“It was a prized possession,” Stiller says. “I had it on a piece of tinfoil on a shelf. Maybe if I had been really lucky and had picked up a base, my mom wouldn’t have made me get rid of that.”

Stiller told me he wouldn’t be directing any episodes of “Severance’s” upcoming third season to free him up to make a feature film, a World War II survival story about a downed airman in occupied France who becomes involved with the French Resistance. Stiller has spent most of this year helping prep the third season and wants to be clear that the show is “a real priority.” But after a long break, he’s ready to return to feature filmmaking.

“Severance” star Adam Scott understands, though he finds it hard to imagine the set without Stiller. Scott remembers exactly what he told Stiller when they were shooting the jaw-dropping, mood-shifting Season 2 finale.

“I was just like, ‘Dude, this is our ‘Temple of Doom,’” Scott told me, referencing the second “Indiana Jones” movie. “And I was in absolute paradise the entire time, not just because ‘Temple of Doom’ is my favorite movie, but because we were getting to do it all. There’s the marching band. There’s a fight scene. There’s the running in the hall. We had the big scene where Mark talks to Outie.”

“And when we finished it, we were all so tired,” Scott continues. “But I could see how happy Ben was. It was such a showcase for him.”

And now, he’ll be returning to making movies — the one thing as a kid he always wanted to do.

Well, that and snag third base at Yankee Stadium.

Read more coverage of ‘Severance’

Which critics group will be the first to give Amy Madigan a prize for “Weapons”?

Might she be the standout of the summer, the one most deserving an award, other than the person who updated this billboard near LAX?

I’m Glenn Whipp, columnist for the Los Angeles Times and host of The Envelope newsletter. A forecast for a cosmic future in these parts? Hope, indeed, comes in many forms.

Madigan’s diabolical turn deserves a champion

Julia Garner and Josh Brolin in “Weapons.”

(Quantrell Colbert / Warner Bros. Pictures)

I’m going to tread lightly when it comes to spoilers for Zach Cregger’s horror movie “Weapons,” currently the No. 1 movie at the box office.

But I’m also of the mind that you should see “Weapons” knowing as little as possible about it. So anything I write could be considered a spoiler, though I should also note that I’m someone who never watches movie trailers and will go so far as to close my eyes and cover my ears in a theater to avoid them. Sometimes I think the only reason I’m still writing about movies is that the job allows me to see films in advance and not have them ruined. I love flying blind.

You probably know that “Weapons” follows what happens in an American town after 17 children disappear one night, all of them simultaneously running out the front doors of their homes, arms outstretched, at precisely 2:17 a.m. Cregger unravels the mystery from multiple, often overlapping points of view, calling to mind Paul Thomas Anderson’s audacious epic “Magnolia,” right down to the presence of a clumsy, mustachioed cop.

Well into the movie, we meet Madigan’s Aunt Gladys in a principal’s office at the school that the missing kids attended. All of the children were in the same class. Gladys says she is the aunt of the one child from the class who didn’t run off into night. There’s some understandable curiosity and concern over this boy, Alex (Cary Christopher, another standout in a very good year for child actors), and Gladys is here to reassure everyone that Alex — and his parents — are doing just fine.

Gladys is perhaps not the most reliable messenger. She is wearing a bright-red wig and multiple layers of makeup, a presentation that suggests she has spent a lifetime watching Bette Davis in “What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?” Something is off, and, hoo boy, are we about to find out what that something is.

Madigan is excellent, disarming and adept at concealing, to a point, the hidden core of good ol’ Aunt Gladys. Again, I’m treading lightly. If you’ve seen it, as I’m sure many of you have, you know just how delightfully insane her work in the movie is.

Critics groups love to reward the delightfully insane. They also love to champion genres, like horror, that tend to be marginalized at the Oscars.

So I’d expect some group — perhaps New York, maybe L.A. — could be eager to plant a flag for Madigan as a much-deserved, out-of-the-box supporting actress choice. She’s 74, has enjoyed a fine career on stage and screen and, along with her husband, Ed Harris, made a principled stand (or sit) at the 1999 Academy Awards, refusing to applaud when Elia Kazan took the stage to receive an honorary Oscar.

It’s easy to get swept up in the success of “Weapons” and the countless stories sifting through its ending and themes. Once the film leaves theaters and the fall festival awards contenders start dropping, Madigan will need a champion or two to put her back into the conversation.

History might be on her side, though: Davis earned a lead actress Oscar nomination for “Baby Jane.” And Ruth Gordon won the supporting actress Oscar for “Rosemary’s Baby” for the same kind of deliciously diabolical turn that Madigan gives in “Weapons.”

Plus, you know Aunt Gladys was taking notes on Gordon’s cosmetic routine in “Rosemary’s Baby.”

I’ll be back in your inbox Monday. Thanks, as always, for reading.

Read more of our summer movies coverage

There was much ado Wednesday about President Trump’s picks to receive the coveted Kennedy Center Honors in December. Journalists and culture watchers combed through the histories of the president’s nominees — including actor and filmmaker Sylvester Stallone, glam-rock band KISS, disco singer Gloria Gaynor, country music star George Strait and English actor Michael Crawford — in order to better understand his choices.

Gaynor left some scratching their heads, especially because the disco queen’s most iconic song, “I Will Survive,” is an established anthem on dance floors at LGBTQ+ clubs. But Stallone — fondly known as Sly Stallone — seemed an obvious option. He was part of a cohort of tough-guy performers, including Jon Voight and Mel Gibson, named by Trump as “special ambassadors” to Hollywood, and he once called Trump the “second George Washington” while introducing at a gala in Palm Beach, Fla.

But the heart of an artist apparently beats beneath the “Rocky” star’s hardened pectorals. His Instagram is littered with abstract paintings featuring thick, brash strokes with obvious nods to the work of Jackson Pollock and Jean-Michel Basquiat. He is exclusively represented by Provident Fine Art in Palm Beach, and regularly posts his canvases to social media with captions like, “No hesitation. No overthinking. Just color, motion, guts. Sometimes you don’t wait for the perfect moment—you throw the punch and make it count.”

Another, of a twisted yellow and red face, reads, “A portrait I did of Rambo’s state of mind before he enters a BATTLE, called ‘…SEEING RED’.”

Not all of Sly’s fans are happy about his affiliation with Trump. A comment on his most recent painting read, “Sorry to hear you are taking part in the Kennedy honors. Linking your self to trump is not a good look. I hope you reconsider.”

I’m arts and culture writer Jessica Gelt, wondering if the “Tulsa King’s” oil paintings might now make it into the Smithsonian. Here’s your arts news for the week.

Best bets: On our radar this week

Antigone
Frederique Michel directs Neil Labute’s adaptation of the Jean Anouilh play exploring the effects of authoritarianism (inspired by Sophocles, it was first produced in 1944 Paris during the Nazi occupation).
Friday through Sept. 21. City Garage Theatre, Bergamot Station Arts Center, 2525 Michigan Ave. T1, Santa Monica. citygarage.org

Pirates Wanted
Last Call Theatre presents an immersive adventure experience featuring swashbuckling, knot tying, navigation, liar’s dice, sea shanties and more. Recommended for landlubbers 13 and over. Younger mateys must be accompanied by an adult.
Aug. 16-17, 22-24. Pine Ave. Pier, Long Beach. ticketleap.events/tickets/lastcalltheatre/lastcallpirateswanted

Russian pianist performs with the L.A. Phil Tuesday and Thursday at the Hollywood Bowl.

(L.A. Phil)

Rachmaninoff Under the Stars
Two nights, two different programs of the Russian romanticist’s work featuring Russian pianist Daniil Trifinov and the L.A. Phil conducted by Daniel Harding.
8 p.m. Tuesday and Thursday. Hollywood Bowl, 2301 N. Highland Ave. hollywoodbowl.com

The Broadway production of “Shucked” in 2023; the national tour arrives Tuesday at the Hollywood Pantages.

(Mathew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman)

Shucked
The corn and puns are higher than an elephant’s eye in this Tony-winning musical comedy with a book by Robert Horn, music and lyrics by Brandy Clark and Shane McAnally and directed by Jack O’Brien.
Tuesday through Sept. 7. Hollywood Pantages Theatre, 6233 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood. broadwayinhollywood.com

Multi-instrumentalist Herbie Hancock performs Wednesday at the Hollywood Bowl.

(Amy Harris / Invision / AP)

Herbie Hancock
The versatile performed is joined by trumpeter Terence Blanchard, bassist James Genus, guitarist-singer Lionel Loueke and drummer Jaylen Petinaud for a freewheeling night of jazz.
8 p.m. Wednesday. Hollywood Bowl, 2301 N Highland Ave. hollywoodbowl.com

Culture news

Perry Picasshoe and his father walk through downtown Riverside while looking for a good spot to place another ice block on July 3, 2025.

(Daniel Hernandez)

Riverside artist Perry Picasshoe found a way to address the pain and upheaval of seeing people in his community pursued and deported by ICE. In a symbolic effort, Picasshoe melted 36 ice blocks on sidewalks of the Inland Empire where enforcement raids took place. “I took it as a metaphor of what’s happening,” Picasshoe said in an interview with De Los. “I was also thinking a lot about having these blocks of ice as almost a stand-in for people.”

Times Theater Critic Charles McNulty attended a Black Out matinee performance of the two-character play “Berta, Berta,” by Angelica Chéri. The show is receiving its West Coast premiere in an Echo Theater Company production at Atwater Village Theatre directed by Andi Chapman. The action, which takes place in 1923 Mississippi, unfolds as the titular character wakes in the middle of the night to find the love of her life covered in the blood of a man he killed. The play’s themes were enhanced by the unique community environment of the performance, McNulty writes. “I was more alert to the through line of history. Although set in the Deep South during the Jim Crow era, there appeared to be little distance between the characters and the audience,” he notes.

A new museum is set to open in a historic building in Miami, honoring, “the history of Cuban exiles with immersive, state-of-the-art exhibits that explore the meaning of migration, freedom and homeland,” writes Joshua Goodman. The building that houses the new enterprise was once the city’s tallest structure and was known as the “Ellis Island” of Miami.

The SoCal scene

Dancer Michael Tomlin III, with the Lula Washington Dance Company, rehearses in Los Angeles in January 2020.

(Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times)

Lula Washington Dance Theatre is celebrating its 45th anniversary on Aug. 23 at the Ford. Washington has been a seminal figure in the arts world, including in her home base of South L.A. — guiding and shaping hundreds of young community members and dancers at her studio over the years. The company has toured extensively around America and the world, and in 2021 received a nearly $1 million Mellon Grant. “Where there’s a will there’s a way. We are still here! After all of the trials and tribulations, riots, earthquakes, COVID and Project 2025, we are still dancing! Dance has saved us and it will save us all,” Washington told The Times in advance of the anniversary. The tribute at the Ford will include performances of historic Washington pieces alongside new works by Martha Graham, Donald McKayle and more. For tickets and additional information, click here.

The Old Globe announced that actor Katie Holmes will kick off the theater’s 2026 season in a new production of Henrik Ibsen’s “Hedda Gabler,” directed by the Globe’s Artistic Director Barry Edelstein. The classic stage play is being given fresh life in a Globe-commissioned new version by playwright and screenwriter Erin Cressida Wilson. The show marks Holmes’ return to the Globe after Edelstein directed her in a 2023 production of “The Wanderers.” Performances are scheduled to run from Feb. 7 to March 8, 2026, and tickets are currently available by subscription only at TheOldGlobe.org.

The Broad is back with its summer concert series. On Aug. 16, guests can attend a show called “PAST + FUTURE = PRESENT, Pt. 1.” The after-hours event (8 p.m. to 11 p.m.) includes access to the special exhibition, “Jeffrey Gibson: the space in which to place me,” as well as two performance stages on several museum floors. Haisla hip-hop duo Snotty Nose Rez Kids will rock out upstairs while indie rockers Black Belt Eagle Scout will take to the lobby stage.

— Jessica Gelt

And last but not least

Wondering what Trump’s Kennedy Center Honors announcement felt like to watch? Here are the first 13 minutes, although it went on for much (much) longer.

It turns out the amount of objectifying Pete Davidson received from the tabloids took a toll on his “BDE.”

The “Saturday Night Live” alumnus told “The Breakfast Club” on Wednesday that he was “embarrassed” by the way his personal life crowded out his work.

“I brought a lot of pop culture into [SNL], like, I made it sort of like tabloid-y, like trendy thing unintentionally. … No one talked about any work I was doing,” the 31-year-old father-to-be said. “They were just like, ‘Oh, that’s the f— stick.”

The “Bupkis” star began his “SNL” career in 2014, when he was only 20, then spent eight seasons on the late-night sketch comedy show. After leaving in 2022, he came back a year later to host the show.

His dating life dominated the headlines during his time on “SNL.” Davidson dated singer Ariana Grande, actor Kate Beckinsale, model Kaia Gerber, actor Madelyn Cline and reality TV star Kim Kardashian.

The Grande and Kardashian periods attracted the most attention of course, with the singer hinting at Davidson’s alleged “BDE” and the reality mogul saying later that she was up for some of that amid her divorce from Ye — then known as Kanye West. The rapper, by the way, was not pleased with his ex’s rebound entanglement. (BDE is short for “big d— energy.”)

“I don’t want to victimize myself in any way because I’m cool, but the sexualization of me, if that was a girl, you know, [there would] be a march for it,” Davidson said.

He said the attention his track record brought affected his dating life and made him “sad.”

In July, the “King of Staten Island” star revealed that his current girlfriend, British model and actor Elsie Hewitt, is expecting their first child. She posted a series of pictures of the two of them on social media, including a shot of an ultrasound and video of her getting the scan done.

Her caption: “welp now everyone knows we had sex.”

In a remote-work funk? Still Zooming in your pajama pants? Is your sofa pillow your makeshift desk? A work-from-home lifestyle can feel isolating, boring or even uncomfortable at times, a sign that a change in routine is needed. Thankfully, across L.A.’s ever-expanding cafe scene, there are plenty of options to jolt you out of your rut.

And today’s coffee shops offer more than espresso and Wi-Fi — they’ve expanded into cream-top creations, layered matcha lattes and food programs worth seeking out on their own, alongside intentionally designed interiors with comfy furniture and ample outlets to keep devices charged for a long workday, inspiring ideas in a creative atmosphere.

With more amenities than ever, work-appropriate coffee shops have become essential third spaces where creativity and collaboration can flourish. From an Indonesian market and cafe in Miracle Mile to a comforting library cafe in Silver Lake, there are options to keep your remote work environment fresh. At the following 15 cafes, you’ll find plenty of seating, curated playlists, high-speed Wi-Fi and eclectic menus that might offer a Greek-inspired Freddo cappuccino or Japanese sandos.

Some SoCal residents spent their summer at the beach, or at their local rooftop pool; others spent it indoors, hiding from ICE agents.

It’s why Riverside artist Perry Picasshoe spent his summer documenting the melting of 36 ice blocks on sidewalks across the Inland Empire.

He traveled to nine locations, a mix of parks, storefronts and gas stations, where immigration enforcement raids have taken place in the past few weeks. In each spot, he placed four 25-pound ice blocks on the ground and took photos of them as they melted. He would periodically check on the progress, he explained, and found that some were smashed into pieces or completely disappeared.

“I took it as a metaphor of what’s happening,” Picasshoe said, referencing the recent ICE raids taking place across Southern California. “I was also thinking a lot about having these blocks of ice as almost a stand-in for people.”

This latest art piece is just one of the many other Chicano-focused projects that Picasshoe has created in his hometown in the past three years. His goal, among all of the artworks, is to push its residents to reflect on the complexity of the Inland Empire’s Latino identity.

Perry Picasshoe and his father place an ice block near the epicenter of the city’s monthly arts walk in downtown Riverside on July 3, 2025.

(Daniel Hernandez)

Juan Carlos Hernandez Marquez is an emerging Mexican American multidisciplinary artist from Riverside who goes by the stage name Perry Picasshoe. The moniker, which he created as a teenager, is a play on Pablo Picasso’s name mixed with an early 2010s social media term “art hoe.” Under this pseudonym, Picasshoe first gained recognition for creating art that explored the complexities of his dueling identities of being an LGBTQ+ artist while surrounded by traditional Latino ideals.

While studying visual arts at UCLA, he reimagined Sandro Botticelli’s painting “The Birth of Venus” with LGBTQ+ imagery, created a 9-foot-tall Christmas cactus in honor of the time he spent with his father during the holidays and hosted a solo exhibition called “Mystic Garden,” which showcased pieces inspired by flowers given to him by an ex-partner. It’s also where he developed his signature red-dominant style in both his fashion and art.

“Red is my comfort color,” Picasshoe said.

He suffered from occasional panic attacks while studying at UCLA, he explained, which discouraged him from going to school. It continued for months — until he found himself wearing a bright red outfit, which brought him a sense of peace.

“It just kind of grew from there,” he added. “It just followed me everywhere that I went.”

Picasshoe also posted videos showcasing his pieces on social media. Like his artwork, his posts were intricately filmed and edited with bright red accents. They were also accompanied by narration detailing the work’s inspiration, creation process and meaning. His efforts amassed him almost 200,000 followers between TikTok and Instagram.

This rapid growth, both on social media and within his network, brought new opportunities to grow professionally in Los Angeles. Yet after graduating in 2022, he decided to continue his career in his hometown instead.

“It was just a different pace that I was not ready for,” he said. “The art scene out here is much more [based in] community, as opposed to [money] or clout. It’s more of making work that people here will get to enjoy.”

It’s a decision that’s worked in his favor.

This year, he’s been honored by the city at the Mayor’s Ball for the Arts with the Emerging Artist award and recognized as one of UCLA’s top 100 alumni entrepreneurs for 2025. Picasshoe’s decision to be a professional artist within the Inland Empire also came at a time when opportunities for Latino artists in the region have grown in recent years.

Cosme Cordova, long-time Riverside Chicano artist and Division 9 Gallery founder, explained that for decades, Latino artists considered Riverside a “boot camp” instead of a city where they could make a living. They would earn some money in their hometown, then travel to other prominent locations, like Los Angeles or Palm Springs, where artists felt their work was more respected. As the years went on, he said, the local community began to understand the value in supporting its artists.

“Then when the Cheech came, it’s got international attention, so it’s just gotten even better,” Cordova said. “I’m starting to see a lot of artists now more genuinely focused on just trying to showcase their work here in Riverside.”

The most prominent addition within the region has been the Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art and Culture — known colloquially as “the Cheech.” The museum is widely considered the only space in the country that exclusively showcases Latino-made exhibitions, including some of Picasshoe’s work.

Since returning to the Inland Empire, Picasshoe’s artistic vision caught the attention of both community leaders and larger institutions. While hosting one of his first solo exhibitions, called “Red Thoughts,” at the Eastside Arthouse in Riverside, the directors of the Cheech took notice of his unique style.

“They approach their work with abandon, with any medium,” said María Esther Fernández, the center’s artistic director. “They had an installation and it was very interactive and immersive. I think pushing the boundaries of that is really fun and innovative.”

It would lead Picasshoe to work on a wide range of projects in collaboration with the Chicano art center for the next three years.

Perry Picasshoe stands in front of the Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art & Culture in Riverside, Calif., on July 3, 2025.

(Daniel Hernandez)

Last year, Picasshoe teamed up with Inland Empire-based artist Emmanuel Camacho Larios to curate an exhibition for the Cheech’s community gallery called “Desde los Cielos.”

“It was a group show that explored what the term ‘alien’ meant in the context of Chicanxs, and alien in the political, the social and the queerness of it all,” Picasshoe said. “I also made a huge painting for that one, the largest that I’ve ever done so far.”

The seven-foot-tall painting, called “Simulacra of Guillermo Hernandez, Beethoven, y los Guachimontones,” depicts his late grandfather sitting on the bed of a pickup truck alongside a small chihuahua. In the background, looming over his abuelo, is a giant circular pyramid built by the Teuchitlán people. A golden pyramid, made from Abuelita Mexican Chocolate bricks, was placed in front of the painting; the bricks were free for the taking during the exhibition’s debut.

After the time for his co-curated exhibition ended, another installation named “Queer Wishes” was featured in the Cheech for an exhibition co-curated by the Eastside Arthouse’s founder and resident artist.

The piece is a three-dimensional black box with a white dress made from bath towels and bedazzled gems displayed on a dress form mannequin inside. Next to the mannequin is a small black vanity desk and mirror with makeup and porcelain wishbones filling the table’s surface.

“The first time I was really able to express myself was when I would get out of the bathroom, put my bath towel on and pretend it was a dress,” Picasshoe said. “I know I’m not the only one with that experience of being in the bathroom and having that be the only time you have to yourself.”

Since debuting the installation at the Cheech, Picasshoe had hoped to take a step back from creating larger community-focused pieces and spend time finalizing some personal projects. However, as immigration enforcement raids ramped up in Southern California, Picasshoe felt the need to create artwork to express his frustration.

Picasshoe and his father drove the family truck to Fontana on July 3 to pick up three translucent ice slabs, each about 40 inches tall and weighing around 300 pounds, and brought them back to downtown Riverside.

They arrived 45 minutes before the start of the city’s monthly arts walk, an event where dozens of local vendors set up booths to sell their artwork to hundreds of residents.

Picasshoe and his father slowly unloaded the slabs from the truck’s bed onto a dolly and wheeled the installations out into the three chosen locations: the front of the Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art and Culture, the epicenter of the city’s monthly arts walk event and the front of the Riverside County Superior Court.

A wooden platform was placed under each slab, with the words “life,” “liberty” and “the pursuit of happiness,” written upside down and divided between the three art pieces, along with a QR code explaining its meaning.

He chose this day, he said, because of its high foot traffic. It was the best opportunity to help some passersby feel represented while confronting others with a hard truth.

“Art should be lived in,” Picasshoe said. “It’s prevalent in a lot of my work, and especially this one, since it’s meant to be commenting on something regarding the public.”

Their medical research focuses on potentially lifesaving breakthroughs in cancer treatment, and developing tools to more easily diagnose debilitating diseases. Their studies in mathematics could make online systems more robust and secure.

But as the academic year opens, the work of UCLA’s professors in these and many other fields has been imperiled by the Trump administration’s suspension of $584 million in grant funding, which University of California President James B. Milliken called a “death knell” to its transformative research.

The freeze came after a July 29 U.S. Department of Justice finding that the university had violated the civil rights of Jewish and Israeli students by providing an inadequate response to alleged antisemitism they faced after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack.

The fight over the funding stoppage intensified Friday after the Trump administration demanded that UCLA pay a $1-billion fine, among other concessions, to resolve the accusations — and California Gov. Gavin Newsom said the state will sue, calling the proposal “extortion.”

Amid heightened tensions in Westwood, thousands of university academics are in limbo. In total, at least 800 grants, mostly from the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, have been frozen.

UCLA scholars described days of confusion as they struggle to understand how the loss of grants would affect their work and scramble to uncover new funding sources — or roles that would ensure their continued pay, or that of their colleagues. While professors still have jobs and paychecks to draw on, many others, including graduate students, rely on grant funding for their salaries, tuition and healthcare.

At least for the moment, though, several academics told The Times that their work had not yet be interrupted. So far, no layoffs have been announced.

Sydney Campbell, a UCLA cancer researcher whose grant funding has been cut, stands inside the Biomedical Sciences Research building at UCLA.

(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

Sydney Campbell, a pancreatic cancer researcher and postdoctoral scholar at UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine, said her work — which aims to understand how diet affects the disease — is continuing for now. She has an independent fellowship that “hopefully will protect the majority of my salary.” But others, she said, don’t have that luxury.

“It is absolutely going to affect people’s livelihoods. I already know of people … with families who are having to take pay cuts almost immediately,” said Campbell, who works for a lab that has lost two National Institutes of Health grants, including one that funds her research.

Pancreatic cancer is among the most deadly of cancers, but Campbell’s work could lead to a better understanding of it, paving the way for more robust prophylactic programs — and treatment plans — that may ultimately help tame the scourge.

“Understanding how diet can impact cancer development could lead to preventive strategies that we can recommend to patients in the future,” she said. “Right now we can’t effectively do that because we don’t have the information about the underlying biology. Our studies will help us actually be able to make recommendations based on science.”

Campbell’s work — and that of many others at UCLA — is potentially groundbreaking. But it could soon be put on hold.

“We have people who don’t know if they’re going to be able to purchase experimental materials for the rest of the month,” she said.

Fears of existential crisis

For some, the cuts have triggered something close to an existential crisis.

After professor Dino Di Carlo, chair of the UCLA Samueli Bioengineering Department, learned about 20 grants were suspended there — including four in his lab worth about $1 million — he felt a profound sadness. He said he doesn’t know why his grants were frozen, and there may not be money to pay his six researchers.

So Di Carlo, who is researching diagnostics for Lyme and other tick-borne diseases, took to LinkedIn, where he penned a post invoking the Franz Kafka novel “The Trial.” The unsettling tale is about a man named Josef K. who wakes up and finds himself under arrest and then on trial — with no understanding of the situation.

“Like Josef K., the people actually affected — the public, young scientists, patients waiting for better treatments and diagnostic tools — are left asking: What crime did we commit?” wrote Di Carlo. “They are being judged by a system that no longer explains itself.”

The LinkedIn post quickly attracted dozens of comments and more than 1,000 other responses. Di Carlo, who has been working to find jobs for researchers who depend on paychecks that come from now-suspended grants, said he appreciated the support.

But, goodwill has its limits. “It doesn’t pay the rent for a student this month,” he said.

Di Carlo’s research is partly focused on developing an at-home test that would detect Lyme and other tick-borne diseases, which are on the rise. Because no such product is currently approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, he said, people who’ve experienced a tick bite have to wait for lab results to confirm their infection.

“This delay in diagnosis prevents timely treatment, allowing the disease to progress and potentially lead to long-term health issues,” he said. “A rapid, point-of-care test would allow individuals to receive immediate results, enabling early treatment with antibiotics when the disease is most easily addressed, significantly reducing the risk of chronic symptoms and improving health outcomes.”

Di Carlo lamented what he called “a continual assault on the scientific community” by the Trump administration, which has canceled billions of dollars in National Institutes of Health funding for universities across the country.

It “just … hasn’t let up,” Di Carlo said.

Scrambling for funds

Some professors who’ve lost grants have spent long hours scrambling to secure new sources of funding.

Di Carlo said he was in meetings all week to identity which researchers are affected by the cuts, and to try to figure out, “Can we support those students?” He has also sought to determine whether some could be moved to other projects that still have funding, or be given teaching assistant positions, among other options.

He’s not alone in those efforts. Mathematics professor Terence Tao also has lost a grant worth about $750,000. But Tao said that he was more distressed by the freezing of a $25-million grant for UCLA’s Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics. The funding loss for the institute, where Tao is director of special projects, is “actually quite existential,” he said, because the grant is “needed to fund operations” there.

Tao, who is the James and Carol Collins chair in the College of Letters and Sciences, said the pain goes beyond the loss of funds. “The abruptness — and basically the lack of due process in general — just compounds the damage,” said Tao. “We got no notice.”

A luminary in his field, Tao conducts research that examines, in part, whether a group of numbers are random or structured. His work could lead to advances in cryptography that may eventually make online systems — such as those used for financial transactions — more secure.

“It is important to do this kind of research — if we don’t, it’s possible that an adversary, for example, could actually discover these weaknesses that we are not looking for at all,” Tao said. “So you do need this extra theoretical confirmation that things that you think are working actually do work as intended, [and you need to] also explore the negative space of what doesn’t work.”

Tao said he’s been heartened by donations that the mathematics institute has received from private donors in recent days — about $100,000 so far.

“We are scrambling for short-term funding because we need to just keep the lights on for the next few months,” said Tao.

Rafael Jaime, president of United Auto Workers Local 4811, which represents 48,000 academic workers within the University of California — including about 8,000 at UCLA — said he was not aware of any workers who haven’t been paid so far, but that the issue could come to a head at the end of August.

He said that the UC system “should do everything that it can to ensure that workers aren’t left without pay.”

What comes next?

A major stressor for academics: the uncertainty.

Some researchers whose grants were suspended said they have not received much guidance from UCLA on a path forward. Some of that anxiety was vented on Zoom calls last week, including a UCLA-wide call attended by about 3,000 faculty members.

UCLA administrators said they are exploring stopgap options, including potential emergency “bridge” funding to grantees to pay researchers or keep up labs such as those that use rodents as subjects.

Some UCLA academics worried about a brain drain. Di Carlo said that undergraduate students he advises have begun asking for his advice on relocating to universities abroad for graduate school.

“This has been the first time that I’ve seen undergraduate students that have asked about foreign universities for their graduate studies,” he said. “I hear, ‘What about Switzerland? … What about University of Tokyo?’ This assault on science is making the students think that this is not the place for them.”

But arguably researchers’ most pressing concern is continuing their work.

Campbell explained that she has personally been affected by pancreatic cancer — she lost someone close to her to it. She and her peers do the research “for the families” who’ve also been touched by the disease.

“That the work that’s already in progress has the chance of being stopped in some way is really disappointing,” she said. “Not just for me, but for all those patients I could potentially help.”

More than 100 artists, musicians, comedians, actors and performers from L.A.’s thriving, multifaceted underground art scene are featured in a new experimental video game named “Blippo+.” Created by Jona Bechtolt and Claire L. Evans, with music by Bechtolt and Rob Kieswetter, the trio behind the L.A.-based post-pop band YACHT (Young Americans Challenging High Technology), the game is part video art installation, part interactive theater. It was created for the newfangled gaming console Playdate, which was released in 2022 and purposefully conjures old-school devices like the Nintendo Game Boy, with a black-and-white, 1-bit display.

“This is essentially our bootleg way of making television, by skipping all the gatekeepers and going straight to a distribution platform that is still open to artist’s weird experiments, a.k.a. video games,” said Evans, in an interview Thursday in advance of the game’s exhibition party at Bob Baker Marionette Theater in Highland Park.

“Hollywood [production] has left Los Angeles, so the people that are here have to scramble to figure out what to do,” added Bechtolt. “So we moved to where there’s lots of funding, and an openness for experimentation. And that’s the video game world, indie video games, specifically.”

Playdate’s low-res format was ideal for “Blippo+,” which rolls out in a looping, 11-week cycle, with new programming — original, avant-garde soaps, sitcoms, news, weather and talk shows— arriving every Thursday at 10 a.m. PDT. Bechtolt and Evans collaborated with director JJ Stratford, a longtime video artist and music video maker, who runs the all-analog Telefantasy Studios in Glendale, dedicated to, according to its website, “bringing the strange, surreal, and speculative to life.”

“She’s a scholar of video arts, and an artist herself,” explained Bechtolt of Stratford. “When all of the TV studios in Los Angeles converted to digital, they just threw out their analog equipment. So JJ has been collecting this stuff for years and years, and now she has a full-on 1982 television studio.”

The L.A.-based post-pop trio YACHT has created a new art project / video game called “Blippo+.”

(YACHT)

The programming on “Blippo+” was filmed over the course of a year using the kind of tube cameras common in television studios before the digital era, and employing the talents of the band’s aforementioned artist-collaborators including artists Martine Syms and Maya Man; musicians Staz Lindes (of the Paranoyds), Calvin Johnson (of K Records / Beat Happening) Phil Elverum (Mount Eerie); and comedians Whitmer Thomas, Clay Tatum, Mitra Jouhari, Donny Divanian, Kyle Mizono, Anna Seregina, Steve Hernandez, Tipper Newton and Brent Weinbach.

Post-production took another year, and the game was finally released on Playdate in May. Next month “Blippo+” will roll out on Steam and Nintendo Switch.

Playdate was created by the Portland-based software development and video game publishing company Panic Inc. YACHT originated in Portland and the people behind Panic were longtime fans. They approached the band almost a decade ago at a music festival in North Carolina.

“They gave us this open invitation to make something as YACHT if we ever had an idea for a video game,” said Bechtolt.

Evans added that Panic’s interest was likely fueled by the band’s reputation for creating experimental multimedia art projects that exist both on and offline, including co-founding the Triforium Project, which worked to restore and revitalize artist Joseph Young’s controversial Triforium sound-and-light sculpture in downtown Los Angeles, and resulted in a variety of live art and music performances at the site.

“Blippo+” is a natural extension of YACHT’s immersion in underground art and obsession with how analog and digital tools can collide to create new forms and functions for a post-postmodern world. It was also proudly made without the use of AI, Bechtolt and Evans noted.

I’m arts and culture writer Jessica Gelt, heading back underground where I belong. Here’s your weekly dose of arts news.

Best bets: On our radar this week

Gustavo Dudamel conducts the L.A. Phil in John Williams’ score for “Jurassic Park.”

(L.A. Philharmonic)

‘Jurassic Park’ in Concert
Gustavo Dudamel and L.A. Phil perform John Williams’ epic score live to picture as Steven Spielberg’s 1993 blockbuster starring Sam Neill, Laura Dern and Jeff Goldblum is projected on the big screen in HD.
8 p.m. Friday and Saturday. Hollywood Bowl, 2301 N Highland Ave. hollywoodbowl.com

The Old Globe presents “Deceived,” based on the play “Gas Light,” Saturday through Sept. 7.

(Ben Wiseman)

Deceived
Playwrights Johnna Wright and Patty Jamieson’s update Patrick Hamilton’s classic 1938 stage thriller “Gas Light” (also the basis of the 1944 film “Gaslight”) about a woman who begins to doubt her seemingly perfect new husband as she is increasingly bedeviled by strange occurrences.
Saturday through Sept. 7 Old Globe Theatre, 1363 Old Globe Way, San Diego. theoldglobe.org

The Hollywood Bowl at night.

(L.A. Philharmonic)

The Russians are coming …
And L.A. Phil has them for two separate programs this week at the Hollywood Bowl. Tuesday night, Elim Chan conducts the orchestra performing Tchaikovsky’s “Violin Concerto in D major, Op. 35” (with violinist James Ehnes), Britten’s “Four Sea Interludes from Peter Grimes, Op. 33A” and the 1919 version of Stravinsky’s “The Firebird.” Then on Thursday, Gemma New takes the baton for Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Capriccio espagnol, Op. 34,” Arutiunian’s Trumpet concerto (performed by Pacho Flores) and Tchaikovsky’s Fourth symphony.
8 p.m. Tuesday; 8 p.m. Thursday. Hollywood Bowl, 2301 N Highland Ave. https://www.hollywoodbowl.com/

Brittany Howard and Alabama Shakes play the Hollywood Bowl on Wednesday.

(Amy Harris / Invision / AP)

Alabama Shakes
In their first L.A. show in eight years, the soulful rockers led by singer-guitarist Brittany Howard are joined by Oakland punk quartet Shannon and the Clams.
8 p.m. Wednesday. Hollywood Bowl, 2301 N Highland Ave. hollywoodbowl.com

The North American tour of “& Juliet” arrives at the Ahmanson on Aug. 13.

(Matthew Murphy)

& Juliet
What if Romeo’s tragic love didn’t end it all? Find out in this jukebox musical written by David West Read (TV’s “Schitt’s Creek”) and featuring the music of Swedish pop hitmaker Max Martin and others.
Wednesday–Sept. 7. Ahmanson Theatre, 135 N. Grand Ave., downtown L.A. centertheatregroup.org

Legendary L.A. jazz composer/musician Bobby Bradford, pictured in 2019, brings his tribute to baseball great Jackie Robinson to the Hammer’s JazzPOP series on Thursday.

(Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times)

Bobby Bradford’s Stealin’ Home: A Tribute to Jackie Robinson
The West Coast jazz great leads an all-star septet performing his original composition, an homage to the Dodger legend who broke baseball’s color barrier in 1947. Part of the Hammer’s 2025 JazzPOP series.
8 p.m. Thursday. UCLA Hammer Museum, 10899 Wilshire Blvd., Westwood. hammer.ucla.edu

Culture news

Vincent Van Gogh, “Tarascon Stagecoach,” 1888, oil on canvas

(Henry and Rose Pearlman Foundation)

Los Angeles County Museum of Art announced that it has been gifted its first paintings by Vincent van Gogh and Édouard Manet, in addition to four works by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Alfred Sisley, Wilhelm Lehmbruck and Maurice Brazil Prendergast. The pieces come from the Pearlman Foundation, which is dividing its collection of Impressionist, Post-Impressionist and Modernist art among LACMA, New York’s Museum of Modern Art and the Brooklyn Museum.

Times Classical Music Critic Mark Swed writes an appreciation of experimental theater director and playwright Robert Wilson, who died at the end of July. Swed was in Austria when he heard the news, attending the Salzberg Festival, and watching, “the kind of uncompromisingly slow, shockingly beauteous and incomprehensibly time-and-space-bending weirdness Wilson took infinite pleasure in hosting when he made what he called operas.”

The Japanese Pavilion at the L.A. County Museum of Art in 2012.

(LACMA)

Times contributor Sam Lubell takes a deep dive into the work of Bruce Goff, who designed Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s Japanese Pavilion, noting that while Goff remained largely under-the-radar throughout his life, he nonetheless inspired a host renegade of West Coast architects.

Gustavo Dudamel appeared onstage at the Hollywood Bowl on Tuesday, to the great joy of fans and the orchestra alike. This summer marks the 20th anniversary of the now legendary conductor’s U.S. debut, writes Swed in a review of Dudamel’s single homecoming week this Bowl season. “After 20 years, Dudamel clearly knows what works at the Bowl, but he also likes to push the envelope as with Tuesday’s savvy blend of Duke Ellington and jazzy Ravel,” Swed writes.

The SoCal scene

Philanthropist Glorya Kaufman at her Beverly Hills home in 2012.

(Al Seib / Los Angeles Times)

Glorya Kaufman, the philanthropist who transformed dance in Los Angeles through the establishment of an eponymous dance school at USC as well as a prominent dance series at the Music Center, among many other initiatives, has died. She was 95. Read her full obituary here.

The Tom and Ethel Bradley Residence in Leimert Park — along with the Stylesville Barbershop & Beauty Salon in Pacoima, St. Elmo Village and Jewel’s Catch One in Mid-City, the California Eagle newspaper in South L.A. and New Bethel Baptist Church in Venice—have been designated Historic-Cultural Monuments as part of a project meant to recognize Black heritage and led by the Getty in collaboration with the City of Los Angeles’ Office of Historic Resources.

When Pasadena Playhouse announces its new seasons each year, it typically delays naming one show until a later date. That time has now come, and Producing Artistic Director Danny Feldman sets Julia Masli’s “ha ha ha ha ha ha ha,” directed by Kim Noble, as the theater’s fifth Mainstage production, running from Oct.15 to Nov. 9. The playhouse also announced some juicy casting news: Tony Award winner Jefferson Mays will star as Salieri in Peter Shaffer’s “Amadeus,” which is scheduled to open Feb. 15.

Paging parents of teenagers! There is an organization called TeenTix that has paired with a veritable cornucopia of L.A.-area arts institutions to offer a youth pass that charges local kids between the ages of 13 and 19 $5 to attend shows, concerts and exhibits. More than 35 groups participate in the program, including Geffen Playhouse, Center Theatre Group, the Soraya, Pasadena Playhouse, Boston Court, Pasadena Symphony, the Armory, A Noise Within, the Autry Museum of the West, Heidi Duckler Dance, Skirball Cultural Center, Sierra Madre Playhouse and Actors Gang. Reservations are required, and info and passes can be found here.

— Jessica Gelt

And last but not least

There is a free plant stand in Altadena — a symbol of new life in the wake of January’s devastating Eaton fire.

Hello, this is De Los reporter Carlos De Loera. I will be taking over the Latinx Files for the next couple of months while Fidel is on parental leave. I hope I do him justice!

“No me quiero ir de aquí.”

It’s more than just the name of Bad Bunny’s months-long Puerto Rico concert residency; it’s a radical declaration against colonialism and gentrification, as well as a defiant call for cultural preservation and celebration.

This week the U.S. federal government exercised another overreach of power over Puerto Rico, when the Trump administration dismissed five out of seven members of Puerto Rico’s federal control board that oversees the U.S. territory’s finances. All of the fired board members belonged to the Democratic Party; the remaining two members are Republicans.

As other parts of the Spanish-speaking world grapple with being priced out of their own communities, and a watering down of their long-standing cultures, artists in Puerto Rico are using their work to give visitors a not-so-gentle reminder: No one can kick them out of their own home.

Last week, the Latinx advocacy group Mijente — alongside the art collective AgitArte — collaborated with local Puerto Rican artists and organizations to present a free art exhibition that highlights the everyday societal struggles of Boricuas. Located in the Santurce barrio of San Juan, the “De Aquí Nadie Nos Saca” exhibit is marketing itself as a spiritual companion piece to Bad Bunny’s album, “Debí Tirar Más Fotos,” by delving into the musical joy and ongoing resistance movements of the island.

The name of the exhibition itself is a play on the lyrics from Bad Bunny’s track “La Mudanza,” in which he sings, “De aquí nadie me saca” — “nobody can get me out of here.” But the space has more than just a thematic connection to the Grammy-winning artist.

Members of AgitArte and one of its affiliated community theater collectives, Papel Machete, contributed to the “La Mudanza” music video by providing a giant papier-mâché puppet named La Maestra Combativa. It can be seen in the last minute of the video, holding up a colorful sign that reads “De aquí nadie me saca.”

The momentum of Bad Bunny’s latest album and subsequent tour met Mijente’s mission at a serendipitous time that led to the creation of the new showcase.

“The socio-cultural moment and the political moment needed different kinds of things, not just the normal playbook of social work,” said Mijente communications director Enrique Cárdenas Sifre. “We needed to experiment a little bit more.”

According to Cárdenas Sifre, part of the hope for the exhibition is to combat a pervasive narrative that Latinx people are more conservative-leaning than they realize.

Bad Bunny’s sentiment of “todo el mundo quiere ser latino” — and the universal praise and online utilization of “Debí Tirar Más Fotos” — allowed for Mijente to reopen the conversation about the true values of Latinx people in Puerto Rico.

“We can use the opportunity of a mainstream event to experiment with reoccupying and reutilizing all the cultural work for our causes,” he said. “For immigration causes, for liberation, decolonization, social, racial, gender equity and struggles … especially in Puerto Rico. So all of that came together at the same time.”

With hundreds of thousands of tourists descending upon the island to watch the “Baile Inolvidable” singer perform, it seemed like the right time to challenge tourists to engage with some of the more difficult and harrowing experiences of Puerto Ricans.

“No seas un turista más,” or “don’t be just another tourist,” is one of the main phrases used to advertise the exhibition, which asks people to confront colonialism, gender dynamics, environmental ruin, state violence and displacement.

“If you only have a few moments to be in San Juan [for the tour], please come to the exposition and help us amplify, connect and support all the local organizations that are doing the work,” Cárdenas Sifre said. “No seas un turista más, conoce un poco de la historia real de Puerto Rico.”

Telling the “real history” of the island are over 39 artists and organizations — with special help from AgitArte curator Dey Hernández — that make up “a piece” of the whole movement that Mijente is pushing for.

“We always try to recognize that we need joy, we need perreo, we need our culture, we need our sazón, but at the same time, we keep fighting for the things that we want in our lives and in our future,” Cárdenas Sifre said. “We want to go a little bit deeper for tourists to understand that it’s generations of struggle. So you can come to the exposition and support by donating directly to an organization or artist that is presenting.”

Open from Wednesday through Sunday, the exhibition will continue showcasing its works through early October. After its opening weekend, organizers of the event are enthused by the intergenerational crowds and the litany of responses the art has elicited.

“They see their fights, they see themselves in the exhibition,” Cárdenas Sifre said. “Some people have to go outside to cry for a minute, because there hadn’t been a place that hit on all these social battles and they recognize the years of work that went behind collecting it all. There’s also joy and celebration, it’s really run the gamut of every emotion…. Everyone tells us that this space was needed.”

One thing that Cárdenas Sifre wanted to make clear is that the exhibit is not affiliated with any electoral political alliance, but rather a “real new alliance of the folks doing the work on the ground every day.”

“These organizations and artists don’t always have a space to come together to talk about the work that [they] are doing, talk about the struggles they are facing. [It’s about] generating a little space [to] conspire the next [steps for] the movement in Puerto Rico.”

Comic this Week: Drag, DACA, and Departure

Julio Salgado is a visual artist based in Long Beach. His work has been displayed at the Oakland Museum, SFMOMA, and Smithsonian American Art Museum. (@juliosalgado83)

Stories we read this week that we think you should read

Unless otherwise noted, all stories in this section are from the L.A. Times.

Immigration and the border

Politics

Arts and Entertainment

Climate

Gripping Narrative

(Jackie Rivera / For The Times; Martina Ibáñez-Baldor / Los Angeles Times)

Feels like a good weekend to stay in, stay cool, maybe put some peaches in a deep freeze and catch up with some favorite shows, old and new. (I’m still watching “Miami Vice,” even though my white linen suit is at the cleaners.)

I’m Glenn Whipp, columnist for the Los Angeles Times and host of The Envelope newsletter. Got any home improvement projects on tap? Seems like a good time to tackle one while we take a look at the shows that might win Emmys next month for writing and directing.

Writing and directing power rankings

The writing and directing categories at this year’s Emmys could give us a couple of A-list acceptance speeches — Ben Stiller and Seth Rogen — as well as providing the usual hints about what shows will wind up prevailing in the series categories.

Let’s sketch out how the races are shaping up with our official set of power rankings, ordered from worst to first for drama, comedy and limited series. Try to see if you can read it all in a single take in honor of all the “oners” nominated.

Drama series directing

Adam Scott and Britt Lower in “Severance.”

(Apple TV+)

7. “The White Lotus.” “Amor Fati,” Mike White
Season 3 aftertaste remains as bitter as one of Timothy’s poison piña coladas.

6. “Slow Horses.” “Hello Goodbye,” Adam Randall
Another exemplary season. There’s a reason Randall recently became the first director to be hired for another go-round.

5. “Andor.” “Who Are You?,” Janus Metz
Should be required viewing for American citizens right now.

4. “The Pitt.” “7 a.m.,” John Wells
How it all began …

3. “The Pitt.” “6 p.m.,” Amanda Marsalis
And how it ended.

2. “Severance.” “Chikhai Bardo,” Jessica Lee Gagné
We finally got our Gemma episode and it was breathtaking in the ways it used visual language to convey the most heartbreaking love story this side of “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.”

1. “Severance.” “Cold Harbor,” Ben Stiller
Innie Mark vs. Outie Mark. Frantic chases down the hallways. An impossible choice. And a marching band.

Comedy series directing

Sarah Polley, left, Catherine O’Hara and Seth Rogen in “The Studio.”

(Apple TV+)

5. “Mid-Century Modern.” “Here’s to You, Mrs. Schneiderman,” James Burrows
For those keeping score, that’s Emmy nomination No. 28 as a director for Burrows. (He has won five times.)

4. “The Bear.” “Napkins,” Ayo Edebiri
Tina’s origin story, and the episode that probably won Liza Colón-Zayas her Emmy last year. Also likely to be remembered for being Edebiri’s directorial debut and, taken with her co-writing this season’s standout “Worms,” an auspicious sign of good things to come.

3. “The Rehearsal.” “Pilot’s Code,” Nathan Fielder
In which Fielder lives the life of Sully Sullenberger, from baby to adult, complete with a puppet mom and an unforgettable lactation scene.

2. “Hacks.” “A Slippery Slope,” Lucia Aniello
Blueprint for Colbert’s last episode?

1. “The Studio.” “The Oner,” Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg
Not my favorite “Studio” episode (that would be “The Pediatric Oncologist”) but an obvious choice to take this category.

Limited / TV movie directing

Owen Cooper, left, and Stephen Graham in “Adolescence.”

(Netflix )

6. “Sirens.” “Exile,” Nicole Kassell
It was not a good year for limited series.

5. “Zero Day,” Lesli Linka Glatter
Seriously.

4. “Dying for Sex.” “It’s Not That Serious,” Shannon Murphy
La petite mort onward to the last roundup. Que Dieu te garde, Molly.

3. “The Penguin.” “A Great or Little Thing,” Jennifer Getzinger
Just when you thought it couldn’t get any darker, the show’s finale went there.

2. “The Penguin,” “Cent’Anni,” Helen Shaver
The series’ best episode and why Cristin Milioti will probably win the Emmy.

1. “Adolescence,” Philip Barantini
Every episode was a oner.

Drama series writing

Tramell Tillman in “Severance.”

(Apple TV+)

6. “Slow Horses.” “Hello Goodbye,” Will Smith
To my great and everlasting surprise, “Slow Horses” won this Emmy last year, meaning that however long it lasts — and there will be at least two more seasons — it will have triumphed at least once.

5. “The White Lotus.” “Full–Moon Party,” Mike White
I’m a little like Saxon after his hookup with his brother in this episode, wanting to pretend it — and the whole season — never happened.

4. “The Pitt.” “7 a.m.,” R. Scott Gemmill
This is such a wonderfully written episode, introducing us to a couple of dozen characters, establishing them and the setting and doing so in a tight 53 minutes.

3. “Andor.” “Welcome to the Rebellion,” Dan Gilroy
There’s so much respect for what the Gilroy brothers did with “Andor” that you could see voters having a strong impulse to reward it.

2. “The Pitt.” “2 p.m.,” Joe Sachs
You remember how this episode ends? The honor walk for Nick? I am getting tears in my eyes typing this sentence. And that was just one element in an episode that left me so gutted that I had to sequester myself after it ended before I could even choke out a word or two with my wife.

1. “Severance.” “Cold Harbor,” Dan Erickson
Trippy, emotionally fraught season finale that’ll probably win since loyalists of “The Pitt” have two choices in this category.

Comedy series writing

Jean Smart in “Hacks.”

(Jake Giles Netter / HBO Max)

6. “What We Do in the Shadows.” “The Finale,” Sam Johnson, Sarah Naftalis and Paul Simms
They shut the casket one final time, satisfying nearly everyone who loved the show for six seasons.

5. “Somebody Somewhere.” “AGG,” Hannah Bos, Paul Thureen and Bridget Everett
Another series finale, a near-perfect summation of the show’s lovely blend of joy and melancholy.

4. “Abbott Elementary.” “Back to School,” Quinta Brunson
Solid season opener of a series that has crossed over into “taken-for-granted” status.

3. “The Rehearsal.” “Pilot’s Code,” Nathan Fielder, Carrie Kemper, Adam Locke-Norton and Eric Notarnicola
“It was difficult at first to inhabit the mind of a baby. I know so much more than babies do, and it can be hard to forget all that stuff. So I tried not to think about the fact that I was a 41-year-old man and just did my best to be present in the moment.”

2. “The Studio.” “The Promotion,” Seth Rogen, Evan Goldberg, Peter Huyck, Alex Gregory and Frida Perez
The episode that started it all and made me more interested to see a “Kool-Aid” movie than practically anything that an actual studio released this summer.

1. “Hacks.” “A Slippery Slope,” Lucia Aniello, Paul W. Downs and Jen Statsky
“Hacks” has won this Emmy twice in its first three seasons, and the dramatic episode — Deborah loves Ava more than her dream job! — seems a spot to prevent a “Studio” sweep.

Limited / TV movie writing

Christine Tremarco and Stephen Graham in “Adolescence.”

(Netflix )

5. “Say Nothing.” “The People in the Dirt,” Joshua Zetumer
Car bombs, hunger strikes, political assassinations.

4. “Black Mirror.” “Common People,” Charlie Brooker and Bisha K. Ali
Technology really is going to destroy us, isn’t it?

3. “Dying for Sex.” “Good Value Diet Soda,” Kim Rosenstock and Elizabeth Meriwether
Of course, we’re all gonna die anyway. Might as well indulge.

2. “The Penguin.” “A Great or Little Thing,” Lauren LeFranc
After all, evil and depravity win out in the end.

1. “Adolescence,” Jack Thorne and Stephen Graham
So hug your children tonight.

A high-profile law firm representing the city of Los Angeles in a sweeping homelessness case submitted an $1.8-million invoice for two weeks of work in May, according to records reviewed by The Times.

The invoice from Gibson Dunn & Crutcher LLP comes as the city is already under serious financial pressure, caused in part by rapidly growing legal payouts.

With at least 15 of Gibson Dunn’s lawyers billing at nearly $1,300 per hour, the price tag so far equates to just under $140,000 per day over a 13-day period.

Gibson Dunn, while representing the city of Grants Pass, Ore., recently secured a landmark ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court that upheld laws barring homeless encampments in public spaces.

Los Angeles officials retained the law firm in May, roughly a week before a seven-day evidentiary hearing to determine whether control over the city’s homelessness programs should be taken away from Mayor Karen Bass and the City Council and turned over to a third-party receiver.

A month later, U.S. District Judge David O. Carter issued a scathing ruling, saying the city failed to adhere to the terms of a three-year-old settlement agreement with the L.A. Alliance for Human Rights, which calls for the creation of 12,915 homeless beds or other housing opportunities by June 2027.

Still, Carter also concluded that “this is not the time” to hand control of the city’s roughly $1 billion in homelessness programs to a third party.

Matthew Umhofer, an attorney representing the Alliance, said the city paid big money to Gibson Dunn in a failed attempt to wriggle out of its legal obligations.

“The city should be spending this money on complying with the agreement, and/or providing services to the people who need them,” he said. “Instead, they are paying a law firm to fight tooth and nail against obligations that are clear in the settlement agreement — and that a judge has affirmed they are in violation of.”

The invoice, which The Times obtained from the city attorney’s office, lists a billing period from May 19 to May 31, covering a week of preparations for the high-stakes federal hearing, as well as four of the seven trial days — each of which typically lasted eight or more hours.

Theane Evangelis, head of the Gibson Dunn team representing the city, referred questions about the invoice to the city attorney’s office.

Karen Richardson, a spokesperson for City Atty. Hydee Feldstein Soto, said in a statement that Gibson Dunn “did an outstanding job of stepping into a crucial matter that had been in litigation for nearly 5 years before they were hired,” compressing “what would normally be years worth of work into a very short time period.”

“We are grateful for their service and are in the process of reviewing the expenditures … to ensure that we go back to Council with a complete picture of what was done and charged,” she said in a statement.

The city retained Gibson Dunn just as council members were signing off on hundreds of employee layoffs, part of a larger strategy for closing a nearly $1-billion budget shortfall. The first batch of layoff notices was scheduled to go out this week.

The City Council initially appropriated $900,000 for Gibson Dunn, for a period not exceeding three years, according to the firm’s contract. Going over $900,000 required prior written approval from the city attorney, according to the contract.

The law firm quickly surpassed that threshold, eventually billing double the specified amount.

During the seven-day hearing, Gibson Dunn took a highly aggressive posture, voicing numerous objections to questions from attorneys representing the Alliance, as well as two organizations that intervened in the case.

Councilmember Bob Blumenfield, who serves on the council’s homelessness committee, said the city attorney’s office did not advise him that Gibson Dunn’s legal costs had reached $1.8 million in such a short period. Blumenfield, who represents part of the San Fernando Valley, said he is “not happy” but is reserving further comment until he receives more specifics.

Three months ago, Blumenfield co-authored a motion with Councilmember Tim McOsker seeking regular updates on the Alliance litigation — both from Gibson Dunn and the city attorney’s office.

McOsker, who serves on the budget committee and spent several years running the city attorney’s office, also did not receive notification of the Gibson Dunn $1.8-million invoice from the city’s legal team, according to Sophie Gilchrist, his spokesperson.

Gilchrist said her boss had asked for regular updates to “prevent any surprises in billing” related to the Alliance case.

“That’s why the Councilmember is requesting that this matter be brought to City Council immediately, so the City Attorney can provide a full accounting and discuss all invoices related to the case,” she said.

Gibson Dunn has filed a notice of the city’s intent to appeal at least portions of Carter’s ruling, which ordered a third-party monitor to review and verify the data being produced by the city on its housing and encampment goals.

Carter signaled that he probably would order the city to pay the legal fees of the Alliance and homeless advocacy groups that have intervened in the case. So far, the Alliance has sought $1.3 million from the city to cover its legal expenses incurred since April 2024.

In a statement to The Times earlier this week, Evangelis, the Gibson Dunn lawyer, cited the judge’s “suggestion that the Alliance may recover attorneys’ fees” as one reason for the appeal.

“The City believes that its resources should be spent providing services to those in need, not redirected to the Alliance’s lawyers — particularly when the district court has rejected most of their arguments,” she said.

LOVE Island fans claim they’ve figured out the real reason Yasmin Pettet was in tears during the series finale.

Yas, 24, who finished third with Jamie Rhodes, 26, was spotted crying behind host Maya Jama as she interviewed second-place pairing Shakira Khan and Harry Cooksley.

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Emotions were running high on the night and viewers originally believed she was weeping over her friends’ success.

But last night Yasmin revealed her beloved pet cat Miaow Miaow died while she was in the villa and fans think she might have learned the news during the finale.

Yasmin explained she had a gut feeling something wasn’t right while she was in the villa.

And her mum, Mitra, and sister, Zara, told her the white lie that “everything was fine” when they visited as part of the the Meet The Parents episode.

But people are now speculating the sad news somehow got to Yasmin before filming wrapped on Monday night.

One wrote on Facebook: “I bet that’s why she was crying in the background.”

Another said: “Maybe that’s why she was crying during the final as well.”

The reality star spoke lovingly about her cat numerous times in the villa.

Her partner Jamie even gifted her a ring with a paw on it because he knew she loved her cat so much.

Announcing Miaow Miaow’s death, Yasmin wrote on Instagram: “As I’ve spoken about her on the show I’m sure a lot of you will know I have a cat called miaow miaow who’s been by my side for 11 years now.

“When I was filming Love Island I had a bad gut feeling something
was off and when my mum and sister came into the villa I asked
them and still felt like something was off.”

She continued: “Rightfully they didn’t tell me because I was still in the villa but after the final I called my sister and she told me that miaow miaow had cancer and died whilst I was away filming Love Island.”

Yasmin explained she was doing her best to maintain a visible presence online in light of the news, but it was proving hard.

She said: “I’m trying to be as active as I can be on socials but am taking time for myself to process this heartbreak.

“RIP to my beautiful baby girl, you were so loved and will always be
in my soul.”

Yasmin returned to social media yesterday to thank fans for supporting her on the show.

She said: “My love island journey has been crazy to say the least but I really wouldn’t have been able to do it without my Jamie, Toni and Shakira.

“I feel so grateful and blessed and can’t wait to see what the future holds.”

Jamie, who affectionately describes Yasmin as having ‘black cat energy‘, made his feelings toward her, writing: “Absolutely smashed it, wouldn’t want to do the journey with anyone else.”

Toni Laites and Cach Mercer were announced as the winners of Love Island 2025.

During the finale, Yasmin’s twin sister Zara and mum Mitra hosted a TikTok livestream.

Speaking in the clip, Mitra said: “What you don’t understand is this is not a paid vote.

“If it’s not a paid vote, you cannot see the results. That means they can say whatever they want.

“Do you understand? For you to see the result – a correct result that people vote – you have to pay cash.

“Because this is free voting, they decide.”

Mitra referenced Yasmin and Dejon writing each other’s names on their boards during a villa game.

The Islanders were asked who they’d couple up with if their actual partner wasn’t in the villa.

She added: “I always knew after that episode that Yasmin’s not going to win – because of the way they edited it.”

The Sun approached ITV for comment.

ITV later released the finale’s voting percentages, as they do each year.

Winners Toni and Cach secured an impressive 33.5 percent of the audience’s support.

Shakira and Harry drew a sizeable 26.2 percent of the votes, while Yas and Jamie were not far behind taking 22 percent.

Aesthetics practitioner Angel, 26, only made her debut on July 17, and managed to secure 18.3 percent of the overall voting audience with Casa Amor boy Ty.

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The nation’s first mandated work requirement for Medicaid recepients, approved by the Republican-led Congress and signed by President Trump, is expected to have a seismic effect in California.

One estimate from state health officials suggests that as many as 3.4 million people could lose their insurance through what Gov. Gavin Newsom calls the “labyrinth of manual verification,” which involves Medi-Cal recipients proving every six months that they are working, going to school or volunteering at least 80 hours per month.

“It’s going to be much harder to stay insured,” said Martha Santana-Chin, the head of L.A. Care Health Plan, a publicly operated health plan that serves about 2.3 million Medi-Cal patients in Los Angeles County.

She said that as many as 1 million people, or about 20% to 40% of its members, could lose their coverage.

The work requirement will be the first imposed nationwide in the six-decade history of Medicaid, the program that provides free and subsidized health insurance to disabled and low-income Americans.

It’s relatively uncharted territory, and it’s not yet clear how the rules will shake out for the 5.1 million people in California who will be required to prove that they are working in order to qualify for Medi-Cal, the state’s version of Medicaid.

After the 2026 midterm elections, millions of healthy adults will be required to prove every six months that they meet the work requirement in order to qualify for Medicaid. The new mandate spells out some exceptions, including for people who are pregnant, in addiction treatment or caring for children under age 14.

Democrats have long argued that work requirements generally lead to eligible people l osing their health insurance due to bureaucratic hurdles. Republicans say that a work requirement will encourage healthy people to get jobs and preserve Medicaid for those who truly need it.

“If you clean that up and shore it up, you save a lot of money,” said House Speaker Mike Johnson of Louisiana. “And you return the dignity of work to young men who need to be out working instead of playing video games all day.”

Only three U.S. states have tried to implement work requirements for Medicaid recipients: New Hampshire, Arkansas and Georgia. One study found that in the first three months of the Arkansas program, more than 18,000 people lost health coverage.

People can lose coverage a variety of ways, said Joan Alker, a Georgetown University professor who studies Medicaid. Some people hear that the rules have changed and assume they are no longer eligible. Others struggle to prove their eligibility because their income fluctuates, they are paid in cash or their jobs don’t keep good payroll records. Some have problems with the technology or forms, she said, and others don’t appeal their rejections.

Of the 15 million people on Medi-Cal in California, about one-third will be required to prove they are working, the state said. Those people earn very little: less than $21,000 for a single person and less than $43,000 for a household of four.

The state’s estimate of 3.4 million people losing coverage is a projection based on what happened in Arkansas and New Hampshire.

But those programs were brief, overturned by the courts and weren’t “a coordinated effort among the states to figure out what the best practices are,” said Ryan Long, the director of congressional relations at the Paragon Health Institute, a conservative think tank that has become influential among congressional Republicans.

Long said advancements in technology and a national emphasis on work requirements should make work verification less of a barrier. The budget bill includes $200 million in grants for states to update their systems to prepare, he said.

Arguments from liberal groups that people will lose healthcare are a “straw man argument,” Long said: “They know that the public supports work requirements for these benefits, so they can’t come out and say, ‘We don’t support them.’”

A poll by the health research group KFF found this year that 62% of American adults support tying Medicaid eligibility to work requirements.

The poll also found that support for the policy drops to less than 1 in 3 people when respondents hear “that most people on Medicaid are already working and many would risk losing coverage because of the burden of proving eligibility through paperwork.”

In June, Newsom warned that some Californians could be forced to fill out 36 pages of paperwork to keep their insurance, showing reporters an image of a stack of forms with teal and gold accents that he described as “an actual PDF example of the paperwork that people will have to submit to for their eligibility checks.”

Many Californians already are required to fill out that 36-page form or its online equivalent to enroll in Medi-Cal and Covered California, the state’s health insurance marketplace.

Experts say it’s too soon to say what system will be used for people to prove their work eligibility, because federal guidance won’t be finalized for months.

Newsom’s office directed questions to the Department of Health Care Services, which runs Medi-Cal. A spokesperson there said officials are “still reviewing the full operational impacts” of the work requirements.

“The idea that you are going to get a paper submission every six months, I’m not sure people have to do that,” Long said.

Georgia is the only state that has implemented a lasting work requirement for Medicaid. Two years ago, the state made healthcare available to people who were working at least 80 hours per month and earned less than the federal poverty limit (about $15,000 for one person or $31,200 for a household of four).

More than 100,000 people have applied for coverage since the program’s launch in July of 2023. As of June of this year, more than 8,000 people were enrolled, according to the state’s most recent data.

The Medicaid program has cost more than $100 million so far, and of that, $26 million was spent on health benefits and more than $20 million was allocated to marketing contracts, KFF Health News reported. Democrats in Georgia have sought an investigation into the program.

The Inland Empire agency that provides Medi-Cal coverage for about 1.5 million people in San Bernardino and Riverside counties estimated that 150,000 members could lose their insurance as a result of work requirements.

Jarrod McNaughton, the chief executive of the Inland Empire Health Plan, said that California’s 58 counties, which administer Medi-Cal, “will be the ones at the precipice of piecing this together” but haven’t yet received guidance on how the eligibility process will be set up or what information people will have to provide.

Will it be done online? Will recipients be required to fill out a piece of paper that needs to be mailed in or dropped off? “We don’t really know the process yet, because all of this is so new,” Naughton said.

In the meantime, he said, the health plan’s foundation is working to make this “as least burdensome as possible,” working to improve community outreach and connect people who receive Medi-Cal insurance to volunteer opportunities.