After a long and tiring day at work, Mark headed to an East Hollywood movie theater that he called “always a fun, chill” time — and bought an eight-hour ticket.
At this cinema house, there were no movie posters touting “Barbie,” no IMAX screens, no buckets of buttery popcorn. This month’s curated selections include “Tiny & Tight Size Queens 2” and “Stepmom Seductions.”
Mark had come to the Tiki Theater: the last porn theater in Los Angeles.
It is a place that has outlasted more vaunted film houses such as the ArcLight Hollywood and its historic Cinerama Dome, which shuttered during the COVID-19 pandemic.
A cyclist rides past the entrance to the Tiki Theater on Santa Monica Boulevard.
(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)
“I just want to feel free here, watching something very primal,” said Mark, 34, during a recent screening at the Tiki.
“I think sex is beautiful, and I like sharing it with others — whether the energy is weird or not,” said Mark, who described himself as “gay with a side of bi” and declined to share his last name because, well, he had come to watch porn.
The Tiki, a red-tiled storefront theater next to a snack bar selling “natural juices,” is a Santa Monica Boulevard institution — an X-rated bulwark against online porn, videos that can be watched privately at home, and other factors that have all but rendered adult film theaters obsolete.
Three miles west on Santa Monica Boulevard, West Hollywood’s Studs Theater — a straight and LGBTQ+ porn house in a 1940 building that once housed one of the legendary Pussycat theaters — shut down last year.
Now, Tiki is the last adult film theater in a city that once had scores of them, according to L.A. Department of Building and Safety permit records reviewed by The Times.
Open 24 hours a day, the Tiki beckons customers with signs in both English and Spanish: CINE XXX PARA ADULTOS and XXX ADULT THEATER.
Passersby in front of the Tiki Theater on Santa Monica Boulevard.
(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)
Curious passersby sometimes peek inside. On a typical day, most shuffle away, a few linger, and only a handful stand at the ticket counter — right there on a bustling sidewalk — and pay for a ticket: $20 for four hours, $25 for eight hours and $30 for 12 hours.
No refunds.
Inside, patrons are welcomed by a darkness penetrated only by the light of the theater’s sole silver screen.
At the Tiki, the ringmaster of porn is Juan Martinez, the theater’s longtime manager.
Most days, the 59-year-old immigrant from El Salvador works 12-hour shifts in a tiny box office with a mini fridge and stacks of neatly organized porn DVDs. He has been working there for more than 15 years.
“Honestly, I don’t even need to work that much anymore,” Martinez said in Spanish. “I just need enough for my food. But I appreciate this place because it was one of the places where I started out when I came to the United States.”
Signs inform patrons on the front doors to the Tiki Theater.
(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)
The hardcore sex and nudity on screen do not faze him, he said. Martinez described himself as a romantic — even though he recently had to break up with a girlfriend because her mom did not like his job.
Martinez is Tiki’s projectionist, maintenance worker — and bouncer, if need be. He also programs Tiki’s 24/7 screenings, which, as advertised by the black signs taped on the outside hallway, feature “3 new movies, very recent” every day.
“I have a lot of appreciation for this place,” Martinez said. “I go about maintaining it, fixing everything, whether it’s the plumbing, electricity. I adjust the cameras, I take care of everything. I do it like it’s something personal. I do it with lots of care.”
Juan Martinez, the manager of the Tiki Theater, has worked at the establishment for more than 15 years.
(Juan Martinez)
Martinez’s early life hardly would have suggested a future at the Tiki. In his homeland, Martinez studied health and medicine.
The Salvadoran military drafted him at 17, enlisting him as a battlefield nurse during the country’s grueling civil war.
Martinez said he retrieved drowned bodies from rivers and corpses booby-trapped with bombs. He said guerrillas hid explosives within tree branches, waiting for the moment soldiers would touch them.
“Boom! Boom! Boom! And people would die,” Martinez recalled. “Sometimes, I saw people without eyes, without hands.”
At 19, Martinez left the military. He immigrated to the United States with his two sisters and younger brother.
Before he found work at the Tiki, he was a busboy at a Thai barbecue restaurant, a maintenance worker at the Hollywood Cabaret, another now-defunct porn theater on Hollywood Boulevard. Now, he uses his Tiki earnings to help build a home for a granddaughter in Santa Clarita.
As he told his life story from the box office, the groans and awkward dialogue of a porno could be heard coming from the theater. Martinez paused his story as a man approached the ticket stand.
Tiki Theater manager Juan Martinez is pictured at age 20, one year after he immigrated to Los Angeles from El Salvador.
(Juan Martinez)
Martinez talks to customers through an opaque window. Theatergoers can’t see him, nor can he really see them.
The man slid a crisp $25 into the window’s deal tray.
“Hello,” the customer said. “How are you?”
“Good, how many hours?” Martinez replied.
“Eight.”
The customer grabbed the ticket from Martinez’s tan hands.
From his side of the window, Martinez removed the rod that serves as the outdoor turnstile, allowing the man to step inside, into the darkness.
The Tiki’s single viewing room, about the size of four parking spaces put together, has black-painted walls and six rows of cushioned leather seats. It can seat about 30 people.
An adult film on the screen inside the Tiki Theater on Santa Monica Boulevard.
(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)
Men tend to sit toward the back, watching the main screen while a smaller television propped in the room’s upper right corner consecutively plays a second porn film.
Among the patrons on a recent weekday was Mario Lopez, visiting for the first time after a friend recommended it. Lopez, 37, was unimpressed. He bought a four-hour ticket but said he probably wouldn’t return.
“It wasn’t what I thought it would be,” Lopez said in Spanish with a laugh. He expected “más ambiente” — more ambiance. Nevertheless, he stayed for over an hour because he struck up a conversation with Luis Arjeta, another customer.
Arjeta, 51, has been frequenting the Tiki for five years. He used to come up to five times a week, but this was his first visit in about three months.
“I like the type of movies they show here,” said Arjeta, who bought a 12-hour ticket. He likes the longer tickets — eight and 12 hours — because they allow reentry and he can enter and leave at his own discretion during the allotted time period.
Arjeta, who is, like Martinez, a Salvadoran immigrant, described Tiki as “a refuge.”
“What happens when police shut down places like these?” Arjeta said in Spanish. “These are places that grant us the opportunity to be more comfortable.”
Back in the 1970s and ’80s, there were a lot more places like the Tiki in Los Angeles.
With names like Copenhagen Adult Cinema, The Cave, Sin-O-Rama (which, in a 1977 advertisement in The Times, said customers could “Get your sex education here”), and more, these adult theaters were a common sight in Hollywood and East Hollywood.
“There used to be a lot more of them,” said Kim Cooper of Esotouric, a tour company that advocates for historic preservation and public policy. “And clearly with the spread of porn onto people’s phones, it really changed the way that people perceive that sort of material.”
An employee mans the ticket booth at the Tiki Theater.
(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)
Before video cassette recorders became common in American households in the latter half of the 20th century, making pornography viewable in the privacy of one’s home, those who wanted to see sexual content had to go into public spaces to view it.
“That has now become part of American history and going there is an act of nostalgia,” Cooper said, “but it’s also showing that there’s always been a need for this type of content.”
Construction of the Metro Red Line and large-scale redevelopment in the 1990s helped transform seedy Hollywood streets that had become known for their drugs, prostitution and porn purveyors into round-the-clock tourist destinations.
Richard Schave, who co-runs Esotouric with Cooper, his wife, said the sex shops near Hollywood and Western “are all really important spaces that are all gone.”
All but Tiki.
“Tiki is the real deal,” Cooper said. “You walk in there, you’re part of something that’s very old. I think it’s kind of magical.”
Though Tiki is the last porn theater standing, that doesn’t mean it’s a stranger to change.
Originally known as the Mini Theater in the early 1970s, it welcomed nude performers to its stage. Now, that stage is occupied by cleaning supplies.
Tiki once had an iconic sign: a bright-red marquee with a palm tree, a totem pole, and the words: “Tiki Theater Xymposium / ADULT XXX LIVE NAKED GIRLS.”
It’s unclear, Cooper said, when it was torn down.
“One day, we go by, and we were like, ‘What just happened?’” Cooper said. “This beautiful thing, this jewel of the city.”
The Tiki Theater is believed to be the last porn theater in Los Angeles.
(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)
“It had such a Polynesian exotic look to it,” Willard said. “I say, ‘Maybe there’s hula dancers in here. Maybe there’s mai tais.’ I went in and I realized I was the only one awake and sober and conscious.”
He also tweeted: “lousy film, but theater would make a terrific racquetball court.”
Nowadays, a sign outside the theater warns: “Movie theater viewed by LAPD.”
The Los Angeles Police Department “doesn’t have any cameras in that area and did not post that sign,” said Capt. Kelly Muniz, an LAPD spokeswoman. “That sign was likely posted by management or the property owner.”
And in somewhat fractured Spanish, the theater also used to have handwritten signs saying smoking and drinking were prohibited and warned patrons: “No habran el pantalon or el zipper.” Don’t open your pants or the zipper.
Willard said at the time that he thought porn theaters no longer existed.
It’s a sentiment echoed by Mark, the recent customer, more than a decade later.
“I always wonder how these places survive,” he said.
As he pondered the Tiki’s future, Mark’s eyes kept drifting to the screen, to a tight shot of actors’ private parts.
“I’m too distracted by what’s happening on the screen,” he said, “to share any last words.”
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Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis lambasted L.A. County Dist. Atty. George Gascón during a Thursday night Fox News debate with Gov. Gavin Newsom.
In a spat over crime in California and Florida, DeSantis repeatedly pointed to Gascón, who has sought to overhaul L.A. County’s criminal justice system since he entered office in 2020.
“They are on an ideological joyride to let people out of prison,” DeSantis said. “Gavin’s buddy in Los Angeles, Gascón, he doesn’t even prosecute them,” he added, continuing that he had heard from people in California who were scared to go shopping for fear of getting mugged.
“Gavin Newsom has not lifted a finger to rein in Gascón in L.A.,” DeSantis said, arguing that the county has “collapsed” because the district attorney “is not enforcing the law.”
A Times analysis of the L.A. County district attorney’s office’s filing rates showed that Gascón actually prosecuted felonies at a near-identical rate to his predecessor, Dist. Atty. Jackie Lacey, during his first two years in office. Gascón did, however, file only half as many misdemeanor cases as Lacey after barring prosecutors from filing low-level charges for crimes such as trespassing and simple drug possession.
Avoiding those low-level charges was part of Gascón’s effort to keep people experiencing mental illness or homelessness out of jail and instead steer them into diversion programs for counseling, treatment and rehabilitation.
Violent crime, robberies and aggravated assaults have gone up in L.A. County during Gascón’s tenure, according to California Department of Justice statistics. But criminologists have noted similar crime increases in parts of the state overseen by traditional prosecutors, raising doubts about any link between Gascón’s policies and a crime surge.
Violent crime in the city of L.A. was down nearly 7% in the first nine months of 2023 relative to the same period last year, according to Los Angeles Police Department statistics.
One of Gascón’s proposals was to reduce the length of prison sentences for up to 30,000 people in California prisons. Few people have actually had their sentences changed, a Times analysis concluded.
Gascón has received blowback on his policies since entering office, but survived two failed recall efforts last year. He faces a crowded field of challengers in next year’s election.
Times staff writer James Queally contributed to this report.
Last fall, when RSV and flu came roaring back from a prolonged and erratic hiatus, and COVID was still killing thousands of Americans each week, many of the United States’ leading infectious-disease experts offered the nation a glimmer of hope. The overwhelm, they predicted, was probably temporary—viruses making up ground they’d lost during the worst of the pandemic. Next year would be better.
And so far, this year has been better. Some of the most prominent and best-tracked viruses, at least, are behaving less aberrantly than they did the previous autumn. Although neither RSV nor flu is shaping up to be particularly mild this year, says Caitlin Rivers, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, both appear to be behaving more within their normal bounds.
But infections are still nowhere near back to their pre-pandemic norm. They never will be again. Adding another disease—COVID—to winter’s repertoire has meant exactly that: adding another disease, and a pretty horrific one at that, to winter’s repertoire. “The probability that someone gets sick over the course of the winter is now increased,” Rivers told me, “because there is yet another germ to encounter.” The math is simple, even mind-numbingly obvious—a pathogenic n+1 that epidemiologists have seen coming since the pandemic’s earliest days. Now we’re living that reality, and its consequences. “What I’ve told family or friends is, ‘Odds are, people are going to get sick this year,’” Saskia Popescu, an epidemiologist at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, told me.
Even before the pandemic, winter was a dreaded slog—“the most challenging time for a hospital” in any given year, Popescu said. In typical years, flu hospitalizes an estimated 140,000 to 710,000 people in the United States alone; some years, RSV can add on some 200,000 more. “Our baseline has never been great,” Yvonne Maldonado, a pediatrician at Stanford, told me. “Tens of thousands of people die every year.” In “light” seasons, too, the pileup exacts a tax: In addition to weathering the influx of patients, health-care workers themselves fall sick, straining capacity as demand for care rises. And this time of year, on top of RSV, flu, and COVID, we also have to contend with a maelstrom of other airway viruses—among them, rhinoviruses, parainfluenza viruses, human metapneumovirus, and common-cold coronaviruses. (A small handful of bacteria can cause nasty respiratory illnesses too.) Illnesses not severe enough to land someone in the hospital could still leave them stuck at home for days or weeks on end, recovering or caring for sick kids—or shuffling back to work, still sick and probably contagious, because they can’t afford to take time off.
To toss any additional respiratory virus into that mess is burdensome; for that virus to be SARS-CoV-2 ups the ante all the more. “This is a more serious pathogen that is also more infectious,” Ajay Sethi, an epidemiologist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, told me. This year, COVID-19 has so far killed some 80,000 Americans—a lighter toll than in the three years prior, but one that still dwarfs that of the worst flu seasons in the past decade. Globally, the only infectious killer that rivals it in annual-death count is tuberculosis. And last year, a CDC survey found that more than 3 percent of American adults were suffering from long COVID—millions of people in the United States alone.
With only a few years of data to go on, and COVID-data tracking now spotty at best, it’s hard to quantify just how much worse winters might be from now on. But experts told me they’re keeping an eye on some potentially concerning trends. We’re still rather early in the typical sickness season, but influenza-like illnesses, a catchall tracked by the CDC, have already been on an upward push for weeks. Rivers also pointed to CDC data that track trends in deaths caused by pneumonia, flu, and COVID-19. Even when SARS-CoV-2 has been at its most muted, Rivers said, more people have been dying—especially during the cooler months—than they were at the pre-pandemic baseline. The math of exposure is, again, simple: The more pathogens you encounter, the more likely you are to get sick.
A larger roster of microbes might also extend the portion of the year when people can expect to fall ill, Rivers told me. Before the pandemic, RSV and flu would usually start to bump up sometime in the fall, before peaking in the winter; if the past few years are any indication, COVID could now surge in the summer, shading into RSV’s autumn rise, before adding to flu’s winter burden, potentially dragging the misery out into spring. “Based on what I know right now, I am considering the season to be longer,” Rivers said.
With COVID still quite new, the exact specifics of respiratory-virus season will probably continue to change for a good while yet. The population, after all, is still racking up initial encounters with this new coronavirus, and with regularly administered vaccines. Bill Hanage, an epidemiologist at Harvard’s T. H. Chan School of Public Health, told me he suspects that, barring further gargantuan leaps in viral evolution, the disease will continue to slowly mellow out in severity as our collective defenses build; the virus may also pose less of a transmission risk as the period during which people are infectious contracts. But even if the dangers of COVID-19 are lilting toward an asymptote, experts still can’t say for sure where that asymptote might be relative to other diseases such as the flu—or how long it might take for the population to get there. And no matter how much this disease softens, it seems extraordinarily unlikely to ever disappear. For the foreseeable future, “pretty much all years going forward are going to be worse than what we’ve been used to before,” Hanage told me.
In one sense, this was always where we were going to end up. SARS-CoV-2 spread too quickly and too far to be quashed; it’s now here to stay. If the arithmetic of more pathogens is straightforward, our reaction to that addition could have been too: More disease risk means ratcheting up concern and response. But although a core contingent of Americans might still be more cautious than they were before the pandemic’s start—masking in public, testing before gathering, minding indoor air quality, avoiding others whenever they’re feeling sick—much of the country has readily returned to the pre-COVID mindset.
When I asked Hanage what precautions worthy of a respiratory disease with a death count roughly twice that of flu’s would look like, he rattled off a familiar list: better access to and uptake of vaccines and antivirals, with the vulnerable prioritized; improved surveillance systems to offer people at high risk a better sense of local-transmission trends; improved access to tests and paid sick leave. Without those changes, excess disease and death will continue, and “we’re saying we’re going to absorb that into our daily lives,” he said.
And that is what is happening. This year, for the first time, millions of Americans have access to three lifesaving respiratory-virus vaccines, against flu, COVID, and RSV. Uptake for all three remains sleepy and halting; even the flu shot, the most established, is not performing above its pre-pandemic baseline. “We get used to people getting sick every year,” Maldonado told me. “We get used to things we could probably fix.” The years since COVID arrived set a horrific precedent of death and disease; after that, this season of n+1 sickness might feel like a reprieve. But compare it with a pre-COVID world, and it looks objectively worse. We’re heading toward a new baseline, but it will still have quite a bit in common with the old one: We’re likely to accept it, and all of its horrors, as a matter of course.
For Judith Ortiz, whose parents brought her to this country from Durango, Mexico, when she was 2, a mere 24 hours have made the difference between a life of freedom and opportunity and one constrained by limits and obstacles.
Ortiz and her twin sister, Janette, were raised in suburban Dallas, where Judith was her high school’s valedictorian, graduating with a 3.96 GPA.
Both girls had remained in the country illegally as toddlers when their family overstayed a tourist visa. When they turned 18, they became eligible for benefits under Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, the Obama-era program designed to shield from deportation young people brought to this country illegally as children.
Drawing on an unprecedented poll, this series tells the stories of immigrant life in America today, putting their voices in the foreground.
Because the girls have the same birth date, the same address and the same surname, their lawyer suggested Judith mail her application a day after her sister to avoid confusion.
Janette’s paperwork was approved six months later, in June 2021. Shortly after, a federal judge in Texas blocked the government from approving additional DACA petitions. Judith’s application — and her future — have been on hold ever since. She can’t be sure that the mailing date, not some other arbitrary bureaucratic quirk, caused the fateful difference, but in her mind, that one-day delay in sending off the application is what has set their lives on different courses.
“Having DACA would make my life 100 times easier,” said the 21-year-old, who attends classes at Texas A&M alongside her sister. “I was always scared of getting pulled over. There’s things that people don’t really think about sometimes.”
Judith took the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery, hoping to enlist in the military, and scored well enough to enter West Point, only to be rejected because of her immigration status. Because of that status, she can’t legally get a job or a loan because she can’t get a Social Security number.
Her twin, who entered the country on the same day and grew up in the same house, has a job, an apartment and a car loan.
Judith, who is slated to graduate in December, is eligible to be deported back to a country she never knew and can’t remember while her twin sister can legally remain, work and study.
“I grew up in America. I don’t know [Mexican] culture very well. It’s not the same,” she said.
Few who work in immigration law are surprised by the story; the capriciousness of America’s broken immigration system seems to be the rule, not the exception.
“It’s a bit of layer cake,” said Travis Murphy, a former U.S. diplomat who is the founder and CEO of Jetr Global Partners, a Washington-based firm that works to solve visa and immigrant issues for athletes and sports franchises. “Policies have been enacted year over year that don’t necessarily work directly, in a coherent way, with previous policies.”
Janette Ortiz’s DACA paperwork was approved in June 2021.
(Jordan Vonderhaar / For The Times)
“We don’t have consensus in what we want the outcome to be,” he added. “That’s the problem.”
The sometimes arbitrary and frequently confusing nature of American immigration law enforcement constrains the lives of millions of immigrants — those who live in the country legally as well as those here without legal status.
More than 4 in 10 immigrants who participated in a wide-ranging survey conducted earlier this year by the Los Angeles Times and KFF, formerly known as the Kaiser Family Foundation, said they don’t understand how the country’s immigration policies work, nor how those policies affect their families. Yet they have no choice but to rely on those policies to be able to live, work, study and sometimes simply exist in this country.
Roughly 1 in 4 immigrants said they worry that they or a family member could be deported. The number is highest among the undocumented, but the fear is shared by one-third of legal permanent residents and 1 in 8 naturalized citizens. Many immigrants who have legal status have family members who do not.
Some 10.5 million people — precise estimates vary — lived in the U.S. without authorization in 2021. Roughly 1.8 million live in uncertainty, recipients of temporary protected status, student visas, DACA and other protocols that either have limited length or can be revoked, with little notice, at any time. Tens of thousands more are apprehended at the southern border each month trying to join them.
Judith Ortiz, left, was her high school’s valedictorian, graduating with a 3.96 GPA.
(Jordan Vonderhaar / For The Times)
Meantime, the pathway to legally immigrate to the U.S. has become so constrained that for many, it doesn’t truly exist.
The Cato Institute, in a June report titled, “Why Legal Immigration Is Nearly Impossible,” estimated that fewer than 1% of the people who apply to move permanently to this country are now able to do so.
“The government’s restrictive criteria render the legal paths available only in the most extreme cases,” wrote David J. Bier, Cato’s associate director for immigration studies. “Legal immigration is less like waiting in line and more like winning the lottery: It happens, but it is so rare that it is irrational to expect it in any individual case.”
The U.S. caps the number of permanent employment-based immigrants at 140,000 annually, with no more than 7% allowed from any one country. As a result, people in countries with large numbers of applicants could wait a lifetime. The wait for an employment-based green card for residents of India is 134 years, according to Cato’s estimate, based on government data. A U.S. citizen who wants legal permission for their married adult child to immigrate to the U.S. from Mexico would have to wait 160 years at the current rate of approval.
Those who do enter the U.S. legally aren’t exempt from the law’s complexities.
Six years ago, Agustina Vergara packed up her life and moved from Argentina to Southern California to finish a master’s program at USC.
With her employer’s help, she applied to exchange her student visa for one reserved for workers in fields requiring special knowledge. That’s when things went off the rails.
As she waited, Vergara’s father was diagnosed with cancer. She couldn’t go back to Argentina without abandoning her visa application, which would have meant starting the process over again with less chance of success. When he died, she couldn’t attend the funeral.
Weeks later, her lawyer gave her more bad news: She wasn’t going to get the visa anyway. The government offered no explanation why. Vergara was crushed.
“My thinking was perhaps a little too optimistic,” she said. “There is no way that a hardworking person that really loves America and wants to build a life here and contribute to make America the amazing country that it is, there is no way that they won’t have me.”
Like Judith Ortiz, Vergara, 35, had filed every form, paid every fee, followed every rule. She was, by all accounts, an outstanding student and a model citizen. Her background check came back as clean as hospital linen.
“There’s a point where it is so convoluted, so complicated, so nonsensical,” she said. “It cannot be an accident. It is, in a way, kind of designed to make it really difficult,” said Vergara, now an associate fellow at the Ayn Rand Institute, a libertarian organization based in Santa Ana. “Is this an immigration system or an anti-immigration system?”
Most immigrants, 84%, say they feel the U.S. immigration system has treated them and their families fairly, the Los Angeles Times/KFF poll found. But that number is notably lower among immigrants from Mexico, Central America and India, who face some of the longest wait times. It is also lower among the undocumented.
And even those who feel the process was fair can often find it an ordeal.
Vergara was eventually allowed to stay in this country after moving up her long-planned wedding and marrying her fiance, a U.S. citizen, at the Laguna Hills courthouse. Millions of others, however, have had to put their lives on hold.
Elvina Kovaleva and her husband were welcomed into this country, but it could be years before they know if they’ll be able to stay. A respondent to The Times/KFF poll, Kovaleva agreed to a follow-up interview by email.
Kovaleva, 28, and her husband, Yaroslav, both Russian citizens, left well-paying jobs in Moscow last year after Yaroslav was mobilized to fight in Ukraine, a war the couple strongly oppose.
“We don’t want to take part in an awful war against a brotherly nation,” said Kovaleva, who was pregnant at the time they left. They had just a day to pack and make travel arrangements, but she and her husband didn’t have to discuss where they would go. “The country of freedom and human rights,” she said.
They don’t regret the choice.
“We have already received great help from the United States,” said Kovaleva. “Everywhere we meet people who are ready to help with anything. USA is really a country of migrants.”
The couple, who settled in Brooklyn, have permission to live and work here legally as their asylum petition is reviewed. Yaroslav, who was an engineer in Russia, has a driver’s license and is working as a heating, ventilation and air-conditioning technician while Elvina, who gave birth to a daughter this spring, is a stay-at-home mom.
But the Kovalevas are reluctant to make any long-term plans until their case is heard by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.
Should they buy a house? Expand their family? Start a business? How can they when their future is so uncertain. They would like to petition to bring their elderly parents to the U.S. because they believe they’re not safe in Russia, but they can’t do that until their immigration paperwork is approved. Nor can they exit the U.S. without abandoning their asylum request.
They have no idea when they will have answers.
The U.S. had 1.6 million pending asylum applications as of the start of this year, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University, which compiles and analyzes immigration data.
“We’re still waiting,” Kovaleva said. “We are told some people have been waiting eight to 10 years.”
In the meantime, she keeps her fingers crossed.
“The U.S. is a land of freedom, opportunity and choice,” she wrote. “And we do hope that this will never change.”
It’s certainly been a land of opportunity for Julio Calderon. But as for freedom and choice, well, not so much.
In 2005, Calderon fled the poverty and gang violence of Honduras for the U.S., entering illegally 30 days after his 16th birthday. That made him a month too old to apply for DACA when the program was introduced in 2012.
He also entered a few years too late to qualify for Temporary Protected Status (TPS), a government designation that gave Hondurans in the U.S. employment authorization and guarded them from deportation after Hurricane Mitch devastated their country in 1998. TPS status has been extended multiple times since it was first established and now covers around 76,000 Hondurans.
“It’s like an invisible wall that keeps me away from building wealth,” Calderon, who has an economics degree from Florida International University, said of his undocumented status. “It’s difficult to learn when you’re hungry.”
Even as he fears being deported to Honduras, a country he hardly knows, Calderon said he’s not letting his immigration status hold him back.
“I want people to see the opportunities that you have even if you’re undocumented because I don’t think we’re talking about that. We focus too much on the limitations,” he said.
“So I am undocumented, but I graduated high school and college,” he continued. “I got scholarships. Now, whenever I go to a place, I know that [my] immigration status might have taken me to a different path. And sometimes I have to be the one creating those paths for those who are coming after me.
“I am qualified. I am qualified to do a lot of things. But just because I don’t have immigration status, I’m limited. At the end of the day, I am losing, but also this country is losing because I can give so much.
“Like myself, there are many out there ready to give back. Politics is what keeps us away from a solution.”
Even among immigrants, however, little consensus exists about what that solution might be. About 8 in 10 immigrants say that allowing people like Judith Ortiz, who were brought to the U.S. illegally as children, to apply for citizenship would be a good idea.
Much like the native-born population, however, they’re more divided on other proposals. Asked about allowing people without documentation to apply for government-provided health insurance, 59% of immigrants called that a good idea and 37% said it would be a bad idea. Immigrants who are undocumented heavily supported that idea, but naturalized citizens split evenly, The Times/KFF poll found.
Immigrants divided closely on what they think of enforcement of U.S. immigration policies, with about 1 in 5 calling it too tough and another 1 in 5 saying it’s not tough enough. The rest said either that enforcement is about right (27%) or that they weren’t sure (35%).
Because of the capriciousness of the American immigration system, one of the Ortiz twins stays and works in the U.S. legally and the other remains without legal status.
(Jordan Vonderhaar / For The Times)
Calderon’s lack of documents costs him more than just economic opportunities. In Florida, where he lives, Gov. Ron DeSantis has required hospitals to ask patients about their citizenship or immigration status and has expanded penalties for employers who hire undocumented workers. Undocumented residents are blocked from applying for IDs or a driver’s license, and it is illegal for undocumented people to use driver’s licenses legally issued in other states.
“Mobility, it’s a big one,” Calderon said of the limits his immigration status has placed on his life. “Not being able to travel outside of the U.S., to have a driver’s license, I rely upon [other] transportation.”
About 4 in 10 poll respondents said they had avoided things like talking to the police, applying for a job or traveling out of fear of drawing attention to their status or the status of someone in their family.
Even among those in the U.S. legally, significant numbers say the same.
“It’s difficult,” said Santos González, 48, a construction worker from El Salvador who has lived nearly half his life in the U.S.
“I’ve been here more than 20 years, working every day. But in Washington they can’t come to an agreement to give us some kind of permanent status,” he said, speaking in Spanish.
González is covered by TPS, which the U.S. granted to Salvadorans after the Central American country was hit by a series of earthquakes in 2001. As with Hondurans, TPS for Salvadorans has been extended multiple times since, most recently for an additional 20 months beginning in July.
Under TPS, González has been able to work, buy a house in San Bernardino, build a family and pay taxes.
The Trump administration tried to end TPS for El Salvador, Nicaragua, Honduras and several other countries, but courts blocked that. As Congress continues to kick the idea of a more stable solution down the road, González and hundreds of thousands of others covered by temporary status are left in limbo, fearing the next president could move to end the program again.
“Then we’d basically be done,” González said.
“TPS has a lot of benefits,” he said. “But they’re benefits that can be taken away. It’s complicated because I don’t know what’s going to happen.”
“Just having to navigate that whole thing has been very nerve-racking,” said his 23-year-old son, Oscar González, a DACA recipient with a college degree and a job in the pharmaceutical industry. His two younger sisters, both born in the U.S., are American citizens.
“I don’t really know how it’s going to play out, so it’s just, I guess, figuring it out in the moment. You don’t have that security. Everything’s always like a gamble, really.”
If anything defines America’s current obesity-drug boom, it’s this: Many more people want these injections than can actually get them. The roadblocks include exorbitant costs that can stretch beyond $1,000 a month, limited insurance coverage, and constant supply shortages. But before all of those issues come into play, anyone attempting to get a prescription will inevitably confront the same obstacle: their body mass index, or BMI.
So much depends on the simple calculation of dividing one’s weight by the square of their height. According to the FDA, people qualify for prescriptions of Wegovy and Zepbound—the obesity-drug versions of the diabetes medications Ozempic and Mounjaro—only if their BMI is 3o or higher, or 27 or higher with a weight-related health issue such as hypertension. Many who do get on the medication use BMI to track their progress. That BMI is the single biggest factor determining who gets prescribed these drugs, and who doesn’t, is the result of how deeply entrenched this metric has become in how both doctors and regular people approach health: Low BMI is good and high BMI is bad, or so most of us have come to think.
This roughly 200-year-old metric has never been more relevant—or maligned—than it is in the obesity-drug era. BMI has become like the decrepit car you keep driving because it still sort of works and is too much of a hassle to replace. Its numerous shortcomings have been called out for many years now: For starters, it accounts for only height and weight, not other, more pertinent measures such as body-fat percentage. In June, the American Medical Association formally recognized that BMI should not be used alone as a health measure. Last year, some doctors called for BMI to be retired altogether, echoing previousassertions.
The thing is, BMI can be an insightful health metric, but only when used judiciously with other factors. The problem is that it often hasn’t been. Just as obesity drugs are taking off, however, professional views are changing. People are so accustomed to seeing BMI as the “be-all, end-all” of health indicators, Kate Bauer, a nutritional-sciences professor at the University of Michigan, told me. “But that’s increasingly not the way it’s being used in clinical practice.” A shift in the medical field is a good start, but the bigger challenge will be getting everyone else to catch up.
BMI got its start in the 1830s, when a Belgian astronomer named Adolphe Quetelet attempted to determine the properties of the “average” man. Using data on primarily white people, he observed that weight tended to vary as the square of height—a calculation that came to be known as Quetelet’s index.
Over the next 150 years, what began as a descriptive tool transformed into a prescriptive one. Quetelet’s index (and other metrics like it) informed height-weight tables used by life-insurance companies to estimate risk. These sorts of tables formed “recommendations for the general population going from ‘average’ to ‘ideal’ weights,” the epidemiologist Katherine Flegal wrote in her history of BMI; eventually, nonideal weights were classified as “overweight” and “obese.” In 1972, the American physiologist Ancel Keys proposed using Quetelet’s index—which he renamed BMI—to roughly measure obesity. We’ve been stuck with BMI ever since. The metric became embedded not only in research and doctor’s visits but also in the very definitions of obesity. According to the World Health Organization, a BMI starting at 25 and less than 30 is considered overweight; anything above that range is obese.
But using BMI to categorize a person’s health was controversial from the start. Even Keys called it “scientifically indefensible” to use BMI to judge someone as overweight. BMI doesn’t account for where fat is distributed on the body; fat that builds up around organs and tissues, called visceral fat, is linked to serious medical issues, while fat under the skin—the kind you can pinch—is usually less of a problem. Muscularity is also overlooked: LeBron James, for example, would be considered overweight. Both fat distribution and muscularity can vary widely across sex, age, and ethnicity. People with high BMIs can be perfectly healthy, and “there are people with normal BMIs that are actually sick because they have too much body fat,” Angela Fitch, an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School and the president of the Obesity Medicine Association, told me.
For all its flaws, BMI is actually useful at the population level, Fitch said, and doctors can measure it quickly and cheaply. But BMI becomes troubling when it is all that doctors see. In some cases, the moment when a patient’s BMI is calculated by their doctor may shape the rest of the appointment and relationship going forward. “The default is to hyper-focus on the weight number, and I just don’t think that that’s helpful,” Tracy Richmond, a pediatrics professor at Harvard Medical School, told me. Anti-obesity bias is well documented among physicians—even some obesity specialists—and can lead them to dismiss the legitimate medical needs of people with a high BMI. In one tragic example, a patient died from cancer that went undiagnosed because her doctors attributed her health issues to her high BMI.
But after many decades, the medical community has begun to use BMI in a different way. “More and more clinicians are realizing that there are people who can be quite healthy with a high BMI,” Kate Bauer said. The shift has been gradual, though it was given a boost by the AMA policy update earlier this year: “Hopefully that will help clinicians make a change to supplement BMI with other measures,” Aayush Visaria, an internal-medicine resident at Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School who researches BMI’s shortcomings, told me.
Physicians I spoke with acknowledged BMI’s flaws but didn’t seem too concerned about its continued use in medicine—even as obesity drugs make this metric even more consequential. BMI isn’t a problem, they said, as long as physicians consider other factors when diagnosing obesity or prescribing drugs to treat it. If you go to a doctor with the intention of getting on an obesity drug, you should be subject to a comprehensive evaluation including metrics such as blood sugar, cholesterol levels, and body composition that go “way beyond BMI,” Katherine Saunders, a clinical-medicine professor at Weill Cornell Medicine, said. Because Wegovy and other drugs come with side effects, she told me, doctors must be absolutely sure that a patient actually needs them, she added.
But BMI isn’t like most other health metrics. Because of its simplicity, it has seeped out of doctor’s offices and into the mainstream, where this more nuanced view still isn’t common. Whether we realize it or not, BMI is central to our basic idea of health, affecting nearly every aspect of daily life. Insurance companies are notorious for charging higher rates to people with high BMI and lowering premiums for people who commit to long-term weight loss. Fertility treatments and orthopedic and gender-affirming surgery can be withheld from patients until they hit BMI targets. Workplace wellness programs based on BMI are designed to help employees manage their weight. BMI has even been used to prevent prospective parents from adopting a child.
The rise of obesity drugs may make these kinds of usages of BMI even harder to shake. Determining drug eligibility by high BMI supports the notion that a number is synonymous with illness. Certainly many people using obesity drugs take a holistic view of their health, as doctors are learning to do. But focusing on BMI is still common. Some members of the r/Ozempic Subreddit, for example, share their BMI to show their progress on the drug. Again, high BMI can be used to predict who has obesity, but it isn’t itself an obesity diagnosis. The problem with BMI’s continued dominance is that it makes it even harder to move away from simply associating a number on a scale with overall health, with all the downstream consequences that come along with a weight-obsessed culture. As obesity drugs are becoming mainstream, “there needs to be public education explaining that BMI by itself may not be a good indicator of health,” Visaria said.
In another 200 years, surely BMI will finally be supplanted by something else. If not much sooner: A large effort to establish hard biological criteria for obesity is under way; the goal is to eliminate BMI-based definitions once and for all. Caroline Apovian, a professor at Harvard Medical School, gives it “at least 10 years” before a comparably cheap or convenient replacement arises—though any changes would take longer to filter into public consciousness.” Until that happens, we’re stuck with BMI, and the mess it has wrought.
Over 100 firefighters battled a “city-block-sized” fire that destroyed multiple homes in South Los Angeles early Tuesday, displacing families and injuring at least three people, fire officials said.
Around 3:20 a.m., crews responding to the 1500 block of East Vernon Avenue in Central-Alameda found an apartment building under construction engulfed in flames and downed power lines, according to the Los Angeles Fire Department. Neighboring residents were awakened and told to evacuate as firefighters defended the surrounding buildings.
A 66-year-old man and a 64-year-old woman were taken to a hospital for serious burns, and a 30-year-old man was evaluated at the scene but declined to be taken by paramedics for further treatment, according to authorities.
Nearby residents were evacuated due to the massive fire, which spread to seven other buildings, five of them a total loss.
(Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times)
Seven buildings were damaged in the fire, and five are considered a total loss, the Fire Department said. The American Red Cross and the Los Angeles Emergency Management Department are assisting 17 people whose homes were destroyed.
It took 140 firefighters 78 minutes to put out the fire, with some firefighters from the Los Angeles County Fire Department called in to assist.
Arson investigators are on the scene as part of the city’s protocol for structure fires, but the cause of the fire is still under investigation and it’s not clear when authorities will make a determination, LAFD spokesperson Margaret Stewart said. The blaze tore quickly through the open-sided wooden frame of the building that was under construction.
“When you have a building that’s in the framing stages, it’s going to burn hot and fast because you have all of the wood exposed and nothing stops; there’s no compartmentalization,” Stewart said. “There’s nothing that stops the flame so it goes up very hot, very fast, which then exposes anything that’s around it.”
Gerardo Diaz, 30, heard his father screaming in the early morning. That’s when he saw the flames outside their home.
Diaz dragged his father, whose mobility is limited from a previous stroke, out of the house.
“When we came out the door, we already had the flames on our porch,” Diaz said after the fire was put out. “I don’t know — it’s just like a blink of an eye. All of a sudden it burned down.”
Half of the house burned down and his truck was damaged, Diaz said, but he was grateful that his family was able to escape relatively unharmed. “The heat was so hot,” his 12-year-old niece, Kimberly Erendira, said.
Raymon Chaidec, 58, woke up around 3 a.m. to booms and yells outside his house. He looked out the window and saw an out-of-control fire towering above the utility poles on his street.
“It was way up there, even taller than the poles that you see are now burned,” he said, motioning his hands to the sky.
Chaidec raced out of the house with his daughter, and they watched from their driveway as the fire engulfed the construction site across the street and encroached onto their property.
“We were ready to run,” he said. “We were scared when we saw the fire get a little close to our house, but nothing was damaged. We are so, so lucky.”
Aaron Vazquez, 28, heard explosions and felt his home vibrating. He looked out the window and saw orange, but didn’t think it was a fire.
“I thought it was an ambulance,” Vazquez said. “I look out the kitchen window and all I see are flames. There were dogs in the back, from the neighbors in the back, that were whimpering and crying.”
Firefighters douse the smoldering wreckage of the apartment building that was under construction.
(Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times)
Vazquez was able to get his family out of the home but went back inside for his cat. Intense heat radiated from the fire burning next door as he searched for his cat, which he eventually found.
“It was a huge inferno,” he said.
Vazquez’s home was not destroyed, but he thinks there was some water and smoke damage. The sides of adjacent homes were burned from the heat that radiated off the fire at the construction site.
Several hours after the fire started, neighbors watched from the sidewalk as crews demolished the ruins of the building that had been under construction. A bulldozer knocked over the remaining charred wooden planks to prevent any of the wood from smoldering, LAFD Capt. Carlos Caceres said, after crews convinced city officials that the building was beyond repair.
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Nathan Solis, Irfan Khan, Ashley Ahn, Karen Garcia
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It was July 29, 2019—the worst day of my life, though I didn’t know that quite yet.
The traffic in downtown Washington, D.C., was inching along. The mid-Atlantic humidity was sweating through the windows of my chauffeured car. I was running late and fighting to stay awake. For two weeks, I’d been sprinting between television and radio studios up and down the East Coast, promoting my new book on the collapse of the post–George W. Bush Republican Party and the ascent of Donald Trump. Now I had one final interview for the day. My publicist had offered to cancel—it wasn’t that important, she said—but I didn’t want to. It was important. After the car pulled over on M Street Northwest, I hustled into the stone-pillared building of the Christian Broadcasting Network.
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All in a blur, the producers took my cellphone, mic’d me up, and shoved me onto the set with the news anchor John Jessup. Camera rolling, Jessup skipped past the small talk. He was keen to know, given his audience, what I had learned about the president’s alliance with America’s white evangelicals. Despite being a lecherous, impenitent scoundrel—the 2016 campaign was marked by his mocking of a disabled man, his xenophobic slander of immigrants, his casual calls to violence against political opponents—Trump had won a historic 81 percent of white evangelical voters. Yet that statistic was just a surface-level indicator of the foundational shifts taking place inside the Church. Polling showed that born-again Christian conservatives, once the president’s softest backers, were now his most unflinching advocates. Jessup had the same question as millions of other Americans: Why?
As a believer in Jesus Christ—and as the son of an evangelical minister, raised in a conservative church in a conservative community—I had long struggled with how to answer this question. The truth is, I knew lots of Christians who, to varying degrees, supported the president, and there was no way to summarily describe their diverse attitudes, motivations, and behaviors. They were best understood as points plotted across a spectrum. At one end were the Christians who maintained their dignity while voting for Trump—people who were clear-eyed in understanding that backing a candidate, pragmatically and prudentially, need not lead to unconditionally promoting, empowering, and apologizing for that candidate. At the opposite end were the Christians who had jettisoned their credibility—people who embraced the charge of being reactionary hypocrites, still fuming about Bill Clinton’s character as they jumped at the chance to go slumming with a playboy turned president.
Most of the Christians I knew fell somewhere in the middle. They had to some extent been seduced by the cult of Trumpism, yet to composite all of these people into a caricature was misleading. Something more profound was taking place. Something was happening in the country—something was happening in the Church—that we had never seen before. I had attempted, ever so delicately, to make these points in my book. Now, on the TV set, I was doing a similar dance.
Jessup seemed to sense my reticence. Pivoting from the book, he asked me about a recent flare-up in the evangelical world. In response to the Trump administration’s policy of forcibly separating migrant families at the U.S.-Mexico border, Russell Moore, a prominent leader with the Southern Baptist Convention, had tweeted, “Those created in the image of God should be treated with dignity and compassion, especially those seeking refuge from violence back home.” At this, Jerry Falwell Jr.—the son and namesake of the Moral Majority founder, and then-president of Liberty University, one of the world’s largest Christian colleges—took great offense. “Who are you @drmoore?” he replied. “Have you ever made a payroll? Have you ever built an organization of any type from scratch? What gives you authority to speak on any issue?”
This being Twitter and all, I decided to chime in. “There are Russell Moore Christians and Jerry Falwell Jr. Christians,” I wrote, summarizing the back-and-forth. “Choose wisely, brothers and sisters.”
Now Jessup was reading my tweet on-air. “Do you really see evangelicals divided into two camps?” the anchor asked.
I stumbled. Conceding that it might be an “oversimplification,” I warned still of a “fundamental disconnect” between Christians who view issues through the eyes of Jesus and Christians who process everything through a partisan political filter.
As the interview ended, I knew I’d botched an opportunity to state plainly my qualms about the American evangelical Church. Truth be told, I did see evangelicals divided into two camps—one side faithful to an eternal covenant, the other side bowing to earthly idols of nation and influence and fame—but I was too scared to say so. My own Christian walk had been so badly flawed. And besides, I’m no theologian; Jessup was asking for my journalistic analysis, not my biblical exegesis.
Walking off the set, I wondered if my dad might catch that clip. Surely somebody at our home church would see it and pass it along. I grabbed my phone, then stopped to chat with Jessup and a few of his colleagues. As we said our farewells, I looked down at the phone, which had been silenced. There were multiple missed calls from my wife and oldest brother. Dad had collapsed from a heart attack. There was nothing the surgeons could do. He was gone.
The last time I saw him was nine days earlier. The CEO of Politico, my employer at the time, had thrown a book party for me at his Washington manor, and Mom and Dad weren’t going to miss that. They jumped in their Chevy and drove out from my childhood home in southeast Michigan. When he sauntered into the event, my old man looked out of place—a rumpled midwestern minister, baggy shirt stuffed into his stained khakis—but before long he was holding court with diplomats and Fortune 500 lobbyists, making them howl with irreverent one-liners. It was like a Rodney Dangerfield flick come to life. At one point, catching sight of my agape stare, he gave an exaggerated wink, then delivered a punch line for his captive audience.
It was the high point of my career. The book was getting lots of buzz; already I was being urged to write a sequel. Dad was proud—very proud, he assured me—but he was also uneasy. For months, as the book launch drew closer, he had been urging me to reconsider the focus of my reporting career. Politics, he kept saying, was a “sordid, nasty business,” a waste of my time and God-given talents. Now, in the middle of the book party, he was taking me by the shoulder, asking a congressman to excuse us for just a moment. Dad put his arm around me and leaned in.
“You see all these people?” he asked.
“Yeah.” I nodded, grinning at the validation.
“Most of them won’t care about you in a week,” he said.
The record scratched. My moment of rapture was interrupted. I cocked my head and smirked at him. Neither of us said anything. I was bothered. The longer we stood there in silence, the more bothered I became. Not because he was wrong. But because he was right.
“Remember,” Dad said, smiling. “On this Earth, all glory is fleeting.”
Now, as I raced to Reagan National Airport and boarded the first available flight to Detroit, his words echoed. There was nothing contrived about Dad’s final admonition to me. That is what he believed; that is who he was.
Once a successful New York financier, Richard J. Alberta had become a born-again Christian in 1977. Despite having a nice house, beautiful wife, and healthy firstborn son, he felt a rumbling emptiness. He couldn’t sleep. He developed debilitating anxiety. Religion hardly seemed like the solution; Dad came from a broken and unbelieving home. He had decided, halfway through his undergraduate studies at Rutgers University, that he was an atheist. And yet, one weekend while visiting family in the Hudson Valley, my dad agreed to attend church with his niece, Lynn. He became a new person that day. His angst was quieted. His doubts were overwhelmed. Taking Communion for the first time at Goodwill Church in Montgomery, New York, he prayed to acknowledge Jesus as the son of God and accept him as his personal savior.
Dad became unrecognizable to those who knew him. He rose early, hours before work, to read the Bible, filling a yellow legal pad with verses and annotations. He sat silently for hours in prayer. My mom thought he’d lost his mind. A young journalist who worked under Howard Cosell at ABC Radio in New York, Mom was suspicious of all this Jesus talk. But her maiden name—Pastor—was proof of God’s sense of humor. Soon she accepted Christ too.
When Dad felt he was being called to abandon his finance career and enter the ministry, he met with Pastor Stewart Pohlman at Goodwill. As they prayed in Pastor Stew’s office, Dad said he felt the spirit of the Lord swirling around him, filling up the room. He was not given to phony supernaturalism—in fact, Dad might have been the most intellectually sober, reason-based Christian I’ve ever known—but that day, he felt certain, the Lord anointed him. Soon he and Mom were selling just about every material item they owned, leaving their high-salaried jobs in New York, and moving to Massachusetts so he could study at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary.
For the next two decades, they worked in small churches here and there, living off food stamps and the generosity of fellow believers. By the time I arrived, in 1986, Dad was Pastor Stew’s associate at Goodwill. We lived in the church parsonage; my nursery was the library, where towers of leather-wrapped books had been collected by the church’s pastors dating back to the mid-18th century. A few years later we moved to Michigan, and Dad eventually put down roots at a start-up, Cornerstone Church, in the Detroit suburb of Brighton. It was part of a minor denomination called the Evangelical Presbyterian Church (EPC), and it was there, for the next 26 years, that he served as senior pastor.
Cornerstone was our home. Because Mom also worked on staff, leading the women’s ministry, I was quite literally raised in the church: playing hide-and-seek in storage areas, doing homework in the office wing, bringing high-school dates to Bible study, working as a janitor during a year of community college. I hung around the church so much that I decided to leave my mark: At 9 years old, I used a pocket knife to etch my initials into the brickwork of the narthex.
The last time I’d been there, 18 months earlier, I’d spoken to a packed sanctuary at Dad’s retirement ceremony, armed with good-natured needling and PG-13 anecdotes. Now I would need to give a very different speech.
Standing in the back of the sanctuary, my three older brothers and I formed a receiving line. Cornerstone had been a small church when we’d arrived as kids. Not anymore. Brighton, once a sleepy town situated at the intersection of two expressways, had become a prized location for commuters to Detroit and Ann Arbor. Meanwhile, Dad, with his baseball allegories and Greek-linguistics lessons, had gained a reputation for his eloquence in the pulpit. By the time I moved away, in 2008, Cornerstone had grown from a couple hundred members to a couple thousand.
Now the crowd swarmed around us, filling the sanctuary and spilling out into the lobby and adjacent hallways, where tables displayed flowers and golf clubs and photos of Dad. I was numb. My brothers too. None of us had slept much that week. So the first time someone made a glancing reference to Rush Limbaugh, it did not compute. But then another person brought him up. And then another. That’s when I connected the dots. Apparently, the king of conservative talk radio had been name-checking me on his program recently—“a guy named Tim Alberta”—and describing the unflattering revelations in my book about Trump. Nothing in that moment could have mattered to me less. I smiled, shrugged, and thanked people for coming to the visitation.
They kept on coming. More than I could count. People from the church—people I’d known my entire life—were greeting me, not primarily with condolences or encouragement or mourning, but with commentary about Limbaugh and Trump. Some of it was playful, guys remarking about how I was the same mischief-maker they’d known since kindergarten. But some of it wasn’t playful. Some of it was angry; some of it was cold and confrontational. One man questioned whether I was truly a Christian. Another asked if I was still on “the right side.” All while Dad was in a box a hundred feet away.
It got to the point where I had to take a walk. Here, in our house of worship, people were taunting me about politics as I tried to mourn my father. I was in the company of certain friends that day who would not claim to know Jesus, yet they shrouded me in peace and comfort. Some of these card-carrying evangelical Christians? Not so much. They didn’t see a hurting son; they saw a vulnerable adversary.
That night, while fine-tuning the eulogy I would give at Dad’s funeral the following afternoon, I still felt the sting. My wife perceived as much. The unflappable one in the family, she encouraged me to be careful with my words and cautioned against mentioning the day’s unpleasantness. I took half of her advice.
In front of an overflow crowd on August 2, 2019, I paid tribute to the man who’d taught me everything—how to throw a baseball, how to be a gentleman, how to trust and love the Lord. Reciting my favorite verse, from Paul’s second letter to the early Church in Corinth, Greece, I told of Dad’s instruction to keep our eyes fixed on what we could not see. Reading from his favorite poem, about a man named Richard Cory, I told of Dad’s warning that we could amass great wealth and still be poor.
Then I recounted all the people who’d approached me the day before, wanting to discuss the Trump wars on AM talk radio. I proposed that their time in the car would be better spent listening to Dad’s old sermons. I spoke of the need for discipleship and spiritual formation. I suggested, with some sarcasm, that if they needed help finding biblical listening for their daily commute, the pastors here on staff could help. “Why are you listening to Rush Limbaugh ?” I asked my father’s congregation. “Garbage in, garbage out.”
There was nervous laughter in the sanctuary. Some people were visibly agitated. Others looked away, pretending not to hear. My dad’s successor, a young pastor named Chris Winans, wore a shell-shocked expression. No matter. I had said my piece. It was finished. Or so I thought.
A few hours later, after we had buried Dad, my brothers and I slumped down onto the couches in our parents’ living room. We opened some beers and turned on a baseball game. Behind us, in the kitchen, a small platoon of church ladies worked to prepare a meal for the family. Here, I thought, is the love of Christ. Watching them hustle about, comforting Mom and catering to her sons, I found myself regretting the Limbaugh remark. Most of the folks at our church were humble, kindhearted Christians like these women. Maybe I’d blown things out of proportion.
Just then, one of them walked over and handed me an envelope. It had been left at the church, she said. My name was scrawled across it. I opened the envelope. Inside was a full-page-long, handwritten screed. It was from a longtime Cornerstone elder, someone my dad had called a friend, a man who’d mentored me in the youth group and had known me for most of my life.
He had composed this note, on the occasion of my father’s death, to express just how disappointed he was in me. I was part of an evil plot, the man wrote, to undermine God’s ordained leader of the United States. My criticisms of President Trump were tantamount to treason—against both God and country—and I should be ashamed of myself.
However, there was still hope. Jesus forgives, and so could this man. If I used my journalism skills to investigate the “deep state,” he wrote, uncovering the shadowy cabal that was supposedly sabotaging Trump’s presidency, then I would be restored. He said he was praying for me.
I felt sick. Silently, I passed the letter to my wife. She scanned it without expression. Then she flung the piece of paper into the air and, with a shriek that made the church ladies jump out of their cardigans, cried out: “What the hell is wrong with these people?”
There has never been consensus on what, exactly, it means to be an evangelical. Competing and overlapping definitions have been offered for generations, some more widely embraced than others. Billy Graham, a man synonymous with the term, once remarked that he himself would like to inquire as to its true meaning. By the 1980s, thanks to the efforts of televangelists and political activists, what was once a religious signifier began transforming into a partisan movement. Evangelical soon became synonymous with conservative Christian, and eventually with white conservative Republican.
My dad, a serious theologian who held advanced degrees from top seminaries, bristled at reductive analyses of his religious tribe. He would frequently state from the pulpit what he believed an evangelical to be: someone who interprets the Bible as the inspired word of God and who takes seriously the charge to proclaim it to the world.
From a young age, I realized that not all Christians were like my dad. Other adults who went to our church—my teachers, coaches, friends’ parents—didn’t speak about God the way that he did. Theirs was a more casual Christianity, less a lifestyle than a hobby, something that could be picked up and put down and slotted into schedules. Their pastor realized as much. Pushing his people ever harder to engage with questions of canonical authority and trinitarian precepts and Calvinist doctrine, Dad tried his best to run a serious church.
The author and his father in 2019 (Courtesy of Tim Alberta)
But for all his successes, Dad had one great weakness. Pastor Alberta’s kryptonite as a Christian—and I think he knew it, though he never admitted it to me—was his intense love of country.
Once a talented young athlete, Dad came down with tuberculosis at 16 years old. He was hospitalized for four months; at one point, doctors thought he might die. He eventually recovered, and with the Vietnam War escalating, he joined the Marine Corps. But at the Officer Candidates School in Quantico, Virginia, he fell behind in the physical work. His lungs were not healthy. After receiving an honorable discharge, Dad went home saddled with a certain shame. In the ensuing years, he learned that dozens of the second lieutenants he’d trained alongside at Quantico—as well as a bunch of guys he’d grown up with—were killed in action. It burdened him for the rest of his life.
This experience, and his disgust with the hippies and the drug culture and the war protesters, turned Dad into a law-and-order conservative. Marinating in the language of social conservatism during his time in seminary—this was the heyday of the Moral Majority—he emerged a full-spectrum Republican. His biggest political concern was abortion; in 1947, my grandmother, trapped in an emotionally abusive marriage, had almost ended her pregnancy with him. (She had a sudden change of heart at the clinic and walked out, a decision my dad would always attribute to holy intercession.) But he also waded into the culture wars: gay marriage, education curriculum, morality in public life.
Dad always told us that personal integrity was a prerequisite for political leadership. He was so relieved when Bill Clinton’s second term ended that he and Mom hosted a small viewing party in our living room for George W. Bush’s 2001 inauguration, to celebrate the return of morality to the White House. Over time, however, his emphasis shifted. One Sunday in early 2010, when I was home visiting, he showed the congregation an ominous video in which Christian leaders warned about the menace of Obamacare. I told him afterward that it felt inappropriate for a worship service; he disagreed. We would butt heads more regularly in the years that followed. It was always loving, always respectful. Yet clearly our philosophical paths were diverging—a reality that became unavoidable during the presidency of Donald Trump.
Dad would have preferred any of the other Republicans who ran in 2016. He knew that Trump was a narcissist and a liar; he knew that he was not a moral man. Ultimately Dad felt he had no choice but to support the Republican ticket, given his concern for the unborn and the Supreme Court majority that hung in the balance. I understood that decision. What I couldn’t understand was how, over the next couple of years, he became an apologist for Trump’s antics, dismissing criticisms of the president’s conduct as little more than an attempt to marginalize his supporters. Dad really did believe this; he believed that the constant attacks on Trump’s character were ipso facto an attack on the character of people like himself, which I think, on some subconscious level, created a permission structure for him to ignore the president’s depravity. All I could do was tell Dad the truth. “Look, you’re the one who taught me to know right from wrong,” I would say. “Don’t be mad at me for acting on it.”
To his credit, Dad was not some lazy, knee-jerk partisan. He was vocal about certain issues—gun violence, poverty, immigration, the trappings of wealth—that did not play to his constituency at Cornerstone.
Dad wasn’t a Christian nationalist; he wanted nothing to do with theocracy. He just believed that God had blessed the United States uniquely—and felt that anyone who fought to preserve those blessings was doing the Lord’s work. This made for an unfortunate scene in 2007, when a young congregant at Cornerstone, a Marine named Mark Kidd, died during a fourth tour of duty in Iraq. Public opinion had swung sharply against the war, and Democrats were demanding that the Bush administration bring the troops home. My dad was devastated by Kidd’s death. They had corresponded while Kidd was overseas and met for prayer in between his deployments. Dad’s grief as a pastor gave way to his grievance as a Republican supporter of the war: He made it known to local Democratic politicians that they weren’t welcome at the funeral.
“I am ashamed, personally, of leaders who say they support the troops but not the commander in chief,” Dad thundered from his pulpit, earning a raucous standing ovation. “Do they not see that discourages the warriors and encourages the terrorists?”
This touched off a firestorm in our community. Most of the church members were all for Dad’s remarks, but even in a conservative town like Brighton, plenty of people felt uneasy about turning a fallen Marine’s church memorial into a partisan political rally. Patriotism in the pulpit is one thing; lots of sanctuaries fly an American flag on the rostrum. This was something else. This was taking the weight and the gravity and the eternal certainty of God and lending it to an ephemeral and questionable cause. This was rebuking people for failing to unconditionally follow the president of the United States when the only authority we’re meant to unconditionally follow—particularly in a setting of stained-glass windows—is Christ himself.
I know Dad regretted it. But he couldn’t help himself. His own personal story—and his broader view of the United States as a godly nation, a source of hope in a despondent world—was impossible to divorce from his pastoral ministry. Every time a member of the military came to church dressed in uniform, Dad would recognize them by name, ask them to stand up, and lead the church in a rapturous round of applause. This was one of the first things his successor changed at Cornerstone.
Eighteen months after Dad’s funeral, in February 2021, I sat down across from that successor, Chris Winans, in a booth at the Brighton Bar & Grill. It’s a comfortable little haunt on Main Street, backing up to a wooden playground and a millpond. But Winans didn’t look comfortable. He looked nervous, even a bit paranoid, glancing around him as we began to speak. Soon, I would understand why.
Dad had spent years looking for an heir apparent. Several associate pastors had come and gone. Cornerstone was his life’s work—he had led the church throughout virtually its entire history—so there would be no settling in his search for a successor. The uncertainty wore him down. Dad worried that he might never find the right guy. And then one day, while attending a denominational meeting, he met Winans, a young associate pastor from Goodwill—the very church where he’d been saved, and where he’d worked his first job out of seminary. Dad hired him away from Goodwill to lead a young-adults ministry at Cornerstone, and from the moment Winans arrived, I could tell that he was the one.
Barely 30 years old, Winans looked to be exactly what Cornerstone needed in its next generation of leadership. He was a brilliant student of the scriptures. He spoke with precision and clarity from the pulpit. He had a humble, easygoing way about him, operating without the outsize ego that often accompanies first-rate preaching. Everything about this pastor—the boyish sweep of brown hair, his delightful young family—seemed to be straight out of central casting.
There was just one problem: Chris Winans was not a conservative Republican. He didn’t like guns. He cared more about funding anti-poverty programs than cutting taxes. He had no appetite for President Trump’s unrepentant antics. Of course, none of this would seem heretical to Christians in other parts of the world; given his staunch anti-abortion position, Winans would in most places be considered the picture of spiritual and intellectual consistency. But in the American evangelical tradition, and at a church like Cornerstone, the whiff of liberalism made him suspect.
Dad knew the guy was different. Winans liked to play piano instead of sports, and had no taste for hunting or fishing. Frankly, Dad thought that was a bonus. Winans wasn’t supposed to simply placate Cornerstone’s aging base of wealthy white congregants. The new pastor’s charge was to evangelize, to cast a vision and expand the mission field, to challenge those inside the church and carry the gospel to those outside it. Dad didn’t think there was undue risk. He felt confident that his hand-chosen successor’s gifts in the pulpit, and his manifest love of Jesus, would smooth over any bumps in the transition.
He was wrong. Almost immediately after Winans moved into the role of senior pastor, at the beginning of 2018, the knives came out. Any errant remark he made about politics or culture, any slight against Trump or the Republican Party—real or perceived—invited a torrent of criticism. Longtime members would demand a meeting with Dad, who had stuck around in a support role, and unload on Winans. Dad would ask if there was any substantive criticism of the theology; almost invariably, the answer was no. A month into the job, when Winans remarked in a sermon that Christians ought to be protective of God’s creation—arguing for congregants to take seriously the threats to the planet—people came to Dad by the dozens, outraged, demanding that Winans be reined in. Dad told them all to get lost. If anyone had a beef with the senior pastor, he said, they needed to take it up with the senior pastor. (Dad did so himself, buying Winans lunch at Chili’s and suggesting that he tone down the tree hugging.)
Winans had a tough first year on the job, but he survived it. The people at Cornerstone were in an adjustment period. He needed to respect that—and he needed to adjust, too. As long as Dad had his back, Winans knew he would be okay.
And then Dad died.
Now, Winans told me, he was barely hanging on at Cornerstone. The church had become unruly; his job had become unbearable. Not long after Dad died—making Winans the unquestioned leader of the church—the coronavirus pandemic arrived. And then George Floyd was murdered. All of this as Donald Trump campaigned for reelection. Trump had run in 2016 on a promise that “Christianity will have power” if he won the White House; now he was warning that his opponent in the 2020 election, former Vice President Joe Biden, was going to “hurt God” and target Christians for their religious beliefs. Embracing dark rhetoric and violent conspiracy theories, the president enlisted prominent evangelicals to help frame a cosmic spiritual clash between the God-fearing Republicans who supported Trump and the secular leftists who were plotting their conquest of America’s Judeo-Christian ethos.
People at Cornerstone began confronting their pastor, demanding that he speak out against government mandates and Black Lives Matter and Joe Biden. When Winans declined, people left. The mood soured noticeably after Trump’s defeat in November 2020. A crusade to overturn the election result, led by a group of outspoken Christians—including Trump’s lawyer Jenna Ellis, who later pleaded guilty to a felony charge of aiding and abetting false statements and writings, and the author Eric Metaxas, who suggested to fellow believers that martyrdom might be required to keep Trump in office—roiled the Cornerstone congregation. When a popular church staffer who had been known to proselytize for QAnon was fired after repeated run-ins with Winans, the pastor told me, the departures came in droves. Some of those abandoning Cornerstone were not core congregants. But plenty of them were. They were people who served in leadership roles, people Winans counted as confidants and friends.
By the time Trump supporters invaded the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, Winans believed he’d lost control of his church. “It’s an exodus,” he told me a few weeks later, sitting inside Brighton Bar & Grill.
The pastor had felt despair—and a certain liability—watching the attack unfold on television. Christian imagery was ubiquitous: rioters forming prayer circles, singing hymns, carrying Bibles and crosses. The perversion of America’s prevailing religion would forever be associated with this tragedy; as one of the legislative ringleaders, Senator Josh Hawley, explained in a speech the following year, long after the blood had been scrubbed from the Capitol steps, “We are a revolutionary nation precisely because we are the heirs of the revolution of the Bible.”
That sort of thinking, Winans said, represents an even greater threat than the events of January 6.
“A lot of people believe there was a religious conception of this country. A biblical conception of this country,” Winans told me. “And that’s the source of a lot of our problems.”
For much of American history, white Christians have enjoyed tremendous wealth and influence and security. Given that reality—and given the miraculous nature of America’s defeat of Great Britain, its rise to superpower status, and its legacy of spreading freedom and democracy (and, yes, Christianity) across the globe—it’s easy to see why so many evangelicals believe that our country is divinely blessed. The problem is, blessings often become indistinguishable from entitlements. Once we become convinced that God has blessed something, that something can become an object of jealousy, obsession—even worship.
“At its root, we’re talking about idolatry. America has become an idol to some of these people. If you believe that God is in covenant with America, then you believe—and I’ve heard lots of people say this explicitly—that we’re a new Israel,” Winans said, referring to the Old Testament narrative of God’s chosen nation. “You believe the sorts of promises made to Israel are applicable to this country; you view America as a covenant that needs to be protected. You have to fight for America as if salvation itself hangs in the balance. At that point, you understand yourself as an American first and most fundamentally. And that is a terrible misunderstanding of who we’re called to be.”
Plenty of nations are mentioned in the Bible; the United States is not one of them. Most American evangelicals are sophisticated enough to reject the idea of this country as something consecrated in the eyes of God. But many of those same people have chosen to idealize a Christian America that puts them at odds with Christianity. They have allowed their national identity to shape their faith identity instead of the other way around.
Winans chose to be hypervigilant on this front, hence the change of policy regarding Cornerstone’s salute to military personnel. The new pastor would meet soldiers after the service, shaking their hand and individually thanking them for their service. But he refused to stage an ovation in the sanctuary. This wasn’t because he was some bohemian anti-war activist; in fact, his wife had served in the Army. Winans simply felt it was inappropriate.
“I don’t want to dishonor anyone. I think nations have the right to self-defense. I respect the sacrifices these people make in the military,” Winans told me. “But they would come in wearing their dress blues and get this wild standing ovation. And you contrast that to whenever we would host missionaries: They would stand up for recognition, and we give them a golf clap … And you have to wonder: Why? What’s going on inside our hearts?”
This kind of cultural heresy was getting Winans into trouble. More congregants were defecting each week. Many were relocating to one particular congregation down the road, a revival-minded church that was pandering to the whims of the moment, led by a pastor who was preaching a blood-and-soil Christian nationalism that sought to merge two kingdoms into one.
As we talked, Winans asked me to keep something between us: He was thinking about leaving Cornerstone.
The “psychological onslaught,” he said, had become too much. Recently, the pastor had developed a form of anxiety disorder and was retreating into a dark room between services to collect himself. Winans had met with several trusted elders and asked them to stick close to him on Sunday mornings so they could catch him if he were to faint and fall over.
I thought about Dad and how heartbroken he would have been. Then I started to wonder if Dad didn’t have some level of culpability in all of this. Clearly, long before COVID-19 or George Floyd or Donald Trump, something had gone wrong at Cornerstone. I had always shrugged off the crude, hysterical, sky-is-falling Facebook posts I would see from people at the church. I found it amusing, if not particularly alarming, that some longtime Cornerstone members were obsessed with trolling me on Twitter. Now I couldn’t help but think these were warnings—bright-red blinking lights—that should have been taken seriously. My dad never had a social-media account. Did he have any idea just how lost some of his sheep really were?
I had never told Winans about the confrontations at my dad’s viewing, or the letter I received after taking Rush Limbaugh’s name in vain at the funeral. Now I was leaning across the table, unloading every detail. He narrowed his eyes and folded his hands and gave a pained exhale, mouthing that he was sorry. He could not even manage the words.
We both kept quiet for a little while. And then I asked him something I’d thought about every day for the previous 18 months—a sanitized version of my wife’s outburst in the living room.
“What’s wrong with American evangelicals?”
Winans thought for a moment.
“America,” he replied. “Too many of them worship America.”
TSA screened 2,907,378 people traveling through U.S. airports, the highest single-day number ever. Air travel has taken three years to surpass the heights reached in 2019, before the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Wherever we land [on a final number], we’re fully back to the year-over-year increase we were seeing before the pandemic,” a TSA official said.
During the 2019 Thanksgiving weekend, nearly 2.9 million passengers flew in a single day. Even before Sunday, that record was broken this year, with the previous busiest day occurring on June 30, the Friday before the Fourth of July holiday.
Since TSA’s inception in 2001, passenger volume consistently increased by more than 4% yearly until January 2020, when travel numbers plummeted due to the pandemic. Officials said the numbers had modestly increased over the last three years.
During the early months of the pandemic, airline travel nearly ground to a halt, forcing carriers to lay off or furlough thousands of workers. As of September, the U.S. airline industry employs nearly 808,000 full- and part-time workers, surpassing pre-pandemic levels by 8.7%, according to federal data.
Airlines for America, a trade group for all major U.S. air carriers, said airlines have worked for months to ensure they would be prepared for the high volume of travel for this year’s holiday season. Airlines have continued aggressively hiring, adjusting schedules and improving communication with passengers to combat the increased demand for air travel, according to the group.
John Heimlich, an economist for Airline for America, said the group predicted early in the pandemic that it would take until 2023 before the industry returned to pre-pandemic volumes. He said the industry is on track to surpass the 2019 number and anticipates further growth in 2024, albeit at a slower rate.
Los Angeles International Airport also saw its busiest Thanksgiving holiday travel period since 2019, as it welcomed 2.46 million travelers over the last week and a half. Officials said several days saw more than 220,000 passengers move through the terminals.
Of the 51,332 scheduled flights across the country Sunday, fewer than 0.5% were canceled, according to flight tracker Flight Radar 24.
AAA predicted that 4.7 million people would fly over the Thanksgiving holiday period, the highest number of Thanksgiving air travelers since 2005 — a 6.6% increase compared with 2022.
“I’m optimistic that what we saw over Thanksgiving is emblematic of the kind of demand we’ll see this winter,” Heimlich said. The demand “is going to be very strong.”
A 54-year-old man was swept into the ocean with a young girl on Saturday afternoon at Half Moon Bay, spurring a search by air and boat crews.
The 5-year-old girl was recovered at Martin’s Beach by San Mateo County Fire personnel and taken to a nearby hospital, but U.S. Coast Guard crews were still searching for the man as of Sunday morning. The Coast Guard said in a statement that it did not have information about the condition of the rescued girl.
The National Weather Service warned this weekend that a broad stretch of the California coast from Point Reyes to Big Sur is at risk of “sneaker waves” that can sweep across beaches without warning, pulling people into the sea and moving logs and other heavy objects that can crush people. It urged everyone to stay out of the ocean and warned that people could be yanked into the water from jetties, rocks and beaches.
The U.S. Coast Guard launched its search on Saturday after receiving a report about the incident at 1:20 p.m., dispatching a 47-foot motor lifeboat and a helicopter to the area, according to the agency. An 87-foot patrol boat was also sent to Half Moon Bay on Saturday night.
At least three people were killed by speeding or inebriated drivers in South Los Angeles on Thursday, marking the deadliest Thanksgiving Day in the community in recent years, according to police and media reports.
“In 28 years, this is the worst Thanksgiving I’ve ever seen,” Det. Ryan Moreno of the LAPD’s South Traffic Division told KNBC-TV Channel 4. Moreno responded to the three accidents.
In total, nine fatal accidents occurred in the LAPD South Traffic Division in less than two weeks, according to police.
The first incident on occurred about 5:30 a.m. Thursday near the intersection of 18th and Figueroa streets in Harbor Gateway, according to police and NBC. A driver suspected of being drunk and traveling more than 100 mph hit a car with three women inside, killing a 24-year-old single mother of a 5-year-old boy.
Just after 1 p.m., another suspected drunk driver pulled out of a liquor store on Western Avenue near 83rd Street and crashed into a speeding motorist, who then struck and killed Alma Letecia Aragon, 26, as she walked with her 8-year-old daughter, authorities said. The child remained in critical condition on Friday.
“It’s looking right now, [that] it’s going to take a miracle [for] this girl to pull out,” Moreno said to NBC. “We’re all praying for her that she makes it.”
A few blocks away, on Western Avenue and 73rd Street, police responded about 11 p.m. to a speeding driver under the influence of marijuana who authorities said struck and killed a homeless man.
“All of these cases range from manslaughter, to possibly murder,” Moreno told NBC. “It’s people just now, self-entitled, thinking, they can do whatever they want.”
There are car chase fanatics, and then there’s me.
During high school, I suffered through weekend reruns of “Little House on the Prairie” and “M*A*S*H” in hopes that the stations would cut to a live police pursuit. In college, I wrote a term paper exploring their allure and even interviewed a man who charged a dollar a month to alert subscribers via beeper whenever one started.
When I earned enough money for a Sony Playstation in the mid-2000s, one of the first games I bought was “Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas” so I could live vicariously through my character as he crashed through blockades while blasting “Pressure Drop” by Toots and the Maytals. I live-tweeted real-life chases for years, à la ManningCast, and I still tune into KCAL-TV Channel 9 every night at home for their three-hour news block — just in case.
I’m a fan despite knowing I shouldn’t like them. Pursuits are a waste of police resources. Watching them encourages stations to air more of them, which encourages copycats. Too many end with innocent bystanders maimed or killed. And yet, like too many Southern Californians, I just can’t quit. Seeing someone flee the law at 90 miles per hour while caroming across crowded freeways taps into a Jungian desire to buck authority, channels the American love for the open road and offers a cheap adrenaline rush — all from the safety of our living rooms.
So I was excited when Pluto TV, a free streaming service best known for airing classics like “I Love Lucy,” “Dr. Who” and “The Carol Burnett Show,” debuted a 24-hour car chase channel last week. I left it on for an entire day, expecting to be endlessly entertained.
California Highway Patrol chase Al Cowlings, driving, and O.J. Simpson, hiding in rear of white Bronco on the 91 Freeway in 1994.
(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)
Car Chase — that’s the direct, if unimaginative, name for Pluto TV’s new channel — airs each pursuit from the first breaking news chyron to its inevitable end. Almost all first appeared over the past few years on Channel 2 and Channel 9, both owned by Pluto TV’s parent company, Paramount. Mundane commercials — cellphone games, Toyota, some prescription drug hawked by Queen Latifah — break up the pursuits, so that each feels like a play with acts.
The day I tuned in, I saw a stolen black pickup wheeze up the Sepulveda Pass. A big U-Haul barreled down the 91 Freeway in Anaheim. A woman made it all the way to Fallbrook. Most passed through the San Fernando Valley, that speedster paradise of long, straight highways and streets. The best one lasted all of two minutes, ending with a car skidding out of control and crashing into a building before the driver tried to make a run for it and got tackled by law enforcement officers. Nearly all happened at night and still had the timestamp, station logo and temperature of when it originally aired.
It was all as surprising as Old Faithful.
Newscasters and helicopter reporters offered the same pablum. No one ever got away at the end. This is what millions of people like myself have obsessed over for decades? The only attempt at anything original came during the commercial breaks, when an overly dramatic announcer offered boilerplate slogans: More from this car chase when we come back. Stand by, for more — Car Chase. Helicopter to base, we’re in the air with more Car Chase. We’re back up — over the Chase.
After sitting through hour after hour, I realized that watching people peel potatoes offers as much excitement — and there’s even more potential for blood.
You’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all — yet you can’t turn away. I was so mesmerized by Car Chase that I forgot to watch the much-anticipated Monday Night Football matchup between the Kansas City Chiefs and Philadelphia Eagles.
By hour 9, I realized that the siren call of police pursuits isn’t the possibility of violence or even escape, but rather how comforting they are. We’ve collectively seen so many televised police pursuits that they’re part of our Southern California experience, like beautiful sunsets and screeching green parrots. You can instantly summon the sound and look of a car chase in your mind. The din of the helicopter blades in the background as the chopper pilot-reporter offers his play-by-play. The hushed tones of the newscasters. The grainy, widescreen shots of the getaway vehicle and the cops who want to catch it.
In our increasingly fractured society, car chases are one of the last collective Southern Californian experiences. When there’s one going on, all of our problems take a break, if only for an hour. If there weren’t any more car chases, something would be terribly wrong. We stare on, even as we look away from the fact that the central characters are people in extremely troubled moments, risking their lives and those of others.
No wonder Pluto TV — whose nostalgia shtick is so thick that one of their channels is devoted to Ed Sullivan’s best musical and comedic guests — was the network that thought it up.
The aftermath of a police pursuit in Echo Park in 2019. Three robbery suspects were killed and a fourth hospitalized in critical condition.
(Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times)
“Data and research show that car chases have been of huge interest to audiences for many years,” a Pluto TV spokesperson told me via email. The streamer has no plans to change what they’re doing right now but promised “we will continue to listen to our audiences” and tweak as needed.
Group them by theme — motorcycles, RVs, funny endings — with appropriate soundtracks (“Yakety Sax,” for sure, but don’t forget “Foggy Mountain Breakdown”). Pull from Paramount’s collection of films with legendary car chases — “Mission Impossible,” “The Italian Job,” even “Grease.” And for crying out loud, bunch your commercials together at the start or finish of a car chase, the way public television thanks its sponsors. I don’t need the Charmin bears harshing my buzz.
Car Chase could be the Southern California scrapbook we didn’t know we needed.
Then again, maybe Pluto TV doesn’t need to change a single thing. My friend called at one point during my marathon. He’s a serious guy, a political strategist by trade. I had barely explained the channel’s premise before he interrupted me.
Los Angeles police have launched an investigation into a protest Thursday at the Brentwood home of the president of a pro-Israeli lobbying group, with footage on social media showing them igniting smoke devices in the street and spattering fake blood on the property.
The incident, which police are investigating as a possible hate crime, is the latest in Los Angeles after Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, prompting Israel to bombard and invade Gaza, the Palestinian enclave that Hamas controls.
The crisis has roiled Los Angeles, home to large populations of both Jews and Palestinians. On Nov. 1, Canter’s Deli, an iconic Jewish restaurant in the Fairfax District, was defaced with antisemitic messages spray-painted below a mural depicting the history of Jews in Los Angeles.
Los Angeles Police Department officers responded Thursday morning to the 11900 block of Foxboro Drive, where a group of protesters were causing a “disturbance,” according to a statement posted on X. Police made no arrests at the scene, but were investigating the incident as suspected vandalism, assault with a deadly weapon and a hate crime.
The statement did not name the owner of the home that was targeted. Officer Melissa Ohana, an LAPD spokeswoman, said the department doesn’t identify victims of crimes.
But in a post on X, Mayor Karen Bass appeared to identify the victim as Michael Tuchin, a Los Angeles attorney and president of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC.
“I’ve spoken with Michael Tuchin and Chief [Michel] Moore about yesterday’s disturbing incident,” Bass wrote. “Hate and violence will not be tolerated in our City. LAPD will continue to work with city and business leaders to keep Angelenos safe.”
Tuchin didn’t immediately respond to a message seeking comment.
A video posted by the People’s City Council – Los Angeles showed a group of people standing outside a home that the organization identified as Tuchin’s, holding a banner that read, “F— your holiday baby killer.” A red liquid had been poured on the driveway. Small white bundles were scattered on the driveway and front lawn.
Footage posted by Sam Yebri, a former City Council candidate, showed smoke billowing in the street as people yelled and a siren droned.
Brian Humphrey, a spokesman for the Los Angeles Fire Department, said a person contacted the department at 10:37 a.m. about an unspecified incident in the 11900 block of Foxboro Drive. During the call, it was determined that the police and not the Fire Department should respond, Humphrey said. No fire units were dispatched to the scene.
New South Wales (NSW) and Queensland regulators appointed special managers to oversee the company’s operations after the scandals surrounding its risk management failures and unethical behaviors. The beleaguered operator has recorded substantial progress in remedying its deficiencies but must still convince authorities it is ready to resume control.
Both Regions Expect Swift Progress
In ASX filings on Friday, Star disclosed the extension of Nicholas Weeks’ term as Manager of The Star Sydney by nearly six months, lasting until 30 June 2024. Similar to NSW, the position of the Special Manager for The Star Gold Coast and Treasury Brisbane casinos in Queensland has been extended by 12 months to 8 December 2024.
These extensions aim to demonstrate that Star is capable of the necessary remedial actions to regain suitability and resume gaming activities as per its casino license provisions in NSW and Queensland. This change necessitates Star to demonstrate its adherence to the ongoing remediation plans and regain suitability by summer 2024.
Queensland’s decision to extend its special management follows a recent decision by Attorney General Yvette D’Ath to alter the effective date of a 90-day casino license suspension from 1 December 2023 to 31 May 2024. Meanwhile, the NSW Independent Casino Commission (NICC) clarified that its extension will likely mark the final continuation of the Manager’s term, with the option to conclude the tenure earlier if deemed appropriate.
The Operator Faces Growing Pressures
Star Entertainment managing director and CEO Robbie Cooke commented on the recent developments, expressing satisfaction with the Remediation Plan’s approval in Queensland. He stressed the need for unwavering commitment, accountability, and diligence to implement the measures successfully and prove that Star Entertainment can operate without additional supervision.
Despite the operator’s steady progress towards compliance, it faces substantial financial issues. Recent casino duty rate increases threaten to undermine the company’s long road to profitability as its FY 2022/23 results reported an unpleasant full-year loss of $1.6 million. However, all revenue-related policies must wait until the company regains regulatory compliance.
We need to regain the trust and confidence of all our stakeholders and communities and continue to have an unwavering focus on transformation.
Robbie Cooke, Star Entertainment managing director
While Star Entertainment has recorded steady progress with its remedial measures, many industry experts express skepticism about whether the operator can salvage its influence and reputation. Even if the company regains the trust of regulators, it must still struggle with mounting losses and macroeconomic pressures, meaning a return to profitability may take years.
Sean Pattwell, executive director of the New Jersey Casino Reinvestment Development Authority, is rumored to be preparing to resign from his position. Sources told ROI-NJ, a news outlet covering events in New Jersey, that the director may depart from the authority very soon.
ROI-NJ was contacted by three separate people on the matter, all of whom preferred to remain anonymous because of the sensitive nature of the information.
According to the reports, Pattwell may leave by the end of the year, although none of the individuals who contacted ROI-NJ was able to provide an exact date. The people familiar with the matter couldn’t confirm what Pattwell would do next but noted that he would pursue other opportunities.
Pattwell joined the New Jersey Casino Reinvestment Development Authority on April 1 last year, replacing Matt Doherty, the authority’s previous executive director. Before joining the body, he served the insurance industry and spent some time as the co-CEO of Herbert L. Jamison. He is also the founding chair of Grosvenor Brokers.
According to the news outlet’s report, the people familiar with the matter have suggested that Pattwell may now return to the private sector. They also told ROI-NJ that the New Jersey Casino Reinvestment Development Authority is on the lookout for Pattwell’s successor.
At the moment, the authority is still discussing the matter and considering its options. ROI-NJ’s concluded that Pattwell’s successor will ultimately be appointed by Governor Phil Murphy.
New Jersey’s Casino Industry Remains Strong
Speaking of New Jersey, a recent report from the Division of Gaming Enforcement (DGE) highlighted the growth of the local casino industry. According to the regulator, the gambling revenue for October increased to $487.1 million, which represents a 9.3% year-on-year growth.
Year-to-date revenue was also strong, demonstrating the resilience and momentum of the local gambling sector. Casino gaming continued to be the main revenue stream and was responsible for almost half of the total revenue.
In the meantime, New Jersey continues to discuss the future of smoking at Atlantic City’s casinos. Seeking to revisit old laws that exempt casinos from the indoor smoking prohibition, proponents of the ban claim that the smoke jeopardizes casino workers’ health. However, casino companies are wary of such a measure as they believe that it would undermine their profits.
Wayne Brady got into a fight over the weekend in Malibu with a driver who hit his car and tried to run away, authorities said. The incident ended with the arrest of the other driver.
The “Don’t Forget the Lyrics” host was driving along Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu near Las Flores Road and Duke’s restaurant around 7:30 p.m. Sunday when another car backed into Brady’s, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Dept. said in a statement shared with The Times.
When Brady and the other driver pulled over to exchange information, the driver heard first responders’ sirens and ran away, the statement said. Brady attempted to stop the person, which led to “a minor physical altercation.”
The driver ran into a nearby neighborhood, where deputies arrested the individual on suspicion of driving under the influence of alcohol, hit and run with damage to property, and battery, the statement said.
The department declined to release the person’s name, citing an ongoing investigation. Nobody required medical attention.
Representatives for Brady did not immediately respond to The Times’ requests for comment.
Brady most recently made headlines when he announced his pansexuality in an interview with People.
He said he was prompted to start discovering new parts of himself after the 2014 death of Robin Williams, along with his own battle with depression.
“I did all the therapy I could do,” he said. “I was treated for love addiction. It’s a part of my journey. I had to start examining why I was looking for myself and happiness in a slew of people.”
Brady has hosted TV shows including “Don’t Forget the Lyrics” and “Let’s Make a Deal” and was a frequent panelist on “Whose Line Is It Anyway,” for which he won a Primetime Emmy. He has also acted in “30 Rock” and “Chappelle’s Show.”
An accomplished stage actor, Brady also has starred in Broadway hits “Chicago,” “Rent” and “Hamilton.” He performed in a Hollywood Bowl revival of “Kinky Boots” in 2022 and next year will star as the titular character in the touring revival of “The Wiz.”
Raising campaign money from Hollywood after a long hiatus during industry strikes, Vice President Kamala Harris sounded confident as she told supporters Monday that President Biden will win the 2024 election.
“It will not be easy,” she said. “There are powerful forces in our country right now that are trying to divide our nation. And it will be incumbent on us to hold it together for the sake of the strength of our nation and our future.”
Harris delivered the remarks at a glitzy fundraiser held at the Los Angeles home of Hollywood philanthropists and lawyers Leslie and Cliff Gilbert-Lurie. The event showed how Democrats are intensifying efforts to attract political donations from Hollywood now that the entertainment industry strikes have ended. It also revealed some of the challenges Democrats confront as the party splinters over the Israel-Hamas war, with protesters staging a small demonstration outside the fundraiser.
Harris and Biden have been largely absent from the political fundraising circuit in Los Angeles this year as Hollywood was hobbled by striking actors and screenwriters pushing for better pay and benefits. The heightened tension between Hollywood workers and studio executives made tapping into donations from the entertainment industry politically fraught. Candidates didn’t want to risk crossing picket lines, and executives didn’t want to be seen cutting big checks to politicians while negotiating with workers.
But with actors reaching a deal to end their strike earlier this month, following the conclusion of the writers’ strike in September, Hollywood is resuming its role as a major source of campaign cash for national Democrats.
Monday’s fundraiser included more than 140 guests and raised close to $500,000, Leslie Gilbert-Lurie told the crowd gathered at her home’s poolside lounge with lights strung around trees in the yard. Inside the modern home adorned with art, people sipped wine and nibbled on crostinis with squash and truffle walnut hummus with pomegranates.
The fundraiser also attracted about two dozen protesters opposed to the Israel-Hamas war who yelled “Free Palestine!” and “Shame on you!” as people entered the home. Before Harris arrived, they threw fake blood in front of the Gilbert-Luries’ house and placed red handprints on the ground. About a dozen police officers stood in front of the home.
Harris’ husband, Doug Emhoff, who is the first Jewish spouse of a president or vice president, spoke to the group about his work to combat antisemitism and hate.
“You saw it outside walking in here today,” he said, referencing the protesters. “This is the times that we’re living in right now.”
Before Harris delivered her remarks standing between two American flags, a woman in the audience called for a cease-fire. Security led her out of the home.
Harris told the audience to “take a minute” before she continued speaking, noting that Americans have to continue their fight against antisemitism, Islamophobia and other forms of hate.
“This is a very critical moment in the history of our country and the history of the world, and so much of what we have each fought for and believed in our entire lives is at stake in this election and in this moment,” she said.
While politicians have avoided fundraising during the Hollywood strikes, Biden’s campaign has been picking up donations in the Bay Area. Throughout this year, Biden has held fundraisers in San Francisco and Silicon Valley, tapping into the region’s tech-industry wealth. Last week, during the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation conference, Biden and Harris attended a Democratic National Committee fundraiser while hundreds of pro-Palestinian protesters opposed to the Israel-Hamas war chanted outside the the Merchants Exchange Building.
In October, Biden’s campaign said it raised more than $71 million in the third quarter, surpassing fundraising by former President Trump and GOP primary candidates.
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A protest by about 1,000 people angry over U.S. support for Israel in its war with Hamas entered the convention center where the California Democratic Party was meeting Saturday evening, causing security guards to lock entrances to the SAFE Credit Union Convention Center in downtown Sacramento and prompting an early end to the day’s official events.
Delegates and other participants were temporarily blocked from exiting and entering the building after demonstrators barged through security around 6 p.m. and opened several doors, allowing more people to stream into the building where California Democrats gathered for a weekend of events gearing up for the 2024 election.
“Cease-fire now. Cease-fire now,” they chanted as they marched through the convention hall waving Palestinian flags and carrying “Free Palestine” signs.
California Democratic Party officials canceled evening meetings and parties “for the safety and security of our delegates and convention participants,” spokesperson Shery Yang said in a statement.
The demonstration was not as dramatic as Wednesday’s protest at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington, in which police clashed with demonstrators calling for a cease-fire as members of Congress gathered inside. Both instances highlight how the war between Israel and Hamas is dividing the left as the U.S. heads into an election year.
Protesters in Sacramento called President Biden “Genocide Joe,” and said, “bombing hospitals and children is a crime.”
Israel’s military has been searching the Gaza Strip’s largest hospital for a Hamas command center that it alleges is located under the building, a claim Hamas and the hospital staff deny.
The Sacramento protest began earlier in the afternoon in a park blocks away. The crowd heard from speakers decrying the Israeli bombardment of Gaza after Hamas’ Oct. 7 incursion in which militants massacred about 1,200 people in Israel and abducted about 240. In response, the Israeli military has killed more 11,500 Palestinians, according to Palestinian health authorities, with an additional 2,700 missing, believed buried under rubble.
Several Jewish delegates to the convention expressed frustration that protesters who had not registered to attend the convention could so easily enter the facility.
Naomi Goldman, a Democrats for Israel California board member wearing a “Nice Jewish Girl” T-shirt, said it was painful to hear protesters chanting, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” While many Palestinians consider the refrain a cry for liberation, many Jews hear it as a message that Israel should be obliterated.
“I am eagerly anticipating meaningful comment from my party on hate speech and violence targeting the Jewish community,” Goldman said, “as well as a total denunciation of what delegates did to disrupt our assembly, and how it will ensure safe inclusive spaces for everyone who hold a diversity of opinions.”
Ameera Abouromeleh, an 18-year-old Palestinian American who joined the protest with six members of her family — including her 74-year-old grandfather who she said was born in Jerusalem — said she looks forward to voting next year for the first time as a way to show solidarity with family who remain in the West Bank.
“I’m feeling really lucky to be 18 because this is when I can really make a change about what happens to my people and my land,” said the community college student from the East Bay Area. “Even though you squish someone under the rubble, our voices will be heard further.”
She said that in the presidential election she plans to vote for Cornel West, a progressive academic who is running as an independent. But she was unsure about whom she prefers in California’s race for the U.S. Senate seat formerly held by the late Sen. Dianne Feinstein.
Democratic candidates in that race — including Reps. Katie Porter of Irvine, Adam B. Schiff of Burbank and Barbara Lee of Oakland — made the rounds at the convention Saturday seeking their party’s endorsement.
In response to last winter’s abnormally high gas bills, the Southern California Gas Co. has launched a text-messaging service that aims to alert customers so they can adjust their gas and energy use accordingly.
At the time, a combination of out-of-state natural gas supply constraints, early cold weather conditions and low storage inventories in the western region drove up commodity prices, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
To give customers a direct notice of potential increases in the future, SoCalGas recently created the Natural Gas Price Notice. This is an alternative way customers can be alerted, other methods include through email, mail correspondence and the utility’s website.
Don Widjaja, the service provider’s vice president for customer solutions, said people are used to getting important messages through their cellphones.
“We feel that this is an opportunity to meet the customer where they are and the expectation is, a text message alert is important and it’ll catch your attention,” he said.
Once the customers have the information, they can make an informed decision about their gas usage, especially during a seasonal billing increase, Widjaja said.
The optional notification system will send customers a text message when there is a 20% or more increase in the monthly natural gas commodity cost, which affects a portion of the bill.
The alert will not notify customers when their increased usage leads to a higher bill. Customers who wish to track their usage can do so from their online account.
If there is a need to send out the alert, it will be between December and March 2024.
Customers can sign up for the text alert through their online SoCalGas account.
Customers who are looking to save energy can start by lowering the temperature on their thermostat. Pacific Gas & Electric says customers can decrease their bill by about 2% for each degree that the temperature is lowered on the thermostat. Turning down the temperature from 70 to 65 degrees, for example, saves about 10%.
Cold showers in the winter aren’t ideal but cold water uses less energy, according to Widjaja. That also applies to doing laundry with cold water.
As Southern California enters the winter season next month, the crisp and anticipated 50-degree weather makes it difficult for people not to turn on their wall heater or furnace.
Instead of using the natural gas-powered wall heater, people can opt to use a space heater instead.
To avoid using the heater for long periods of time, retain the heat in the house by ensuring any gaps or cracks are sealed.
The Natural Resources Defense Council advises that people check their baseboards and attic hatches for openings that can be sealed to make the living space less drafty.
Wind can also get in through the front door if the weather-stripping is worn. If the weather-stripping can’t be replaced, cover the opened space with a towel or blanket.
