child

There are few greater muses than one’s own childhood. In recent months, this idea has taken visual form across fashion runways, with brands from Chanel to Acne Studios showcasing childlike sketches, often referred to as ‘naive design’. The aesthetic favors deliberate roughness and mistakes over a sterile, polished sheen.

Book covers are the latest medium to embrace the trend. Scribbles, doodles, crayon marks and stickers — evoking Lisa Frank and anime cartoons — have begun appearing on prominent Gen Z contemporary fiction covers. The more childish and unrefined, the better.

The covers, which often accompany literary fiction written by women, signal a particular emotional register of naive, sticky chaos that youth promises. The visual language recalls a simpler time — a reclamation of an innocence lost. For millennials and Gen Z readers who worship collectibles like Labubus, friendship bracelets and butterfly hair clips, it’s natural that art direction would follow suit — sometimes with an ironic twist. Often, the design’s playfulness obscures the protagonist’s malaise.

The book cover trend, imbued with nostalgia for childhood, promises fiction that grapples with the pangs of adulthood in an age of precarity. In her Substack, cultural critic and novelist Natasha Stagg commented on the trend, noting, “Reverse-image searching these images turn up books on early childhood education, dealing with anxiety or migraines, or teaching a kid to color outside the lines as an artistic parent.” The book trend cover suggests collective angst about adulthood, highlighted by a cultural fixation on “girlhood” that sparked a spate of online think pieces in recent years.

It’s fitting, then, that the aesthetic has been adopted by Gen Z fiction writers like Honor Levy, whose paperback edition of “My First Book” includes girlish heart stickers on a hot pink background. The Y2K aesthetic elicits a young girl’s diary. Meanwhile, the 2025 novel “Unfit” by Ariana Harwicz, about a mother losing her children in a custody battle, uses erratic crayon scribbles on its cover. In the fall, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern was contained in a binder with a Lisa Frank-style aquatic wonderland on the cover. This month, Cazzie David released a book of essays about early adulthood titled “Delusions: Of Grandeur, of Romance, of Process” with a cover resembling a child’s birthday cake.

(New Directions Publishing, Penguin Books)

Writer and culture critic Drew Zeiba noted the trend in his June 2025 Substack post. “I wonder if it represents a fed-up-ness with prior or concurrent trends in book design,” writes Zeiba over email. “A move away from the layered, the blobby, the clean — to something with more illusion of or allusion to an id.”

“Not for nothing, I assume adult coloring books sell better than literary fiction,” says Zeiba. “I’m struck by that in a way the crayon or marker drawing is provisional — there’s no final form to it.”

This January, novelist and Forever Magazine co-founder Madeline Cash released her highly anticipated debut novel, “Lost Lambs.” The story follows a family unraveling amid open marriages, conspiracy and emotional turmoil. Designed by Na Song, the cover features drooping blue crayon text and a small illustration of a girl.

The cover was heavily influenced by Henry Darger’s Vivian Girls. “I was attached to this Henry Darger painting when I was writing the book. I felt like that was a really accurate visual representation of little girls running away from utter chaos,” says Cash.

“The childish scribbling handwriting is also a red herring for some of the more serious and sinister themes in the book, “ says Cash.

(St. Martin’s Publishing Group, Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

“Having read Cash’s, I’m struck by the fact that the children in the book — and children are central to the book — are really insightful and transformative, and ‘lost lambs’ actually refers in the text to a specific group of adults,” adds Zeiba.

A similar artistic logic underpins Sophie Kemp’s breakout 2025 novel, “Paradise Logic,” which gained attention for its unsettling cover. The book cover is an existing painting by Brooklyn-based artist Naruki Kukita, selected by veteran art director Martha Kennedy with Kemp’s input. Kennedy had come across “Virtual Temptation in Eden” in a weekly art newsletter called “It’s Nice That.” The image invokes a children’s coloring book with darker undertones, blending various cartoon and drawing styles to depict Adam and Eve in paradise. A cartoon snake lurks behind them.

The design mirrors the memorable prose. “This novel showcased one of the most original voices I’ve ever read. I would describe it as a psychosexual fever dream,” says Kennedy. “I recall the editor calling it ‘the first true Gen Z novel.’”

Kemp recalls sending a lengthy email about the book cover inspiration. “I want something super maximalist. I want it to be a preexisting image. And I wanted to do something that is shocking or crazy,” says Kemp. Kennedy presented Kukita’s painting, and it was love at first sight for Kemp.

(New Directions Publishing, Simon & Schuster)

“Kukita’s combination of finely crafted painterly portraiture and flat graphic anime (often in very intense sexual combination) seemed like a perfect match for the tone of this novel,” says Martha Kennedy, who served as the art director at Simon & Schuster.

Then, enter Comic Sans typeface — a perfect dash of irony. “Let’s use a typeface that feels kind of wrong,” Kemp recalls prescribing. “I used Comic Sans for the first time in my 35-year career for the rest of the type. I felt that was some sort of weird pinnacle in itself,” Kennedy explains over email.

Kemp sees a thematic alignment between her and Cash’s book designs. “Mine and Madeline’s books are about naive female characters,” Kemp says. “It makes a lot of sense with the protagonist of my novel, who’s an extremely naive young woman, for the book cover to match that tone that I created.”

While working in marketing, Cash recalls another book cover trend she calls “book blob.” The blob was earth-toned and splashed bestselling covers for years. “With any kind of viral aesthetic: one of those books did well, so they engineered every cover to emulate that, because people were drawn to them,” says Cash. “It looks like all the content was the same and ubiquitous. It is a disservice to a lot of those books.”

“I really wanted it to stand out,” says Cash about her own cover.

Connors is a writer living in Los Angeles. She hosts the literary reading event Unreliable Narrators at Nico’s Wines in Atwater Village every month.

SACRAMENTO — Murder is considered the worst crime out there, but for my money, it’s child rapists who are the worst of the worst — especially the serial ones who destroy one life after another.

That’s wholly subjective on my part, but I doubt I’m alone. Which is why I was far from surprised at the outrage that accompanied two recent, successful parole hearings for convicted serial child predators in Sacramento.

Gregory Lee Vogelsang, 57, and David Funston, 64, both attacked children and were granted parole through California’s elderly parole program — though both remain behind bars for now.

But the fury over the possibility of their freedom has put the state’s controversial elderly parole program under scrutiny — again — and led to a flurry of legislation to add new restrictions. Should sex offenders be excluded? Especially heinous murderers? Everyone under the age of 75?

It’s easy to answer “yes” to all of the above.

“Part of the problem we have is we shouldn’t be making policy decisions based on speculation and on scary rhetoric that’s disconnected from the facts,” Keith Wattley told me. He’s the founder and director of UnCommon Law, a nonprofit that provides legal services and parole advocacy.

“That’s how politicians make people afraid, but it shouldn’t be how we make law,” he said.

And he’s right, as grotesque as these headline-grabbing cases are. In 2024, there were 3,580 elderly parole hearings and 606 people were granted that relief. Most have remained law-abiding. In the 2019-20 year, the most recent recidivism statistics available from CDCR, 221 people were granted elderly parole. Within three years, only four had been convicted of new crimes, and only one of those was a felony for a crime against a person. That tracks with lots of data that shows men generally age out of violent crimes.

But Funston and Vogelsang are the worst of what we fear when we talk about parole, and their cases rightfully make us wonder what the heck the parole board is doing. Though Gov. Gavin Newsom sent both of these decisions back for review, it’s easy to imagine the attack ads should he run for president: Under Newsom’s watch, child rapists walked free.

“Elder parole has gone too far,” Thien Ho, the Sacramento district attorney whose office prosecuted both men, told me. “I support the opportunity of people to be rehabilitated. But I think that certain individuals, in my opinion, and in my experience, cannot be rehabilitated.”

Here’s where I’m going to make a lot of folks mad on both sides of this issue. I agree with Ho, but also, I agree with Wattley. I don’t think we can pass laws based on our grimmest view of humanity. Removing hope from the system turns our prisons into dungeons and does not ultimately serve public safety.

But then, neither does releasing child molesters into our communities.

Lost in all the wrath about these two cases is the difficult business of justice that led to the early release law in 2014, and any interest in the hard and nuanced conversation that we need to have around terrible crimes. It’s easy and popular to say no violent criminal should ever be released, but we can’t just lock up everyone with no possibility of ever getting out because the “R” in CDCR stands for “rehabilitation,” and also — we just can’t afford the forever scenario, morally or fiscally.

California tried the throw-away-the-key model in the 1980s and ‘90s and ended up with prisons so overcrowded that the federal courts stepped in. The original elderly parole effort came through a 2014 court decision on overcrowding that gave inmates 60 or older who had served at least 25 years a chance to go before the parole board. A chance — no guaranteed freedom, and usually it takes multiple hearings years apart before the board approves it.

Later, the Legislature expanded elderly parole to inmates 50 or older who had served 20 years, but excluded those sentenced under the “three strikes” law or those who had murdered peace officers.

The reality is California has a lot of old, aging and sick people behind bars — at great expense. As we grapple with the idea of universal healthcare, there’s one place in California where it already exists — our prisons and jails. We currently pay more than $41,000 in healthcare costs per inmate per year, according to the Legislative Analyst’s Office.

I’m not going to tell you it’s the best healthcare, but it’s taxpayer-funded, and includes even long-term dementia care. And yes, we do have incarcerated dementia patients.

“This is about reducing our prison population and our liability to cover housing and healthcare for an aging prison population, and we have to balance that with the safety of the community and the rights of victims,” state Assemblymember Maggy Krell (D-Sacramento) told me. She’s sponsoring a bill that would create an additional layer of safety around sex crimes by referring these possible parolees to the civil system that evaluates sexually violent predators for confinement in mental facilities after their prison terms.

“Under some circumstances, it is worth considering paroling some of these defendants,” she said, with the kind of thoughtful rationality sure to offend many. “But the cases that you’re seeing right now are completely egregious, and those defendants should not be released.”

Vogelsang was convicted of almost 30 counts of kidnapping and sex crimes, against kids as young as 5. He’s served 27 years of a 355-year sentence.

David Allen Funston, a Sacramento County child predator convicted in 1999 of multiple counts of kidnapping and child molestation. Funston was granted parole suitability under California’s Elderly Parole Program after serving more than two decades in prison.

(Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office)

David Allen Funston was convicted in 1999 of 16 counts of kidnapping and child molestation for kids as young as toddlers. He was sentenced to three consecutive 25-to-life prison sentences. Newsom bounced his first successful parole bid back to the parole board for a review, and on Feb. 18, it affirmed its decision.

But Placer County prosecutors quickly charged him with an old crime that had never been filed due to the Sacramento case, and he remains incarcerated awaiting trial on those charges.

Vogelsang’s case particularly raised a red flag for me. He told the parole board he’s been working successfully for about five years to control his thoughts about children.

“I don’t want to become aroused, but I know it’s always going to be there,” he said during the hearing.

Newsom also sent Vogelsang’s case back for review, and he will go before the board again on March 18. Vogelsang’s testimony was concerning enough that if I had a vote in this, I’d probably ask him to come back again in a few years, but we’ll see what the board does.

I’ll admit my decision would be emotional, and these cases do make me wonder. But Wattley is right that condemning elderly parole based on the monstrous deeds of these child predators is shortsighted. There is likely little to no public safety benefit in raising the overall age for elderly parole, and certainly no fiscal benefit.

“When you’re paying for older, sicker people to be incarcerated, and they don’t pose a risk to public safety, what are we actually getting for that? We’re not getting anything that supports survivors. We’re not getting anything that prevents crime. We’re just spending taxpayer dollars on something that doesn’t correlate with the public safety risk,” Wattley pointed out.

As hard as it is to wrap our minds around, it’s best for public safety to allow even the worst of the worst their chance in front of the parole board. It may even make sense for some who have committed truly terrible crimes decades ago to be released, if there is strong evidence of change and a low risk to public safety. That’s the kind of fair and realistic justice that no one on either side of the issue wants to talk about.

I’m not convinced Vogelsang and Funston have met those bars. But that doesn’t mean we should throw out the bars.

What else you should be reading

The must-read: USC and ABC7 criticized for exclusion of all candidates of color in upcoming gubernatorial debate
Money, it’s a gas: Poison-pill effort to cancel proposed billionaire tax hits voters’ mailboxes
The L.A. Times Special: China-backed Big Pork wants to override 63% of California voters. Even conservatives are mad

Stay Golden,
Anita Chabria

—
Was this newsletter forwarded to you? Sign up here to get it in your inbox.

I SPEND a lot of my time looking at holiday prices – comparing deals, breaking down packages, and figuring out where the strange little pricing tricks are hiding.

There’s one trend I keep seeing again and again. In some family resorts, it can actually work out cheaper to stay as an adult and a child than as one adult on their own.

That’s not because flights suddenly get cheaper, but because the hotel part of the package drops in price.

It sounds odd, but when you look at how hotels price their rooms, it starts to make sense.

Why does this strange holiday pricing trick happen? The main reason is something called a single supplement.

Most hotel rooms are priced for two people sharing, so when just one person stays, hotels often increase the price to make up for the empty bed.

Solo travellers can end up paying a hidden surcharge, but when you add a child, the pricing works differently.

Family resorts – especially in places like Turkey, Spain and Greece – are built around rooms designed for two adults and a child, and children usually cost hotels less to accommodate.

They often sleep on sofa beds, eat smaller portions and have discounted all-inclusive rates.

Because of that, hotels often price children very cheaply – and sometimes the total hotel cost actually drops compared with a solo booking.

Hotels are usually happy with this because families tend to spend more around the resort, from drinks and snacks to activities and excursions.

So, filling a room with an adult and a child can be more valuable than one guest travelling alone, which occasionally leads to the strange situation where bringing a child makes the hotel portion of the holiday cheaper.

When I looked at the data, I found several resorts where this pricing quirk shows up.

I compared the price of a 7-night stay as a solo traveller versus the cost when bringing one child at a variety of holiday resorts.

Here are some of the best examples, and the biggest savings of up to £698.

Labranda Targa Club Aquapark, Marrakech

Average saving: £30

Just outside Marrakech, Labranda Targa Club Aquapark combines Moroccan sunshine with a proper family-friendly resort setup.

Kids get water slides and splash pools, while adults can explore the markets and gardens of the city nearby.

And the pricing still shows a small advantage, with adult and child bookings averaging £30 cheaper for a 7-night stay than solo travellers.

BLUESEA Puerto Caleta, Fuerteventura

Average saving: £43

Located in Caleta de Fuste, Puerto Caleta is a relaxed apartment complex perfect for an adult and child beach holiday.

You’ve got sandy beaches, boat trips and plenty of restaurants right on your doorstep.

When I priced it up, holidays average a £43 saving for an adult and child per 7-night stay compared with travelling alone.

Sol Barbados, Majorca

Average saving: £45

Sol Barbados in Magaluf is one of the most family-friendly resorts in Majorca.

There’s a huge waterpark-style pool area, kids’ entertainment and easy access to the beach.

For an adult travelling with a child, it’s a simple sun-and-pool holiday – and the pricing shows an average saving of around £45 for a 7-night stay compared to booking solo.

Staycity Aparthotels, near Disneyland Paris

Average saving: £60

City breaks can show the same pattern too.

At Staycity Aparthotels near Disneyland Paris, you’re just minutes from the Disney parks, which makes it ideal for an adult taking a child on their first big theme park trip.

And the pricing structure means the average holiday can come out around £60 cheaper for a 7-night stay when you book as an adult and child instead of travelling alone.

Oludeniz Beach Resort by Z Hotels, Dalaman

Average saving: £81

Oludeniz Beach Resort sits right by one of Turkey’s most famous beaches – the stunning Blue Lagoon at Ölüdeniz.

It’s an easygoing, all-inclusive resort where an adult and child can spend the day swimming, exploring the beach or watching the paragliders drift down from the mountains.

And package bookings for this hotel show an average saving of £81 for a 7-night stay when adding a child versus travelling solo.

Gran Castillo Tagoro, Lanzarote

Average saving: £212

This five-star resort in Lanzarote is practically designed for family holidays.

Gran Castillo Tagoro has dedicated kids zones, family pools and incredible views over the volcanic coastline near Playa Blanca.

For an adult and child travelling together, it’s the perfect mix of relaxation and activities.

Bookings here show an average saving of around £212 when bringing a child for a 7-night stay compared with a solo holiday.

Golden Port Salou & Spa, Costa Dorada

Average saving: £251

In Spain, Golden Port Salou & Spa is a brilliant base for an adult and child holiday.

It’s close to the beaches of Salou and just minutes from PortAventura theme park, which makes it perfect for a trip packed with rides, waterparks and ice cream stops.

Thanks to family-friendly pricing, the average holiday price drops by about £251 per 7-night stay when a child is added to the booking.

Rixos Radamis Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt

Average saving: £279

If you’re looking for something more luxury, Rixos Radamis in Sharm El Sheikh is one of the most impressive resorts in Egypt.

Huge pools, beach access on the Red Sea, kids clubs and endless all-inclusive food options make it a dream for families.

And the pricing structure here means an adult travelling with a child can save around £279 for a 7-night break on average compared with booking the same trip alone.

Auramar Beach Resort, Algarve

Average saving: £349

Over in Portugal, Auramar Beach Resort sits right above the cliffs near Albufeira with incredible sea views.

It’s a laid-back all-inclusive hotel where an adult and child can spend the day between the beach, the pools and the buffet before watching the sunset over the Atlantic.

Because it’s built for families, adding a child actually brings the average holiday price down by around £349 for a 7-night break compared with travelling solo.

Eftalia Blue, Antalya

Average saving: £698

One of the biggest differences I found was at Eftalia Blue on Turkey’s Mediterranean coast.

This is a classic big Turkish all-inclusive resort with huge pools, slides, and easy access to the famous Eftalia Island beach complex.

For an adult and child travelling together, it’s ideal – kids get waterparks and entertainment all day while parents can relax by the pool or head down to the beach.

And the pricing quirk here is huge, with holidays averaging almost £700 cheaper for an adult and child for a 7-night stay compared to travelling alone.

Here’s my key takeaways for travellers.

I should make it clear: holidays aren’t always cheaper with kids.

Flights are still one of your biggest spends, and plenty of hotels price things normally.

But when you start digging through package holiday deals, you occasionally find this strange pricing quirk.

Because of single supplements and heavily discounted child rates, this is one of those travel industry secrets you only really notice when you spend your days digging through holiday data.

BERLIN — Juergen Habermas, whose work on communication, rationality and sociology made him one of the world’s most influential philosophers and a key intellectual figure in his native Germany, has died. He was 96.

Habermas’ publisher, Suhrkamp, said he died on Saturday in Starnberg, near Munich.

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said that “Germany and Europe have lost one of the most significant thinkers of our time.”

Merz said that “his sociological and philosophical work had an impact on generations of researchers and thinkers.” He praised “Habermas’ intellectual forcefulness and his liberality” and said in a statement that “his voice will be missed.”

Habermas frequently weighed in on political matters over several decades. His extensive writing crossed the boundaries of academic and philosophical disciplines, providing a vision of modern society and social interaction. His best-known works included the two-volume “Theory of Communicative Action.”

Habermas, who was 15 at the time of Nazi Germany’s defeat, later recalled the dawn of a new era in 1945 and his coming to terms with the reality of Nazi crimes as something without which he wouldn’t have found his way into philosophy and social theory. He recalled that “you saw suddenly that it was a politically criminal system in which you had lived.”

He had an ambivalent relationship with the left-wing student movement of the late 1960s in Germany and beyond, engaging with it but also warning at the time against the danger of what he called “left-wing fascism” — a reaction to a firebrand speech by a student leader that he later said was “slightly out of place.” He would later recognize the movement as having driven a “fundamental liberalization” of German society.

In the 1980s, Habermas was a prominent figure in the so-called Historians’ Dispute, in which Berlin historian Ernst Nolte and others called for a new perspective on the Third Reich and German identity. They tended to compare what happened under Adolf Hitler to atrocities carried out by other governments, such as the deaths of millions in the Soviet Union under Josef Stalin. Habermas and other opponents contended that the conservative historians were trying to lessen the magnitude of Nazi crimes through such comparisons.

Habermas supported the rise to power of center-left Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder in 1998. He was critical of the “technocratic” approach and perceived lack of political vision of Schroeder’s conservative successor, Angela Merkel, complaining in 2016 of the paralyzing effects on public opinion of “the foam blanket of Merkel’s policy of sending people to sleep.”

He was particularly critical of the “limited interest” shown by German politicians, business leaders and media in “shaping a politically effective Europe.” In 2017, he praised newly elected French President Emmanuel Macron for laying out of plans for European reform, saying that “the way he speaks about Europe makes a difference.”

Habermas was born on June 18, 1929, in Duesseldorf and grew up in nearby Gummersbach, where his father headed the local chamber of commerce. He became a member of the Deutsches Jungvolk, a section of the Hitler Youth for younger boys, at 10.

He was born with a cleft palate that required repeated operations as a child, an experience that helped inform his later thinking about language.

Habermas said he had experienced the importance of spoken language as “a layer of commonality without which we as individuals cannot exist” and recalled struggling to make himself understood. He also spoke of the “superiority of the written word,” and said that “the written form conceals the flaws of the oral.”

His wife, Ute Habermas-Wesselhoeft, died last year. The couple had three children: Tilmann; Rebekka, who died in 2023; and Judith.

Moulson writes for the Associated Press.

WASHINGTON — Iran’s new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, vowed retaliation Thursday against the United States and Israel and signaled that Tehran will continue to choke off the world’s most critical oil route, as the war strained global energy markets and raised new security concerns in the United States.

In his first public remarks since U.S.–Israeli strikes killed his father, former Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Mojtaba Khamenei swore revenge. The new leader, notably, did not appear in person for the televised statement. Instead, his written words were read aloud on Iranian state media.

“We will never retreat and vow to avenge the blood of our martyrs,” he said. “Our revenge will be never ending, not only for the late supreme leader, but also for the blood of all of our martyrs. … Those who killed our children will pay the price.”

The new leader expressed condolences to families who lost children in a strike on a girls school in Minab that killed more than 165 people, many of them children. He also warned that the war could expand, declaring that the continuation of the conflict “depends on the interests of the parties.”

The Associated Press, citing two sources, reported that outdated intelligence likely led to the United States carrying out the deadly missile strike on the elementary school. U.S. Central Command relied on target coordinates for the strike using outdated data provided by the Defense Intelligence Agency, according to a person familiar with the preliminary finding.

Khamenei indicated that Tehran would maintain its blockade in the Strait of Hormuz, a key choke point through which 20% of the world’s oil supply is shipped. He also said he believes in friendship with his country’s neighbors, but that attacks on U.S. military installations in the region will continue. He described maintaining pressure on the passage as a necessary part of Iran’s war strategy.

His remarks came as attacks continued to disrupt shipping and energy infrastructure across the Persian Gulf. The war sent oil up 10% Thursday as hostilities in Iran drag on.

Reports from the region said Iranian forces have intensified strikes on vessels attempting to pass through the Strait of Hormuz, leaving hundreds of ships stranded at its entrances and rattling global oil markets.

Two oil tankers were struck by explosives in Iraqi waters near the port of Basra. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps claimed responsibility for the attacks, which killed at least one crew member and set both vessels ablaze, according to the Associated Press. A third unnamed vessel was reported to have been struck by an “unknown projectile” near Dubai and Jebel Ali, causing a small fire, the United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations reported.

The latest incidents come after drone strikes targeted fuel storage facilities across the Gulf, including at energy sites in Bahrain and at the port of Salalah in Oman, an important hub for tankers seeking to bypass the Strait.

“They will pay the price. We will destroy their facilities,” Khamenei said. “It is necessary to continue our defensive activity, including continuing to close the Strait of Hormuz.”

There’s a hidden door in Downtown Disney. Only this one isn’t meant to be walked through.

Flanking a stage near the monorail station, you’ll find a glistening white tower, the work of artist and activist Nikkolas Smith, who has adopted the term “artivist.” At first glance, the tower — one of Downtown Disney’s most striking works — appears to be a nod to Disneyland’s Midcentury art, for its curved lines and space-age optimism wouldn’t be out of place in Tomorrowland.

That’s there, says Smith, but there are also a number of more subtle inspirations.

The tower is a nod to five Black architects, trailblazers whose creations sometimes went unnoticed or overlooked. And that’s why at the base of the structure is a looping opening meant to signify a half-open doorway.

Downtown Disney’s Legacy Tower touches on the styles of different Black architects as it rises into the sky.

(Gary Coronado / For The Times)

Smith shares a distressing anecdote. “They had to learn how to read drawings upside down, because they weren’t allowed to sit next to the white clients,” Smith says, adding they also had to endure unequal pay. “So I was incorporating things like the half doorway to symbolize their struggle.”

Officially designated as the Legacy Tower, Smith himself fixates on that word — “legacy.” The term, he says, represents a thematic constant across his work. A regular collaborator on a number of Walt Disney Co. projects and a former architect with Walt Disney Imagineering, the division of the company focused on theme park experiences, Smith is something of a connector. His canvas art, full of fast-moving brush work, is often rooted in the past while urgently seeking to draw links to the present.

Artist Nikkolas Smith went viral for his portrait of Martin Luther King Jr. in a hoodie, a tribute to slain teenager Trayvon Martin.

(Nikkolas Smith)

His 2025 children’s book, “The History of We,” tells the story of how humanity can trace its roots to Africa. And one of his best-known pieces is of Martin Luther King Jr. in a hoodie, meant to evoke the image of Trayvon Martin, the slain 17-year-old whose death inspired a social justice movement. The work went viral in 2013 while Smith was still working for Imagineering. It altered his career trajectory.

“It was like, ‘I cannot just make art about churros and rides right now,’” Smith says. “There’s a time for that, and there’s also a time to talk about this.” He references his portraits related to the killings of Black men, many at the hands of police officers, such as Philando Castile and Michael Brown.

“At the end of the day, Disney understood that,” Smith adds. “They understood that I needed to make art that was extremely important at the moment, about justice or the lack of justice.”

Smith left Disney in 2019 after 11 years but has maintained a close relationship with the company, so much so that Imagineering called upon Smith to design the tower, which opened in 2023.

Artist Nikkolas Smith, left, chats with guests Ricky Yost and Martina Yost of Aubrey, Texas, who recognized Smith from a recent Disney cruise excursion.

(Gary Coronado / For The Times)

As the Legacy Tower spirals toward the sky, its patterns and and lattice work nod to the likes of James H. Garrott, Robert A. Kennard, Roy A. Sealey, Ralph A. Vaughn and Paul Revere Williams. All were active in Los Angeles — Williams, for instance, was a pivotal designer on the LAX Theme Building — and Smith interlaces decorative flourishes in varying styles that twist around one another to work up the Legacy Tower’s pointed spheres.

The door of the Legacy Tower symbolizes perseverance, Smith says. “They made it through, despite all of the obstacles they had to go through.”

Smith had studied the architects while a student at Hampton University, and has documented on his Instagram their various stylings, which range from restrained to whimsical to ornate. A section referencing Vaughn is modern minimalism, whereas an area dedicated to Sealey is full of jagged, pointed linework. All of it is held together via a coiling design that feels full of movement.

The patterns of the Legacy Tower are nods to the likes of James H. Garrott, Robert A. Kennard, Roy A. Sealey, Ralph A. Vaughn and Paul Revere Williams.

(Gary Coronado / For The Times)

“How can I show humanity’s interconnected future? That’s the idea,” Smith says. “There’s this African theme of Sankofa. If we look toward our future, we have to look at the past and value and appreciate the past. I thought it would be great if I could really commemorate some Black designers and architects as the foundation and backstory of the tower. And I was also thinking about these breezeway block patterns that you see in Leimert Park.”

And yet it also feels like something that belongs in the park. Smith says he looked at some Tomorrowland designs.

“A Midcentury Modern vibe was Walt,” Smith says, referring to park patriarch Walt Disney. “That was Walt’s thing. It all connects. I love that people can hopefully now connect both things. You can connect Tomorrowland and Walt with Paul Revere Williams.”

It’s clearly Smith’s favorite design of his for Disney, although it’s not the only space at the resort that features his artistry. During his decade-plus with Imagineering he regularly worked on teams that focused on projects at Disney California Adventure, which this year is celebrating its 25th anniversary. He was heavily involved, he says, in the evolution of Avengers Campus, contributed to a small promenade stage in Pixar Pier and helped envision the facade of Guardians of the Galaxy — Mission: Breakout!, which transformed the former Tower of Terror into a sci-fi structure.

Nikkolas Smith says elements of Downtown Disney’s Legacy Tower symbolize perseverance.

(Gary Coronado / For The Times)

Smith looks back fondly at his years at Imagineering, specifically calling out his time on the Guardians project. The former fake hotel is now full of glistening bronze pipes, a retro futurist look that former Imagineer Joe Rohde, who led the design, has said takes influence from the high-tech aesthetic of architect Renzo Piano, who worked on France’s Pompidou Centre.

“How much can we add to it? How much can we get away with gluing onto this thing?” Smith says of the Guardians facade. “What is the right amount of ‘Guardians of the Galaxy,’ without being too much? Without scaring people on the freeway?”

Today, Smith continues to focus on social justice work, and has also collaborated with filmmaker Ryan Coogler, such as completing concept designs for his Oscar-nominated film “Sinners.” Smith’s 2023 children’s book “The Artivist” documents the importance of creating art that’s in conversation with the world, believing it’s not only a source for education but for empathy. Smith’s weekly paintings speak out often against the current administration, and Smith has been particularly vocal on the ICE raids.

A selection from “The Artivist,” an illustrated book from Nikkolas Smith.

(Nikkolas Smith)

“Some people say that all art is activism, but I feel that some of the best art that is created is art that has a message,” Smith says. “And hopefully that message has to do with the humanity of all people, and for me, I like to focus on marginalized communities, and how we can value the humanity of everybody. That’s why I make picture books about the origins of humanity and the origins of this country.”

The Leimert Park resident says his wife and young son regularly visit the Disneyland Resort. And when he does, Smith says, he always takes a moment to stop by the Pixar Pier stage that he contributed to, which is often used for character meet and greets.

“They were team projects, and I do go up to them with so much pride,” he says. “I go up to the Pixar Pier promenade stage, and I just go up to it and touch it. … The beautiful thing about Disney is these creations are usually around for a lifetime.”

It turns out you can take the artivist out of Disney, but you can’t fully take the Disney out of the artivist.

One of the biggest takeaways from the biography “Judy Blume: A Life” may not be in the story itself but in its author. Because of her frank talk about puberty and sexual awakenings, Blume’s work is usually associated with young female readers. Her biographer, Mark Oppenheimer, is a middle-aged father of five.

He says he received minimal pushback on the idea that a man should be allowed to write Blume’s definitive life story. If the whole point of her books is that there should be no shame in body awareness, what service does it do to say only a woman has the authority to write her story? Plus, although her books aren’t selling as well as they used to — who’s are? — Oppenheimer’s biography points out that there are still plenty of parents who will throw a copy of her seminal “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.” at their kids rather than have the menstruation talk or risk any misinformation that may be online.

“No good writer should be ghettoized,” Oppenheimer says during a recent Zoom call with The Times. “If you’re a good writer, you shouldn’t be marketed just to girls or just to boys or just to white people or just to straight people. Good art should be for everyone.”

It is intrinsic and impossible not to parlay Blume’s stories of sibling rivalries, first loves, friends and frenemies, and (most famously) puberty with what was going on in your life when you read them. Books like “Deenie” and “Superfudge” and “Margaret” are also remarkably malleable enough so that, even if a kid picks them up decades after their release or cannot relate with a parallel experience, they can become placeholders and explainers for what must be going on in the minds of their classmates. Last year, TV creator Mara Brock Akil adapted “Forever,” Blume’s 1975 story of the kind of mutually shared devotion that feels like it will last eternally, into a miniseries set in 2018 Los Angeles.

“I think for many of us, Judy’s books are our first crush or our first love and they do hold a special place that no book we read in our world-weary, cynical 40s can hold,” says Oppenheimer.

Some of this can be attributed to time and brain space. Oppenheimer discovered Blume’s work when he was a child. He’s now a parent, with a career and all the other time-sucks that come with adulthood.

“The books I read as a child imprinted on me in a way that books today don’t,” he says. “I probably remember more plot points of the first Judy Blume books that I read than I do of any book I’ve read in the past five years.”

But what of Blume herself? Can America’s mom also be a three-dimensional person who makes her own mistakes? Discovering her four adult novels — especially “Wifey,” a book about a gilded-caged suburban housewife that even Oppenheimer describes as “a very salacious, one might say, smutty, adult novel” that even some of Blume’s collaborators wanted her to publish under a pseudonym — or watching documentaries about her like 2023’s “Judy Blume Forever,” in which she is seen joking about masturbation with employees at her Key West, Fla., bookstore, can seem as evasive and dangerous as reading your mom’s diary.

Author Mark Oppenheimer

(Lu Arie)

There have been other books about Blume and her work, most notably Rachelle Bergstein’s 2024 deep-dive “The Genius of Judy: How Judy Blume Rewrote Childhood for All of Us.” But Oppenheimer’s biography is a more straightforward tracing of Blume’s life and career. He starts with her childhood when she was encouraged to read Philip Roth at home and went to sleepovers at friends’ houses that were more about body awakenings. He discusses her stifling first marriage, which gave her the last name she carries with her to this day and her two children but is also where she hung her college diploma and another award over her washing machine as reminders of her intellect. There’s talk of her second marriage, which Blume has always been reluctant to discuss, as well as the two abortions that resulted from it. And there are details on her life with her third husband, the polymath George Cooper.

Oppenheimer relied on past news stories about Blume, as well as a collection of her work and professional correspondences that are archived at Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library and, probably most informatively, his own interviews with Blume and her friends and family. (Although Blume did agree to speak with Oppenheimer for his book, she declined our request to interview her for this story about that book).

“I think that the difficult subjects are sometimes the ones that make her more relatable,” Oppenheimer says of his subject. “I think most of her fans will find it interesting and admirable that she speaks so candidly about her abortions, about especially her divorce from her first husband, which came as she was getting involved in the [second-wave] women’s movement, about her early same-sex experiences, about masturbation as a girl; these are things we would expect Judy Blume to be candid about.”

Oppenheimer matches how these life events correspond with the ones of Blume’s characters because, for better or for worse, she almost always was an author who wrote what she knew even if her fandom transcended it. What her books lack in character diversity, they make up for in specificity. And that, in turn, also makes them relatable.

“Judy found incredibly compelling human drama in books about the New Jersey suburbs, and that’s a testament to her strength as an artist,” Oppenheimer says.

Writer Judy Blume at her nonprofit bookstore Books and Books on March 26, 2023, in Key West, Fla.

(Mary Martin / Associated Press)

Examining and reexamining Blume’s work as an adult also gave Oppenheimer a better perspective of her writing style. Blume didn’t begin to try to write professionally until she was a married mother of two and some have criticized her work for not being as flowery and polished as others’.

“All of her books tend to take a fairly tight focus on the characters,” Oppenheimer says. “They don’t tend to pull back and look at large societal forces or changes going on in the country or the world. And that’s fine. You know, the same could be said of Jane Austen.”

Perhaps the best example of this is Blume’s own religious foundation. Her most autobiographical novel, “Starring Sally J. Freedman as Herself,” has a protagonist who is paranoid that she sees Adolf Hitler on park benches and whose life is imprinted with stories of a relative who followed her mother into the concentration camps and the neighbors sitting shiva (a time of mourning) for their daughter who got pregnant with her non-Jewish boyfriend. And yet, Oppenheimer notes, Blume is not always immediately thought of as a Jewish writer. Nor have most of her readers been Jewish.

“I think that her Judaism is there, if you know where to look,” says Oppenheimer, who spends the early part of his biography looking at how the synagogue and religious community were a normal part of a young Blume’s life. He adds that “she is somebody who speaks really, really well across religious, cultural and racial differences, and that’s partly why she has sold tens of millions of books.”

Oppenheimer acknowledges that Blume’s characters may not be diverse enough by today’s standards; that they don’t usually discuss “gender identities or sexualities; children of multiracial backgrounds; children who have disabilities.” They can also feel like time capsules to other dimensions; his 12-year-old daughter was scandalized by how normative bullying was after she read “Blubber,” Blume’s 1974 novel about tween mean girls and body shaming.

He adds that some of today’s bestselling young adult novels, like Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson series about a teen demigod or Suzanne Collins’ dystopia-set “Hunger Games” books, are “contemporary realism [that] focus on extraordinary or unusual circumstances.” And while he’s happy for these books’ popularities, he says that some subjects may be better told by kids who also aren’t tasked with saving the world. (I am pretty sure I learned more about male puberty from Blume’s 1971 story “Then Again, Maybe I Won’t,” which is as much about wealth divides and questionable friend choices as it is about a 13-year-old boy’s inner monologues about her awkward adolescence).

“If what you’re looking for is realism that isn’t focused on obvious external differences, but rather on interiority,” Oppenheimer says, “then Judy Blume still remains one of the premier novelists that you would want to read.”

Friedlander is a pop culture and entertainment journalist based in Los Angeles who hates coffee but loves Coke Zero.

Naledi Raptou has joined Channel 4 soap Hollyoaks as Kathleen-Angel McQueen replacing actress Kiara Mellor

A Hollyoaks teenager is set to played by a new actress.

Naledi Raptou has joined the cast of the Channel 4 soap and has been already filming with Jorgie Porter and Danny Mac as she takes on the role of Kathleen-Angel McQueen, the daughter of Theresa McQueen and the late Calvin Valentine.

In the coming weeks, Theresa (Jorgie Porter) will find herself navigating the realities of raising a rapidly maturing teenager when her sixteen-year-old daughter Kathleen-Angel has unprotected sex with her Ant Hutchinson (Brook Debio).

Naledi’s first episode on Hollyoaks will air on Tuesday (March 17). Actress Kiara Mellor had previously played the role since 2021. Theresa also shares a daughter, Myra-Pocahontas, with now boyfriend Dodger Savage (Danny Mac).

Talking about joining Hollyoaks, Naledi said “I’m really grateful for the opportunity to join the cast of Hollyoaks, it’s a great place to work and a very nurturing environment to grow.

“It’s been a pleasure to play Kathleen-Angel as she develops into a young adult. We’re learning new things about her and I’m excited to be able to present a different side of her.”

Naledi has previously appeared in an episode of ITV’s Significant Other as Chloe in 2023.

Hollyoaks spoilers for next week reveal the Hutchinson teens decide to bunk off school for the day in upcoming scenes.

Kathleen-Angel decides to join them but she’s caught sneaking out by Dodger who ends up covering for her.

At the park, Kathleen-Angel tries to find out if Ant still likes classmate Trina (Sadie Williams) but berates him in the process and he leaves.

Back at the flat, Ant is playing computer games when Kathleen-Angel arrives. Tension rises between the teens when they both call out each other’s behaviour. Ant tells Kathleen-Angel to leave if he’s such an awful person but she refuses.

Uncle Dom Reilly (John Pickard), who is looking after the kids while Tony and Diane Hutchinson are in London seeking a second opinion following her cancer diagnosis, later learns the teens have bunked off school.

He finds Ant at home who claims he is unwell and admits Ro and Dee Dee are at the park. As Dom leaves, Kathleen-Angel emerges from the bedroom and it’s revealed the pair discover they have slept together.

The following day, In need of the morning after pill, Kathleen-Angel goes to text Dee Dee Hutchinson (Chloe Atkinson) for help but startled when Ant comes up behind her and she accidentally sends it Dodger.

Not wanting her mum to find out, Kathleen-Angel returns home and tries to delete the text from Dodger’s phone but he catches her and reveals he’s already read the text.

The teen pleads with him not to tell her mum and Dodger says he won’t because she must. Coming into the room, Theresa catches the end of the conversation.

Theresa is devastated to learn that her daughter has slept with someone and Kathleen-Angel pleads with her mum not to make a scene as she really likes Ant.

The mum is horrified to learn who her daughter slept with given his past behaviour but Dodger encourages Theresa to listen to her daughter.

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

For the latest showbiz, TV, movie and streaming news, go to the new **Everything Gossip** website.

REALITY TV star Paul Preece Jr who won the Netflix survival show Outlast has been charged with raping a child.

The 51-year-old was arrested in Tennessee on Friday and booked into Knox County Jail.

Jail records show Preece has also been charged with aggravated sexual battery and attempted rape of a child, The Daily Mail reports.

The age of the victim has not yet been released.

Preece is currently being held on a $150,000 bond and will be required to wear a GPS tracker upon release.

His arrest comes after a capias warrant was issued, according to TMZ.

The court-ordered warrant is typically used when a person fails to appear in court, violates bond conditions, or neglects to pay court-ordered fines or child support.

Preece rose to prominence after competing on the first season of Outlast in 2023.

The gruelling reality show sees a group of contestants trying to survive remote Alaskan terrain in punishing conditions for a chance at a $1 million prize.

Sixteen participants are dropped by parachute into the wilderness before being divided into teams.

Season one was filmed on the Neka River on Chichagof Island, while series two moved south of Petersburg to Little Duncan Bay.

Unlike many competition shows, contestants cannot compete alone.

Participants are allowed to switch teams throughout the competition.

The only way to leave the game is to quit.

Preece won the inaugural season alongside teammates Seth Lueker and Nick Radner.

Season two landed in the Global Top 10 in 22 countries.

Two Texas men, Drake Vliem II and Drew Haas, won the million-dollar pay-out in the second series.

The series was renewed for a third season in February 2025.

CHICAGO — A day after former presidents, sitting governors and local Chicago residents alike attended a vibrant, televised celebration for the late Rev. Jesse Jackson Sr., the family and friends who knew him best hosted a more intimate gathering Saturday to grieve the civil rights leader at his organization’s headquarters.

The final memorial service at the Rainbow PUSH Coalition’s headquarters on the South Side of Chicago included a few hundred attendees, most of whom were family members, allies and confidants. The event served as a capstone to a week of services and a call to action.

In a series of speeches, the late reverend’s children, civil rights leaders and two presidents of African nations said the best way to honor Jackson’s legacy is to continue his advocacy for universal human rights and economic justice.

“It is appropriate that we respect this season of grief,” said Yusef Jackson, one of Jackson’s sons and president of the Rainbow PUSH Coalition. “However, it is also appropriate to honor him by stepping up, to step out, and continue his work by answering his call to serve.”

The younger Jackson said that the Rainbow PUSH Coalition recently honored Jackson by deepening partnerships with activists in Minnesota, which saw mass protests after the Trump administration launched a massive immigration crackdown in the state.

U.S. Rep. Jonathan Jackson, an Illinois Democrat and a son of the late reverend, said his father taught him “that any society that will not support the many who are poor will never be able to save the few who are rich.” He said that his father’s relentless activism and charisma were rooted in a Christian call to service.

“For the children on the reservations, in the barrios, in the ghettos, he was speaking to you,” said the congressman. “My father was attacked for speaking about diversity. He was vilified for his stand on equality, and had the people who wanted to kill him had their way, we would have never seen a rainbow coalition.”

Marc Morial, president of the National Urban League, said that ambitious politicians should emulate the political strategy Jackson championed during his two presidential bids.

“Let the word go out that anyone who would like to be president of the United States in 2028, you’d better study this concept of the rainbow coalition,” Morial said.

Public visitors greet family, world leaders

In a move meant to reflect Jackson’s ethos, some members of the public who gathered outside the PUSH headquarters were allowed to enter the private service.

“Dad’s theology was rooted in the belief that every human being carries inherent worth,” said Ashley Jackson, the late reverend’s youngest daughter. “He fought for that truth in places that most people never saw, people whose names never made the news across decades and continents and causes.”

The service included musical performances by Stevie Wonder, Opal Staples, Terisa Griffin, Kim Burrell and others. Comedian Chris Tucker added some levity to the solemn services with a stand-up set.

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa thanked the late reverend for his work to end South Africa’s apartheid system. Jackson was a close friend of Nelson Mandela, South Africa’s iconic anti-apartheid leader and its first Black president.

“He told the world that the struggle for dignity in the United States was inseparable from the fight against apartheid and injustice in South Africa,” said Ramaphosa, who said his nation claimed the late civil rights leader as one of their own.

“When Jesse Jackson reminded the United States that its strength as a nation lies not in exclusion, but in the beautiful diversity of its people — Black and white, rich and poor, urban and rural, workers and farmers, immigrants and the forgotten — we were hugely inspired by his message,” said Ramaphosa, who was a key negotiator in the process to the end the apartheid system.

Felix Tshisekedi, president of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, praised Jackson as a peacemaker and humanitarian.

“Your mourning is also ours. You have lost a father, a husband, a brother. The world has lost a pastor, a champion, a mender of bridges. Africa has lost a faithful, loving son,” Tshisekedi said.

Since his death last month, Jackson’s family and allies have honored the late reverend with commemorations, community service and demonstrations in an effort to continue his work.

Mourners first honored Jackson as he lay in repose in Chicago last month. The late reverend then lay in state at the South Carolina Capitol. Jackson grew up in segregated Greenville, S.C. As a high schooler, he led fellow students into a protest that desegregated a local library, starting a lifetime of civil rights leadership.

Services honoring Jackson in Washington were postponed after a request for him to lie in honor at the U.S. Capitol was denied. House Republican leadership cited the precedent that only former presidents and senior generals typically receive the privilege.

Jackson’s allies have emphasized the forcefulness of his message and convictions.

“He maintained an intense relationship with the political order, not because presidents were white or Black, but the demands of our message — the demands of speaking to the least of these, those who were disinherited, the dispossessed, the disrespected — demanded not Democratic or Republican solutions, but demanded a consistent, prophetic voice,” said Jesse Jackson Jr., the reverend’s eldest son and a former congressman seeking to win back his seat in this year’s elections.

Fraternity brothers

Jackson’s mentees also organized efforts to continue his civil rights activism.

“We’re in a global moment where peace in the world is in jeopardy, where we just have bombs being dropped carelessly, killing children, innocent victims of political actions,” said the Rev. Janette Wilson, a longtime senior advisor to Jackson and executive director at the Rainbow PUSH Coalition. “When the government cuts SNAP benefits and you have millions of children and families who will be food insecure, I think you have to tell them that we’re fighting for you.”

On Thursday, the headquarters hosted a series of events that celebrated Jackson’s life, including a memorial service for several hundred members of Omega Psi Phi Fraternity Inc., of which Jackson was a member. That same night, the chamber hosted a reunion for Rainbow PUSH alumni to commemorate Jackson and his years of activism.

They celebrated Jackson’s life and reminisced about his 1984 and 1988 presidential bids, his globe-trotting activism as an anti-apartheid activist and hostage negotiator, and his evangelism for a Christianity that emphasized justice for all and support for the downtrodden.

Jackson family expected at voting rights march

On Sunday, members of the Jackson family and many of Jackson’s mentees will travel to Selma, Ala., to commemorate the “Bloody Sunday” protest marches when civil rights activists were beaten by police on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in 1965.

The Rev. Jackson often attended the same anniversary march.

“Selma has always stood for the basics of what civil rights is, what we are debating in policy,” said Jimmy Coleman, a longtime aide to Jackson and native of Selma. “He was always focused on what we needed in terms of policy in any given political moment, and that’s what the march represents.”

Brown writes for the Associated Press.

Four siblings who were part of Michael Jackson’s secret “second family” have filed a lawsuit revealing the depths of the alleged sexual abuse they suffered as children, including claims that the singer molested one of the boys at the homes of Elton John and Elizabeth Taylor.

The lawsuit, filed against Jackson’s estate in California’s Central District Court on Friday, accuses the late singer of grooming, drugging, raping and sexually assaulting four of the Cascio children — Edward, Dominic, Marie-Nicole and Aldo — over the course of more than a decade, beginning when some of them were as young as 7. A fifth sibling, Frank Cascio, is not a plaintiff in the lawsuit.

The pop icon used code phrases such as “Can I have a meeting,” “Yogi Tea,” “Neverland,” and “Go to Disneyland” to encourage the children to engage in “extreme sex acts” with him, the suit alleges. He plied them with wine — “Jesus Juice” — and hard liquor — “Disney Juice “ — and used drugs to make them more compliant, according to the lawsuit.

The “Thriller” singer’s connection to the Cascio family began in the 1980s when he met their father, Dominic Cascio Sr., at a luxury hotel in New York where the father worked.

The lawsuit accuses Jackson of “insinuating himself” into the Cascio family by using “obsessive attention, lavish gifts, access to his celebrity lifestyle, and declarations that he loved and needed each of them.” He invited them to travel around the world with him and celebrated Thanksgiving, Christmas and his own birthday with them. He often spent long periods of time at their New Jersey home, where he also brought his own children, according to the complaint.

The chart-topping artist is accused of raping and molesting Edward “Eddie” Cascio at Elizabeth Taylor’s house in Switzerland as well as at Elton John’s home in the United Kingdom. Representatives for Jackson’s estate, Taylor’s estate and John did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The complaint alleges that the late singer abused the four siblings at international and national tour stops as well as at his Santa Barbara County estate, Neverland Ranch. That property became a central focus of the 2019 documentary “Leaving Neverland,” in which two of Jackson’s accusers, Wade Robson and James Safechuck, detail the abuse they suffered as children.

The complaint states that Jackson’s staff would help conceal and normalize his abuse of the Cascios; employees would deliberately book the parents hotel rooms away from their children, the suit says, so they could not tell how much time Jackson was spending with them.

The entertainer showed the siblings pornography and photos of naked children to desensitize them, the complaint alleges. He told them that his life, their lives and that of their family members would be destroyed if people knew what was going on.

“He told them to stay away from therapists and to avoid women, who he told them were ‘evil,’ ‘sneaky,’ ‘liars,’ and could ‘smell’ if something sexual had happened,” the complaint states.

For decades after the initial 1993 sexual assault claim against Jackson surfaced, the Cascio family did not speak up against the singer.

The performer convinced the parents to withdraw Aldo Cascio and Marie-Nicole Cascio from school on two occasions to “prevent disclosure of the abuse and gain more access to them,” the complaint alleges. The second time was shortly after authorities raided Neverland Ranch in 2003.

The Cascios’ longtime relationship with the superstar became known to the public when they appeared on Oprah in 2010.

During the appearance, they were billed as Jackson’s secret “second family” and said that they were reluctant to come forward but wanted to “show the world who Michael really was.” At the time, the family said that the siblings were never abused and that they didn’t believe the accusations against Jackson.

As the four siblings aged and exposés such as “Leaving Neverland” came out, their statements about their childhood relationship with the pop star shifted. In 2019, several members of the Cascio family entered a confidential settlement agreement with Jackson’s estate agreeing to remain silent about their relationship to the singer.

That agreement provided for Jackson’s estate to pay each sibling five annual payments of about $690,000 as compensation “for the many years that Jackson abused each of them and that the Jackson Organization enabled and covered up the abuse,” according to the complaint. The Cascios say that this amount is “wholly inadequate,” noting that the singer reportedly paid $25 million in 1994 to settle the abuse allegations made against him in 1993.

Now, the four siblings are challenging the agreement as part of their recently filed lawsuit, alleging that they were coerced into signing it without understanding their rights.

“Buried within the Document’s legalese was a purported release of the Estate from liability for Jackson’s crimes, and language that prohibited Plaintiffs from reporting Jackson’s crimes to law enforcement or anyone saying anything negative about Jackson, or holding the Estate accountable in court for its and Jackson’s wrongdoing,” the complaint alleges.

Marty Singer, an attorney for Jackson’s estate, decried the lawsuit as “a desperate money grab” in a statement to People. A representative for Singer did not immediately respond to The Times’ request for comment.

“The family staunchly defended Michael Jackson for more than 25 years, attesting to his innocence of inappropriate conduct,” Singer told People. “This new court filing is a transparent forum-shopping tactic in their scheme to obtain hundreds of millions of dollars from Michael’s estate and companies.”

The four Cascio siblings are asking a jury to award them financial damages — including some potentially tripled damages because they were abused as children — over their allegations of sexual abuse and cover-up. They are also asking the court to throw out the 2019 agreement they say was used to silence them and are also seeking a ruling that the estate cannot force their claims into private arbitration.

WASHINGTON  — The Supreme Court revived a San Diego judge’s order Monday and said parents have a right to know about their child’s gender identity at school.

The decision came in a 6-3 order granting an emergency appeal from lawyers for Chicago-based Thomas More Society.

They said the student privacy policy enforced in California infringes parents’ rights and the free exercise of religion.

“The parents object that these policies prevent schools from telling them about their children’s efforts to engage in gender transitioning at school unless the children consent to parental notification,” the court said. “The parents also take issue with California’s requirement that schools use children’s preferred names and pronouns regardless of their parents’ wishes.”

The judge’s injunction “does not provide relief for all the parents of California public school students, but only for those parents who object to the challenged policies or seek religious exemptions,” the justices added.

The six conservatives were in the majority, while the three liberals dissented.

Religious liberty advocates hailed the decision.

“Parents’ fundamental right to raise their children according to their faith doesn’t stop at the schoolhouse door,” said Mark Rienzi, president of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty. “California tried cutting parents out of their children’s lives while forcing teachers to hide the school’s behavior from parents. We’re glad the Court stepped in to block this anti-family, anti-American policy.”

The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals had put on hold a late December ruling by U.S. District Judge Roger Benitez, who held that the student privacy rules enforced by California school officials were unconstitutional.

“Parents and guardians have a federal constitutional right to be informed if their public school student child expresses gender incongruence,” Benitez wrote. “Teachers and school staff have a federal constitutional right to accurately inform the parent or guardian of their student when the student expresses gender incongruence.”

Escondido public schoolteachers Elizabeth Mirabelli and Lori Ann West, who described themselves as “devout Catholics,” sued in 2023, and they were later joined by parents in Pasadena and Clovis.

The Supreme Court’s ruling refers only to the parents.

The parents who brought the case “have sincere religious beliefs about sex and gender, and they feel a religious obligation to raise their children in accordance with those beliefs,” the court said.

The court added: “Gender dysphoria is a condition that has an important bearing on a child’s mental health, but when a child exhibits symptoms of gender dysphoria at school, California’s policies conceal that information from parents and facilitate a degree of gender transitioning during school hours.”

“This is a watershed moment for parental rights in America,” said Paul M. Jonna, special counsel at Thomas More Society. “The Supreme Court has told California and every state in the nation in no uncertain terms: you cannot secretly transition a child behind a parent’s back.”

The 9th Circuit had agreed with the state’s attorneys who said the judge had misstated California law.

“The state does not categorically forbid disclosure of information about students’ gender identities to parents without student consent,” they said in a 3-0 decision.

“For example, guidance from the California Attorney General expressly states that schools can ‘allow disclosure where a student does not consent where there is a compelling need to do so to protect the student’s wellbeing,’ and California Education Code allows disclosure to avert a clear danger to the well-being of a child.”

In their parents’ rights appeal to the Supreme Court, attorneys said school employees are secretly encouraging gender transitions.

“California is requiring public schools to hide children’s expressed transgender status at school from their own parents — including religious parents — and to actively facilitate those children’s social transitions over their parents’ express objection,” they told the court.

“Right now, California’s parental deception scheme is keeping families in the dark and causing irreparable harm. That’s why we’re asking the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene immediately,” Jonna wrote in his appeal. “Every day these gender secrecy policies stay in effect, children suffer and parents are left in the dark.”

California state attorneys had urged the court to put the case on hold while it is under appeal.

They said the judge’s order “appears to categorically bar schools across the State from ever respecting a student’s desire for privacy about their gender identity or expression — or respecting a student’s request to be addressed by a particular name or pronouns—over a parent’s objection.”

They said the order “would allow no exceptions, even for extreme cases where students or teachers reasonably fear that the student will suffer physical or mental abuse.”

LAREDO, Texas — A month after ICE agents sent the young Ecuadoran mother and her 7-year-old daughter to a sprawling detention center 1,300 miles from their Minnesota home, they were finally free.

But when the bus pulled up to a migrant shelter in the Texas border city of Laredo, dropping off a half-dozen families lugging bags stuffed with belongings, the stress of recent weeks tracked mother and daughter like the long shadows on that mid-February afternoon.

Night after night inside south Texas’ Dilley Immigration Processing Center with hundreds of other families, the grade-schooler wept and pleaded to know why they were being held.

“She would tell me, ‘Mom, what crime did I commit to be a prisoner?’ I didn’t know what to tell her,” said the 29-year-old, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear being identified could negatively affect their immigration case. Her husband was deported to Ecuador soon after they were taken into custody.

Many Americans were alarmed last month when photos circulated showing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in Minneapolis detaining a 5-year-old boy wearing a bunny hat and carrying a Spider-Man backpack. The concern followed Liam Conejo Ramos and his father when they were sent to Dilley, surrounded by chain-link fences on a dusty plain about 75 miles south of San Antonio.

But Liam was hardly an outlier. ICE has been holding hundreds of children at Dilley — many for months.

“We are all Liam,” Christian Hinojosa, an immigrant from Mexico, said by phone from Dilley, where she and her 13-year-old son were held for more than four months. They were released this month and allowed to return home to San Antonio, where she works as a health aide.

She noted that Liam and his father were released from Dilley after 10 days, after members of Congress and a judge intervened.

“My son says, ‘That’s unfair, Mama. What’s the difference between him and us?’”

Ramping up family detentions

When the Obama administration opened Dilley in 2014, nearly all families detained there had recently crossed the border from Mexico. Detentions at the facility were scaled back by the Biden administration in 2021, before it was closed three years later.

Since being reopened by President Trump’s administration last spring, life inside Dilley — a compound of trailers and other prefabricated buildings — has been shaped by three decisive changes.

The number of detained families has risen sharply since last fall. The government is holding many children well beyond the 20-day limit set by long-standing court order. And many detainees have lived in the U.S. for several years, with roots in neighborhoods, workplaces and schools, according to lawyers and other observers.

“Just imagine that you’re a child and you’re taken out of your surroundings,” said Philip Schrag, a Georgetown University law professor and author of “Baby Jails: The Fight to End the Incarceration of Refugee Children in America.”

Suddenly you’re in “a completely strange environment with the doors locked and guards in uniform roaming around,” said Schrag, who counseled Dilley detainees as a volunteer lawyer during the Obama administration.

ICE booked more than 3,800 children into detention during the first nine months of the new Trump administration, according to an Associated Press analysis of data from UC Berkeley’s Deportation Data Project. On an average day, more than 220 children were held, with most of those detained longer than 24 hours sent to Dilley. More than half of Dilley detainees during that period were children.

Nearly two-thirds of children detained by ICE were eventually deported, and almost 1 in 10 left the country when their parents accepted voluntary departure, according to an AP analysis of the latest comprehensive data. About a quarter were released in the U.S., requiring their parents to check in regularly with ICE as their legal cases proceed.

The number of detainees at Dilley has risen sharply since the period covered by the data, nearly tripling between fall and late January to more than 1,300, according to Relevant Research, which analyzes immigration enforcement data.

“We’ve started to use 100 days as a benchmark for prioritizing cases because so many children are exceeding 20 days,” said Leecia Welch, the chief legal director at Children’s Rights, who visits Dilley regularly to ensure compliance. In a visit this month, Welch said she counted more than 30 children who had been held for over 100 days.

The increased detention of children comes as the Trump administration has gutted a Department of Homeland Security office responsible for oversight of conditions inside Dilley and other facilities.

“It’s a particular concern that family detention is being increased,” said Dr. Pamela McPherson, a child and adolescent psychiatrist contracted by Homeland Security from 2014 until last year to inspect and investigate conditions at Dilley and other ICE facilities holding children. “Just who’s providing that check and balance now?”

Rep. Tony Gonzales (R-Texas), who represents the congressional district where Dilley is located, said multiple visits have convinced him criticism of the center is unfair.

He said he’d been impressed by Dilley’s facilities and the professionalism and dedication of staff. “They’re not doing policy. They’re just fulfilling a duty,” Gonzales said.

The Homeland Security Department did not respond to detailed questions about Dilley submitted by the AP. But both Homeland Security and ICE objected to allegations of poor care and conditions there.

“The Dilley facility is a family residential center designed specifically to house family units in a safe, structured and appropriate environment,” ICE Director Todd M. Lyons said in a statement this week. Services include medical screenings, infant care packages and classrooms and recreational spaces, he noted.

But concerns about Dilley are personal for Kheilin Valero Marcano, a Venezuelan immigrant detained with her husband and 1-year-old daughter, Amalia, in December and held for nearly two months.

When the child got a high fever, Valero Marcano said Dilley staff told her it was just a virus. Two weeks later, Amalia started vomiting, then losing weight. Valero Marcano said she took her to the Dilley doctor’s office at least eight times, and was offered only Tylenol and ibuprofen.

The baby was eventually sent to two hospitals, where doctors diagnosed COVID-19, bronchitis, pneumonia and stomach virus, she said.

ICE disputed Valero Marcano’s account, saying in a statement the baby “immediately received proper medical care” at Dilley before being sent to the hospital. Back in Dilley, “she was in the medical unit and received proper treatment and prescribed medicines,” it said.

The family’s return to Dilley coincided with a measles outbreak there. They were released earlier this month after their lawyers petitioned the court.

“I’m so worried for all the families who are still inside,” Valero Marcano said.

A teen in distress

After more than two months in a cramped room at Dilley with three other families, the 13-year-old girl’s depression turned increasingly dark.

The eighth-grader stopped eating after finding a worm in her food, family members said. Staff sometimes withheld medications she’d long been prescribed to keep her anxiety in check and help her sleep.

When a total lockdown was imposed, a guard blocked the teen from leaving the crowded room to join her mother and sister in the bathroom. She spiraled into crisis, and used a plastic knife from the cafeteria to cut her wrist.

“She said she didn’t want to live anymore because she preferred to die rather than having to keep living in confinement,” her mother, Andrea Armero, told the AP in a video call from Colombia, where the family was deported this month. The AP generally avoids identifying people who attempt or die by suicide.

The girl’s struggles began before she arrived at Dilley. Soon after starting middle school in Colombia, she learned a family member had sexually abused her younger sister. Armero said she saw no option but to leave, and in early 2024 she and her daughters traveled to the U.S.-Mexico border and applied for asylum.

Living with family in Florida, the 13-year-old was doing well in school but sometimes experienced panic attacks about being sent back to Colombia. Under a psychiatrist’s care, she was prescribed anti-anxiety and anti-depression medications and regularly saw a therapist. Then, in December, ICE agents detained Armero and her daughters during a routine check-in.

At Dilley, the 13-year-old calmed herself by drawing, producing haunting pictures of a girl locked inside gates. But when she and other detainees took part in a protest after 5-year-old Liam and his father got to Dilley, guards took away drawing materials and ordered everyone to stay inside.

The teen’s mental health collapsed. She tried to harm herself with the plastic knife, Armero said, and repeatedly hit her head. The family was put into isolation without seeing a doctor, then deported to Colombia on Feb. 11 after a judge ordered them removed, she said.

Dilley discharge documents described “active problems,” including a “suicide attempt by cutting of wrist” and “self-harm,” in addition to a “history of post-traumatic stress disorder” and “history of anxiety.” AP also spoke with detainees and attorneys who independently described the girl’s suicide attempt.

Responding to questions from AP, a Department of Homeland Security official acknowledged there had been “a case of self-harm” inside the facility, but did not specify what had happened, or how staff handled the incident. When AP asked for details, the department did not respond to follow-up questions.

“No child at Dilley … has been denied medical treatment or experienced a delayed medical assessment,” said Ryan Gustin, a spokesman for CoreCivic, the for-profit prison company that operates the facility under contract with ICE. Gustin declined to answer specific questions about the 13-year-old girl, citing privacy rules.

Detention weighs on children

On a phone call from inside Dilley, 13-year-old Gustavo Santino-Josa introduced himself to a reporter by name and the nine-digit identification number ICE assigned him when he was taken into custody with his mother.

“Until today I don’t know what we did wrong to get detained,” Gustavo said. “I’ve seen my mom cry almost daily, and I ask God that we can go out and go home soon.”

He worried they might never be released.

“My mom says that as long as there is hope it is worth fighting for,” Gustavo said before handing the phone to his mother, Christian Hinojosa, the healthcare aide originally from Mexico.

“All his friends have left already,” his mother said. “Some were deported. Some got released recently. And it hurts. It hurts to see people leaving and you’re staying here.”

Dilley was built to hold 2,400 people, housed in clusters ICE calls “neighborhoods.” Bunk beds are arranged side-by-side for up to four families, frequently putting parents with young children in close quarters.

Once in full operation, Dilley is expected to generate about $180 million in annual revenue for CoreCivic, according to the company’s recent filing with securities regulators.

In a video on its website, CoreCivic says Dilley’s “open campus layout allows residents to move freely and unescorted throughout the day.”

It does not mention that parents and their children are locked inside.

In response to questions from the AP, CoreCivic’s Gustin said the staff at Dilley includes a pediatrician, pediatric nurse practitioner and other trained medical professionals and mental health services workers to “meet the needs of children and families in our care.”

In talks with parents of children held at Dilley, however, the same problems come up repeatedly, said Welch, the children’s rights lawyer.

Kids cry often and don’t get enough sleep, in part because lights are on around the clock, she said. The water tastes terrible and causes stomachaches and rashes, so some families stick to what they can buy in the commissary.

Their children don’t eat enough and have lost weight, Welch said. There are classrooms, but instruction is limited to an hour daily, mostly filling out worksheets.

A 14-year-old girl, identified in court papers by the initials NVSM, reported there were tensions with up to 12 people sharing their room. At night when she and her mother tried to sleep, others insisted on turning up the TV.

“I feel very sad and stressed to be here,” the teen said in an account filed with the court that oversees a binding settlement governing detention and release of children. “My nerves are so high. I don’t know what is happening. My muscles will twitch because I’m so nervous and on edge.”

Concerns about oversight

As the government’s detention of parents and their children came under scrutiny in 2014, an ICE official claimed that family detention centers, equipped with basketball courts and medical clinics, were “more like a summer camp.”

The characterization irritated McPherson, the child psychiatrist who, along with another physician, was retained in 2014 by Homeland Security to inspect family detention centers. Their contracts were not renewed by the Trump administration last year after Homeland Security announced sweeping staff reductions.

“Having a clean place to sleep, having food, that’s not the same thing as having family and community,” McPherson said.

The doctors’ investigations of family detention centers exposed consistently inadequate staffing and disregard by administrators for the trauma caused by detention, concerns they reported in 2018 to a Senate caucus set up to hear from whistleblowers.

At Dilley, the doctors noted a persistent shortage of pediatricians and the inability to hire a child psychiatrist from the time they began their inspections until they alerted senators.

Employees unsure how to deal with 2-year-olds biting and hitting one another placed the children and their parents in medical isolation for days, McPherson and her colleague told senators. Without supervision, a nurse at Dilley gave adult-strength hepatitis A shots to about 250 children in 2015, the American Immigration Lawyers Assn. reported.

Homeland Security responded to many of the findings by making changes before a special committee recommended in late 2016 that the government discontinue family detention except in rare cases. The first Trump administration increased family detention before the Biden administration began phasing it out in 2021.

That the Trump administration is again holding families at Dilley after so many warnings feels “dystopian,” McPherson said.

“The decision to knowingly traumatize children and subject them to chronic stress, I just have no words for it,” she said.

Worries even after release

Huddled around picnic tables at the Laredo migrant shelter, parents released from Dilley searched anxiously for flights back to the homes they left behind. They called relatives, friends, teachers, anyone who might help with money to get there.

The young Ecuadoran mom talked of returning to Minneapolis, where her 2-year-old daughter, born in the U.S., was staying with a friend. With her husband deported, parenting will be entirely her responsibility.

That means getting her 7-year-old back in school. Then the woman, who had a work permit and a job in a Minneapolis restaurant before being detained, needs to keep her children fed.

“Let’s go home, Mom, but don’t go back to work because ICE is going to pick you up again,” the little girl said. Her mother tried to reassure her.

That won’t happen, she said, because now they have a special paper telling ICE to leave them alone.

She hopes that’s a promise she can keep.

Burke, Geller and Gonzalez write for the Associated Press. AP data reporter Aaron Kessler in Washington contributed to this report.

Today it’s an Italianate apartment building wedged between an Indian restaurant and a Target. But what stood half a century ago at 1454 5th Street in downtown Santa Monica was the Beach Boys’ Brother Studio, a former porn theater turned recording complex where the preeminent American rock band of the 1960s sought to coax its resident genius, Brian Wilson, back into the fold after a long stretch in the wilderness.

Nobody would consider the albums the Beach Boys made at Brother in the mid-70s — among them “15 Big Ones,” “The Beach Boys Love You” and the long-shelved “Adult/Child” — the band’s most successful. (Well, nobody except for Wilson, who frequently cited the synthed-up “Love You” as his fave.) A decade after 1966’s “Pet Sounds,” which so blew the Beatles away that they had to answer with “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” the burly, bearded Beach Boys were far from the center of pop music; Wilson, in particular, had largely withdrawn from public life as he struggled with the effects of drugs and his fragile mental health.

Yet Brother offered the setting for a creative reflowering — arguably the band’s final moment of unity before the start of years of more serious infighting.

“It was like we all got back together and became Beach Boys again,” says Al Jardine, who founded the group in suburban Hawthorne in 1961 with Wilson, Wilson’s brothers Dennis and Carl and the Wilsons’ cousin Mike Love. Now, eight months after Brian Wilson’s death in June at age 82, a new box set looks back at the era as an expressive outpouring led by the band’s rejuvenated visionary.

“We Gotta Groove: The Brother Studio Years” collects 73 tracks from 1976 and ’77, including outtakes, demos, a remastered version of the “Love You” LP and the first official release of the widely bootlegged “Adult/Child,” which puts Wilson’s touchingly emotive singing amid orchestral arrangements in a glossy big-band style. Among the set’s highlights are a voice-and-piano rendition of “Still I Dream of It,” which, according to legend, Wilson wrote in the hopes that Frank Sinatra would perform it, and a majestic take on “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling” that shows how brilliant a record-maker Wilson remained despite all the well-documented turmoil.

“Brian was healing from his personal life, and he was ready to go in the studio again,” says Jardine, 83, whose latest tour with the members of Wilson’s road band will stop Friday night at L.A.’s United Theater on Broadway for a complete performance of “The Beach Boys Love You.” With quirky but heartfelt tunes about Wilson’s daughter Carnie (“I Wanna Pick You Up”) and Johnny Carson (uh, “Johnny Carson”) — not to mention the propulsive “Honkin’ Down the Highway,” on which Jardine sang lead — “Love You” has become something of a cult classic among Wilsonologists.

Says Jardine of the LP: “Brian’s spirit — his songwriting soul — is really strong on that one.”

The Beach Boys opened Brother Studio around 1974 near the corner of 5th Street and Broadway, just a few blocks from the beach. They’d traveled to the Netherlands to record their most recent album, “Holland”; before that, they cut several records at Wilson’s home on Bellagio Road in Bel-Air, though the group’s erstwhile mastermind spent as much time upstairs in his bedroom as he did recording music with his bandmates.

Wilson’s retreat after the flameout of his notoriously ambitious “Smile” project made space for the other Beach Boys to shape the band’s music, as on 1970’s fondly remembered “Sunflower.” But the lack of hits eventually took its toll: With a laugh, Love, 84, says one reason they started up Brother was that Wilson’s wife, Marilyn, eventually “threw in the towel after years of having her house flooded with people” to less-than-spectacular returns. “It was sort of like a self-preservation thing,” he adds.

The Beach Boys backstage at New York’s Central Park in 1977.

(Richard E. Aaron / Redferns)

In “We Gotta Groove’s” liner notes, engineer Stephen Moffitt, who designed Brother after working earlier at L.A.’s Village Recorders, recalls clearing out “all the porn crap” from the building and installing a circular stained-glass window to establish the right vibe. A vintage magazine ad boasts of the studio’s high-end gear as well as its “large screen video lounge” and “a playroom with pong, pinball and bumper pool.”

“It was a respite,” Love says. “A place to go and be creative.”

Just as the band was getting Brother up and running, the Beach Boys scored an unexpected smash with 1974’s “Endless Summer,” a double-LP compilation of the group’s early material — “Surfin’ Safari,” “Don’t Worry Baby,” “California Girls” — that topped the Billboard album chart on its way to sales of more than 3 million copies. A similar hits collection issued in the U.K., “20 Golden Greats,” did just as well there. “An enormous success,” says Love. “One in every five families had it.”

Suddenly, having more or less ignored group-minded efforts like “Holland” and “Carl and the Passions — ‘So Tough,’ ” the world remembered what it loved about the Beach Boys, and that was songs written and produced by Brian Wilson.

The band got to work at Brother recording “15 Big Ones,” which featured a mix of Wilson originals and covers of oldies like “Chapel of Love” and “Blueberry Hill.” The first Beach Boys album since “Pet Sounds” to carry a solo production credit for Wilson, it came accompanied by an aggressive marketing campaign known as “Brian Is Back!”; Wilson appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone — “The Healing of Brother Brian,” the cover line read — and took part in a Beach Boys television special that showed his return to the concert stage at Anaheim Stadium.

Earle Mankey, an engineer at Brother in the mid-70s, says “15 Big Ones” was less Wilson’s attempt to relight the flame than it was “everyone else’s attempt to relight the flame.” He recalls Wilson looking like a “scared rabbit” when he walked into the studio to find some of the session musicians who’d worked with the Beach Boys back in the old days. (This was the time of Wilson’s first dalliance with the psychologist Eugene Landy, who would reenter Wilson’s life to much controversy in the early ’80s.)

Fans watch the Beach Boys perform at Anaheim Stadium on July 3, 1976.

(Tony Korody / Sygma via Getty Images)

Even Love admits that “Brian Is Back!” was a little overblown. “Brian was back to some degree,” Love says now. “One hundred percent? Perhaps not.”

Yet the campaign worked: “15 Big Ones” went to No. 8 on the Billboard 200 — the highest for a Beach Boys studio album in more than a decade — while the LP spun off the band’s first Top 5 single since “Good Vibrations” with a rendition of Chuck Berry’s “Roll and Roll Music.”

More important, the commercial success set up Wilson for a true artistic comeback with “The Beach Boys Love You,” which can still startle you with the purity of its emotion and the strange textures of Wilson’s production. Check out the beautifully lopsided groove of “Mona,” which Dennis sings with a bleary smoker’s rasp, or the lonely-sounding electric-guitar lick floating over the Wilson brothers’ harmonies in “The Night Was So Young”; listen to Brian and Marilyn trading marital assurances in their almost painfully guileless duet, “Let’s Put Our Hearts Together.”

“Of all Brian’s stuff, I’d say it’s his most personal album after ‘Pet Sounds,’ ” says Darian Sahanaja, who played with Wilson for the last couple of decades of his life. “Maybe even more than ‘Pet Sounds,’ because Tony Asher wrote most of the lyrics on ‘Pet Sounds’ and Brian wrote most of the lyrics on ‘Love You.’ The Brian that I knew is very much living and breathing in these songs.”

Unlike “15 Big Ones,” “Love You” was not a hit, peaking at No. 53 — even lower than “Holland.” As much as he adores the album, Sahanaja finds it amusing that anyone in the Beach Boys’ camp might have expected Wilson to try to give rock fans what they wanted.

“He wasn’t listening to the Top 40 at the time,” he says. “He just wrote whatever came out of him. There was no, ‘I wonder what Fleetwood Mac’s up to…’ ”

Indeed, Wilson went even further out with “Adult/Child,” for which he commissioned orchestral arrangements by Dick Reynolds, who’d worked in the ’50s with Wilson’s beloved Four Freshmen. Both Love and Jardine say they can’t quite remember why the album didn’t come out; Love says “it may not have suited the record company at the time” and points out that even “Pet Sounds” got the group’s A&R rep wondering “if maybe we could do something more like ‘I Get Around.’ ”

Whatever the case, “Adult/Child’s” mothballing led to another withdrawal by Wilson, who had far less to do with the band’s next few records and who eventually turned to a solo career. In 2012, Wilson produced a so-so Beach Boys reunion record — minus Dennis, who died in 1983, and Carl, who died in 1998 — but for much of the ’00s he and Jardine toured under Wilson’s name while Love toured as the Beach Boys. (Love’s band will play three shows at the Hollywood Bowl in July.)

Asked what it’s been like performing with Wilson’s band since his death, Jardine says, “I just feel like he’s still around.” Sahanaja says he’s seen Jardine tear up as they’ve been working up songs from “Love You” on the road ahead of Friday’s show. But he’s also been gratified to see the excitement among younger fans regarding what he views as the Beach Boys’ last great album.

“The reaction has been more insane than I’ve ever seen for any of the shows we ever did with Brian,” he says. “It’s like they feel they found this secret thing that they really identify with.” He laughs. “I’m telling you, these kids are freaking out — jumping up and down, singing along to all the words. They’re, like, pogo-ing.”

Lauren Chapin, the former child actor best known for portraying Kathleen Anderson in the 1950s series “Father Knows Best,” has died. She was 80.

The actor’s son, Matthew Chapin, announced on Facebook that his mother succumbed to her “long hard fought battle” with cancer after five years. He did not disclose additional details about her death or her condition. He said in his post he is “at a complete loss for words right now.”

“Please keep my sister and family in your thoughts and prayers as we go through this incredibly tough time,” Matthew Chapin added.

Lauren Chapin, a Los Angeles native born on May 23, 1945, began her screen career in the 1950s with a minor role in 1954’s “A Star Is Born” starring Judy Garland and James Mason, appearances in TV including the anthology series “Lux Video Theatre” and the family sitcom “Father Knows Best.”

“Father Knows Best” aired from 1954 to 1960 — bouncing between networks CBS and NBC — and starred Robert Young as the patriarch of the middle-class Anderson family. Chapin’s Kathleen, also “Kathy” and nicknamed “Kitten,” was the youngest of Jim Anderson Sr. (Young) and Margaret Anderson‘s (Jane Wyatt) three children. Her screen siblings were played by Elinor Donahue and Billy Gray.

The Emmy-winning sitcom, which ran for more than 200 episodes over six seasons, comprised the bulk of Chapin’s screen career. Chapin followed up her time on “Father Knows Best” with a single appearance on “General Electric Theater,” and nearly two decades later a role in 1976’s “The Amorous Adventures of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza” and two “Father Knows Best” reunion specials. In 1980, she appeared alongside Gary Coleman in the film “Scout’s Honor.”

She would not return to the screen until the late 2010s, starring as an elderly school bus driver in the YouTube series “School Bus Diaries” from 2016 to 2017, according to IMDb.

Off-screen, Chapin was an evangelist who shared her faith through public speaking, ministry and outreach, according to her website. She also concerned herself with various charitable efforts and work as a talent agent, channeling her experience to guide rising stars, including a young Jennifer Love Hewitt. Chapin’s website notes her accolades, including five Junior Emmy awards for child actress and “Honorable Mayor” titles from Oklahoma, Texas and Florida for her charity work.

In 1989, she penned “Father Knows Best: The Lauren Chapin Story,” which chronicled her time on the beloved sitcom but also illuminated the emotional and sexual abuse she allegedly endured from several family members off-screen. The memoir also concerned itself with Chapin’s post-”Father Know Best” life, including struggles with drug addiction, suicide attempts, troubled marriages and legal trouble.

“Lauren Chapin’s story reminds us that while fame may introduce a person to the world, it is perseverance, honesty, and compassion that define a life well lived,” says the description on Chapin’s website.

She is survived by her son, her daughter Summer and her brother Michael Chapin, according to the Hollywood Reporter.

Before the onset of YouTube, U.S. parents had very limited options when it came to video programs that helped teach their children Spanish.

There was, of course, the ever-popular Nickelodeon show “Dora the Explorer” and before that, the PBS show “Amigos,” that looked to instill the basics of Spanish into kids across America.

These programs — while useful, innovative and entertaining — never allowed for full-on Spanish-language immersion for viewers, relying heavily on English as their primary tongue.

Now, kid-friendly videos for language acquisition can be found on all corners of the internet with YouTube playing host to the lion’s share of the market, ranging from partially in Spanish to only in Spanish.

The Times spoke to three of the most viewed Spanish-language educators for children on YouTube to see what goes behind creating highly engaging children’s content.

Isa Muñoz — “Aprende Peque”

Isa Muñoz, 33, had known from a young age that she wanted to become a teacher.

Growing up in the Baja California city of Mexicali, Muñoz’s parents worked as teachers, as did many of her aunts and uncles. Seeing how fulfilling her family members’ careers were, she dedicated her life to educating young children.

After graduating with a bachelor’s degree and master’s in special education, she worked as a preschool teacher and a private tutor before one day receiving a call from veteran program producers Alexandra Cohen and Karen Garzon.

Born and raised in Venezuela, but now raising children in Miami, Cohen and Garzon were disappointed after scouring the internet for video tools to help them make learning Spanish fun and effective for their respective children and finding few helpful resources.

To fill this gap in the market, the duo teamed up with their lifelong friend Jessica Rutenberg to create the Spanish-only educational YouTube channel “Aprende Peque.”

As the idea came into fruition, the team searched for the perfect person to be the face of their channel — specifically someone who had experience working with kids and understood how to efficiently communicate with them.

That’s where Muñoz came in.

As part of the auditioning process, she flew out to Miami from Mexicali to try out for the role. The trip resulted in two days of filming which produced three full episodes of the program that included 21 featured songs.

In the almost three years since “Aprende Peque” launched, the channel has gained 1.05 million subscribers on YouTube and posted more than 500 videos, which have amassed more than 500 million views.

The thumbnail of each video features Muñoz’s ever-emotive face, as well as her signature orange-and-white outfit and large orange head bow. More than just adding an energetic face to the videos, she also integrates elements from the latest studies on child education into each episode.

Interwoven between Muñoz’s warm, patient and interactive lessons are musical numbers that range from nursery range to rock to folksy with visuals that fluctuate between grounded and fantastical.

While Muñoz had always envisioned herself as an educator, she wasn’t as ready to be known for singing.

Muñoz works closely with the program’s musical director, Pablo Estacio, to craft the songs featured in each video. The Venezuelan native has served as the bassist and songwriter for the band Bacalao Men for over 27 years and earned a bachelor’s degree in music production and engineering from the lauded Berklee College of Music.

“Pablo has helped me tune, refine and shape my voice to the point that it’s at right now,” she said.

Those musical detours are crucial to breaking up the episodes into distinct sections and provide renewed points of interaction in videos that often last between 40 minutes and an hour.

The process of crafting such long and engaging videos often takes between three and five weeks, Muñoz noted.

“It takes about a week to write one script,” she said. “After that, we film the episode, which takes about 12 hours. Then comes the part that requires the most amount of time, which is editing and integrating any necessary animations.”

The team aims to complete two to three episodes monthly in order to have a constant stream of content year-round.

While making “Aprende Peque” episodes is creatively exhilarating, Muñoz said it’s the fan reaction and interaction that mean the most to her.

“We’re so lucky that our audience has so much love to give and that they send that love through their messages,” she said. “I personally get motivated by knowing that this whole project is actually helping children.

“For a person to reach a point where they believe that the program has worked so well that they feel compelled to write in to thank us is so wonderful,” she said. “That’s something that we’re so thankful for and something that inspires us.

On a personal level, Muñoz has also experienced moments of deep connection with her family thanks to “Aprende Peque.”

“My mom has joined me on several occasions at meet and greets and I’ve seen her shed tears of joy when she sees the impact that the program has had on kids,” she said.

Liz De León — “Spanish with Liz”

In contrast to Muñoz, Liz De León, 39, never really thought of entering the education space before kick-starting her YouTube channel “Spanish with Liz.”

The native Texan was born in El Paso, but spent the first few years of her life just across the Mexican border in Ciudad Juárez. She moved back to Texas for middle and high school before ultimately settling in California for work.

De León was inspired to start her YouTube channel after having kids of her own.

“Once my kids were born, I wanted them to grow up with my culture and my language and the roots that I value so much,” she said.

At first, De León thought she would be able to find plenty of helpful of educational videos online. But much like Cohen and Garzon, she soon found that many of the visual resources out there came up short when it came to teaching fundamental elements of Spanish.

“A lot of it was catered toward only grabbing the attention of the child with a lot of ice cream and candy and sweets and high energy,” she said. “It didn’t teach the true fundamentals of things moms worry about.”

De León’s husband was the one who first suggested that she record herself singing songs that she created to teach her kids. She began to consider it more seriously after a relative told her that her teaching style was similar to the uber-popular kids’ YouTuber Ms. Rachel.

“That’s when I was first introduced to an educator on-screen that I felt aligned with when it came to teaching — with clear pronunciation, a storyline, making sure everything that was spoken was foundational and root words,” she said. “I really liked her format and thought, ‘She’s just a regular person like me and she did it.’ So I just did it.”

Filmed in front of a green screen in one of the rooms of her San Diego home, De León’s videos aim at helping young children learn vocabulary for specific real-life situations.

Donning her signature pink T-shirt and rocking a slicked-back ponytail, she attempts to minimize the stress of things like going to the airport or a dentist visit by introducing kids to the many elements that factor into those experiences. She creates levity in the videos by having colorful animated backgrounds, through the use of puppets and by singing songs throughout.

Raised in a household that put a premium on education, De León had looked at life through the eyes of a student — which proved particularly helpful as a registered nurse specializing in anesthesia.

“If you ask any medical person, they are teachers. Half of your job is education and teaching people how to stay healthy and to take care of themselves,” De León said. “You have to learn to cater to what’s developmentally appropriate to each person. You learn about child behavior, child psychology and the formation of the brain and how they learn.”

Each episode is crafted with two very important subjects in mind for De León: her two kids, who are 4 and 5. As the kids develop, so does the show.

“They are now understanding the episodes at a deeper level,” she said. “For example, we just watched the Halloween episode a couple of months ago and they now understood that October is a month within the year.”

Her children are also her first round of critics and help her understand what works and what doesn’t. Perhaps most importantly, they are De León’s gauge for how engaging her songs are.

“They help me with the music, actually,” she said. “If they don’t learn it and it doesn’t stick with them I know it’s not good enough. Then I redo it. They’re very much my little co-creators.”

One of the reasons “Spanish with Liz” has reached more than 18 million views on YouTube is the obvious care and research that goes into every video. Being a nurse and having a physician husband, De León has extensive access to medical professionals that let her borrow tools and inform her on what they’ve seen be effective methods for working with children.

“Something unique about our channel, is that we’ve thought about the storyline, how we’re gonna say things, the phrases, what works, what doesn’t work, what kids are afraid of and how we’re gonna tackle all that,” she said. “ So much purpose goes into each episode and then we try to borrow the equipment that’s actually going to be used so they can see it.”

And when she doesn’t have an expert on a topic immediately at her disposal, De León seeks out professionals who can thoroughly inform her. For example, when working on an episode about potty training, she took a class from two potty training experts.

Being that making videos is her third job behind being a nurse and a mom, time is a fleeting asset for the YouTuber. Because of that, each video takes about two months to create from start to finish with De León serving as the writer, director, songwriter and preliminary editor. She is aided by her husband who helps record and occasionally functions as a puppeteer, an additional editor, a composer, a designer and a babysitter, whose help allows her the time to record.

But having a team like that doesn’t pay for itself and that’s where De León’s more than 78,000 YouTube subscribers come into play.

According to the content creator, all the money made from the channel goes into paying for the fees associated with production and the rest goes to donating to three different charities — one that helps immigrant families in the U.S.; another is an orphanage in Mexico; and the final one is World Central Kitchen, which provides food relief in response to humanitarian, climate and community crises.

De León still often finds herself shocked that she’s able to have a platform that helps empower people to achieve new goals and that she’s touched so many lives through her videos.

“Isn’t it crazy that YouTube can change someone’s life?” she asked. “I think of all the artists that came up from putting their music out there on YouTube. I feel like it’s a place the whole world can tap into, mostly for good.”

Miss Nenna — “Spanish for Minis”

From her early days of growing up in the L.A. area, Miss Nenna, 32, felt a deep connection to the universal language of math. So profound was her interest that she obtained a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering and now works at a utility firm in the San Diego area.

As an eighth grader, when she served as a math tutor, Miss Nenna thought about what went into becoming an effective teacher.

“I thought about how I could help someone learn to understand it and make it fun,” she said. “So it was always really fun trying to figure out what worked for some students and what what didn’t work for others.”

She has since taken that ethos and turned it into the YouTube channel “Spanish for Minis,” which has 289,000 subscribers and has amassed over 31 million views. As is popular in the genre, her videos are broken into segments that involve a mix of direct instruction, interactive conversation and exceedingly catchy sing-alongs.

Just like with De León, Miss Nenna first got into the video-making game based on a suggestion from her husband made back in 2022.

“He saw a lot of potential in me because I have a bubbly personality around kids,” she said. “He mentioned I should try teaching Spanish and science to kids and added that it would benefit our child.”

It wasn’t until the couple’s 16-month-old son was diagnosed with speech delay that she really got serious about making videos so that her son could interact with her when she was away.

When the project first began, Miss Nenna had no experience with shooting and editing videos.

“I just sat with my husband and we’d watch videos on how to edit, how to use different graphics, how to make sure it’s OK for us to use certain songs,” she said. “So a lot of trial and error and a lot of research, since it’s just the two of us.”

“Spanish for Minis” videos are filmed at the couple’s residence in front of a green screen and each episode takes about 40 hours to complete.

“None of it is ever scripted. I kind of just set the camera myself and all the lighting,” she said. “I get a basket and I put a bunch of toys in it from my kids’ playroom, then I walk into a room and I record myself.”

While filming, Miss Nenna imagines that she is speaking directly to her almost-4-year-old son or 1-year-old daughter in order to make sure she’s in the right headspace.

The topics of the videos aim to evolve with the ever-changing needs of her son. Most of the earlier “Spanish for Minis” videos were focused on babies and now they have transitioned into content for toddlers.

Production on Miss Nenna’s videos has slowed down in recent months as she has focused her time on raising her children, but she has goals to put out two videos each month in 2026.

One of the more rewarding aspects of “Spanish for Minis” is the interactions that Miss Nenna has with parents and children who watch the program.

“I get messages every day, and I try my best to respond to as many as I can because I love connecting with the parents online,” she said. “I also have Cameo where I make personalized videos. Those are a lot of fun because I always message the parents and it’s like, ‘Hey, give me every single detail about what your kid loves. I want to make sure this is a really personalized video and that they enjoy it.’”

This is the Year of the Fire Horse in the Chinese zodiac — but for the White House, it’s more like the Year of Babies.

No, not the ones in the Trump administration. Actual babies.

Parents can take advantage of a larger child tax credit. July 5 will see the launch of $1,000 stock investments funded by the Treasury Department for children born in this country during President Trump’s reign. He has mulled offering $5,000 “baby bonuses” and creating a “National Medal of Motherhood” for women who have six or more children.

All this is happening even as birthrates have plummeted in this country for decades, reaching their lowest point ever in 2024. A reduced population tends to relegate countries to economic and demographic doom — look at Japan and Russia. That’s why one of Trump’s big campaign promises was to Make America Fertile Again.

“I’ll be known as the fertilization president and that’s OK,” he boasted last spring during a women’s history event at the White House.

But even as this administration urges families to grow and single people to marry and welcome little ones into their lives, it’s persecuting children in the name of Trump’s deportation deluge.

While the president told a crowd last October, “We want more babies, to put it nicely” while announcing cheaper in vitro fertilization drugs, the New York Times found his administration was keeping an average of 175 children a day in immigration detention — a 700% increase from the end of the Biden administration.

As Vice President JD Vance bragged during a March for Life rally in January that he “practices what he preaches” by expecting a fourth child this year, 5-year-old U.S. citizen Génesis Ester Gutiérrez Castellanos was adjusting to life in Honduras along with her deported mother.

On the same day last month that Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy posted on social media, “My greatest job is being a dad to my nine kids and family will always come first,” a federal judge ordered the release of 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos, an Ecuadorean preschooler grabbed outside his Minneapolis home along with his father in what the jurist described as a “perfidious lust for unbridled power.”

Just last week, Alaska resident Sonia Espinoza Arriaga and her sons, ages 5 and 16, were dumped in Tijuana by la migra even though the family had an active case to determine whether they qualified for asylum. And Trump’s campaign against undocumented children is just beginning on multiple fronts.

Ayaan Moledina protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement as they march toward the South Texas Family Residential Center on Jan. 28 in Dilley, Texas.

(Joel Angel Juarez / Getty Images)

The Supreme Court has scheduled hearings in April for Trump’s lawsuit seeking to end birthright citizenship for people born to parents who aren’t citizens or permanent residents. U.S. Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi is suing to end policies that protect immigrant children in custody.

Thousands more agents are expected to storm our streets in the coming weeks while the Department of Homeland Security spends billions of dollars to build or retrofit warehouses to stuff with the people they grab. Reports are already emerging from the South Texas Family Residential Center an hour south of San Antonio, which ICE uses to house children slated for removal from this country, of rancid food and overcrowded cells.

Trump’s apologists will claim there’s nothing racist or heartless about removing youngsters in this country illegally — or if their parents are in the U.S. without documentation — while asking citizens to have bigger families, even as the main proponents of the so-called pronatalist movement are white conservatives while nearly all of the kids la migra are booting are Latinos.

But an administration that can’t treat these children humanely shouldn’t be trusted with taking care of even American-born children. And one can’t separate Trump’s supposed pro-baby policies from what this country has historically inflicted on Latino families.

American authorities forced U.S.-born children to leave for Mexico with their parents during the Great Depression, arguing they would become a welfare burden at the expense of white children. Doctors were sterilizing Latinas without their consent in the name of population control as recently as the 1970s. Popular culture ridiculed large Latino families as backward and destined for poverty.

I grew up in a California where politicians railed against Mexican American kids like myself for supposedly overwhelming schools, parks, medical clinics and streets with our numbers. We were supposedly the ground troops in a nefarious conspiracy called Reconquista that sought to return the American Southwest to Mexico.

By the time I reached high school in the 1990s, voters began to pass laws that sought to make life miserable for undocumented immigrants like my father and other relatives, with a special punitive focus on their progeny. The infamous Prop. 187, which passed in 1994, would’ve banned undocumented children from attending California public schools from kindergarten to higher education. Five years later, the Anaheim Union High School District, whose schools I attended, passed a resolution seeking to sue Mexico for $50 million for educating the children of undocumented immigrants.

Board president Harald Martin — who migrated to this country from Austria as a 2-year-old — appeared on NPR to justify his actions by comparing the students he was in charge of to Tribbles, furry little aliens that starred in a famous “Star Trek” episode when they bred in such numbers that the Starship Enterprise was overwhelmed.

“They were so cute and fluffy, nice little things when there were four or five of them,” Martin said. “Then it got to the point down the road when it wasn’t so nice. They were getting in the way because there now were thousands of them on the ship.”

Martin’s example was not only wildly racist, it ignored the reality that Latinos were on the same road to assimilation as other previous immigrant groups ridiculed for their large families. While a March of Dimes study released last year shows Latinas had more children than any other ethnic group in this country as of 2023, the Latina birthrate declined by a third since 2003 — by far the largest drop of those groups.

I’ve seen this play out in my own family. I have 16 aunts and uncles who lived to adulthood and am the oldest of four children born to my parents — but my dad has just one grandchild and probably isn’t getting any more. I agree with Trump, Vance and the rest of them that children bring magic and vitality to communities — but what Latino family would want to raise a family where everything is far more expensive and the threat of deportation is never far away?

In this photo released by U.S. Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Texas), Adrian Conejo Arias and his son, 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos, are seen in San Antonio on Jan. 31 after being released from the Dilley detention center.

(U.S. Rep. Joaquin Castro)

Fatherhood wasn’t in the cards for me, but I love being Tío Guti to my nephew and the children of my friends. That’s why my heart breaks when I hear them say that their classmates left the United States and my blood boils when I hear Vance, Trump and others urge Americans to have more kids. Trumpworld isn’t looking to increase the number of people who look like my loved ones — and that’s something that should frighten us all.

Palestinian boy Nidal Abu Rabeea died in Gaza after waiting 14 months for Israel to allow his medical evacuation, despite having the necessary clearance. Thousands of Palestinians are blocked from seeking urgent medical care through the partially reopened Rafah crossing.

A sparkly pink electric guitar hangs on a wall of the recording studio where Hilary Duff made her new album. The cozy, gear-filled joint near the Van Nuys Airport belongs to her husband, Matthew Koma, who produced “Luck… or Something,” the singer and actor’s first LP in more than a decade. But as Duff points out on a recent afternoon, the paisley-print guitar is all hers.

“I got it for my 16th birthday,” she says proudly — a gift from the Fender company. “I found it in the storage unit and Matt was like, ‘Oh, that’s going up there.’”

Before Miley Cyrus, before Sabrina Carpenter, before Olivia Rodrigo, Duff arrived in the early 2000s as a Disney kid with pop-idol ambitions. She broke out in the endearingly awkward title role of the Disney Channel’s “Lizzie McGuire” then went on to star in family-friendly movies like “Agent Cody Banks” and “Cheaper by the Dozen.” By the time she received that guitar, she’d topped the Billboard 200 with her album “Metamorphosis,” which sold 4 million copies and spawned hit singles like “So Yesterday” and “Come Clean.”

Duff stepped away from music for most of her 20s to focus on acting and starting a family. (An attempted comeback album in 2015, “Breathe In. Breathe Out.,” didn’t really go anywhere.) Now, at 38, she’s returned with a bracingly honest record full of the texture and detail of her life as a wife, sister and mother of four.

In frank yet wordy songs that layer guitars and synths over shimmering grooves, Duff sings about trying to overcome old habits and about her fear that her best times are behind her. “We Don’t Talk” appears to address her estrangement from her older sister, Haylie, while “Weather for Tennis” describes her tendency to keep the peace as a child of divorce. In “Holiday Party,” she recounts a recurring dream in which Koma cheats on her with her friends.

“I wake up in a rage and he’s like, ‘I didn’t do anything!’” she says with a laugh. “And I’m like, ‘But you want to.’ A lot of this stuff came out of the hormonal boom of: I’ve just had a baby and I’m nursing and I’m trying to get my two feet back on the ground again.” (Duff and Koma have three daughters aged 7, 4 and 1, while Duff shares a 13-year-old son with her ex-husband, former hockey player Mike Comrie.)

Asked how he hopes the album fares commercially, Koma says, “I don’t [care]. Public perception or sales, that’s all cool, but it’s a separate experience from why we did it.” The producer, who’s known for his work with Zedd and Shania Twain, adds, “The whole purpose was to make something that Hilary could feel good about stepping into.”

Yet early-2000s nostalgia led to a recent run of sold-out theater gigs, and this summer it’ll carry her into arenas around the world, including Inglewood’s Kia Forum on July 8 and 9. (Less happily for Duff, it also made a viral sensation of an essay in the Cut by her fellow millennial Ashley Tisdale in which Tisdale wrote about leaving a “toxic mom group” that allegedly included Duff and Mandy Moore.)

Curled on a sofa in the studio’s control room, Duff says, “I’m finally at this place where I’m zero percent ashamed of my past and any of the things that used to embarrass me” — one reason she made the bold choice to open her set at the Wiltern last month with two of her biggest hits, “Wake Up” and “So Yesterday.”

After those songs came “Roommates,” perhaps the most vulnerable track on Duff’s new album. It’s about navigating a dry patch in a marriage, and the language is as vivid as it is unsparing: “I only want the beginning / I don’t want the end,” she sings, adding that she longs to be in the “back of a dive bar, giving you h—.”

A surprising word choice.
How would you have said it? Sometimes you need to make the lyrics fit — you need it to rhyme with something. [Laughs] It’s meant to be polarizing because it’s such a desperate plea. I can say I haven’t actually given h— in the back of a dive bar. But it’s just trying to capture the feeling of a time when you felt alive.

Like all teen stars, you had to figure out how to grow up and talk about sex as a public figure. Now there’s the idea that it’s better left to the young.
I finally feel like I know a lot about sex. My whole 20s, sex was not always enjoyable — it was so much to figure out. Now I finally understand it. Maybe that’s a female thing, but I’m not ready to be put out to pasture. People come up to me all the time and they’re like, “Wow, you aged really well.” I’m like, “I’m only 38! Just because you’ve known me since I was 9…”

You’re handling senior citizenship well.
When do I start getting the discounts? I feel like 38 is not old, although when I thought about my parents at 40, they looked so different than we look now.

I always stop at those TikToks where it shows what 35 looked like in 1982.
I don’t think anyone drank water back then. They were, like, dusty-crusty.

Hilary Duff, left, and Matthew Koma at Apple Music Studios in Los Angeles in December.

(Amy Sussman / Getty Images for Apple Music)

You borrow the chorus of Blink-182’s “Dammit” for your song “Growing Up.” Why?
Blink is one of my favorite bands. I remember getting my driver’s license, and that was what was playing on my iPod. “Growing Up” is such a deeply personal song to me, talking about sitting in the backyard with one of my best friends and just needing to drink too much wine and unload about life. But it also feels like a love letter to my fans. I don’t like saying that word, but I genuinely feel like I’ve had fans for 25 years, and getting to see them now in adulthood — I didn’t know I was going to have this opportunity.

What’s the problem with “fan”?
It puts me on a pedestal that makes me feel uncomfortable. If you were to talk to Matt or someone close to me, they’d probably say, “Hilary doesn’t understand what she’s meant to some people.” And I think that’s true. When I think of myself, I’m not like a grand pop star — I feel more like a woman of the people.

A woman of the people?
Am I allowed to say that? [Laughs] Is that offensive in any way? My feet hit the ground in the morning, and I’ve got a million things to do. Sometimes my baby’s still sleeping. And I have a teenager to get ready for school that we’re always all waiting on.

Why do you have four children?
I know — we’re sick.

Did you expect to have four?
I thought I would have at least three. I always wanted a big family because I come from a super small family and I always wanted more siblings. I had Luca obviously pre-Matt, and then we had Banks before we got married. Then the pandemic hit — we had a pandemic baby like everybody else. The fourth was just a crazy-a— decision. Matt was like, “Everybody’s gonna think we’re really Christ-y if we go for No. 4.” We also have three dogs, two cats and eight chickens.

As two artists, how do you sort out the work of child-rearing?
I don’t know if I’ve actually said this out loud — to Matt I have for sure — but I think that part of my wanting to make a record was coming out of having my fourth child. I love motherhood, obviously — I wouldn’t have four kids if I didn’t. But I think I felt really jealous that he got to go to work every day and just be alone with his thoughts. I was like, I need to stretch. That’s what it felt like after the fourth baby: I’m either gonna lose myself completely and just become a stay-at-home mom and wait for the phone to ring, or I’m gonna go make something that moves me.

You don’t need me to tell you that our culture is always happy to make moms feel guilty. Was it a journey to accept that it’s OK to do something for yourself?
That’s what the healthy part of the brain says. But the other part that’s wired to be with the children you birthed — sometimes that part overshadows it. And it’s very hard to fight that. I could probably cry right now thinking about all the things I’m gonna miss this year.

Hilary Duff in the studio where she recorded her new album.

(Jay L Clendenin / For The Times)

You’ve got a line in “Roommates” where you say, “Life is life-ing and pressure is pressuring me.” At the shows you just played, did you think of your audience as being at the same place in life as you?
For sure. When they were scream-singing it back to me, I was like, “Oh, you know.” That doesn’t mean you have to be a parent. “Life is life-ing” is the bills and the monotony and the traffic and the family — it’s all the things. I knew that if it’s bumping around inside my head, and I’ve been living a pretty normal life for 10 years — normal as I can get — then people would see themselves in it.

Twenty-five years ago, you were playing to 10-year-olds. Would a 10-year-old today be interested in your new songs?
I don’t think so. But I mean, I used to sing Natalie Imbruglia’s “Torn” all the time, and I had no idea what it was about.

The last decade has been a golden age for young female songwriters: Taylor Swift, Billie Eilish, Olivia Rodrigo.
You forgot Chappell Roan.

“Luck… or Something” feels aligned with that deepening craft. But maybe your early stuff felt sophisticated to you.
I don’t think the intent back then was sophisticated songwriting. There was no Taylor Swift yet — it’s like before Christ and after Christ.

She changed the game?
On all the levels.

How’d you end up on Atlantic Records? I wondered whether this was a product of personal friendships — the Elliot Grainge and Sofia Richie and Good Charlotte of it all.
We’re more personally friends with them now. I finished making the record and for the first time ever was like, “It’s done — do you like it?”

You weren’t looking for notes from the label.
I’m not saying I didn’t have meetings with A&R. But pretty much the record was created, and that was that. I didn’t go shopping anywhere else, which was fantastic because I hate a dog-and-pony show.

Did you feel like you’d been chewed up by the record industry in any way?
After “Breathe In. Breathe Out.,” it was very easy to be like, “RCA forced me to lead with this song when I knew it should’ve been this song.” But that was me not having [courage], you know what I mean? It was a joint effort of [messing] it up. But I learned a lot from that. I don’t think I would’ve made this record if I hadn’t fumbled the ball a little.

The story about the toxic mom group blew up just as you were launching this album. Did that experience give you pause about reentering the pop world?
I mean, this is not new for me. I’ve had this since I was maybe 15 and starting to get followed around by paparazzi. Everything starts getting documented and everyone knows my life and all the players in it. So the stories that get news pickup — it’s not what happens to a normal person who maybe became an actor as an adult. And now it’s escalated by the talking heads on TikTok that need clickbait. It’s hard because you’re like, “Wait, whoa, that person kind of got it right,” and “Whoa that person doesn’t know what they’re talking about.” I saw something that was like, “None of the moms at school actually like her and neither do the teachers,” and I was like, “First of all…”

Is it hard or easy for you to tune out —
By the way, the women at school are lovely and I’m obsessed with all of them.

But can you ignore the chatter about you on social media?
It just depends on the day. Knowing that I get to open up the backdoors and play soccer as a family and take a hot tub and go get our chicken eggs — that’s the purpose of life. On the days when crazy s— happens, I go home and quiet the noise.

The nominated Oscar shorts come in three categories — and a lot of subjects, styles and temperaments. It’s further proof that an award dictated by length needn’t be bound by anything else.

In the live-action category, a mixed bag of approaches — some inspired by classic literature — are burnished by inspired performances. Lee Knight’s “A Friend of Dorothy” may be a tad on the nose about the cultural and emotional impact of a lonely London widow on a closeted teenaged boy. But leads Miriam Margolyes and Alistair Nwachukwu practically shimmer with humor and warmth. “Jane Austen’s Period Drama,” a loving tweak of the writer’s oeuvre from Steve Pinder and Julia Aks (who also stars), is essentially a one-joke calling card to make feature comedies and it should do the job. Its cast is exactly the sprightly ensemble needed to land its what-if laughs.

Two others just miss the mark in terms of bringing their tensions to powerful resolutions yet benefit from who the camera adores. Meyer Levinson-Blount’s “Butcher’s Stain,” centered on a flimsy accusation against a friendly Palestinian butcher in an Israeli market, undercuts its gripping story with lackadaisical filmmaking and an unnecessary subplot, but lead Omar Sameer is commanding. The black-and-white future shock “Two People Exchanging Saliva,” directed by Natalie Musteata and Alexandre Singh, is an uneven Euro-art bath of unrealized intimacy and casual violence — kissing is punishable by death, slapping is currency — but is given exquisite tautness by the elegant, unrequited swooniness of stars Zar Amir and Luana Bajrami.

A scene from “Jane Austen’s Period Drama,” nominated in the live-action short category.

(Roadside Attractions)

Then there’s my favorite, Sam A. Davis’ likely winner “The Singers,” from Ivan Turgenev’s short story, which pays off handsomely in bites of soulful warbling that briefly turn a barroom’s den of anesthesia into a temple of feeling.

Most of this year’s documentary nominees deal with the grimmest of tragedies, as in “All the Empty Rooms” and “Children No More: Were and Are Gone,” which address the remembrance of children brutally killed. The former film, from Joshua Seftel, follows CBS correspondent Steve Hartman and photographer Lou Bopp on an essay project into the bedrooms of kids gunned down in school shootings, their private worlds heartbreakingly preserved by their families. The latter short, directed by Hilla Medalia, witnesses Tel Aviv’s silent vigils for Gaza’s children, protests marked by posters with beaming faces, and sometimes met with open scorn. These are dutiful, sobering acts of mourning — Seftel’s is the probable awardee. You may wish they were more than that, however, considering the issues (guns, war, political intransigence) that created the devastation.

Combat is what drove award-winning photojournalist Brent Renaud, killed in Ukraine in 2022. But his brother Craig’s memorializing of him, “Armed Only With a Camera,” is oddly uninvolving, more an excerpted flipbook of Brent’s far-flung assignments than a meaningful portrait of excelling at a dangerous job. A more affecting real-world dispatch (and my pick, if I could vote) is “The Devil Is Busy,” directed by Christalyn Hampton and dual nominee Geeta Gandbhir, also up for the feature “The Perfect Neighbor.” It observes a day in the operation of a carefully guarded, female-run Georgia abortion clinic as if it were a newly medieval world’s last chance healthcare outpost, getting by on grit, compassion and prayer. You certainly won’t forget security head Tracii, the clinic’s heavyhearted knight and guide.

A scene from “Perfectly a Strangeness,” nominated in the documentary short category.

(Roadside Attractions)

Your chaser is Alison McAlpine’s appealing, aptly titled “Perfectly a Strangeness,” sans humans, but starring three donkeys in an unnamed desert happening upon a cluster of hilltop observatories. The whir of science meets the wonder of nature and this charming, gorgeously shot ode to discovery (both on Earth and out there) makes one hope the motion picture academy sees fit to recognize more imaginative nonfiction works going forward.

Animation, of course, thrives on the thrill of conjured worlds, like the one in Konstantin Bronzit’s wordless (but not soundless) desert island farce “The Three Sisters.” It owes nothing to Chekhov — though there are seagulls — but much to a classically Russian sense of humor and a Chaplinesque ingenuity. Elsewhere, you can watch the overly cute Christian homily “Forevergreen,” from Nathan Engelhardt and Jeremy Spears, about a nurturing tree, a restless bear and the dangerous allure of potato chips. The message gets muddled but this eco-conscious journey is charming.

It’s tough to predict a winner when the entrants are this strong, but John Kelly’s “Retirement Plan” feasts on wry relatability, as Domhnall Gleeson narrates a paunchy middle-aged man’s ambitious post-career goals, while the cascade of deadpan funny, thickly-lined and mundanely hued images stress a more poignant, finite reality. In its all-too-human view of life, this is, entertainingly, whatever the opposite of a cloying graduation speech is.

A scene from “Retirement Plan,” nominated in the animated short category.

(Roadside Attractions)

The spindly aged-doll puppetry in the stop-motion gem “The Girl Who Cried Pearls” marks a sly fable of need, greed and destiny, centered on a wealthy grandfather’s Dickensian fashioning of his poverty-stricken childhood in early 19th century Montreal. Filmmakers Chris Lavis and Maciek Szczerbowski find an enchanting balance between storybook allure and adult trickery. Maybe this one steals it?

Whichever the case, the animation that moved me the most is “Butterfly,” from Florence Miailhe, imagining the last, memory-laden swim of Jewish French-Algerian athlete Alfred Nakache, who competed in the Olympics before and after the Holocaust. In the cocooning fluidity of an ocean-borne day, rendered with thick-brushed painterliness and splashes of sound, we travel across flashes of community, injustice, achievement, love and despair. The visual, thematic constant, though, is water as a haven and a poetic life force that feeds renewal.

A BRITAIN’S Got Talent star was accused of a child sex offence just days before she was found dead at home, an inquest heard.

Kerri-Anne Donaldson, 38, reached the semi-final of the ITV show in 2014 as part of the group Kings and Queens.

An inquest heard today Kerri-Anne was arrested on suspicion of “child sex offending” but no further details were revealed.

The dancer was detained on June 4, 2023, and questioned at a police station.

She was discovered dead at home in Farnborough, Hampshire, three days later by her sister Cara Donaldson.

There was a note at the top of the stairs urging Cara not to come inside alongside photos of her dog and family.

SCOTTY’S HELL

‘I was out 7 days a week doing drugs’, says Scotty T as he opens up on arrest

CAUGHT OUT

Sisters stole goods from duty free to fund lavish lifestyles including surgery

The song “You are so Beautiful” was also playing when Kerri-Anne was found, the inquest heard.

The court was told the performer’s cause of death was given as hanging.

A post mortem also found she had non-fatal levels of medication in her blood, which were consistent with an overdose.

The inquest heard evidence yesterday from Detective Constable Benjamin Harris, of Hampshire Constabulary, who led the investigation into the unknown accusation against Kerri-Anne.

He said her accuser had let police know the dancer threatened to take her own life “if someone finds out” about the allegation.

Det Con Harris said he had considered the possibility her comments could be a “form of control” against the complainant.

He said: “In my experience in some offences it can often be said without wanting to carry it out.”

The officer told the inquest the suggestion of self-harm was “something we take very seriously” and he reported it to his senior officers and advised his colleagues who arrested Kerri-Anne.

He said following the interview, he graded the dancer’s risk of self-harm as “standard”.

The officer added: “When I spoke to Kerri, which was after the interview, in the cell she presented to me at that time that she was fine, so normal.

“She had no indication that she wanted to take her own life, when that was spoken about with her she gave no indication that would happen.”

Det Con Harris said Kerri-Anne told him she had seen a counsellor previously and added: “She knew how to get help and she was in no way considering harming herself.”

But he told the court “with the benefits of hindsight” he should have included a question about the complainant’s comments when making the risk assessment.

The inquest heard yesterday how following her release from custody, Kerri-Anne failed to return home – causing her family to report her as a missing person.

She was later found at a Travelodge hotel in Woking, Surrey, after taking an overdose.

Cara said her sister told an emergency doctor at St Peter’s Hospital in Surrey that she had wanted to kill herself.

Recalling the tragic statement, she continued: “I just wanted to hug her.”

Psychiatric liaison nurse Serina Juru, who carried out a mental health assessment after the overdose, said today she assessed Kerri-Anne as at a “high and imminent risk of suicide” and rated her risk as level 10 out of 10.

She told the court the dancer said she could be sent to prison if convicted of the offence and that she “could not face that”.

The nurse added: “She wanted to end her life because she was embarrassed about what had happened.”

Ms Juru said she offered Kerri-Anne an “informal” admission to hospital for further assessment or home care support but she refused both that day leading her to start a “high-risk care plan”.

She said the performer also told her that if she was discharged into the care of her sister Cara, she would wait for her to leave to look after her children and then take her own life.

The inquest heard Kerri-Anne was discharged from hospital the following day into Cara’s care when Ms Juru was not on duty.

Psychiatrist Dr David Enright, who had assessed her, said she was “calm” and no longer thinking about suicide.

But Cara said when she drove her sister home on June 6, the dancer told her she had made the decision to take her own life.

She claimed the family had not been given any care plan or advice on how to assist the star when they left the hospital.

Cara also said she asked her sister about the allegation and was told she was not guilty and that it had “all been constructed”.

She said she spent the evening with her sister and was reluctant to leave her alone, saying: “If you do anything, Kerri, that will always be on my shoulders.”

Cara continued: “[Kerri-Anne] joked ‘I am not going to do that’, so I left.

“One of the last messages was ‘Thanks for everything today’ and she gave a heart emoji, I just thought she was OK.”

But when Kerri-Anne did not answer the phone the next morning, Cara went round to her home and discovered her dead.

Describing her sister, she said: “Heart of gold, full of fun, brought happiness to life, especially mine, career-driven, adored her family, adored her friends, fantastic dance teacher, everyone loved her.”

She said Kerri-Anne had been on television a few times and added: “Her main passion was to choreograph dancing.”

The Kings and Queens Latin dance troupe were a big hit with BGT fans, making it all the way to the semi-final of the ITV show.

Kerri-Anne performed alongside Neil and Katya Jones and Kai Widdrington, all of whom became professionals on Strictly Come Dancing.

Following her death, Neil said: “Kerri Anne Donaldson – remember that name and please never forget it because it belongs to a woman who loved to dance, create and perform, she had the cheekiest laugh and a heart of gold.

“She hated getting in the car with me, but would always listen to my crazy ideas, we shared so many moments and stories and she was always the voice of reason.

“Kerri you were my friend and like my big sister.”

Ex-Strictly dancer Joanne Clifton also paid her respects to the “beautiful dancer”.

She said: “I have no words… This is just heartbreaking.. truly devastating.

“We’ve known you and shared the dance floor with you basically all our lives.

“Dance up there with the angels Kerri.. you beautiful dancer, you beautiful soul.”

Amy Dowden echoed those sentiments, writing: “So shocked and sad. Such a beautiful dancer and kind soul.

“Sending love to all your family and friends. Heaven has certainly gained an angel. Keep dancing up there lovely.”

If you are affected by any of the issues raised in this article, please call the Samaritans for free on 116123.

SACRAMENTO — Gavin Newsom writes in his upcoming memoir about San Francisco’s highborn Getty family fitting him in Brioni suits “appropriate to meet a king” when he was 20 years old. Then he flew aboard their private “Jetty” to Spain for a royal princess’s debutante-style party.

Back home, real life wasn’t as grand.

In an annual performance for their single mom, Newsom and his sister would pretend to find problems with the fancy clothes his dad’s friends, the heirs of ruthless oil baron J. Paul Getty, sent for Christmas. Poor fit. Wrong color. Not my style. The ritual gave her an excuse to return the gifts and use the store credit on presents for her children she placed under the tree.

California’s 41st governor, a possible suitor for the White House, opens up about the duality of his upbringing in his new book. Newsom details the everyday struggle living with his mom after his parents divorced and occasional interludes into his father’s life charmed by the Gettys’ affluence, including that day when the Gettys outfitted him in designer clothes at a luxury department store.

“I walked out understanding that this was the split personality of my life,” Newsom writes in “Young Man in a Hurry.”

For years, Newsom asserted that his “one-dimensional” public image as a slick, privileged politician on a path to power paved with Getty oil money fails to tell the whole story.

“I’m not trying to be something I’m not,” Newsom said in a recent interview. “I’m not trying to talk about, you know, ‘I was born in a town called Hope with no running water.’ That’s not what this book is about. But it’s a very different portrayal than the one I think 9 out of 10 people believe.”

As he explores a 2028 presidential run and basks in the limelight as one of President Trump’s most vociferous critics, the book offers the Democratic politician a chance to write his own narrative and address the skeletons in his closet before opponents begin to exploit his past.

A book tour, which is set to begin Feb. 21 in Nashville, also gives Newsom a reason to travel the country, meet voters and promote his life story without officially entering the race. He’s expected to make additional stops in Georgia, South Carolina, New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles.

The governor describes the book as a “memoir of discovery” that sent him interviewing family members and friends and digging through troves of old documents about his lineage that his mother never spoke about and his father smoothed over. Learning about his family history, the good and the bad, Newsom said, helped him understand and accept himself. Mark Arax, an author and former Los Angeles Times journalist, was his ghostwriter.

“I’ve changed the opinion of myself,” Newsom said when asked if he believed the book would revise his glossy public image. “It kind of rocked so many parts of my life, and kind of cracked things open. And I started to understand where my anxieties come from and why I’m overcompensating in certain areas.”

Newsom writes that his interest in politics brought him and his father, William, closer. His mother, Tessa, on the other hand, didn’t share his father’s enthusiasm.

She warned him to get out while he still could, worried her only son would eschew his true self.

“My mother did not want that world for me: the shrewd marriage of tall husbands and tall wives that kept each year’s Cotillion Debutante Ball stocked with children of the same; the gritted teeth behind the social smiles; the spectator sport of who was in and who was out based on so-and-so’s dinner party guest list,” Newsom wrote.

At the heart of her concern was her belief that Newsom’s “obsessive drive” into business and politics was in response to his upbringing and an effort to solve “the riddle” of his identity from his learning disorder, dyslexia, and the two different worlds he inhabited.

“As I grew up trying to grasp which of these worlds, if either, suited me best, she had worried about the persona I was constructing to cover up what she considered a crack at my core,” Newsom writes. “If my remaking was skim plaster, she feared, it would crumble. It would not hold me into adulthood.”

Newsom’s mother was 19 years old when she married his father, then 32. He learned through writing the book that his mother hailed from a “family of brilliant and daring misfits who had carved new paths in botany and medicine and left-wing politics,” he writes.

There was also secret pain and struggles with mental health. His maternal grandfather, a World War II POW, turned to the bottle after returning home. One night he told his three young daughters to line up in front of the fireplace so he could shoot them, but stopped when his wife walked in the door and took the gun from his hand. He committed suicide years later.

Newsom’s father’s family was full of more traditional Democrats and Irish Catholic storytellers who worked in banking, homebuilding, law enforcement and law. Newsom describes his paternal grandfather as one of the “thinkers behind the throne” for former California Gov. Edmund “Pat” Brown, but his family never held public office despite his dad’s bids for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors and the California Legislature.

The failed campaigns left his father in financial and emotional turmoil that crippled his marriage when Newsom was a small boy. A divorce set the stage for an unusual contrasting existence for the would-be governor, offering him brief exposures to the wealth and power of the Gettys through his dad.

Newsom said he moved casually between the rich and poor neighborhoods of San Francisco as a boy.

“It was a wonder how effortlessly I glided because the two realms of my life, the characters of my mother’s world and the characters of my father’s world, did not fit together in the least,” Newsom writes.

Mayor Gavin Newsom and his dad, Judge William Newsom, have lunch at the Balboa Cafe in San Francisco.

(Christina Koci Hernandez / San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images)

Though William Alfred Newsom III went on to become an appellate court justice, Newsom’s father was best known for his role delivering ransom money to the kidnappers of J. Paul Getty’s grandson. He served as an adviser to the family without pay and a paid administrator of the $4 billion family trust.

The governor wrote in the book that the ties between the two families go back three generations. His father was close friends with Getty’s sons John Paul Jr. and Gordon since childhood when they became like his sixth and seventh siblings at Newsom’s grandparents’ house.

Gordon Getty in particular considered Newsom’s father his “best-best friend.” Newsom’s dad helped connect the eccentric music composer “to the outside world,” the governor wrote.

“My father had this way of creating a safe space for Gordon to open up,” Newsom writes. “He became Gordon’s whisperer, his interpreter and translator, a bridge to their friends, a bridge to Gordon’s own children.”

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom and his sister, Hilary Newsom, in a promotional portrait for the Search for the Cause campaign, which raises funds for cancer research, on Nov. 21, 2025.

(Caroline Schiff/Getty Images)

His father’s friendship with Gordon Getty exposed Newsom and his younger sister, Hillary, to a world far beyond their family’s own means. Gordon’s wife, Ann, and Newsom’s father organized elaborate adventures for the Gettys’ four sons and the Newsom children.

Newsom describes fishing on the Rogue River and riding in a helicopter while studying polar bears on the shores of the Hudson Bay in Canada. He recalled donning tuxedos and carrying toy guns pretending to be James Bond on a European yacht vacation and soaring over the Serengeti in a hot air balloon during an East African safari.

Throughout his travels, Newsom often blended in with the Gettys’ brown-haired sons. He wrote that the actor Jack Nicholson once mistakenly called him one of the “Getty boys” at a party in a 16th-century palazzo in Venice where guests arrived via gondola. Newsom didn’t correct him.

“Had I shared this encounter with my mother, she likely would have asked me if deception was something I practiced whenever I hobnobbed with the Gettys,” Newsom said in the book. “Fact is, I was always aware of the line that separated us from the Gettys. Not because they went out of their way to make us aware of it but because we, as good Newsoms, paid constant mind to the distinction.”

Newsom wrote that his mother seemed to begrudge the excursions when her children returned home. She raised them in a much more ordinary existence. Newsom describes his father’s presence as “episodic.”

“For a day or two, she’d give us the silent treatment, and then we’d all fall back into the form of a life trying to make ends meet,” he wrote. “After enough vacations came and went, a cone of silence took hold.”

Newsom’s mother worked as an assistant retail buyer, a bookkeeper, a waitress at a Mexican restaurant, a development director for a nonprofit and a real estate agent — holding as many as three jobs at once — to provide for her children. His mother’s sister and brother-in-law helped care for them when they could, but he likened himself to a latchkey kid because of the amount of time he and his sister spent alone.

They moved five times in 10 years in search of a “better house in a better neighborhood” with good schools, taking the family from San Francisco to the Marin County suburbs. Though his mother owned a home, she often rented out rooms to bring in extra money.

Tired of his mother complaining about finances and his father not coming through, Newsom wrote that he took on a paper route.

In the book, Newsom describes his struggles with dyslexia and how the learning disorder undercut his self-esteem when he was an emotionally vulnerable child.

Eager to make himself something more than an awkward kid with sweaty palms and a bowl haircut who couldn’t read, Newsom mimicked Remington Steele, the suave character on the popular 1980s detective show. He chugged down glassfuls of raw eggs like Sylvester Stallone in “Rocky” and ran across town and back like a prizefighter in training.

He found confidence in high school sports, but his struggle to find himself continued into young adulthood. Newsom wrote that he watched tapes of motivational guru Tony Robbins and heeded his advice to remake yourself in the image of someone you admire. For Newsom, that became Robbins himself.

“Find a person who embodies all of the outward traits of personality, bearing, charisma, language, and power lacking in yourself,” Newsom described the philosophy in the book. “Study that person. Copy that person. The borrowed traits may fit awkwardly at first, but don’t fret. You’ll be surprised by how fast the pose becomes you, and you the pose.”

His father scoffed at the self-help gurus and nurtured his interest in business.

More than a half-dozen friends and family members, including Gordon Getty, invested equal shares to help him launch a wine shop in San Francisco. Newsom named the business, which expanded to include restaurants, hotels and wineries, “PlumpJack,” the nickname of Shakespeare’s fictional character Sir John Falstaff and the title of Gordon Getty’s opera.

“Gordon’s really inspired me to be bolder and more audacious. He’s inspired me to be more authentic,” Newsom said. “The risks I take in business … just trying to march to the beat of a different drummer and to be a little bolder. That’s my politics. But I also think he played a huge role in that, in terms of shaping me in that respect as well.”

Newsom described Gordon and Ann Getty as like family. The Gettys also became the biggest investors in his wineries and among his largest political donors.

In an interview, Newsom said there are many days when he feels his mother “absolutely” was right to worry about the facade of politics and the mold her son stuffed himself into.

Gavin Newsom heads for his home neighborhood on Nov. 3, 2003, to cast hisvote for San Francisco mayor.

(Mike Kepka / San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images)

He described the day the recall against him qualified for the ballot amid the COVID-19 pandemic as humbling and humiliating, though it later failed by a wide margin. Still today, he said, there’s a voice in his head constantly questioning why he’s in politics, what he’s exposing his wife and children to and doing with his life.

By choosing a career as an elected official despite his mother’s warnings, Newsom ultimately picked his father’s world and accomplished his father’s dream of taking office. But he said the book taught him that so much of his own more gutsy positions, such as his early support for gay marriage, and his hustle were from his mother.

Newsom said he’s accepted that he can’t control which version of himself people choose to see. Writing the book felt cathartic, he said, and left him more comfortable taking off his mask.

“It allowed me to understand better my motivations, my purpose, my meaning, my mission… who my mom and dad were and who I am as a consequence of them and what truly motivates me,” Newsom said. “There’s a freedom. There’s a real freedom. And it’s nice. It’s just so much nicer than the plaster of the past.”