guide

The line at Holbox during the midweek lunch hour has become a cultural sensation, a queue of locals and visitors trailing past the automatic doors and around the parking lot like devotees angling for the latest iPhone series or limited-release sneakers. Believe the lauds, including ours when we named Holbox as The Times’ 2023 Restaurant of the Year. Gilberto Cetina’s command of mariscos is unmatched in Southern California – his ceviches, aguachiles and tostadas revolutionary in their freshness and jigsaw-intricate flavors. The smoked kanpachi taco alone — clinched with queso Chihuahua and finished with salsa cruda, avocado and drizzles of peanut salsa macha — is one of the most sophisticated things to eat in Los Angeles.

Holbox could be considered for the top ranking on its own strength. But in a year when disasters tore at our city, honoring the power of community feels more urgent than ever. Cetina’s seafood counter doesn’t thrive in a vacuum. Holbox resides inside the Mercado La Paloma in South L.A. The mercado is the economic-development arm of the Esperanza Community Housing Corp., a nonprofit organization founded in 1989 that counts affordable housing and equitable healthcare among its core missions. When the mercado was in the incubation stage, Esperanza’s executive director Nancy Ibrahim interviewed would-be restaurateurs about their challenges and hopes in starting a business. Among the candidates was Cetina’s father, Gilberto Sr., who proposed a stall serving his family’s regionally specific dishes from the Yucatán. Their venture, Chichén Itzá, was among the eight startups when the mercado opened in a former garment factory nearly 25 years ago, in February 2001.

Step into the 35,000-square-foot market today, and the smell of corn warms the senses. Fátima Juárez chose masa as her medium when she began working with Cetina at Holbox in 2017. Komal, the venue she opened last year with her husband, Conrado Rivera, is the only molino in L.A. grinding and nixtamalizing heirloom corn varieties daily. Among her deceptively spare menu of mostly quesadillas and tacos, start with the extraordinary quesadilla de flor de calabaza, a creased blue corn tortilla, bound by melted quesillo, arrayed with squash blossoms radiating like sunbeams.

Wander farther, past the communal sea of tiled tables between Holbox and Komal, to find jewels that first-timers or even regular visitors might overlook.

Taqueria Vista Hermosa, run by Raul Morales and his family, is the other remaining original tenant. Order an al pastor taco, or Morales’ specialty of Michoacan-style fish empapelado smothered in vegetables and wrapped in banana leaf. The lush, orange-scented cochinita pibil is the obvious choice next door at still-flourishing Chichén Itzá, but don’t overlook crackling kibi and the brunchy huevos motuleños over ham and black bean puree. The weekends-only tacos de barbacoa de chivo are our favorites at the stand called Oaxacalifornia, though we swing through any time for the piloncillo-sweetened café de olla and a scoop of smoked milk ice cream from its sibling juice and snack bar in the market’s center. Looking for the comfort of noodles? Try the pad see ew at Thai Corner Food Express in the far back.

The everyday and the exquisite; the fast and the formal (just try to score a reservation for Holbox’s twice-a-week tasting menu); a food hall and sanctuary for us all. Mercado La Paloma embodies the Los Angeles we love.

Kyiv, Ukraine – Have you been on a plane during severe turbulence, fearing that the shaking aircraft is about to fall apart and tumble down? Brief moments of weightlessness stop your breath, perhaps you whisper prayers and remember everyone you love.

That’s the feeling you get during a Russian air raid in Kyiv, Ukraine, and there have been more than 1,800 of them since Russia’s full-scale invasion began in 2022.

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These days, they are bigger, scarier and longer than ever, because each one involves hundreds of drones and dozens of missiles.

They begin after dark and sometimes last in waves until dawn. Whooshing missiles tear up the night sky in two. Drones buzz like horror movie chainsaws or giant mosquitoes out of childhood flu nightmares.

What’s really harrowing is to hear two or three drones at once – I sardonically call it “stereo” and “Dolby surround” – while the arrhythmia of bass drum-like air defence explosions coincides with your heartbeat.

Each boom and thud chokes your body with adrenaline, and some shake your house, but after a couple of hours, your brain gives up, and you fall asleep processing the booms into nightmares.

And in the morning, you fall awake – feeling hungover and disoriented – and read about the consequences. You’re glad when no one is killed, and still sad because several people are usually wounded, and several apartment buildings are damaged.

Sometimes, I think about the people who operate the drones and launch the missiles. How they come back to their families after the night shift, what they tell their children and, most importantly, themselves.

But I prefer the memory of a crowd of high school graduates who walked past my house in June, at dawn, after their prom night that coincided with an especially long and loud air raid.

Their laughter and happiness about the sunrise, the clouds of blossoming trees around them, the rugs of flowers and grass under their feet, and the future ahead of them made them sound immortal. It was a sound that defied Russian President Vladimir Putin.

In recent months, blackouts have been the most inevitable part of each air raid. It feels as though keeping millions awake and horrified during the raids is only part of Moscow’s strategy of terrorising Ukraine.

Moscow’s logic appears simple: if you do not want to surrender, you will freeze. It methodically destroys power stations, transmission and central heating lines to keep millions without electricity, light and heat.

And then there are “planned outages”. There are usually three a day, lasting between two and eight hours.

You can hear an outage because even the sounds in your ears barely register, such as the fridge’s purring or the flow of hot water in the heating system, are gone. You can see an outage because the neighbourhood lights go out, making the stars in the night sky closer and brighter.

How to survive darkness

What saves you from darkness and disconnection is gadgets.

Apart from smartphones with energy-saving modes, wi-fi hotspots and flashlights, there are laptops, tablets, wireless speakers and vacuum cleaners running on batteries.

There are also inexpensive rechargeable lamps – I have 10 of them. Three are pint-sized and bright enough for my mother to read. Three more are motion-activated, which means she can safely use the bathroom any time, and the cat is perpetually amazed.

There is a cap lamp that makes me look like a miner and helps me cook or find something in the basement, and two tiny lamps that can be stuck into a power bank and just glow in a corner.

And there is a Christmas garland in the kitchen that makes each outage feel festive.

But the most important device, the symbolic hearth of my powerless house, is a $1,200, 20kg (40lbs) battery that can keep us warm and energised for up to 12 hours.

I live on the outskirts of Kyiv in a remodelled summer house that has its own pump and a natural gas-powered heating system. Both need electricity, along with the two 50-litre (13-gallon) water heaters.

But boiling water and microwaving meals is too energy-consuming, so we stick to frying pans and an old-fashioned whistling kettle that scares the cat.

And when the power is back on, there is no room for procrastination.

You need to recharge all the lamps and devices, start a washing machine, wash dishes, and go out for groceries without risking your life while crossing the road with the traffic lights off.

The electricity’s comeback may be deceptive – sometimes, it’s too weak. I recently tried to microwave a bowl of soup, twice, but it remained cold.

And for extreme emergencies, I have a gasoline-fuelled generator.  It’s loud, shaky and stinky, and you need an entire canister of gas worth $30 for it to keep it going all night.

But such generators keep Ukraine running.

You can see them next to shops, offices and apartment buildings. Some are chained to trees or walls to prevent theft, and some are too huge and heavy to be carried away.

During a recent music festival celebrating Ukrainian composers, a giant diesel generator powered the concert hall.

My internet provider turns them on seconds after an outage begins, so I am online no matter what.

You also need to be prepared when you go out.

After covering the 2008 Russian war in Georgia, I used to drive everyone around me mad with my I-have-to-be-ready-for-any-emergency obsession.

Now, all of Ukraine feels the same obsession.

The phone has to be fully charged. There has to be a power bank in my backpack – along with a basic first aid kit, a lighter (I don’t smoke), extra batteries for the Dictaphone, pens and a pencil to take notes in subzero temperatures, when ballpen ink freezes.

A couple of months ago, I used the lighter at Kyiv’s Independence Square, dotted with hundreds of tiny Ukrainian flags next to photos of fallen soldiers.

I helped a man with a toddler light a tiny candle that he wanted to place next to the photo of his younger brother.

“He’s the toddler’s father,” the man said, and all I could utter was “God rest his soul” as I walked away, hiding tears and putting the lighter back.

Editor’s note: We are at a historical moment in which much of the mainstream discussion about Venezuela centers on two extremes: countering MAGA narratives, often riddled with lies and half-truths, and warning about the dangers of military intervention; or, conversely, leaning into the idea that the US will not back down from Maduro & Co., and that military intervention is imminent. Writing in absolutes and taking the words of figures like Diosdado Cabello, Stephen Miller, or even María Corina Machado at face value—within a context where they are in constant dialogue with allies and supporters—can seriously mislead audiences. Especially when framed as professional analysis. Which is not the same as opinion (as a former lady editor of this prestigious blog used to say: opinions are like assholes, everybody has one). And that’s fine. We have nothing against opinion, these pages are riddled with it.

But, again, professional analysis is something different, which is why the writing in our Political Risk Report doesn’t look at all like what we post on the webpage. Some actors posing as serious analysts and rational players are, of course, capable of generating strong headlines and plenty of material for meaty feature stories. But now, more than ever, focus should be on avoiding simplistic narratives and to bridge political discourse with on-the-ground realities, voices, and data obscured by chavismo’s censorship regime. Intelligence analyst Daniel Blanco here offers advice on how to help you identify (and/or write) credible analysis.

1) Don’t play into politics, stick to facts

Your role as an analyst, whether you are a political consultant advising a senior leader or an economic analyst with corporate clients, is to provide informed judgments to your consumers to support decision-making. It does not matter if the assumptions presented are an ugly truth; they need to be as accurate as possible. Shaping ugly truths into pleasing narratives to score points with political factions or escalate positions as a pleasing analyst can lead to policy failures or operational setbacks. Furthermore, such behaviour may end up damaging trust between analysts and consumers, as well as weakening the public credibility of your persona.  

2) Use estimative language to communicate nuance

Estimative language—using terms like likely, probable, possible, or unlikely—signals that your conclusions are based on judgments under uncertainty and prevents giving the false impression that you have absolute certainty. Consumers often come from non-technical backgrounds and may interpret analytical conclusions as statements of guarantees. Communicating the likelihood and percentages of different outcomes allows your consumers (including readers from the public in some cases) to understand that you are not presenting a black-and-white fact.

3) Keep up with the domestic context 

Context refers to the broad framework within which a foreign decision-maker operates, or within which an event or process unfolds. It is both temporal and spatial in nature. Venezuela, in particular, has a context dynamic that shifts constantly, variables that could act as an indicator yesterday could be a nothingburger tomorrow. Keeping up with the context can be the difference between interpreting data as a critical bullet point or an outdated pattern. Take for example, the power outages or connectivity blackouts that some junior analysts assessed as a major alert, while in reality, it is a common occurrence in Venezuela over the last seven years. 

4) Never assume actors are rational or cohesive 

Venezuelan actors are not always rational, and this includes decision makers in the government and the opposition. Some may act based on emotion or ideology, while others could throw personal ambition into their calculations. Assuming rationality may cause analysts to overlook actions that appear illogical but are nonetheless likely or meaningful within the actor’s perspective. Second, any organisation of human beings will produce factions. Before you assess the statement of a single actor as the current intent of a whole side, you need to take into account whether it represents a faction’s interest or if it’s part of a wider trend. 

5) Human contacts will always beat open source

Don’t get me wrong on this one, publicly available information can help you collect observable patterns or supporting evidence, but will only get you so far once you get knee-deep in assessing intentions. Venezuela runs heavily on informal power structures that are not visible on social media or tracking applications. Additionally, the civilian population, from community leaders to corporate figures, do not express their opinions or knowledge in public space due to the increasing internal repression. Developing ground contacts in different organisations is critical to collect and process information that will never be open to the public. 

6) Never stop challenging your local sources 

Speaking from experience, sources can have motives that shape their reporting. They may exaggerate their access level or withhold critical information for a variety of reasons that can range from pursuing personal agendas to avoiding political conflicts. Your responsibility to the consumer is to ensure that firsthand observation is distinguished from hearsay or speculation. Also, you need to clarify the collection method. Ask your source if they heard this in a meeting or if it is indirect information coming from a family member or a party friend. This needs to be presented in the most honest way possible in the body of your analysis.

7) Write disclaimers/statements on your analysis

Writing a statement of analysis forces the analyst to evaluate the quality of sources and identify analytical uncertainties. Often, we have to make calls on incomplete information, and the whole purpose of a statement on analysis is to let the report consumer know that there are some potholes along the road and things may turn out differently. Communicating your own level of confidence (low-medium-high) on a written report may be the difference between your decision maker acting with caution, knowing that we don’t have as much information as we like, or committing to a decision that will become a failure down the road.