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On Sept. 11, 2001, there were no smartphones and no social media. What the country watched that morning — a jet airliner colliding with the south tower of the World Trade Center, the ash rolling through the streets, the paper still falling in the afternoon — was through a television set and the journalists who had to deliver the unfathomable details.

The jarring images shattered the peacefulness of a sunshine-filled late summer morning in New York.

“Everything seemed so perfect,” said MS NOW’s Chris Jansing, reflecting on the moments before anchoring her network’s continuous coverage. “It was another day of doing a job I loved, living in a city I loved.”

By nightfall, nearly 3,000 people were dead in lower Manhattan, at the Pentagon and in a field outside Shanksville, Pa. The experience of covering the terrorist attacks and their grim aftermath transformed Jansing and other journalists who were there. Twenty-five years later, it’s never far from their minds.

“It’s with me in ways large and small,” said NJ Burkett, a correspondent who covered the tragedy for New York station WABC. “When I look at my phone and it says 9:11, it takes me back.”

The Times asked five of the on-air personalities who are still working today to look back on the day they were called to cover the tragedy and its lasting impact.

Bret Baier: “I just said yes to everything.”

Fox News anchor Bret Baier at the National 9/11 Pentagon Memorial in Arlington, Va., on Aug. 25, 2026.

(Jared Soares/For The Times)

On every anniversary of Sept. 11, Fox News anchor Bret Baier uses the hashtag #NeverForget. He can recall every moment of that day.

Baier, 56, was driving to the Fox News bureau in Atlanta when he first heard on his car radio that a plane had hit the World Trade Center. He was a 31-year-old correspondent for the network, covering stories throughout the southeast U.S. and Latin America. When he arrived at the office, a call came from New York headquarters telling him to book a flight to the city so he could file reports from the World Trade Center site for Fox TV affiliates around the United States.

After a second plane hit the south tower of the World Trade Center 17 minutes later, all flights in the U.S. were halted. Baier and his producer were told to get a car and start driving.

“I just remember going really fast when I was driving,” Baier said. “I remember thinking what is happening with the world, and how big this story is. How big this moment is.”

By the time the duo reached northern Georgia, their plans changed again. A jetliner struck the Pentagon while a San Francisco-bound United Airlines flight crashed in Shanksville, Pa. Fox News executives told Baier and his producer to reroute to Arlington, Va.

After the 10-hour drive, Baier started the first of 10 straight days of reporting on the recovery efforts at the site. While the World Trade Center provided the most dramatic and enduring pictures of the stunning attack, the loss of life at the Pentagon was staggering as well, as 125 people died along with the 64 passengers and crew members on American Airlines Flight 77.

Baier was eventually pulled into the larger military story that followed 9/11. Fox News, just 5 years old, did not have a full-time Pentagon correspondent. Baier was offered the job while traveling overseas with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who was making the case for war against Afghanistan.

“I called a buddy on a satellite phone to get me an apartment in Washington,” he said. “Fox packed up my stuff in Atlanta.”

But the unplanned move changed Baier’s life. In six years on the Pentagon beat, he traveled to 74 countries. He was embedded with the military in war zones. “I just said yes to everything,” said Baier, who has anchored Fox News’ Washington newscast “Special Report” since 2009.

Baier recalled it was in the weeks after Sept. 11 that he first wore an American flag pin on his lapel. He never felt conflicted about it, even though such displays were prohibited at other network news divisions. “I thought I could report on America, ask tough questions and still be an American, pulling for us to win,” he said. “I wanted to be tough but fair, but also show that as a country we were standing together against this horrible attack.”

Byron Pitts covering the terrorist attacks in lower Manhattan for CBS News on Sept. 11, 2001.

(CBS)

Byron Pitts: “It’s the only story I think about every day.”

A newcomer to New York 25 years ago, Byron Pitts, then a CBS News correspondent, admitted it took him a few moments to understand the massive scope of what happened the morning of Sept. 11, 2001. He arrived early at the network’s headquarters on the West Side of Manhattan to screen an interview he did with entertainer and civil rights icon Harry Belafonte. Shortly after he started, a producer knocked on his door and told him there was a plane crash at the World Trade Center.

Pitts, 65, acknowledged the producer but kept working. “I thought it was a novice pilot bumping into a building,” he recalled. “I thought it would be three hours out of my day and it won’t make television.”

The producer came back shortly and said, “You need to go down there.”

An irritated Pitts hailed a cab and headed down the West Side Highway. While in the car, he learned a second plane had hit the south tower. Traffic was stopped and he had to head downtown by foot.

As Pitts got closer to the site, he tried to use his past experiences covering fires and other disasters during his career to judge the severity of the situation.

But the horrible scenes that unfolded before him were incomparable. One was a lifeless body near the lobby of the north tower. He thought it was a homeless man until he saw a uniform. He later learned it was Father Mychal Judge, the chaplain of the New York Fire Department killed by fallen debris. Judge’s body was later carried away by a group of first responders. Pitts saw a woman and a man standing at a window of one of the towers holding hands, and then jumping.

“Gravity takes over and their hands split, and he moves a little faster than she does,” Pitts said. “And we see them on the ground. That was the moment I realized something significant was going on.”

Pitts crossed paths with Mika Brzezinski, then a CBS News correspondent, now the cohost of MS NOW’s “Morning Joe.” As debris came down and smoke filled the air, they headed into an elementary school that Pitts believes was a command post for the fire and police departments. They took turns calling into CBS News on a hard-line phone, one delivering accounts of the unfolding catastrophe while the other looked outside to gather details amid the blinding smoke and dust.

Pitts said from that day forward, he never went to a story assignment without a handkerchief.

Pitts was awed not just by the enormity of the event, but also by how despite the rigid hierarchy of CBS News, he was “the new kid on the block” who had to present the story on Dan Rather’s evening newscast that night.

“My approach became almost childlike, so I would not become overwhelmed,” he said. “I tried to make it as simple as possible. I said, ‘Dan, I’ve never heard New York City this quiet.’ I was thinking — what simple thing can I say that you would understand if you’ve never been in New York.”

A few weeks later, Pitts headed off to Afghanistan to cover the U.S. military action. His evening news report on Sept. 11 won an Emmy Award and his star rose at CBS News, leading to “60 Minutes” and then ABC News in 2014, where he is currently a co-anchor of “Nightline.”

Pitts knows the good fortune he’s had in TV journalism is linked to the tragedy that started with a producer’s knock on his door 25 years ago. “I feel some measure of guilt but mostly gratitude,” he said. “It’s the only story I think about every day.”

Pitts said he uses his 9/11 experience to provide perspective. “When we’re discussing politics, a mass shooting, or the latest awful day in Iran, I know for a fact there is one guy in the room who has seen worse and who can say, ‘we’ll be OK,’ ” he said.

Chris Jansing: “You had to balance the news response with the human response.”

Chris Jansing paid her dues as a local reporter in upstate New York before she joined MSNBC (now called MS NOW) as a daytime anchor in 1998. She loved living in Manhattan, and took friends from out of town to the World Trade Center observation decks and Windows on the World, the restaurant on the 106th floor of the north tower.

“It was so iconically New York,” she said. “And I was proud to live in the city.”

Jansing, 69, had little time to process her emotions when she was told to “get in the chair” before 9 a.m. that morning at MSNBC’s Secaucus, N.J., studios after the first plane hit.

“You had to balance the news response with the human response,” she recalled.

For several hours, Jansing co-anchored the network’s coverage alongside Gregg Jarrett. The look of 24-hour cable news evolved that day, as the tsunami of information led to Fox News, MSNBC and CNN all adding running tickers at the bottom of the screen.

Jansing went to the roof of the network’s building after Brian Williams took over the anchor chair. Trauma centers in the area had been alerted, and she was told to watch for ambulances. “There was still a hope and a prayer that there would be injured folks who would overwhelm the hospitals in New York and would need to be brought to New Jersey,” Jansing recalled. She saw none.

Jansing has never watched the coverage of that day, which is now on YouTube. She had real-life reminders every day in her Manhattan neighborhood when she walked by the Rescue Company 1 firehouse that lost half its battalion at the crash site. She adopted a dog left behind by a 9/11 victim, a Dachshund named Baron. She remains friends with every producer she worked with on the story. The experience also reinforced her purpose in a career approaching its 50th year.

“I will always think that those moments are what keep you going,” said Jansing, currently chief political reporter for MS NOW. “They were an affirmation that’s kept me in the job,”

NJ Burkett, a correspondent for WABC, on the 13th floor of the Walt Disney Co. offices in Manhattan on Aug. 31, 2026.

(Roshni Khatri/For The Times)

NJ Burkett: “I put myself in increasingly dangerous situations.”

Burkett, 64, recalls how pedestrians were gathered around WABC’s windowed street level studio on the Upper West Side of Manhattan when he arrived for work on 9/11. He presumed the crowd was there for a big name guest on “Live with Regis and Kelly.” They were actually watching monitors showing news reports of the first plane that hit the north tower.

As Burkett and his cameraman Marty Glembotzky headed downtown in a truck, he already knew it was a terror attack. He recalled covering the 1993 terrorist bombing of the World Trade Center and regretted not getting footage of the firefighters’ rescue efforts. This time around he wanted to go inside the buildings and document their heroism.

A police officer stopped Burkett and Glembotzky before they could get in, likely saving their lives. A short time later, they would escape death again.

Burkett was doing a second take for a taped report that would set the scene for viewers when he heard the rumbling that “sounded like Niagara Falls.” It was the south tower of the World Trade Center coming down behind him. “A huge explosion now raining debris on us — we better get out of the way,” he said in what may be the most terrifying video clip from that morning.

Burkett and Glembotzky took cover in an adjacent building. “We open up the door and in a weird way it’s sort of providential, right?” he said. “The door is a metaphor. It’s like the door into the rest of your life. If we had to run for half a block, we’d be dead.”

Glembotzky was so shaken by the experience, he stepped away from his career as a cameraman and became a wine seller before eventually returning. But Burkett took on more dangerous assignments in the Middle East, heading to Israel to cover the Palestinian uprising known as the Second Intifada. He later headed to Iraq to cover the run-up to the U.S. invasion in 2003.

Burkett won a George Foster Peabody Award for his work on 9/11. In retrospect, he believes he took on assignments in war zones to avoid dealing with the trauma of the day.

“I would put myself into increasingly dangerous situations,” he said. “Looking back, I was running from 9/11. That was my way of coping. Sometimes I wonder did I allow myself feel it enough. Or did I just run too far and too hard and it will all come down and crash on me one day?”

Occasionally he worries about 9/11-related illnesses. “If I start to cough — the slightest little cough — I’ll think ‘is this it?’” he said.

But as a New York TV fixture since 1989, Burkett still feels the appreciation from viewers for his efforts. “To this day, almost 25 years later, people will come up to me on the street and ask to hug me and say ‘NJ Burkett I’m glad you’re alive,’ ” he said.

Carson Daly at NBC’s “Today” show studio at Rockefeller Plaza in Manhattan on Sept. 3, 2026.

(Roshni Khatri/For The Times)

Carson Daly: “I remember how motionless the room was.”

As continuous news coverage of the Sept. 11 attacks saturated television for days, the makers of entertainment shows had to decide when it would be appropriate to go back to work. Carson Daly and the MTV executives mulled over the situation as their wildly popular program “Total Request Live” remained off the air for three days since the attacks.

“We had such a massive audience that the question was raised, ‘do we have a responsibility to simply show up?’ ” Daly, 53, recalled in a recent interview.

Daly, now a feature anchor on NBC’s “Today,” was not a journalist by trade. But he understood the trust that young viewers had in him and “TRL,” a live show that counted down the most popular music videos of the moment. The show had dealt with tragedy a few years before after the high school shooting in Columbine, Colo.

But 9/11 happened on the home turf of “TRL,” which aired from New York City’s Times Square. With the bridges and tunnels closed, getting a crew to the studio was a challenge.

“Everybody wore multiple hats,” said Daly, who also served as an executive producer.

By Sept. 14 of that week, the MTV studio on Broadway was filled with young “TRL” fans, but lacked the energy viewers were used to seeing on the screen. “They were frozen,” Daly recalled. “That was in such stark contrast to what the show was every day. I remember how motionless the room was and feeling like, ‘What am I doing on television?’ ”

Carson Daly shows a tattoo he got after the 9/11 attacks in New York.

(Roshni Khatri/For The Times)

Daly leaned on the MTV News team to update the audience on the 9/11 story developments. Music stars including Jay-Z, Justin Timberlake and Kid Rock called into the program to share their thoughts with Daly. Instead of music videos, the screen showed email messages from viewers expressing their feelings about the tragedy.

MTV News personality Sway delivered a music news report that noted how two new CD releases — “Party Music” by the American hip-hop group The Coup and Dream Theater’s “Live Scenes from New York” — were delayed because both used cover artwork that depicted the destruction of the World Trade Center.

Daly has a permanent remembrance of the week. When he arrived at the MTV offices the day before “TRL” returned, the building was evacuated after it received a bomb threat.

“I remember walking around Hell’s Kitchen,” he said. “I ended up getting a tattoo. A red, white and blue NYC on my right wrist.”

It’s pronounced “human.” Yet writer-director Siân Heder acknowledges that the unusual spelling of the title of her new movie, “Being Heumann,” is something people might give a puzzled second look, unsure of how to say it and possibly dismissing it altogether.

Which, the more she sat with it, made it perfect as the title for a portrait of real-life disability rights activist Judy Heumann, who, while being in a wheelchair, made herself undismissable.

More specifically, the film looks at the pivotal 1977 protest in which Heumann led a group in a 26-day sit-in at a federal office building in San Francisco until the government began enforcing Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 — the first federal law that recognized disability as a civil rights category.

“The fact that her last name was ‘human’ has so many beautiful layers of meaning,” says Heder, 49, during a recent interview in Los Angeles. “I think Judy was asking for the world to see disabled people as human beings who were worthy of rights and being looked at and being included.”

A world premiere and the opening-night selection of this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, which begins on Thursday, “Being Heumann” will hit theaters Nov. 6 and begin streaming on Apple TV Nov. 13. It is also, crucially, Heder’s first film since 2021’s “CODA,” the bittersweet drama about a young woman in a Deaf family (the title is an acronym for “child of Deaf adults”) that won three Academy Awards including adapted screenplay for Heder and best picture.

Actor Ruth Madeley and filmmaker Siân Heder during production on “Being Heumann.”

(Apple TV)

In Heumann, a wheelchair user after contracting polio as a child, Heder found a subject who was in the process of discovering herself as a leader: learning when to hold firm and when to cede ground and empower other people. And for someone who was grappling with the aftermath of unexpected success, that felt familiar.

“I think I was making a movie about myself, honestly,” Heder says. “When you’re moving forward on a massive project or a movement or anything, there’s a necessary drive and ambition and focus that is needed. And if you look at any major change that’s happened in human history, it takes a certain kind of person to push that through. I’m not identifying myself with great leaders of the civil rights movement, but directing a movie is a similar thing.”

Heder is tucked into a quiet corner of a busy coffee shop in L.A.’s Eagle Rock neighborhood, where she has long lived. She is in the process of moving from one historic house to an even older one a few blocks away. Heder didn’t want to disrupt the schooling of her two young children, ages 10 and 12, and has become too enmeshed in the area to want to leave it.

“There’s definitely an element of: ‘She manipulated everyone with that movie. She made us all cry and that’s why she won,’” Heder says of “CODA,” her Oscar-winning best picture. “I was an indie filmmaker that was compelled to tell that story.”

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

Community is a word that comes up often over the course of a conversation with Heder, who has a warm manner and a quiet self-possession. Though “CODA” may have brought her wider attention, she was far from a novice by the time she made that film. She won a Peabody Award as a writer on the series “Men of a Certain Age” and was a writer, director and producer on the acclaimed “Orange Is the New Black.” She expanded her 2006 short film “Mother” into her first feature “Tallulah,” about a young woman who takes a baby from a reckless mother and tries to pass it off as her own. It premiered at Sundance in 2016.

Winning the Oscar created changes in her life both big and small. Heder at first kept it on her desk at home, but had to move it because she began to feel the statuette’s crossed arms quietly judging her as she worked. When she drove herself to the Spirit Awards the year after “CODA’s” triumph and spontaneously gave a ride to an afterparty to Maggie Gyllenhaal and Ebon Moss-Bachrach, Heder suddenly realized her 10-year-old Subaru wasn’t going to cut it anymore.

“I have a nicer car now,” she says, laughing at the memory. “It’s baby steps.”

The day after the Oscars, Heder recalls that she couldn’t stop crying, all the pressure built up from months of campaigning events and Q&As finally letting itself out.

She says two things changed almost immediately after winning the Oscar. One was a sense of expectation, wanting to make the most of whatever the moment might allow.

“This was not a part of my plans,” she says. “I didn’t ever intend to have so many eyeballs turn to me and go, ’What are you doing now?’”

The second was simply the volume of material and opportunities incoming. Heder says she met with Marvel “so many times” about different projects but none of them felt right. As an independent filmmaker “you’re always pushing against the no,” she puts it, moving projects forward against all odds. But now she felt she had to be the resistance, the one to ask whether something was worthwhile.

“Suddenly there are a lot of voices chiming in too because your reps have an idea of what you should do next and the industry has an idea of what you should do next,” Heder says. “And it was really important for me to center myself back in a feeling of: I’ve always been drawn to stories because they move me. And that hasn’t changed.”

Her Oscars triumph was also the night of the notorious Will Smith-Chris Rock on-stage slap, which overshadowed coverage. Heder is online enough that she knows that some film fans would want an asterisk next to the Oscar wins for “CODA,” as if to note some sort of COVID-era exception for the first film from a streaming service to win Hollywood’s top award.

“There’s definitely an element of: ‘She manipulated everyone with that movie. She made us all cry and that’s why she won,’” Heder says with a edge of defiance. “I was an indie filmmaker that was compelled to tell that story. And then audiences embraced that story and that story took off in a way that was unexpected and surprising even for me.”

Siân Heder holds her Oscar for best adapted screenplay for “CODA” backstage during the Oscars in 2022.

(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)

Heder had been developing “Being Heumann” before “CODA” was released. A friend encouraged Heder to see the 2020 documentary “Crip Camp,” which includes Heumann as a subject, and the filmmaker was so struck by that story, she followed up by reading Heumann’s 2020 memoir.

She sent Heumann a cold email expressing interest in the book. As it turned out, Heumann was deciding that very day who should direct a movie of her life. Heumann gave the filmmaker a last-minute chance to pitch herself. After saying she’d cast authentically disabled performers as she did on “CODA,” Heder got the job.

Heder would work for two years on researching and developing the project with Heumann, interviewing dozens of people involved in the actual Carter-era protest. When Heumann died unexpectedly in 2023, Heder did not think she could continue, but it was “Crip Camp” co-director James Lebrecht who convinced her otherwise.

“I think Judy’s death, which was sudden — it made me feel like she had left her legacy in my hands,” remembers Heder.

After developing other scripts post-Oscars that never quite became her next film, Heder eventually found herself in the enviable position of having two projects greenlit at once: “Being Heumann” at Apple and an adaptation of Gabrielle Zevin’s popular novel “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow” at Paramount.

As she was trying to make a decision, she went to a meeting with several other directors about the relaunching of the Village Theater in Westwood. She found herself having coffee with Guillermo del Toro and asked him how he decided between potential projects.

“And he said, ‘Make the movie that can’t get made without you,’” she recalls. “And that was very clarifying for me. When you are the element that gets that story told, it takes on an importance and urgency.”

As can often be the case, Del Toro’s advice confirmed what she already felt and she began to move forward with “Being Heumann.” (She is currently prepping “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow” so there will not be another five-year gap between releasing films.)

“I was having a rare moment of power in the industry to push something forward,” Heder says, “and it felt like there was a path to go make a big paycheck and have that kind of jump up, or I could use that moment of power and success to try to push through the hardest project I could think of. It was in that moment, after ‘CODA,’ where I really realized: I could make this incredibly difficult movie that no one might make.”

Andrew Pilkington, from left, Siena Rafter, Charlie Rush-Reese, Dylan O’Brien, Roberta Colindrez, Ruth Madeley and Madeline Delp in the movie “Being Heumann.”

(Apple TV)

Following what Heder describes as “the casting Olympics,’ she arrived at BAFTA-nominated actor Ruth Madeley, a wheelchair user, to play the lead role. “Being Heumann” was shot in Toronto, largely on a soundstage built to stand in for the San Francisco federal office building where the sit-in took place.

“Hollywood might be the least accessible industry out there,” Heder notes while beginning to explain the accommodations that needed to be made for a cast that included performers with a wide range of disabilities. Custom-built trailers were created and the set had to be made accessible in ways that a filming location typically is not. An accessibility team oversaw everything, from large-scale logistics to the personal needs of individual background actors.

Rather than a more conventional biopic, Heder wanted to tell the more specific story of the 504 sit-in, building out an ensemble of characters around Heumann.

“I said, “It’s almost like ‘Bad News Bears’ and ‘Dog Day Afternoon’ together,” says Heder. “There’s an underdog-sports-team feeling and bank-heist-gone-wrong.”

But a filmmaker friend asked her: Is making movies about disability now her “thing”? It is a question Heder had already considered.

“Of course it was on my mind if it starts to feel like: Oh, is Siân Heder a social justice warrior who’s just out to try to make these movies that have some kind of message behind them,” she says preemptively. “But I think this is just a great story. Outside of disability, outside of anything else, it is a great story.”

Heder remains interested in stories about outsiders, about class and people generally ignored by or on the fringes of society. And it remains important that she herself feel a part of a larger community in her life and her work.

“My daughter said to me the other day, ‘Mom, I think you’re the right kind of famous because you are important to people who know who you are, but you can still just be in the world and be anonymous.” And I think there’s something true about that.”

Her daughter has obviously inherited Heder’s deep well of empathy, one that is more concerned with bringing new, unseen stories to the screen than with the pursuit of cool points or pure fame.

“‘Earnest’ has become a dirty word,” says Heder. “And what earnest actually means is direct and truthful.”

“Dang!,” an amiably chaotic new adult animated comedy premiering Tuesday on Netflix, tells the story of the Dangs, three Chinese American siblings living in New York City. Eunice (Poppy Liu, “Hacks”) and older brother Andrew (Andrew Law) share a walk-up apartment in Chinatown; at 26, she’s still determinedly the baby, with little practical knowledge and dependent on him for the tiniest things. He’s the anxious middle child. (Therapist to Andrew: “I’m getting the sense that you’re an anxious people pleaser.” Andrew: “I’m cool with that if you are. Oh my God, are you?”) Somehow Andrew, who is gay, has a lot of casual sex, and only casual sex, despite being incredibly (and comically, obviously) awkward.

Both Andrew and Eunice, who makes money from a live stream in which “horny men and a few women with eating disorders pay me to step on bread,” are relationship averse. When it’s suggested she might like someone she’s been seeing, Eunice panics, “Am I catching feelings? Can it be stopped? Is there a vaccine? Damn whoever the president is.” There is little romance in this comedy.

Where Andrew and Eunice are aspirational slackers who spend off hours watching reality TV and taking whatever drug comes to hand, their older sister, Ruthie (Stephanie Hsu, “Everything Everywhere All at Once”), is a high-powered lawyer, more than comfortable defending evil corporations from the common people; she recoils at a community garden or free library, which she regards as socialism. (“I don’t even like fire departments.”) Though she’s seemingly the successful one, her life has taken an unexpected turn; she’s left her husband, Warren, a weedy Briton overeager to please her, and is pregnant by a colleague, a creep she idealizes. Her fall from perfection delights her brother and sister, who chant, “One of us!” She moves to New York and into the series.

Co-created by Law, who wrote for “Hacks,” “The Good Place” and “Late Night With Seth Meyers” and has acted a little, and Matt Murray (a smorgasbord of 21st century smart comedies are on his resume), the show was originally conceived as live-action. If anything like the present product, it would have to have been a very particular kind of comedy — something like “30 Rock,” whose beats were borrowed from cartoons in the first place. In any case, animation is the place it ought to be. The grotesqueness of Eunice’s boss, Jane, a product-damaged monster who is all face and very little body, if not unachievable in live-action — Katherine Helmond in “Brazil” comes to mind — isn’t really sustainable. You could not have a dead old man’s head come loose from his body and roll across a conference table with quite the same air of insouciance, or melt a rat walking across an overheated microwave oven, if actual people and rats were involved. On the other hand, the fact that Warren is so annoying reminds us that unreal people can elicit genuine repulsion. I ground my teeth at his every appearance; for Ruthie’s sake, I wanted him gone, and she isn’t real, either. It’s the magic of animation.

The show is generally amusing, sometimes very funny and easy to watch as an evolving story of family. (A visit to the Dang parents in Episode 8 is especially productive.) One’s mileage will vary depending on generation and experience. (“I was born in 1999,” says Eunice, who has never heard of Facebook. “Anything before ‘Skibidi Toilet’ is just cave paintings to me.” Of course, I had to look up “Skibidi Toilet,” and I don’t feel bad about admitting that.) There are sex jokes, fart jokes and pop culture jokes; there are jokes I don’t even want to describe. But there is a satisfying specificity to the humor, especially as involves Asian American culture, gay life, New York City and New York City gay Asian American life, which is not overexplained. The city itself is rendered with some light-handed detail — its delis, drug stores, coffee shops (why did I especially like the paper sleeves on the to-go cups?), Central Park on “Freaquinox,” “the first day that everyone decides it’s spring” when citizens turn into sex-crazed zombies. (Eunice: “Last year, I woke up next to an Uber Eats delivery robot.”)

As a situation comedy, its characters will spend their days and nights getting in and out of scrapes, enduring self-inflicted humiliations, experiencing minor triumphs; they are all a little stupid, and a little smart. And as a cartoon, its job is not just to tell you a story, but to give you something fresh to look at, something to set itself apart while offering easy access to its world and people. The character design, which borrows from anime, is elegant and a little odd — hands and feet are drawn tiny, which has the paradoxical effect of drawing your attention, making them more expressive.

Beyond the three stars and Noël Wells (as Greta, Jane’s cowed assistant), neither the producers nor the publicists nor the onscreen credits nor the usual websites have identified who played whom. But I copied down these names down from the screen: Al Roberts, Sungwon Cho, Jared Goldstein, John Michael Higgins, Adam Pally, Jaboukie Young-White and Mary Holland.

Dambrauskas says he had known since the age of 12 he would not make it as a player, but coaching would keep him close to football.

He arrived in London in August 2002 aged 25 on a student visa with limited English.

What followed would be eight years of hard work where he would coach for community projects, at a semi-professional club, within professional youth programmes – and hold down multiple jobs while raising two children.

In 2004 he enrolled on a course in sports science and coaching at London Metropolitan University, the first real step in his career.

Then he started out coaching by volunteering with the Access to Sports Project for deprived children in Finsbury Park.

He went on to work with London Tigers, a charitable community organisation which runs teams from junior level right through to semi-professional.

Starting out as a volunteer, across five years he progressed to manage the first team in non-league football in the Spartan South Midlands League, FA Cup and FA Vase.

Dambrauskas became the first Lithuanian to achieve a Uefa coaching licence through the London Football Association.

“I went on every possible course, every possible conference, London Football Coaches Association meetings,” Dambrauskas said.

“Everywhere I could go just to gain some information, some knowledge, some extra diploma, extra course.

“That was very important for me and I took my chances.”

He got his first break at a professional club when Manchester United Soccer Schools took a chance on him in 2004.

Dambrauskas spent five years coaching on residential courses in the UK and in Europe.

“That was the best thing that could happen in my life,” Dambrauskas said.

“I went through three or four interviews. I will be forever grateful to [Foundation chief executive] John Shiels, the way he gave me this chance, because I didn’t have experience.

“I’d never been in a place with so many great personalities as I got in the Manchester United Soccer Schools.”

After a short spell with Fulham, Dambrauskas moved to Brentford. He credits academy director Ose Aibangee as one of the biggest influences on his career, pushing his limits.

All the while he was juggling home life and working multiple jobs to make ends meet.

“I was a gardener, a handyman, doing newspaper rounds at the beginning, also polishing floors in a pub,” Dambrauskas said.

“So many jobs. Working in retail, and then as a sports development officer, then a sports development manager, and the central YMCA.

“I was doing two, three, sometimes four jobs.”

As well as the trip to Manchester United this week, Sabah will complete their Champions League group games at Arsenal in January.

This also feels like fate for Dambrauskas – one of the buildings at London Metropolitan University on Holloway Road overlooked Emirates Stadium.

When asked about his time in England, Dambrauskas’ face lights up.

“When I hear this word ‘England’, it for me sounds like opportunities,” Dambrauskas said.

“It was really amazing. England gave me all this and I’ll forever be grateful.”

It was 1963 and up-and-coming freelance journalist Gloria Steinem had been a working writer in New York City for roughly three years when Show magazine sent her on an undercover assignment that she was uniquely qualified for: to infiltrate Manhattan’s “greatest new showbiz gimmick,” the Playboy Club. She already had the beauty and brains, all she’d need was an alias, a leotard and a notebook. The assignment would change the course of her career, but not in the way that she’d hoped.

“GIRLS:

Do Playboy Club Bunnies Really

Have Glamorous Jobs,

Meet Celebrities, And

Make Top Money?

Yes, it’s true! Attractive young girls can now earn $200-$300 a week at the fabulous New York Playboy Club, enjoy the glamorous and exciting aura of show business, and have the opportunity to travel to other Playboy Clubs throughout the world.”

Armed with the above ad and welcomed by a grinning private guard calling, “Here bunny, bunny, bunny!” Steinem set out to expose the working conditions and interior lives of the bunnies slinging booze to the playboys who patronized the club. She subjected herself to the wardrobe fittings, which included getting her bunny suit stuffed to boost her breast size; she was poked and prodded during an invasive physical exam; she strutted through the club near-naked with sore feet and a suit so tight, she had to wrap gauze around her midsection where her skin had been rubbed raw; and various other indignities she underwent for the sake of journalism.

Documenting a lunch shift at the club, Steinem wrote, “Somehow, the usual tail pullings and propositions and pinching and ogling seemed all the more depressing when, outside this windowless room of perpetual night, the sun was shining.”

Steinem’s article accomplished what it set out to do, and not only were the working conditions at the club exposed, but some were subsequently improved because of her work. In her essay collection “Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions,” Steinem wrote that in response to the story, Hugh Hefner wrote her a letter saying that her “beef about the physical given [to] the girls before they start work at the club prompted my eliminating it.”

Also as a result of her piece, she was slapped with a $1-million libel suit, subpoenaed as a witness in a liquor laws case against the Playboy Club, and received “obscene and threatening” calls.

Most notable, of the short-term results of the story, was the immediate impact it had on her career. Sure, in a lot of ways it had put her on the map, but she struggled to land serious journalistic assignments because, as she put it, “I had now become a Bunny — and it didn’t matter why.”

Steinem, a feminist icon and one of the most widely recognized leaders of the second-wave women’s movement, died on Wednesday at 92. Since she shed the bunny suit after her 11-day stint on the job at the Playboy Club, she went on to cofound New York Magazine and Ms. Magazine, which changed the course of the abortion rights movement with its “We Have Had Abortions” petition in which high-profile women admitted to having illegal abortions, Steinem among them. She played a pivotal role in spearheading some of the most influential and successful women’s rights efforts. And in 2013, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom for her lifetime of work as a journalist and activist.

Still, with all the aforementioned accomplishments, and decades later, Steinem said that her naysayers used her bunny work in an attempt to discredit her. For decades she considered the story a “professional error of gigantic proportions.” But later, she changed her tune.

“I’m not sorry I did it,” she told Ronan Farrow in 2020, when she was 86 years old. “But it is true that as old as I am, when anybody wants to put me down, they say, ‘Well, she was once a bunny.’ ”

In Steinem’s “Famous Last Words” interview, released on Netflix following her death, she closed the segment by addressing the audience. “Please tell your own story,” she said. “This is the most important thing we can do for each other: is to know each other through stories.”

I was hesitant to tell this story, and stewed over the potential risks I would be taking by telling it, but then I thought of the risk Steinem took. She dealt with fallout and she grappled with the ways the article may have hurt her career more than helped. But of the ample wisdom she imparted, its the power of women’s stories to shift culture, change policy and empower other women that feels most resonant.

I didn’t discover Steinem’s “I Was a Playboy Bunny” exposé until I was in college. I was in my late twenties at the time because I’d taken a few detours after I left high school, most of them dead ends.

One such detour led me through the massive hedge-lined gates of the Playboy Mansion. I was 18, and the E! reality series “The Girls Next Door” sparked renewed interest in Playboy bunnies. I wish I could say that I’d arrived at the mansion on an undercover magazine assignment, but the reality was different. I’d been watching a rerun of the E! show from a bedbug-ridden townhome in downtown Los Angeles, and earlier that day I grappled with whether I should pay my parking debt or buy a burrito.

I watched as the girls bounced around the mansion, appearing carefree, bedbug-free and parking ticket-free. Their lives, produced and edited as they were, appeared to be stable and glamorous, and I thought, “Hmm, maybe I should do that.” If Hefner was good at anything, it was creating a facade.

Like Steinem found, applying to be a Playboy bunny was surprisingly simple. I emailed a photo of myself in a swimsuit and shortly afterward, an invitation to a casting call at the mansion arrived.

At the casting call, I was handed a satin robe and pointed toward a small tent where I could change and a large tent with the photo crew inside. Steinem had likened wearing the bunny suit to feeling like meat on a hook. I, too, couldn’t shake the thought of a meat factory and almost instantly, realized I wanted off the conveyor belt.

My trip to the mansion and endeavor to become a bunny was short-lived. I’d driven there feeling like a femme fatale, and left feeling naive and out of my depth. Worse, it was just another humiliating misadventure that I’d carry around for years with shame.

That is until I came across her story in her essay collection “Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions.”

Steinem said that she was pigeonholed because of the story. She struggled afterward to be taken seriously and that may be true, but I’d argue an opposite point. Because Steinem was ultimately held in such high regard as a journalist and activist, and because she was an undercover bunny along the way, she helped the bunnies of the world to take themselves a little more seriously, to see that beyond the bunny suit, there is a world of possibilities waiting for them.

In the collection, originally published in 1983 and reprinted several times, Steinem wrote that after a town-hall meeting in New Bedford, Mass., a little girl of 6 or 7 gave her a crayon drawing of her in the bunny costume copied from a photo that had circulated online. “ ‘Even if a girl looks silly,’ she said, ‘boys should know that’s she’s smart.’ ”

“This story may outlast me,” she wrote. “but it’s not going to outlast or outsmart that little girl.”

In the book, Steinem wrote that one longer-term result of the article was “realizing that all women are Bunnies. After feminism arrived in my life, I stopped regretting that I had written the article.”

The line “All women are Bunnies” stands out. But what I imagine she meant is, bunnies are just women.

Dodgers star Shohei Ohtani has not played since Wednesday, when he struck out four times and winced noticeably at the plate.

On Saturday, the Dodgers held him out of the lineup for the third consecutive game because of pain in his right biceps.

Manager Dave Roberts said Ohtani’s path back to the field is predicated on how he responds to hitting in the cage, which he planned to do before Saturday night’s game against the Washington Nationals at Dodger Stadium.

“My expectation is that he’s going to hit today in the cage,” Roberts told reporters. “Once he hits and how he comes out of it, that’ll be telling for tomorrow.”

The injured list becomes a consideration if Ohtani is not trending in a positive direction Sunday, Roberts said.

Ohtani falls under the 15-day category for the IL, which covers pitchers and two-way players, as opposed to the 10-day list for position players. The Dodgers can backdate the move up to three days, akin to time served. So a 15-day window would be reduced to 12 days.

Although Roberts said he has not spoken to Ohtani about how he feels physically, the manager said he can get a hint from the player’s demeanor.

“When he doesn’t feel well physically, he gets more short and he’s not the same personality,” Roberts said, adding that Ohtani has seemed looser and more easygoing the past couple of days.

Michael Lomonaco can account for every minute of the morning of Sept. 11, 2001 — including the small decision that saved his life.

Lomonaco, the executive chef who ran Windows on the World on the 106th and 107th floors of the North Tower of the World Trade Center, was on his way up to his office when he stopped at an optometrist shop on the ground level to have his eyeglass frames adjusted.

He was still inside when American Airlines Flight 11 hit the tower above him at 8:46 a.m.

“I felt the buidling shake,” he recalled in the new CNN Films documentary “Top of the World.” “And I thought that can’t be the subway. That’s impossible.”

Lomonaco was evacuated. From the street, he watched employees of his own restaurant wave a white tablecloth from a window more than 100 floors up. Seventy-nine Windows on the World employees and 91 guests died that morning in the gastronomic soul of the Twin Towers — the one part of the complex that belonged to New Yorkers who didn’t work there, and to visitors from everywhere else.

“Top of the World” premieres Monday at 8 p.m. ET/PT on CNN and begins streaming the following day on the network’s subscription streaming platforms. The documentary short arrives on a double anniversary: 25 years since the attacks, and 50 years since Windows on the World opened on April 19, 1976.

It is the work of producer-director team Betsy West and Julie Cohen, who made “RBG,” the Oscar-nominated portrait of the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. The film is a production of CNN Films, TIME Studios and Tribeca Studios, in association with Montalto Pictures and Storyville Films, and was inspired by Tom Roston’s book “The Most Spectacular Restaurant in the World.” Actor Denis Leary voices the restaurant’s creator, Joe Baum, drawn from decades of archival recordings.

West and Cohen were reluctant to take it on. Both were working in network television news in 2001.

“There’s like a part of you that doesn’t want to go back there,” Cohen said in a recent interview. “But when we read this book and met some of the amazing people who had worked at Windows over its 25-year history, we realized this was actually a really good way into remembering there was a lot of beautiful stuff in the Twin Towers and like we shouldn’t let that disappear just because it ended so painfully.”

What emerges is a history of how a restaurant transformed the reputation of the monolithic Twin Towers, which received little respect from architecture critics and bafflement from a public that wondered why it was built in the 1970s by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey as the city was fighting off financial collapse.

“This film tells a story of a restaurant that was very special to New York a time when New York was getting kicked in the teeth,” the Brooklyn-born Lomonaco said in a recent interview.

The World Trade Center operators turned to restaurant impresario Joe Baum to create a dining experience that would draw people to the Manhattan neighborhood largely known for its blocks of stores that sold radios and electronic parts. Baum was known for such New York dining landmarks as the Four Seasons and Tavern on the Green, and his new creation became an immediate hit after it opened in 1976, becoming a magnet for tourists and celebrities alike who came for the eye-popping views through the floor-to-ceiling windows.

At the time of the 9/11 attack, the World was the highest-revenue-generating privately owned restaurant in the U.S.

West noted another draw to the story was the stories of the many immigrants who worked at Windows, which proudly called itself “the U.N. of restaurants.” The film’s focus on the contribution of the foreign-born population to the restaurant industry stands in stark contrast to the image of immigrants conveyed by the Trump White House to justify its deportation efforts.

“Immigrants continue to make a contribution to our country and to the economy,” West said. “This was an opportunity to tell that positive story as opposed to what’s going on in our country now.”

Cohen and West scoured the Windows on the World Facebook page to find surviving former employees to help tell the story. Nathalie Tolentino was a hostess whose family came to the U.S. to escape political upheaval in Peru. Sekou Siby was a line cook from the Ivory Coast, who swapped shifts with one of the workers who died during a morning breakfast held in the restaurant on 9/11. Both talk about how the restaurant changed their lives.

Lomonaco is a central character in the “Top of the World,” as his arrival as the executive chef of Windows in 1997 boosted the restaurant’s culinary reputation. A hot chef who oversaw a turnaround at the 21 Club, another legendary New York dining spot, Lomonaco turned Windows into a destination for American cuisine along with the breathtaking views.

Lomonaco arrived after the restaurant was closed for three years following the first terrorist bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993 that killed six people and injured more than 1,000 but left the towers intact.

Once Windows on the World was gone, Lomonaco was offered high-profile restaurant jobs in other parts of the country. But he had unfinished business in New York.

“I didn’t want to abandon my city,” he said.

In the first days after the attacks, Lomonaco said, he read nothing about Windows on the World; coverage centered on the massive loss of life among the first responders and at the financial firms inside the World Trade Center. But over time, he got attention and support for the families of the employees who lost their lives that day.

Lomonaco and the restaurant’s owners formed Windows of Hope, a charitable foundation that raised more than $22 million to pay for healthcare and tuition costs for the children of the victims. “We were giving checks to people to pay their rent before federal funds came through,” he said.

Lomonaco said he still meets patrons who give him a matchbook or coaster from their visit to Windows. “They feel like they have to give me or send me these little artifacts,” he said. “That’s what has touched me the most.”

The first edition of the remade “60 Minutes” under CBS News editor in chief Bari Weiss debuts Sept. 13 with a reliable formula from the venerable newsmagazine’s playbook.

Correspondent Jon Wertheim will lead off the 59th season with an in-depth look at the Los Angeles Rams, the favorite of oddsmakers to win the Super Bowl this season. Wertheim sits down with Rams general manager Les Snead, head coach Sean McVay and veteran quarterback Matthew Stafford. The segment will also explore team owner Stan Kroenke’s investment in technology, including artificial intelligence, to help the team gain an edge on the field.

Jon Wertheim interviews Los Angeles Rams head coach Sean McVay.

(CBS News)

“60 Minutes” has often turned to sports-related segments when a season premiere follows a late afternoon NFL game. Last year, Wertheim profiled Ultimate Fighting Championship Chief Executive Dana White for the 58th season premiere. The program scored more than 10 million viewers and was the most-watched non-sports program of the week. In 2023, Wertheim interviewed University of Colorado head football coach Deion Sanders for the 56th season opener.

CBS News will be under pressure to have “60 Minutes” get off to a strong start in the ratings following the major upheaval at the program earlier this year.

After the completion of a successful season where ratings were up 9% over the previous year, Weiss fired “60 Minutes” correspondents Sharyn Alfonsi and Cecilia Vega — both of whom complained that the executive pushed them to add right-wing talking points to their stories. Weiss also dismissed “60 Minutes” executive producer Tanya Simon and replaced her with screenwriter and documentary filmmaker Nick Bilton, who has no previous experience in TV news.

In response to the firings, longtime correspondent Scott Pelley accused Weiss of “murdering” the program and claimed she was putting “her thumb on the scale” for more favorable coverage of President Trump’s administration. Pelley was shown the door with cause after confronting management at a June 1 meeting. CBS denied the claims.

The discord meant the program spent much of the summer hiring replacement correspondents, including Ross Douthat, a conservative New York Times opinion writer with no experience as a TV journalist.

Weiss, founder of the heterodox digital news site the Free Press, was hired by Paramount Chief Executive David Ellison with a mandate to pull the news division to the political center. The stated goal has put every move by Weiss under heavy scrutiny, as many critics have suggested she is at the network to placate the Trump White House while Paramount pursues its acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery.

Other new “60 Minutes” contributors include author and journalist Sebastian Junger, former CNN and Vice News correspondent Gianna Toboni, and Trevor Phillips, a British journalist who joined CBS News earlier this year as a senior global affairs correspondent. They will join correspondents Wertheim, Norah O’Donnell, Bill Whitaker and Lesley Stahl.

The program will also feature stories with CBS News correspondents outside of the core group at “60 Minutes,” such as Seth Doane and Matt Gutman.

The other two segments on the “60 Minutes” premiere, — which could include a significant newsmaker interview, — will be announced sometime next week.

This year’s premiere should get a strong boost, as most of the country will get CBS coverage of a late afternoon match-up between the Green Bay Packers and the Minnesota Vikings, two contenders in the highly competitive NFC North. The network’s pregame show “The NFL Today” is traveling to Green Bay for the telecast.

Eating breakfast in a South Dakota coffee shop, Gloria Steinem was all too aware of the couple eyeballing her from the next booth. He was sporting chains. She wore leather pants and what Steinem later recalled as “an improbable hairdo.” The place was packed with tough-looking, mostly male bikers pumped about a huge rally they were attending. Steinem, returning from a Sioux powwow honoring ancient tribal women, knew she wasn’t in her element.

Finally, the leather-clad woman came over and spoke up. “I just want to tell you how much Ms. magazine has meant to me over the years — and my husband too,” she told an astonished Steinem.

There was a time, the woman said, when rolling down the road meant perching on her husband’s back seat. But now she had her own sweet ride: “I even put ‘Ms.’ on my license plate, and you should see my grandkids’ faces when Grandma rides up on her purple Harley!”

The image of that breezy, boisterous grandma stayed with Steinem for years. “I’ve come to believe that inside, each of us has a purple motorcycle,” she wrote in her 2015 memoir. “We have only to discover it — and ride.”

Steinem, the co-founder of Ms. Magazine and for six decades a charismatic leader who urged women to pursue self-affirmation, political power and equality both in the workplace and at home, died Wednesday at her home in New York City, according to her foundation’s social media pages. She was 92.

“Gloria lived true to her independent spirit, always with curiosity and a great sense of humor,” the posts said.

An activist, journalist, and relentless traveler who said she went for 20 years without spending more than eight consecutive days in her New York apartment, Steinem described herself as “an entrepreneur of social change.”

“I raise money. I talk. I write. I tell stories. I want to do justice to the women I meet,” she told The New Yorker in 2015.

Steinem, who struggled with stage fright most of her life, talked with women at gigantic conferences and in intimate kaffeeklatsches. At book signings and on barstools, she sought their stories, sometimes re-telling them in her essays and on her countless speaking tours. Her portfolio of issues was vast, from sexual violence, female genital mutilation and racism to the more mundane injustices that helped fuel a movement for sweeping social change.

At one campus visit, the discussion turned to men who expect women to pick up after them. A young Japanese woman, silent for most of the increasingly raucous session, stood up, turned around to address 500 other audience members and said: “When my husband leaves his underwear on the floor, I find it quite useful to nail it to the floor.”

She had never before said a word in public, she told the cheering crowd.

Steinem had a “gift for empathy,” New York Times columnist Gail Collins wrote when the feminist icon turned 80 in 2014.

“Women who read about her or saw her on TV felt that if they ran into her on the street, they would really get along with her. And women who actually did run into her on the street felt the same way. More than a half-century into her life as an international celebrity, she remains stupendously approachable, patient with questions, interested in revelations.”

Gloria Steinem, left, and Pat Carbine, two of Ms. magazine’s founding editors, in 1980.

(Dave Pickoff / Associated Press )

Famously attractive, Steinem over the years gave hope to young women who wanted to “stand up for their rights without being called man-haters,” Collins wrote. “She was evidence that it was possible to be true to your sisters while also being really, really attractive to the opposite sex.”

At the same time, she alienated the religious right with her fervent pro-choice advocacy. When Lands’ End featured an interview with Steinem in its 2016 catalog, outraged readers threatened a boycott. Company officials then cut their ties with the woman they had headlined as a “legend.”

Steinem first drew public notice when she was in her 20s and struggling to establish herself as a freelance writer. Her breakthrough story was a funny, scathing account of her two weeks as a Playboy “bunny” — a scantily clad cocktail waitress at Hugh Hefner’s Manhattan nightclub.

In some ways, the story backfired. Steinem became known not as a crusader for women but as a former bunny. For several years, her magazine assignments continued to veer toward “women’s page” topics — in 1964, she wrote about textured stockings for the New York Times — and even after she delved into serious political issues for New York magazine, she wasn’t taken as seriously as she would have liked.

In 1968, a Washington Post columnist described her as “the mini-skirted pinup girl of the intelligentsia.” Two years later, a headline in the Los Angeles Times read, “Gloria: Beautiful Brain in Ditto Body.”

Meanwhile, the women’s liberation movement had propelled itself into the mainstream, ignited by writers like Betty Friedan. For Steinem, though, it became a passion only after she covered a meeting during which women opened up about their illegal abortions. The event was held to protest a legislative hearing on abortion where the only witnesses were 14 men and a nun.

“Suddenly I was no longer learning intellectually what was wrong. I knew,” Steinem recalled in 1983. “I had had an abortion when I was newly out of college, and I told no one. If one in three or four adult women shares this experience, why should we be made to feel criminal and alone?”

Nearly 60 years after her unwanted pregnancy, Steinem dedicated her memoir to the British physician who arranged her abortion after she agreed to two conditions.

The first was that she never reveal his name. (She did, long after his death.)

The second: “You will do what you want to do with your life.”

Born on March 25, 1934, in Toledo, Ohio, Steinem didn’t attend school regularly until seventh grade. Most winters, her father Leo, an ebullient, 300-pound dreamer who was often in debt, would drive the family down back roads in a trailer, stopping here and there to sell antiques he’d picked up along the way.

Ruth Steinem, Gloria’s mother, was a former journalist who was hospitalized for long periods with severe mental health problems. From the age of 11, after her parents divorced and her older sister Susanne left home, Gloria often cared for her mom.

In an essay, “Ruth’s Song (Because She Could Not Sing It),” Steinem recalled her mother cutting her arm when she smashed a window to escape the Nazi invaders that only she could see. “I remember a long Thanksgiving weekend holding on to her with one hand and holding my eighth-grade assignment of ‘Tale of Two Cities’ with the other,” Steinem wrote.

Despite her patchy schooling, Steinem received a scholarship to Smith College, where she graduated Phi Beta Kappa after majoring in government. After spending two years in India on a fellowship, she worked briefly for an international youth organization funded by the CIA.

Basing herself in New York in 1960, she quickly became known for her stylish prose, sharp wit, and striking appearance. Within a decade she was “Gloria-Steinem-the-antiwar-gorgeous- bachelor girl who was pictured with Henry Kissinger in Time and Life…,” according to a breathless 1970 account in the Los Angeles Times.

But she was also the Gloria Steinem who helped start New York magazine, who wrote insightfully about the intersection between racism and sexism, and who in 1971 became the first woman chosen to address an annual banquet of the Harvard Law Review.

She zeroed in on the school’s failings.

“There is a course on international whaling law but none on women’s rights internationally,” she told the black-tie gathering. “An eminent professor of administrative law said as late as last night that he didn’t know what the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission was. The same man replied to a request that at least one full-time female professor be hired by answering that women faculty brought problems because of ‘sexual vibrations’…”

The following year, Steinem, with several other feminist journalists, founded Ms. Its first, tentative edition, a 40-page insert into New York magazine, sold out in eight days.

The debut issue of Ms. included pieces on gender stereotypes, lesbian relationships, and job discrimination. It also featured an open letter from 53 prominent women — including tennis great Billie Jean King, singer Judy Collins and Steinem — who revealed that they had undergone abortions.

While the magazine’s monthly circulation eventually topped 500,000, it also fueled skeptics. “I’ll give it six months before they run out of things to say,” newscaster Harry Reasoner predicted on national TV.

Ms. also took flak from some of Steinem’s sister feminists, who contended that it cast women as victims. As new waves of feminists confronted different issues, some became exasperated by Steinem’s seemingly perennial role as the face of the women’s movement.

“Guys in the media chose Gloria as our leader,” said feminist writer Susan Brownmiller in 2016. “A lot of us, our hope is that eventually, history will straighten this all out and say, no, Gloria came in a little later, and her very loyal supporters have backtracked that history.”

Steinem remained a contributing editor to Ms. for 15 years.

Gloria Steinem at home in New York City, 2010.

(Annie Leibovitz / Penguin Random House)

Meanwhile, she was crisscrossing the country, campaigning for liberal Democratic candidates, fighting laws restricting abortion, and urging legislators to adopt the Equal Rights Amendment.

“Like Sky Masterson, the wandering gambler in Damon Runyon stories, I’ve been in more hotel rooms than the Gideon Bible,” she wrote, “and he didn’t wash his hair with hotel soap, eat from vending machines, or sit up late organizing with the hotel maids.”

In 2013, President Barack Obama gave Steinem the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor.

Her books include a 1983 essay collection, “Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions”; a 1986 portrait of Marilyn Monroe; her 2015 memoir, “My Life on The Road”; and works on aging and self-esteem.

Over the years, Steinem had longstanding romantic relationships with a number of men but vowed never to marry or have children.

However, at 66, she broke her vow and married David Bale, a British businessman and animal rights advocate. By then, the institution of marriage had changed for the better, she later explained.

“We spent 30 years in the United States changing the marriage laws,” she said. “If I had married when I was supposed to get married, I would have lost my name, my legal residence, my credit rating, many of my civil rights.”

Three years after their marriage, Bale died of brain cancer. Steinem’s stepchildren include the actor Christian Bale.

At 80, Steinem celebrated her birthday by riding an elephant in Botswana.

In the following years, she campaigned for Hillary Clinton, spoke at the Women’s March on Washington, helped save her hometown’s last abortion clinic and gave numerous interviews denouncing President Trump’s views on women. She was the subject of an off-Broadway play and was honored by Rutgers University with the Gloria Steinem Endowed Chair in Media, Culture, and Feminist Studies.

For fun, she danced. When asked by TV hosts, she occasionally demonstrated a well-worn soft shoe routine, though her heart was with the tango.

“It’s a sick, authoritarian dance,” she told a reporter, “but I loved it.”

Chawkins is a former Times staff writer.

WASHINGTON — Natalie Harp has never been in the spotlight quite like this.

Before the 35-year-old White House aide made headlines for her close access to President Trump, much of her early life was spent in Southern California, where she was home-schooled and attended a mega-church on Sundays — a quiet upbringing that, her brother says, was defined by conservative values and Christian teachings.

Their mother taught them at home using educational materials written from a biblical worldview. The family would attend services regularly at Shadow Mountain Church in El Cajon, where pastors would deliver sermons like the one from a recent Sunday, calling on God to use its thousands of congregants “in a way that turns this world upside down.”

“We were raised with the idea that America was God’s gift to the world and it’s the only place that people really live in freedom,” Preston Harp, her brother, told The Times.

Years later, in 2019, Harp’s ascent into Trump’s orbit began, when she went on Fox News to credit a healthcare bill Trump signed into law with saving her from a rare form of cancer — a story that later caught the president’s attention.

As that relationship took hold, the California family bubble she’d been raised in was bursting behind the scenes, culminating with her father’s suicide in July 2020. A month later, Harp emerged on the national stage, introducing herself as a “formerly forgotten American from California” at the Republican National Convention, where she declared her devotion to Trump.

“I wouldn’t be alive if it wasn’t for you,” she said.

Natalie Harp speaks after being called onstage by President Trump during the Faith & Freedom Coalition 2019 Road To Majority Policy Conference in Washington on June 26, 2019.

(Mark Wilson / Getty Images)

Now, she spends her days working as a special assistant to Trump, a man she has described, in highly personal letters, as her “guardian and protector.” In those letters, published by the Daily Beast, she has thanked the president for “always being there” for her and alluded to a “promise” Trump made to her after she lost her dad.

Harp’s taxpayer-funded job, with its unmatched access to the president, mostly happens away from the public eye. She has been called the “human printer” because she follows Trump with a portable printer to provide Trump with hard copies of flattering news coverage or information the computer-averse president requires.

She also stays up late drafting social media posts with the president, the New York Times reported. Several of Trump’s Truth Social posts have generated controversy in recent months, including an AI-generated image showing him as Jesus in a white robe laying his hands on a sick man.

Those who know her describe her as detail-oriented and a “devoted staffer to the cause” whose tight-knit circle includes those closest to Trump, such as Susie Wiles, Trump’s chief of staff, and Karoline Leavitt, the White House’s former press secretary.

“Just like many of the administration officials, you become friends with your co-workers,” Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, a Florida Republican who talks to Harp on a weekly basis, said in an interview.

Harp is “almost always” with Wiles, Luna said. The congresswoman added that her relationship with the president is “100% professional,” and that any suggestion otherwise is an attempt to smear her.

“She’s been nothing but professional and an absolute killer when it comes to getting her job done,” Luna said. “I would kill to have someone like her on my team.”

To her brother, Harp’s integration in Trump’s inner circle is in line with her upbringing.

“My mom raised us as super conservative, and he’s everything that she taught us to respect,” he said.

The White House declined to comment.

A California native in Trump world

As a kid in the San Diego neighborhood of Carmel Valley, Harp played with old-fashioned dolls and spent a lot of time reading, her brother said. For school, their mother used a curriculum from Bob Jones University Press, whose material focused on “biblical worldview shaping,” according to its website.

The home in which Natalie Harp, an aide to President Trump, grew up in the Carmel Valley neighborhood of San Diego.

(Sandy Huffaker / For The Times)

“We start with God’s truth as the standard,” the website states. “Scripture serves as the blueprint for how we put together our textbooks so that every lesson begins with truth.”

Growing up, Harp spent most of her time with adults, especially her mother, and would rarely socialize with her peers, her brother recalled. Even at church, she would opt to sit with the adults instead of spending time with the youth group.

“There would be like skateboarding demos, there would be cool stuff going on, but my sister was just with all the grown-ups, and she preferred it,” he said.

Harp and her brother were close as young children but drifted apart as they got older. Preston Harp found an outlet skateboarding and surfing with friends, and Harp opted to stay close to home, he said.

At some point, their mother began policing their discussions, particularly as he started espousing more progressive beliefs, her brother recalled.

“I wasn’t really allowed to be in her life,” he said. “If we ever talked on the phone my mom was listening to everything we’d say, and they were talking on the phone together with me on speakerphone.”

Harp declined to comment for this story through a request sent to the White House. Her mother did not respond to a phone call seeking comment.

An aerial view of Natalie Harp’s family’s home in the private gated community of Woodbridge Cove, in Irvine.

(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

In her mid-20s, Harp moved with her parents to Irvine to be closer to their father’s work at Biola University, a private Christian institution in La Mirada, southeast of Los Angeles. He worked as a professor at the school of business and later served as the executive director of the Office of Innovation, according to the university.

The family lived in a home adjacent to a man-made lake in Irvine’s Woodbridge neighborhood, a master-planned community known for its peaceful, family-friendly atmosphere.

Both Irvine and Carmel Valley are silos from the problems of the outside world, places where everything might seem perfect, even when it isn’t, her brother said.

“My mom likes living in bubbles,” he said.

Within a few years of the family’s move, in July 2020, Harp’s father, 61, died by suicide at their home. When Preston Harp arrived at the house, he said his mother wanted him to go along with the story that their father had died in his sleep. Preston refused, he said, not wanting to downplay his dad’s pain to keep up appearances. It was the start of a massive rift in the family.

“That was the last time I ever talked to my sister,” he said.

Entering the national stage

Harp has shared little about her upbringing publicly. However, she has spoken at length about medical issues she experienced starting in her mid-20s.

In 2020, she said during remarks at the Republican National Convention that five years earlier she was “the victim of a notoriously deadly medical error.”

“I survived, but only to be diagnosed with a rare and terminal bone cancer,” she said.

She said she was diagnosed with Stage 2 bone cancer. It was that experience that sparked her interest in entering the political arena.

“I just wanted to get better,” she said on the program. “I started tuning in for the first time into politics because I had never had a representative before. All my representatives were Democrats, so I thought, why should I care about politics?”

Two rounds of chemotherapy did not help and she was rejected from clinical trials, she said. But in 2018 Trump signed the Right to Try Act, which allows terminally ill patients to access certain experimental drugs and immunotherapy treatments that have not received full approval from the Food and Drug Administration.

“I am not dying from cancer anymore thanks to President Trump, I am living with cancer,” Harp said on the program.

The White House did not respond to a request seeking comment on the treatment she received.

Natalie Harp follows former President Trump as he boards his airplane after speaking at an event in Manchester, N.H., on April 27, 2023.

(Jabin Botsford / The Washington Post via Getty Images)

During Trump’s 2020 reelection campaign, Harp’s role was to talk about the Right to Try Act, said Sarah Matthews, a former deputy press secretary for Trump.

“I remember we would correspond over Twitter DMs, and she just seemed very excited to be helpful in any way,” Matthews said. At the time, it seemed Harp was trying to make inroads with staffers, she said.

“My role would not necessarily interact with her, but … I could tell that she was trying to initiate a connection,” she said.

Although it’s not clear who on the team found Harp, Matthews said she was “very eager” to help the campaign.

“They found this woman who was eloquent and well-spoken and all the things, but it did just come off to me like she really wanted to be part of Trump world,” Matthews said.

In intimate letters, Harp has explained her devotion to the 80-year-old president.

Natalie Harp listens as former President Trump speaks outside the courtroom during his trial on charges of covering up hush money payments, on April 30, 2024 in New York City.

(Curtis Means / Pool Photo)

In one letter, she writes that she is “unworthy” of Trump and reminisces about the times Trump called during her “Talkshow days,” a reference to her stint in 2021 hosting “The Real Story with Natalie Harp” on the right-wing One America News channel.

“We’d talk about everything and nothing,” she writes. “I want to get back to that synergy. We shouldn’t have to talk about work all the time!!”

She adds: “I always felt like an in-betweener, somewhere between Staff and those you enjoy talking to on the Plane or at Dinner, because that’s who I used to be to you when I was a ‘Talkshow Host’ (as much as I hated that actual job!)”

Ossoff’s ‘Natalie’ reference brings attention

The public attention on Harp sharpened this month when Jon Ossoff, a Democratic senator from Georgia, told supporters in Atlanta that Trump wanted to “build his ballroom and travel with Natalie” rather than do the work of the presidency. The remarks came after it became public that Harp had been one of a select few who joined Trump on an alternate plane flying out of Turkey as a precaution amid a threat of attack by Iran.

President Trump and Natalie Harp, right, attend a dignified transfer for service members killed during operations in the Middle East, at Dover Air Force Base in Dover, Del., on July 22.

(Lau Loeb / AFP via Getty Images)

Ossoff’s comment drew the ire of Trump allies, from Capitol Hill lawmakers to conservative influencers, with many of them blasting the comment as sexist and inappropriate.

Although the White House and Trump allies have fiercely defended Harp in public forums, and dismissed suggestions of an improper relationship, Trump has sidestepped questions about his aide.

“People can be very mean to successful, pretty women,” Luna said. “And that is what is happening to Natalie.”

In their book “Regime Change,” New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan write that Trump has told staff that Harp is the only one who loves him as much as his wife and kids.

“All of you will go off and make money,” Trump would say. “She’ll never leave me.”

Although Trump worked closely with other executive assistants during his first administration, Matthews said his relationship with Harp appears to be “a different level of closeness.”

President Trump,right, accompanied by Tiffany Trump’s husband, Michael Boulos, left, and aide Natalie Harp, center, looks out the window of Marine One as it lands on the South Lawn of the White House on Sept. 18, 2025.

(Andrew Harnik / Getty Images)

“I think it’s because of the way she fawns all over him and the love notes,” she said. “I think he just really trusts her. So she’s been able to, I think, develop an even closer bond.”

Despite the recent controversy, Harp remained by the president’s side during public appearances last week.

At the Freedom 250 Grand Prix in Washington on Aug. 23, Harp sat a few rows behind Trump and First Lady Melania Trump, chatting with the president’s son Eric. Days before that, she reportedly traveled with Trump to South Carolina for a campaign rally and to his northern Virginia golf club.

“She’s just all work,” Luna said. “She is one of the hardest workers and it is hard to find people who are like that.”

Natalie Harp looks on as President Trump visits the Mission Control Center at NASA Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center in Houston on Friday.

(Kent Nishimura / AFP via Getty Images)

Ceballos reported from Washington, Fry from Irvine.

If you or someone you know is struggling with suicidal thoughts, seek help from a professional or call 988. The nationwide three-digit mental health crisis hotline will connect callers with trained mental health counselors. Or text “HOME” to 741741 in the U.S. and Canada to reach the Crisis Text Line.

Thanks so much for running the article on Eric Sondheimer. As a longtime SoCal resident who moved to Dallas two years ago, I still subscribe to The Times online to follow the Rams, Lakers, Angels and Dodgers. But I also follow high school sports and am glad to see Eric get the recognition he deserves for covering high school sports for 50 years. Congrats, Eric!

Bob Ring
Dallas

The Times sports section once again hit the jackpot with Bill Plaschke’s column on Eric Sondheimer coupled with Sondheimer’s own column on his 50 top memories of his 50 years of reporting high school sports. To me, an important part about sports is the memories that continue for so long after the events, and these two columns by two terrific writers truly brought that home.

Bill Francis
Pasadena

I have had the privilege over the years of having met and talked with Mr. Sondheimer at various games. He is an encyclopedia of knowledge on high school sports, and his ideas about keeping this level of competition moving in the right direction is unmatched. Why he does not have the role of commissioner is something I have often thought about over the years, but then I would miss reading his columns.

Mark Kaiserman
Santa Monica

Thank you, Eric, for being here, there and everywhere over the last 50 years. Your stories are a great reminder of what sports teaches high school students about life.

Jeff Perkins
Huntington Beach

Congratulations to Eric Sondheimer on his 50 years of dedication and professionalism covering high school sports. Bill Plaschke did an excellent job paying tribute to Eric for all that he has done in telling stories that captured our interest for these many years. Eric has never shied away from expressing his opinions on the state of high school sports and how they can be improved. I always respected him for doing so. Well done, Eric!

Rob Wigod
Seal Beach

About half of Sondheimer’s career ago, I reached out to Eric as a first-year middle school basketball coach with “a story you might want to tell.” It was about a legally blind player who made our team, legitimately earning his spot over some sighted players and also scoring in a game. Eric came to our gym, interviewed players about what an incredible teammate he was and wrote a fantastic story. Twenty-six years later, I’m still coaching, and that remains one of the great memories of my career. The term GOAT gets thrown around too easily these days. Not here. He’s undisputed.

Richard Brisacher
Mar Vista

The drive to Pedrovo is vertiginous, and each hairpin bend has me sending a silent prayer that we won’t meet a tractor coming the other way. When we near it, we abandon the car and continue on foot to the hamlet, a scattering of red-roofed, whitewashed houses high on the steep karst hillside. The air is warm and dry, scented with wild sage.

We follow a hand-painted sign to Čilčevi Farmstead. Descending stone steps to a lush garden, we find a shaded table set with fresh cheeses produced at the farm’s own dairy. Below, the valley stretches in both directions, a wide flat plain hemmed in by steep mountain slopes, with the Vipava River winding lazily through fields and vineyards.

If the Vipava valley gets a mention in a Slovenian guidebook, it’s usually as a wine region footnote. The area is an hour’s drive south-west of Ljubljana, meeting Italy at the cross-border city of Nova Gorica (called Gorizia on the Italian side). Most visitors skip it in favour of the Soča valley to the north, drawn to the turquoise river and opportunities for rafting on the rapids.

Vipava is a landscape shaped by a strong wind, the burja, which barrels down from the Alps, keeping the red earth arid, the trees bent low, and creating the perfect terrain for dry wines and dried meats. Tourism has traditionally been less of a focus, but I’m here with my family to meet local entrepreneurs and producers, to learn how this valley is building a genuine visitor experience that works for the community.

Part of the reason for the slow development of tourism has been the scarcity of accommodation, save a few nondescript business hotels and a handful of holiday cottages. One place that’s helping change that narrative is Wellba, a boutique guesthouse in the village of Planina, where an old abandoned farmstead has been converted into self-catering apartments and guest rooms by a local couple, working with traditional craftspeople and salvaged materials.

Marko and Tereza Kobal grew up on this hillside and then worked in Ljubljana before deciding to return to build a family business, striving to create the kind of place they seek out when travelling. “People who travel want to experience something that is just the way it is, without embellishment, pretence, exaggeration – somewhere authentic,” says Marko. We enter Wellba through a traditional “black kitchen”, its walls darkened by generations of wood smoke. “When we came here the building needed work but it had a real soul. We want the building to stand for another 300 years, so we took the renovation slowly and carefully.”

Our light, spacious accommodation wears its history lightly, with plenty of space for playing card games and reading books on the balcony, with views of the neighbouring farmyard and the valley beyond. Next door, another tumble-down farm building will be converted and opened in 2027. The couple are also working on a boutique hotel in Vipava town in the valley below. The dream is for their children to run Wellba one day, forging their futures in this valley.

Across Vipava, similar small projects are emerging: small, family-run and developing slowly and thoughtfully. Tom Ločniškar and Borut Kokalj began Čilčevi Farmstead during the pandemic, having moved to Pedrovo and become interested in farming. “We started to keep animals. Now we have 150, which is too many animals for just a hobby,” laughs Tom.

He recalls the mad panic to source equipment before the lockdowns began. The pandemic also brought him his first customers, people who were out walking and keen to support local businesses. Tom and Borut keep local Istrska sheep and Drežnica goats, which graze on dry karst grasslands, changing pastures across this hillside every four days. Having tasted fresh cheese straight from the chill of the dairy, including creamy goat’s cheese with fenugreek and buttery mature sheep’s cheese, we walk uphill to meet the goats.

Tom says that in the early 1900s around 1,000 people lived in Pedrovo, but by the 1970s the permanent population had fallen to just two, and remained that low until the 1990s. “The village was almost abandoned because people moved to the cities,” he says. “It was the same in a lot of hill villages: life was hard and tractors didn’t work on steep slopes.” Today the population has risen to 20, with second homeowners roughly doubling that number in the holidays.

Elsewhere in the village, I meet Alenka and Mark Smerajc, who were one of the first families to return, raising three children and running a business here. Today they have two small holiday cottages in what were farm outbuildings and run a relaxed courtyard restaurant for guests, opening to the public at weekends and for holidays. “People wanted food,” shrugs Alenka, as her teenage children help bring out beautiful plates of handmade pasta with local cheese and wild herbs from the kitchen.

“In Vipava valley there was no tourism, so we got to decide how to build it,” says Jani Peljhan. That means GPS-guided cycling tours along roads too small to merit signposts, and experimenting with “wine trains”, carrying visitors from Nova Gorica to the vineyards with local winemakers on board to lead tasting sessions.

Jani’s company, Wajdušna, also offers hiking and paragliding, both gaining in popularity here. He meets us at Wellba with some e-bikes and we pedal through Ajdovščina to spot Roman ruins, and up to Vipavski Križ, famed for being one of the smallest towns in Slovenia, before zigzagging back up the other side of the valley through vineyards. The warmth of the afternoon and the steep hillsides makes me appreciate the “sport” mode on the bikes.

In other regions, wine tourism often means visitor centres and branded experiences. In Vipava it still means sitting in someone’s kitchen. At Vina Lisjak in Zalošče, I eat at a little restaurant run by two brothers. “We opened the restaurant to show the wine,” says Peter Lisjak. “It’s all from our farm.” We eat generous platters of house dried meat, aged mountain cheeses, a fennel frittata and slow-cooked celeriac steaks with celery pesto and spinach. Dishes are served family style and there’s plenty of time for stories, with samples of delicious wine straight from the barrels in the cellar.

From Wellba, we walk across the village to Ferjančič vineyard, where seventh generation winemaker Matic Ferjančič talks us through his wines. His father developed the vineyard, going from five to 50,000 plants. “We work hard in the vineyard to make it easy in the cellar,” he says. As we chat, Matic keeps an ear to the baby monitor for the eighth generation sleeping upstairs.

Although many of my favourite restaurant experiences are the simple ones, Vipava valley cuisine can reach loftier heights. One night we smarten up the best we can and follow a winding road uphill to Zemono Manor, to eat at Gostilna Pri Lojzetu. Chef Tomaž Kavčič is known as a Slovenian slow food pioneer, and has earned a Michelin star for his playful dishes and proud use of local ingredients.

We eat delicate Vipava river trout with fermented apricots from the previous summer, and langoustine bisque from the coast. Traditional dishes such as jota, a sauerkraut and potato stew, are honoured on the menu, their humble roots celebrated not hidden. There are some theatrics, like a juniper plant producing flavoured vapour to complement a sorbet, but the restaurant atmosphere is friendly and relaxed. The server chats with my young stepson about his preferences, and brings him a generous bowl of gnocchi. It’s Kavčič’s night off so he sits with friends and a bottle of wine at the back of the restaurant, coming round all the tables frequently to chat.

Vipava may not remain overlooked for ever. But talking to the people building businesses here, there is little appetite for becoming the next famous wine destination. What they seem to want instead is something rarer and more interesting: tourism that helps a place thrive without changing what made it worth visiting in the first place.

The trip was provided by Vipava Valley Tourism and the Slovenian Tourist Board. Wellba Planina has doubles from £97

Yayoi Kusama, the Japanese artist known for her hypnotic, repetitive polka dot artworks, died earlier this week at the age of 97. Hers was the third in a string of deaths this week that left me feeling quite melancholy. First Dolly Parton, then Tim Curry and finally, Kusama.

The silver lining in the death of an artist, whether they be musician, actor, writer or visual artist, is that they leave a trail of comfort for fans through their work. I can (and did) sit in my breakfast nook weeping to the sound of Parton’s voice in songs including 1971’s “Coat of Many Colors.” When it comes to mourning Kusama, I am planning a trip to the Broad museum in downtown L.A., which houses two of her famous Infinity Mirror Rooms.

“Longing for Eternity” (2017) is on view on the third floor and can be accessed with a free general admission ticket. “Infinity Mirrored Room —The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away” (2013), however, requires a separate free reservation. A rep for the museum said reservations are currently available through September with many time slots already completely full. The museum is also accommodating as many walk-ups as capacity allows — and these walk-ups have increased in the wake of Kusama’s death.

In an email to The Times, Broad founding President and Director Joanne Heyler wrote that Kusama’s Infinity Mirror Rooms, “have been among the most beloved works at The Broad since we opened in 2015.”

Heyler noted that the Broad’s 2017 exhibition, “Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors,” “was an incredible moment in the museum’s early history. It was a beautiful show, and unprecedented operationally: the only time our ticketing system broke down due to demand, minutes after release. Her work is both wildly popular and conceptually rigorous; her journey as an artist is complex, full of resilience and a refusal to be limited. Visitors have found deep connection inside the Infinity Mirror Rooms at The Broad — smiles, tears, even marriage proposals. We’re grateful to be one of the places where people can go to spend time with her work and remember her, and we’ll keep working to ensure her art is experienced as she intended: by everyone, infinitely.”

This is welcome news, and the devoted interest makes sense. In many ways, these physically small but emotionally vast rooms encapsulate the essence of Kusama’s practice throughout her life. Built in a distinctively analog way, the rooms create the illusion of endless space through the use of light, mirrors and splashes of color. Kusama incorporated hand-sewn cloth, and later, multimedia video projections, but at their core the rooms remained largely technology-free.

The irony being that a decade ago they emerged as social media sensations, and were ubiquitous in selfies across the internet as they traveled from blockbuster show to blockbuster show.

It’s a pity because all the people who stepped into those rooms with their cellphone cameras at the ready missed a profound opportunity to inhabit a floating dreamscape of true peace and quiet — the kind we rarely grasp in our digital-notification suffocated world.

I can still remember the first time I had the opportunity to experience one of Kusama’s Infinity Mirror Rooms. It was dark and glittering with tiny pinpricks of colored light. I felt as if I were suspended in a deep, black pool of energy that extended beyond me in all directions. I could hear my blood rushing in my ears and briefly wondered if this could be what it felt like in the womb.

I got dizzy and recovered, and then — for what felt like a long time but was only a matter of seconds — I was free.

I’m Arts editor Jessica Gelt taking moments of solace where I can get them. This is your arts and culture news for the week.

The week ahead: A curated calendar

FRIDAY

Babatunde Akinboboye
The baritone fuses classical opera with hip-hop on “Toreador,” “Funiculi, Funicula,” “O Sole Mio” and more.
8 p.m. Friday and Saturday. Sierra Madre Playhouse, 87 W. Sierra Madre Blvd. sierramadreplayhouse.org

Director Richard Linklater at the 2023 Toronto Film Festival.

(Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times)

Richard Linklater
A three-movie American Cinematheque tribute featuring Q&As with the Texas filmmaker. In a recent interview, Times film writer Mark Olsen asked Linklater what it’s like to reflect on his work: “What resonates with me in my mind is the experience of making the movie more than the movie itself — all the people you worked with and the cast and all those good feelings.”
“Boyhood,” 7:30 p.m. Friday; “Waking Life,” 4 p.m. Saturday. Aero Theatre, 1328 Montana Ave., Santa Monica; “Dazed & Confused,” 7:30 p.m. Saturday. Directors Village, 961 Broxton Ave. Westwood. americancinematheque.com

Pericles
Boston Court, in partnership with Play On Shakespeare, presents the West Coast premiere of Ellen McLaughlin’s modern verse translation of Shakespeare’s rarely performed adventure tale. Directed by Margaret Shigeko Starbuck.
Through Sept. 27. Boston Court Pasadena, 70 N. Mentor Ave. bostoncourtpasadena.org

Romeo & Juliet
A site-specific, immersive, queer adaptation of Shakespeare’s tragedy.
7:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday; 1 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. Sassafras Saloon, 1233 Vine St. eventbrite.com

SATURDAY

Place Is the Space
A four-hour immersive performance experience created by artist Edgar Arceneaux and co-creator Frank Lawson employs live jazz improvisation, theatrical storytelling and multimedia design inspired by Sun Ra’s philosophy and his film “Space Is the Place.” Presented by CAP UCLA, the event includes an audience procession to the Hammer Museum in conjunction with the current exhibition, “Space Is the Place,” for a final performance.
1 p.m. UCLA Nimoy Theater, 1262 Westwood Blvd. cap.ucla.edu

Joshua Smith Untitled (Yellow Heart), 2026 Acrylic on canvas 14 ¾ x 14 ½ in.

(839 Gallery)

Joshua Smith: Hearts and Triangles
The artist’s first Los Angeles solo show includes brightly colored monochrome paintings on shaped canvases.
Opening reception, 5-8 p.m. Saturday; exhibition continues through Oct. 17. 839, 839 N. Cherokee Ave. 839gallery.com

Winter’s Bench
The world premiere of Mike Kenny’s play about a woman who returns to a park where she thinks a tree once spoke to her. Starring Anne Gee Byrd and Shih-wei Wu. Directed by Debbie Devine. All performances will feature Spanish supertitles.
Previews, 8 p.m. Saturday; 2 p.m. Sunday; 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, Thursday and Sept. 4; 8 p.m. Saturdays, 2 p.m.; Sundays, 8 p.m.; Sept. 7 and 14; through Oct. 25. 24th Street Theatre, 1117 W. 24th St. 24thstreet.org

SUNDAY

Element Band
Led by Ara Dabandjian, the ensemble features 12 musicians and vocalists, including Soseh Aramouni Keshishyan and Natalie Avunjian, in a celebration of Armenian heritage, creativity and live music.
7:30 p.m. The Ford, 2580 Cahuenga Blvd. East. theford.com

TUESDAY

Dvořák & Bruch
Conductor Anja Bihlmaier and violinist Bomsori join the Los Angeles Philharmonic.
8 p.m. Hollywood Bowl, 2301 N Highland Ave. hollywoodbowl.com

THURSDAY

Amadeus in Concert
The Los Angeles Philharmonic, led by conductor Norman Huynh, conductor, and the Pacific Chorale perform live to Milos Forman’s 1984 Oscar-winning best picture starring Tom Hulce and F. Murray Abraham.
8 p.m. Hollywood Bowl, 2301 N Highland Ave. hollywoodbowl.com

The Arsonists
Max Frisch’s 1953 absurdist satire, translated by Alastair Beaton and directed by Luke Harlan.
8 p.m. Thursdays through Saturdays; 5 p.m. Saturdays; 2 p.m. Sunday; through Sept. 20. Skylight Theatre, 1816 1/2 N. Vermont Ave. skylighttheatre.org

Under the Oaks
A weekly salon series featuring performance and music: “Currents: Composers in Concert” (Sept. 3); “Beer! A New Musical-in-Development” (Sept. 10); “Cabaret Theatricum Sings Marvin Gaye” (Sept. 17); and “The Voice of Dr. King” (Sept. 24.
7:30 p.m. Thursdays through Sept. 24. Will Geer Theatricum Botanicum, 1419 N. Topanga Canyon Blvd. Topanga. theatricum.com

Arts everywhere

Sarah Bareilles in the documentary “Sarah Bareilles: Good Grief.”

(A Group Effort Films / Naked Edge Films)

Sara Bareilles: Good Grief
The Grammy-winning Broadway star and pop singer’s return to the recording studio for the first time in seven years is captured in this intimate documentary directed by Josh Alexander receiving a one-night-only theatrical release. The film looks at Bareilles’ experience of channeling her own pain to create art and the healing journey that accompanied it. Bareilles will perform at the Dolby Theatre, Oct. 12-14.
7 p.m. Wednesday. Laemmle and AMC theaters. sarabmusic.com

Culture news and the SoCal scene

Dolores Huerta photographed at Dolores Huerta “Help Wanted/Leave Now” exhibit at California Museum.

(Beth Baugher / California Museum)

Dolores Huerta has prioritized involving herself in projects relating to labor and women’s rights in the wake of going public with sexual abuse allegations against former labor leader Cesar Chavez. One of those projects can now be seen at the California Museum in Sacramento in an exhibition called “Help Wanted/Leave Now: ‘Operation Wetback’ and the Revolving Door of Mass Deportation,” which, according to a story by contributor Isa Farfan, “examines decades of the federal government’s deportation campaigns against Mexican immigrants even while it recruited millions of these farmworkers and rail workers to fill labor shortages during and after World War II.”

Contributor Leah Ollman reviews a new Eileen Cowin retrospective called “Between Panic and Paradise” at Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Labeling Cowin a “wry disruptor,” Ollman notes that over the artist’s nearly six-decade career, she has toyed with time in a novel way: “By deviating from straightforward chronology, the installation resonates smartly with one of Cowin’s key operating principles — that we don’t experience time as a continuous line moving in one direction, but as episodic, fragmented, interrupted, layered.”

Gustavo Dudamel at the end of the first half his show at the Hollywood Bowl on Aug. 20.

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

Gustavo Dudamel is really leaving — although it feels as if the city has been mourning the eventuality for years. Times classical music critic Mark Swed was, of course, on hand to bear witness to Dudamel’s final farewell: a four-night Hollywood Bowl extravaganza. “Dudamel addressed the audience, sounding very much like he had 17 years ago at the Bowl, extolling in our being a crowd of many types together for many musics. L.A., he said, made him an Angeleno,” Swed wrote.

Swed also attended a Tuesday night show at the Hollywood Bowl after the Dudamel farewell extravaganza and found it rather empty and a bit “forlorn,” a situation, he writes in a review, that “left Anna Handler, who becomes the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s conductor-in-residence this fall, with the trickiest conducting assignment of the summer anywhere.”

Theater Director Bart DeLorenzo on the set of “Enemy of the People” at the Odyssey Theatre on Friday, Aug. 21, 2026.

(Ariana Drehsler / For The Times)

Times theater critic Charles McNulty recently sat down for a lunchtime conversation with Bart DeLorenzo, “L.A.’s most playfully provocative theater auteur,” about his decision to direct (and adapt) Henrik Ibsen’s “Enemy of the People” at Odyssey Theatre. “If ever there was a moment to revive ‘An Enemy of the People,’ it’s now,” McNulty writes. “The demoralizing spectacle of the U.S. Senate’s inquisition of Dr. Anthony Fauci last month, led by Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) in unapologetic witch-hunt mode, was yet another reminder that Ibsen’s drama about a public health crusader being targeted by politicians and business leaders when his medical advice goes counter to their interests hasn’t lost its punch.”

The drama never stops at the beleaguered Kennedy Center as it deals with the continued tumult resulting from President Trump’s takeover early last year. Most recently the Justice Department claimed in a recent court filing that Trump’s “efforts and prestige provide the sole hope for the Center’s financial survival, and structural renewal.” If the center isn’t shut down for the two-year renovation Trump demands, it may need to be demolished, the filing reads.

Visitors line up outside the Japanese American National Museum for a 2022 event recalling World War II incarceration camps.

(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

After closing in early January, 2024, the Japanese American National Museum has announced it will reopen its newly renovated Pavilion on Jan. 23, 2027. Renovations include a new main entrance and new first-floor galleries for a brand new exhibition titled “In the Future We Call Now: Realities of Racism, Forging Democracy.” The special exhibition galleries on the second floor have also been updated and will feature the inaugural exhibition, “Pictures of Belonging: Miki Hayakawa, Hisako Hibi, and Miné Okubo.”

The Broad has announced its next fall exhibition, “Has the myth been shattered,” opening Nov. 21. The exhibition is set to include recent acquisitions by Guadalupe Rosales, Hank Willis Thomas and Mickalene Thomas. “Gathered together, works in the exhibition create unexpected connections across six decades, prompting an examination of how media has shaped history, memory, and collective experience,” a news release notes.

— Jessica Gelt

And last but not least

A little rare bird is making people happy, and I’ll take the moment of levity.

Famous for its walls bearing scribbles and sketches left behind by patrons for over 60 years, El Batey, a bar in Old San Juan, is a Puerto Rican institution serving locals and tourists alike.

It was inside this famed establishment that filmmakers Lorraine Jones Molina and Cristian Carretero first met one night back in 2008. Since then, the two have joined forces in both life and art; they are a married couple, as well as parents and close collaborators on film projects.

Their first feature, “Esta Isla,” which is now available on VOD, made history as the first Puerto Rican film to win at the Independent Spirit Awards in February, taking home the John Cassavetes Award honoring a production made for under $1 million. At the 2025 Tribeca Film Festival, it received three prizes, including best new narrative director.

A politically charged, coming-of-age road-trip movie, “Esta Isla” follows Bebo (Zion Ortiz), a young man from the “caserios,” or projects, and Lola (Fabiola Victoria Brown), a well-off girl unhappy in her bubble of privilege. Violence forces Bebo to run away to the mountains. Lola tags along and together they come across a series of people who expand their worldview.

There’s a grounded, earthy lyricism to the images captured in “Esta Isla” that show a Puerto Rico that’s at once lush and entrancing but also undiscovered and unseen in cinema.

Fabiola Brown, pictured above, plays “Lola” in the new Puerto Rican film “Esta Isla.”

(Experimento Ludico)

Key to their professional success thus far, the filmmakers believe, is their loving personal bond. “We’re always together and talking about ideas. When we were working on ‘Esta Isla,’ it helped a lot to really dig deep and have long conversations about certain details and topics,” Carretero says during a recent video call. “We do mostly everything ourselves, just me and Lorrie. Sometimes I do camera, Lorrie does sound. We keep it pretty small.”

In 2010, Carretero and Jones Molina founded the production company called Experimento Lúdico in the western town of Mayagüez with the intent of decentralizing production on the island. Most opportunities for filmmaking are still based in the San Juan metropolitan area.

“I’m from Arecibo, from the north, and Cristian is from here, from Mayagüez. That’s part of who we are, and we want to tell these stories from here. It’s part of resisting. It feels like somebody has to do this,” Jones Molina says with a laugh, while sitting next to Carretero.

Lorraine Jones Molina and Cristian Carretero are the filmmakers behind the Puerto Rican road trip movie “Esta Isla.”

(Experimento Ludico)

When Carretero and Jones Molina first met, it was the documentary scene that sustained Puerto Rican cinema because those stories could be told with fewer resources. Karen Rossi’s 2007 environmentalist doc “Isla Chatarra,” for example, inspired Jones Molina.

She and Carretero later directed the 2016 medium-length doc “Seeds, Chronicles of the Earth,” about GMO experimentation on the island.

Most of the fiction production on the island then pertained to Hollywood films, such as “Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides” (2011). In the 2010s, however, a string of fiction films, including Ari Maniel Cruz’s “Under My Nails” (2012) and “Before a Rooster Crows” (2016) and Ángel Manuel Soto’s “La Granja” (2015), pushed local storytelling forward.

And while those movies, just like “Esta Isla,” don’t address the socioeconomic issues facing Puerto Ricans didactically, their mere existence is in itself a statement. “Making Puerto Rican films in Puerto Rico is political,” says Jones Molina. “Talking about who we are, our identity, our culture, our history and saying that we are here and we exist is political.”

Residents in San Juan are currently experiencing a water crisis, and while the scarcity hasn’t directly affected Jones Molina and Carretero in Mayagüez, this problem is not new and has only turned more urgent in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria.

That’s why they deliberately wrote a scene in “Esta Isla” showing people getting water from a water truck.

“It’s crazy that we filmed that a couple of years ago to talk about that issue, and it’s just gotten worse,” says Carretero. “Now we have a drought, and you have to have water rationing. It’s something that is reflective of a bigger problem in the island: the neglect of the most important needs of the citizens.”

Puerto Rico’s status as a colony of the U.S., where the interests of corporations supersede the well-being of the local population, is the source of many of its challenges. And for a long time, even referring to Puerto Rico as a colony was taboo. A history of persecution on behalf of the U.S. government ingrained fear in Puerto Ricans.

“The FBI would keep ‘carpetas,’ or files with information on regular people, who were suspected of organizing or fighting for independence,” Carretero says. “People were being surveilled by the FBI, and they’d pay family members or people they knew to survey them.”

“Esta Isla” touches on the troubled relationship between Puerto Rico and the U.S. via Lola’s deceased father, who is a stand-in for Filiberto Ojeda Ríos, a Puerto Rican revolutionary and leader of the pro-independence militant group Los Macheteros. After years on the run, the FBI assassinated him in 2005. In the film, the character Cora (Teofilo Torres) lives in the mountains and works the land. The location used for his house carries great significance.

“The inside shots, with the bullet holes, and the windows, and the books, all of that is from Filiberto’s actual house where he was assassinated,” says Jones Molina. “When you go there, you see all those bullet holes; it’s heavy.”

To that, Carretero adds: “There’s an inferiority complex that the colony perpetuates, which has to do with not knowing where you come from. Once you know all these names and all the stories of women and men who’ve worked for the good of Puerto Rican people, here and in the States, it opens up this whole other space for inspiration that’s from our ancestors”

Carretero and Jones Molina found the core concept for “Esta Isla” on the first page of Octavio Paz’s seminal novel “The Labyrinth of Solitude,” where the Mexican author discusses adolescence as a moment in a person’s life where they open up to the world, while at the same time noting that societies themselves also go through a coming-of-age.

Zion Ortiz, pictured above, plays “Bebo” in the new Puerto Rican film “Esta Isla.”

(Experimento Ludico)

“Puerto Rico is still an evolving organism. It’s a country, a people and a culture still evolving,” Carretero explains. “We’re still trying to understand who we are and where we’re going. Are we a country? Are we not? Are we part of the U.S., or not? Are we Americanos, or somos latinoamericanos? Tantas preguntas that are still unresolved.”

Jones Molina continues: “There’s this idea that you have to just be grateful that you’re a part of the United States and don’t complain. But when you question that, and when you want to really look at why you love and care about your country and your culture and want to educate yourself, then you’re definitely going through this kind of coming-of-age.”

For this filmmaking couple, reaching maturity as artists forged in the complex context of a modern colony hinges on acknowledging their limitations and still persevering.

“We also wanted to show that you can make films with very little; you don’t have to wait for the perfect moment or all the different resources. That’s what we call tropical realism. Not only the style of the filmmaking, but it’s also the means, and how that matches your reality,” explains Carretero. “We cannot pretend to be something that we are not. We have to develop our own language, our own way of filming, our way of telling our stories.”

I’d like to pen an ode to the once-L.A.-based artist Mel Kadel on the occasion of the release of her first coloring book for women and girls, published by Secret Headquarters in Atwater Village. Titled “Dream Drops,” the detailed hand drawings allow blossoming artists to participate in Kadel’s elaborate, imaginative world of fragile, brave, timid, hopeful, brash, adventurous women — characters she’s drawn for decades now.

I first met Kadel more than 25 years ago when I moved to L.A. from Boston with my then-up-and-coming indie rock band called the Movies. The band moved into a two-bedroom triplex in Silver Lake that cost $845 per month and immediately fell in with a ragtag group of iconoclastic and wildly talented artists including Kadel, photographer Alex Prager, painter America Martin, artist Mercedes Helnwein and bands and musicians such as the Silversun Pickups, Jimmy Tamborello, the Jealous Sound, Earlimart, Radar Bros. and Irving.

Kadel and her then-partner Travis Millard — another prolific and accomplished artist — lived in a cabin near the wild mountainy edges of Echo Park, and friends would gather there to draw, drink and make music. Kadel always had her head bent over her work, page after page of detailed line drawings that later appeared on friends’ bedroom and living room walls and sometimes on fliers for shows at Spaceland or the Silverlake Lounge.

It was Kadel who encouraged many of us to try our hand at creating art, and she once staged a group show at an Echo Park record shop called Sea Level that was owned by a friend of ours. I painted a self-portrait on a piece of wood for the show that still hangs on my wall today.

Kadel created the album cover for the Silversun Pickups’ debut EP, “Pikul,” which was released on Dangerbird Records in 2005, and later, after the band and the label soared to new heights, she covered Dangerbird headquarters near Sunset Junction in Silver Lake with a building-sized mural featuring her otherworldly woman clad in blue stripes with forever flowing flowered hair.

In many ways it is Kadel whom I credit with opening a young me up to the magical world of art and the ideas that flow from it — Kadel and those early L.A. friends, many of whom I no longer see regularly, but whose accomplishments I relish in when they come to my attention. Which is just what I did when I saw that Kadel had released her coloring book — a project that she has worked on (no doubt in the same intentional, intense way that she always has) for the past year.

I’m arts editor Jessica Gelt, glad for what was and looking forward to what will be. This is your arts and culture news for the week.

The week ahead: A curated calendar

FRIDAY

Eleanora Owen in “Being Piaf.”

(Doug Engalla )

Being Piaf
Written and performed by Eleanora Owen, this solo theatrical piece explores the life and songs of French singer and lyricist Edith Piaf. Directed by Tim Byron Owen.
8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays; 4 p.m. Sundays; through Aug. 30. Odyssey Theatre, 2055 S. Sepulveda Blvd. odysseytheatre.com

Green Corridors
The West Coast premiere of Natalka Vorozhbyt’s darkly humorous drama about the plight of four Ukrainian women — refugees from the full-scale Russian invasion in 2022. Translated by John Freedman with Natalia Bratus. Directed by Frédérique Michel and produced by Charles A. Duncombe.
8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays; 4 p.m. Sundays; through Sept. 27. City Garage Theater, Bergamot Station Arts Center, 2525 Michigan Ave T1, Santa Monica. citygarage.org

Tercera Raíz
The contributions of the African diaspora to Mexican culture are celebrated with dance and mariachi music. Produced in partnership with Grandeza Mexicana Folk Ballet Company.
8 p.m. The Ford, 2580 Cahuenga Blvd. East. theford.com

SATURDAY

New–Music Game Night!
Brightwork Ensemble and People Inside Electronics present an evening of game-inspired works by Cristina Lord, Isaac Schankler, Siobhán Dougall and Richard An, and audience participation.
8 p.m. Sierra Madre Playhouse, 87 W. Sierra Madre Blvd. sierramadreplayhouse.org

SUNDAY

Eileen Cowin: Between Panic and Paradise
The Los Angeles–based photographer and artist’s 50-year career has produced visual narratives that incorporate cinema, literature, poetry and painting, erasing the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction.
Through Jan 3, 2027. Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd. lacma.org

Jamar Gilbert and Amber Liekhus in “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” at a Noise Within.

(Daniel Reichert)

Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom
A Noise Within opens its season with the seventh of the 10 plays in August Wilson’s Century Cycle to be produced by the company. Amber Liekhus stars as an iconic blues singer during a tempestuous recording session in 1927 Chicago. Directed by Gregg T. Daniel.
Previews, 2 p.m. Sunday; 7:30 p.m. Wednesday-Aug. 28; Aug. 29-Sept. 20. A Noise Within, 3352 E. Foothill Blvd., Pasadena. https://www.anoisewithin.org/play/ma-raineys-black-bottom/

TUESDAY

Beethoven’s Fifth with Anna Handler

Da-da-da-DUM. The Los Angeles Philharmonic’s incoming conductor-in-residence leads the orchestra in one of classical music’s most iconic pieces, along with the composer’s rarely heard Triple Concerto and the U.S. premiere of Grace-Evangeline Mason’s “Ablaze the Moon.”
8 p.m. Hollywood Bowl, 2301 N Highland Ave. hollywoodbowl.com

Jeff Goldblum and the Mildred Snitzer Orchestra will play Blue Note LA on Tuesday and Wednesday.

(Blue Note LA)

Jeff Goldblum & the Mildred Snitzer Orchestra
As they’ve been doing for three decades, the actor-musician and his band perform contemporary arrangements of classic jazz and American Songbook standards.
7 and 9:30 p.m. Tuesday and Wednesday. Blue Note Los Angeles, 6372 Sunset Blvd. bluenotejazz.com

Looking West: How the Myth of the Western Frontier Got Its Start
Muse/ique takes a deep dive into the legends and reality of the American West through classic Hollywood film scores, folk songs and contemporary compositions that reclaim the era’s diversity. Led by artistic and music director Rachael Worby with Damon Daunno, Raye Zaragoza, Glynn Turman and Muse/ique Orchestra.
7:30 p.m. Tuesday and Wednesday. The Huntington, 1151 Oxford Road, San Marino; 3 pm. (premium RSVPs only) and 7:30 p.m. Aug. 30. Skirball Cultural Center, 2701 N. Sepulveda Blvd. muse-ique.com

WEDNESDAY

California African American Museum
The museum augments two of its ongoing shows with special events. On Wednesday, Justen LeRoy of Art + Practice offers a curatorial walkthrough of “The Sound of Gordon Parks,” an immersive exhibition highlighting the sonic dimension of the photographer, composer, author, poet and filmmaker’s work. Thursday night, poets Pam Ward, Luis Rodriguez and Lynne Thompson share original work inspired by “A New Song: Langston Hughes in the West.”
Gordon Parks, 2 p.m. Wednesday; Langston Hughes, 7 p.m. Thursday. CAAM, 600 State Drive, Exposition Park. caamuseum.org

“Conscience” by playwright Joe DiPietro will have its L.A. premiere at International City Theatre in Long Beach.

(Justin Patterson)

Conscience
The Los Angeles premiere of Tony Award-winning playwright Joe DiPietro’s drama about pioneering politician Margaret Chase Smith, who famously challenged Joseph McCarthy’s tactics and was the first woman to serve in both houses of the U.S. Congress. Directed by Caryn Desai.
Previews, 7:30 p.m. Wednesday and Thursday; 7:30 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays; 2 p.m. Sundays; through Sept. 13. International City Theatre the Beverly O’Neill Theater, 330 E. Seaside Way, Long Beach. ictlongbeach.org

THURSDAY

Rachmaninoff & Adams
Gemma New conducts John Adams’ “Short Ride in a Fast Machine,” ahead of Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto (with Jeneba Kanneh-Mason in her L.A. Phil debut) and Symphonic Dances.
8 p.m. Hollywood Bowl, 2301 N Highland Ave. hollywoodbowl.com

— Kevin Crust

Retrospective

L.A. Times arts coverage from the past …

Eisa Davis, playwright and actor, who appeared in Melissa Jane Gibson’s play “This” at the Kirk Douglas Theater in Culver City in 2011.

(Mel Melcon / Los Angeles Times)

A double life as actor, playwright

Aug. 14, 2011

“I’m in a play called ‘This.’ ”

“OK, what is it called?”

“No, no, it’s called ‘This.’ ”

“Yes? What? It’s called what?”

With a lighthearted laugh, Eisa Davis says she often encounters this response when revealing that she is in a new production of “This,” which recently opened at the Kirk Douglas Theatre. The perplexity may be fitting for the universe playwright Melissa James Gibson has created: a world of confusion in which close friends enter a vulnerable time of unforeseen circumstances testing their expectations — a time also known as middle age.

Davis’ work as an actor and a playwright has contributed to a textured career. She was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in drama in 2007 for her play “Bulrusher,” about a biracial orphan infant found in a basket and raised by a quiet schoolteacher. She went on to write and star in the autobiographical “Angela’s Mixtape,” which was among the New Yorker’s best plays of 2009. Other plays she has written include “Ramp,” as well as “The History of Light,” which is returning to the stage this fall in New Jersey. READ MORE

– Jasmine Elist

Culture news and the SoCal scene

Conservators examine “Portrait of Mai” by Joshua Reynolds at the Getty museum.

(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

A 250-year-old portrait by painter Joshua Reynolds recently arrived at the Getty and is being examined by conservators before going on view in its West Coast debut later next month. “The Portrait of Mai” was acquired by the Getty for $61 million in a rare joint purchase with the National Portrait Gallery in London and depicts a young, regal-looking Tahitian man who arrived in London with Capt. James Cook in 1774.

If you’ve seen the recent national tour of Disney’s “Beauty and the Beast” at the Hollywood Pantages Theatre, you may have wondered how on earth the actor playing the living chandelier Lumiere sings and dances for more than two hours while wearing lighted candles on both of his hands. The answer has arrived via this fun story written by Times contributor Jenelle Riley, who headed backstage during a recent performance to trail Danny Gardner as he donned the 7-pound props and went about the business of performing in the rigorous show.

The group show “To Share a Stomach” recently opened at the Brick in East Hollywood. Times contributor Sharon Mizota wrote a review that included her take on the unique and difficult-to-execute concept. The show was made manifest when 25 Iranian artists, working under challenging wartime conditions, sent instructions to artists counterparts in L.A. for how to create artworks using various levels of collaboration. Mizota found the results understandably uneven, but deeply touching and impactful.

The Kennedy Center’s National Symphony Orchestra performs at the Hollywood Bowl under musical director Gianandrea Noseda on Aug. 18.

(Carlin Stiehl / For The Times)

The newly homeless National Symphony Orchestra, whose fate has become uncertain as a court battle wages over whether or not the Kennedy Center will close down for two years, performed at the Hollywood Bowl earlier this week. Times classical music critic Mark Swed was there to watch, along with many effusive supporters of music director Gianandrea Noseda’s now wandering orchestra. Swed found the program lacking in imagination, but noted, “with its smooth strings, creamy brass, pungent winds and friendly percussion, Noseda’s NSO came across as a gracious orchestra meant to please, and, consequently, a seemingly marvelous anomaly in an otherwise divisive present-day D.C.”

Speaking of the Kennedy Center, last week proved a pivotal one for its fate. The Kennedy Center Board of Trustees voted late in the week to move forward with President Trump’s plan to close the building for renovations for two years. According to multiple news reports, the board also voted to inscribe Trump’s name on the building using the language “Restored and Renovated by President Donald J. Trump.”

Brett Littman has been named the new director and chief executive of the the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego.

(Don Stahl)

The Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego announced earlier this week that it has appointed Brett Littman as its new director and chief executive. Littman is replacing Kathryn Kanjo, who left to become the new director of the UC Irvine Langson Orange County Museum of Art. Littman has previously served in a variety of leadership roles in the arts in New York City, including as director of the Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum; executive director of the Drawing Center; and deputy director of MoMA PS1. He was also co-director of Dieu Donné Papermill and associate director of UrbanGlass. He will start at MCASD in early October as the fifth director and chief executive in the museum’s history.

The Perenchio Foundation has awarded a $2,040,000 grant to the Los Angeles Children’s Chorus, representing the largest grant in the Grammy-winning organization’s history. The 2026 General Operating Support grant, which aids many aspects of the organization’s programming and community offerings, will be distributed over three years, and arrives at LACC celebrates its 40th anniversary.

— Jessica Gelt

And last but not least

Here are 16 burger and drink deals for when you need an “adult happy meal,” from The Times food section. Who doesn’t?

Nearly every week, I pass a colleague in the office who taunts me with four words: “Count of Monte Cristo, Count of Monte Cristo,” as he shakes his head. He’s disappointed his favorite book didn’t make the cut of our 101 best book club picks list, which served as the 2026 LA Times Festival of Books curtain-raiser. I don’t mind the barb. There’s nothing more exciting than an impassioned reader — even when they’re wrong. I’m all for rallying around a book or author and debating their merits like it’s a sporting match. Our book lists, after all, aren’t meant to be final verdicts. They’re invitations to read more (and, maybe, better).

To compile our expansive list we surveyed more than 200 bookish luminaries — along with a few zealous book club members. Our readers had their own ideas for their top book club picks, many of which we deeply considered. Here you’ll find some of our worthy Los Angeles Times reader selections.

“Fahrenheit 451” by Raymond Bradbury

“A favorite book my book group read and discussed is ‘Farenheit 451.’ It was fascinating to see what the past thought the future might bring,” reader Margaret Hardy writes of the 20th century classic. “In terms of technology and control by the government we are seeing today what Bradbury was thinking about in 1953. We felt that the future was found in the past. It was a chilling read.” Equally chilling is that the book often shows up on banned books lists — not unlike in its narrative.

“Homegoing” by Yaa Gyasi

“You missed ‘Homegoing’ by Yaa Gyasi!” reader Melanie H. writes of the critically acclaimed Ghanian historical fiction novel. “My book club read it and I was enthralled. I can’t stop thinking about it ever since. The amount of research and empathy into every single character and era Gyasi put into this story is incredible. It altered my brain and to this day I tell everyone about this book.”

“Giovanni’s Room” by James Baldwin

Reader Roxanne Yahner writes, “It is beautifully written, elegant and eloquent, and there is no preparing anyone for the sheer inexorable force of Baldwin’s language. This novel expresses the personal — and historical — grief of two gay, perhaps bisexual, men as they explore their sexuality at a time and place where such behavior was dangerous. The reader aches for these men and feels their grief. Some in our book club were disturbed by this novel, but all agreed they were deeply moved by it.”

“The Satanic Verses” by Salman Rushdie

Several readers wrote to us recommending Rushdie’s magical realist epic. “It’s such a complex, yet entertaining novel. We learned a lot about the tenets of Islam as woven into the story,” Ellyn Moscowitz shares about their book club pick. “It provoked great discussions about death, afterlife, religion in general and great character studies.”

“Geek Love” by Katherine Dunn

Reader Francesca Smithwick-Driver chose this as a book club pick in the ‘90s for her group and the 1989 National Book Award fiction finalist remains a favorite.

“[It’s] about a family who runs a carnival of ‘freaks.’ The story is told by an albino dwarf. There are strong themes about what it is to be normal, falling in and out of love with yourself — your family — and the world around you. Wonderfully written scenes about horrible things and beautiful things. I still remember the discussion of my book club — from ‘why in the world did you recommend this disgusting book’ to ‘what a book’ … I couldn’t wait to get back to it each time I put it down.”

“The Master and Margarita” by Mikhail Bulgakov

Reader Kate Karp, who has a cat who resembles a key character in this Russian classic, writes: “[It] turned out, no surprise, to have been the inspiration for the Stones’ ‘Sympathy for the Devil.’” She notes it also requires multiple readings to grasp all the subplots — but it’s worth it.

“Klara and the Sun” by Kazuo Ishiguro (and “Chain Gang All-Stars” by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah)

“I am terrible at book clubs because I have found that I am a very picky reader who simply will not read a book that I do not enjoy,” reader Mike Gascoigne writes. “That said, in a book club I did very much enjoy Kazuo Ishiguro’s ‘Klara and the Sun’ and Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s ‘Chain Gang All-Stars.’ There was a lot to discuss about both titles including AI/robots, intellectual enhancements, climate change, reality television, prison reform/abolition and human nature.”

“All the King’s Men” by Robert Penn Warren

“‘All the King’s Men’ is a powerful summer read — a Pulitzer-winning novel that feels strikingly current,” reader Ken Muche writes. “Set in the 1930s South, Willie Stark’s political rise echoes modern demagogues, reminding us how easily power can blur truth. Even more important, the novel invites reflection on our own bad life choices — showing that taking accountability for one’s actions is the first step toward forgiveness, peace, and ultimately, a more grounded kind of happiness.”

(Grove Press / Black Cat)

“Girl, Woman, Other” by Bernardine Evaristo

Reader Seth Kivnick’s pick is this work of fiction that co-won the Booker Prize in 2019, he notes that the compelling book describes the Black women in the British Isles who came from all walks of life and different countries. “[It] appealed to male and female club members.”

“Hell of a Book” by Jason Mott

“It’s good-humored without being comedy or satire but opens serious friendly discussions about contemporary problems,” reader Christine Almeida writes of the novel that won the 2021 National Book Award for fiction. “Our library-based book club talked about it for a solid 90 minutes without straying from what the book itself had to offer its readers.”

We’d have to say the most challenging thing about us writing “The Comeback” was coming back from the dead after the show was canceled following its first season way back in 2005. Talk about a hiatus.

There are always nerves when you return to do the next season of a series, but when the hiatus lasts 10 years between Season 1 and Season 2, and then another 10 years between the second and this third, final season — that’s a whole other level of “When we last left Valerie …”

But, gratefully, when we get together to write Valerie Cherish and her world again, it’s somehow more exciting than daunting. The nerves fade and the fun starts. The fun along with — of course — the doubts, the surprises, the deadlines, the page count. The comedy and the tragedy (see page count again). We improvise dialogue so much in the writing room that our notes tend to reach into hundreds and hundreds of pages — per episode. That’s a joke … kind of. And on top of all that, this season and this script that we’ve been nominated for writing had a particular challenge.

(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)

Between the second and third seasons, one of our most beloved cast members, Robert Michael Morris, died. Robert played the beloved, significant, audience-favorite character Mickey, Valerie’s hairdresser. At first, we couldn’t imagine doing a season without this important person and character … but when we decided to go forward with this season’s story, which deals with the TV industry’s fear of an AI takeover, we knew we had to find a way to deal with Mickey’s absence. We decided that since Robert Michael’s death happened during that second 10-year hiatus, we had to find a way to incorporate that history into the Valerie and Mickey storyline. And because it had never been dealt with by the show on camera, we decided that maybe Valerie hadn’t fully dealt with it as well. That way, the viewers wouldn’t feel like they missed a significant turn in Valerie’s journey. We decided if we could create a story where Valerie hadn’t really grieved Mickey’s passing and had to face it in the episode, then she and (hopefully) the viewers could share the sadness and the love together. And together, they could find a way to accept and release him with respect for the actor and the character and with a bit of triumph for all he meant to Valerie and to all of us on our series.

So, we created a character named Tommy Tomlin — another hairdresser and longtime friend of Mickey’s who Valerie hires to step in and take Mickey’s place and be the hairdresser on her new AI-written sitcom. Well, Tommy can do her hair but, by design, can never replace Mickey, and that conflict between Valerie and Tommy underlines her loss and her denial of Mickey’s passing. Tommy’s presence helps push Valerie to acknowledge Mickey’s absence and moves her to gently face it, finally scatter his ashes and let him go.

It was an emotional story to write and even more emotional to film. Lisa was standing on top of a Warner Bros. soundstage ready to open the box of prop ashes, to allow them to float over “Old Hollywood,” a lure that Mickey loved. But we were filming this scene at sunset, and what comes with the light at that picturesque time of day in Burbank is a strong wind from the surrounding mountains that gets trapped in an impromptu kind of wind tunnel between the soundstages. If Lisa opened the box at the wrong moment, the ashes would fly right back into her face — and in this moment, we were not going for comedy.

I was directing from down on the ground, and I looked up to the heavens and said to Robert Michael Morris, “This is your big moment — please quiet the wind so it can be beautiful and touching and an appropriate goodbye to you and your character.” And — I swear — the wind died down. I called “Action!” and on top of the soundstage, Lisa said her goodbye as Valerie, opened the box and the ashes lifted out, almost magically, and floated out and away into the sunset over the Warner Bros. Studio back lot — just as we imagined in the writing room all those months earlier.

Lots of broken-up bands reconvene for a tour, as the Black Crowes did in 2019, half a decade after brothers Chris and Rich Robinson dissolved the Southern rock group they’d formed in Atlanta in the mid-1980s. Some even stay together long enough to make a new record, as the Crowes managed to do with 2024’s well-received “Happiness Bastards.” What’s relatively rare in music is for a reunited band to quickly follow up a comeback album with a second one. Yet that’s what the Robinsons did this year when they dropped “A Pound of Feathers,” the Crowes’ 10th studio LP, behind which they’ll touch down Monday night at the Hollywood Bowl. Ahead of the show, Chris Robinson, 59, called from the road to tell the stories behind five of the band’s songs.

‘Hard to Handle’ (1990)

The Black Crowes broke out with a frisky cover of this Otis Redding tune just as hair metal was giving way to grunge. A hit on MTV, the song drove sales of the band’s debut, “Shake Your Money Maker,” to sales of more than 5 million copies.

There are some songs of Otis’ that I couldn’t do justice. As a 21-year-old kid starting my career — well, we didn’t even know we were gonna have careers — but what am I gonna sing? “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long”? “Hard to Handle,” it’s cheeky, it’s lighthearted. And I loved the break: “Pretty little thing, let me light your candle…” So I took it to George Drakoulias, our producer, and I said, “I think we could do this.” George is the one who turned it into “Walk This Way” — he put it in the same rhythmic space. Otis’ version swings, but we really couldn’t swing at the time.

So “Hard to Handle” wasn’t something you were playing live early on?
No, we brought it in for the record. Being from Georgia and Otis being from Georgia, it was important to us that people knew this is where we’re coming from. Two autumns ago, Zelma Redding and her family invited us to their big old ranch outside Macon, and we had an afternoon in the great man’s study. They have all his awards and guitars and stuff and the velvet slippers he had on when the plane crashed. At certain times in our career, we’ve been like, “F—, do we have to play ‘Hard to Handle’ again?’” We’d jam at the end or try all these things to make it sound different. But as the years have gone by, we just play it the way it’s supposed to be.

George’s engineer, Brendan O’Brien, played the guitar solo in “Hard to Handle.” Why?
We had Jeff Cease, but he’d split and gone back to Nashville. And Rich didn’t play solos back then. That changed, but at the time he was the rhythm guitar player. So it was out of necessity. We needed that meat-and-potatoes solo, and Brendan could rip it. I saw him on some podcast saying we were in L.A. and we were gonna call Slash. I’m like, “No we weren’t — you did the solo in Atlanta on Rich’s Les Paul.”

“Shake Your Money Maker” came out on Rick Rubin’s Def American label, and he’s credited as executive producer. Did Rick do anything on the album?
No.

All righty.
I’m just being honest. George and I lived in Rick’s house — I was in the basement — but the most I saw of him at the time was him leaving to go get lunch at Canter’s with Glenn Danzig. He did come to a session once with Andrew Dice Clay. We were called Mr. Crowe’s Garden at the time — we weren’t yet the Black Crowes. Rick and George were like, “You guys probably need to change your name,” and Andrew Dice Clay goes, “You should change it to Sticky Paste.” I said, “Why don’t you stick to the cigarette over your head, and I’ll handle this?”

‘She Talks to Angels’ (1990)

For “Money Maker’s” fourth single, the band released this darkly poetic ballad about a woman struggling with a drug addiction.

Were you nervous to reveal a softer side?
The only trepidation would’ve been because this was the power-ballad era of all the hair-metal bands.

Poison with “Every Rose Has Its Thorn” and so on.
Every band had one. There were hair-metal bands that only had power ballads — Firehouse or some band with 17th century French aristocrat hair.

Everything but the lace cravat.
Everything but sincere songwriting. Look, they’re people too — I get it. But we wrote a ballad out of the sincerity of how we were feeling, you know? We were reaching for “Wild Horses” or “Dark End of the Street” or “Astral Weeks.” The power ballad was a device for rock bands, but we didn’t use it as that. We used it as pure expression.

Tell me about the story the song tells.
My interest in writing and literature revolved around darker themes, whether it was the Beats or Paul Bowles or whatever. There’s drugs and madness and pain but also glory and redemption and the true heartbeat of life. So the song is a sad story but it’s romantic. There’s no moral gotcha — no resentment toward the character or the predicament they find themselves in.

How’d you come by that approach?
Reading. My mother, who just passed away a few weeks ago, she gave me a great gift: I’m dyslexic, and my mom in the early ’70s in the Deep South, she knew something was up with me. I went to school three times a week after school for years to learn how to read. And when that clicked, that was everything. My life now, it’s horribly boring. Rick Rubin with Danzig at Canter’s sounds exciting compared to Chris Robinson and the used bookstores of my life.

“Angels” is full of vivid details: the lock of hair in the woman’s pocket, for instance. Who were the songwriters that taught you how to create an image?
It all starts with Bob: “Jewels and binoculars hang from the head of the mule” — like, what?! But I’m a funny Dylan fan because I like the weird lyrics he does, like “Clothes Line Saga” from “The Basement Tapes.” Alex Chilton was really big. The first Big Star record I could get my hands on in the early ’80s was “3rd.” As a matter of fact, the first show we ever did, Rich and I played “Nightime” from that record.

On the strength of “Money Maker,” the Crowes were nominated for best new artist at the Grammys in 1991. You didn’t win —
A theme that continues today.

You remember who did?
It was Mariah Carey, I think.

Correct.
Good for her. Rich and I flew in from some tour date for one night, and I remember MC Hammer winning and doing something with Pepsi. I met MC Hammer a couple years ago. Amazingly cool guy.

What put you and Hammer in the same room?
I’m not allowed to talk about that.

Sure.
No, I’m serious — I can’t talk about it.

‘Remedy’ (1992)

The Crowes’ sophomore album, “The Southern Harmony and Musical Companion,” was led by this swaggering soul-rock jam, which Robinson opened with a memorable couplet: “Baby, baby, why can’t you sit still? / Who killed that bird out on your windowsill?”

I was in Philly a few weeks ago, in Rittenhouse Square, and I said to my friend, “That’s the hotel that I opened my window one gray day on tour, and there was a dead bird.” The room was on the 15th floor or something, and I guess the bird had flown into the glass. I was in a series of early failed rock and roll relationships, so my imagination was: Who killed that bird? Oh, she did it. The rest of it’s made up, but I had to see the dead bird that morning to kick off the thought.

There’s some great interplay here between you and your background singers — really draws out the R&B in the band’s sound.
For us, it’s instinctive. I’ve ingested a lot of Funkadelic, a lot of Prince, a lot of the Gap Band. One of my first concerts was Cameo on the “Alligator Woman” tour — mind-blowing. My singing is far more rhythmic than it is melodic a lot of the time. When I was playing with Joe Perry last summer, Steven Tyler came down to the Hollywood Bowl to do “Train Kept A-Rollin’.” He was like, “What key’s it in?” I said, “I don’t know.” He’s like, “You’ve been out with Joe for three weeks, and you don’t know what key the song’s in?” I said, “Steven, are you ready? I’ve never known what key a song is in.”

“Remedy” spent 11 straight weeks at No. 1 on Billboard’s rock radio chart. One of the songs stuck behind it was the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ “Under the Bridge.”
And just think — I never took my shirt off.

‘Sting Me’ (1992)

The tune that eventually knocked “Remedy” from the top spot? The Crowes’ second single from “Southern Harmony.”

It’s as close to a protest song as we ever got. Concerts in the ’90s were wild, man — we were seeing security guards beating on kids. But we were also seeing this blind patriotism toward ideals and philosophies that you’ve never even really looked at with any depth. So: “If you feel like a riot / Then don’t you deny it.”

There’s something slippery about the riff — it takes a second to figure out where the one is.
It fights itself — it’s funky in there. “Shake Your Money Maker” was very straight — click tracks to put the drum track together, now play the bass over that, blah blah blah. We just weren’t great at that point. By the time we’re in the studio with “Sting Me,” though, that’s one take live on the floor. We made “Southern Harmony” in eight days.

You can hear the effect of having played a few hundred gigs.
I’m glad you say that. Now bands are like, “I don’t want to go on the road — I’m gonna take a mental health break.” Can you imagine in 1992, you’re in one of the biggest bands in the world, and you’re like, “Hey man, I gotta chill out”? Get the f— out of here.

The “Sting Me” video was filmed at the Great Atlanta Pot Festival in 1992, which the band played as part of your activism around legalizing weed. What’s it been like to see those efforts succeed to some degree?
My main victory within that, if my voice was a part of it, is that we’re in a more gentle place — that it won’t ruin your life now if the police pull you over and there’s a roach in your ashtray. You have to realize: Being arrested isn’t just about the inconvenience of being incarcerated — it’s that now you’re in the system. I mean, ask any marginalized community — those drug laws were put on the books to keep you down.

‘Pharmacy Chronicles’ (2026)

Over a shuffling country-blues groove, Robinson sings about “perfume, Champagne and sin” in this standout from “A Pound of Feathers.”

Would you have foreseen that, after you got back together, you and Rich would release two albums in less than two years?
I don’t know about that. But leave Rich and I to our own devices, and that’s what we do. Our whole entrée into this world wasn’t because I could sing or he was a great guitarist — we wanted to write songs. I’ve written a lot of songs by myself, and probably out of those songs, there’s a few that I’m proud of. And I think Rich would say the same thing for himself. But there’s just something about the inspiration I get from Rich’s playing that makes us a successful songwriting team.

“Pharmacy Chronicles” has some bedraggled wisdom to it. I’m not sure you could have written it as a younger man.
I wasn’t that cynical then. It’s making fun of yourself in a way — like some old Victorian actor in the bowels of the theater taking his makeup off and wondering what it all means.

Do you think your voice has changed along with your perspective?
Of course my voice has changed — through age and, in the ’90s, through abuse. I can’t hit the super-highest notes I could as a young person. But we still sing the old songs in the original keys. Not that I know what those keys are.