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SACRAMENTO — For all the media attention California’s proposed billionaire tax has generated nationally — with some blasting it as a foolish Left Coast assault on American enterprise — the November ballot item has actually triggered a rift among progressive labor unions and Democrats, groups critical to the measure’s success.

Championed by California’s largest health workers union, Proposition 40 would levy a one-time, 5% tax on California’s roughly 200 billionaires. The measure aims to backfill Medicaid cuts signed into law last year by President Donald Trump, and would raise an estimated $100 billion.

Dave Regan, the measure’s architect and president of Service Employees International Union-United Healthcare Workers West, said the tax was intended to prevent “the imminent collapse of California’s health care system because of the Trump cuts in the ‘One Big Beautiful Bill.’”

Regan, who has become well-known for using ballot measures as leverage in negotiations with state lawmakers and the healthcare industry, seemed poised to channel public anxiety over economic affordability, access to medical care and anti-Trump sentiment when the initiative was announced last fall.

Today however, the initiative not only faces heavy and well-funded opposition from those it aims to tax, but also divided support among groups who traditionally favor taxes on the wealthy — labor unions. Both the powerful California Teachers Association and the State Building and Construction Trades Council of California have come out against Prop. 40, while Teamsters California and AFSCME California support it. Others unions have yet to weigh in, including the California Federation of Labor Unions and SEIU California, a parent organization for Regan’s healthcare worker union.

Establishment Democrats are also divided. Gov. Gavin Newsom aggressively opposed the measure and sought to negotiate with Regan to remove it from the ballot beginning last year. Days before a state deadline to withdraw ballot measures in late June, Regan publicly offered to trim the wealth tax to 2% over two years, an offer Newsom quickly rejected.

To some close observers, the offer signaled that Regan may have been looking for a way out of an expensive ballot fight.

“I found it unusual that he did that because he’s usually not that kind of negotiating type — he’s no nonsense,” said Democratic political consultant Steven Maviglio. “I don’t know if he felt it was a hot potato or what.”

Regan’s union spent $31 million to gather 1.6 million voter signatures to put the tax on the ballot.

“At the outset, this may have looked like the replay of a strategy he’s employed successfully many times in the past, but he ended up painting himself into a corner, and so now he’s stuck with an initiative that he knows he probably can’t pass,” said Dan Schnur, a politics and communications professor at Pepperdine, USC and UC Berkeley.

A March poll by UC Berkeley’s Institute of Governmental Studies showed 52% of registered voters support the billionaire tax while 33% opposed it and 15% were undecided. However, campaign experts say its position remains precarious, due in part to the deep pockets of its opponents.

Several billionaires, including Google co-founder Sergey Brin, have so far pumped a combined $118 million into a campaign committee that gathered enough signatures to place two other measures on the ballot aimed at undercutting the billionaire tax.

Groups that might otherwise support more revenue for healthcare have also come out against Prop. 40, including Planned Parenthood Affiliates of California and the California Medical Assn.

“The dangerous wealth tax directly threatens vital funding for education and schools, healthcare and clinics, public safety, and infrastructure projects by making California’s revenue even more volatile,” leaders of the California Medical Association, California Primary Care Association and California School Boards Association wrote in a joint statement.

Regan and fellow supporters insist that, without approval of the tax measure, Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” will gut the state’s healthcare resources.

“This will take between $20 and $25 billion annually out of our healthcare system, meaning three and a half million people are going to lose insurance, 150,000 health care workers will be laid off and over 20 million consumers are already paying more in premiums, deductibles and copays,” he said.

While prominent progressives such as Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Fremont) have voiced support for the measure, some progressive opponents say its near exclusive focus on healthcare is a problem. (Only a small portion of tax revenues would go toward education and food security.)

The CTA said after reviewing the measure, its council of delegates “determined that this policy will not provide the sustainable and long-lasting funding that our schools and communities deserve.” Leaders of the state’s largest teachers union plan to focus their efforts on passing Proposition 3, which would make permanent an existing tax on certain high earners to fund schools and community colleges.

Labor unions have typically aligned in support of tax-raising ballot measures, including earlier temporary versions of this year’s Prop. 3 and an unsuccessful 2020 proposal to revamp commercial property taxes.

But the billionaire tax “doesn’t benefit everybody. It benefits workers in the healthcare sector primarily, and I think that’s why not everybody’s on board. It’s not a ‘rising tide lifts all boats’ kind of proposal,” Maviglio said.

In the 15 years he has led SEIU-UHW, Regan has become known for using expensive ballot measures — or the threat of them — to bring lawmakers and industry opponents to the negotiating table.

In a landmark 2023 deal, Regan secured a statewide $25 wage floor for healthcare workers after qualifying initiatives to raise industry wages in Los Angeles and other cities. The deal included a 10-year moratorium on minimum wage propositions. He also pushed ballot measure regulations on kidney dialysis clinics for three subsequent election cycles. Though none of them passed, the dialysis industry spent hundreds of millions between 2018 and 2022 to defeat them.

“Everybody knows that he is wielding ballot measures as a weapon to leverage his unionization or political demands. It’s not a secret. He’s admitted it,” said Brandon Castillo, a ballot measure strategist who often finds himself opposite Regan in ballot fights including the dialysis clinic propositions.

The measure retroactively applies a tax on billionaires who were residing in California as of Jan. 1. Newsom and other opponents say the initiative would drive the ultra-wealthy out of the state and their departure would blow a hole in the state budget.

California’s budget is dependent on income taxes the rich pay on stock market profits. The Legislative Analyst’s Office said the measure would “likely” result in an “ongoing decrease in state income tax revenues of hundreds of millions of dollars or more per year.”

“You may not be able to pick up and move to Texas or Florida to shelter your income from taxation, but I promise you that billionaires can, and do,” Newsom wrote in a post on Substack in late June. “Wealth is movable, and it shops for the state with the lowest taxes.”

After the talks ultimately failed to result in a deal, Newsom endorsed the idea of a national wealth tax instead.

“It’s easy to see how they may have believed that Newsom’s strongest incentive was simply to stay out,” Schnur said. “There’s a huge potential downside for a Democratic governor [to weigh in] on either side of this initiative. If you oppose it, you’re alienating your base. If you support it, you’re putting your state in dire fiscal peril.”

Focusing on raising taxes at the federal level allows the governor to support a popular idea nationally, which he can campaign on if he runs for president. His opposition to the measure in California could still leave him vulnerable to criticism from progressives in a national Democratic primary.

Times staff writer Taryn Luna contributed to this report.

Lost luggage? Tarmac delays? Rental-car blues? No whining about measly travel headaches with the mother of all bad-trip sagas looming on the big screen.

“The Odyssey,” Christopher Nolan’s epic take on the Trojan War’s fallout, debuts July 17. Spoiler alert, if you somehow avoided Homer in community college: Nobody, save biblical Job, has had more misery hurled at them.

Outflanked by cruel and fickle gods at every turn, legendary Greek hero Odysseus outsmarted a one-eyed giant, suffered through the bewitching Sirens’ song and braved the Underworld’s dead denizens. He battled oversize cannibals, outmaneuvered a witch and lost scores of men at every turn. Then made it back to Ithaca after 10 years only to find his home overrun by suitors wooing his wife.

It’s a tale packed with bad decisions, failure, heartbreak and death. Perfect story fodder, given how much we love bad-trip stories. We consume lists of the worst airports and wonder at accounts of illness-plagued cruises. We scroll through videos starring unruly passengers or mangled bags, and read about the last resting place for lost luggage.

Hollywood has created a whole franchise around road trips gone wrong. Think of “The Hangover” or “Sideways” or “Little Miss Sunshine.” Screenwriter-director John Hughes perfected the big-screen comedic treatment of travel gone south with classics such as “Home Alone,” “National Lampoon’s Vacation” and “Planes, Trains and Automobiles.”

Let’s not even talk about the “three-hour tour” that left Gilligan and friends stranded on a deserted island for 98 episodes, or how Jack Dawson’s voyage ended aboard 1997’s “Titanic.”

A significant body of evidence even indicates that travel makes us sick. Trip-related problems are so common, in fact, that consumer advocate Christopher Elliott has stitched an entire career out of resolving them — from timeshare scams to horrible airline customer service and beyond.

Still, we keep buying tickets and packing our bags to sail into the great unknown, across Homer’s wine-dark sea. Why? Elliott attributes it to what he terms “traveler’s amnesia.”

“It amazes me that travelers are not up in arms about the way they get treated,” he said. “They take a trip, have a terrible experience, and forget about everything that went wrong and only remember what went right.”

He suggests that avoiding a bad trip starts with choosing companies noted for strong customer service. He cited some name-brand examples: Marriott for hotels, Alaska Airlines, and Enterprise Rent-A-Car. He avoids cruises as much as possible.

Which is funny, because when I think about cruising, I don’t revisit the miserable 36 hours that norovirus confined us in our cabin. I instead recall coasting past a flotilla of icebergs in Alaska’s Glacier Bay.

When I think about Mexico, I don’t wallow in memories involving Montezuma and his gastrointestinal revenge. But I do cherish thoughts of snorkeling with playful sea lion pups.

And when I consider airports, I blot the memory of the woman next to me at Gate 66 who insists on blaring a video call at maximum volume. Instead, wielding my noise-canceling earbuds, Odysseus-like, I plan to smother this screeching sound to preserve my sanity. But before I can insert them, a voice speaks to me.

To all of us, to be technically correct, since it emanates from the speakers of Los Angeles International Airport’s Terminal 6.

“It’s time to play TSA’s favorite game!” says the voice, mimicking a game-show host’s hustle. “You lost it, we found it!”

The speaker explained that someone had left a laptop computer at a checkpoint. The two were reunited moments later, which set my feet in motion, wondering whose voice it was. There at the checkpoint I met Carl Revis, a TSA supervisory officer with a penchant for comedy.

“You don’t have to be a jerk to get things done,” he told me. “I think reaching people through comedy is a lot easier than screaming and yelling at them.”

Taken together, my trip recollections probably qualify me as living proof of Elliott’s traveler’s amnesia theory. The final diagnosis should be clear soon. I’m retiring from full-time work this year, and people inevitably ask what’s next.

It’s not completely clear, I tell them. But I’ll definitely have more time to travel. Maybe sail across the Aegean … what could go wrong?

Planned Parenthood and two smaller regional abortion providers are resuming billing Medicaid for services other than abortion after being cut off for most of a year.

The defunding, which was mandated in President Trump’s big tax and policy law last year, has been blamed in the closure of multiple clinics as well as a reduction in the number of Planned Parenthood patients being screened for breast cancer or tested for sexually transmitted infections.

The Medicaid billing was allowed to resume last weekend.

The restored funding does not mean the battle over federal abortion policy has ended, and not all services that were cut will return.

Here’s what to know about the situation.

Planned Parenthood closed clinics and saw fewer patients

Many abortion providers, including Planned Parenthood affiliates, have struggled financially since the 2022 Supreme Court decision that overturned Roe v. Wade and allowed state abortion bans to be enforced. Clinics have closed in states with abortion bans and restrictions as well as those without.

Planned Parenthood says its affiliates have closed nearly 30 of its roughly 600 clinics over the past year, citing the funding change as a key reason.

Over that period, affiliates dispensed about 25% fewer packs of birth control pills and conducted about 20% fewer breast cancer exams than the previous year.

Many patients — especially in places where healthcare can be hard to access — may not have had care at all because of the defunding, the organization said.

Planned Parenthood Action Fund spokesperson Angela Vasquez-Giroux said the cuts have also led to limited abortion access in some places.

Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin halted abortions for about a month, then dropped its status as an “essential community provider” so it could resume seeking reimbursement. The Arizona affiliate paused offering many of its services to patients covered by Medicaid.

Two smaller providers were also impacted

The defunding provision also affected two other healthcare providers that met the criteria in the law because the were nonprofit family planning organizations that provided abortion and received more than $800,000 yearly in Medicaid reimbursements.

Their experiences were very different.

Maine Family Planning closed three primary care clinics that served about 1,000 patients in the largely rural state.

Evelyn Kieltyka, a senior vice president of program services, said that even with help, their former patients had to wait an average of four to six months to be established with new providers.

Meanwhile, the number of abortions the group provided held steady, she said. Maine is one of several states where state-funded Medicaid covers abortion.

Patients at Health Imperatives in Massachusetts may not have noticed the change, as no services were dropped.

The state government funded Medicaid reimbursements that the federal government stopped — something that Planned Parenthood says happened in some form in 14 states. On top of that, the clinic system received a grant from Melinda Gates’s foundation.

Some services are returning but others may not

Planned Parenthood’s Arizona affiliate has already announced expanded hours and more telehealth options linked to the ability to bill Medicaid again.

Some other services are not likely to be restored.

Kieltyka said Maine Family Planning isn’t planning to bring back its primary care practices again.

“When you close something down and you lose positions,” she said, “it’s very difficult to bring that back and build it back up again.”

And Michelle Quesada, vice president of communications, brand and marketing for the Planned Parenthood affiliate in Florida, said a closed clinic in Lakeland isn’t expected to reopen, partly out of concern that Congress or the Trump administration could cut Medicaid reimbursements for the organization again.

“There’s no telling with this uncertainty,” she said. “It’s like a yo-yo effect.”

Abortion opponents want to stop the Medicaid reimbursements again

The political battle isn’t over.

Abortion opponents are pushing Congress to adopt another defunding policy.

“They’ve defunded Big Abortion before,” Kelsey Pritchard, a spokesperson for Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, said Monday, “and they should do everything in their power to do it again.”

Planned Parenthood contends that most general election voters don’t want the organization to be defunded. Pritchard said that the Republican base does.

Mulvihill writes for the Associated Press.

After 52 years of providing the Inland Empire with mini golf, roller skating and go-karting, Fiesta Village Family Fun Park is shutting down.

The Colton amusement park said in a statement Tuesday that it will remain open to the public for its final days this weekend.

“This decision has not been easy. For decades, Fiesta Village has been a place where families gathered, friendships grew and memories were made,” the company said in the statement.

Owner Michelle O’Brien said that rising operation costs and declining attendance were the main reasons behind the closure.

“It’s been a privilege to be the steward at the park. It’s devastating to have to close it, but you get to a point where there are no other options,” O’Brien said. “We’re so grateful that Fiesta Village carried a place in people’s hearts.”

The park first opened in 1974, with a mini golf course, waterslides and go-karts. O’Brien purchased it in 2002 and has operated it ever since. Under her and her husband Patrick’s ownership, the park added attractions such as the Scrambler and Tilt-a-Whirl, along with laser tag and a roller skating rink.

Since the COVID-19 pandemic, the theme park industry has struggled to fully rebound. Rising costs and a lack of tourism have made the business increasingly difficult to sustain.

Last year, California’s Great America, a Silicon Valley park operated by Six Flags Entertainment, had to cut its workforce and shorten its season. Even theme park giants such as Disneyland are seeing slight downturns in attendance. Disney previously said its U.S. theme parks saw a 1% drop in attendance compared with the prior year, which the company attributed to “continued softness” in attendance by international visitors. Disneyland’s Anaheim park also recently began offering $71 tickets to draw more local visitors.

For parks like Fiesta Village, the rising cost of essentials such as food ultimately makes survival harder, said Dennis Speigel, president of International Theme Park Services, a consulting firm. He added that competition from nearby parks is also drawing business away. As a Southern California venue, Fiesta Village sits within driving distance of destinations such as Knott’s Berry Farm and Disneyland.

“It’s hard for smaller parks to compete with the big entities that surround them. Particularly now as we continue to see this amazing growth in technology for rides and attractions,” Speigel said. “Big attractions are very expensive propositions for parks to put in, and parks like Fiesta Village can’t keep up with that.”

Given the current economic uncertainty, Speigel said, theme parks will probably see a “flat year” — meaning no major growth or decline industrywide.

After Fiesta Village’s final celebration with the public on Friday and Saturday, the park will host a private event Sunday before shutting down for good. It’s unclear what will happen to the property afterward.

“Thank you for allowing us to be part of your lives and your family traditions,” the company wrote. “We will always cherish the role Fiesta Village has played in bringing people together.”

Times staff writer Samantha Masunaga contributed to this report.

John Slattery was jet-lagged in Budapest late one night after a day of shooting the 2025 drama “Nuremberg” when his old “Mad Men” co-star and friend Jon Hamm texted him with the kind of pitch that would send many actors sprinting in the opposite direction.

Would he be willing to play an out-of-work version of himself who hadn’t had a gig in a decade and was shamelessly coasting on his “Mad Men” fame?

Reading the script for “Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass” through the haze of fatigue, Slattery fixated on that one detail: “Hasn’t worked in 10 years, huh?” he recalls by phone from his home in New York. “I had to go: Wait a second. Let me IMDb myself.”

As it happens, the 63-year-old Slattery — best known for his four-time Emmy-nominated turn as the silver-haired ad executive Roger Sterling on “Mad Men” — has racked up some 30 film and TV credits since that show ended in 2015. Still, he says he was happy to detonate his cool, unflappable persona in the latest comedy from “Wet Hot American Summer” and “Role Models” filmmaker David Wain.

The gleefully unhinged “Gail Daughtry,” which premiered earlier this year at Sundance and opens Friday, casts Slattery as a washed-up version of himself who is enlisted by a Midwestern woman (Zoey Deutch) who flies to Los Angeles determined to cash in on a celebrity sex pass with Hamm after discovering her fiancé cheated on her with Jennifer Aniston.

For Slattery, what begins as an exercise in comic self-demolition gradually becomes the movie’s biggest surprise, with the actor turning a desperate, delusional version of himself into its most unexpectedly lovable character.

From left, Miles Gutierrez-Riley, John Slattery, Ben Wang, Ken Marino and Zoey Deutch in the movie “Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass.”

(Sundance Institute)

Speaking with The Times, Slattery reflected on cheerfully becoming the butt of the joke, why broad comedy is anything but easy and what it’s like navigating Hollywood at a moment when fading away feels a little less far-fetched than it once did.

Actors spend years building a certain cool image, but within seconds of appearing onscreen in this movie, you’re whining, farting and generally making an ass of yourself. What appealed to you about that?

I never considered it risky. Not that it was foolproof, but it was just such a silly idea and I was a fan of David Wain and those guys anyway. These kinds of comedies take skill and experience. I mean, you have to be really smart to make a movie this stupid.

You’re always looking for something that’s different and this was such a funny way to depart from myself — ironically, by playing myself. It seems like the wildest character I’ve played in a while, and it’s me. I thought: What kind of research am I supposed to do? Am I supposed to watch myself and imitate myself? But there was really nothing to do. You just learn the lines and show up.

Was there ever a moment where you thought: This is either going to be really funny or the end of my career?

I didn’t have that feeling on this. There’s nothing funnier to me than a confident moron. My favorite thing in the world to watch or try to do is somebody who has full confidence in their idiocy.

I’m not somebody who dives into the deep end right away. First I want to know I can trust the people in charge of what I’m about to deliver to them. If I do all this, whose hands am I leaving it in? With David, that wasn’t even a consideration. He’s just so good at what he does, and that gives you permission to just go all in.

Have you always been able to laugh at yourself or is that something that’s gotten easier as you’ve gotten older?

I come from a large family of piss-takers. They’re all really good at ball-breaking and really funny. My mother had six kids, and all her brothers had five or six kids. I had a million cousins, and they will shred you. Somebody would always knock your feet out from under you if you took yourself too seriously.

John Slattery and Jon Hamm in a scene from the AMC drama “Mad Men.”

(Frank Ockenfels / AMC)

Every successful actor probably has a nightmare that one day the phone stops ringing and you’re coasting on fading glory. Did you ever have that feeling after “Mad Men” ended?

After going through COVID and the strike and directing an independent movie [2023’s black comedy “Maggie Moore(s)”], which doesn’t pay very well, I hadn’t acted in a while. I was like: Oh, I wonder if this is going to continue. I don’t know.

The business has contracted. It seems like there’s an endless list of titles on every streaming menu, and yet they’re making less and people are struggling. So I’m glad to be working. I’ve had a pretty lucky run of late and I’m not taking it for granted.

At this point in your career, what makes you say yes to something?

Money. [laughs] No, it’s really the same as it’s always been. You always want a big, fat, juicy part, but sometimes it’s just a functioning part in a really good story.

You kind of roll with the punches. You do something, you have some success with it and then you get a lot of offers for things that are a lot like that. If that’s all that comes in, you pick the best one and keep going. People say, “Well, it’s not ‘Mad Men.’” And you go, “Well, what do I need to do that again for? I did that.”

This is a perfect example of something that’s every bit as interesting and fun in a completely different way. If they could all be like this one, I could die tomorrow. You want them all to be this fun, because they’re not. Sometimes you’re stuck in a courtroom all day and it’s pretty dry. This was anything but that.

Hollywood feels like a deeply anxious place right now. You’ve worked through a lot of different eras of this business. How does this moment compare?

I have a job coming up, so that’s always hopeful. Having just come off something, and knowing you’re about to do something else, gives you a sense of security. But there’s definitely a palpable anxiety. You hear it when people get jobs: “Thank God.” Or, “It’s about time.” Or, “I don’t care what it is, I’m going to do it.”

I was listening to Taylor Sheridan recently talking about how people who don’t tell stories are governing the telling of stories. That’s more than disconcerting. And now AI is the overlord of all that. It’s very strange.

It’s always been a youth-oriented business. There are definitely more movies about people who are 27 than people who are 63. Maybe it all kind of shakes out. I don’t know. Sometimes I wish it were 1943 and I was in a suit playing a detective.

I would watch that movie. Meanwhile, Hollywood doesn’t make many broad theatrical comedies like this anymore. Why do you think that is?

I don’t know why the studios have given up on comedies in movie theaters. They used to be the thing, right? Those big Will Ferrell movies were huge moneymakers.

Maybe this will turn the tide. When you think about the condition of the country right now, and how pissed off and divided everybody is, you roll out this silly, smart-but-stupid comedy, and it seems like the perfect amelioration of everybody’s anxiety. Go get some popcorn and laugh your ass off. You’ll feel better.

Former NFL defensive end and Los Angeles sports radio personality Marcellus Wiley was arrested Saturday in Florida after allegedly threatening to kill his wife and poking her in the face with his finger.

Wiley faces a possible charge of misdemeanor domestic battery. According to the Orange County (Fla.) Corrections Department, he was released on a $1,000 cash bond Sunday at 8:43 p.m. An arraignment hearing has been scheduled for Aug. 4.

“I completely and unequivocally deny these allegations, and I’m certain the truth will prevail,” Wiley wrote Monday on X. “As you know, I’m usually the first to break down the truth and separate facts from fiction. But because this is now a legal matter — and because my greatest responsibility is protecting my babies, who have already been impacted — I have to handle this differently.

“When I can speak freely, I absolutely will. Until then, thank you for your patience, your prayers, and for continuing to stand with me.”

The former Pro Bowl player is married to Annemarie Wiley, a former cast member of “The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills” and the mother of three of his children. The name of the alleged victim is redacted from the arrest affidavit viewed by The Times, but she is identified as a woman who said she has been married to Wiley “for approximately 14 years” and shares three children with him.

A sheriff’s deputy responded to a call at the World Marriott in Orlando around 4:47 p.m., according to the arrest report, and the accuser said she wanted Wiley removed from their hotel room.

“She stated Marcellus told [her] he was going to kill her and she was afraid of his behavior,” the report states. “When asked to elaborate, she stated on the previous morning Marcellus had put his hands on her.”

The report states that the woman told the deputy that on the morning of July 3, Wiley “used one finger to sternly and intentionally poke her in the cheek. [She] stated he did not have permission to do this, and she stated she believed he did this to cause her harm.”

She did not request medical attention after the alleged incident, according to the affidavit, and the deputy said he did not see any visible injury. The woman also told the deputy that Wiley “had an unreported history of violence toward her and she was planning to divorce him when they returned home to California.”

Their 7-year-old daughter, who the woman said had witnessed the incident, told the deputy she did not see her father touch her mother but had heard them arguing that morning.

According to the affidavit, Wiley told the deputy in an oral statement that “he and his wife had not had any physical altercation while at the hotel, and he also stated they have never had any physical violence between them.”

In addition, the report said, “Marcellus stated he believed his wife had called deputies to make a report due to her intention to divorce him. Marcellus stated he had been taking care of the children and no violence had occurred between them.”

The deputy determined probable cause existed for Wiley’s arrest, and he took the 10-year NFL player to the correctional facility “without incident.”

According to court records, Wiley has been appointed a public defender. He is allowed to return to California but must obey a no-contact order that prohibits him from “having any type of contact with the victim(s), either directly or indirectly.”

He can return home one time with law enforcement to collect his belongings.

A Compton native, Wiley played four years at Columbia before a 10-year NFL career from 1997 to 2006. He spent three seasons with the San Diego Chargers, including his only Pro Bowl year in 2001, and also played for the Buffalo Bills, Dallas Cowboys and Jacksonville Jaguars. His post-football broadcast career included several years as a host on KSPN-AM (710) in Los Angeles.

Multiple women accused Wiley in civil lawsuits of sexually assaulting them in the past. One Jane Doe filed in April to turn her lawsuit into a class-action suit against Wiley and Columbia University. The filing included four new accusers and stated that “at this time, without the benefit of discovery, there appears to be at least 10-12 victims. It is anticipated that discovery will reveal more.”

Wiley has denied all the allegations against him in court documents and publicly.

Disneyland Resort is rolling out the red carpet for its closest neighbors with a limited-time $71 ticket deal exclusive to Anaheim residents.

The one-day, one-park promotion runs from July 20 through October 8, a timeframe that includes Halloween celebrations at Disneyland. Anaheim residents over age 10 can also purchase discounted one-day Park Hopper tickets during this time for $104. Children ages 3 to 9 can get either one-day, one-park tickets or one-day Park Hopper passes for $50. Park reservations are required.

Disneyland has offered deals for Anaheim residents in the past. But this promotion comes less than a week after the theme park announced a limited-time $59 evening ticket offer. Already, that deal has sold out for all dates.

Together, the two promotions highlight the importance of local visitors for Disneyland. Earlier this year, an executive said the theme park’s high volume of California attendees helped mitigate a dip in international tourism. More than 50% of the Anaheim theme park’s audience typically has been from California.

The Burbank media and entertainment company previously signaled that it would pivot its marketing and promotional efforts toward domestic visitors as it monitored the headwinds affecting international attendance.

In May, Disney executives said its U.S. theme parks had a 1% drop in attendance compared with the previous year, which the company attributed to “continued softness” in international visitors. However, during a second-quarter earnings call, Disney leaders said the park was starting to move past those headwinds.

WAUSAU, Wis. — Michael Alfonso, the 26-year-old son-in-law of U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, has an answer for people who say he doesn’t have the experience necessary to join Congress as its youngest member.

He points to George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.

“They were 26 when they were first elected to public office,” said Alfonso, a Republican.

Alfonso is trying to ride support from his father-in-law to win his old House seat in rural northern Wisconsin. Duffy has repeatedly jetted back to the district to campaign and raise money for Alfonso, and he’s tapped $1 million from his old congressional account to support Alfonso’s candidacy.

Alfonso has also scored the endorsement of President Trump, who called him a “MAGA warrior.” But to Alfonso’s detractors, including prominent Republicans in the 7th Congressional District, he’s too young and inexperienced for the job.

“I think it’s insulting to people in the 7th that someone who lacks qualifications and any life experiences and any kind of demonstrable leadership skills or experience is even being touted as a candidate,” said Meg Ellefson, a 20-year resident of the district who voted for Trump three times and now opposes him. “It’s super aggravating to me.”

The Aug. 11 primary will test whether Trump’s endorsement of Alfonso, Duffy’s star power in his old congressional district and Alfonso’s fundraising advantage will be enough to put the political newcomer over the top.

Alfonso leans into Duffy’s ‘Real World’ past

Alfonso is taking a page from his father-in-law’s playbook by participating in a reality show. He appeared alongside Duffy, a 1997 alum of MTV’s “Real World,” in the “Great American Road Trip” video series that Duffy launched with his wife and 11 children on YouTube in June.

Duffy was elected to Congress in 2010, flipping a seat that had been under Democratic control for 41 years. He served for just under nine years before leaving politics. He returned last year when Trump tapped him to serve as transportation secretary.

Alfonso has leaned into his youth and lack of political experience.

“I’m a young man with the energy of a young man, but I have the values of someone who’s in their 60s,” Alfonso said, citing the fact that he got married to Duffy’s daughter Evita Duffy at age 22 and became a father in May.

Alfonso graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2022 and then moved to Florida, where he worked for about a year on a podcast hosted by Trump supporter Dan Bongino. Prior to that, he worked construction jobs while in college.

Alfonso said that conservative activist Charlie Kirk’s assassination inspired him to run to continue what he calls a “spiritual battle for the soul of our nation.” Kirk’s Turning Point Action has endorsed Alfonso.

Duffy’s son-in-law faces a former Iranian hostage and a dog musher

One of Alfonso’s rivals in the Republican primary, Kevin Hermening, has deep ties to the district.

Hermening is a former Marine who was one of 66 Americans held hostage by Iran for 444 days starting in 1979. Framed photos of the then-20-year-old Hermening meeting with former Presidents Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter hang on his office wall.

He has worked nearly 40 years as a financial planner, spent 16 years on a local school board and was chairman of the Marathon County Republican Party for 24 years, helping Duffy and scores of other Republicans win local, state and federal races across the district.

Hermening also previously ran for Congress in 1986, when he was the same age as Alfonso is now — 26. He lost by 25 percentage points to Democratic incumbent Rep. David Obey.

“The voters told me that I wasn’t ready or prepared yet,” Hermening, who’s now 66, said in an interview at his Wausau office. “I was ill prepared to have actually done the job, and I’m not saying that because Mr. Alfonso’s in the race. It’s a fact.”

Another candidate in the primary, Ashley Furniture executive Jessi Ebben, has the backing of powerful Republican megadonors. Others running are Niina Baum, a dog musher, and Don Raihala, an accountant and real estate broker.

Longtime Republicans are publicly opposing Alfonso despite Trump backing

While Alfonso has endorsements from House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., and four of Wisconsin’s six Republican congressmen, local Republican officials in the district have publicly questioned the young candidate’s credentials.

Leaders in at least three counties have publicly spoken out against Alfonso as being too inexperienced for the job and questioned Duffy’s influence.

Iron County Republican Party Chair Tanner Hiller accused Duffy of trying to use his connections to get his son-in-law elected.

“I think what they’re doing is wrong morally,” Hiller told Wisconsin Public Radio in May. “There’s a lot of people that have better credentials, that know this district, that will represent this district better than Michael Alfonso.”

Donations in question as GOP megadonors are divided

Alfonso has benefited from tens of thousands of dollars in donations from transportation interests, raising more questions given that Duffy leads the federal agency that oversees the nation’s transportation system.

When asked whether he would be beholden to those donors, Alfonso said he answers only to God and the voters.

“That’s it,” Alfonso said.

But Hermening said Alfonso will feel indebted to the donors.

“I would think that the people would want to get paid back,” he said.

Duffy, despite his repeated visits back home to the district to campaign and raise money for Alfonso, is focused exclusively on executing the president’s agenda, his Transportation Department spokesperson Nathaniel Sizemore said when asked about the donations.

A super political action committee backing Alfonso has received $1 million from Duffy’s old congressional account and another $1 million from Republican megadonor Richard Uihlein, whose shipping and packaging business, Uline, is based in Wisconsin.

However, Uihlein’s wife, Elizabeth Uihlein, has donated $1 million to another PAC supporting Ebben. Ebben also has the backing of Club for Growth and Diane Hendricks, a billionaire builder from Wisconsin who is another GOP megadonor.

Alfonso hopes Trump endorsement overcomes GOP pushback

Alfonso is leaning into the Trump endorsement, while saying it will be hard work and not the president’s backing that gets him elected. His red, white and blue campaign signs say, “Endorsed by President Donald Trump.”

Jack Hoogendyk, chair of the Republican Party in Marathon County, which is home to the district’s largest city of Wausau, said Trump’s endorsement is “solid gold” in a district where Trump won by 22 percentage points two years ago.

But Ellefson, the longtime district resident, who hosted a conservative talk radio show in Wausau for five years, isn’t so sure that Trump’s blessing carries the same weight now that it used to.

“I personally would like to believe that voters in the 7th are intelligent enough and critical thinkers and won’t be swayed by a Trump endorsement,” she said. “I’m going to give the voters credit for not being that foolish.”

Bauer writes for the Associated Press.

Hi, and welcome to another edition of Dodgers Dugout. My name is Houston Mitchell. No animals were harmed in the production of this newsletter.

Dalton Rushing has certainly been in the spotlight lately. From his miscommunication with Shohei Ohtani to getting emotional on the bench. We put the spotlight on him recently in this newsletter, which you can read here.

This led to readers asking whether his teammates like him. And while you can never know what lies in the heart of a person, it seems very likely that they do. We quoted colleague Maddie Lee‘s story last time. This time, we look at a couple of interesting quotes from Katie Woo’s story in the Athletic.

Freddie Freeman: “Everyone here loves Dalton Rushing. The person he is in the clubhouse, before games, after games, doesn’t get to be shown on the field. But there’s that three-hour window where his emotions come forward, and it can be a lot. I wish people could see the Dalton Rushing inside the clubhouse, on the plane, on buses. It’s not what you see during the game. He’s a young guy who’s learning the starting role, who wants to be great, who is just learning, and we’re here to help, and that’s why you see so many people trying to help him.”

Miguel Rojas: “It’s really hard to change one person’s personality from one year to another. We have to understand and give him a little bit of a break, because he’s young. Now, if we’re seeing this next year, or the same thing happening two years from now, there’s probably going to be a conversation with the organization. You have to see growth.”

That sounds like two guys who like him, and are trying to help him navigate through all of this. Which is what teammates are for.

However, is Rushing in sync with the pitchers? Let’s take a look at the starting pitcher ERA with Rushing and with Will Smith in their career. We’ll include Austin Barnes and Ben Rortvedt too.

Yoshinobu Yamamoto
ERA with Rortvedt: 0.86 (21 innings)
Barnes: 1.64 (33)
Rushing: 1.75 (92.2)
Smith: 3.29 (221.2)

Justin Wrobleski
Smith: 2.60 (86.2)
Rushing: 3.75 (72)
Rortvedt: 6.14 (7.1)
Barnes: 10.90 (17.1)

Shohei Ohtani
Rortvedt: 0.00 (11)
Smith: 2.08 (82.1)
Rushing: 2.97 (39.1)
Barnes never caught him

Roki Sasaki
Rortvedt: 0.00 (2)
Barnes: 2.00 (9)
Smith: 4.32 (58.1)
Rushing: 6.21 (37.2)

Emmet Sheehan
Rortvedt: 0.00 (1)
Rushing: 3.04 (50.1)
Smith: 4.20 (124.1)
Barnes: 7.56 (16.2)

Tyler Glasnow
Rushing: 1.46 (24.2)
Rortvedt: 2.89 (18.2)
Smith: 3.42 (210.2)
Barnes: 5.40 (10)

Blake Snell
Rortvedt: 0.47 (19)
Smith: 3.26 (30.1)
Rushing: 4.80 (15)

Eric Lauer
Smith: 1.50 (6)
Rushing: 3.86 (23.1)

All Dodgers pitchers this season
Smith: 3.02 (393)
Rushing: 3.74 (341.1)
Chuckie Robinson: 4.88 (59)

All Dodgers pitchers in 2025
Rortvedt: 2.89 (140.1)
Rushing: 3.87 (325.1)
Smith: 4.00 (865.1)
Robinson: 5.14 (7)
Barnes: 5.16 (103)

You can see why the Dodgers liked Rortvedt so much.

Dave Roberts, millennium man

Dave Roberts got the 1,000th victory as Dodgers manager when they beat the Athletics on Tuesday.

“I mean, 1,000 didn’t even seem on my radar,” Roberts said after that game. “That’s a long time of consistent winning, let alone keeping a job for 11 years. That’s just kind of the life I chose. But yeah, to kind of put your head down and look back and go, ‘Oh my God, I’m here,’ it’s mind-blowing. I still feel like I’m getting better, and I still enjoy it.”

Roberts, who is in his 11th season as Dodgers manager, gave a hint as to how long he will be at the helm.

“I will not manage 20 years. Mookie wants me to manage until his contract expires [in 2032], so that’s something I am thinking about. But I can be certain I’m not going to do 20 years. It’s too much. I love it, but it’s a lot to give. To see myself doing that for another seven, eight, nine years, that’s a lot.”

Barring some unexpected collapse by the Dodgers for a couple of seasons, Roberts will be manager of the Dodgers for as long as he wants. He has won three World Series titles and will go into the Hall of Fame one day. He has grown considerably as a manager, as he has shown in the last two postseasons. There is always a vocal minority who doesn’t like him, or who thinks anyone could manage this team to a title. Nonsense. As Mookie Betts said:

“I would definitely say it’s probably the reverse. It makes it harder. It’s probably easy to write in a lineup, for sure. But to manage so many personalities, injuries, guys coming up, guys coming down, it’s a lot, especially losing. We went through our stretches where we weren’t playing well.

“And then it’s the other way, like, ‘Oh, you got this roster, and you’re still losing X, Y, and Z.’ But he just kind of handled it. Handled it with grace. And still come out on top. So, yeah, it’s probably easy to write in the lineup, but to manage it for 162-plus is really hard to do.”

Roberts became the 69th manager to win 1,000 games and the fourth Dodger manager, joining Walter Alston (2,040), Tommy Lasorda (1,599) and Wilbert Robinson (1,375). He also has the best winning percentage of any manager in history, winning 62.3% of his games. He is 1,003-607. Just behind him is Joe McCarthy, who won 61.5% (2,125-1,333). McCarthy won seven World Series titles, all with the Yankees, and is considered by many to be the greatest manager in history.

Sad news

Catcher Eliezer Alfonzo made his major league debut with the Dodgers on Sunday, but with a heavy heart. Alfonzo’s younger sister, Eliana, and stepmother, Patricia, died during the devastating earthquakes that struck Venezuela recently.

”Don’t really know what to say about it outside of my heart goes out to him and his family,” Roberts said before Sunday’s game. “He’s in [the lineup]. He’s going to play today, but obviously it’s heavy hearts. I don’t want to really go too far because I’ll get emotional, so I don’t know. I know it’s tough, very tough.”

After the game, Alfonzo said this about playing: “Honestly it was a little difficult, but at the same time thanking God always for everything. What happened, unfortunately, is out of my hands and part of life. Only God knows why they happen. I went out there to honor my sister and my stepmother, and give my best in a difficult moment.”

Keep these types of things in mind the next time you want to boo or yell at a player for making an error, mentally or physically. We don’t know what they are going through from day to day. It’s easy to get caught up in thinking these are baseball players making a lot of money and living the dream. But no one lives the dream 24/7.

Four All-Stars

Ohtani, Freeman, Max Muncy and Andy Pages were all elected as starters for this year’s All-Star team, and Yamamoto also made the team, giving the Dodgers four All-Stars this season, tied for the most with Atlanta and Philadelphia. It is Ohtani’s third All-Star nod with the Dodgers (he also had three with the Angels), Freeman’s fifth with the Dodgers (he also had five with the Braves), the third for Muncy, the first for Pages and the second for Yamamoto.

The franchise record for most players on the team is seven, done in multiple years while the Dodgers were in Brooklyn.

Dodgers named to the All-Star team at least four times:

11
Clayton Kershaw

10
Pee Wee Reese

Nine
Don Drysdale

Eight
Roy Campanella
Steve Garvey
Gil Hodges

Seven
Sandy Koufax
Duke Snider
Maury Wills

Six
Ron Cey
Jackie Robinson
Fernando Valenzuela

Five
Freddie Freeman
Mike Piazza
John Roseboro

Four
Mookie Betts
Pedro Guerrero
Cookie Lavagetto
Davey Lopes
Van Lingle Mungo
Don Newcombe
Mickey Owen
Johnny Podres
Preacher Roe
Don Sutton
Dixie Walker
Whit Wyatt

These names seem familiar

How notable players who were with the Dodgers the last couple of seasons are doing with their new teams (through Sunday). Click on the player’s name to be taken to their full stats page:

Anthony Banda, Twins: 2-0, 4.46 ERA, 2 saves, 34.1 IP, 31 hits, 15 walks, 33 K’s, 98 ERA+, on the IL

Cody Bellinger, Yankees: .251/.348/.426, 374 PA’s, 17 doubles, 3 triples, 11 homers, 50 RBIs, 116 OPS+

Walker Buehler, Padres: 5-4, 4.61 ERA, 82 IP, 83 hits, 30 walks, 76 K’s, 91 ERA+

Mike Busch, Cubs: .234/.367/.391, 398 PA’s, 14 doubles, 2 triples, 11 homers, 47 RBIs, 114 OPS+

Michael Conforto, Cubs: .250/.345/.492, 148 PA’s, 10 doubles, 7 homers, 21 RBIs, 133 OPS+

Justin Dean, Cubs: .400/.500/.800, 6 PA’s, 1 triple, 3 RBIs, 259 OPS+

Caleb Ferguson, Reds: 1-0, 1.62 ERA, 1 save, 16.2 IP, 15 hits, 6 walks, 16 K’s, 278 ERA+

Jack Flaherty, Tigers: 2-8, 4.60 ERA, 76.1 IP, 74 hits, 37 walks, 92 K’s, 93 ERA+

Kenley Jansen, Tigers: 1-4, 4.98 ERA, 10 saves, 21.2 IP, 14 hits, 12 walks, 23 K’s, 87 ERA+

Craig Kimbrel, Rays: 0-2, 4.62 ERA, 25.1 IP, 22 hits, 10 walks, 23 K’s, 9Gavin 4 ERA+

Gavin Lux, Rays: on the IL

Dustin May, Cardinals: 5-6, 4.80 ERA, 84.1 IP, 83 hits, 24 walks, 78 K’s, 84 ERA+

Zach McKinstry, Tigers: .196/.274/.291, 225 PA’s, 6 doubles, 2 triples, 3 homers, 16 RBIs, 58 OPS+

James Outman, Tigers : .159/.234/.292, 124 PA’s, 4 doubles, 1 triple, 3 homers, 11 RBIs, 46 OPS+

Joc Pederson, Rangers: .242/.338/.466, 276 PA’s, 7 doubles, 2 triples, 14 homers, 31 RBIs, 133 OPS+

Luke Raley, Mariners: .228/.293/.466, 241 PA’s, 8 doubles, 1 triple, 14 homers, 35 RBIs, 114 OPS+

Ben Rortvedt, Mets: in the minors

Corey Seager, Rangers: .182/.292/.374, 219 PA’s, 6 doubles, 10 homers, 25 RBIs, 94 OPS+, on the IL

Justin Turner, Tijuana (Mexican League): .281/.394/.475, 216 PA’s, 17 doubles, 6 homers, 28 RBIs

Trea Turner, Phillies: .246/.283/.360, 364 PA’s, 15 doubles, 10 homers, 31 RBIs, 72 OPS+

Miguel Vargas, White Sox: .247/.363/.494, 304 PA’s, 17 doubles, 1 triple, 20 homers, 56 RBIs, 138 OPS+

Kirby Yates, Angels: 0-3, 2.75 ERA, 2 saves, 19.2 IP, 11 hits, 7 walks, 28 K’s, 154 ERA+

Note: Vargas was named to the AL All-Star team.

Up next

Monday: Colorado (*Kyle Freeland, 2-7, 7.25 ERA) at Dodgers (*Eric Lauer, 4-5, 4.84 ERA [3-0, 2.88 ERA with Dodgers]), 7:10 p.m., SportsNet LA, AM 570, KTNQ 1020

Tuesday: Colorado (Michael Lorenzen, 3-9, 6.91 ERA) at Dodgers (*Justin Wrobleski, 10-2, 2.80 ERA), 7:10 p.m., SportsNet LA, AM 570, KTNQ 1020

Wednesday: Colorado (Ryan Feltner, 3-2, 4.27 ERA) at Dodgers (Roki Sasaki, 3-5, 5.40 ERA), 7:10 p.m., SportsNet LA, AM 570, KTNQ 1020

All times Pacific

*-left-handed

In case you missed it

Dodgers’ Edwin Díaz pushes back against alleged links to illegal cockfighting

Dodgers’ Eliezer Alfonzo to start after his sister and stepmother died in Venezuela

Dodgers sending four more players to MLB All-Star Game, tied for most selections

Shohei Ohtani and Dodgers taking cautious approach with his biceps ailment

How Dodgers’ Max Muncy, vying for his third All-Star selection, continues to evolve

Fan loudly expresses unbridled enthusiasm for Mexico’s World Cup goal … at Dodgers-A’s game

Dodgers Debate: Midseason awards

Walter Alston, Dave Roberts and everyone in between: The 10 managers in L.A. Dodgers history

And finally

Vin Scully tells us about Kirk Gibson‘s home run. Watch and listen here.

Until next time …

Have a comment or something you’d like to see in a future Dodgers newsletter? Email me at houston.mitchell@latimes.com. To get this newsletter in your inbox, click here.

The Minions took over theaters this weekend as Universal Pictures and Illumination’s “Minions & Monsters” won the top spot at the box office, though with a lower-than-expected domestic haul.

The animated movie, which follows the Minions’ takeover of Hollywood, took in $61.4 million in the U.S. and Canada for the five-day Fourth of July holiday weekend, according to studio estimates. That haul was lower than analysts’ expectations for a domestic opening of about $68 million. The movie’s three-day total was $36.4 million.

But the Minions performed well internationally, bringing in about $85 million. In total, “Minions & Monsters” made $159.9 million worldwide on a production budget of about $85 million.

The film is the latest in the powerhouse franchise that began with “Despicable Me” in 2010. Across its previous six installments, the “Despicable Me” and “Minions” franchise has made more than $5.6 billion at the global box office. The last movie, 2022’s “Minions: The Rise of Gru,” made more than $940 million worldwide.

“Minions & Monsters” marks the lowest opening for the franchise. Part of the issue could be timing — the box office can be negatively affected when the Fourth of July lands on a Saturday, said Paul Dergarabedian, head of marketplace trends at Rentrak.

Walt Disney Co. and Pixar’s “Toy Story 5” came in second at the box office this weekend with a domestic three-day gross of $31 million. Angel Studios’ biopic “Young Washington” ($20.8 million), Warner Bros. and DC Studios’ “Supergirl” ($9.6 million) and Universal’s “Disclosure Day” ($6 million) rounded out the top five, according to Rentrak.

The haul for “Minions & Monsters,” coupled with the strong holdover performance of “Toy Story 5,” proved again that family films are making a dent in the summer box office.

“Toy Story 5” has now brought in a total of $764.3 million worldwide, and last month, Universal, Illumination and Nintendo’s “The Super Mario Galaxy Movie” crossed $1 billion at the global box office, becoming the first film of any kind to do so this year.

The rest of the summer theatrical lineup is also expected to bring in audiences and push domestic box office totals closer to pre-pandemic figures. Next week, Disney will release its live-action “Moana,” followed by Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey” and Sony Pictures’ “Spider-Man: Brand New Day.”

To date, the summer box office is now about $2.3 billion, a nearly 12% increase compared with the same period a year ago, according to Rentrak data. Compared with pre-pandemic 2019’s numbers, however, it is still down about 7%.

The American democratic experiment stands on shaky ground. Not since the Civil War have these proverbially United States been so disunited. As the nation throws itself a grand old 250th birthday bash in Washington, the mood in much of the country is more funereal than festive.

All-out partisan warfare has sown chaos. Republican legislators, taking their lead from a president who sees half the nation as his personal enemy, have put their own party’s interests over the republic’s. Staying in office has become the only thing that matters. The values imparted to me throughout my public school education — equal opportunity, impartial justice, respect for expertise, basic honesty — have been abandoned by a new breed of politician that has turned governance itself into a blood sport.

Where can one turn for reassurance that America’s best years are still ahead? Would you believe me if I said the theater? I’m not toeing the line for my field. I’m merely calling attention to a development that’s been gaining strength since I first reported on it in 2015. A cohort of playwrights, breathtakingly diverse demographically as well as aesthetically, has been rejuvenating American theater.

These writers aren’t on a sociological mission. They’re not trafficking in grievance or appealing to a particular political base. They let their plays do the talking. And they’ve been trying to have a conversation that isn’t hijacked by the most doctrinaire voices in the room.

From an institutional perspective, the American theater is in bad shape. The triple whammy of the COVID-19 closures, inflation and technological disruption has left everyone hurting. The Mark Taper Forum had to suspend programming for more than a year, smaller companies still in operation are producing fewer shows, and producers everywhere are gravitating toward the bankably familiar.

But despite this difficult terrain, it has been a boom time for American playwriting. For more than a decade, I’ve been teaching a course at the California Institute of the Arts called American Drama Now, and each year the selection of plays has become harder to whittle down. I designed the seminar partly around theater offerings in Los Angeles to connect students to recent developments in the field and to consolidate awareness that something special is happening in the American theater.

The current generation of playwrights has revealed itself to be remarkably resilient and independent. It has had no other choice. By the time many of these rising talents were accruing debt in graduate writing programs, the dream of a sustainable career in the nonprofit theater had already gasped its last breath.

When Wendy Wasserstein, Tony Kushner, Craig Lucas and Jon Robin Baitz emerged in the late 1970s and ’80s, it was still imaginable that a chosen few playwrights could make a living via the regional theater circuit, that constellation of companies founded as an alternative to the Broadway model.

That prospect was growing dimmer a few years later when playwrights such as Suzan-Lori Parks and Lynn Nottage came into prominence. But hope was still alive in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Regional theaters such as Seattle Rep, the Guthrie, the Goodman and Baltimore Center Stage remained committed to their missions while New York nonprofit companies continued to hold the line off-Broadway.

When did the picture change? In 2009, “Outrageous Fortune: The Life and Times of the New American Play” was published by the Theatre Development Fund, and one of the key findings in this study written by Todd London with Ben Pesner and Zannie Giraud Voss is that “there is no way to view playwriting as anything but a profession without an economic base.” A chasm had opened between the network of increasingly corporate-minded nonprofit theaters and the artists this system was built to serve.

The situation has grown bleaker in the last decade and a half as commercial pressures have ramped up and media consolidation and digital shortsightedness have obliterated arts coverage. Yet there’s been an unexpected upside. Theater artists who have come of age in this period have been released from the burden of having to conform to notions of regional theater respectability.

Instead of worrying about the timid taste of subscription audiences, these dramatists have been writing for themselves and their communities, dreaming up plays that don’t have to fit into institutional slots or stay within the staid bounds of traditional proscenium house decorum. The irony is that in not trying to pass muster with more conservative theatergoers (and their fastidious institutional guardians), playwrights have been winning over not just critics but also formerly squeamish artistic directors and perennially nervous Broadway producers.

The playwrights who appear regularly on the syllabus in American Drama Now — Young Jean Lee, Tarell Alvin McCraney, Annie Baker, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Samuel D. Hunter, Martyna Majok, Jeremy O. Harris, Will Arbery, Jackie Sibblies Drury, Quiara Alegría Hudes, Ayad Akhtar, among them — are of different ages, sensibilities and backgrounds. What they share is an appreciation of the complexities and contradictions in being an American.

The politics of identity for them is a lived experience. And as dramatists, they’re uniquely positioned to appreciate the conflicted loyalties and communal tensions of American life in dramatic rather than dogmatic terms. Whatever agendas they may personally espouse, these writers are too alert to the messiness of history and human nature to be rigidly ideological in their work.

The ongoing war between woke and anti-woke factions is a fatuous melodrama best left to the satirists. The goal of playwrights grappling seriously with what it means to be an American today isn’t to score social media points but to shed light on the fractured reality of our collective experience.

Characters in plays by Young Jean Lee, such as “Straight White Men,” are often “trying on masks to see what might prove effective in a given situation.”

(Lawrence K. Ho / Los Angeles Times)

Identity is not a fixed fact but a raucous collision of parts. No single category can contain the Whitmanesque multitudes jockeying for position inside us. Race, religion, ethnicity, gender, age, sexuality, class, disability and geography don’t line up in perfect political harmony, and each social marker tells only a fraction of the whole story. (Money, the great unequalizer, may be the most taboo subject of all.) “We are not only but also,” the sociologist and cultural historian Todd Gitlin wrote in his 1995 book “The Twilight of Common Dreams: Why America Is Wracked by Culture Wars.” We also overlap and often even clash with ourselves.

Discussion around identity can be dangerous. How can anyone be expected to navigate the minefield? Tribalists and traditionalists have controlled the terms of the battle, one by simplifying, the other by denying, the way privilege has shaped our compound selves.

Playwrights know better. They understand the way oppression, which falls disproportionately on the marginalized, has warped all of us. History, whether acknowledged or not, is etched in our souls.

It is a long-held tenet of the theater that the most interesting characters, like the most interesting people, are defined by their schisms and paradoxes. (How else could Hamlet have maintained his centuries-long hold?) Dramatists are more cognizant than ever of the sociopolitical import of these contradictions and they’ve been chronicling the way this historically freighted baggage emerges in the drama of everyday life.

All the world is indeed a stage and all its inhabitants merely stock players, as Jaques lays out in “As You Like It.” Hegel described Shakespeare’s characters as “free artists of their own selves.” The truth where we and our contemporary stage surrogates are concerned is somewhat more constrained. Culture and representation largely determine the range of our performance possibilities.

Plays such as Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ “Appropriate” reexamine “the canon of great American family dramas … to uncover the stories that have been suppressed.”

(Craig Schwartz)

Jacobs-Jenkins has recognized perhaps more acutely than any of his peers the way dramatic forms have locked us into set scripts about our lives. He tackles genres — adapting a Dion Boucicault melodrama in “An Octoroon,” reexamining the canon of great American family dramas in “Appropriate” — to uncover the stories that have been suppressed in the dominant white middle-class narratives that would prefer not to think of themselves as political.

Lee’s standout identity plays — “Straight White Men,” “The Shipment” and “Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven” — reject the illusion of stable, coherent characters propagated by psychological realism. The figures in her uncategorizable works are in experimental flux, trying on masks to see what might prove effective in a given situation. Even “Straight White Men,” which uses the old home-for-the-holidays genre as a springboard, can’t help spinning away from the drama’s droll hyper-naturalism toward something resembling performance art. (Not even straight, white men want to be confined to a box, even a relatively plush one.)

“Fairview,” by Jackie Sibblies Drury, “theatricalizes the experience of the white gaze.”

(Jeff Lorch)

In “Fairview,” Jackie Sibblies Drury theatricalizes the experience of the white gaze, ultimately reversing the comfortable position white theater audiences have traditionally held. Bess Wohl’s “Liberation,” this year’s most decorated play, reanimates the history of the 1970s feminist movement by questioning what it could be leaving out of the picture. “The Balusters,” by David Lindsay-Abaire, brings the current culture wars to the stage with unique sensitivity through the squabbles of a neighborhood association torn between protecting its town’s heritage status and coming to terms with the more pluralistic demands of the 21st century.

“Fairview,” “Liberation,” and “The Balusters” are extremely funny plays that also happen to be deadly serious. If philosophy begins in wonder, trenchant social drama seems to start in laughter.

What do theatergoers want? They don’t just want to look; they also want to be seen. Isn’t that what any of us wants when gazing into the mirror held up to nature, as Hamlet describes the theater? To be granted a more expansive view of ourselves and others?

E pluribus unum, the motto of the United States, is so fundamental that it’s printed on our currency. There’s perhaps no place where the truth of this phrase — out of many, one — is more regularly realized than at the theater, where strangers transform over the course of a show into that mysterious organism we call an audience.

Gitlin ends “The Twilight of Common Dreams” with a plea: “For too long, Americans have busied themselves digging trenches to fortify their cultural borders, lining their trenches with insulation. Enough bunkers! Enough of the perfection of differences! We ought to be building bridges.”

A coalition mindset doesn’t mean denying history or pretending that America has been a level playing field. It’s been anything but in this “melting pot where nothing melted,” to quote the rabbi whose eulogy sets Kushner’s “Angels in America” in motion. But history happens to all of us, not just a select few. And to be an American is to be embroiled in the great democratic experiment that has been defined by division from the beginning. Empathy, the nuclear fusion of playwriting, is expanded when we’re allowed to take in more of our patchwork selves. Today’s dramatists have been extending a generous invitation to their compatriots: We’ll show you our complexity, if you’ll show us yours.

I’m Laurie Ochoa, general manager of L.A. Times Food, with a packed summer vacation edition of Tasting Notes.

On a roll

The sourdough-enhanced interior of the cinnamon bun at Daegens in Oslo, Norway.

(Laurie Ochoa / Los Angeles Times)

Norway is not only the land of the Viking Row, one of the most captivating national fandom displays to emerge during this year’s World Cup — and certain to be seen when Erling Haaland and the Martin Ødegaard-led team battle five-time champs Brazil. Norway is also home to one of the world’s greatest cinnamon rolls.

Until I went to Oslo recently, the best cinnamon roll I’d ever eaten was in Chicago — at the venerable Swedish-American diner Ann Sather, where a milky sugar glaze used to be drizzled onto the still-warm, pillowy pastry right at the table. (These days the rolls are glazed in the kitchen after they’re baked.)

Los Angeles, of course, also has show-stopping cinnamon rolls. This spring, Food senior editor Danielle Dorsey, with help from Stephanie Breijo, Jenn Harris and Angela Osorio, put together a guide to 11 of L.A.’s most intriguing cinnamon rolls, including the hip-hop-inspired over-the-top creations at All About the Cinnamon, the sweet-savory buns with honey and sesame seeds at Modu and the tallboy “cinnamon goo”-filled rolls topped with caramel-toffee sauce from SweetBoy. Harris also recommends the especially decadent cinnamon roll served during brunch at Baltaire in Brentwood, where the cake-size roll is wheeled out on a cart and “slathered with frosting at the table.”

In Oslo, however, I discovered a cinnamon bun that stripped away the excess and let the essence of the spiced dough reveal itself.

Daegens, a tiny cafe and bakery hidden away in Oslo’s pretty Lilleborg neighborhood, is run by Anta Stinnerbom, a young entrepreneur who spent several months sharpening his coffee knowledge and barista skills at the acclaimed roastery Tim Wendelboe and is now deep into his explorations of sourdough baking. It’s the sourdough, in fact, that gives the Daegens cinnamon bun its character.

Baker and barista Anta Stinnerbom at his Daegens cafe in Oslo.

(Laurie Ochoa / Los Angeles Times)

Even more than Stinnerbom’s cardamom bun — which some praise as the best in Oslo — the more elemental cinnamon notes, enhanced with lemon zest and juice, allow the sourdough’s multifaceted dimensions to come through. Not just tang, but the taste of time.

When you can’t decide between Anta Stinnerbom’s cardamom bun, front, or cinnamon bun at Daegens in Oslo … get both.

(Laurie Ochoa / Los Angeles Times)

Daegens’ BMO (bolle med ost), which the Oslo bakery makes with a good seeded sourdough roll topped with fresh butter and cheese.

(Laurie Ochoa / Los Angeles Times)

The discovery of a great sourdough cinnamon bun is just one of the reasons I love to travel.

Lately, I’ve been absorbed in the world of Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard, both for his most recent novel, “The School of Night,” which features a grand-scale narcissist captured in a Faustian downfall, and for “So Much Longing in So Little Space,” which documents the author’s search for the meaning of art through his encounters with the work of Edvard Munch. At Oslo’s boldly vertical, 13-story Munch museum and Bergen’s more contemplative Munch collection at the Kode museum’s Rasmus Meyer galleries, I was able to see for myself the wild stylistic leaps taken by the artist before and after “The Scream,” including the paintings he did for the women’s cafeteria at Oslo’s Freia chocolate factory.

But it was only after the first of many good meals in Oslo that I started to get a feel for the city. As I wrote in the introduction to our new collection of summer vacation dining guides, traveling with an eater’s mindset gives us a deeper understanding of places we’ve read about in cookbooks and novels or seen in movies and paintings. Wandering markets, eating at food stalls, sitting among locals and fellow travelers at the restaurants that embody a city or its surrounding countryside … these are the ways we absorb the rhythm of a place. Its flavors and ways of living are revealed to us over dinner or even a simple morning coffee accompanied by a beautifully baked cinnamon bun.

If you go …

(Giacomo Bagnara / For The Times)

For those of us lucky enough to write about food for a living, each vacation is a chance to add one more spot on our individualized maps of the world’s great places to eat. And this year, we’re sharing our personal maps and notes on places we’ve loved during our wanderings with readers.

Restaurant critic Bill Addison explored Melbourne, whose “modern dining moment,” he says, “derives from the immigrant communities that have rooted in the city since its founding,” making it “innately familiar to Angelenos, and also something wholly distinct to experience.” Then he shared 25 Melbourne restaurants, coffee shops and bars that showed the ambition of its dining scene.

(Photo illustration by Los Angeles Times)

Addison, restaurant critic Jenn Harris, deputy food editor Betty Hallock and I shared a personal list of 33 Paris restaurants and bars we love. Reporter Stephanie Breijo and senior food editor Danielle Dorsey wrote about their 15 favorite London pubs, food halls and bake shops. Addison and Hallock detail 17 splendid Tokyo dining suggestions. I detail 9 reasons Michelin-ignored Lima is one of the world’s greatest restaurant cities and came back from Hong Kong with 10 great eating experiences. And food editor Daniel Hernandez filed three reports from Mexico: an updated guide to 17 new and old favorites in Mexico City, a to-do list for exploring often-overlooked Colima, Mexico’s smallest state, and a fascinating look at how palm wine from Colima is at the heart of “a flourishing culinary movement rooted in its 250 years of trade with the Philippines.”

Given that these suggestions are not meant to be definitive — they are our personal favorites — we know that there are many other worthy places to explore. We’d love to hear from you if you have your own personal picks. We’ve built a form for entering your favorites from around the world and will publish the results in the coming weeks.

And if you’re staying closer to home, check Danielle Dorsey and Stephanie Breijo’s guide to the 23 best new L.A. bars, Dorsey’s choices for the best new L.A. rooftops for drinking and eating and the entire food team’s picks for 50 essential L.A. dining experiences.

We’ve also introduced a new way to save your favorite recommendations and build your own custom guides. Times senior product manager Jeff Poirier explains the new feature, which includes maps and is as simple to use as hitting the “save” button on any individual entry.

Introducing …

Los Angeles Times cooking editor Cody Reiss

(Stephanie Breijo / Los Angeles Times )

We are thrilled to introduce our new cooking editor Cody Reiss, who learned most of what he knows about cooking professionally at Alice Waters’ Chez Panisse Cafe in Berkeley and did time behind the counter at Murray’s Cheese in New York. He also had a part in Eva Victor‘s “Sorry, Baby” and played himself in the very funny “narrative cooking short” “Breakfast for Liz.” Read more about Cody in his hello to readers, which describes the teaching approach he’s aiming for in the food videos he’ll be doing. And check out the videos he released this week on why you should throw away your salt shaker and how to cut a tomato. Finally, with Cody taking over our Cooking Newsletter — which is moving from Sundays to Fridays so that you can have more time to plan your weekend cooking — now is an excellent time to sign up for the free weekly dispatch if you’re not already a subscriber. This week, he provides two crucial lessons on salt and why you might be using it wrong.

Chilaquiles heaven

Chilaquiles, molletes and salsas at Taquearte in Pico Rivera.

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

Restaurant critic Jenn Harris’ latest review is about Pico Rivera’s Taquearte, which happens to be one of my favorite places to get chilaquiles and a loaded Mexico City-style taco campechano, which made our 101 Best L.A. Tacos list. I first heard about Taquearte from my mom and her friend Pablo. (She went to high school in Pico Rivera and lives in nearby Whittier.) Harris bookmarked the place when Eater’s Bill Esparza wrote about the chilaquiles as L.A.’s best. Harris wholeheartedly agrees and loved how “the chips … were noticeably thin, delicate but sturdy enough to retain their crunch. They hovered in a magical state of limbo between wet and dry, crisp and wilted.”

More restaurants recommendations: 7 L.A. spots for bandeja paisa, Colombia’s classic lunch platter by Angela Osorio, 9 great places to try Midwest-style tavern pizza in L.A. by Kelly Dobkin and the best places to eat and drink in July, according to our Food writers.

The loss of two trailblazers

Chef Joshua Gil, pictured January 17, 2024.

(Tharini Shanmugarajah)

Joshua Gil, who “helped recontextualize and reimagine Mexican food in L.A.,” as reporter Stephanie Breijo wrote, died last week after a four-year fight with cancer.

Gil, who is credited with helping the late Joe Miller‘s now-closed Joe’s Restaurant in Venice gain a Michelin star, and went on to co-found the much-missed Tacos Punta Cabras and Hamburguesas Punta Cabras, as well as the pop-up Supper Liberation Front, established the Alta California restaurants Mírame in Beverly Hills, which closed in 2023, and the still-running Mírate in Los Feliz, which Gil left after a legal dispute. He also established the rooftop raw bar Mother of Pearl, which is closed at the moment, and the teppanyaki restaurant Maison Kasai, both at the downtown L.A. dining collection Level 8.

In an extensive story about Gil opening the now-closed Three Flames in the midst of cancer treatment and his drive to continue mentoring chefs, such as Macheen‘s Jonathan Perez, he told Breijo, “I’m a very stubborn a—. I like telling people, ‘I’m Mexican. I don’t know how to give up.’”

Chef Katsuya Uechi in 2016 at the 10th anniversary celebration of the Brentwood location of Katsuya.

(Michael Kovac / Getty Images for Katsuya)

Late last week, we also got word that Katsuya Uechi, the sushi master whose name has become synonymous with the global Katsuya brand, has died at the age of 67.

“The Okinawa-born chef altered the DNA of the L.A. sushi scene with his innovative, genre-bending creations,” writes Melody Xu of the chef who first came to prominence for many L.A. diners at Sushi Katsu-ya in Studio City, which he opened in 1997. “Spicy tuna crispy rice, which he debuted in the early 2000s, has since become a modern staple in sushi restaurants across the U.S.”

Also …

Amid the puestas of Olvera Street in downtown Los Angeles.

(Etienne Laurent/For The Times)

• Many were hoping that the World Cup would provide an incentive for downtown Los Angeles’ city leaders and other stakeholders to invest in the area’s infrastructure. But it’s sobering to read reporter Angela Osorio’s look at the sad state of downtown’s once-bustling Olvera Street — with even taquito mecca Cielito Lindo facing a precarious financial situation that has left it shuttered … we hope only temporarily.
• Melody Xu talked with the owners of some of L.A.’s prominent Venezuelan restaurants about how they are connecting people and fundraising for survivors of the twin earthquakes. At publication time, the parents of Full Arepas’ Kelly Montano, writes Xu, “who were on vacation in La Guaira when the quakes happened, [were] among the more than 40,600 people still unaccounted for.”
• “For the first time in its history,” writes Stephanie Breijo, the Michelin Guide awarded a Mexican restaurant three stars.” That honor went to Val Cantú‘s Californios in San Francisco. Breijo has all of the news from the announcement of Michelin’s California guide, including the new two-star designation for Los Angeles’ Kato.
• More from Breijo: As the Boyle Heights fire burned, restaurants depended on which way the wind blew.
• The legal fight over who can sell a white nectarine variety, reports Claire Rush, led central California farmer Cesar Mora to give away more than 100,000 pounds of the fruit.
• And Hailey Branson-Potts has the story of the beer queen of Mendocino County, Lost Coast Brewery’s Barbara Groom, one of the country’s first female microbrew owners, who turns 80 this year.

Can you tell the story of America in 10 movies? Maybe so — at least a version of it — if you stick to moments of serious national friction and those rare instances when a filmmaker meets the mood with a true vision. If you want tearjerkers about red, white and blue triumph, this is not your list (although the Space Race drama “The Right Stuff” always does the trick). Meanwhile, our current state of disunity and division will find its own expressions in time; start with “Civil War,” though it’s a bit too soon. Instead, we thought about historical pivot points and built a list of classics, along with a few alternatives for each title.

The Great Depression

Henry Fonda, left, in the 1940 film “The Grapes of Wrath,” directed by John Ford.

(20th Century-Fox)

‘The Grapes of Wrath’ (1940)

America is a broken place in John Ford’s poetically charged adaptation of the Steinbeck novel: a downbeat landscape of Oklahoma dust storms, long shadows and the teetering sight of a car turned into a truck transporting a family westward. This will always be one of those essential movies about a particular national dream — not just a myth — of emerging from economic catastrophe and being reborn in the promised land of California. Ford, with the instincts of a showman, foregrounded hope on the horizon via inspired performances by Henry Fonda and Jane Darwell’s pragmatic Ma Joad getting the final word (“We keep a’coming…”). But there is still so much darkness in “The Grapes of Wrath,” especially in its scenes of John Qualen’s Muley Graves, crumpled on the ground, suddenly a squatter on his own piece of land. He’s no match for the bulldozers. As long as the idea remains that property gets its purpose from those tending it, working it, nourishing it and dying on it, the film will never become a relic. Its binding values of labor and community remain relevant, even if today’s Hollywood rarely speaks to them. — Joshua Rothkopf

See also: “Modern Times,” “Sullivan’s Travels,” “Bonnie and Clyde”

Postwar optimism

Michael Hall, from left, Teresa Wright, Myrna Loy and Fredric March in the 1946 movie “The Best Years of Our Lives.”

(Samuel Goldwyn Productions)

‘The Best Years of Our Lives’ (1946)

World War II ended with ticker-tape parades and soaring expectations. William Wyler’s sweeping drama arrived just as America was beginning to reckon with what coming home actually meant. Harold Russell, a real-life veteran who lost both hands during the war, plays a sailor struggling to imagine a future with the woman he loves. Dana Andrews is a decorated bombardier who returns to the same soda fountain job he held before the war, discovering that military heroism doesn’t necessarily translate into peacetime opportunity. The movie became one of the biggest hits of 1946 because it understood a challenge facing millions of Americans: The war had given the country a common purpose but peace meant each person had to find their own. Yet for all its honesty about that dislocation, the film remains remarkably hopeful. Its faith that people can rebuild their lives and start over feels almost radical today. Seen from the distance of eight decades, it feels like a dispatch from a country that had just survived a catastrophe and still believed its best days lay ahead. — Josh Rottenberg

See also: “It’s a Wonderful Life,” “Miracle on 34th Street,” “Giant”

Capitalism, unchecked

Daniel Day-Lewis in the 2007 movie “There Will Be Blood,” directed by Paul Thomas Anderson.

(Paramount Vantage)

‘There Will Be Blood’ (2007)

“I drink your milkshake — I drink it up!” Oil man Daniel Plainview’s deranged metaphor, allegedly taken from congressional transcripts from the 1920s Teapot Dome scandal in which Interior Secretary Albert Fall defended the practice of directional oil drilling, a.k.a. drainage, became a catchphrase when “There Will Be Blood” arrived in 2007. Elon Musk probably has a T-shirt in the back of a drawer emblazoned with the line. It epitomizes the American ethos of extracting resources that belong to someone else and then brutally bragging about the beatdown. Paul Thomas Anderson’s movie is part history lesson, part horror film, which, when it comes to chronicling the American experience, feels like the perfect blend. The oil man’s exploits take place more than a century ago, but seem particularly relevant now with Musk newly minted as the world’s first trillionaire and income inequality rapidly widening. Plainview confesses, “I have a competition in me. I want no one else to succeed.” It neatly sums up the endgame in which we find ourselves — and his vanquishing of the preacher Eli speaks to what we worship in the United States. He’s finished and sometimes it feels like we are too. — Glenn Whipp

See also: “The Wolf of Wall Street,” “WALL-E,” “Sorry to Bother You”

Post-Vietnam/Watergate cynicism

‘Nashville’ (1975)

Ronee Blakley in the 1975 movie “Nashville,” directed by Robert Altman.

(Paramount Pictures)

Could one movie capture the breadth of emotions around this year’s 250th anniversary celebrations as well as Robert Altman did the bicentennial? As the country was still reeling from the assassinations and discord of the 1960s, the despair of Vietnam and the scandals of Nixon and Watergate, there was a soul-baring uncertainty to what it even meant to be an American. With 24 main characters interwoven around the town of Nashville, home of country music and intersecting political undercurrents, the film tries to make sense of the chaos. While the conspiracy thrillers of the 1970s are seen as the most direct response to the moral malaise of the moment, Altman finds an unexpected way to gild his innate skepticism with a light filigree of hope, a complex quilt of characters capturing the contradictions inherent in the American identity. And yet as cynical and beaten-down as the film’s viewpoint can often be, there is still a spark of decency and perseverance. That is the America that Altman celebrates, even as he lets no one off the hook. Few films capture the hum of life in all its maddening beauty quite like this one. — Mark Olsen

See also: “Blow Out,” “The Conversation,” “The Parallax View”

‘Network’ (1976)

Robert Duvall, Faye Dunaway and William Holden in the 1976 movie “Network,” directed by Sidney Lumet.

(MGM Studios / Getty Images)

Much has been made over the years about how prescient this film was, as if screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky and director Sidney Lumet saw the constrictive dangers of corporate consolidation in the distance and came back to warn us. But if these rumbling premonitions have remained true across multiple eras of an ever-evolving media landscape, have we really learned anything? Perhaps we really do live in a “demented slaughterhouse of a world,” as the unhinged newsman Howard Beale says in one of his apocalyptic broadcasts, and have all along. Maybe what “Network” nails most of all is apathy: that even the most righteously committed can have their heads turned from their true goals and then struggle to get back on track. What may be most shocking rewatching the film today is the suspicion that some current media figures see the maneuverings of villainous executives played by Robert Duvall and Faye Dunaway and somehow think that they were the heroes of the story all along. Not even Lumet or Chayefsky would have predicted that. — Mark Olsen

See also: “Broadcast News,” “The Insider,” “Nightcrawler”

Gentrification and racial tensions

Spike Lee, left, and Danny Aiello in the 1989 movie “Do the Right Thing.”

(Universal Pictures)

‘Do the Right Thing’ (1989)

Spike Lee’s masterpiece was met with hand-wringing when it arrived in theaters 37 summers ago, with white critics fretting how “urban audiences” would react to its shocking ending of brutality and angry protest. “If some audiences go wild, [Lee] is partly responsible,” critic David Denby wrote in New York Magazine. Nobody rioted. “Do the Right Thing” made some people uncomfortable because it told truths from a Black perspective that they did not want to accept. That unwillingness to have hard conversations and learn from them remains evident today as we prepare to celebrate our nation’s 250th birthday without an honest reckoning of the anguish that lies beneath the storybook version of America’s founding. The paradox is that Lee’s movie is itself that conversation, its characters engaging in a series of arguments, evenhanded and empathetic, about how race affects the lives we lead in America. Until our country engages in that dialogue, nothing will change. For a moment, the Black Lives Matter movement signaled a willingness to grapple with the past. But the pendulum swung and we’re back to days of “Driving Miss Daisy” denial. But “Do the Right Thing” remains with us, its urgency and relevance undiminished, waiting for an America open to listen and live up to its idealized aspirations. — Glenn Whipp

See also: “Get Out,” “12 Years a Slave,” “Fruitvale Station”

The rise of the yuppies

Roddy Piper, left, and Keith David in the 1988 movie “They Live,” directed by John Carpenter.

(Universal Pictures)

‘They Live’ (1988)

“I believe in America,” the guy says, but we’re not in the private office of some all-powerful Corleone. Rather, this is a working man in a plaid shirt and denim. As the sun sets on his sad L.A. tent city (inspired by the real-life Justiceville), he only wants what everyone else wants: a hard day’s work for fair pay and the chance to get ahead. “It’ll come,” he says, serenely. He doesn’t know he’s in a John Carpenter movie — Roddy Piper was never put to better on-screen use — and that those keeping him down are, in fact, aliens hypnotizing us into an unseeing stupor as they carve up the world’s resources. Released at the tail end of Reaganomics, Carpenter’s most politically forward thriller now feels like a decoder ring for ’80s-era greed, detachment, complacency and ruthlessness. Carpenter meant us to to see his bug-eyed space invaders as yuppies. He also intended us to question whether we were selling each other out, just to join the “human power elite” for a tiny piece of pie. “They Live” looms just on the other side of appreciated. Many genre films say what our more prestigious dramas can’t about the creeping forces that are changing America; this one still feels like it’s getting away with murder. — Joshua Rothkopf

See also: “American Psycho,” “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” “After Hours”

’80s women in the workplace

Harrison Ford, left, Melanie Griffith and Sigourney Weaver in the 1988 movie “Working Girl.”

(20th Century Fox)

‘Working Girl’ (1988)

Mike Nichols’ zeitgeisty hit opens on a shot of the Statue of Liberty hoisting her torch like a paycheck. Down by her green toes, Melanie Griffith’s Staten Island secretary Tess McGill ferries to Manhattan to type memos for important men. Tess has a job, not a career. But 1988 was the first year that female undergraduates outnumbered men on college campuses. Even without a degree, Tess is ambitious to climb the corporate ladder — once she swaps out her practical white sneakers for a pair of pumps. The script by Kevin Wade throws up hurdles of sexism and class snobbery, never sugarcoating how Tess’ male co-workers treat her like a blow-up doll. (Critics dismissed Griffith, too, until this performance earned her an Oscar nomination.) Yet note how her Ivy League-educated boss Katharine (Sigourney Weaver) isn’t immune to harassment either; she’s just mastered how to parry her colleagues’ advances. Fantastic as it is, “Working Girl’s” core flaw is that Tess can’t snag her seat at the conference table until she yanks Katharine out of it. Weaver said that when she showed the script to real-life working girls on Wall Street, they asked, “This awful secretary steals your man, wears your clothes, takes your office — who’s going to sympathize with her?” Millions did and still do. — Amy Nicholson

See also: “9 to 5,” “Baby Boom,” “Silkwood”

Digital alienation

Justin Timberlake, left, and Jesse Eisenberg in the 2010 movie “The Social Network,” directed by David Fincher.

(Merrick Morton / Columbia TriStar )

‘The Social Network’ (2010)

In 2010, Apple introduced the iPad, Instagram launched its app and Silicon Valley still looked to many tech-besotted Americans like a force for progress. At a moment when technology companies were promising to bring people closer together, David Fincher’s acerbic drama about the founding of Facebook had a darker theory about why people wanted to connect in the first place. Aaron Sorkin’s screenplay traces Facebook’s creation back to a very old human desire: getting noticed by the people who matter. Instead of celebrating innovation, the movie unfolds through lawsuits and broken friendships. At Harvard, Jesse Eisenberg’s Mark Zuckerberg fixates on the exclusive final clubs that won’t quite accept him. It’s a surprisingly sour approach for a Facebook origin story. Years before social media became a political battleground, Fincher was focused on something more basic — the fear that everyone else had been invited to a party you couldn’t get into. The movie ends with Zuckerberg alone at a computer, refreshing the Facebook page of the woman who dumped him and waiting for her to accept his friend request. More than 15 years later, it’s still hard to think of a better image for the loneliness and insecurity lurking beneath our connected lives. — Josh Rottenberg

See also: “Her,” “Eighth Grade,” “Ingrid Goes West”

Post-9/11 anxieties

A scene from the 2004 movie “Team America: World Police,” directed by Trey Parker.

(Melinda Sue Gordon / Paramount Pictures)

‘Team America: World Police’ (2004)

To add drama to the ennui over the 2000 U.S. presidential campaign, “South Park” creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone pledged to immediately produce a silly sitcom about the winner. “That’s My Bush!” ran for eight episodes in the spring of 2001, with plans to spin off into a feature called “George W. Bush and the Secret of the Glass Tiger.” But the Sept. 11 attacks changed everything, including the work of satirists. Parker and Stone pivoted to “Team America: World Police,” a bomb-throwing comedy about our country’s napalm-strength combination of naiveté and swagger. To prevent an attack hailed as “9/11 times a thousand,” a squadron of puppet commandos blows up the planet themselves. The dark joke is these marionettes aren’t behaving much differently than the action heroes who have shaped the national id — it’s a through-the-looking-glass lens into our Hollywoodized view of the globe, down to the Parisian streets made of cobblestone croissants. At once straight-faced, sacrilegious and scatological, “Team America” needed nine tries to eke past the MPAA. Yet in divided times, it was a unifier. The political spectrum from Kim Jong Il to Alec Baldwin got equally savaged and the film’s eff-yeah patriotic theme song (“Rock and roll! The internet! Slavery!”) could even be heard blaring from real-life tanks in Fallujah. — Amy Nicholson

See also: “Eddington,” “Idiocracy,” “Harold & Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay”

Donny Hathaway had already been expounding on the splendors and indignities of American life by the time he got to the Troubadour in West Hollywood in the last week of August 1971.

A classically trained pianist with a declamatory voice shaped by his years in the church, Hathaway closed Side 1 of his 1970 debut with an original called “Tryin’ Times” — “Maybe folks wouldn’t have to suffer,” he sang, “if there was more love for your brother” — and finished the LP with a stately rendition of Nina Simone’s “To Be Young, Gifted and Black.” Months after the album was released, he dropped a joy bomb of a holiday single, “This Christmas,” that unapologetically made space for a Black experience in the yuletide-industrial complex.

Donny Hathaway performs at Mister Kelly’s in Chicago in 1971.

(Val Mazzenga / Chicago Tribune / Tribune News Service via Getty Images)

Yet Hathaway captured something indelibly American during his week of shows at the Troubadour, which were recorded (along with a later gig at New York’s Bitter End) for the singer’s classic “Live” album that came out in February 1972. On an LP full of spine-tingling performances, the undeniable high point is Hathaway’s take on Carole King’s “You’ve Got a Friend” — a clear-eyed if optimistic portrait of resilience and cultural exchange.

King — who’d made her name in the 1960s as half of a prolific Brill Building songwriting duo with her husband, Gerry Goffin — wrote “You’ve Got a Friend” after leaving Goffin and moving to Los Angeles with her two young daughters. Here she remade herself as a low-key singer-songwriter dispensing wise yet unflashy tunes about love, home and family — part of a gentle resetting of pop’s mood after the turmoil of the previous decade.

Cut like the rest of the album at A&M Studios on La Brea Avenue, “You’ve Got a Friend” helped drive King’s 1971 “Tapestry” LP to sales of more than 10 million copies and to a boatload of trophies (including album, record and song of the year) at the Grammy Awards; the singer’s pal James Taylor, whom she’d performed with for the first time in late 1970 at the Troubadour, topped Billboard’s Hot 100 with his own cover of “Friend” featuring background vocals by Joni Mitchell.

On the advice of Atlantic Records’ Jerry Wexler, Hathaway also recorded “Friend” as a studio duet with Roberta Flack, a fellow Howard University alum; their take sat in the Top 20 of Billboard’s R&B chart as Hathaway began his run at the Troubadour — popular enough that the audience on “Live” erupts at the sound of Hathaway’s opening organ lick.

Carole King at A&M Studios in Los Angeles in 1970.

(Jim McCrary / Redferns via Getty Images)

Indeed, the crowd is really the thing in this live version of “You’ve Got a Friend.” Hathaway and his band — including guitarist Phil Upchurch, bassist Willie Weeks and 16-year-old Fred White (soon to be of Earth, Wind & Fire) on drums — are cooking, to be clear; the groove is funky and viscous, and Hathaway’s vocal is gorgeous, not least in his nimble ad-libs.

But it’s his interplay with the few hundred folks in the room that elevates the recording to a deeply moving piece of art.

For King (and Taylor), the song’s promise of unflagging support is an intimate one-to-one matter; their renditions use homey acoustic arrangements to create a picture of two people exchanging confidences. In Hathaway’s hands, “Friend” is about community: Before he even asks them to, the audience takes over for him on lead vocals in the song’s chorus, a congregation in all but name.

Given the proximity to the civil rights movement, it’s impossible to hear Hathaway’s “You’ve Got a Friend” as disconnected from the struggles of Black people. At the Troubadour (as in his and Flack’s duet), he nixes the song’s second verse to arrive more quickly at the bridge, in which he describes a cold world filled with those who’d “hurt you and try to desert you” — even “take your soul if you let them.”

As Emily J. Lordi notes in her 2016 book about “Donny Hathaway Live,” the crowd lays back during the bridge before rejoining Hathaway for the song’s second chorus; the decision, somehow spontaneous and collective at once, is an expert bit of record-making on the part of an audience that, according to legend, hadn’t been told the concert was being taped.

“From this perspective,” Lordi writes of Hathaway’s fans — some number of whom had surely availed themselves of the Troubadour’s bar, as she points out — “they are not stealing the show so much as they are holding him up, ensuring he won’t sing the duet alone.” Together, performer and audience are turning back (not that they necessarily had a choice) to the ugly truths that singer-songwriter music sometimes sought to move past.

In this way, Hathaway’s “Friend” becomes a reinvention of a reinvention — an act of moral imagination about as American as it gets.

This wasn’t the only instance of a Black soul singer interpreting a tune King had written as a single mom newly arrived in L.A.: In May 1972, the Isley Brothers released a sultry cover of “It’s Too Late”; a month after that, Aretha Franklin’s live “Amazing Grace” album mashed up “You’ve Got a Friend” with “Precious Lord, Take My Hand,” completing the gospel-ification that Hathaway had begun in a bastion of white rock culture temporarily remade as an African American church.

Yet in Hathaway’s “Friend” you can hear the whole story American music tells about identity and belonging (and about commercial ambition).

“This might be a record here,” Hathaway tells the crowd near the end of the song, and so it was — a document of adaptation, a testament to borrowing, a bulwark against pretty fictions.

Happy Birthday, America!

You turned 250 on Saturday and, honestly, you don’t look a day over 249. (Ha ha.)

Seriously, it’s perfectly understandable why there’s more gray on your scalp and deeper worry lines on your face. This last year has been another challenging one, to say the least. (And we thought the one cataloged 12 months ago in this space was rough.)

The country is caught up in an unpopular, on-again, off-again war with Iran that was recklessly launched by President Trump with far more swagger than foresight. In an utterly predictable move, Iran choked off the the Strait of Hormuz, a vital passageway for the world’s oil, sending gasoline prices skyrocketing. Though they’ve fallen since the announcement of a shaky ceasefire agreement, the cost of filling up is still significantly higher than a year ago.

Of course, costlier oil means virtually everything else has become more expensive. Trump was reelected in good part because he vowed to tame inflation on his very first day in office. Instead, it’s reached a three-year high.

The ground beef served up at many July 4 cookouts costs 75 cents a pound more than it did a year ago. A package of hamburger buns is up 15 cents. The price of hot dogs and other picnic staples have also increased, along with just about every other item at the grocery store.

Chew that over with your corn on the cob. (Up roughly 2.5% from July 2025.)

Meanwhile, Trump enriched himself to the tune of $2.2 billion during his first year in office alone. Treating the U.S. treasury like his personal cash cow, the president has lavished hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars on vanity projects such as a personally kitted out Air Force One — a “gift” from Qatar that Trump plans to keep after retirement — and a gilded White House ballroom, rising where the demolished East Wing used to stand. Plans are underway for a grand, marble arch in Washington celebrating, well, you know who.

At the same time, Trump has squandered money and resources pursuing political vendettas, persecution of his enemies and fruitless investigations like the one probing “theft” of the 2020 election and “vandalism” at the algae-clogged Reflecting Pool he promised and failed to rehab.

All this while millions of Americans have lost healthcare coverage and/or federal food assistance, all thanks to the One Big Billionaire Bounty bill that Trump signed into law a year ago.

It’s all a bit unnerving isn’t it, America? You’re on edge in a way you haven’t been in at least a generation.

In Minnesota, in the dead of winter, two of your citizens were gunned down by federal officers as they engaged in that most American of exercises, registering dissent against the policies of their government. From sea to shining sea, innocent Americans have been arrested — and sometimes shipped abroad — and immigrant communities cower in fear of federal agents who often seem bent more on meeting deportation quotas than meting out justice.

You’re divided, America, in ways no one alive has ever seen.

It starts at the very top. Trump acts as though he’s president of a favored rump group — his political supporters — rather than the nation as a whole. He’s used your 250th birthday not to celebrate those many grand and glorious things that hold us together as Americans but to bask in the tanning-bed glow of his immeasurable self-regard.

But, heck, if it’s any consolation on this star-spangled holiday weekend, the country has been through worse. Much worse. And you, America, have not only survived but in many ways grown stronger by surmounting obstacles, facing down your flaws and overcoming some knee-buckling, soul-crushing challenges.

Slavery. Civil war. Racist exclusionary laws. Genocide against indigenous peoples. Two worldwide conflicts. Depression. Financial crises. And too many deadly natural disasters — fire, floods, earthquakes, hurricanes — to enumerate.

Your treatment of some Americans, it should be said, hasn’t always been fair and just. It still isn’t.

People are despairing over the Supreme Court and its genuflecting deference to the president. The justices of its conservative majority have done just about everything short of handing Trump a crown and scepter to reign as a virtually untouchable, imperial president.

But it’s worth noting that earlier court majorities held that Black Americans — “beings of an inferior order,” in the words of the wretched Dred Scott decision — could be denied citizenship, that racial segregation was constitutional and that compulsory sterilization based on eugenics was perfectly fine from a legal standpoint.

That ugly, sordid history won’t necessarily make anyone feel better about the current state of affairs, nor should it. But it does offer some perspective and, with it, hope.

This weekend is best celebrated honoring the country’s many good things and the bright, shining place that America aspires to be, with liberty and justice for all. So chin up! Have another slice of birthday cake, America, and don’t worry about the calories — you really do look terrific for 250!

Going forward it’s up to us, your citizens, to keep working toward that more perfect union mentioned in the preamble to the Constitution. Whatever ails you, America, the remedy resides with we the people and the power we hold, particularly at the ballot box.

Unhappy with the wrecking crew that’s heedlessly chain-sawed federal programs and allowed Trump to money-grub with both fists, defile the White House and undermine our rule of law? Send a message and vote ‘em out, starting in November’s midterm election. And bear in mind the damage that’s been wrought come the 2028 presidential race.

Don’t stop believing that, as dark and difficult as things may seem right now, better days lie ahead.

That undimmed and abiding faith is what makes America great.

SEATTLE — James Wilson, one of just six men who signed both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, never could have imagined how grand the country he was founding would become. But he knew how it could get there.

Wilson envisioned a steady stream of foreigners coming to America every year, reinvigorating the energy and vitality the nation needed if it were to survive, much less thrive. Which is why Wilson, who moved to the colonies from Scotland at 22, argued against barriers on immigration that would “deprive the government of the talents, virtue and abilities of such foreigners as might chose to remove to this country.”

What Wilson had in mind, then, is something such as the U.S. national soccer team, which gathered to train Saturday morning, on the country’s 250th birthday.

Six of the 26 players on the team, which will face Belgium in a World Cup elimination game Monday, are foreign-born. Five others were born to immigrant parents and two others have immigrant grandparents or great-grandparents. Nearly half have dual nationality.

U.S. coach Mauricio Pochettino jumps into the arms of his players after their World Cup win over Paraguay at SoFi Stadium on June 12.

(Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times)

Yet they all play with the U.S. flag stitched over their hearts. What could be more American than that?

“It is special,” U.S. captain Tim Ream said of having the team together on Independence Day. “Obviously, doubly special because it’s during a World Cup and triple special because it’s here in the U.S. “As a group, with all our different backgrounds, it’s a true representation of what America is. It’s a melting pot of, of people, of personalities, of characters.”

And it’s led by a country-music-listening Argentine coach, Mauricio Pochettino, who first learned to throw a baseball last week so he could perform first-pitch duties at a Seattle Mariners’ game. (He threw a strike.)

“That sort of stuff can only happen in America,” said striker Folarin Balogun, who grew up in England with Nigerian parents but plays for the U.S. because he was born in Brooklyn, qualifying for birthright citizenship through the 14th Amendment to the constitution Wilson helped write.

It would be hard for the U.S. soccer team to more closely resemble the architects who founded the country, nor the vision those architects had for their creation.

Eight the 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence and eight of the 55 framers of the Constitution were immigrants. That’s about the same percentage of immigrants on this summer’s World Cup roster. Another 20 of the Founding Fathers were the sons of immigrants; again, the same percentage as the national team.

“That is the U.S. experience of taking different people from all over the world, the immigrant experience, and mixing it into something that the world has never seen,” said Adam Sawyer, a co-founder of Relevant Research, a Baltimore firm which provides support to immigration researchers and organizations.

“One in seven Americans was foreign-born. Our soccer team is like one in four. I always think of soccer [as] leading society and it’s pulling us with it,” continued Sawyer, who recently published an analysis of the role global migration has played on World Cup success. “Our sporting teams push us forward towards further integration.”

The signers of the Declaration of Independence never foresaw a World Cup, much less an American World Cup team. But they did see immigration as such a fundamental strength, they used America’s founding document to condemn King George III for endeavoring “to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners.”

Without that naturalization, Christian Pulisic might not be playing for the U.S.; in fact, he might not even be in the U.S. His paternal grandfather Mate immigrated from the former Yugoslavia in search of opportunity and was later naturalized as a U.S. citizen. The paternal ancestors of goalkeeper Matt Turner became naturalized citizens after fleeing to the U.S. to escape religious persecution in Lithuania and midfielder Cristian Roldan’s parents escaped civil wars in El Salvador and Guatemala, then gained permanent residency through President Reagan’s amnesty program.

“This soccer team is reflecting America at its best,” said Faisal Al-Juburi, co-chief executive of RAICES, a Texas-based humanitarian aid and immigration services nonprofit. “Its global roots, its shared purpose, its one jersey.”

Soccer in the U.S. has long been an immigrant sport. In the years after World War II, when soccer was still an amateur and semi-pro game, the best teams in the country had names such as the Philadelphia Ukrainian Nationals, New York German-Hungarian SC and the Los Angeles Danes. Joe Gaetjens, one of the country’s first stars and the man who scored the goal that beat England in the 1950 World Cup, was a Haitian immigrant.

In recent years, however, the national team has begun recruiting dual-nationals from overseas, among them World Cup midfielder Malik Tillman, who was born to a U.S. serviceman in Germany, and Antonee Robinson, who was born in England to a naturalized U.S. citizen father, and Sergiño Dest, a Dutch native whose father is Surinamese American.

“It is definitely a team that embraces their diverse backgrounds, and that’s quite meaningful, especially now,” said Al-Juburi, the son of Iraqi immigrants. “This notion that we are stronger with impenetrable walls that divide us is definitely not reflected in this team. It credits a lot of its success to its immigrant roots.

“And I think that’s incredibly powerful to see that and to see a nation cheering and getting behind that diversity. It is a reminder that we are stronger from that coexistence.”

But Al-Juburi doesn’t see the result as a melting pot, which burns away the unique flavors and characteristics of each ingredient. For him, it’s more a gumbo in which every ingredient changes and improves the mix.

U.S. players huddle seconds before playing Bosnia-Herzegovina during a World Cup knockout round match at Levi’s Stadium on Wednesday.

(Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Times)

“You’re looking at lineage from Nigeria, from Guatemala, from El Salvador, from Mexico, from Liberia, Jamaica, Croatia,” he said. “All these disparate ingredients work together so beautifully and in such a balanced way.”

And when that team succeeds, as the U.S. has this summer, it not only underscores the wisdom of the Founding Fathers, but it offers a lesson for today as well.

“This team contains a different picture of inclusion really mattering, just by being exactly who they are,” said Jules Boykoff, a political science professor at the University of Portland (Ore.) and a former U.S. youth international. “They don’t have to say anything. They just have to be who they are and do their best on the pitch.”

WASHINGTON — President Trump’s plans to commemorate America’s 250th anniversary of independence with a rally on the National Mall were complicated on Saturday by severe storms that gathered near Washington, forcing event organizers to order an evacuation.

“Freedom 250 will share updates on programming and doors reopening,” Freedom 250 spokesperson Danielle Alvarez said in a statement that encouraged participants to seek shelter at museums and federal buildings near the National Mall. Washington’s metro system also said several of its underground stations were available for shelter.

Plans for fireworks were still moving forward in other cities including Chicago and New York, where tall ships passed the Statue of Liberty earlier in the day, recalling the fanfare around America’s 200th anniversary in 1976.

Anticipation for the milestone holiday has been building for much of the year, serving as an opportunity for Americans to reflect on their complicated history as onetime colonists of an empire who became a superpower of their own. Organizers of celebrations months in the making had to adjust or cancel activities entirely as much of the East Coast sweltered under heat that approached and in many cases surpassed triple digits.

Heat is defining the big weekend in many places

The disruption was particularly acute in Washington, where signs at the Great American State Fair posted an alert shortly after 7 p.m. ET encouraging participants to leave the area. As the order to evacuate was played over loudspeakers on the National Mall, some people appeared to be standing in place, talking with those around them and not exiting the area, while others were walking toward exits. National Guard troops told people to leave.

The U.S. Secret Service announced it had temporarily closed checkpoints to screen attendees ahead of Trump’s speech, which was scheduled to begin around 10 p.m. ET.

Crowds were building in the area several hours before Trump’s speech. Tina Hale, 58, of Cohoes, New York, watched three of her grandchildren children dip their hands into a pool of water near a museum. Hale pointed toward the sky and urged them to look up as three military jets roared above the crowd.

“If that doesn’t make you proud to be an American,” she said.

David Koshko, 42, and his wife, Jennifer Koskho, of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, came to Washington for a baseball game but planned to stay for the city’s fireworks show. After baking in the heat for hours during the Pittsburgh Pirates’ win over the Washington Nationals, they took a break in the shade of an overpass near the National Mall to plot their next stop.

“Just to be a part of the 250 years (anniversary) is an amazing thing,” said David Koshko, a commercial driver and veteran of the Marine Corps reserves.

In Philadelphia, fireworks began to crack as early as midday in the birthplace of the nation near the site where the Declaration of Independence was adopted by delegates to the Second Continental Congress. Hundreds of visitors were gathering at Independence Hall in the sweltering heat to await the celebrations coinciding with the France-Paraguay World Cup knockout game at Philadelphia Stadium, which began with commemorations of the holiday.

“It’s one big party in here,” Carlos Alban, who traveled to Philadelphia from Chicago to watch the match, said as he arrived at the stadium, adding that he spotted a fan in the parking lot dressed as one of the Founding Fathers.

About 45 minutes before another World Cup match in Houston, a message from astronauts aboard the International Space Station noting the holiday was beamed into the stadium.

In New York, tall ships, with their masts, rigging and white sails outlined against a blue sky, made a procession around the Statue of Liberty and up the Hudson River.

The 43 ships were followed by a display of aerial might with a stealth bomber and the Navy’s Blue Angels. Patrouille de France, the French Air Force’s acrobatic teams, flew over New York Harbor with their red, white and blue trails, evoking images of the American flag.

“We got up early and just rode our bikes about a mile down here to come see the scene,” said Oona Moore, a Jersey City, New Jersey, resident who took in the New York festivities. “We saw the tall ships and we saw the planes, you know, all different manner of military aircraft. I’ve never seen it so close and in the sky at the same time.”

At George Washington’s Mount Vernon, people took the Oath of Allegiance to become U.S. citizens. They stood with eyes closed and hands over hearts for the national anthem.

An uneasy nation gets ready to celebrate

Trump spoke Saturday with world leaders including Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who both congratulated the U.S. as they engage in a war. The president has also heard from Britain’s King Charles III and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in recent days.

Inside the U.S., The celebrations are unfolding against the backdrop of a deep divide this election year that has been expanding for years, visible in everything from political expression to cultural norms to age-old questions over race, class and immigration.

At Mount Rushmore on Friday, Trump spoke of communism as a “mortal threat to American liberty” with the Republican president saying it was more dangerous than either World War or 9/11.

Without naming Trump, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a Democrat who is also a democratic socialist and recently backed several successful congressional candidates in their primaries, appeared to reference Trump during a speech Friday.

“Those ideals upon which our nation was built — they are strong enough to endure any authoritarian regime, but only if we reach for them,” he said.

Vice President JD Vance said small but loud voices would speak on America’s birthday about its imperfections instead of its greatness.

“They will tell you that America is just another country, where the weak struggle against the strong,” Vance said speaking aboard the USS Kearsarge in New York Harbor.

Sloan writes for the Associated Press. Associated Press writers Emily Wang in New York, Luis Andres Henao in Philadelphia, Kristie Rieken in Houston, Sarah Rankin in Richmond, Va., Jeffrey Collins in Columbia, S.C., Safiyah Riddle in Los Angeles and Jesse Bedayn, Anna Johnson, Will Weissert and Michael Kunzelman contributed to this report.

LONDON — During a weekend that celebrates life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, Wimbledon offers an American variation in the pursuit of Grand Slam glory.

Sunday’s fourth-round clash on the No. 1 Court between Jessica Pegula, the top-ranked American and veteran standard-bearer, and Iva Jovic, the brightest young American star since Coco Gauff, is a compelling intergenerational showdown between the present and future of U.S. women’s tennis.

It’s the kind of matchup worthy of a holiday complete with fireworks.

“I know she’s going to come after me hard,” the 32-year-old Pegula said following her clinical 6-1, 6-3 third-round defeat of Jessica Bouzas Maneiro of Spain on Friday.

“Everyone kind of wants to be the top American, I guess,” agreed Jovic, an 18-year-old from Torrance who toughed out a 6-3, 3-6, 6-4 win over Ekaterina Alexandrova of Russia on Friday to reach the fourth round at Wimbledon for the first time. “There is a little bit extra competition there.”

Pegula and Jovic are hardly unfamiliar opponents, and not just because people frequently told a young Jovic to model her game after Pegula. The two have met three times before, including twice this year, on hard courts in Dubai and on clay in Charleston, S.C. Pegula won all three matches.

American Jessica Pegula serves the ball during a win over Spain’s Sara Sorribes Tormo at Wimbledon on Wednesday.

(Kirsty Wigglesworth / Ap Photo/kirsty Wigglesworth)

“There is a lot of things we do well, and we do similar, but a couple of differences too,” Jovic noted of their baseline-centric, tactical styles.

Pegula is expecting nothing less than a mirror-like baseline duel from the player she affectionately dubbed “mini-me” after beating her in February.

Their career arcs have taken different paths to their first Grand Slam meeting. Pegula spent years grinding away on the Women’s Tennis Assn.’s lower tier before becoming a late-blooming major contender and top-10 mainstay. The experience gap remains enormous: Pegula owns 11 career singles titles to Jovic’s one and has amassed more than 500 tour-level wins compared with just over 100 for the teenager.

Jovic, a top-ranked junior in just her second Wimbledon, quickly has made her presence felt on tour, becoming the youngest player to win a WTA title last season at 17 before backing it up with her breakout quarterfinal run at the Australian Open in January. She is the youngest player in the top 20 and the youngest remaining in the Wimbledon singles draw.

After watching Jovic’s rise this season, Pegula praised her competitive instincts and rapid adjustment to grass.

Jovic “competes like an animal,” Pegula said.

Their relationship to grass, however, couldn’t be more different.

Pegula historically has not been a force at Wimbledon, reaching the quarterfinals only once in 2023. She acknowledges battling her own instincts on the surface.

“I feel like sometimes years in the past I’ve really fought against how to move on it, fought against all the intangibles, all the slices,” she said.

This year she’s relaxed her approach, improved her balance and added more pop to her serve, a major asset on grass.

Jovic, by contrast, has been a quick study when it comes to adapting to the tricky footing, sliding and occasional tumbles on grass. She’s taken to the lawns of London like a natural despite growing up in Los Angeles County, where grass courts are virtually nonexistent.

Jovic credits playing left wing in local soccer leagues from about ages 6 to 13 for her exceptional, low-to-the-ground footwork. That cross-training has paid dividends. She won her first professional title on grass in England last year and recently reached the semifinals at the prestigious Queen’s Club warmup event.

“It’s very closely related to the movement that we do in tennis,” Jovic said of soccer.

Jovic, who’s of Serbian and Croatian descent, also has been keeping tabs on the World Cup, though rooting for the U.S. during late starts has proved challenging in Europe.

Hall of Fame analyst Pam Shriver says the age gap adds a fascinating dimension to the grass-court chess match.

“It’s interesting when rivalries can develop generations apart from the same country, and I think they have a really good respect for each other,” Shriver said.

Torrance native Iva Jovic, left, congratulates fellow American Jessica Pegula after Pegula won their match during the Charleston Open on April 4 in Charleston, S.C.

(Matthew Stockman / Getty Images)

Shriver added that Jovic can learn from Pegula’s cerebral approach, while veterans like Pegula can tap into a fresh mindset from the younger generation’s unflinching energy.

“It goes by so fast,” Pegula acknowledged of the creeping sense of urgency in pursuit of her first major title.

Jovic is aware Sunday’s match is a massive opportunity to prove her rapid ascent is no fluke and flip the script on her head-to-head deficit.

“Hopefully, this will be the one I get her,” she said.

Through the first week in London, Pegula has been in sharper form. She hasn’t dropped a set in three matches, gliding into the fourth round and looking more and more like the favorite in her quarter. She also feasts on fellow Americans. Since 2023, Pegula is an impressive 34-3 against her compatriots.

“I’m always motivated to beat the other Americans in a way that’s different,” Pegula said. “Excited again to challenge myself against someone who is much younger, who is playing with nothing to lose and no fear.”

Still, reaching next weekend’s final will require either player to navigate a brutal top half of the draw. It includes four-time major winners Aryna Sabalenka and Naomi Osaka, two-time major champion Gauff and the last Wimbledon champion left in the field, 2024 winner Barbora Krejcikova.

On a weekend devoted to celebrating the U.S., at least one American will be celebrating at Wimbledon when the fireworks fade.

Good morning, and welcome to L.A. on the Record — our City Hall newsletter. It’s Noah Goldberg, David Zahniser and Melissa Gomez, giving you the latest on city and county government.

Los Angeles voters won’t get a chance to increase the size of the City Council. They won’t take up a plan to give noncitizens the right to vote, either.

These and other proposed ballot measures got put on the back burner, delayed for a future year as the council scrambled to finish its work before its summer break.

One proposal did survive the sometimes blunt vetting process: decreasing the number of council meetings.

On Tuesday, council members sent voters a measure for the Nov. 3 ballot that would only require a single council meeting per week. The City Charter currently mandates a minimum of three.

Councilmember Tim McOsker was among those pushing for the change, saying it will make the council more efficient and effective.

“It will also allow council members to take care of more business in their districts,” said McOsker, who represents neighborhoods stretching from Watts to the Port of Los Angeles.

The council, which voted 12-0 to place the measure on the ballot, has been thinking about cutting back on the number of meetings for a few years.

In 2024, McOsker and Councilmember Katy Yaroslavsky tried to place a measure before voters that would have made the same change. But other council members were not prepared to put it on the ballot.

Yaroslavsky said at the time that much of the city’s public comment period was occupied by “15 people screaming racist, misogynistic, antisemitic epithets.”

Any change to the City Charter would not preclude the council from scheduling additional special meetings.

The proposal drew sharp criticism from Rob Quan, an organizer with Unrig LA, who spent much of the past year tracking the effort to rewrite the charter. He fears that a reduction in meetings will also lead to a decrease in opportunities for Angelenos to address their council representatives.

One of the reasons council members, who each make $244,727 a year, don’t get as much business done is that they frequently use their Friday meetings for ceremonial activities — honoring civic leaders, community groups, youth sports teams, Dodgers superstar Shohei Ohtani and beloved bands from the 80s.

“Do we really need that? Not necessarily,” Quan said.

Quan said the proposal to cut the number of meetings received zero vetting from the council. The 13-member Charter Reform Commission, which spent nearly a year examining various changes to city government, took up the idea and rejected it.

If voters approve the change, council meetings could end up resembling those of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, which meets most Tuesdays at 9:30 a.m. The supervisors frequently don’t finish their business until well after 5 p.m.

Former prosecutor will stay away from Lee case

We told you last week that Councilmember John Lee is suing the city Ethics Commission over a $138,000 fine he received for allegedly violating city gift laws — a case that stems largely from a notorious 2017 trip to Las Vegas. The council responded to that lawsuit by voting to retain the law firm Hecker Fink to defend the Ethics Commission, at a cost of $120,000.

As it turns out, at least one Hecker Fink lawyer knows plenty about that Vegas trip.

Mack Jenkins, who heads the firm’s L.A. office, was one of the federal prosecutors who brought the criminal case against Lee’s onetime boss, Councilmember Mitchell Englander, in 2020. That case stems from the duo’s trip to Sin City in 2017.

Federal prosecutors said Englander and Lee, listed in court filings as Staffer B, were plied with fancy meals, expensive alcohol and other freebies by people seeking to do business with the city. Englander went a step further, walking into a casino bathroom and picking up $10,000 cash in an envelope from a Los Angeles-area businessman. He later pleaded guilty to providing false information to investigators.

The city’s lawyers say they cannot represent the Ethics Commission because Lee is one of their clients. But does Jenkins’ history with the case create any type of conflict for Hecker Fink?

Nancy Jackson, a spokesperson for the Ethics Commission, says no. In an email, she said Jenkins will be walled off from Hecker Fink’s work on the matter.

“That former prosecutor is recused from the case and will have no involvement in the case,” she said.

What went wrong with the lighting assessment?

Property owners resoundingly rejected a recent request to pay more to fund streetlight repairs. One of the reasons might have been the wording on their ballot.

The city mailed letters asking if they would like to increase the yearly assessment, using language that didn’t offer a lot of explanation.

In the section where property owners had the option to vote yes, the ballot read: “Yes I am in favor of the proposed maximum assessment for Fiscal Year 2026/2017 and the proposed annual cost of living increases as described in the attached notice beginning Fiscal Year 2026/2027.”

Councilmember Eunisses Hernandez, who chairs the council’s Public Works Committee, said the phrasing could have been a lot more persuasive — and better explained the need for additional money.

“Some of the language that was put out was not written in a way for us to be clear about what we were doing, and instead used language that really turned people off,” she said.

The assessment, which has not changed since 1996, currently generates about $45 million a year. For the average single-family home, the current payment is $58 annually.

The increase would have brought the average annual bill to $117, generating an additional $80 million a year as the city faces a backlog of broken streetlights due to stagnant funding and a rise in vandalism and theft.

After the vote failed to pass, the council approved a motion directing city staff to identify $6.6 million for the Bureau of Street Lighting. Without that money, the city will face “an immediate threat to public safety and our infrastructure at large,” the motion said.

“There will be a 15% cut in field workforces by the end of July 2026, making the timeline for streetlight repair to reach 2 years when the City had previously been able to do this work within 7 days,” said the motion authored by Hernandez and Yaroslavsky.

Hernandez voiced frustration over the defeat of the assessment. She took aim at Proposition 218, the state law that restricts how local governments can raise money, saying it disenfranchises renters who have to “live with the conditions that property owners choose for them.”

She added that the ballot measure’s wording, which she said was crafted by the City Attorney’s Office, failed to capture the reason for the increase.

“People really think that the main reason our lights are out is copper wire theft,” she said. “But the fact is that over 60% of our street lights are out because of lack of maintenance, because we just do not have the money to do that work.”

Hernandez said that next time, she would push for more community engagement so voters understand why the increased funding is needed. She also raised the possibility of reforming Proposition 218.

“No matter what, I’m going to get these streetlights on, and if that’s figuring different things out until we can get a significant effort to do another assessment, then we will do that,” she said.

State of play

— COLD FEET: The L.A. City Council decided against putting two major measures on the Nov. 3 ballot. One measure would have provided a pathway for noncitizens to vote in local elections, while the other would have given the council more authority over the LAPD.

— COSTLY COLLISION: The city of Los Angeles will pay $20 million to settle a lawsuit brought on behalf of a teen who lost his leg in a 2023 hit-and-run in Boyle Heights. The lawsuit blamed the city for an intersection lacking signage, lighting and other traffic controls.

— LAHSuit: The Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, also known as LAHSA, sued the Trump administration Monday to stop it from suspending the agency from receiving hundreds of millions of dollars in funding. LAHSA argued that the decision would put thousands of people at risk of losing their government funded housing.

— FORWARDING ADDRESS: The only post office in Skid Row abruptly closed in January due to repeated break-ins and damage to employee property, according to the U.S. Postal Service. The closure has frustrated residents and business owners.

— BUILDING BLITZ: Senate Bill 79, the historic housing bill, took effect across the state on Wednesday. The law could bring townhomes, row houses and other developments to 57 neighborhoods across the city.

— AIRBORNE TOXIC EVENT: A preliminary analysis showed that the recent inferno at a Boyle Heights warehouse contaminated the air with high levels of smoke and soot, rivaling the pollution that filled the region during the 2025 wildfires.

— MORE MEGA PROJECTS: Two large scale developments grabbed the attention of downtown Los Angeles this week. One, approved by the council, is slated to add 1,500 residences to Skid Row. The second, proposed this week, would transform the World Trade Center building into a 512-unit affordable housing complex.

QUICK HITS

• Where is Inside Safe? The mayor’s signature program to combat homelesssness went to the area near Olympic Boulevard and Menlo Avenue in Pico Union on Friday in Hernandez’s district, bringing 24 people indoors.
• On the docket next week: The City Council will be on summer recess until Aug. 4.

Stay in touch

That’s it for this week! Send your questions, comments and gossip to LAontheRecord@latimes.com. Did a friend forward you this email? Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Saturday morning.

I will miss watching the greatest maestro and savant in the history of basketball, LeBron James. He is to basketball what Van Gogh was to painting, Coltrane to music, Hemingway to literature. He came from poverty and rose to a global hero and gave back. His after-game interviews were always intelligent and sometimes humorous. To all his detractors and haters? Eat your hearts out, he is a happy man.

Dell Franklin
Cayucos

I have always been in awe of LeBron’s athleticism and basketball IQ. And I greatly admire his dedication to maintaining his physical abilities throughout the years and his philanthropic pursuits.

But, as a lifelong Lakers fan, I will not miss LeBron. He was never a true Laker. He made it clear when he announced that he was taking his talents to South Beach that he cared only about LeBron, not the team.

So, as he closes out his career elsewhere, I will enjoy watching his superior playing prowess from afar. But I will be grateful that I can now cheer for my Lakers without the drama LeBron brings to every team he’s been on.

Linda Salzman
Rancho Palos Verdes

I agree that it was probably time to move on from LeBron simply in the interest to pursue a long-term player versus one more year from the King. But Bill Plaschke’s argument that he was tired of the mind games LeBron supposedly was playing is a terrible take. Losing 27-7-7 is not replaceable overnight, if ever.

George Metalsky
Redondo Beach

While acknowledging LeBron James as one of the greatest basketball players of all time, it never really felt as if he was selflessly committed to the Purple and Gold team concept like so many of the legendary players that preceded him.

During his eight years as a Laker there seemed to be countless occasions when Lakers brass capitulated to his “demands.” Year after year we endured a mishmash roster with his hand-picked players, just to appease LeBron.

During the Lakers’ dynasty we had championship teams. With LeBron we had a king shaping his fiefdom to first and foremost best serve him.

He’s a great player but a horrible GM. The Lakers will be a better team without him.

David Griffin
Westwood

I only have one question regarding LeBron James: What happens to Bronny now?

David Waldowski
Laguna Woods

New Jersey is launching a new fee on companies whose workers have Medicaid health coverage instead of being covered by their employers. Other states are considering it, too.

Democratic lawmakers and governors see it as a way to help pay for the joint federal and state insurance program that covers low-income residents as federal policy changes are expected to make the program more expensive for states and may lead to a reduction in the number of people with coverage.

Proponents also say it’s about fairness because employers benefit from having some lower-income workers with taxpayer-funded health coverage.

Business groups object. So do some liberal policy organizations.

New Jersey is putting the fee in place

New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill signed a measure Tuesday night to charge employers that have at least 50 workers covered by Medicaid, and the state budget she approved earlier in the week counts on raising $145 million this year from the program.

Under the plan, companies will be billed for each employee and employees’ dependent receiving Medicaid, the joint state-federal insurance program.

The fees per person would start at $325 a year for companies with 50 to 249 Medicaid beneficiaries and top out at $725 annually for employers with at least 500 recipients.

A bill passed this week in California doesn’t impose a charge now, but it does direct the state administration to present lawmakers options for doing so next year.

Finishing the job would fall to the successor of Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat who is leaving office in January. Democratic gubernatorial candidate Xavier Becerra has made an employer charge part of his election platform.

State Sen. John Laird, a Democrat who sponsored the California proposal, said the big tax and policy law President Trump signed a year ago was a major factor in the need for action because it could prompt the state to spend more on Medicaid to plug holes left by federal changes.

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office expects more than 10 million people will be uninsured because of the law by 2034. It requires some beneficiaries to work, be in school or volunteer — and requires even more to document whether they meet the requirements.

Most employees at the bigger companies would not be at risk of losing Medicaid coverage as long as they’re working at least 20 hours a week.

Laird also said there’s an equity issue involved.

“If you’re a small business person in California, you are quite likely paying for health insurance for your employees. And through your taxes, you’re paying for health insurance for some of the biggest employers in California,” he said. “And that’s not fair.”

Legislation with similar intents passed one legislative chamber in both Colorado and Oregon this year, but neither made it to law. A measure was also introduced in Washington.

Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont, a Democrat who is seeking a third term in November’s election, has called for the same move there with the idea of making it a part of the state budget that would kick in two years from now.

Opposition comes from business and some liberal groups

It’s no surprise that business organizations have criticized the approach, which would add to their expenses.

“The fact remains that many job-creators are still going to be penalized for something they have no control over,” Christopher Emigholz, the chief government affairs officer at the New Jersey Business and Industry Assn., said in a statement. “If an employee declines an employer-provided health plan because they’d rather be on Medicaid, it is unfair to penalize the employer for that employee’s decision.”

Some left-leaning policy organizations also oppose the charges.

Gideon Lukens, who analyzes health policy at the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, said that while the idea may be well-intentioned, it could lead companies to employ fewer people from low-income household or single parents. He said companies could also consider the policy in decisions about whom to hire or lay off — and also on where to locate or how many workers to employ.

And, he said, it could make employees — or potential employees — less likely to enroll in Medicaid knowing it would make them less attractive to employers.

“Usually, when I see a tax on something it’s going to discourage whatever being taxed,” he said in an interview.

New Jersey’s legislation tries to address some of the concerns. It would exempt temporary, seasonal and part-time employees. It would also bar employment decisions based on a workers’ Medicaid status.

Charging companies whose workers are covered by Medicaid isn’t a new idea. At least two states have previously enacted it, and it’s been proposed in Congress.

Massachusetts lawmakers in 2017 adopted a charge on employers up to $750 per nondisabled worker who was covered through Medicaid or a state-subsidized health exchange plan. The program began in 2018 was not renewed when it expired the next year.

An even earlier policy in Maryland, in 2006, immediately affected only Walmart. An industry group challenged it in court and won, stopping the fees.

The latest generation of proposals may avoid that legal pitfall by not referencing those health plans in the legislation.

Mulvihill writes for the Associated Press.

PHILADELPHIA — The Philadelphia Flyers are prepared to pay Ducks center Leo Carlsson the highest annual salary at $18 million since the salary cap era began in 2005, now giving the Ducks seven days to match the offer.

The Flyers tendered the five-year, $90-million offer sheet to Carlsson on Friday, which would require four of the Flyers’ first-round draft picks in each of the next four seasons as compensation.

The Ducks have seven days to exercise their right of first refusal on the player, per the NHL collective bargaining agreement.

The offer sheet comes 14 years after the Flyers, under previous management, offer-sheeting Nashville defenseman Shea Weber for $110 million over 14 years, which the Predators matched.

The 21-year-old Carlsson had 29 goals, 38 assists for 67 points in 70 games last season with the Ducks. He added 11 points in 12 playoff games to help lead the Ducks to the second round.

A native of Karlstad, Sweden, Carlsson has 141 points (61 goals, 80 assists) in 201 regular-season games with the Ducks. The 6-foot-3, 208-pound center was selected by the Ducks second overall in the 2023 draft.

The Minnesota Wild in September signed Kirill Kaprizov to an eight-year, $136 million extension, giving him the richest contract in NHL history.

Kaprizov will count $17 million against the salary cap beginning next season, through 2034. That’s the highest annual average salary of any player since the league’s cap era began in 2005, surpassing Edmonton’s Leon Draisaitl at $112 million over eight years, a $14 million annual average. Alex Ovechkin’s 13-year, $124-million contract signed with Washington in 2008 was previously the highest total value.

Gelston writes for the Associated Press.