young people

Unto every generation, and fraction thereof, a sitcom is born, in which the young people of the moment state their case, self-mockingly. FX recently gave us a State of New York Youth in “Adults,” and here we are now, closer to home with “I Love L.A.,” premiering Sunday on HBO, the network of “Girls” (your guide to the 20-teens), still the most prestigious slot on linear television.

As a native of this fair city, who will never call downtown “DTLA” — let alone #DTLA — I miss the days when the rest of the country wanted nothing to do with us. (Real conversation from my life: Person: “Where are you from?” Me: “Los Angeles.” Person: “I’m sorry”). I can get a little cranky when it comes to the gentrihipsterfication of the city by succeeding hordes of newly minted Angelenos. (The place-name dropping in “I Love L.A.” includes Canyon Coffee, Courage Bagels, Jumbo’s Clown Room, Crossroads School and Erewhon.) I’m just putting my cards on the table here, as I approach characters whose generational concerns are distinct from mine, even as they belong to a venerable screen tradition, that of Making It in Hollywood, which runs back to the silent era. (The heroine of those pictures, stardom escaping her, would invariably return to the small-town boy who loved her. No more!)

Created by and starring Rachel Sennott (“Bottoms”), “I Love L.A.” takes its title from a Randy Newman song written well before Sennott or any of her co-stars were born. (To tell us where we are, as regards both HBO and the location, the series opens with a sex scene in an earthquake.) As in many such shows, there is a coterie of easily distinguishable friends at its center. Sennott plays Maia, turning 27 and in town for two years, working as an assistant to talent/brand manager Alyssa (the wonderful Leighton Meester, from “Gossip Girl,” that 2007 chronicle of youth manners) and hungry for promotion. Back into her life comes Tallulah (Odessa A’zion, the daughter of Pamela Adlon, whose throatiness she has inherited), a New York City It Girl — does any other city have It Girls in 2025? — whose It-ness has lately gone bust, as has Tallulah herself, now broke and rootless. She is one of those exhausting whirlwind personalities one might take to be on drugs, except that there are people who really do run at that speed, without speed — Holly Go-Heavily.

Also starring in the series are Jordan Firstman, left, True Whitaker and Odessa A’zion.

(Kenny Laubbacher / HBO)

Charlie (Jordan Firstman) is a stylist whose career depends on flattery and performative flamboyance. (“What’s the point of being nice,” he wonders, “if no one that can help me sees it?”) Alani (True Whitaker) is the daughter of a successful film director who has presumably paid for her very nice house, with its view of the Silver Lake Reservoir, and whatever she needs. (She has a title at his company even she admits is fake.) Since she wants for nothing, she’s the least stressful presence here, invested in spiritual folderol in a way that isn’t annoying. Attached to the quartet, but not really of it, is Maia’s supportive boyfriend, Dylan (Josh Hutcherson), a grade-school teacher and the only character I came close to identifying with. Do the kids still call them “normies”? Or did they ever, really?

That I find some of these people more trying than charming doesn’t prevent “I Love L.A.” from being a show I actually quite like. (The ratio of charm to annoyance may be flipped for some viewers, of course; different strokes, as we used to say back in the 1900s.) If anything, it’s a testament to Sennott and company having done their jobs well; the production is tight, the dialogue crisp, the photography rich — nothing here seems the least bit accidental. The cast is on point playing people who in real life they may not resemble at all. (My own, surely naive, much contradicted assumption is that all actors are nice.)

Desperation, in comedy, is pathetic but not tragic; indeed, it’s a pillar of the form. Maia, Tallulah and Charlie are to various degrees ruled by a need to be accepted by the successful and famous in the hope of becoming famous and successful themselves. (Alani is already set, and Dylan is almost a hippie, philosophically.) At the same time, the successful and famous come in for the harshest lampooning, including Elijah Wood, in an against-type scene reminiscent of Ricky Gervais’ “Extras.” On the other hand, Charlie’s unexpected friendship with a Christian singer he mistakes for gay is quite sweet; comedy being what it is, one half-expects the character to be taken down. Miraculously, it never happens. You can take that as a recommendation.

With next week’s publication of his ninth novel, “Shadow Ticket,” Thomas Pynchon’s secret 20th century is at last complete.

For many of us, Pynchon is the best American writer since F. Scott Fitzgerald. Since the arrival in 1963 of his first novel, “V.,” he has loomed as the presiding colossus of our literature — revered as a Nobel-caliber genius, reviled as impenetrable and reviewed with increasing condescension since his turn toward detective fiction with “Inherent Vice” in 2009.

Now comes “Shadow Ticket,” and it’s late Pynchon at his finest. Dark as a vampire’s pocket, light-fingered as a jewel thief, “Shadow Ticket” capers across the page with breezy, baggy-pants assurance — and then pauses on its way down the fire escape just long enough to crack your heart open.

Only now can we finally see that Pynchon has been quietly assembling — one novel at a time, in no particular order — an almost decade-by-decade chronicle no less ambitious than Balzac’s “La Comédie Humaine,” August Wilson’s Century Cycle or the 55 years of Garry Trudeau’s “Doonesbury.” This is his Pynchoniad, a zigzagging epic of America and the world through our bloodiest, most shameful hundred years. Perhaps suffering from what Pynchon called in “V.” our “great temporal homesickness for the decade we were born in,” he has now filled in the only remaining blank spot on his 20th century map: the 1930s.

A photograph of Thomas Pynchon in 1955. The elusive novelist has avoided nearly all media for more than 50 years.

(Bettmann Archive)

It all begins in Depression-era Milwaukee as a righteously funny gangster novel. In a scenario straight out of Dashiell Hammett’s early stories, a detective agency operative named Hicks McTaggart gets an assignment to chase down the runaway heiress to a major cheese fortune. Roughly midway through, Pynchon’s characters hightail it all the way to proto-fascist Budapest, where shadows more lethal than any Tommy gun begin to encroach. By the end, this novel has become at once a requiem, a farewell, an old soft-shoe number — and a warning.

When Pynchon’s jacket summary of this tale of two cities first surfaced six months ago, cynics could be forgiven for wondering whether an 88-year-old man, hearing time’s winged chariot idling at the curb, hadn’t just taken two half-completed works in progress and spot-welded them together. Younger people are forever wondering — in whispers, and never for general consumption — whether some person older than they might have, you know, lost a step.

Well, buzz off, kids. Thomas Pynchon’s voice on the page still sings, clarion strong. Unlike most novelists, his voice has two distinct but overlapping registers. The first is Olympian, polymathic, erudite, antically funny, often beautiful, at times gross, at others incredibly romantic, never afraid to challenge or even confound, and unmistakably worked at. The second, audible less frequently until 1990’s “Vineland,” sounds looser, freer, warmer, more improvisational, more curious about love and family, increasingly wistful, all but twilit with rue. He still brakes for bad puns and double-negative understatements, but he avoids the kind of under-metabolized research that sometimes alienated his early readers.

“Shadow Ticket’s” structure turns the current film adaptation of “Vineland” inside out — that would be “One Battle After Another,” whose thrilling middle more than redeems an only slightly off-key beginning and end. By contrast, “Shadow Ticket” offers a wildly seductive overture, a companionable but occasionally slack midsection, and a haunting sucker punch of an ending.

Mercifully, having already set “The Crying of Lot 49” and “Inherent Vice” largely in L.A., Pynchon still hasn’t lost his nostalgia for Los Angeles, a place where he lived and wrote for a while in the ’60s and ’70s. “Shadow Ticket” marks Pynchon’s third book to take place mostly on the other side of the world, but then — like so many New Yorkers — the novel finds its denouement in what Pynchon here calls “that old L.A. vacuum cleaner.”

Pynchon may not have lost a step in “Shadow Ticket,” but sometimes he seems to be conserving his energy. His signature long, comma-rich sentences reach their periods a little sooner now. His chapters end with a wink as often as a thunderclap. Sometimes he sounds almost rushed, peppering his narration with “so forths,” and making his readers play odds-or-evens to attribute long stretches of dialogue.

Maybe only on second reading do we realize that we’ve been reading a kind of Dear John letter to America. Nobody else writing today can begin a final chapter as elegiacally as Pynchon does here: “Somewhere out beyond the western edge of the Old World is said to stand a wonder of our time, a statue hundreds of meters high, of a masked woman. … Like somebody we knew once a long time ago.”

Is this the Statue of Liberty, turning her back at last on the huddled masses she once welcomed? One character immediately suggests yes, another denies it. Either way, it’s a sobering way to introduce an ending as compassionately doom-laden as any Pynchon has ever given us.

Bear in mind, this is the same Pynchon who, a hundred pages earlier, has raffishly referred to sex as “doing the horizontal Peabody.” (Don’t bother Googling. This one’s his.) One early reviewer has compared “Shadow Ticket’s” shaggy charm to cold pizza, and readers will know what he means. Who’s ever sorry to see a flat box in the fridge the next morning?

For most of the way, though, “Shadow Ticket” may remind you of an exceptionally tight tribute band, playing the oldies so lovingly that you might as well be listening to your old, long-since-unloaded vinyl. The catch is, for an encore — just when you could swear the band might actually be improving on the original — the musicians turn around and blow you away with a lost song that nobody’s ever heard before.

Thus, with a flourish, Pynchon types fin to his secret 20th century. But what does he do now? The man’s only 88. (Anybody who finds the phrase “only 88” amusing is welcome to laugh, but plenty of people thought Pynchon was hanging it up at 76 with “Bleeding Edge.” Plenty of people were mistaken.)

So, will Pynchon stand pat with his 20th century now secure, and take his winnings to the cashier’s window? Or will he, as anyone who roots for American literature might devoutly wish, hold out for blackjack?

Hit him.

Kipen is a contributor to Cambridge Pynchon in Context, a former NEA Director of Literature, a full-time member UCLA’s writing faculty and founder of the Libros Schmibros Lending Library and the just-birthed 21st Century Federal Writers’ Project.

Like many young men these days, Kamaldeep Dhanoa, a lanky 17-year-old, knew he wanted to do something with his life, be a part of something, but didn’t quite know what that meant.

Coming up with a career was important. But even more, it was finding the right friends — discovering what he wanted to be a part of.

He did both when he joined Improve Your Tomorrow, a mentorship organization for teenage boys and young men — that vulnerable, chronically online demographic from which Charlie Kirk drew many of his most ardent supporters, and where so much of our societal angst is focused in the wake of his death.

Now a senior at Florin High School in a suburb outside Sacramento, Dhanoa has a plan to become a paramedic, and more importantly, has those friendships that help him feel not just connected, but included and valued.

His something.

“I just know I have brothers around me,” he told me Tuesday. “We’re always with each other. It gives you, like, a sense of security. So if you’re feeling down, you could always, always rely on them.”

Dhanoa was hanging out in his school’s gym with Gov. Gavin Newsom, who dropped by to announce the California Men’s Service Challenge, an effort to recruit 10,000 Golden State males to serve as mentors to boys such as Dhanoa, so more boys can find their something.

It’s a worthy effort and before you jump to thinking it’s a reaction to Kirk, I’ll point out that 10 years ago, California’s first partner, Jennifer Siebel Newsom, made a documentary about the crisis of connection and identity facing young men, “The Mask You Live In.”

Recently, her husband caught up.

To be fair, a lot of us have been slow on the uptake when it comes to understanding why so many young men seem drawn to the obvious loneliness and disconnection of chronically online lives.

Kamaldeep Dhanoa, 17, and Michael Lynch helped Gov. Gavin Newsom announce his new statewide initiative to engage more men in volunteer and mentorship work.

(Anita Chabria/Los Angeles Times)

“Touch grass” has become a generation’s cultural shorthand to describe both the isolation and cure for people who seem so deep into a virtual world that the real one has lost meaning. It’s a dismissive way of looking at a problem that doesn’t begin and end with boys.

But, if we didn’t see it earlier, Kirk’s killing has made it clear that there are too many boys that need to be pulled back from the brink of a very bad something. One that is less about left or right and more about exactly who and what those boys stumble upon inside those ethereal spaces that most parents can’t even find, much less understand.

“We’ve got to get these kids back,” Newsom said. “They’re very susceptible young men. They’re very vulnerable online.”

Even more concerning, when the nihilism of the darkest corners of the internet catches up to their psyches, “young people weaponize those grievances,” Newsom said — whether that anger turns inward or outward.

Suicide among young men has increased. In 2023, the male suicide rate was about 23 deaths per 100,000 men, nearly four times higher than for women, a number that has been climbing for years (albeit with some slight dips). Sadly, women attempt suicide more often, but men have a higher rate of completion, often because they use more deadly means such as guns.

But lonely boys are also more prone to commit violence on others, maybe especially when they mix their anger with politics. Once recent study by social epidemiologist Julia Schleimer at the University of Washington School of Public Health found that individuals who reported having few social connections were, “more likely than others to support political violence or be personally willing to engage in it in one form or another.”

For reference, about 15% of men have no close friendships, according to a recent poll by the Survey Center on American Life. Newsom puts that figure even higher for young men, with “one in four men under 30 years old reporting that they have no close friends, a five-fold increase since 1990.”

Kirk stepped into that gap, providing meaning and belonging not just through his podcasts, where he was best known, but through the grassroots Turning Point USA organization that gave thousands of young people (of both sexes) both an ideology and, equally as important, real-world connections and events.

“Obviously Charlie Kirk was a master at not only the work he did online, but offline, and his capacity to organize and engage,” Newsom said.

Whether you agreed with Kirk’s views or not (and I did not agree on many points, including matters of race, sexual orientation, immigration or the meaning of patriotism), he created that something that is missing for so many young people. He created a vision of an America that needed to be saved, and could be saved, through a dedication to a certain kind of family and a certain kind of faith. As Newsom described it of his own effort, young people don’t just want a cause. They want to feel invested, they want to feel an “obligation to give back.”

If Newsom’s recent foray into Trump-esque social media proves anything, it’s that he’s willing to learn, even emulate, success — wherever he finds it. Newsom is trying to offer the belonging that Kirk supplied, seeped not in the exclusion and rigidity that Kirk embodied, but in California values.

“It’s about building an inclusive community of all different kinds of voices,” Michael Lynch told me of the California Challenge. He’s the co-founder and chief executive of Improve Your Tomorrow, the organization Dhanoa belongs to.

Lynch said kids get all kinds of benefits from mentors, but when he asks what those are, the sentence usually starts, “Now that I have friends…. “

The outcome of the effort to bring boys out of the virtual world is all about who those friends are, who pulls them out.

Our boys don’t just need to touch grass, they need to be around men who don’t seek to impose values, but teach them how to craft their own, how to believe in themselves before they believe in something someone is selling.

“What the world needs is your authenticity,” Newsom told a teenage journalist who covered the event for the school newspaper. “And so I just hope we take a deep breath and discover the most important, powerful thing in the world, and that’s who you are.”

If Newsom’s effort inspires just one good man to step up and help a kid figure that out — who they are, and how to believe in themselves first and forever — it will be something.

Charlie Kirk, the conservative millennial influencer who galvanized young Americans to support the GOP and was assassinated this week in Utah, was the most influential modern-day catalyst of shifting voting trends among fledgling voters, according to Republican and Democratic strategists.

Kirk founded the nonprofit Turning Point USA in 2012 at the age of 18, and it grew into a force that promoted conservative views on high school and college campuses across the nation.

“He found something among young people that none of us identified,” said Shawn Steel, a member of the Republican National Committee from Orange County who knew Kirk for nearly a decade and invited him to speak before the RNC’s conservative steering committee.

“He found an entire movement in America that conservatives were not even aware they could find. Not only that, he nurtured and created an entire new generation of conservative activists,” said Steel, the husband of former Rep. Michelle Steel. “His legacy will endure.”

The admiration for Kirk’s political organizing skills and mental acuity cut across political lines.

“Whether you agreed with him or not — and to be clear, I didn’t — he was one of the most brilliant political organizers of his generation, and probably generations before that,” said Stephanie Cutter, a veteran Democratic strategist who served as an advisor to Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, First Lady Michelle Obama and Vice President Kamala Harris. “He could be controversial, but he struck a nerve with people who were likely disengaged in politics prior to Turning Point and built a powerful movement.”

In addition to appealing to young voters about the economic headwinds they faced as they sought to climb the career ladder and tried to buy a house, Kirk also espoused sharply conservative views.

Beyond espousing traditional conservative views — being anti-abortion, pro-gun rights and dubious of climate change — Kirk was critical of gay and transgender rights, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, saying last year that if he saw a Black airplane pilot, he hoped he was qualified. He was accused of being an anti-Semite because of repeated comments about the power of Jewish donors in the United States, and of being Islamophobic because of comments such as describing “large dedicated Islamic areas” as “a threat to America.”

Kirk, 31 and a father of two, died Wednesday after being shot in the neck while speaking at Utah Valley University. Kirk’s assassination was the latest instance of political violence in an increasingly politically polarized country.

In June, Democratic Minnesota Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband were killed, while state Sen. John Hoffman and his wife survived a shooting at their home, roughly five miles away, the same day. In 2022, a home invader bludgeoned the husband of then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco). In 2017, House Majority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.) was shot during a practice session for an annual congressional baseball game. In 2011, Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.) barely survived an assassination attempt as she met with constituents in a Tucson strip mall.

President Trump survived two assassination attempts in 2024 as he successfully sought reelection to the White House.

Kirk’s “mission was to bring young people into the political process, which he did better than anybody ever, to share his love of country and to spread the simple words of common sense on campuses nationwide,” Trump said Wednesday.

On Thursday, Trump told reporters on the White House’s South Lawn that Kirk was partly responsible for his victory in the 2024 presidential election and repeated that he would posthumously award Kirk the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Turning Point USA, created a month before Kirk graduated from high school, became the new face of conservatism on college campuses and had chapters at more than 800 schools. Prominent conservatives heavily funded the group; in the fiscal year that ended in June of 2024, Turning Point reported $85 million in revenue.

Longtime GOP activist Jon Fleischman, the former executive director of the California Republican Party and the former chairman of the state’s chapter of Young Americans for Freedom in the early 1990s, said Kirk was pivotal to Trump’s election.

“Charlie Kirk was probably the single most prominent and successful youth organizer in the Trump movement,” Fleischman said, adding that Kirk superseded any other GOP organizer he knew at increasing conservative prospects among young voters.

“As somebody who cut their teeth as a youth organizer, I have nothing but awe for the level of sophistication he brought to that field of work,” he said.

Support for Trump among young voters exponentially increased in the 2024 presidential election, according to data compiled by Tufts University. While President Biden had a 25-point edge over Trump among voters ages 18 to 29 in the 2020 election, Harris had a four-point advantage among this cohort last year.

“This last election was the best performance Republicans have had with the youth vote, particularly male voters, in 20 years, maybe even going back to the ’80s,” said Steve Deace, a conservative radio host in Iowa who had known Kirk for a decade.

He gave credit for that success partly to work Kirk did on the ground at colleges across the country, notably being willing to amicably debate with people who disagreed with his beliefs.

“Charlie was basically a Renaissance man who was comfortable in a lot of settings. He wasn’t hoity-toity,” he said.

Deace and others added that this moment could be a turning point for the nation’s democracy and the split between the left and the right.

“We’re going to have a real conversation about whether we can share a country or not. The answer may be we can’t,” Deace said. “We have to decide if we are capable of the fundamental differences between us being adjudicated at the ballot box…. We have to decide if we can share a country. If we truly want to, we’ll figure it out. If we don’t, we won’t. That’s the conversation that needs to happen.”

Bombastic conservative commentator Roger Stone went further, arguing that modern-day Democrats are a greater threat to the nation than terrorists, drug cartels and foreign spies.

“The rot is too deep to reverse our course with mere rhetoric,” Stone wrote to supporters. “Sept. 10, 2025 was the day we crossed the Rubicon, lost our innocence and realized only one path remains to ensure humanity’s survival. The time for American renewal is at hand, and the tree of liberty shall germinate in warp speed with Charlie Kirk serving as the martyr of our glorious refounding.”

As President Trump declared Washington, D.C., a crime-ridden wasteland in need of federal intervention last week and threatened similar actions in other Black-led cities, several mayors compared notes.

The president’s characterization of their cities contradicts what they began noticing last year: that they were seeing a drop in violent crime after a pandemic-era spike. In some cases the declines were monumental, due in large part to more youth engagement, gun buyback programs and community partnerships.

Now members of the African American Mayors Assn. are determined to stop Trump from burying accomplishments that they already believed were overlooked. And they’re using the administration’s unprecedented law enforcement takeover in the nation’s capital as an opportunity to disprove his narrative about some of the country’s greatest urban enclaves.

“It gives us an opportunity to say we need to amplify our voices to confront the rhetoric that crime is just running rampant around major U.S. cities. It’s just not true,” said Van Johnson, mayor of Savannah, Ga., and president of the African American Mayors Assn. “It’s not supported by any evidence or statistics whatsoever.”

Trump has deployed the first of 800 National Guard members to the nation’s capital, and at his request, the Republican governors of three states pledged hundreds more Saturday. West Virginia said it was sending 300 to 400 Guard troops, South Carolina pledged 200, and Ohio said it would send 150 in the coming days, marking a significant escalation of the federal intervention.

Beyond Washington, the Republican president is setting his sights on other cities including Baltimore, Chicago, Los Angeles and Oakland, calling them crime-ridden and “horribly run.” One thing they all have in common: They’re led by Black mayors.

“It was not lost on any member of our organization that the mayors either were Black or perceived to be Democrats,” Johnson said. “And that’s unfortunate. For mayors, we play with whoever’s on the field.”

The federal government’s actions have heightened some of the mayors’ desires to champion the strategies used to help make their cities safer.

Some places are seeing dramatic drops in crime rates

Trump argued that federal law enforcement had to step in after a prominent employee of his White House advisory team known as the Department of Government Efficiency was attacked in an attempted carjacking. He also pointed to homeless encampments, graffiti and potholes as evidence of Washington “getting worse.”

But statistics published by Washington’s Metropolitan Police contradict the president and show violent crime has dropped there since a post-pandemic-emergency peak in 2023.

Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson scoffed at Trump’s remarks, hailing the city’s “historic progress driving down homicides by more than 30% and shootings by almost 40% in the last year alone.”

Mayor Karen Bass of Los Angeles, where homicides fell 14% from 2023 to 2024, called the federal takeover in District of Columbia a performative “power grab.”

In Baltimore, officials say they have seen historic decreases in homicides and nonfatal shootings this year, and those have been on the decline since 2022, according to the city’s public safety data dashboard. Carjackings were down 20% in 2023, and other major crimes fell in 2024. Only burglaries have climbed slightly.

The lower crime rates are attributed to tackling violence with a “public health” approach, city officials say. In 2021, under Mayor Brandon Scott, Baltimore created a Comprehensive Violence Prevention Plan that called for more investment in community violence intervention, more services for crime victims and other initiatives.

Scott accused Trump of exploiting crime as a “wedge issue and dog whistle” rather than caring about curbing violence.

“He has actively undermined efforts that are making a difference saving lives in cities across the country in favor of militarized policing of Black communities,” Scott said via email.

The Democratic mayor pointed out that the Justice Department has slashed more than $1 million in funding this year that would have gone toward community anti-violence measures. He vowed to keep on making headway regardless.

“We will continue to closely work with our regional federal law enforcement agencies, who have been great partners, and will do everything in our power to continue the progress despite the roadblocks this administration attempts to implement,” Scott said.

Oakland officials this month touted significant decreases in crime in the first half of this year compared with the same period in 2024, including a 21% drop in homicides and a 29% decrease in all violent crime, according to the midyear report by the Major Cities Chiefs Assn. Officials credited collaborations with community organizations and crisis response services through the city’s Department of Violence Prevention, established in 2017.

“These results show that we’re on the right track,” Mayor Barbara Lee said at a news conference. “We’re going to keep building on this progress with the same comprehensive approach that got us here.”

After the president gave his assessment of Oakland last week, Lee, a steadfast Trump antagonist during her years in Congress, rejected it as “fearmongering.”

Social justice advocates agree that crime has gone down and say Trump is perpetuating exaggerated perceptions that have long plagued Oakland.

Nicole Lee, executive director of Urban Peace Movement, an Oakland-based organization that focuses on empowering communities of color and young people through initiatives such as leadership training and assistance to victims of gun violence, said much credit for the gains on lower crime rates is due to community groups.

“We really want to acknowledge all of the hard work that our network of community partners and community organizations have been doing over the past couple of years coming out of the pandemic to really create real community safety,” Lee said. “The things we are doing are working.”

She worries that an intervention by military troops would undermine that progress.

“It creates kind of an environment of fear in our community,” she said.

Patrols and youth curfews

In Washington, agents from multiple federal agencies, National Guard members and even the United States Park Police have been seen performing law enforcement duties including patrolling the National Mall and questioning people parked illegally.

Pentagon Press Secretary Kingsley Wilson said the National Guard troops will not be armed, but he declined to elaborate on their assignments to safety patrols and beautification efforts.

Savannah’s Johnson said he is all for partnering with the federal government, but troops on city streets is not what he envisioned. Instead, he said, cities need federal assistance for things like multistate investigation and fighting problems such as gun trafficking and cybercrime.

“I’m a former law enforcement officer. There is a different skill set that is used for municipal law enforcement agencies than the military,” Johnson said.

There has also been speculation that federal intervention could entail curfews for young people.

But that would do more harm, Lee said, disproportionately affecting young people of color and wrongfully assuming that youths are the main instigators of violence.

“If you’re a young person, basically you can be cited, criminalized, simply for being outside after certain hours,” she said. “Not only does that not solve anything in regard to violence and crime, it puts young people in the crosshairs of the criminal justice system.”

A game of wait-and-see

For now, Johnson said, the mayors are closely watching their counterpart in Washington, Muriel Bowser, to see how she navigates the unprecedented federal intervention. She has been walking a fine line between critiquing and cooperating since Trump’s takeover, but things ramped up Friday when officials sued to block the administration’s naming its Drug Enforcement Administration chief as an “emergency” head of the police force. The administration soon backed away from that move.

Johnson praised Bowser for carrying on with dignity and grace.

“Black mayors are resilient. We are intrinsically children of struggle,” Johnson said. “We learn to adapt quickly, and I believe that we will and we are.”

Tang writes for the Associated Press.

In his first words directed specifically to Americans, Pope Leo XIV told young people on Saturday how to find hope and meaning in their lives through God and in service to others.

“So many people who suffer from different experiences of depression or sadness — they can discover that the love of God is truly healing, that it brings hope,” the first American pope said in a video broadcast on the giant screen at Rate Field, the White Sox baseball stadium on Chicago’s South Side.

The event — set in Leo’s hometown and at the home stadium of his favorite major league team — was organized by the Archdiocese of Chicago in honor of his recent election as pope. Leo seized the opportunity to speak directly to young people, tying his message to the Roman Catholic Church’s ongoing Jubilee year of hope that was declared by Pope Francis.

In Saturday’s message, Leo urged those listening in the stadium and online to be beacons of hope capable of inspiring others.

“To share that message of hope with one another — in outreach, in service, in looking for ways to make our world a better place — gives true life to all of us, and is a sign of hope for the whole world,” he said.

The afternoon program, emceed by Chicago Bulls announcer Chuck Swirsky, highlighted Leo’s roots, including music by the city’s Leo Catholic High School Choir and a musician from Peru, where Leo lived and worked for years. There was also a discussion featuring a former teacher of the future pope as well as a high school classmate and fellow Augustinian.

The event also celebrated the mixing of Catholicism and baseball, including a special invitation from the team for Leo to throw out a ceremonial first pitch at a future White Sox game.

Leo, formerly Robert Prevost, was elected May 8, becoming the first American pope in the 2,000-year history of the church.

Leo, 69, spent his career serving as an Augustinian missionary and ministering in Peru before taking over the Vatican’s powerful office of bishops. He succeeded Pope Francis, who died April 21.

“When I see each and every one of you, when I see how people gather together to celebrate their faith, I discover myself how much hope there is in the world,” Leo said in the video message.

The program was followed by a Mass celebrated by Cardinal Blase Cupich, the archbishop of Chicago who was part of the conclave that elected Leo.

Meyer writes for the Associated Press.

“If you’re a parent, Lauren Greenfield’s new doc about teens and social media ‘is a horror movie.’”

That Los Angeles Times headline ran on an August story about Greenfield’s acclaimed five-part docuseries that followed Los Angeles-area high school students during the 2021-22 school year, tracking their cellphone and social media use for a revealing portrait of their online life.

Greenfield remembers the headline.

“I’ve heard that from parents,” Greenfield says. “And I keep hearing it whenever we screen the series.”

Greenfield has taken “Social Studies” to schools around the country since its premiere last summer, airing episodes and answering questions, speaking alongside a rotating group of the show’s subjects. And, yes, the most common takeaway remains: Parents have no idea what’s going on with their teenagers — though “horror” is in the eye of the beholder.

Today, Greenfield and three of the “Social Studies” participants — Cooper Klein, Dominic Brown and Jonathan Gelfond, all now 21 — are in a Venice bungalow, just back from showing the series to some 6,000 teenagers in San Francisco — young people who, by and large, had a much different reaction than their elders to the depictions of online bullying, body-image issues, partying, hooking up and FOMO culture.

These teens were sometimes gasping and talking to the screen, laughing at points, fully immersed, fully relating, even feeling nostalgic for TikTok trends that were popping three years ago.

In one episode, teenager Sydney Shear is having a text exchange with a guy Greenfield describes as “creepy.” We see the message he sends: “Permission to beat.” Right after she tells him no, the group of girls sitting behind Greenfield screamed, “You know he did anyway!”

“It’s really fascinating how differently adults versus adolescents reacted to the show,” says Klein, now a junior at Vanderbilt. “Adults are terrified by it, but young people find it funny. It’s like watching reality TV.”

Lauren Greenfield.

(Matt Seidel / For The Times)

Much has changed for these “Social Studies” subjects since Greenfield stopped filming in 2022. How could it not? The years immediately following high school usually bring about intense growth and change and, hopefully, a little maturity. The world around them is different. Palisades Charter High School, which many of the students in the series attended, was heavily damaged in the January wildfires. (“The show’s like a time capsule,” says Gelfond, a Pali High grad. “Looking back, the series is even more special now.”)

Some things haven’t changed at all, though. Technology remains addictive, they all agree. Even when you are aware that the algorithms exist to snare your time and attention, it can be hard to stop scrolling, the self-soothing leading to numbness and deepening insecurities.

“You can have a greater understanding about the effects, but it still pulls you in,” says Brown, who, like Gelfond and Cooper, has worked at teen mental health hotlines. “It’s hard to stay away from what is essentially our lifelines.”

Which is one reason why they all see the value in the Los Angeles Unified School District’s cellphone ban, which went into effect in February.

“The pull-away from tech only works if it applies to everyone,” Klein says. “When a whole group doesn’t have access, that’s when the magic happens. You’re going to start to connect with the people in front of you because …” She pauses, smiling. “I mean, you want to be engaging with something, right?”

Then you have time to do things like read and solve jigsaw puzzles with friends, two hobbies Klein says she has taken up again recently in a conscious effort to disengage from her phone. Reclaiming your time, she says, can only work if you’ve got a plan.

If the takeaway from the series was that parents couldn’t fully comprehend how technology shapes and defines their teens’ lives (“They’re the guinea pig generation,” Greenfield notes), watching “Social Studies,” either together or alone, has served as a conversation starter.

“I have always had a very open relationship with my parents,” Gelfond says, “but the way this really explains social media has led to eightfold more transparency.”

“It made me more grateful for the way my parents navigated all this,” Klein adds. “I thought they were overstepping boundaries, trying to protect me too much. And I think this show validated that they did a really great job. Because we were the first generation, they were kind of flying blind.”

Gelfond, left, and Klein, right, join one of the group discussions in “Social Studies.”

(Lauren Greenfield / INSTITUTE)

Now Klein wonders what she’d do differently if she ever has kids. She started on Instagram at 12. If she could go back, she’d probably delay that entry, even though Klein says it now seems normal for kids to join the app when they turn 8 or 9.

So what would be the ideal starter age?

“Maybe I’m crazy for saying this, but I think it should be 16,” Brown says. Greenfield nods her head, noting Australia recently banned social media — Snapchat, TikTok, Instagram and X — for children under 16.

“I got on Instagram when I was 10 or 11, and I had no idea of the world that I had just gained access to,” Brown continues. “You should wait until you gain critical thinking skills. Sixteen, 17, 18, maybe.”

“It is the end of childhood,” Greenfield says. “You get that phone and everything that comes with it, and it is the end of innocence.”

In that respect, Greenfield sees “Social Studies” in conversation with “Adolescence,” the Netflix limited series about a 13-year-old boy suspected of killing a girl. The boy had been actively exploring incel culture online.

“What’s scary about ‘Adolescence’ is how did they not know he was involved in something so terrible,” Greenfield says. “But it makes sense. That’s the world we live in now.”

To hear Republicans tell it, California is a failed state and Donald Trump won the presidency in a landslide that gives him a mandate to do as he pleases. No surprise there.

But more and more, Democrats are echoing those talking points. Ever since Kamala Harris lost the election, the Democratic Party has been on a nationwide self-flagellation tour. One after another, its leaders have stuck their heads deep into their navels, hoping to find out why so many Americans — especially young people, Black voters and Latinos — shunned the former vice president.

Even in California, a reliably blue state, the soul-searching has been extreme, as seen at last weekend’s state Democratic Party convention, where a parade of speakers — including Harris’ 2024 running mate, Tim Walz — wailed and moaned and did the woe-is-us-thing.

Is it long-overdue introspection, or just annoying self-pity? Our columnists Anita Chabria and Mark Z. Barabak hash it out.

Chabria: Mark, you were at the convention in Anaheim. Thoughts?

Barabak: I’ll start by noting this is the first convention I’ve attended — and I’ve been to dozens — rated “R” for adult language. Apparently, Democrats think by dropping a lot of f-bombs they can demonstrate to voters their authenticity and passion. But it seemed kind of stagy and, after a while, grew tiresome.

I’ve covered Nancy Pelosi for more than three decades and never once heard her utter a curse word, in public or private. I don’t recall Martin Luther King Jr., saying, “I have a [expletive deleted] dream.” Both were pretty darned effective leaders.

Democrats have a lot of work to do. But cursing a blue streak isn’t going to win them back the White House or control of Congress.

Chabria: As someone known to routinely curse in polite society, I’m not one to judge an expletive. But that cussing and fussing brings up a larger point: Democrats are desperate to prove how serious and passionate they are about fixing themselves. Gov. Gavin Newsom has called the Democratic brand “toxic.” Walz told his fellow Dems: “We’re in this mess because some of it’s our own doing.”

It seems like across the country, the one thing Democrats can agree on is that they are lame. Or at least, they see themselves as lame. I’m not sure the average person finds Democratic ideals such as equality or due process quite so off-putting, especially as Trump and his MAGA brigade move forward on the many campaign promises — deportations, rollbacks of civil rights, stripping the names of civil rights icons off ships — that at least some voters believed were more talk than substance.

I always tell my kids to be their own hero, and I’m starting to think the Democrats need to hear that. Pick yourself up. Dust yourself off. Move on. Do you think all this self-reproach is useful, Mark? Does Harris’ loss really mean the party is bereft of value or values?

Barabak: I think self-reflection is good for the party, to a point. Democrats suffered a soul-crushing loss in November — at the presidential level and in the Senate, where the GOP seized control — and they did so in part because many of their traditional voters stayed home. It would be political malpractice not to figure out why.

That said, there is a tendency to go overboard and over-interpret the long-term significance of any one election.

This is not the end of the Democratic Party. It’s not even the first time one of the two major parties has been cast into the political wilderness.

Democrats went through similar soul-searching after presidential losses in 1984 and 1988. In 1991, a book was published explaining how Democrats were again destined to lose the White House and suggesting they would do so for the foreseeable future. In November 1992, Bill Clinton was elected president. Four years later, he romped to reelection.

In 2013, after two straight losing presidential campaigns, Republicans commissioned a political autopsy that, among other recommendations, urged the party to increase its outreach to gay and Latino voters. In 2016, Donald Trump — not exactly a model of inclusion — was elected.

Here, by the way, is how The Times wrote up that postmortem: “A smug, uncaring, ideologically rigid national Republican Party is turning off the majority of American voters, with stale policies that have changed little in 30 years and an image that alienates minorities and the young, according to an internal GOP study.”

Sound familar?

So, sure, look inward. But spare us the existential freakout.

Chabria: I would also argue that this moment is about more than the next election. I do think there are questions about if democracy will make it that long, and if so, if the next round at the polls will be a free and fair one.

I know the price of everything continues to rise, and conventional wisdom is that it’s all about the economy. But Democrats seem stuck in election politics as usual. These however, are unusual times that call for something more. There are a lot of folks who don’t like to see their neighbors, family or friends rounded up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in masks; a lot of people who don’t want to see Medicaid cut for millions, with Medicare likely to be on the chopping block next; a lot of people who are afraid our courts won’t hold the line until the midterms.

They want to know Democrats are fighting to protect these things, not fighting each other. I agree with you that any loss should be followed by introspection. But also, there’s a hunger for leadership in opposition to this administration, and the Democrats are losing an opportunity to be those leaders with their endless self-immolation.

Did Harris really lose that bad? Did Trump really receive a mandate to end America as we know it?

Barabak: No, and no.

I mean, a loss is a loss. Trump swept all seven battleground states and the election result was beyond dispute unlike, say, 2000.

But Trump’s margin over Harris in the popular vote was just 1.5% — which is far from landslide territory — and he didn’t even win a majority of support, falling just shy of 50%.

As for a supposed mandate, the most pithy and perceptive post-election analysis I read came from the American Enterprise Institute’s Yuval Levin, who noted Trump’s victory marked the third presidential campaign in a row in which the incumbent party lost — something not seen since the 19th century.

Challengers “win elections because their opponents were unpopular,” Levin wrote, “and then — imagining the public has endorsed their party activists’ agenda — they use the power of their office to make themselves unpopular.”

It’s a long way to 2026, and an even longer way to 2028.

But Levin is sure looking smart.

Chabria: I know Kamala-bashing is popular right now, but I’d argue that Harris wasn’t resoundingly unpopular — just unpopular enough, with some.

Harris had 107 days to campaign. Many candidates spend years running for the White House, and much longer if you count the coy “maybe” period. She was unknown to most Americans, faced double discrimination from race and gender, and (to be fair) has never been considered wildly charismatic. So to nearly split the popular vote with all that baggage is notable.

But maybe Elon Musk said it best. As part of his messy breakup with Trump, the billionaire tweeted, “Without me, Trump would have lost the election, Dems would control the House and the Republicans would be 51-49 in the Senate.”

Sometimes there’s truth in anger. Musk’s money influenced this election, and probably tipped it to Trump in at least one battleground state. Any postmortem needs to examine not just the message, but also the medium. Is it what Democrats are saying that isn’t resonating, or is it that right-wing oligarchs are dominating communication?

Barabak:

Chabria: Mark?

Barabak: Sorry.

I was so caught up in the spectacle of the world’s richest man going all neener-neener with the world’s most powerful man I lost track of where we were.

With all due respect to Marshall McLuhan, I think Democrats need first off to figure out a message to carry them through the 2026 midterms. They were quite successful in 2018 pushing back on GOP efforts to dismantle the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, if you prefer. It’s not hard to see them resurrecting that playbook if Republicans take a meat-ax to Medicare and millions of Americans lose their healthcare coverage.

Then, come 2028, they’ll pick a presidential nominee and have their messenger, who can then focus on the medium — TV, radio, podcasts, TikTok, Bluesky or whatever else is in political fashion at the moment.

Now, excuse me while I return my sights to the sandbox.