Yusra Farzan
reports on issues affecting current and future college students, their families and communities.
Published February 26, 2024 2:48 PM
Karen Kropp stands in front of The Book Rack.
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Courtesy The Book Rack's Facebook
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Topline:
The Book Rack in Arcadia is closing down after serving the community for 40 years. Karen Kropp has worked at the store for most of that time and in the last two decades has owned the used bookstore and tried to keep it afloat.
The reason: Rising costs, including rent and utilities, have become too much for Kropp, who is approaching her 80th birthday. So, come Thursday, she'll return the keys to her landlord and officially retire.
The backstory: Kropp moved to Arcadia 29 years ago to be closer to her daughter and granddaughter. An avid reader, she couldn’t borrow enough books from the library, so her daughter suggested she work at the store. When Pat Carlson, the original owner of the Book Rack, died, her husband Chuck sold the used bookstore to Kropp.
What's next: After she donates the last of the books remaining on Wednesday, Kropp will empty her apartment and make the move to Albuquerque to be with her little sister. When her sister retires later this year, she plans to use her Social Security checks to travel in a RV.
The Book Rack in Arcadia is closing down after serving the community for 40 years. Karen Kropp has worked at the store for most of that time and in the last two decades has owned the used bookstore and tried to keep it afloat.
Rising costs, including rent and utilities, have become too much for Kropp, who is approaching her 80th birthday. So, come Thursday, she'll return the keys to her landlord and officially retire.
Kropp moved to Arcadia 29 years ago to be closer to her daughter and granddaughter. An avid reader, she couldn’t borrow enough books from the library, so her daughter suggested she work at the store.
“I always wanted to be a librarian and live in a library because people talk to you there. They don’t just ignore you,” she said. “So it would be a good place to be and to still have social contact and be able to talk about things you're really interested in.”
When Pat Carlson, the original owner of the Book Rack, died, her husband Chuck sold the used bookstore to Kropp.
But, in recent years, it’s become “harder and harder” to run the business.
Challenges in running the store
Kropp employed two local high school students, part-time. They worked at the Book Rack through high school, college, and are now completing their graduate degrees. Rather than hire new employees, Kropp thinks it's a good time to shut down the shop as her longtime employees move on.
County and statewide assistance programs, she said, required her to have a certain number of full-time employees to qualify and weren't really geared toward mom-and-pop stores like hers.
As for city grants, Kropp says “by the time you hear about those, sometimes, they're past their usefulness. It isn't going to save you in the end.”
She used up all her life savings— including her life insurance — to keep the place afloat. One of her employees set up a GoFundMe page. The funds raised helped for a while, but as Kropp says,”no matter how hard you try to cut corners, the cost of other things going up takes care of anything you are doing to try and save money.”
Life after Book Rack
Kropp said she’s made peace with closing the bookstore, even though it was a hard decision given that it was her life for so long.
“This was my life six days a week,” she said. “Seven days a week until COVID hit.”
After she donates the last of the books remaining on Wednesday, Kropp will empty her apartment and make the move to Albuquerque to be with her little sister.
When her sister retires later this year, she plans to use her Social Security checks to travel in a RV. She says she’ll miss California and the friends and people she’s met here.
“I am ready. I have had time to grieve,” she said.
Sunshine Skate Center is a tribute to bygone rinks
By By Jennifer Stavros | The LA Local
Published September 28, 2026 6:00 AM
Cory Joseph still remembers the last day he rolled across the rink at Word on Wheels.
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Courtesy Sunshine Skate Center
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Topline:
Cory Joseph built Sunshine Skate Center in Inglewood to fill a void left by the closure of a number of skate hubs, such as Skate Land in Northridge and Skate Depot in Cerritos.
Why it matters: The closing of these parks struck a nerve for Joseph, who grew up in San Diego and is the son of two professional skaters — Maureen Joseph and Timothy Carter — from the disco skating heyday in the 1970s and 1980s.
Why now: Sunshine Skate Center celebrated its one-year anniversary this month.
Cory Joseph still remembers the last day he rolled across the rink at Word on Wheels.
The beloved skating rink shuttered in 2021 as part of a downward trend in places where you can groove on four wheels under luminescent disco balls and hot tunes.
The closing of these skate hubs struck a nerve for Joseph, who grew up in San Diego and is the son of two professional skaters — Maureen Joseph and Timothy Carter — from the disco skating heyday in the 1970s and 1980s.
It’s no wonder he felt a desire to open the Sunshine Skate Center in Inglewood to fill this void. His journey to open Sunshine, named after his parents’ old skating team, took three long years of hurdles and obstacles until finally opened on Sept. 4, 2025.
A year of serving Inglewood
Cory Joseph still remembers the last day he rolled across the rink at Word on Wheels.
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Jennifer Stavros
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The LA Local
)
The rink celebrated its one-year anniversary this month.
“Skating for a lot of people is their therapy. It’s their way that they cope with things. It’s the way that they navigate through things,” Joseph said, adding that he understood how these places once served as third spaces for Black L.A.
“I think it’s more than just skating,” he said. “I really understand skating as a place for community.”
Cory Joseph still remembers the last day he rolled across the rink at Word on Wheels.
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Jennifer Stavros
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The LA Local
)
On a Friday night this past summer, Joseph’s ethos was seen in action.
Looking around the rink, the range of skaters varied widely in ability — from folks dance-skating to rolling backward, along with beginners using tools to help them on their first journey on wheels. Some were there with their families. Others were there with their friends. Spectators were delighted as they watched from outside the rink and the surrounding seating.
The unapologetic free flow of joy was palpable. Joseph said that when he sees the impact on Inglewood’s youngest residents, the three years it took him to open the rink feels worth it.
“You have a lot of kids that are not physically active,” he explained. “We’re able to engage kids [to] have them off their phones for certain periods of time when they’re skating.”
The debate over the safety of AI and whether and how it should be regulated is not a simple clash between two opposing sides. There are multiple factions with a variety of goals and assessments about the technology's promise, dangers and how it should be governed. Here are the main arguments shaping that debate.
So: From Steve Bannon to cognitive psychologist Geoffrey Hinton, here is a guide to who's who in that debate.
The debate over the potential benefits and safety risks of accelerating artificial intelligence development reached a crescendo this month, as supporters and critics of the technology clashed over warnings that increasingly powerful AI could pose existential risks to humanity.
On September 8, Jacob Coxon, a researcher-turned-whistleblower, publicly resigned from major AI firm Anthropic after a previous stint at OpenAI, accusing the companies of "racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives."
Coxon's claims supercharged an ongoing debate over the potential damage AI could wreak on society and prompted Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and other AI CEOs to call for a slowdown in AI development.
Over the past two months, companies including OpenAI and Anthropic disclosed multiple incidents in which their AI agents accessed the internet when they weren't supposed to and carried out unapproved activities. In OpenAI's case, swarms of agents worked together to hack the open-source software platform Hugging Face and OpenAI itself, without alerting humans.
The debate over the safety of AI and whether and how it should be regulated is not a simple clash between two opposing sides. There are multiple factions with a variety of goals and assessments about the technology's promise, dangers and how it should be governed. Here are the main arguments shaping that debate.
Effective accelerationists and the tech right
Those who have an aggressively optimistic worldview of AI are often referred to as effective accelerationists (sometimes shortened to e/acc) — a term reflecting their belief that AI should be rapidly advanced.
People belonging to the faction are emphatically optimistic about AI and its future benefits to society. They believe that the technology can propel medical advancements, boost economic productivity, increase living standards and automate dangerous or undesirable work. To achieve this, they argue that AI development should be accelerated, not restricted.
Effective accelerationists' ideology overlaps with that of the "tech right" in that both camps wholeheartedly believe in accelerating AI development and deployment and minimize critics' concerns over safety and security.
However, the tech right takes a more nationalistic stance, championing U.S. dominance in the global AI race. Like effective accelerationists, they believe that AI research and deployment should be unencumbered by regulation, arguing that could slow innovation or allow adversarial governments such as China to overtake the U.S. in the AI race.
Venture capitalist David Sacks is one of the leading accelerationist voices in the AI safety debate and was President Trump's AI and cryptocurrency advisor.
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Ian Maule
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AFP via Getty Images
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The tech right's philosophy is represented by figures such as former White House AI and cryptocurrency advisor David Sacks, whose views remain influential with the Trump administration. Other significant players include venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, and OpenAI president and co-founder Greg Brockman. The three founded the Leading the Future super PAC to support pro-AI political candidates, and campaign against those who advocate for regulation.
Andreessen also penned a 2023 widely-read blog post titled "Why AI Will Save the World," in which he claimed that fears of AI triggering mass unemployment are overstated. He argued that previous waves of automation ultimately created more jobs and economic activity than they eliminated, and the fears of existential risk are overblown.
Recently, Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia, whose chips are used by most AI companies, has emerged as one of the industry's leading voices pushing back against calls for a slowdown and urging a light regulatory approach.
Populist right
AI has exposed an ideological split within President Trump's political coalition. While Trump and his advisers overwhelmingly favor accelerating AI, parts of his MAGA base believe the powerful corporations he has aligned himself with could undermine the U.S. economy.
Figures including former Trump strategist Steve Bannon and former Fox News host Tucker Carlson have been vocal about potential job losses, the tech industry's political power, child safety and threats to traditional social and religious values.
This month, Bannon formed an unlikely partnership with independent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, a socialist, to call for significant restrictions on AI development, government oversight and corporate accountability at the Pro-Human Assembly conference in Washington, D.C.
Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon has sharply broken with the Trump administration around AI policy.
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Saul Loeb
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AFP via Getty Images
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Still, the two have differing stances on what any of those measures should look like. Sanders called for an immediate pause on AI development until clear safety rules are established by scientists, a permanent ban on the development of artificial "superintelligence" (AI systems that are more intelligent than humans in all domains), and an international treaty with China in an effort to avoid an AI arms race. Bannon, meanwhile, argued for slowing the pace of AI development, the formation of a national regulatory organization and cutting off China from U.S. AI technology.
"So why are we letting the Chinese Communist Party drive us? Oh, we have to do this or China wins," said Bannon in his speech at the event in Washington. "We should quarantine now every aspect of the ecosystem of artificial intelligence away from the Chinese Communist Party today. We should cut them off."
Safetyists
Safetyists are primarily concerned with the potential risks of the rapid advancement of AI. Their worries center on the possibility of catastrophic or existential outcomes, such as the death of humanity at the hands of autonomous machines.
High-profile members of the safetyist community include Geoffrey Hinton, who is commonly referred to as the "Godfather of AI" because of his pioneering work in deep learning that helped launch the modern era of AI. In recent years, Hinton, who previously worked at Google, has issued a series of warnings about existential risks associated with AI, particularly if an AI model surpasses human intelligence and becomes autonomous.
Another vocal AI safetyist is Daniel Kokotajlo, a former researcher at OpenAI and co-author of AI 2027, a paper published last year that discusses how super-intelligent AI could lead to human extinction by the mid-2030s.
Effective altruists
Effective altruists (often shortened to "EA") generally believe in maximizing humanity's long-term welfare. The movement originally focused on material ways to reduce global poverty. But more recently, many EA thinkers have focused their concerns on the possibility of existential risks from advanced AI and other potential societal-scale disasters such as nuclear war, climate change and pandemics. They particularly worry about the consequences for future generations. People from the EA camp prioritize AI safety, alignment — which is the science of making sure AI systems behave in a way that is reflective of human values and in line with safety rules — and reducing the probability of catastrophic outcomes.
The key difference between EAs and safetyists is that EAs generally provide funding for AI safety research and risk mitigation, whereas safetyists are researchers and advocates undertaking AI safety work and publicly calling for regulation.
Other AI factions often derisively describe effective altruists as so-called "AI Doomers." EA has also become a focus of criticism from the Trump administration since Coxon's resignation from Anthropic.
"Americanism, not effective altruism. The United States will continue to be AI DOMINANT!" said one Defense Department post this month.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei is associated with the effective altruists and argues for stronger regulations on AI.
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Benjamin Fanjoy
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Getty Images
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Well-known people in the EA movement include Eliezer Yudkowsky, co-founder of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI), which focuses on mathematical approaches to making advanced AI systems safe. He is also the author of Harry Potter fan fiction that helped popularize ideas associated with EA. Holden Karnofsky, an American entrepreneur and philanthropist, founded Coefficient Giving (formerly Open Philanthropy), an organization that funds causes central to the EA mission, including AI and biosecurity. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei is considered to be aligned with effective altruism. Karnofsky also works at Anthropic and is married to Daniela Amodei, who is a co-founder of Anthropic and the sister of Dario Amodei, the CEO.
Another high-profile supporter of the EA movement is Sam Bankman-Fried, who founded major cryptocurrency exchange FTX. In 2023, he was convicted of seven counts of fraud and conspiracy related to the misuse of customer and investor funds and is currently serving a 25-year prison sentence.
AI ethics
The AI ethics camp argues that society should focus on the harms AI is already causing, rather than on hypothetical existential risks. Some proponents contend that emphasizing existential threats from a hypothetical future superintelligence can serve as a distraction from the more immediate harms and accountability issues surrounding AI today.
AI ethicists' concerns include how AI systems can be biased due to the content of their training data, for example, the ways in which AI facial recognition or job application systems might perpetuate existing societal biases. They are also concerned with how AI could be used to exploit workers and to enable mass surveillance, as well as about the environmental costs of data centers, autonomous weapons and the concentration of power among technology companies.
A notable voice of the AI ethics faction is Timnit Gebru, a computer scientist and former co-lead of Google's Ethical AI team. Gebru left the company in 2020 because of a dispute with the company over a research paper she wrote exposing problems with large language models (LLMs), including their tendency to generate harmful or misleading language.
AI as a normal technology
People belonging to the "AI as a Normal Technology" group reject both the utopian and dystopian narratives about AI. Instead, this faction sees AI as a powerful but ultimately normal technology, comparable to the internet or electricity. They believe the focus should be on understanding and regulating specific applications and harms instead of treating AI as an unprecedented threat or as a path to inevitable superintelligence.
Fei-Fei Li is a computer scientist and co-director of the Stanford Human-Centered AI Institute. She and others in her faction argue that AI is more like a typical technology than others in the field believe.
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Big Event Media
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Getty Images
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Notable people associated with this worldview include Fei-Fei Li, a computer scientist and co-director of the Stanford Human-Centered AI Institute. Li is famous for creating ImageNet, a vastly large dataset of images which provided the training data for large neural networks, which led to several major developments in AI.
Katie McQue's reporting is supported by the Tarbell Center for AI Journalism, which is a grantee of Coefficient Giving. Neither Tarbell nor Coefficient have any editorial input into her work. Copyright 2026 NPR
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A vibrant sunset framed by clouds was visible across Los Angeles yesterday. Atmospheric conditions might have something to do with it.
The backstory: The high clouds yesterday were likely related to Hurricane Odalys, which was downgraded to a tropical storm Sunday. “We were getting some high-based tropical moisture coming in far away from the center of the storm,” Robbie Munroe, meteorologist with the National Weather Service, said.
What's next: High clouds are expected to stick around through at least today, according to the National Weather Service, which could make for another picturesque sunset.
Angelenos looking up Saturday may have noticed a particularly striking sight — a vibrant sunset framed by clouds.
Tropical moisture coming in from far off the coast could explain it.
“One thing that might have played a role in making it look awfully nice yesterday was those high clouds that were moving in,” Robert Munroe, meteorologist with the National Weather Service, said. “The way the sun was hitting the high clouds made some bright yellows and oranges in the sky. That moisture is actually related to probably mostly Odalys.”
An early sunset at yesterday's "Be The Light" 5K event in Valencia last night.
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Jenn Baughman
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Jenn Baughman
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Odalys is the hurricane (since downgraded to a tropical storm) churning off the coast of Mexico, along with Hurricane Polo.
Neither is expected to make landfall here, but they're forecast to bring high surf, dangerous rip tides and potential flooding to coastlines already battered this month by Hurricane Marie.
The bright side is Munroe said those high clouds from yesterday will be sticking around through at least today, which could make for another pretty sunset this evening.
Josie Huang
is a reporter and Weekend Edition host who spotlights the people and places at the heart of our region.
Published September 27, 2026 9:27 AM
The star marks the epicenter of a small quake Sunday morning off shore in the South Bay.
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Courtesy USGS
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Topline:
An earthquake with a magnitude of 3.6 struck near Hermosa Beach, and it was reported as being felt as far off as Oxnard.
Keep reading ... for more on what we know for now.
An earthquake with a magnitude of 3.6 struck off the South Bay at about 8:40 a.m. and was reported as being felt as far as Oxnard.
The U.S. Geological Survey says it was centered about four miles west-southwest of Hermosa Beach. More than 1,500 people reported feeling it within the first hour after it struck. [You can report what you felt to the USGS.]
No significant damage has been reported, which is typical at this low of a magnitude.
The quake was below the threshold of 4.0 magnitude that triggers an alert on the ShakeAlert app.
We don't want to scare you, but the Big One is coming. We don't know when, but we know it'll be at least 44 times stronger than Northridge and 11 times stronger than the Ridgecrest quakes in 2019. To help you get prepared, we've compiled a handy reading list:
