The Brief

Forget the real or fake debate — social media just wants to know if your Christmas tree floats.

That's the new bar that's been set by Los Angeles-based creatives Marco Zamora and Juan "El Creativo" Renteria. The pair have become internet Christmas decor legends, redefining what makes a Christmas tree with their fantastical spiral sculpture that gives the illusion of being suspended in the air.

Zamora, a 27-year-old interior decorator/design DIY-er, told NPR the delightful creation was the result of months of brainstorming and finding the perfect collaborator.

"Last year I made the stencil tree and it was this huge viral sensation," he said, referring to the noble fir he draped in sparkling silver tinsel that had more than 3 million Instagram and TikTok users swooning.

This time around, the goal was to make nothing less than a work of art, he said.

"I really wanted to do something that's architectural and different. And I also really wanted it to have a floral element to it," Zamora explained, adding that until now, he hasn't worked with flowers much.

That's where Renteria, who runs a burgeoning L.A.-based floral business and counts Neiman Marcus among his top clients, came in.

The two had formed the beginnings of a friendship on Instagram. Renteria joked that he "fan-girled out" in a DM to Zamora, saying he'd love to work with him if ever an opportunity arose.

They got together in Zamora's 1920s Mid-City apartment where there "were no bad ideas," Renteria said laughing. Together the pair pushed each other to be outrageous and daring.

"It's literally like we both put our minds together to create this magical thing," Renteria said.

How did they do it?

It's a little unclear who came up with the idea for a gravity-defying tree — both said that it just sort of happened.

"It was this beautiful, like, back and forth and creativity and ingenuity to even get it suspended from my ceiling," Zamora said.

Eventually, they devised a plan of attack. It involved three shower curtain suspension rods that are wedged between two hand painted beams on the ceiling, fishline and the unsung hero of all large floral installations, chicken wire.

"She is your best friend when you're doing install work," Renteria said, disclosing the secrets of his trade. "And the cool thing with fishline is that you can photograph it from different angles and it won't come out. It looks fully suspended."

The spiral "tree" is draped in a variety of imported foliage and flowers, including Japanese pine boughs, Japanese pine boughs, Hawaiian orchids, and Amaranth from Ecuador.

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Marco Zamora

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Next came the pines and flowers. Zamora was shooting for a woodsy, fairy forest vibe with sumptuous deep reds, and little sparkle and snow. Renteria said he was fully on board; he sourced imported Japanese pine boughs, Princess Pine and other foliage to create the swirling Christmas-tree like base. Then draped the whole thing in bouquets of a variety of flowers, including burgundy-colored orchids from Hawaii, red and maroon anthuriums, and loads of dangling, purplish Amaranth from Ecuador.

"The Amaranth is our hero flower because that was like the icing on the cake," Renteria said of his vision.

The process was chronicled in a series of TikTok and Instagram videos that have now claimed more than 10 million views — far surpassing Zamora's bold expectations at the start of the project.

He adds, "It's everything I wanted it to be. It is living art."

Advice for the DIYers

Across social media, people are fawning over the floating illusion. Words like "magnificent," "magical," and "dreamy" fill thousands of comments. Many even say they'd like to try their own versions.

To those Zamora and Renteria have a few words of advice: Be prepared to spend a little money. Especially people hoping to recreate the duo's version, with all of the imported greens and flowers. Those particular varieties are pricey, they warn. Of course, they suggest looking for less expensive flowers for anyone working on a tighter budget. Or, Renteria said, "You can keep it green and call it a day!"

Also, as it is a living creation, be prepared to mist and mist and mist, to keep the foliage green. They also suggest using water tubes for individual flowers to help lengthen their lifespan.

"We are so happy that people say they want to try something like this next year," Zamora said. "It's a great compliment that they feel inspired and want it in their home."

It's not just regular people who want the tree. The retail chain, Banana Republic, reached out to Zamora and Renteria. "OMG we love this! Let's talk," they wrote in a message. They wanted an even bigger version for one of their Los Angeles flagship stores.

The result is a 14-foot tall winter wonderland version that fills the storefront window.

The pair are already apprehensive about next year.

Micki Boden wanted a wedding cake that checked off a couple of big boxes — personalized and tasty. Instead of a traditional tiered cake, the San Fernando Valley native went with a favorite from her school days.

“My favorite cake of all time is the coffee cake that I ate through my entire K-12 education going to LAUSD public school,” Boden said.

Boden attended elementary school in Studio City and middle school in Sherman Oaks before graduating from a Reseda high school.

Boden and her husband, Matt Stollman, met in 2016 while working on the reality television show Big Brother and eventually started dating. The two got engaged in 2025.

With the groom’s family traveling from the East Coast for their wedding in October, the couple wanted to provide a uniquely L.A. experience.

Micki Boden and Matt Stollman cut into their LAUSD coffee cake wedding cake.

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Micki Boden

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“We wanted something that was gonna be fun, that was gonna be memorable for people,” Boden said.

They held their wedding at the Valley Relics Museum in Van Nuys, surrounded by San Fernando Valley memorabilia, and got a California favorite — an In-N-Out truck — to serve guests.

The search for a cake that fit 

But when it came to the wedding cake, the couple struggled to find something suitable. Neither Boden nor Stollman liked frosting, and traditional wedding cakes didn’t excite them.

“We explored the more traditional tiered cake setup, and it just wasn’t meshing well,” Boden said.

Boden kept returning to the coffee cake she ate throughout her years in public school. Los Angeles Unified School District had published its official recipe online, but she wasn’t confident she could bake it herself. So she reached out to the district to ask for help.

The Stollman's wedding cake, decorated by the chef at Mulholland Middle School in Lake Balboa, sits in a pastry box.

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Micki Boden

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How LAUSD made it happen 

Thomas Cohen, a public relations representative at the district, and Manish Singh, the director of food services, arranged for a chef at Mulholland Middle School in Lake Balboa to prepare the wedding cake. The chef also shaped part of the cake into a heart just for the couple.

Singh said the district doesn’t take cake orders from the public — but made this exception.

“We were doing it just to make one of our Angelenos, an ex-LAUSD student, make her special day even more special,” Singh said.

For the bride, it was the icing on her big day.

“I think it’s all just part of being an L.A. student,” she said. “The fact that we have these amazing memories from childhood, I think it’s just so meaningful for a lot of people.”

People may have been getting high off cannabis earlier than previously thought — at least 2,800 years ago, a new study suggests.

Archaeologists who led a dig at a monumental tomb in Siberia said they turned up evidence of the earliest known use of cannabis for psychoactive purposes.

The findings point to cannabis consumption at least 300 years earlier than previously known use in neighboring China.

Ancient drug use has long intrigued scholars. The Greek historian Herodotus wrote about inhabitants of Central Asia smoking cannabis around 440 B.C., and recent archaeologists have found the seeds in tombs across its highlands.

The team from Germany, Russia, Sweden and Switzerland said analysis of hair in the royal tomb where cannabis seeds turned up sheds new light on the plant’s role in ancient societies.

“It’s extremely rare that we have both preserved plant parts and human soft tissue with the active compounds in it in the same context,” said co-author Gino Caspari, an archaeologist at the University of Bern.

It’s not clear whether the cannabis was consumed through inhalation or ingestion, he said.

The dig took place starting in 2017 at a large burial mound at the Tunnug 1 site in the Uyuk Valley of southern Siberia, home to one of the earliest monumental tombs showing material culture of the Scythians — ancient nomads who migrated from Central Asia to southern Russia and Ukraine.

The team, deployed “essentially out in the middle of nowhere,” lived in tents for months and faced a spring-to-autumn season that variously featured swamps, snowstorms, frosts and swarms of mosquitoes. Herds of horses ran freely across the grassy steppe.

Larger artifacts on the site include weapons in the burials, horse gear and animal-style motifs. But the team “struck gold” as it also found tiny black spots that turned out to be cannabis seeds along with preserved human hair, Caspari said.

“It’s only so often as an archaeologist that you do get to drug test a person that’s been dead for almost 3,000 years,” he said.

Radiocarbon dating on some of the more than 1,000 seeds helped establish the time of origin, and “they are not there by accident” but deposited within the tomb, suggesting that the plant material had significance in the community, he said.

Results were published Thursday in the journal Science.

Not all independent experts were convinced.

The hair analysis “is scientifically weak” and there’s not enough evidence to tell whether cannabis was used, wrote Volker Auwaerter, head of the forensic toxicology section at the University Medical Center in Freiburg, Germany, in an email.

“For a central part of the study, the article falls far short of what would have been possible,” Auwaerter said. “This matters because the hair data carry the abstract’s main claims (cannabis consumption and use for its psychoactive properties).”

Today, scholars don’t consider ancient accounts trustworthy without corroborating evidence. Because the cannabis plant has other uses — seeds are pressed for oil and fibers used for cloth — their presence alone doesn’t confirm drug use.

Auwaerter, who was not part of the study, said the data didn’t distinguish consumption from external exposure — in other words, the hair could have picked up traces of weed simply by being buried together with it. He said a lab test involving forensic toxicology expertise would have been advisable and easy to arrange.

But Elisa Guerra Doce of the University of Valladolid in Spain, who has written about use of consciousness-altering substances in European prehistory, said toxicological hair analysis was not new in archaeology and has been used to identify consumption of psychoactive substances. She was not involved in the study.

In an email, she credited the authors for showing, through their methodology, that “cannabis was not merely deposited as a funerary offering but was actually consumed by individuals associated with the burial rite.”

A California appeals court has found that “ER” and “The Pitt” have enough similarity that a lawsuit brought by the widow and estate of “ER” creator Michael Crichton alleging “The Pitt” is an unauthorized reboot can move forward.

A three-judge panel from California’s 2nd District Court of Appeal ruled unanimously on Wednesday that the trial court judge was correct to reject a motion to throw out the case from “The Pitt” production company Warner Bros. Television, which also produced “ER.” But the judges dismissed Noah Wyle — the star of both shows and a producer on “The Pitt” — as a defendant along with two other producers who worked on both series.

The lawsuit is a clash between the makers of multiple Emmy-winning TV series that were each among the most important and acclaimed shows of their eras.

Crichton, the author of “Jurassic Park” and many other novels that became hit movies and TV shows, wrote the pilot script for “ER,” the NBC show about a Chicago emergency room that redefined the medical drama genre and drew tens of millions of weekly viewers in its run from 1994 to 2009.

The lawsuit brought by Sherri Crichton was filed two years ago, before a single episode of “The Pitt” had aired. The HBO Max series that shows a real-time day in the life of a Pittsburgh emergency department has since become perhaps the most lauded series in television, winning two Emmys for best drama for its first two seasons and two best actor Emmys for Wyle.

Along with more technical legal issues, the judges had to decide whether the shows had at least the minimal similarity that would give the lawsuit enough merit to move forward. Their decision applies only to this early legal challenge and they did not rule on whether the plaintiffs had proved the “The Pitt” is derivative of “ER.”

The court agreed with the plaintiff that “both shows provide commentaries on the healthcare system; they focus specifically on the emergency room and the difficult conditions under which the medical staff operates. Both shows take place, with little exception, in the emergency room, as opposed to other medical shows which track patients as they move out of the emergency room, or indeed never enter it.”

The opinion also said that both feature “very fast pacing, and reactions to multiple overlapping crises. The fast-paced dialogue is (to a layperson) frequently incomprehensible shorthand and jargon, lending an air of immediacy and accuracy.”

Warner Bros. Television said in a statement that “WBTV continues to maintain that ‘The Pitt’ is an entirely original series and that the claims against it are without merit. Nothing in the Court of Appeal’s decision establishes otherwise, and WBTV looks forward to defending its position as the case proceeds.”

The defendants argued in legal filings that the shows have “generic similarities” that would exist in “any dramatic story” that features “overworked doctors and staff.”

The panel also unanimously dismissed as defendants Wyle, John Wells, who created “The Pitt” and worked on “ER,” and R. Scott Gemmill, a “Pitt” executive producer who also worked on both shows. The judges found there was no evidence the three men knew the provisions of the Crichton contract that the lawsuit alleges they interfered with.

Sherri Crichton’s lawsuit alleges “The Pitt” is a rebranded version of an unauthorized “ER” reboot that she had rejected.

Her husband had secured a coveted “frozen rights” provision in his contract for the series, prohibiting Warner Bros. from proceeding with any sequels, remakes, spinoffs or other productions derived from “ER” without Crichton’s consent, or his estate’s consent after his death from cancer in 2008.

After the production company could not reach an agreement with Sherri Crichton over a proposed “ER” reboot, the TV studio proceeded to develop and produce a series based on the same premise without permission, the lawsuit alleges.

The U.S. Department of Justice on Friday moved to dismiss its own lawsuit that sought to stop California from counting roughly 20,000 ballots it alleged went to noncitizens until their immigration status could be verified.

The request to dismiss the case comes days after Republicans’ significant losses in the midterm elections and about a week before a scheduled hearing where a special master was slated to evaluate the accuracy of the list. California officials have previously said the list is out of date and includes legitimate voters — a sentiment that the federal judge presiding over the case echoed in his blistering order denying the federal government’s request.

The case was at the forefront of President Donald Trump’s administration’s effort to assert control over state-run elections across the country, which Trump has said are rife with illegal voting without providing evidence.

The Department of Justice remains enmeshed in litigation with multiple immigrant and voting rights groups seeking to limit its use of the list of what is says are suspected noncitizens. Another controversial suit it filed in Alaska at Trump’s direction before the election to block the victory of the Democrat in that state’s Senate race was swiftly dismissed by a federal judge. The administration is appealing that ruling but has yet to file a full brief at the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.

California had processed roughly 9 million ballots as of early Friday, with nearly 5 million still left to be counted, according to state election officials. The motion to dismiss the lawsuit said that, by the time of the upcoming hearing, the state will have already irreparably “commingled the challenged ballots with lawful ones.”

“The relief the United States sought and needed is no longer available—rendering voluntary dismissal necessary,” the motion said.

Bill Essayli, the top federal prosecutor in Los Angeles, previously argued in court that the lawsuit would be irrelevant after election day, because there would be no way to sequester the ones allegedly belonging to noncitizens. The lawsuit was filed in mid-October, when ballots had been sent to all of the state’s 23 million registered voters, and after hundreds of thousands of ballots were already processed. Once a ballot is processed, it is completely anonymized.

Essayli said at the time the lawsuit was filed that his goal was to “safeguard the integrity of the election so it doesn’t have an effect on the upcoming election.”

“We want to stop the illegal voting. We don’t want to chase it later,” he said outside of court the week before the election.

California prosecutors in recent weeks have arrested over 30 noncitizens who are accused of illegally registering to vote. Some who were arrested were also accused of voting in previous elections. Elections clerks around California in the week before the election were sent subpoenas to testify before grand juries slated to convene in November. It’s not clear who is being criminally charged in those cases, but the department does not typically subpoena people whom it regards as targets of a criminal investigation to appear before a grand jury.

U.S. District Judge David O. Carter appointed the special master in late October, shortly after allowing California to proceed with elections as planned. Carter, who was appointed by former President Bill Clinton, argued in his blistering order that separating ballots at that late stage would risk disenfranchising citizens and warned it would “wreak havoc” on the midterm elections.

The special master would have also considered whether or not California election officials did in fact have a mechanism for separating the ballots.