The Brief

Josh Groban reminded audiences of his musical — and comedic — skills when he performed at this year’s Oscars with the Los Angeles Master Chorale, as host Conan O’Brien acted out how ungracious he would be if he won an Oscar himself.

While the “I Won” performance was operatic, if you were wondering if it was a nod to actor Timothée Chalamet’s recent dismissive comments about the cultural relevance of ballet and opera, Groban says it was decided on before those remarks went viral.

“We were ready to do that regardless,” Groban told LAist, adding, “I think that having these moments that were like a tip of a hat, not so much like in the face of Chalamet, but more like in the direction of just supporting these arts and showing these arts on a popular culture stage, I think was great.”

Backstage at the Oscars, Groban said he talked to ballet dancer Misty Copeland, who performed later in the show and whom he counts as a friend.

“She's in her incredible costume that she had this historical, wonderful outfit that she wore for her Sinners piece,” Groban recalled. “And I'm in this, you know, medieval outfit, and I just gave her a hug. And I'm just like, ‘How lucky are we that this is our job?’ Like, this is the best that we get to do this. So wonderful that we got to kind of — her more than me — loosely rep those worlds.”

While Groban is no stranger to awards shows, either as a performer or nominee — he has multiple Grammy, Tony and Emmy nominations and almost one for an Oscar (“Believe,” the song he performed for The Polar Express, was nominated for best original song, but only songwriters are credited in the category) — he’s so far never won.

It’s something that he and his fellow 2018 Tonys co-host Sara Bareilles poked fun at with a musical number dedicated to “the people who lose!” And were he to win now, Groban joked,  “I would probably, at this point, 25 years in, react exactly the way Conan did.”

A new album and ‘a call to keep us where the light is’

The idea for Groban’s new album was inspired in part by another performance of his last year, for AFI’s tribute to director Francis Ford Coppola.

Coppola asked Groban to perform “Brucia la Terra,” the Sicilian ballad from The Godfather Part III, for the event, and it’s now one of the songs included on Cinematic, out May 8.

“To be looking out at many of my cinematic heroes and just to kind of be reminded of the incredible brilliance of that score, that put a spark in my head of like, ‘Oh, these songs are wonderful and I love singing them,’” he said.

The first song Groban has released from the album is “Can You Feel the Love Tonight?” from The Lion King, featuring the Gay Men’s Chorus of Los Angeles.

That song, Groban said, “which on the face of it is a beautiful hit Disney song, in today's climate, we were really thinking about uplifting and how can we take some of these songs and really use them as a call to action, a call to keep us where the light is, a call to allyship.”

Groban says he felt such a strong connection to each of the songs on the album, from movies like Casablanca and Stand By Me, “that I knew I would sing my face off, I knew they'd be songs people would want to sing in the car, the surprise for me was the depth of the emotion that went into [them].”

“Moon River,” from Breakfast at Tiffany’s, was especially personal for Groban because it features his father, Jack Groban, playing a trumpet solo: “He played trumpet in college and gave it up for 45, 50 years, and I got him to dust it off,” Groban said.

And being able to have his dad play on a song of his “for the first time ever, was one of the most emotional days in the studio I've ever had.”

‘We need to be reminded of our humanity’

While Groban got his first “big break" at just 17 years old, singing with Celine Dion as a fill-in for Italian tenor Andrea Bocelli during the 1999 Grammy Awards rehearsals, what led up to it was his arts education at the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts (LACHSA).

As a shy kid who had a hard time making friends in school, Groban says seeing what his music teachers saw in him, “was so life affirming for me.” And it led him to found the Find Your Light Foundation, that supports K-12 arts education programs in schools.

“ At a time when our humanity is being tested more than ever,” Groban said, “we need to be reminded of our humanity through these programs. And especially our young people, learning about the beauty inside themselves and the beauty inside others through the arts, I can't think of a more vital time than now.”

Brad Thomas has been up since 6 a.m. on a Sunday — farmer's market first, then prep. By 2 p.m., he's back at the craftsman on 7th and Cherry, the home of his business partner, Clay Wood. The tablecloths go down. The gold cutlery comes out. By 6 p.m., the first of two seatings will fill the living room and front yard — 32 people across the night, all for a six-course dinner at $69 a head: hanger steak, crispy frites, a rotating dessert spread, much of it prepared over open flame in the backyard of the old craftsman.

This is Steak Freaks, and it is exactly the kind of food business that Long Beach just made legal.

Earlier this month, Long Beach became the 19th jurisdiction in California to authorize Micro-Enterprise Home Kitchen Operations — or MEHKOs — joining Riverside County and L.A. County and a growing statewide movement reshaping who can afford to start a food business.

What makes Long Beach different is that it's allowing renters to run these businesses from their homes. (Wood's house, for example, is a rental). In a city where 60% of residents rent and more than half of those renters are cost-burdened, these home kitchens aren't just a creative outlet. For many, they're an economic lifeline. And for those who find success, the program's own limits may push them toward the next step faster than they planned.

Guests dig into the hanger steak frites course during a Sunday dinner at Steak Freaks in Long Beach. The supper club seats 32 people across two seatings and has sold out every dinner since opening.

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Who's behind them

Prior to AB 626, the informal economy long existed in immigrant communities where neighbors sold plates, fed the block and cooked for whoever showed up. That changed in 2018 when the bill passed and gave it a legal pathway and a social media following.

A screenshot from CookConnect, the COOK Alliance's map of permitted MEHKO operators across California, shows the concentration of home kitchen businesses across Los Angeles and Riverside counties.

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According to the COOK Alliance, the nonprofit at the forefront of MEHKO adoption statewide, 79% of operators are people of color and 70% are women. The home-based model removes barriers that have historically kept certain communities out of the food business — no need for a commercial kitchen, massive upfront capital, or to be in two places at once.

Geraldine Gonzales works the wok at Lomo Fuego, where lomo saltado is cooked over an open flame in the backyard.

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It’s worked for Heidi Randolph, who didn't set out to run a restaurant. A couple of years ago, she was selling plates of Peruvian food to soccer players at Lakewood parks on weekends.

I visited Lomo Fuego in March and found families pulling up chairs, her brother working the wok over open flame and her mother pitching in between shifts at her day job. It's started with a handwritten chalkboard and a MEHKO permit posted to a bulletin board that Randolph had to find herself after the city told her it was impossible. What's changed since then tells you everything about both the promise and the limits of the program.

The hanger steak frites at Steak Freaks are finished tableside with a kitchen torch. The six-course dinner runs $69 a head out of a rental home in Long Beach.

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Brad Thomas of Steak Freaks came to it differently. A pastry chef who spent years alongside teams trained by Thomas Keller, Nancy Silverton, and Josiah Citrin, he moved to Long Beach from Texas three years ago and started leaving anonymous pastry deliveries on doorsteps across the city — Lover Boy Provisions, with a flirty note attached.

That's how he met Clay Wood, who owns Clayonfirst pottery studio in the East Village Arts District. When Long Beach passed its MEHKO ordinance, Steak Freaks was born. Every dinner has sold out.

The Steak Freaks menu and a welcome note from collaborating poet Vic Hurtado of Vessel Poetics, set out before service at the Long Beach supper club.

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The landlord question

The council's vote this past April came down to one sticking point: should operators who rent be required to notify their landlord? Councilmember Tunua Thrash-Ntuk, who pushed the motion forward, believed that notification should be voluntary. The COOK Alliance's Roya Bagheri backed that position for a practical reason — even informal landlord approval can evaporate once paperwork gets involved.

Wood's situation says it plainly: his landlord is a former neighbor who follows Steak Freaks on Instagram. No formal conversation has happened. "I make pottery here," Wood said, "and the stuff I do for my pottery business is way crazier than a couple of steaks in the backyard."

The ceiling

When I revisited Lomo Fuego recently, a sign outside announced scaled-back hours — two days a week, down from four. After a neighbor complained, the county health inspector paid a visit and told Randolph she was approaching the annual revenue cap of $110,442 in gross annual sales (a figure adjusted every year for inflation by the California Department of Public Health).

To stay under the cap, she’s opening only on weekends for the near future.

Heidi Randolph with her mother Fritz and brother Luis at Lomo Fuego, the Peruvian restaurant she runs out of her Lakewood home. Randolph is now scouting restaurant locations and pursuing an additional permit to sell at farmers markets.

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Randolph took the health department visit as a sign to move forward. She's actively scouting restaurant locations, and her daughter left her job at a local restaurant to cook alongside her full-time.

Randolph didn't see any of this coming — from the park to the backyard to her daughter cooking beside her, her mother finally getting a day off. The program did exactly what it was supposed to do. She just needs a bigger kitchen now.

"I hope in the future," she said, "people can say — this still tastes like food from home."

A couple who paid nearly $15,000 in monthly rent while displaced by the Eaton Fire are now taking their landlords to court, alleging they violated bans on price gouging in the wake of a disaster.

The lawsuit was filed Thursday in Los Angeles County Superior Court, during the same week the county is set to end its post-fire rent gouging protections.

Over the last 16 months, state prosecutors have filed a handful of criminal rent-gouging charges. But the couple’s lawyer, Josh Nuni with the People's Law Project, said to his knowledge this is the first civil rent gouging case filed by private citizens following the January 2025 fires.

“They want to get back the money that was taken from them, and they also want to make sure to send a message to others that this shouldn't be done to other families when they're in times of crisis,” Nuni said.

How the alleged rent gouging began

Candy Renick’s home in Altadena was left standing after the Eaton Fire, but it was severely smoke damaged. Until it could be professionally cleaned, it would remain uninhabitable.

Renick said when she started looking for temporary housing, she quickly realized thousands of other families were competing for the same listings.

“I started feeling pretty desperate, like I needed to move on something fast,” Renick said.

Less than two weeks after the fires, Renick and her daughter spotted a new Zillow listing for a three-bedroom home in Glassell Park. She said the landlords were asking for $12,990 per month on a one-year lease.

When Renick and her husband asked for a shorter, six-month lease, the owners agreed to a higher monthly rent of $14,938.50, she said.

“I was telling friends what we were paying and everybody was like, ‘Are you kidding? That is crazy,’” Renick recalled. “But we had to do it… We were just kind of desperate to get settled so that we could move on with our lives and move on with fixing our house.”

Candy Renick stands outside her family's home in Altadena.

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How rent gouging laws worked 

Once the Palisades and Eaton fires erupted on Jan. 7, 2025, state and local governments quickly passed emergency declarations that triggered price-gouging bans. These laws made it illegal for landlords to increase rents by more than 10% from pre-fire levels.

For properties that were not listed for rent before the fires, a different limit applied: Landlords offering furnished properties could not charge more than 165% of the area’s fair market rent, as determined by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

For the ZIP code where the Glassell Park property is located, the legal monthly limit for a furnished three-bedroom unit was $5,032.50. The Renicks paid nearly triple that amount.

A warning letter and a short text exchange

Shortly after moving in, the Renicks got a letter from the L.A. City Attorney’s Office, according to the lawsuit. It alerted the tenants and the landlord that the listing may have violated post-fire rent gouging bans.

The letter said if the landlords were violating the law, they should “immediately lower the rental rate” and “refund the tenant the overcharged amount plus 10 percent interest.”

According to the lawsuit, the Renicks texted a screenshot of this letter to their landlord, Catalina Chow, and she responded: “We did not increase rent due to the state of emergency.”

Her text went on to say, “I hope this does not apply to me. Thanks for sending anyway!”

When LAist called Chow to ask about the lawsuit, she picked up but said she was on another call and ended the conversation. LAist was later unable to reach her or Terrence Chow, another defendant named in the complaint.

LAist also contacted the City Attorney’s Office to ask why it did not pursue the case beyond the warning letter. No one from the office responded.

Why tenants are taking cases into their own hands

Tenant advocates have expressed disappointment over what they see as a lack of price gouging prosecution in the wake of the Palisades and Eaton fires.

By the one-year anniversary of the fires, a group called The Rent Brigade had found more than 18,000 listings that appeared to have broken the law. The group found that few criminal charges were ever filed, and laws that allowed private citizens to file their own cases and gave county departments the ability to fine landlords directly went largely unused.

Chelsea Kirk, a founding organizer of The Rent Brigade, said tenants like the Renicks are taking action on their own because governments failed.

“Tenants should never have been put in the position of having to enforce disaster protections themselves,” Kirk said. “After thousands of reports and virtually no meaningful action from the city attorney or county and state agencies, people have realized they can’t rely on government enforcement to protect them from exploitation.”

What the plaintiffs say they want

The Renicks returned to their Altadena home in November after it was professionally remediated. The complaint alleges they paid $95,758 more than what should have been legally allowed during their stay at the home in Glassell Park. The lawsuit asks the court to award damages, civil penalties and attorney’s fees.

Candy Renick said money was not the primary reason she and her husband decided to file the case. Any overpaid rent they manage to recover will largely go back to their insurance company, she said.

Instead, Renick said, she hopes the lawsuit sends a public message.

“People should not tolerate being overcharged for rent again, especially when they're in a very difficult situation,” she said. “And landlords need to know they can't take advantage of people in a crisis.”

A federal judge has declined to temporarily block President Trump's executive order that calls for restricting voting by mail.

The ruling released Thursday by U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols, a Trump nominee based in Washington, D.C., leaves in place — at least for now — an executive order on voting that tests the limits of the president's power under the Constitution. A separate, 2025 executive order on voting was halted by courts.

The latest executive order, issued March 31, calls for the Department of Homeland Security to work with the Social Security Administration to create lists of adult U.S. citizens in each state, and to send those lists to state election officials. It also calls for the U.S. Postal Service — a federal agency that's independent of a president's administration — to come up with lists of eligible voters and to only deliver mail-in ballots to people on those lists.

"The Court recognizes that the Postal Service may ultimately issue a final rule that directly affects Plaintiffs or their members, or that the Government may develop State Citizenship Lists that omit specific individuals due to particularized flaws. Plaintiffs may, of course, renew their motions if and when those future actions occur. Until then, however, Plaintiffs cannot show that preliminary injunctive relief is warranted," Nichols wrote about the decision not to block the order.

Nichols' ruling comes as another federal judge is preparing to issue a ruling in the coming weeks for a similar set of lawsuits based in Boston.

Since Trump signed the order, it's been unclear whether and how it would actually affect mail-in voting, which has been taking place for state primaries in this year's midterm election. In early May, the administration said in a court filing that federal agencies were still deliberating how to carry out the order. Acting U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche later told a Senate Appropriations subcommittee that the Justice Department is working with other agencies to "make sure" the order's goals are implemented.

Democrats, voting rights groups and almost two dozen states, plus Washington, D.C., have filed five lawsuits challenging the order.

They argue that Article I of the Constitution gives state legislatures and Congress — not the president — the power to set rules for federal elections. Their lawsuits also contend that Trump's order directs USPS to make rules about election mail that would overstep the mailing agency's authority.

Trump, who himself voted by mail in Florida in March, has said he issued the order to stop illegal voting by noncitizens in federal elections, which reviews and research have found to be incredibly rare. While there are voters across the partisan divide who rely on mail-in voting, more registered Democrats than Republicans say they voted by mail in the last national election in 2024.

The new court ruling on Trump's order comes out of the three lawsuits filed in federal court in D.C. A decision on a similar request to block provisions of the order may come out of the two Massachusetts-based lawsuits as soon as early June.

Edited by Benjamin Swasey
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