The Brief

The legendary artist Ed Ruscha still has the aura of the coolest guy in the room. The press preview for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s mammoth new retrospective ED RUSCHA/NOW THEN (now on view through Oct. 6) was packed with typically jaded journalists who looked — for once — actually excited to be viewing the 250+ works that span his seven-decade career.

When he emerged, still handsome, lean, and laconic at 86, for a conversation with LACMA director Michael Govan, the press had the anticipatory reverence of a tourist spotting a movie star for the first time.

His backstory

To many people, Ed Ruscha, the pioneer of West Coast pop art who still works most days at his studio in Culver City, has created art that IS Los Angeles — deadpan, sardonic, yet somehow poignant, with its stark, distilled word play and elevation of banal Americana into high art.

And just like many an Angeleno, Ruscha’s story started somewhere else. He was born Edward Joseph Ruscha IV in Omaha, Nebraska. His father worked as an auditor, while his mother encouraged her son’s artistic ambitions. Initially slated for a life in advertising or commercial work, in 1956 he decided to head West to study at the Chouinard Art Institute (now CalArts) by way of the iconic slice of midcentury Americana known as Route 66.

“At that time,” he once said, “the East Coast was starched clothing and heating oil, while the West Coast was flexing biceps and health. This made the choice relatively easy. Didn’t all Oakies with mattresses on their cars go West, anyway?”

Los Angeles was perfect for an artist like Ruscha. "Los Angeles was big, clean, underpopulated and comparatively unscrutinized then,” author James Ellroy writes in Ed Ruscha: Fifty Years of Painting. “It was fresh bait for artists susceptible to newness and eager to experiment with form.”

It also had a sort of ever-changing glamour and modernism that interested and inspired the observant Ruscha.

“I seemed to be drawn by the most stereotyped concepts of Los Angeles, such as cars, suntans, palm trees, swimming pools, strips of celluloid with perforations; even the word 'sunset' had glamour,” he told Alexandra Schwartz, author of Ed Ruscha’s Los Angeles. “West was hot. East was cold. This was new life. … This city simply had a good story for itself, that’s all.”

Ed Ruscha, "Hollywood," 1968, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Museum Acquisition Fund.

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photo © Museum Associates/LACMA

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Ruscha's big break

After graduating from Chouinard in 1960, Ruscha’s big break came when he had his first solo show at the revolutionary Ferus Gallery in 1963. Founded by Walter and Shirley Hopps and for years under the direction of art dealer Irving Blum, the gallery on La Cienega Boulevard. would showcase a fraternity of emerging, hip West Coast artists including Robert Irwin, Walter Berman, and Larry Bell. They also showed Andy Warhol’s famed 32 Campbell’s Soup Cans.

Actor Dennis Hopper was the first person to buy a big-ticket work from Ruscha, a painting of a Standard Gas Station. That same year, LACMA was the first museum to purchase a Ruscha, when they bought Actual Size — an iconic painting featuring what looks like a flying can of SPAM. The museum now has over 500 works by Ruscha.

Ed Ruscha, "Standard Station," 1966, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Museum Acquisition Fund

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Museum Associates/LACMA

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Ed Ruscha, "Actual Size", 1962, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, anonymous gift through the Contemporary Art Council

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Museum Associates/LACMA

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But in typically cheeky Ruscha fashion, he would poke fun at the very L.A. institutions who championed him. In 1965, the controversial new LACMA campus opened on Wilshire Boulevard (it was torn down in 2020). So what a thrill to hear him tell Govan, at LACMA itself, why he decided to paint his famous piece Los Angeles County Museum of Art on Fire, which he finished in 1968 (on loan from the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C., it is a standout of the current exhibit).

It all started when he took a 45-minute helicopter ride above the city. “I took some Polaroid pictures of the museum from the air, and it started from there,” he told Govan. “I forget at what point I decided that it was going to be on fire… Maybe it was that time when I thought the County Museum was an authority figure …but my intention [was that] the left-hand side of the painting and the right-hand side of the painting were at odds with one another, and the left-hand side was the furious fire going on, and the right-hand side would almost put you to sleep.”

Ed Ruscha, "Los Angeles County Museum of Art on Fire," 1965-1968, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; gift of Joseph Helman, 1972.

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Paul Ruscha

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A master self-promoter, he even sent out telegram invitations to view it, noting to bring a fire extinguisher. “That was the Barnum and Bailey part of it,” Ruscha noted slyly.

He would similarly poke the establishment when the Library of Congress refused to accept a copy of his photography folio Twentysix Gasoline Stations by taking out an advertisement in the influential magazine Artforum highlighting the rejection. “I took that as a badge of honor,” he deadpanned.

How L.A. inspired him

Though early in his career Ruscha would downplay his association with Los Angeles (and still does with Hollywood per se), its geography and its façade inspired him. In his famous books like Some Los Angeles Apartments and Thirtyfour Parking Lots, he documented the landscape of an urban metropolis. “One book was kind of a lightning rod to the next,” he told Govan.

Then there is the 25-foot accordion book Every Building on the Sunset Strip (1966), created by Ruscha riding in his pickup truck in the early morning hours to photograph every building and empty lot of the famed road. He and his brother, Paul Ruscha, continue to document the Strip, and have photographed many other legendary L.A. roads including Hollywood Boulevard, Melrose Avenue, and the Pacific Coast Highway.

As Schwartz notes, these books came along as L.A. was gaining status both in the art world and in urban studies. “The moment when Ruscha began making his architectural books coincided with the birth of a spate of ‘Los Angeles Studies,’ that analyzed the history, structure and societal impact of the postwar, highway-based city,” she writes.

Through Hopper and other friends, Ruscha also became friendly with the “New Hollywood” of the late 1960s and 70s, and shared their cynical attitude towards the business that makes L.A. tick. Paintings of the 20th Century Fox logo can be seen as commentary on the death of the studio system, word-based paintings like Another Hollywood Dream Bubble Popped and Hollywood is a Verb speak for themselves.

Ed Ruscha, "Large Trademark with Eight Spotlights," 1962, Whitney Museum of American Art

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Paul Ruscha

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His ominous paintings of the Hollywood Sign, in smoggy skies or from behind, also express his disdain for the dream factory.

“The idea of Hollywood has lots of meanings and one — to me — is this image of something fake up here being held up with sticks,” he once said, per Schwartz, in his typically elusive fashion. “That to me had more meaning with the term ‘Hollywood’ than the other usual associations … I don’t even think it should stay; it doesn’t even mean ‘landmark’ to me. It might as well fall down. That’s more Hollywood — to have it fall down or be removed. But, in the end, it’s more Hollywood to put it back up.”

Despite his studied indifference, he also adopted a persona worthy of a ‘60s’ counterculture icon, dating model Lauren Hutton, actor Samantha Eggar, Diane Keaton and the author and it-girl Eve Babitz, the queen of Los Angeles cool.

“We went to Musso and Frank’s. That was Eve’s favorite spot and mine too. And we would go to openings, go to Barney’s Beanery, places that were hot at the time,” he told the Los Angeles Times.

Ruscha continues to embrace change

Throughout the decades, as L.A. has rapidly changed and gone from a looked-down-upon artistic backwater to an art world powerhouse, Ruscha has continued to embrace, chronicle and comment on its evolution. "I like the idea that things are changing," he once told The Wall Street Journal. "That's not always negative."

And maybe that’s why Ruscha is so beloved by Angelenos — we often hate L.A., we complain, but it has an elusive pull and lore that we just can’t help but love. But Ruscha’s reach has expanded far beyond the borders of L.A. County — he has become a chronicler of Americana, who the New Yorker calls the bard of a “calmly collapsing America,” and the New York Times calls the “deadpan laureate of American Art.”

Ed Ruscha, "Our Flag," 2017, Jimmy Iovine Revocable Trust, Collection Jimmy Iovine

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Paul Ruscha

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Nonpolitical for most of his career, Ruscha has increasingly produced art that can be seen as an attack on fascist thought and misinformation. Indeed, the show charts his career from now to the present day, and one sees the evolution of both a man, a city, and a nation. “Looking in the rearview mirror, it's an avalanche of things from my past that are kind of jarring in a way,” he told Govan. “But I guess they add up … And I’m not over yet.”

How to visit

Location: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd. Los Angeles
Exhibit: April 7 through Oct. 6
More details and hours: ED RUSCHA / NOW THEN

This story first appeared on Long Beach Post.

After 32 years in uniform and a career punctuated by declining murders, spiking traffic deaths and challenges retaining officers, Long Beach Police Chief Wally Hebeish announced Wednesday that he will retire in December.

Hebeish, who began his career in 1994 with the Orange County Sheriff’s Department and joined the Long Beach Police Department a year later, stepped into the limelight in 2021 when he replaced then-Chief Robert Luna, who went on to become the LA County Sheriff.

Hebeish declined a request to comment on Wednesday. In a characteristically terse and formal statement, he thanked the department that he described leading through “some of the most challenging times we have faced in modern law enforcement.”

In a separate statement sent by department spokesperson Allison Gallagher, Hebeish said he had been “contemplating and planning my retirement for some time,” and wanted to see through the department’s newest round of academy cadets and a tough budget year before leaving. “It’s been a rewarding [five] years as Chief and I’m proud of everything the Department has accomplished,” the statement said.

A spokesperson for Mayor Rex Richardson did not respond to a request for comment. In a social media post Wednesday, Richardson praised Hebeish, saying his legacy is one of “leadership, progress, and a deep commitment to our community and the men and women who serve it.”

“Wally Hebeish has always been a public servant focused on keeping people safe and a person of high integrity,” said Rep. Robert Garcia, who served as mayor when Hebeish first became chief. “Long Beach has been lucky to have had him as Chief, and I’m thankful to have worked with him.”

City Manager Tom Modica said the outgoing chief led the department through a “transformative period in modern policing” and did so with “integrity, compassion and an unwavering commitment” to the public. “We thank Chief Hebeish for his decades of public service and wish him the best in his retirement,” Modica said. “As we begin the search for our next Chief of Police, we will build on the strong foundation he leaves behind.”

Modica said the city plans to hire a recruitment firm in the next two weeks to begin a national search he hopes to finish by early next year. Candidates will be screened through the city’s human resources department and undergo interviews with a community panel, a technical panel and city department directors. The final choice will ultimately be made by Modica.

The city manager will also be creating a “community input process;” the city will announce something in the next couple of weeks.

Gerrit DeJongh of the Long Beach Police Officers Association said the union wants a chief with experience at a department of similar size who is “level-headed and fair-minded.”

The union supports a nationwide search, he said, but believes the department has “phenomenal internal candidates as well.” “If the city manager wants to have a discussion or wants the [union’s] opinion on it, I’d be happy to offer it,” DeJongh added.

Born in Cairo and raised in North Long Beach, Hebeish became the city’s first Arab American and Muslim to lead the department. After joining in 1995, he worked in criminal intelligence, investigations, patrol and internal affairs, and later served as chief of staff, deputy chief of the Support and Patrol bureaus and assistant chief, a post he took in 2019.

He became acting chief in 2021 while Luna, then the chief, recovered after being struck by a truck while crossing a street. Hebeish was appointed to the top job in December of that year.

Commanding a department of 800 sworn officers and another 1,200 employees, Hebeish took over the post amid intense pressure on police departments nationwide following the murder of George Floyd in 2020. Meanwhile, the instability of the pandemic led to a spike in murders around the country. Like many departments, Long Beach grappled with new expectations of its police leaders and a need to rebuild public trust against challenges to retain officers.

In Long Beach, it was a balancing act with some success. Hebeish touts a citywide decline in murders, particularly fatal shootings, during his tenure. He said the city saw year-over-year reductions in shootings and, in 2025, its first recorded year without an officer-involved shooting.

He credited a High Crime Focus Team, created in 2024, which directs patrols to the places where violent crime, illegal firearms and quality-of-life complaints occur most often, with helping to reduce gun violence. He also lobbied for funding for a Real Time Crime Center, established a program for drones that back up police, launched a public online crime dashboard and instituted a yearly accountability report.

City officials and the department also point to its largest academy class on record, the opening of a new police academy, creation of a Neighborhood Safety Bike Team and expansion of its team that handles nonemergency calls.

DeJongh is especially proud of the department’s Wellness Division and its Community Services Bureau, which Hebeish helped lead while assistant chief. The program, he explained, watches for traumatic officer-involved incidents and refers them to counseling. It came about shortly after a string of officer suicides rocked the department.

“I cannot help but to think or believe that the experiences and the trauma they experienced on this job played into their decision to take their own lives,” he said. “You can only help but wonder, you know, could we even save just one of them if we had something like this in place at the time?”

But Hebeish leaves a department that has long suffered high vacancy rates, which has slowed response times. An August 2024 analysis of city data by the Post found 155 vacancies, about one in five officers. For all but the highest-priority calls, officers were taking more than 20 minutes longer to respond than they had three years earlier, the analysis found.

While dealing with a shortage of officers, the department announced it would stop responding to many minor noninjury crashes to focus on priority calls. Questions remain over how the department has handled traffic safety enforcement, as the city recorded 53 fatal traffic collisions in 2025 — the most in over a decade and surpassing the city’s homicide count that year.

Fatalities continue to climb into 2026, reaching more than 40 traffic deaths as of mid-October.

Public trust in the city police department continues to be an issue, as well, as criticisms are regularly slung at the department during city council meetings over the department’s handling of homelessness and the federal immigration raids that have continued throughout Long Beach over the past year.

The city’s Office of Police Oversight, established in 2022, has also urged the department to improve how it deals with the families of those killed by police and witnesses to shootings, following the 2024 killing of Brandon Boyd. The oversight commission has previously questioned whether internal investigations are handled in a timely manner and asked the department to review policies for when officers respond to domestic violence calls.

Countries are not doing enough to cut emissions that cause climate change, according to a new report from United Nations scientists. And the United States is a big part of the problem.

The U.S. sticks out as the only major economy where planet-warming pollution increased dramatically last year, the report notes.

Among the world's largest emitters of greenhouse gases, the U.S. was tied last year with Russia for the most emissions per capita. China emits significantly more total greenhouse gases each year than the U.S., but has more than four times the population.

Overall, global emissions were basically the same last year as they were the previous year.

U.S. emissions grew because of increased electricity demand, as well as Trump administration policies that support the burning of fossil fuels. The Trump administration has ordered coal-fired power plants in the U.S. to stay open longer than planned, rolled back fuel-efficiency standards for vehicles and ended tax credits for solar and wind projects.

Those policies have made the U.S. an outlier when it comes to escalating greenhouse gas emissions, says Inger Andersen, the executive director of the U.N. Environment Programme.

"Right now, everybody is scrambling a little bit regarding energy security," Andersen says, pointing to global oil and gas disruptions stemming from the wars in Ukraine and Iran.

Despite the geopolitical upheaval, "several G20 members have shown sustained emissions reduction," she notes.

That includes the European Union, which has invested heavily in energy-efficient appliances and renewable electricity sources such as wind and solar, partly in reaction to Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

The U.S. is pulling out of U.N. climate work

The Trump administration has withdrawn from the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement, and is working to remove the U.S. from all U.N. climate work, arguing the international system imposes unfair burdens on Americans. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency now says greenhouse gases do not pose a threat to human health and welfare, reversing its previous position.

The new report includes a statement from the U.S. government, saying the U.S. "does not endorse or agree with its analysis or conclusions, and has not provided comments to this report." The U.S. State Department did not respond to NPR's questions.

The new report, which is compiled annually by an international group of scientists, comes less than a month before global climate talks kick off in Turkey. World leaders will gather to discuss how to speed investments in clean energy and how to pay for the costs of dealing with climate change. The Trump administration will not participate in those talks.

Still, whether or not American leaders formally participate in international climate efforts, the effects of America's reliance on oil, gas and coal are being felt around the world, the U.N. warns. Burning fossil fuels releases carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, trapping extra heat that warms the entire planet. The effects of all that pollution are felt globally.

The Earth is about 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 degrees Celsius) warmer on average than it was in the mid-1800s, according to the World Meteorological Organization. That warming is driving widespread disasters, from deadly heat waves and floods to more intense storms and wildfires.

"All countries, especially the big emitters, must do more," says U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres. "Every fraction of a degree matters."

The Earth is on track for 5 degrees Fahrenheit of warming this century

Right now, the planet is on track for upwards of 5 degrees Fahrenheit (2.8 degrees Celsius) of warming this century, which would cause catastrophic impacts, such as massive sea level rise and the mass extinction of plants and animals, the report warns.

The U.N. Paris Climate agreement sets a goal of limiting warming to well below 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit (2 degrees Celsius), in the hopes of avoiding such cataclysms.

This is the first year the annual report has acknowledged that even lower targets are now out of reach. However, it finds it is still possible to keep warming below 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, if global greenhouse gas emissions fall by about 25% in the next decade.

But countries are currently lagging far behind that goal.

Under the Paris agreement, about two thirds of countries have submitted formal, up-to-date plans for cutting their greenhouse gas emissions. If they all follow through on those plans, it would reduce emissions by about 15% in the next decade — far less than the 25% needed.

Copyright 2026 NPR

At Chopin Noodle House in Monterey Park's Atlantic Times Square, the dining room is small. But there's still room for a baby grand piano.

If you’re lucky, you might catch owner Zi Yang playing for customers as they work through bowls of Lanzhou beef noodle soup. A few feet away, cooks pull a fresh batch of noodles by hand, made to each diner’s preferred thickness.

The traditional beef noodle soup at Chopin Noodle House in Monterey Park comes with clear broth, chili oil, sliced beef, leeks, and cilantro.

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Gab Chabrán

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LAist

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Noodles are pulled by hand to order at Chopin Noodle House.

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Gab Chabrán

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LAist

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Pianists turned chefs 

Yang and his wife, Mimi Song, are both former piano teachers who met through music.

After moving from China to the U.S., they hoped to make a living teaching piano, but it didn’t pay the bills. So they turned to another love: noodles.

Co-founders Mimi Song (left) and Zi Yang, both former piano teachers, have grown Chopin Noodle House to five locations.

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Courtesy Chopin Noodle House

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The couple opened the first Chopin Noodle House in Catonsville, Maryland, in 2023. They later expanded to Southern California, starting in Chino, and opened in Monterey Park in March. The chain now has five locations in Maryland, Virginia and Southern California.

When I visited, Yang stepped out from behind the counter, sat down at the baby grand and played Frédéric Chopin’s Waltz in C-sharp minor, its soft, rolling melody filling the small dining room. A group of diners in the corner looked up from their bowls of noodles, watched and cheered when he finished.

The restaurant name comes from the Polish composer. “We both love Chopin,” Yang said.

The Lanzhou connection

Yang is from Lanzhou, the capital of Gansu province in northwest China, and the birthplace of the signature beef noodle soup.

“I was born in Lanzhou, a city along China’s ancient Silk Road,” he writes on the restaurant’s website. “Every morning, the streets fill with the scent of beef broth and the rhythm of pulled noodles slapping the counter.”

“Maybe 80% of the people eat it for breakfast or lunch,” he told me.

Before opening the restaurant, he returned to China for a crash course in its creation.

“I went back to learn how to pull the noodles and how to make the very delicious beef noodle soup,” he said.

The piano started as a practical idea.

“We saw that restaurant life would be so boring, so we decided to put a piano in our restaurant. So sometimes if there’s no customer, we can practice the piano,” Yang said.

What’s in the bowl

The most popular order is the traditional beef noodle soup ($14.99). It's made from beef bones and beef shank.

Diners choose from eight noodle styles, from extra-thin to extra-wide, plus knife-sliced and gluten-free rice noodles. The bowl follows what the restaurant calls Lanzhou’s five signature elements: clear beef broth, white radish, red chili oil, green cilantro and leek, as well as golden hand-pulled noodles topped with thinly sliced beef.

For sipping alongside the noodles, order the eight treasures tea, known in Lanzhou as san pao tai. It’s served in a lidded bowl called a gaiwan and brewed with green tea, dried red dates, goji berries, longan, raisins, rose petals, chrysanthemum and rock sugar. You use the lid to keep the fruit and leaves in place as you drink. It’s naturally sweet, a nice counterpoint to the chili oil.

An open bench

Anyone who visits is welcome to play the piano. Yang said they’ve had everyone from kids learning to play to professional musicians, including members of the San Gabriel Valley Symphony.

Some of the players are so good that Yang admits he’s now a little shy about taking his turn.

“I’m afraid to play because they are so good,” he said.

Longer droughts, more extreme heat, greater wildfire risk and more beach erosion: A new state-commissioned report finds that climate change is likely to reshape the Southern California landscape and way of life.

The study, which comes as part of California’s fifth statewide climate change assessment, includes more detailed models than previous reports.

“What we want to highlight with this report is not how doom and gloom everything is, but just to look at climate change in the L.A. area as something that is inevitable, but which we can adapt to, and in particular, protect the most vulnerable,” said UCLA climate researcher Jesse Norris, the lead author of the report focused on Los Angeles.

Sea level rise and beach erosion

If the recent stories of beach and coastline erosion have you concerned, buckle up. The report notes local coastal erosion rates are expected to triple by 2050.

Citing past research, the authors also note that coastal flooding is expected to quickly intensify in the mid-2030s and become a yearly event by the mid-21st century.

Between one-third and two-thirds of the region’s beaches are expected to be lost in the next 75 years.

Researchers found that in L.A. County, about 1,700 housing units are at risk of being permanently inundated. But if sea levels rise by 3.3 feet — which is possible by 2100 — 9,000 units would be at risk of being permanently flooded.

And if sea levels rise by 6.6 feet, which researchers described as an “extreme” scenario, flooding could be widespread during a 100-year wave event. In this scenario, large swaths of urban L.A. and Orange counties could be flooded, though it’s important to note the projections don’t account for any future infrastructure that may be built.

Extreme heat

Temperatures are expected to rise 4 degrees Fahrenheit between 2041 and 2070 — adding to the 4 degrees of warming that have already happened since 1900.

Researchers say those effects are more pronounced in inland areas, which are also projected to see more days of extreme heat. The average hottest day of the year is expected to rise to 115 degrees by midcentury.

Microclimates play a role

Most of the hazards predicted in the report will be familiar to Southern Californians, even as the effects are expected to intensify and become more common during climate change.

“It was quite striking to see how much more vulnerable certain locations are than others to different climate hazards,” Norris said. “In particular, the more inland areas being far more vulnerable to the increase in extreme heat, mountain communities being far more vulnerable to the impacts of extreme rain and flooding as well as reduced snowpack, and coastal areas being obviously far more vulnerable to the impacts of rising seas.”

Planning

Norris stressed that planning for these effects can be undertaken now. One example: increasing tree cover to mitigate heat.

“A lot of inland cities are thinking very seriously about increasing their tree canopies, increasing the ability for people to have shade as they're going about their business,” Norris said.

Norris highlighted the importance of protecting the most vulnerable in these situations, including people experiencing homelessness and those who work outdoors, and ensuring access to air conditioning and cooling centers.

Norris also said continuing and improving initiatives like active wildfire management, water management and coastal adaptation will be vital in the years to come.