The Brief

Curled up on a small, white rectangle of fabric on the grass by a park bench in Paris, Italian swimmer Thomas Ceccon inadvertently took the internet by storm simply by sleeping outside. The moment, posted to social media on August 5 by a fellow Olympic athlete, came a week after Ceccon failed to qualify for the men’s 200-meter backstroke finals, despite having just won gold in the 100-meter event.

In an interview with an Italian broadcaster, Ceccon blamed his performance gap on subpar sleeping conditions in the Olympic Village — namely, heat. Last week, media speculation that the uncomfortable temperatures were also behind his alfresco nap stirred an already roiling pot of concerns around the impact of extreme weather on this year’s summer games. (The Italian Swimming Federation denied that Ceccon’s nap was related to conditions in the Olympic village.)

In the weeks leading up to the Paris Olympics, weather forecasters and athletes alike feared that the games could become the hottest on record, surpassing the 2021 Tokyo events, where high humidity and 90-degree-Fahrenheit days led 100 athletes to seek medical attention for heat illnesses; even more nonathletes followed suit. A punishing heat dome settled over Paris on July 29, lasting for four days and spiking temperatures to highs of 97 degrees F as the first week of the games were underway.

During the scorching weather, national teams rushed to keep their athletes in tip-top shape, renting air conditioners for their bedrooms in the Olympic Village and offering them ice vests. The Australian Olympic Committee even invested in state-of-the-art monitors to record on-the-ground temperature, radiation, humidity, and wind speed, resulting in personalized recommendations to help their athletes manage heat risks. For some outdoor sports, like tennis and soccer, new protocols for additional rest breaks were triggered as temperatures surpassed predetermined safety thresholds.

Climate change is driving up the frequency of extreme and deadly heat waves. Rings of Fire II, a report on Olympic heat released before this year’s games began on July 26, found that average summer temperatures in Paris have warmed by 3.1 degrees Celsius, or about 5.6 degrees F, since 1924, the last time the City of Light hosted the games.

“Yesterday, climate change crashed the Olympics,” said climatologist Friederike Otto of World Weather Attribution, an academic project that studies climate change impacts on meteorology, on July 31. “If the atmosphere wasn’t overloaded with emissions from burning fossil fuel, Paris would have been about 3 degrees C cooler and much safer for sport.”

Just a few degrees can make a big difference for athletes. In warm temperatures, the body is less able to shed the heat it generates, which can impact performance and health: A 2023 study of marathon and racewalking athletes found that a 2.7 degrees F increase in core body temperature could result in up to 20 percent slower performance times. And as the body tries to cool down, it sweats and dilates blood vessels. When these mechanisms are pushed too hard, they lead to dangerous health risks — such as dehydration, organ failure, and heart attacks. And the longer a heat wave drags on, the more deadly the impacts become.

Extreme heat affects a wide range of sports. The Rings of Fire report, a collaboration between the British Association for Sustainable Sport and the Australian climate advocacy group Frontrunners, documented stories from elite athletes across 15 sports on how extreme temperatures had impacted their careers and health. In the report, British swimmer Hector Pardoe said he was “practically paralytic” after a heat stroke that left him vomiting and motionless during a competition in Budapest. For Yusuke Suzuki, a Japanese racewalker, heatstroke was a torturous ordeal that took two years to recover from.

“Going forward, I don’t see this being any less of a problem,” said Mike Tipton, a human physiology researcher at the University of Portsmouth in the U.K. who contributed to the report. While Tipton is encouraged by the changes he sees taking place across sports to protect athletes and fans from extreme heat — such as water breaks and cooling stations — he also cautions against losing sight of the importance of mitigating the direct cause of climate change: humans burning fossil fuels.

The organizers of the Paris Olympics would seem to agree. In the years leading up to the games, the committee made unprecedented sustainability promises like slashing the greenhouse gas emissions of recent Olympics in half. But, along with a 60 percent plant-based menu, the decision to cut energy use by building Olympic Village dorms with geothermal cooling, rather than air conditioning, has become a main source of athletes’ complaints about the accommodations. Bernadette Szocs, a Romanian table tennis player, told The Guardian that the fans offered in dorm rooms weren’t enough. “You can feel it is too hot in the room,” she said.

Japan's Kaito Kawabata lies down after competing in the men's 4x400--meter relay at the Paris 2024 Olympics.

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Antonin Thuillier

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AFP via Getty Images

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“I have a lot of respect for the comfort of athletes, but I think a lot more about the survival of humanity,” Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo told a French radio station in 2023 about the decision to eschew air-conditioning. But as temperature projections and concerns climbed, eventually, the organizers caved and ordered 2,500 air-conditioning units for teams willing to pay for them. Some, like the Korean swim team, have opted to stay in hotels. Unequal access to such comforts have raised concerns of two-tier games.

Experts agree that air-conditioning can create a competitive advantage. “Being able to cool down at night is a significant part of managing heat risk,” said Richard Franklin, a professor of public health and tropical medicine at James Cook University, in Queensland, Australia. Franklin added that heat waves often come with higher nighttime temperatures that prevent the body from fully recovering, and that lack of sleep and the physical strain of competition can increase risks.

There are other ways that athletes can mitigate the dangers of competing in high temperatures.

“The best thing you can do is prepare ahead of the games by acclimatizing your body to the conditions,” said Madeleine Orr, an assistant professor of sport ecology at the University of Toronto and author of a book on how global warming is changing sports. She says that each sport comes with unique risk factors, such as time spent on exposed pavement, or duration of play. But for any athlete to properly sync their body before competition, she says, exercising in the heat is crucial. “It doesn’t eliminate risk, but it pushes the boundaries of when they feel the impacts. It makes a big, big difference.”

Hannah Mason, a public health lecturer at James Cook University and lead author of a 2024 paper analyzing the impacts of extreme heat on mass sporting events, said that other factors — including the availability of shade and existing health conditions — should be considered in athletes’ heat preparedness plans. For example, Paralympic athletes often use equipment, like wheelchairs, that can trap more heat.

Britain's Jack Draper cools himself with a bag of ice during a break in play.

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Martin Bernetti

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AFP via Getty Images

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Tipton, Orr, and Mason all agreed that, eventually, the escalating dangers of climate change will leave Olympics organizers with no option but to change the timing of summer games to happen during months with cooler weather. The good news, Tipton says, is that teams and athletic federations have started taking the risk of heat more seriously. “We’re seeing the nature of sports change in terms of the rules, regulations, and permissible cooling strategies,” he said.

According to Mason, more top-down rulemaking on safety limits will be crucial for managing risk. With the high stakes and pressure of competition, she says athletes are often unwilling to back out even when conditions become dangerously hot.

“If it’s a few degrees too hot, they’re not going to back out,” she said. “We need policies to fall back on so that we don’t put these decisions in the hands of athletes that have spent their whole life training for that event.”

The Long Beach Unified Board of Trustees on Wednesday authorized the school district to end the employment of close to 600 employees, a move the LBUSD says is necessary to stabilize its ballooning deficit.

Board members approved two separate resolutions, the first of which does not renew the contracts of 515 certificated employees, who are on temporary contracts that must be re-upped annually. Though it is common for the district to choose not to renew some temporary contracts, the non-renewal of hundreds of TK-12 teachers, early childhood education teachers and social workers represents a massive change for the next school year from the current workforce of 10,000 total employees. While schools across the district will feel the cuts, Poly and Jordan high schools may be especially hard hit; 14 and 12 teachers at each site are listed on the district’s document of non-renewals.

The second resolution authorized the district to formally lay off 54 classified district positions: non-teaching staff members ranging from office support staff to instructional and recreation aides to library media assistants to parent liaisons.

The board votes come after months of warnings from the district that costs and spending have outpaced the district’s funding, saddling LBUSD with a $70 million deficit. The district is now attempting to shrink that deficit through a fiscal stabilization plan that “has prioritized preserving core instructional, wellness, and student support services,” the district wrote in an agenda item related to the cuts.

Prior to the vote, Superintendent Jill Baker framed the proposed cuts with the historical context of significant enrollment declines, the expiration of funds following the Great Recession and COVID-19 pandemic that had allowed the district to develop a healthy reserve, uncertain federal and state dollars and low attendance numbers, for which the district is penalized — “a really grave situation, fiscally,” she said, one that many districts across California are grappling with.

Baker walked board members through the significant efforts the district has made to manage costs, saving more than $47 million, including through significant central office reductions. Despite these efforts, it’s still not enough, Baker said.

“The release of temporary certificated contracts is one way of reducing the number of employees without impacting permanent certificated employees,” the district wrote in the agenda item.

For those 515 certificated employees who will be notified that their contracts will end, it’s a way that “the district can get away with letting teachers go without calling it a layoff,” said Peder Larsen, vice president of the Teachers Association of Long Beach, which represents certificated employees in LBUSD.

Some of them could be rehired, especially if their positions are in high demand, like science, math and special education teachers, Larsen said. Yet, it throws hundreds into a tailspin of uncertainty and fear, unsure if their jobs have definitively ended and how long they will have health coverage, he added.

While he said the district has not officially announced that no permanent certificated employees will be cut (they have until March 15 to do so), he said he is “reading the tea leaves” and predicting those permanent positions will be safe this year.

In his comment to the board during public testimony, Larsen advocated for examining the money spent annually on consultants and contracts and urged the board and district to re-examine their priorities and “choose to protect the people who serve students every single day.”

On both votes, School Board Member Maria Isabel López was the lone vote against the resolutions, voicing her opinion that some of these positions could have been saved if fiscal priorities had been different and major contracts had not been approved.

Other board members acknowledged that the votes will change lives. “There’s not one of us in this room that takes this lightly,” said Board President Diana Craighead before voting in favor of the cuts. Board Member Doug Otto said he was voting to adopt the resolutions “sadly, reluctantly and necessarily.”

It wasn't supposed to be a big deal. After all, it was just a diner.

Sure, Phil Rosenthal (creator of Everybody Loves Raymond and Netflix's Somebody Feed Phil) and Nancy Silverton (owner of Mozza and Chi Spacca) — two of Los Angeles' most iconic food voices — were teaming up on the project. Still, the concept was modest: fluffy scrambled eggs, turkey club sandwiches and coffee refills.

Named in memory of Rosenthal's late parents, Max and Helen — familiar faces to fans of his Netflix series — their unpretentious love of diner classics became both the menu's foundation and its guiding philosophy.

Yet within weeks of opening in November, Max & Helen's had eight-hour waits, viral hot chocolate and celebrity sightings, including Timothée Chalamet, Kylie Jenner and Selena Gomez. It came as a shock to the newly married couple running it all, Lily Rosenthal Royal, Phil's daughter and the diner's creative director, and her husband, Mason Royal, the director of operations, who oversees the kitchen. (They started working together a week after their wedding).

"We thought we were gonna be hot for Larchmont," Rosenthal Royal says.

Instead, Max & Helen's became a destination — the kind of place people plan their weekends around, wait four hours for and drive across L.A. to experience.

Lily & Mason

Rosenthal and Silverton were never going to run Max & Helen's themselves — the plan was always to build it and hand it over. Royal, who has 12 years of restaurant experience, caught Silverton's attention during tastings.

"Nancy was like,'I feel like Mason would be good as the guy running the show,'" Rosenthal Royal said.

The couple had been developing their own pop-up when the opportunity at the diner arose, and suddenly they were running the family business.

For Royal, working with Silverton has been a dream. For Rosenthal Royal, the project is deeply personal — a love letter to her grandparents and the diners her father grew up on.

"We opened it almost selfishly because we live in Larchmont," she said. "We wanted a diner for ourselves, for our friends, for our community."

Wood-paneled walls and vintage family photographs create a nostalgic atmosphere at Max & Helen's diner.

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Catherine Dzilenski

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Courtesy Max & Helen's

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Rosenthal is clear about their importance.

“Diners are democratic with a small D,” he told me last year when the project was still in development. Places where everyone is welcome, where community can flourish — something he felt was increasingly rare.

Worth the wait

The frenzy has now cooled slightly — while weekends still draw four-hour waits, midweek is much calmer.

When I visited with my family on a recent weekday morning, the wait was about 45 minutes. We were seated in the corner banquette area, accompanied by crocheted cushions bearing the name "Max & Helen's." Along with the wood-paneled walls and the black-and-white family photographs, it felt more like a cozy roadside diner you'd stumble upon on a drive up the coast than something nestled among the lifestyle boutiques and specialty stores that crowd Larchmont Boulevard.

Breakfast wins

The menu was simple, which made ordering easy, with breakfast and lunch options.

I tried Nancy's omelet ($18) with herbs and farmer’s cheese, which was thin and crepe-like, folded perfectly at the edges, and impossibly fluffy, offering bursts of freshness from the herbs.

I was particularly curious to try the waffle, which has been both widely lauded (for its taste) and lambasted (for the $17 price point).

It was transcendent, with golden, crisp ridges and deep pockets built to cradle syrup. Rosenthal Royal told me they use a three-day-fermented sourdough batter, a labor-intensive process that gives the waffle its distinctive texture and flavor.

The $17 waffle with whipped maple butter uses a three-day fermented sourdough batter

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Catherine Dzilenski

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Courtesy Max & Helen's

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What truly set it apart, for me at least, was the whipped maple butter: airy and lush, melting into every nook, both indulgent and unexpectedly light.

As for the price — it's a generous portion, and a comparable waffle at Mel's Drive-In in Santa Monica costs $13.50. Apparently, those extra few dollars equal rage bait these days.

I was less impressed with the turkey club ($19), well-cooked bacon, fresh vegetables and a spicy mayo. Nice nods to California diner cuisine. But the bread was a bit thin, without the heft needed to support the rest of the sandwich's company.

Max & Helen's turkey club sandwich served with a side of tallow French fries and Lily's hot chocolate topped with a brûléed marshmallow

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Gab Chabrán

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LAist

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Still, the tallow fries ($8) were exceptionally crispy, and the hot chocolate, $9.50, — another viral sensation — was stellar, thick and rich with a brûléed marshmallow on top.

I even took the liberty of dipping a few fries into the chocolate, which turned out to be a genius move.

Looking ahead

Royal hasn't taken a day off since opening — a fact his wife is quick to call out with a laugh. Their partnership works because their roles complement each other: His operational rigor meets her's warmth and joy.

"Mason runs a tight ship," Rosenthal Royal said. "But we want this to be warm and fun and lighthearted."

It's that balance — systems and soul — that they hope will define Max & Helen's beyond the viral moments.

The pair hope Max & Helen's becomes an institution like Apple Pan or Musso & Frank — a place where, as Rosenthal Royal put it, "Max and Helen would feel at home, where everyone feels loved and seen and warm."

The counter at Max & Helen's evokes classic American diners.

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Catherine Dzilenski

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Courtesy Max & Helen's

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A man recently came in with a gift, telling Rosenthal Royal he'd met someone at the counter she'd seated him next to. They're now dating.

"If we could have that happen over and over again," she said, "I'd be so happy."

Beyond the diner, Rosenthal Royal is also releasing a children's book this spring, co-written with her father — a fitting parallel to their collaborative work at Max & Helen's. Three months in, they've built something bigger than they imagined. Whether it stands the test of time depends on whether the hype fades into something more enduring: a neighborhood fixture that just happens to make a really good waffle.