The Brief

President Donald Trump on yesterday signed three measures that block California’s mandates to phase out gas-powered cars and clean up diesel trucks. And California immediately struck back with a lawsuit and a vow to continue setting standards.

The move by Trump and Congress deals a substantial blow to the state’s aggressive transition to electric vehicles and could upend its decades-long authority to clean up its air pollution, which is the worst in the nation.

“We officially rescue the U.S. auto industry from destruction by terminating California’s electric vehicle mandate,” Trump said at the White House. “And they’re never coming back.” He said the state's zero-emission car phaseout "has been a disaster for this country."

Last month, Congress used the Congressional Review Act to revoke three waivers that the Biden administration granted to California to set standards phasing out gas-powered cars and diesel trucks. Trump’s signing makes that official. The dispute between California and the Trump administration and Congress highlights the growing political division over electric vehicles and air pollution policy.

Many legal experts, along with the Government Accountability Office and Senate Parliamentarian, said Congress has no authority to revoke the waivers.

California Attorney General Rob Bonta filed suit against Trump and EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin, arguing that it’s an unlawful use of the review act.

"Trump’s all-out assault on California continues – and this time he’s destroying our clean air and America’s global competitiveness in the process. We are suing to stop this latest illegal action by a President who is a wholly-owned subsidiary of big polluters," Gov. Gavin Newsom said in a statement Thursday.

Ten other states that are enforcing California's emissions rules joined the lawsuit — Colorado, Delaware, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington.

Newsom on Thursday also issued an executive order that reaffirms the state's commitment to phasing out gas and diesel-powered vehicles. He directed the Air Resources Board to craft another mandate for cars and trucks — to either bolster its existing mandates or replace them in case they lose in court.

Newsom also directed the air board to create a public list of automakers and truck manufacturers that are following California's emissions rules, and companies that take early action to convert fleets to zero-emission trucks "regardless of the status of those regulations under federal law." And he ordered state agencies within 60 days to determine what more can be done to help consumers with the transition to electric vehicles, including eliminating obstacles to building more charging stations.

Because of its highly polluted air, Congress gave California the power to set its own, more stringent vehicle standards in the 1967 Clean Air Act. Before now, the federal government has never blocked any of California’s dozens of rules.

Under California’s mandate enacted in 2022, 35% of new 2026 model cars sold in the state must be zero-emissions, ramping up to 68% in 2030 and 100% in 2035. It builds on decades of tightening emissions standards for cars sold in the state.

Congress also blocked California’s 2020 Advanced Clean Trucks rule, an unprecedented measure that requires manufacturers to meet ramped-up targets for zero-emission heavy and medium-duty trucks for 2024 through 2035. A third vote revoked the waiver for a 2020 state regulation reducing nitrogen oxides — a key ingredient of smog — emitted by trucks and buses..

Trump said his actions mean those rules "are fully and expressly preempted by the Clean Air Act and cannot be implemented."

"Our Constitution does not allow one State special status to create standards that limit consumer choice and impose an electric vehicle mandate upon the entire Nation," he wrote. (California's mandate applies only to vehicles sold in the state; the other states agreed to enact the same rules.)

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

For nearly a year, people walking down Wilshire Boulevard in Koreatown have passed a small patch of what used to be one of the few public park spaces in the neighborhood. It’s now locked behind a tall chain link fence.

Inside, the grass is overgrown and trash is piled up along the edges. The memorial to Sen. Robert F. Kennedy — built at the site where he was assassinated in 1968 at the Ambassador Hotel — has fallen into disrepair.

The Los Angeles Unified School District fenced off RFK Inspiration Park, located on Wilshire Boulevard. Nearly a year later, the district is considering reopening the space, but only to students at the adjacent RFK Community Schools.

That’s frustrating for some neighbors, who say the park used to belong to everyone.

“I remember the park being open and suddenly a few months after, it was gated,” said Vanessa Aikens, who lives a few blocks away. “I was just wondering why they gated the area because there seemed to be a lot of people interacting with it.”

There has been little information relayed to the community about why.

“We have a number of our members who live right around there and so there’s an angle of access to green space, the access to a safe space for our homeless neighbors,” said Yuval Yossefy, treasurer of Ktown for All, an all-volunteer grassroots organization serving Koreatown’s unhoused community. “This went basically unnoticed.”

Enrique Legaspi, assistant principal at RFK Community Schools, said the school and the district are discussing using the park again, including for classes and student activities. LAUSD confirmed that school leaders have expressed strong interest in using the space for outdoor learning, art programs and student wellness activities.

Officials plan to involve the school community and nearby residents as plans take shape, but they have not given a timeline or said whether the park will reopen to the public.

Koreatown lacks parks

For years, the city’s Department of Recreation and Parks operated and maintained the park under an agreement with the school district dating back to 2010. At the time, the public was allowed to use the space.

Last March, the department stepped away. By then, it had already been taking on costs outside what the 2010 agreement required.

“RAP communicated uncertainty about its ability to sustain long-term maintenance due to staffing and funding constraints,” said Deirdra Boykin, a department spokesperson.

For people who live nearby, the loss of the park has been simple and immediate: there’s nowhere else like it.

“There are no parks around where I live,” Aikens said. “Now I just walk straight down the street.”

In a neighborhood with such limited park space, the memorial park went relatively unnoticed.

“There definitely isn’t enough green space here,” said Emere Alademir, 23, who lives nearby. “I’m originally from Toronto and everywhere they have green space.”

People who never used the park say they would visit if it reopened.

“I’ve never actually gone in but I would be open to coming here if it reopens,” said Wendy Kim, 70, who has lived in the neighborhood for 40 years. “Why not? It’s good for everyone.”

Kim, who splits her time between LA and Seoul, said the parks in Seoul are much better maintained than the ones in LA, and that when she craves nature, she travels out of the city for a hike.

“But every place is different and here, the homeless issue is out of hand. That’s just the reality,” she said.

The fence goes up

Public records obtained by Yossefy and reviewed by The LA Local show that city and LAUSD officials coordinated the park’s handoff around a May 22 encampment removal and cleanup, after which LAUSD took control of the site and moved forward with fencing it off. The emails do not explicitly state that the park was fenced because unhoused people were there, but they show encampment removal was a central part of the transition plan.

Volunteers with Ktown For All, who do weekly outreach to the unhoused community in the area, said they were used to seeing people at the park every Saturday.

“It’s just like all of a sudden the fence was there,” said Nicolas Emmons, who has been doing outreach near RFK since around 2021.

Emmons and others said that while some unhoused residents stayed in the park, the majority of the park was open and available.

“At its peak, it was only a small percentage of the park that was being used by people to live in,” he said. “Some of the people that lived there even took it upon themselves to clean the area around their setup.”

Eunice Jeon, another volunteer with the organization, said they had built relationships with people there over several years.

“We regularly saw people there and had built relationships with people there,” she said. “They respected and treated the park well.”

Jeon added that despite restricting access, the closure has not visibly improved the space.

“If anything I would say the park is in worse state ever since the fence has gone up despite nobody being in there,” she said.

Jeon said many individuals she encountered were navigating complex barriers to housing and services, often caught in bureaucratic loops that made it difficult to access help.

“A lot of the time they’re limited by transportation. Some services don’t allow certain things. They need an address, but in order to get something mailed, they need their driver’s license, which they don’t have because they don’t have an address,” she said.

In email chains included in the public records, officials also discussed installing permanent wrought iron fencing at the site. When asked if that remains the plan, LAUSD said the project is still in the “planning phase” and that details, including potential site features, have not been finalized.

“If the park is fenced off, nobody can access it. It doesn’t provide you any use,” Yoseffy said. “There are a number of people that can’t access this park, whether they were sleeping in this park, or they used the park to exercise, if they liked to sit and read — none of those things can happen there anymore because it’s completely closed off.”

Public records show little evidence of public notice. One email mentions posting notices at the park ahead of the cleanup, but there was no formal announcement made to residents that the park — which had been open to the public for years — would be closed and no longer accessible.

“I think that a public space is meant to be used by the public, including the unhoused,” Jeon said. “That’s something they need to address instead of locking up the parks. That’s a failure of the city. Kicking them out won’t keep anyone safer if they have fewer and fewer places to go.”

LA Local reporter Marina Peña contributed to this report.

The online education platform Canvas went offline after a data breach on Thursday, temporarily leaving students and faculty at thousands of U.S. colleges — and K-12 schools — without access to course materials and communications during finals period.

"I'm sure somewhere in the country when the outage happened, there probably were people actually taking final exams on the platform when it crashed," says Damon Linker, a senior lecturer in political science at the University of Pennsylvania.

Thirty million users — including at half of the higher education institutions in North America — rely on Canvas to manage courses, submit assignments, view grades and facilitate communication, according to its parent company, Instructure.

But when Linker and many other users tried to do so on Thursday afternoon, they met a black screen and a warning message.

"ShinyHunters has breached Instructure [again]," it read. "Instead of contacting us to resolve it they ignored us and did some 'security patches.'"

ShinyHunters is the same entity that took credit for a massive Ticketmaster data breach in 2024. Like many such groups, it's a cluster of young people working remotely together, "kind of like a ransomware gang," says Rachel Tobac, the CEO of SocialProof Security, which trains people and companies to defend themselves against hackers.

ShinyHunters wrote on a threat intelligence website earlier this week that the initial breach on Saturday involved data — including private messages — from 275 million students, teachers and staff at nearly 9,000 schools worldwide. The group said Thursday that affected schools can prevent the release of their data by consulting with cyber advisory firms and negotiating settlements through the encrypted chat platform Tox.

"You have till the end of the day by 12 May 2026 before everything is leaked," the hackers wrote.

Instructure has confirmed a series of cybersecurity breaches this week and provided status updates on its website. It said the breach only appeared to involve identifying information like names, email addresses, student ID numbers and user messages — no passwords, birth dates, government identifiers or financial information.

Instructure confirmed on an FAQ page that it started an investigation after it first detected unauthorized activity in Canvas on April 29, and took Canvas offline on Thursday after that same unauthorized actor "made changes that appeared when some students and teachers were logged in." They said the actor exploited an issue with its Free-for-Teacher accounts, which it has temporarily shut down.

"This gives us the confidence to restore access to Canvas, which is now fully back online and available for use," it said in a statement to NPR. "We regret the inconvenience and concern this may have caused."

It's not clear whether Instructure paid a ransom or what the return of Canvas access could mean for the hackers' May 12 deadline.

Tobac says Canvas could be back online because of a successful negotiation, or because the hackers "didn't get super far in their attack." Either way, she says users should stay vigilant, especially for phishing messages — whether it's someone posing as Canvas prompting a password change, or pretending to be a professor sending course materials.

"I would operate under the assumption that there's going to be some knock-on effects here," she says.

Not everyone got back online immediately 

Just before midnight on Thursday, Instructure posted online that "Canvas is now available for most users," though two separate services, Canvas Beta and Canvas Test, remained in maintenance mode.

Students and faculty at at least some schools were still unable to access Canvas on Friday — either because service had not yet been restored or because administrators warned them to stay away.

Penn State University, for example, said Friday morning that while the school's Canvas access had been partially restored, it was "not yet ready for use."

"Technical teams at Penn State are actively working to prepare the system for our community," it added. "As access is restored, Canvas integrations and related services will be brought back online in phases."

Several schools have taken similar approaches, either temporarily disabling Canvas access or outright asking users to steer clear. The University of California said across its schools, "Canvas access will not be restored until we are confident the system is secure."

And it's not just higher education: The Montgomery County Public School system in Maryland alerted families on Friday morning that even as service returned, it is "continuing to test and review systems before restoring access."

Tobac says this could mean that schools think the attackers might still be within their systems, potentially stealing information like passwords and messages.

"The attackers probably got some sensitive information and … [schools] don't want this information out online," she says.

Many schools are urging users to be on high alert for any unsolicited emails or messages that appear to come from Canvas, especially those requesting login credentials, as Georgetown University warned. The University of Amsterdam — which says it's one of 44 Dutch educational institutions affected — also recommends people change their passwords on any other sites where they use the same one.

Tobac also recommends using a password manager — to generate long, random passwords for each login — and turning on multi-factor authentication for all online accounts, not just Canvas. She says any student or professor who gets a suspicious call, text or email should "use another method of communication to verify what is authentic."

"Even if there was no breach yesterday, I would say these are the things that I recommend you do," she adds, urging people to "be politely paranoid."

The breach disrupts finals, highlights vulnerabilities

Several schools affected by the breach have already postponed or outright scrapped some final exams, with others warning students and professors that they might need to do so.

The University of Illinois is postponing all final exams and assignments scheduled through Sunday. Penn State canceled certain exams scheduled for Thursday night and Friday, saying it was working with faculty to "determine next steps for final grading" and urging students to check their emails (not Canvas) regularly in the meantime. And Baylor University delayed Friday exams and asked all faculty to send students "whatever study materials they have on their local computers to students as soon as possible."

The breach has underscored how much of academia relies on a single, centralized platform.

Linker, of UPenn, told NPR that he received an influx of panicked messages from students on Thursday afternoon when they suddenly couldn't access PowerPoints, readings and previous exams as they tried to study for Monday's final.

"The problem with using a platform like Canvas is that most [students] are not going to have the readings available printed out or on their laptops," he explains. "It all lives on the online platform, and if that platform goes down, they have no way to access them."

He told students on Thursday that he would upload the course materials to another platform (like Dropbox or Google Docs) if Canvas access wasn't restored by Friday morning. Fortunately, he says, it came back online shortly before 9 a.m. ET.

But Linker says he has concerns about relying fully on Canvas in the future.

"Given what this has exposed, the vulnerability involved and also the concern with the data breaches, I'm starting to rethink whether this is really a wise way to proceed," he says.

One example of that is grading. Linker says Canvas makes it so easy to calculate and weigh students' scores — on individual assessments and overall — that it's come to function as a digital grade book. Going forward, he says he may start keeping an analog record of students' grades just in case.

While Canvas does have competitors like Blackboard, Linker says he doesn't think any would be less vulnerable to a future breach. And Tobac agrees.

"The problem is not that this one website had this cyber event, right? Because nothing in this world is unhackable," she says. "The thing that we have to think about is disaster recovery: How do we continue doing business when there is a cyber event, and how do we do our very best to keep the bad actors out?"

Tobac says this week has shown that many institutions did not have a clear plan for how students and professors can be in touch and access course materials without Canvas. She said those plans should vary based on schools' different circumstances and schedules — which might explain why some are proceeding with finals as usual while others are scrapping exams altogether. But she'd like them to approach the immediate aftermath with one common goal.

"We have to treat people with dignity and respect," Tobac says. "And I hope that that is something that the institutions do, within their timelines and constraints."
Copyright 2026 NPR

An international team of disease detectives is now racing to connect with the more than two dozen passengers who disembarked the MV Honius cruise ship on the Atlantic island of St. Helena before the hantavirus outbreak was identified.

These individuals have flown across the world, including to the United States.

The risk of further spread of this virus is low since it requires close and prolonged contact with an infected individual — and those infected seem to transmit the virus for only a brief period of time. But public health officials want to make sure the outbreak is contained.

Here's how authorities are using the practice of contact tracing to contain the outbreak and keep the hantavirus from spreading.

Contact tracing 101

The concept of modern contact tracing dates to the 1930s and was part of an effort to stop the spread of syphilis. It involves locating the close contacts of anyone who may have been infected. "By identifying people who are at risk of infection," says Preeti Malani, an infectious disease physician at the University of Michigan, "you try to get ahead when people don't have symptoms yet with the goal of preventing the infection from continuing to propagate."

This is a well-tested approach for containing an infectious disease. "It's the oldest tool in the epidemiologic toolbox," explains Malani. "We thought about this a lot early in the pandemic with COVID. But we also do contact tracing for sexually transmitted infections, for things like meningitis and even measles."

Malani likens contact tracing to monitoring ripples in a pond, "trying to prevent those outer rings from propagating by isolating individuals and by identifying individuals who might be at risk of infection."

The idea that "there's a time period where people don't have symptoms but could be harboring the virus, that's what contact tracing helps identify," says Malani.

It starts by pinpointing someone with an infection or suspected infection of the disease in question — in this case, hantavirus. Epidemiologists then look to see with whom they've recently had close contact since these individuals are more likely to have been infected.

This hunt for those with the greatest probability of infection is important. "Otherwise, it becomes an impossible web to contain because everyone is connected to everyone," says Boghuma Titanji, an infectious diseases doctor at Emory University. "So you have to stratify by high, intermediate and low-risk contacts."

The next step involves public health agencies ordering precautions for those who are infected or who may be infected but aren't showing symptoms yet. Such measures may include quarantine, so that an individual doesn't come into contact with even more people — who may then become infected.

One challenge that hantavirus presents is that its incubation period can last up to several weeks. In other words, "people take a long time to become symptomatic after they've been exposed," says Titanji. "Some of these primary contacts would have to be monitoring themselves for symptoms for up to 45 days to be at the tail end of that very long incubation period."

Aboard and ashore

The work isn't high-tech but it is painstaking, requiring officials to reconstruct the many interactions someone may have had over days or weeks.

Onboard the cruise ship, "you might have an individual who is a source of an infection," says Titanji, laying out a hypothetical example. "And then they were sitting at a dinner table with one individual who then goes back to their cabin and shares a bed with their partner who has a conversation with someone else on the deck."

Once someone disembarks the ship, the number of potential interactions can grow quite quickly. This is why officials were concerned when a KLM flight attendant fell ill after being aboard a flight with one of the infected cruise ship passengers. Fortunately, the flight attendant ultimately tested negative for hantavirus.

Titanji is heartened by what she's seen playing out so far. "It seems like the international collaborative effort has been really robust and the mechanisms for containment are in place and underway," she says.

Public health officials argue that contact tracing is a powerful approach that will reduce further spread. "We can break this chain of transmission," said Abdi Mahmoud, the director of the World Health Organization's health emergency alert and response efforts, at a press conference on Thursday.

He has good reason to be confident. Contact tracing was vital during the fight against COVID-19 and helped end the Ebola crisis in Liberia, containing the epidemic there more than a decade ago. Some of the contact tracing even involved hours-long hikes through the jungle to a remote village.

Authorities are hoping for similar success with this hantavirus outbreak.
Copyright 2026 NPR

Tucked away in the back room of a Santa Monica guitar shop is an unlikely temple to live music.

There's no bar. No cellphone screens glowing in the dark. Just 150 people, sitting shoulder to shoulder in folding chairs, so quiet you can hear every picked note ring out.

For nearly 60 years, McCabe's Guitar Shop has hosted intimate performances by legends of folk, country, jazz and rock, everyone from Joni Mitchell to Elvis Costello to Beck.

Elvis Costello (l.) and John Hiatt (r.) perform together in 1984 at McCabe's Guitar Shop.

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On a recent Saturday night, the audience is here for alt-country singer-songwriter Robbie Fulks, who, flanked on a tiny stage with a violinist and bassist, flashes a smile into the dark.

"I'm glad to be back for my 27th appearance at McCabe's here in Santa Monica," Fulks told the crowd. "That's a guess, but it's pretty close."

In a music industry dominated by streaming and scrolling, McCabe's offers something increasingly rare: the rapt attention of an audience sitting a few feet from the performer.

Singer-songwriter Robbie Fulks chats up the crowd at McCabe's during a recent performance, accompanied by violinist Jenny Scheinman and bassist Max Schwartz.

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Landing a show at McCabe's carries the kind of prestige reserved for far larger stages, Peter Lesser writes in his new book chronicling the venue's history, Live at McCabe's Guitar Shop.

One artist told Lesser, "Look, there's Carnegie Hall. There's the Grand Ole Opry, and there's McCabe's Guitar Shop."

A flyer for a Jan. 2019 performance by Beck.

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Lesser, who used to manage live music venues in upstate New York, has long been struck by the big names who played such a tiny room in Santa Monica.

"How were they able to attract the same artists in a 150-seat venue that I was trying to fill 1,000 seats with?" he said.

After moving to Santa Monica to be closer to family during the pandemic, Lesser started attending shows at McCabe's himself and set out to answer his own question.

Peter Lesser, author of Live at McCabe's, chronicles the venue's nearly 60-year history.

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He talked to some 80 people, including artists who performed there like Lucinda Williams, Taj Mahal and Loudon Wainwright III.

It turns out McCabe's road to becoming a music landmark began almost by chance.

An accidental venue

Gerald McCabe, a furniture maker by trade who dabbled in guitar repairs, opened the shop in 1958. A place to browse guitars and accessories, it also became a hangout for musicians during the folk boom of the '60s, hosting jam sessions.

And it was where folk singer Mike Seeger turned in 1969 when a planned show with Elizabeth Cotten at UCLA's Royce Hall fell through.

(From l. r.): Walter Camp, former co-owner of McCabe's, stands with folk singers Elizabeth Cotten and Mike Seeger at the venue's first live performance.

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Bob Riskin

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"He came to McCabe's Guitar Shop and said, 'What do you think I should do?'" Lesser said. "And they said, 'Just play here.'"

But there was a problem: The shop didn't have a permit to host concerts.

"They had to put blankets in front of the windows, because they didn't want anybody to see him," Lesser said.

The next month, another folk singer, Ramblin' Jack Elliott, found himself stranded in L.A. after his car broke down. Needing money for a new transmission, he played two shows at McCabe's.

His friend Arlo Guthrie, in town recording an album, joined in on the second night.

By the end of 1969, McCabe's was advertising planned shows.

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"That's really when [the shop] got the idea," Lesser said. "'We can do this every week.'"

Music royalty

McCabe's became a coveted stop for both rising artists and major acts, including those who'd come up through the venue themselves.

Before he was a star, Jackson Browne regularly played McCabe's, including five shows in 1970 alone. After his 1972 breakout album with hits like "Doctor My Eyes," he kept returning for occasional shows.

Then there was Ry Cooder, the Santa Monica-born roots virtuoso and producer behind the Buena Vista Social Club album. He used to hang out at McCabe's after school, where he perfected his guitar licks and went on to teach others his picking style.

Jackson Browne, used to regularly perform at McCabe's, and would return occasionally after he broke through on the charts.

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Both artists were part of a spectacular night in 1984 held to honor outgoing McCabe's concert director Nancy Covey. They joined a constellation of stars including Richard Thompson, T Bone Burnett and John Hiatt.

Warren Zevon brought down the house with "Werewolves of London," and the evening closed with Elvis Costello leading the room through "So You Want to Be a Rock 'n' Roll Star."

As McCabe's renown grew, Hollywood also came calling.

McCabe's had begun offering lessons, and actors preparing to play musicians in movies studied with its instructors.

Reese Witherspoon and Joaquin Phoenix were coached for roles as June Carter and Johnny Cash in the biopic "Walk the Line." Christian Bale also worked with a McCabe's instructor so he could channel Bob Dylan in "I'm Not There."

On top of being a concert venue, McCabe's is a guitar and repair shop that offers lessons.

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Speaking of the music icon, the actual Bob Dylan sought out McCabe's instructor Fran Banish after hearing him perform blues standards at his son's wedding. In a surreal moment for McCabe's staff, Dylan showed up at the shop to work through a Blind Lemon Jefferson tune with Banish in one of the upstairs lesson rooms.

"Great artists are always learning," Lesser said.

Among the pillars

Upstairs by the lesson rooms, the hallway is lined with photos of the giants who've played at McCabe's.

Fulks, waiting in the green room ahead of his performance, marvels at being in the company of heroes like Doc Watson and Norman Blake, even after himself playing at the venue since the early 2000s.

Multiple artists have recorded tracks or whole albums at McCabe's including Peter Case.

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"You look at the pictures on the wall and I don't think I belong in that group of people," Fulks said.

Having moved to L.A. from Chicago during the pandemic, Fulks is now able to attend concerts at McCabe's himself, and being on the other side of the stage, he knows the reverential attention given to performances.

"There's a sort of a slightly museum-like respect built into the situation of being in the dark and looking up at somebody like it's a movie screen, and the sound is always wonderful," Fulks said.

But Fulks, whose wry, self-deprecating sense of humor shows up in his darkly comic lyrics, likes to keep things loose. Later, when he takes the stage, he brings the jokes.

By his count, Robbie Fulks has performed at McCabe's 27 times.

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"I don't look like a country singer exactly," he said to the audience. "But I feel like I look like a humanities professor at a small community college."

Still standing

Despite changes over the years — including new owners and different concert directors bringing their own distinct tastes — McCabe's has maintained a fiercely loyal following.

"Even though we say, 'Yes, we're the owners of McCabe's,' we're not really," said Walt McGraw, who now runs the shop with his wife, Nora. "It's the community, it's the musicians, it's the artists."

McCabe's Guitar Shop in Santa Monica sits at its third location on Pico.

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The couple took over the business from Nora's father, Bob Riskin, who started working at McCabe's as a teenager in the early 1960s before eventually becoming owner and moving the store to its third and current location at 3101 Pico Blvd.

Walt McGraw and his wife Nora took over operation of McCabe's from her father, Bob Riskin, who retired during the pandemic.

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When an L.A. Times story reported during the pandemic that Riskin was retiring, longtime patrons feared the venue itself might disappear.

"We got inundated with cards," McGraw recalled. "People sent flowers to the shop saying, 'You can't close.'"

But for McGraw, that has never been an option.

"It just seemed too important to sell or close up shop," he said.

The room today

On the night of Fulks' performance, patrons file through the shop to get to the back room, weaving past walls lined with guitars, mandolins, ukuleles and banjos.

While no alcohol is on tap, there is self-serve coffee, water bottles and chocolate bars for sale.

The backroom of McCabe's Guitar Shop holds an audience of about 150 people..

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Travis Prine wanders the store, pausing to admire the Martins and Collings.

"I can't afford most of the guitars in here, but it's a really cool place," said Prine, who drove from Hesperia in the high desert to see Fulks.

It was his first time at McCabe's, and he can feel the history.

"Almost everybody who's anyone has played here over the years," he said. "Jackson Browne has played here. Townes Van Zandt, I believe — just about everyone."

To see shows, concert-goers must first pass through the guitar shop to get to the backroom.

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And now it was Prine's turn to get the McCabe's experience.

For an hour and a half, Fulks runs through an acoustic set that at one moment was classic country, the next, spiky bluegrass, mixing virtuosic picking and storytelling, with a nod to forebears.

"This is slightly embarrassing about the set list, but there's three mentions of Hank Williams over the course of the set," Fulks said to cheers and clapping. "The third one comes much later in the set, so we'll give you a free jelly bean if you spot that one."

It's the kind of night that keeps them coming back to McCabe's, show after show.