The Brief

Late science fiction writer Octavia E. Butler started to imagine the worlds that would become best-selling books while a Pasadena public school student.

Washington Junior High School was renamed Octavia E. Butler Magnet in 2022, 60 years after she graduated the eighth grade.

Butler’s portrait gazes out at the students from murals above the library, in a second-floor hallway, and from the front of the school. Her legacy is alive in the school’s science-focused curriculum and in the annual SciFi writing contest and festival.

“I want [students] to realize that their ideas matter,” said school librarian Natalie Daily. “I think that Butler is a testament to that, you know, she was writing stuff and thinking about really, really deep ideas when she was a student here.”

Thanks to the author’s meticulous archives, which include her journals, early writings, and even her homework, students learn not just about the award-winning writer’s list of adult accomplishments, but the awkward adolescent who walked the very same halls.

“I did hear that she wasn't very talkative either, and she'd write a lot,” said eighth grader Dayana Diaz. “I felt like that's something we had in common.” Dayana's short story about the cost of war between humans on Mars and Jupiter won the school’s 2022 science fiction contest.

“People didn't believe in her,” Dayana said. “But she still made it either way and that's what I would like to do as well.”

Brock St. James with his daughters, Kobe Arnold, 2, and Guinevere Arnold, 7, inside the Octavia E. Butler Magnet library on March 22, 2024. The space is stocked with hundreds of books, board games, puzzles, and craft supplies.

(

Julie Leopo

/

LAist

)

It started with the library

Octavia Estelle Butler was born June 22, 1947 in Pasadena, a city shaped by policies and practices that limited where Black, Latino, and Asian people could buy houses, receive health care, eat at restaurants, and attend school.

The city’s libraries became her second home. Butler wrote her first novel from downtown Los Angeles’ Central Library.

“I'm a writer at least partly because I had access to public libraries,” she wrote in a 1993 column sounding the alarm about the shrinking access to public literary spaces. “I'm Black, female, the child of a shoeshine man who died young and a maid who was uneducated but who knew her way to the library … At the library, I read books my mother could never have afforded on topics that would never have occurred to her.”

Butler was almost 6 feet tall by the time she was 12 and as anyone who has ever attended middle school knows, being different is not always greeted with kindness.

“She knew what it was like to be what she called the out kid, like the kid on the margins,” said Ayana Jamieson, a scholar of Butler’s life and assistant professor of ethnic studies at Cal Poly Pomona, as well as the founder of the Octavia E. Butler Legacy Network.

Butler’s professional writing career was inspired, in part, by the idea that she could do better than Devil Girl From Mars, a “terrible movie” she watched as a kid.

“I was very lucky to be born just in time for the space race to build public support for education,” Butler said in a 1998 MIT speech. “All of a sudden there were plenty of supplies, for instance, for science education.”

Students can see Octavia E. Butler's yearbook picture in the library.

(

Mariana Dale

/

LAist

)

A George Washington Junior High School certificate of promotion given to Octavia E. Butler in 1962. Butler graduated from John Muir High School in 1965.

(

Courtesy the Octavia E. Butler Papers

/

The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens

)

Butler worked and took classes at Pasadena City College.

“I wrote and wrote, and sent things out, and collected rejection slips until I realized that collecting rejection slips was masochistic,” Butler said in the same speech. “And I took the drawer and threw them all out.”

Butler sold her first short story at 23 and when she died in 2006, she’d created a dozen books and several short stories. Her narratives often center on humans trying to figure out how to navigate a dire future that is frightening in its familiarity, rather than its foreignness.

But Jamieson said there is hope in her stories.

“No one has the right answers, but we just have to do our best ... what we can, at the time when we have to make the decisions,” Jamieson said. “I think that's really powerful.”

Changing the name

The board approved the naming of the Octavia E. Butler Library in 2020. Former principal Shannon Malone, who wrote the proposal with librarian Natalie Daily, said it was a “no brainer.”

The reaction from parents was so positive Malone and Daily started to explore changing the school’s name. Institutions everywhere were reckoning with who is memorialized in public spaces and who is not.

“The context of the time made it more important for us to have a school named after someone whose genius started here in the halls,” Malone said. “To recognize someone who represented the community.”

“The idea is to have the exposure to a lot of different things so you can see yourselves in that science diaspora," said former principal Shannon Malone, of Octavia E. Butler Magnet's curriculum.

(

Julie Leopo

/

LAist

)

The school’s existing name carried nearly 100 years of history. Washington Junior High School opened in Northwest Pasadena in 1924. Jet Propulsion Laboratory founders Jack Parsons and Edward Forman and baseball player Jackie Robinson are among the school’s earliest alumni.

The school was also at the center of a 1961 lawsuit, in which a judge eventually ruled that district leaders had created boundaries “for the purpose of instituting, maintaining, and intensifying racial segregation at Washington.”

A 1970 U.S. District Court ruling ordered Pasadena Unified to desegregate and students were bused to increase racial diversity. The following exodus of white students to private and charter schools drained resources from the district.

“Part of changing the name of the school was to almost give a reboot to that space for people to remember that, oh, great people have walked through here,” said Malone, who’s now a district administrator overseeing schools from transitional kindergarten to high school.

Leira Ruperto graduated from what was then Washington Junior High in 2000. Her family still lives within walking distance and her oldest son is in seventh grade this year. She anticipates her three younger sons will follow.

“The schools have changed dramatically from when I was going to school,” Ruperto said. “There's a lot more resources, there's a lot more help for the kids, they do a lot more activities for the kids.”

The school's full name is Octavia E. Butler Magnet, a dual langauge STEAM Middle School. The acronym stands for science, technology, engineering, art, and math.

(

Julie Leopo

/

LAist

)

In 2013, the school adopted a focus on science, technology, engineering, mathematics and art and in 2018 the school started a dual-language Spanish immersion program. There are also accelerated math classes, and a focus on college and career readiness.

While Pasadena Unified, like many Los Angeles school districts, faces declining enrollment, Octavia E. Butler Magnet has attracted 13% more students than five years ago.

California funds schools based on average student attendance, so more students bring more money to a school.

Ruperto said the new name can help teach students a subtle lesson.

“It's good for them to know like, ‘OK, things don't always last forever,'” Ruperto said. “Sometimes some kids kind of struggle with change.”

Ruperto’s answer recalls the gospel in Parable of the Sower: "All that you touch you Change. All that you Change Changes you.
The only lasting truth
is Change.”

Learning from Butler

When Butler died in 2006, she left 398 boxes and 18 oversized folders of journals, manuscripts, notes and other ephemera to the Huntington Library, including many artifacts of her childhood.

At Octavia E. Butler Magnet’s library, students can see her picture in the 1961 yearbook, her eighth grade promotion certificate, assignments, even report cards from her time at the school.

Daily showed them to a student whose grades matched Butler’s at the time— Bs, Cs, and Ds.

“She just goes ‘Well this is very inspiring,’” Daily said. “That's what we're supposed to think. Like just the idea that somebody, she didn't have it all together in middle school yet. Look what she did.”

Ayleen Medina, 12, puts on an astronaut helmet prop during the Octavia E. Butler Library Science Fiction Festival in Pasadena on March 22, 2024.

(

Julie Leopo

/

LAist

)

Daily also said the reports prompt questions about how educators evaluate student success.

“What was she being graded on? Was that appropriate? Was she being graded on the things that made her shine?” Daily said. “Was what she was capable of valued? I think those questions are just as valid.”

There’s also a ranked list of “Favorite Movie Stars.” Nick Adams, was her top-ranked actor— five stars— for his role in the TV western series The Rebel.

“It just really shows that she was a middle school kid just like any other middle school kid,” Daily said.

There are drafts of short stories Butler wrote on her own time.

In “Evolution,” dated in July 1962, the month after she graduated from middle school, a woman finds a baby in a post-war landscape.

“It had two small hard lumps on its shoulders,” Butler wrote. “Probably some new kind of disease brought on by that war.”

The lumps grow and feathers emerge.

“It was time she thought of something to call it. Years before it would probably have had a name on the day of its birth. Now names did not matter much. There was no time for making friends,” the story continued. “A child with wings though. Such a child. deserved a name. There had been mutations before, but none like this.”

"Something that we really want our students to be able to do is have a sense of agency," said librarian Natalie Daily. "[Butler's] a really great model of someone who did exactly that."

(

Julie Leopo

/

LAist

)

Daily visited the archives at the Huntington and said there’s about a dozen versions of the story.

“There's a lot going on in a kid's mind,” Daily said. “We really need to explore it with them and encourage them to keep pulling those threads.”

A new generation of explorers, creators

Octavia E. Butler Magnet educators are encouraged to weave the author’s work into their classrooms.

Eighth grade English teacher Roslyn Terré, a science fiction lover and aspiring writer, recently assigned students a poem based on one of Butler’s.

“They were able to say things like, ‘I am my power,’ ‘I am great,’ ‘I have skills,’” Terré said. “They each talked about their different talents and then how those talents would take them into the future.”

Eighth grader Brooklyn Roffman started exploring Butler’s work after the library was renamed: First, the graphic novel adaptations of her work, then “the real thing.”

In “Speech Sounds,” a disease wipes out much of humanity and those left struggle to communicate.

“I get a lot of social anxiety, and sometimes I don't really have the right words,” Brooklyn said. “So that, I don't know, felt personal to me.”

Brooklyn describes herself as a mix of African American, Irish, and Ashkenazi Jewish heritage.

“There's been a lot of like, feeling like I'm not Black enough, if that makes sense. Or like, I'm not enough of what I am,” Brooklyn said. “I don't fit into any of the boxes. And so in a lot of Octavia's works, it's quite often about characters who don't really fit into a box.”

"When you go out and like meet a mushroom, I recommend smelling them," said Aaron Tupac (left), 32, a mycologist at the Octavia E. Butler Library Science Fiction Festival on March 22, 2024. "Some smell like farts, some smell like uh, apricots, some smell really sweet, some smell like things that you never smelled before. There's over 300 different mushroom smells."

(

Julie Leopo

/

LAist

)

Daily organizes an annual science fiction contest to honor students’ short narrative, poetry, art, and graphic fiction.

“We don't want them to just be consumers of sci fi, which is awesome,” Daily said. “We also want them to be creators of it.”

Each year, every submission is collected into a book for the students.

The school also holds an annual Science Fiction Festival. This year students could make space-inspired art, code robots, and compete in a cosplay contest.

“It's just ways for kids to be engaged in both science and art, and creation,” Daily said. “To see themselves as part of all of it.”

In the spring of 2020, the library was re-named the Octavia E. Butler Library. “Something that I really try to provide as a space for the library to just kind of be a central location,” Daily said. “[I] try to keep it at the heart of the school so kids want to keep coming back.”

(

Julie Leopo

/

LAist

)

Butler, "La Autora," is part of a lotería mural created by Jen Swain in 2023 on the school's second floor.

(

Julie Leopo

/

LAist

)

In one classroom, mycologist Aaron Tupac laid out an array of dried mushrooms for inspection.

“Have ya’ll ever met any mushrooms in your neighborhood?” they asked.

Grayson Schnnitger watched as Tupac zoomed in on the spores of a Turkey Tail specimen with a microscope.

“I haven't ever learned about [mushrooms] before,” Grayson said. “So it was something new.”

Just one example of the middle school exploration, many students were eager to tell LAist about.

Eighth grader Maxine Molnar joined the musical theater club. She’s portrayed Linus in You’re A Good Man, Charlie Brown and a friend to Jasmine in Aladdin.

“I've explored more of, like, what I enjoy doing,” Maxine said. “What I'm really good at and things that I also need to work on.”

Arturo Nuño has learned to code robots in an after-school club — a discovery preceded by an earlier failed after-school experiment. “This is actually a funny story,” Arturo said. “First my mom put me in Glee, but I didn't really like it.”

Sixth grader Naila Walker recently dissected a chicken leg — “It was really gross, but really fun at the same time.”

L.A. County Sheriff Robert Luna confirmed Monday that ICE will play a role in World Cup security, but said he's been told federal agents won't conduct immigration enforcement.

He made the comments at a news conference on law enforcement's plans for the tournament, and said he'd been speaking directly with the head of Homeland Security in the Los Angeles area.

"There will be federal agents," Luna said. " Because it's gonna take all of us to make sure that all the venues, the scoped and unscoped events, are secure."

SoFi Stadium is set to host eight tournament matches, including the U.S. team opener against Paraguay on June 12. Los Angeles will also host a historic match three days later when Iran is set to take the field in Inglewood, making the U.S. the first host nation in World Cup history to be at war with a participating country.

Luna said the federal government had said that civil immigration enforcement would not occur at the tournament. But he made no guarantees.

" They told us that specifically would not be occurring at any of the games. Any of that's subject to change," he said. "But I have trust that they're giving me the appropriate information because if that starts occurring, we're gonna have a whole new host of problems."

In a statement to LAist, Assistant Secretary Lauren Bis wrote that Department of Homeland Security is working with federal, state, local and international partners.

“The safety and security of the American people and the millions of visitors attending these events remain our highest priority," Bis wrote in an email. "DHS will continue leveraging every available authority, technology, and partnership to protect the Homeland while ensuring the World Cup remains safe, secure, and successful for everyone involved.”

Luna is the latest official to confirm that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement will play a role in the tournament. Kathryn Schloessman, who leads L.A.'s World Cup host committee, told reporters last month that ICE would be at the World Cup, and that its presence was typical at these types of major events.

ICE has two main branches: Enforcement and Removal Operations, which detains and deports people, and Homeland Security Investigations, which conducts international criminal investigations.

Todd Lyons, the former head of ICE, said at a congressional hearing earlier this year that it would be ICE’s investigatory branch, not its enforcement division, playing a key role in World Cup security.

Still, some in L.A. aren't satisfied. The World Cup is coming to Los Angeles at exactly the year mark since immigration agents ramped up arrests in the region. Masked agents in neighborhoods across the county sparked protests and widespread fear, and ICE arrests in the L.A. area last year tripled.

SoFi Stadium workers represented by Unite Here Local 11 have threatened to strike over ICE's role in the tournament. They'll vote on whether or not to authorize a strike later this week.

California air regulators on Friday approved a contentious overhaul of the state’s carbon market, creating a program that could steer billions of dollars in free pollution permits to oil refineries and other major polluters over the objections of environmental groups, key lawmakers and three of the board’s own members.

Ten members of the California Air Resources Board voted to adopt the changes to its cap-and-invest program after two days of lengthy hearings, including a full day dedicated to hundreds of public comments.

The overhaul followed intensive lobbying by the oil industry as well as pressure from Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration to help keep refineries operating in the state amid rising gas prices.

The approval sets up a potential budget fight in Sacramento. The Legislative Analyst’s Office projects that quarterly auction revenue for state climate programs will drop from roughly $4 billion a year to about $2 billion under the new overhaul.

Such a shortfall would effectively zero out programs lawmakers spent last year fighting to fund: affordable housing, public transit, drinking water in low-income communities and pollution monitoring in California’s most polluted neighborhoods.

The governor’s office praised the measure as a compromise that balanced economic uncertainty with the state’s climate goals. Refinery closures and the Iran-Israel war have driven average California gas prices above $6 a gallon.

Newsom, in a statement, used the moment to draw a contrast with President Donald Trump.

“While Trump sows ongoing chaos and uncertainty, California is staying focused by protecting our economy, safeguarding public health, and doubling down on the clean energy future all Californians deserve,” he said.

Environmentalists warned the changes to the program amount to a giveaway to the fossil fuel industry that weakens California’s only program setting a firm cap on greenhouse gas emissions.

Katelyn Roedner Sutter, California senior director for the Environmental Defense Fund, called the decision “deeply misguided” for prioritizing polluters over communities.

“Newsom’s air regulators are handing billions to oil executives at the expense of our climate, health, and affordability for working families in a rushed process that has shortchanged meaningful public participation,” said Bahram Fazeli, policy director at Communities for a Better Environment.

How the program works — and what changes

California’s 13-year-old carbon market forces major polluters to buy permits while the state lowers the overall cap each year. Friday’s vote will reduce those permits – and creates a new subsidy program carved out of the market.

The program, which may still see changes, could make available a new pool of free pollution permits available to industry valued at as much as $4 billion. Companies that pledge to invest in clean energy and efficiency may qualify for the permits in exchange for investments in clean energy.

The pool will be capped at 118.3 million permits — the same number the air board has said must come off the market for California to hit its 2030 climate target. Environmentalists say the proposal risks wiping out those reductions.

Half are reserved for the fossil fuel sector. A recent Berkeley analysis, by the chair of an independent committee that oversees the carbon market, found refineries could end up with more free permits than they need to cover their emissions.

The air board has defended the design. Officials say the credits will go only to companies undertaking decarbonization projects, will be limited and temporary and can be clawed back if companies misuse them. The plan, they say, is meant to keep California refineries operating at a time of mounting closures and global market pressure. According to air regulators, the amended program will spur clean-energy investment as Trump cuts federal support.

Here's what you should know about the vote totals currently released:

Keep in mind that June 9 will be the final day for votes postmarked by June 2 to arrive at county elections offices, so the bottom line on the vote totals won't be known until then.

In L.A. County, the combined tallied votes as of Sunday add up to about 10% of registered voters.

In Orange County, the current tallies represent about 22% of registered voters.

How vote counts will be released

I thought it was an election NIGHT?

That hasn't been true in quite a while. It takes a while to get results because after the initial tallies on election night, there are still many, many votes to count and more mail-in ballots are usually arriving.

Here’s what we know so far:

L.A. County turnout

Los Angeles County has more than 5.8 million registered voters. As of Sunday, May 31:

• 580,720 ballots have been processed
• 95% voted by mail
• 5% voted in person

What's next:

• We'll know more on election night and the following days how many ballot remain to be counted.
• Has your ballot been tallied yet? You can track the status of your ballot here.

Orange County turnout

Orange County has more than 1.8 million registered voters. As of Sunday, May 31:

• 401,865 ballots have been processed
• 95% voted by mail
• 5% voted in person

What's next:

• We'll know more on election night and the following days how many ballot remain to be counted.
• Has your ballot been tallied yet? You can track the status of your ballot here.

Expected total turnout

Political Data Inc. is tracking ballot returns across California and in some high-profile races.

As of midday Monday, turnout statewide was at 16%. While Democrats outnumber Republicans statewide by almost double, Republicans have returned more ballots pre-election (21% of their voters compared to 16% for Democrats).

See the latest totals ▶

Why election day has turned into ballot-counting month

Because of the increasing use of vote-by-mail ballots, the vote count has gotten longer, according to the California Voter Foundation. In an analysis, the organization found:

• In November 2004, more than 80% of votes were counted within two days of Election Day, with 32.6% voting by mail. 
• In June 2022, about 50% of ballots were counted within two days of Election Day, with more than 90% of people voting by mail. 
• In November 2024, 66% of votes were counted within the first two days of Election Day, with 81% of the vote by mail.

A closer look at ballot counting times in California where an increasing number of vote-by-mail ballots has slowed ballot counts.

(

Courtesy California Voter Foundation

)

Election officials must physically open mail-in ballots and verify signatures.

Kim Alexander, president of the California Voter Foundation, recently wrote about the ripple effect of turning in mail-in ballots by hand or in drop boxes on election day. She wrote for our partner newsroom CalMatters:

"We turn in ballots in envelopes on Election Day that take time and care to process and cannot be processed until after Election Day. Processing these ballots — which account for as much as a quarter of all ballots cast — creates a bottleneck I like to call 'the pig in the python effect'. It prevents counties from doing other tasks they need to do to certify the results."

The buzz on college campuses is that AI is disrupting the job market for young college graduates.

But new research from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York finds that the culprit may be something else: remote work.

An analysis of federal employment data, paired with a deep dive into the flexible work arrangements at one unnamed Fortune 500 tech company, reveals that companies are less likely to hire recent college grads into occupations that can be done remotely.

Researchers speculate that employers are reluctant to put such workers in a setting where it's harder to absorb lessons from coworkers.

The researchers found the unemployment rate among younger college grads — those under the age of 29 — rose 20% after the pandemic, while unemployment among older college grads fell slightly.

The study compares unemployment rates pre-pandemic, from 2017 to 2019, with unemployment rates after the pandemic, from 2022 to 2024.

Unemployment rose as remote work grew fourfold, the researchers write. "Our analysis suggests that these trends are related, with remote work making it more difficult for managers to train and mentor new employees."

Remote work leads to less feedback on the job

The research began with a look at how much feedback software engineers at a Fortune 500 tech company were getting, says Emma Harrington, an assistant professor of economics at the University of Virginia and one of the authors of the report.

"What we saw was this pretty striking pattern that software engineers got about 20% more feedback if they were sitting near their colleagues than if they were distant from them," she says, adding that that was true even before the pandemic.

But after the pandemic, feedback plummeted.

"And that really hit young workers much harder," says Harrington. "It was these people who had the most to learn that really saw this deficit in feedback."

The researchers then looked deeper into who was getting hired at the tech firm. Turns out, as the company embraced remote work, they switched away from hiring younger people.

"So they used to hire a bunch of new grads for their software engineering jobs," Harrington says. "Then they shifted really towards hiring much older people, like a decade older on average."

Later, the company pivoted again, implementing what Harrington calls a "pretty aggressive" return-to-office policy. At that point, the company resumed hiring new graduates.

"So [there was] some sense that these problems with mentorship were translating into whom this firm was deciding to hire," she says.

A look at the broader economy

The researchers then wanted to see if what was happening at that single tech company was playing out in the broader economy.

Using a widely-used index that measures how feasible it is to do a job from home, the team divided all occupations into two categories: "remotable," which included software engineering, and "non-remotable," which included mechanical engineering.

They found the gap in unemployment between recent graduates and older workers was significantly higher in "remotable" jobs than in jobs that have to be done in person.

The unemployment rate for younger grads in "remotable" jobs jumped by almost a full percentage point after the pandemic, while the unemployment rate among older grads fell marginally.

They concluded that remote work explained nearly two-thirds of the rise in unemployment among young graduates during this period.

"This relative increase in young people's unemployment coincided with the pandemic and has remained elevated since then, as have rates of remote work," the researchers write.

AI isn't disrupting so many jobs for recent college grads — yet

To see how the rise of AI chatbots may have contributed to rising unemployment among the younger set, the researchers used another index that divides occupations into those more exposed to AI, such as engineering and accounting, and those less exposed, such as teaching and nursing.

They found exposure to AI didn't explain the divergence in unemployment rates in the 2022-24 time period. Remote workflows were much more of a driving force, Harrington says, while emphasizing that this could change.

"It's always hard to make guesses about what's going to happen with generative AI," she says. "It's certainly possible that this story could really change over the next few years."

Researchers at the London School of Economics have reached a similar conclusion — that remote work is having a clearer impact on early-career hiring than AI — in a working paper examining new hires in the U.S., the U.K., Canada and Australia.

Regardless of the cause, the New York Fed report warns that a high unemployment rate among young college grads is concerning.

"Early-career experiences can have lasting consequences," the researchers write. "Research finds that individuals who began looking for jobs in slacker labor markets tend to have lower earnings and slower career progression relative to comparable peers who began their job search in better market conditions."

Copyright 2026 NPR