The Brief

Now through August, East Los Angeles College’s Vincent Price Art Museum will host an exhibition that spans three decades of local Latina lesbian activism, from the 1980s to the late 2000s.

Housed on the museum’s third floor, the exhibition features photos, posters, letters and other ephemera that highlight the work of those who fought to put an end to anti-gay hate crimes. The activists also took on other issues, including LGBTQ+ healthcare, affordable housing, fair wages for janitors and immigrants’ rights.

The show is a collaboration between the museum and the Latina Futures 2050 Lab, a research initiative led by UCLA. Jocelyne Sanchez is a project archivist at the university’s Chicano Studies Research Center library and co-curator of the exhibition. In a conversation with LAist, she reflected on what the show might mean for Angelenos, who are bearing witness to immigration detentions across the region.

“It is quite terrifying to see the violence,” she said. “But here, in this room, there's a serenity in knowing that people have always loved each other, and people will always fight for each other.”

Fighting for justice, building community 

The small but mighty exhibition pays homage to activists who have passed and who remain in the fold. This includes civil rights advocate Laura Esquivel, as well as tenant rights attorney Elena Popp. Both of them attended the show’s opening in June.

Vanessa Esperanza Quintero, who co-curated the show and serves as exhibitions coordinator of the Latina Futures 2050 Lab, said she was glad to hear they felt their story has been captured with care.

Co-curator Jocelyne Sanchez, UCLA CSRC director Veronica Terriquez, co-curator Vanessa Esperanza Quintero, Laura Esquivel, Elena Popp, Ridge Gonzalez, and UCLA CSRC assistant director Celia Lacayo.

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Monica Orozco

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Courtesy of Gloria Ortega, Vincent Price Art Museum Foundation

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About halfway through the exhibition, visitors encounter a photo titled “Lesbians of Color- LA, 1980." It features a group of women (and a child in sunglasses) smiling and dancing in a living room. The photo was shot by historian, author and activist Lydia Otero, but the people in the image are unnamed.

The co-curators said they chose to include a large-scale version of the photo because it speaks to a crucial, but rarely acknowledged, aspect of organizing: the joy of finding community. The show also aims to honor unknown people who’ve helped make change.

"Our mission is to share with the public as much history as possible, including highlighting historical moments — and people — who tend to not receive all the attention or credit for their important work,” said Veronica Terriquez, director of UCLA’s Chicano Studies Research Center and cofounder of Latina Futures 2050 Lab.

Next to the photo, Quintero decided to affix a QR code. Should visitors feel called to be part of the women’s legacy, their phones will pull up organizations doing social justice work today.

The co-curators also aim to illustrate that the activists’ work was “not confined by borders,” Sanchez said. Toward the end of the exhibition, several materials — including a giant poster of a 2009 lesbian march in Mexico City — show that the L.A. County organizers were in dialogue with people across the country and the world.

Parts of the exhibition are bathed in lavender. VPAM curatorial assistant Gloria Ortega said the color was chosen because of its "long history with the [LGBTQ+] community."

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Monica Orozco

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Courtesy of Gloria Ortega, Vincent Price Art Museum Foundation

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Ode to an “oppositional child”

Above all, the exhibition is a tribute to the late archivist, “herstorian” and former Chicano Studies Research Center librarian Yolanda Retter Vargas.

During her tenure, she expanded the center’s archives to include the papers of Esquivel, Popp and other local activists. Retter Vargas also led the Latina Lesbian Oral Histories project and, in the early years of the internet, created a website that housed a wealth of information on L.A. County’s lesbian history.

But when Retter Vargas died in 2007, her website domain was lost, and everything she’d posted vanished into the ether. The Latina Futures 2050 Lab digital projects librarian managed to retrieve that work. Now, Retter Vargas’ website is at the museum. Visitors can navigate it by clicking through the pages on a vintage neon green Mac desktop.

For the exhibition, the co-curators also decided to flip the camera on Retter Vargas. Instead of one of the interviews she conducted, Quintero and Sanchez opted to project an interview conducted by Popp, in which Retter Vargas recounts her life and work. In it, viewers can catch glimpses of rare vulnerability.

The tough as nails archivist opens up about her youth, including the pushback she experienced when attempting to live outside prescribed gender norms. In the video, Retter Vargas describes herself as an “oppositional child” — a label she “really took on throughout her life,” Sanchez said.

The name of the exhibition is itself a nod to Retter Vargas’s work. She titled her dissertation “On the Side of Angels: Lesbian Activism in Los Angeles, 1970-1990.” When Quintero came across it, she knew she wanted it to be the name of the exhibition.

At the show, the co-curators placed the toolbelt Retter Vargas wore while making her rounds at UCLA under a glass display case, along with other belongings. More than museum pieces, they seem to function as part of a room-sized altar.

On one of the exhibition’s walls, Quintero and Sanchez quoted the dedication in Retter Vargas’ academic work.

The first line reads: “To the butch and femme lesbian resisters, who were ‘out’ and about when it was not safe.”

It's one of the most anticipated events ahead of the 2026 World Cup.

On Friday, FIFA will conduct the draw for the top men's soccer tournament, taking place across the U.S., Canada and Mexico. The draw — at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. — will determine which opponents all 48 teams participating in the World Cup will eventually face in the initial group stage.

The draw will be attended by the three leaders of the countries hosting the event, including President Trump, in an event that has become quite the spectacle over the years.

Here's what to know about the draw for the World Cup, with the ceremony set to kick off at 9 a.m. PT.

What is the draw for?

Next year's tournament is the biggest ever, with 48 teams set to be split among 12 groups of four.

These groups make up the first stage of the tournament, which determines which teams advance to the knockout rounds. The top two sides of each group automatically qualify, along with the eight best third-place teams.

Not all teams that will take part in the 2026 World Cup are known, though. So far, 42 countries have qualified, with the remaining six — including Italy — set to compete in playoffs next March to determine the final list of participants.

How will the teams be drawn?

Ahead of the draw, all teams have been placed in four pots, primarily based on their most recent FIFA rankings.

Pot 1 will include top-ranked teams such as Spain and Brazil, along with the three hosts. Pot 4 will include the lowest-ranked teams, including World Cup debutants Cape Verde, Curaçao and Jordan, as well as placeholders for the six teams that have yet to qualify.

Teams will be drawn randomly from each pot — but there are a few rules.

There can be only up to two European teams per group and only one team per group from each of the remaining five continental confederations under FIFA. That means, for example, that an African team such as Tunisia cannot be drawn into the same group as Ghana, even if they are in two separate pots.

In addition, in a quirk for this year's tournament, FIFA has determined that the top two-ranked teams — Spain and Argentina — will be placed in groups that would end up on opposite sides of the tournament bracket should they each win their respective groups. That ensures these two early favorites would not meet until the final.

The same rule will apply to France and England, the third- and fourth-best ranked teams according to FIFA.

When will we know where teams will play?

In another quirk, teams will not know at Friday's draw where or when they will play. The locations and kickoff times for each team across all 16 host cities will be determined on Saturday, at a separate event.

FIFA has said it wants to try to take travel times for teams in mind, while also ensuring that teams are drawn into kickoff times that are more favorable for spectators in their respective countries. For example, evening start times would likely be better for Asian sides, ensuring games are taking place when it's roughly the following day for spectators back home.

Spain is considered one of the early favorites to win the 2026 World Cup. Pictured here is star player Lamine Yamal, celebrating a goal against France in the semifinal of the UEFA Euro 2024 tournament, which Spain eventually won.

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Justin Setterfield

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Getty Images

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Does this all matter?

The draw helps determine how easy — or difficult — the path to the knockout rounds will be for most teams.

Just like in any tournament, all teams would prefer to face the ones they view as weaker and avoid being placed in the "Group of Death," the moniker given to the group perceived to be the most difficult in a tournament.

"You don't want to be one of these heroes — like, 'give me the best,'" says Herculez Gomez, who played for the U.S. in the 2010 World Cup and now hosts the Men in Blazers podcast Vamos. "That's not how it works. Even the best don't want the best at the World Cup."

But World Cups are unpredictable. Strong soccer powerhouses have failed to advance past the World Cup's group stage before, including Germany in 2018 and 2022, and Spain in 2014.

That said, this year's tournament is bigger. Even finishing third in a four-team group can ensure qualification, although where each team ends up within its group will determine its path through the knockout rounds.

Which are the early favorites and the teams to watch?

Predictably, among the early favorites are recent global soccer powerhouses such as Spain, England and France, along with South American teams, such as Argentina and Brazil.

But there will be interesting storylines to watch outside the favorites, including Curaçao, which became the smallest country to qualify for the World Cup, with a population of just over 150,000 people.

And, of course, there will be enormous interest in which teams the three hosts will end up facing in their respective groups.

The U.S. men's national team, for example, is approaching the World Cup draw with some momentum after staying undefeated in the past five games. Its most recent record marks a big improvement after a rocky period under coach Mauricio Pochettino and previous coach Gregg Berhalter, which included an early exit from last year's Copa America regional tournament.

NPR sports correspondent Becky Sullivan contributed to this report.
Copyright 2025 NPR

This story was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for their newsletters.

Despite watching one after another of his state’s tech titans head to the White House to seek President Donald Trump’s favor, Gov. Gavin Newsom said Wednesday he doesn’t begrudge the industry’s rightward swing — mostly.

“It’s very situational with a lot of these guys,” he said when asked about tech businessmen going to “the other side.” “They are and they aren’t. … I don’t see it as as big a shift as perhaps others do.”

His comments at a New York Times finance summit underscored the governor’s balancing act with the tech industry, even as his relationship with its major businesses has been strained by Trump this year. Though he has excoriated law firms and universities for “selling out” to Trump administration demands this year — even threatening to pull state funding from California universities that sign certain agreements with the president — Newsom has walked a finer line when it comes to tech.

“I think it’s a little bit more, I don’t want to say the word transactional, but it’s fiduciary,” he said of tech leaders’ decisions to curry favor with Trump.

Newsom, who was San Francisco mayor in the 2000s, has long been close with tech leaders. As governor, he counts on the industry’s outsized gains to keep a massive state budget balanced. As a possible 2028 presidential contender, he could find Silicon Valley’s deep-pocketed donors helpful.

The relationship has made Newsom a reliable politician in the industry’s corner as lawmakers in his own party increasingly push for regulations on social media and its effects on children, data centers’ use of environmental resources and artificial intelligence’s proliferation into workplaces, adolescent relationships and daily life.

While Newsom has signed some of those bills, particularly ones in which advocates negotiated with tech companies, he’s also vetoed several out of concern that overregulating a nascent industry would drive it out of state. And he’s vehemently opposing a proposed wealth tax that would undoubtedly touch tech executives.

Tech titans cozy up to Trump

That’s been the case this year despite Silicon Valley’s increasing coziness with Trump, whom Newsom has criticized for threatening industries with tariffs to extract concessions and demanding loyalty from private business executives. The relationship has affected California in a number of ways, from Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s aggressive pursuit of federal firings and cost-cuttings earlier this year to Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff’s suggestion that Trump send the National Guard to San Francisco, precipitating a nervous few days in October as the president moved to start immigration raids there. Benioff later walked back his statements and Trump said he relented after talking with him and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang.

Peter Leroe-Muñoz, a senior vice president at the industry group Bay Area Council, praised Newsom for nevertheless understanding “the value of the innovation our member companies produce.”

“While the governor may not always agree with innovation companies and how they choose to operate or conduct themselves, at the end of the day the governor recognizes that we all have a stake in the success of California and so not cutting off ties or undermining those industry players is in the long term success of the Golden State,” Leroe-Muñoz said last month.

Still, Newsom offered some criticism of the industry’s relationship with Trump on Wednesday, calling it “self-dealing” that the president’s AI and crypto czar David Sacks, along with many other investors and chipmakers, have reportedly been in line to profit from Trump’s AI directives.

“There needs to be levels of ethics that are demanded of these leaders,” he said. “That entire ecosystem has benefited from it. California has benefited from it. But I do not think it’s healthy for capitalism.”

And he called Apple CEO Tim Cook’s ability to strike a deal with Trump to get tariff exemptions for critical parts of the iPhone supply chain “by definition, crony capitalism.”

“How about the farmers and ranchers in California, how about all the small businesses that can’t pick up the phone and get an exemption on their tariffs?” Newsom said. “It breaks my heart.”

But he acknowledged Cook was serving his shareholders: “Do I begrudge that? Yes. Do I begrudge him? Not as much.”

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

From demogorgons clasping onto a white truck to a decibel reader device, much of the props in Stranger Things were designed with the intention to feel vintage and authentic.

Much of that is thanks to Shane Dzicek, a special effects designer based out of Burbank. Beyond Stranger Things, Dzicek worked on the Faztalker device in the most recent Five Nights at Freddy’s film, the jets on Top Gun: Maverick and the Roomba-esque vacuum cleaner shoes in Hocus Pocus 2.

LAist’s Julia Paskin talked with Dzicek about working on this latest season of Stranger Things and what it’s like to design special effects in the age of AI.

The process of designing the props in “Stranger Things”

Julia Paskin: What can you share on this date in terms of anything that you worked on in the new season?

Shane Dzicek:  One of the things that I was excited to work on was a device that Steve actually has in the squawk van. It's this great device that counts from zero to 99.

 I put in an alpha numerical display. Back in the ‘80s, they might have used different tech…And the original one weighed like 35, 40 pounds. So I hollowed the ones that we remade from scratch. So that way, Steve [Harrington] could have this thing with him and not have to worry about the weight.

A screengrab from the "Stranger Things" season 5 trailer. Special effects designer Shane Dzicek created the decibel system device to the right of Joe Keery's character Steve Harrington.

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Courtesy of Netflix

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Julia Paskin: In the trailer, there's the truck with demogorgons on top of it. And you did some work on that. Can you tell us about that as well?

Shane Dzicek:  Murray [Bauman] was driving the truck. [The actors inside] need to be able to act. They need to have cameras right there, so you can't always have this all strapped on a big truck or on a process trailer moving down the road. So we built rigs that we can move the trucks around [and] be able to do any type of heavy riding, if there's big bumps they gotta go over, if you gotta move and flip the truck over any of that type.

A screengrab from the trailer for "Stranger Things" Season 5. Special effects designer Shane Dzicek rigged the truck to withstand heavy riding.

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Courtesy Netflix

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The impact of AI on the SFX industry

Two years ago, actors and writers in Hollywood went on strike, demanding protections from AI in TV and film writing. Last year, those same fears creeped into labor negotiations between the Animation Guild and studios and streaming companies, with the Guild calling generative AI a top concern.

But when it comes to special effects, Dzicek is optimistic about his field withstanding AI’s threats to job security.

Julia Paskin:  Are you dealing with the same kind of AI anxiety that other industries are fearful of, including myself?

Shane Dzicek: [AI] is a powerful tool. I'll probably end up seeing directors and producers and creative people that might be using it as references, being like: "Hey, I AI generated a thing now. I need you to make this come to life and be physical and practical." So I don't see AI necessarily taking that practical part of making this a real thing. That takes a lot of just ingenuity and years of education on how to fabricate and build things and bring all these elements together to create a working prop.

The other thing is you gotta train AI on the knowledge that we have. And [this] kind of knowledge is all handed by word of mouth. It's not written down anywhere. So good luck trying to protect that. Good luck trying to get the information out of all of us.

These excerpts have been condensed and edited for clarity. Watch the full interview below.

We have a winner in the bidding war for Warner Bros-Discovery.

Netflix is in final talks to buy Warner's film and TV studios, plus its streaming assets and some debt, in a deal worth nearly $83 billion.

Where things stand

In a statement Friday, Netflix said the two entertainment giants had "entered into a definitive agreement under which Netflix will acquire Warner Bros., including its film and television studios, HBO Max and HBO." The announcement caps what had been a closely watched bidding war in Hollywood that involved top competitor Paramount.

The deal would be valued at $82.7 billion, or an "equity value of $72.0 billion," the streaming giant said.

“Our mission has always been to entertain the world,” Ted Sarandos, co-CEO of Netflix, said in a statement. “By combining Warner Bros.’ incredible library of shows and movies — from timeless classics like Casablanca and Citizen Kane to modern favorites like Harry Potter and Friends — with our culture-defining titles like Stranger Things, KPop Demon Hunters and Squid Game, we'll be able to do that even better. Together, we can give audiences more of what they love and help define the next century of storytelling.”

The deal would give Netflix one of Hollywood's most valuable libraries, including the Harry Potter, Game of Thrones, and the DC Comics properties.

A mixed reaction

The Directors Guild of America told Variety that the deal "raises significant concerns."

“The news that Netflix had secured exclusive rights to negotiate for WBD raises significant concerns for the DGA,” the guild said. “We believe that a vibrant, competitive industry — one that fosters creativity and encourages genuine competition for talent — is essential to safeguarding the careers and creative rights of directors and their teams."

For its part, Netflix said in it's statement that it "expects to maintain Warner Bros.’ current operations and build on its strengths, including theatrical releases for films."

What's next

The deal still has to clear regulatory and other hurdles, and would likely take around a year to close.