The Brief

At first glance, Zrinka Stahuljak’s comparative literature class appears to be like any other in the humanities — a hundred UCLA undergraduates in a lecture hall talking about "The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha."

Yet it’s actually the first in the division to use a digital textbook created using artificial intelligence. The homework assignments? Also created using AI. And same for the discussion guides.

While some colleges have moved to ban AI over fears of plagiarism or inaccuracy, UCLA has embraced it. Through a platform called Kudu, developed in-house, professors use AI to help students access course material and save money. The platform also lets professors customize their textbooks and lesson plans and provides 24-hour support.

Supporters say it’s also a tool for relieving long-standing issues related to higher ed and technology.

What can AI do for educators?

Almost immediately after her students took their seats during a recent class, Stahuljak asked them to take out their phones, scan a QR code, and answer a brief questionnaire.

“Based on their feedback, we'll know what they need a little bit more support on. And then, we will update the textbook to reflect that,” said Elizabeth Landers, a doctoral candidate in history who helped create the course materials and continues to customize them for students.

Stahuljak has taught Comp Lit 2BW since 2017. To create the textbook and its accompanying AI features for this semester, she provided Landers with notes from previous iterations of the class, along with the PowerPoint presentations and YouTube videos she created for remote instruction during the COVID-19 pandemic.

All of that became the database for the textbook, Landers said. “Then, we made a very detailed outline and began the content generation process.” Stahuljak and another history major carefully reviewed the end result.

“It's not just about facts,” Stahuljak said. “It is about the tone. It is about the style. It is about the narrative. What is the journey we're taking our students on?”

“There’s a misconception that AI did everything,” Landers added. In reality, she and her colleagues put in “hundreds and hundreds of hours into this course.”

“Everything has been guided by humans, checked by humans, imagined by humans,” she said.

Zrinka Stahuljak has taught her comparative literature course since 2017.

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Julia Barajas

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LAist

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Elizabeth Landers manages the development of course materials for Stahuljak's course.

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LAist

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How did AI come to a humanities class?

Outside of the humanities, other professors have also modified their Kudu textbooks to fit the needs of a particular class.

Physics professor Alexander Kusenko co-developed the platform with a former graduate student. When he arrived at UCLA, he was appalled to find that textbooks could cost his students a couple hundred dollars. Today, Kudu is available for $25 per course.

When Kusenko’s colleague Andrea Ghez was awarded a Nobel Prize for her discovery of a supermassive black hole in the galactic center, he added a section in his textbook about the discovery. Then he added a homework problem that discussed the motion of one of the stars close to the supermassive black hole.

The ability to include recent developments and highlight the work of his colleagues, Kusenko said, “makes teaching more fun for me and more interesting for the students.”

Professors at UCLA also value that Kudu is a closed-loop system: In other words, when students ask the platform about course material, it only provides answers from resources that professors have approved.

As a complement to Kudu, students also have Kai, a Siri-like virtual assistant available to them 24/7.

“That is another great advantage,” Kusenko said, “because when I teach a class of 200 people, I cannot spend enough time with every student individually. And this is unfortunate.”

Having Kai take care of facts and dates enables Stahuljak and her teaching assistants to focus on more enduring lessons with students, including: “how to construct a series of paragraphs that will support your argument” and “how to make a thesis rather than a description.”

“If you ask Kudu for restaurant recommendations, it will ask you to stay on topic,” said Warren Essey, Kudu’s co-developer. The system also “knows not to just answer the homework, but rather guide the students through homework problems.”

How do students actually use it?

Ella Chau, a first year psychobiology major, appreciates an AI feature that turns sections of the Comp Lit 2BW textbook into podcasts.

“It's really helpful,” she told LAist. Instead of having to sit down to read, she can learn key concepts as she makes her way through campus.

Some of the students in Stahuljak’s class are a little more wary of using AI, including first-year theater major Catherine Day.

Outside of the classroom, she’s occasionally used AI for collages or design projects.

“I don't really like AI writing tools,” she said. “I find that they kind of hamper my personal style of writing.”

Day said she appreciates the way the textbook is organized because she can check for comprehension by answering questions at the bottom — but she rarely uses the virtual assistant or podcast feature.

“I prefer to kind of just read it, draw my own conclusions, and use class as the time to reflect on what I have read and hear our professor's thoughts on it,” she said.

Warren Riley, a third-year English major, said he was also initially reluctant to use AI.

“I'm a proud writer, and I'm like, ‘I don't want anyone else to help me, especially a robot,’” he said.

Since then, he’s come to find that AI can be useful.

“Even as an English major, I don't always know how to properly use a semicolon,” he admitted. When that happens, Riley asks ChatGPT: "Did I use a semicolon correctly?"

“And I can just have another perspective on that,” he said.

In Comp Lit 2BW, Riley interacts similarly with Kai, the textbook’s virtual assistant.

“You don't always have immediate access to your professor, and not even your TA,” he said. They “have their own lives, and you can't ask them a bunch of silly questions about the text.”

When Riley doesn’t quite get how a text illustrates something about history, he asks Kai to weigh in. He likes that he can get an answer quickly, “at any time of the day.”

How can AI help struggling students?

Virtual assistants can be especially helpful for students who are struggling, Kusenko said.

Recently, he teamed up with some colleagues at UCLA’s Center for Education Innovation & Learning in the Sciences and at UC San Diego to set up a study that looks at the effects of AI virtual assistant tools and other interventions on learning outcomes.

“I was teaching two classes at the same time, and we were able to compare the outcomes because we turned the AI hints on and off in different chapters, in alternating fashion,” he said.

According to Kusenko, the paper shows that students who needed the most help (based on their initial performance on a physics test given during the first week of class) benefited the most when they used AI hints and supplemental materials.

Essey, Kusenko’s former graduate student, co-founded Kudu after working as a software engineer at Google. He stressed the importance of making sure that all students have access to “the same high-quality AI.”

By way of example, he pointed to the material difference between ChatGPT 4 (the newest model) and ChatGPT 3 (an older model). The latter is free to use. In contrast, ChatGPT 4 has a limited free version, but a more-expansive version costs at least $20 a month to access.

Newer models are trained on more recent data, Essey explained, so the quality of answers differ. AI tools that are available for free also tend to have usage limitations, such as how many questions you can ask.

“We're always using that latest model for the students,” he added, “so they get at least the equivalent to the premium models.”

“People were worried AI would go the other way around, that it would replace educators,” Essey said. “And we've taken the bet that it will actually empower them.”

A federal appeals court has upheld a court order requiring the Department of Veterans Affairs to build more than 2,500 housing units on its West Los Angeles campus.

The U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals on Tuesday ordered the VA to construct 750 temporary units for veterans within 18 months and 1,800 permanent housing units within six years.

The ruling found the agency had “strayed from its mission” by leasing land to commercial interests like a UCLA baseball field and Brentwood School sports complex, instead of caring for veterans.

“There are now scores of unhoused veterans trying to survive in and around the greater Los Angeles area despite the acres of land deeded to the VA for their care,” Judge Ana de Alba wrote in the opinion.

Attorneys for the plaintiffs in the Powers v. McDonough case say the ruling could end veteran homelessness in the Los Angeles region, which is home to more than 3,000 unhoused veterans, according to official estimates.

"It's the most important ruling in the history of this country concerning the rights of veterans," said Mark Rosenbaum, lead attorney with Public Counsel, during a press conference Wednesday. “After this case, there should be no such thing as a homeless veteran.”

The VA did not immediately respond to LAist’s request for comment on the ruling.

‘Long overdue’

The appeals court affirmed most of U.S. District Judge David O. Carter's 2024 ruling, which found the VA discriminated against disabled veterans by failing to provide adequate housing on the 388-acre property deeded as a soldiers' home back in 1888.

The main plaintiff named in the class-action lawsuit, Jeffrey Powers, lived in a tent outside the gates of the VA Medical Center.

At a press conference Wednesday, Powers told reporters this week’s appeals court ruling delivers “about 80%” of what he wanted.

“We got the most important thing, which was to get veterans off the street,” Powers said. “And for that, I'm happy with the outcome.”

The case stems from a 2015 settlement in which the VA promised to build 1,200 housing units, with more than 770 completed by 2022. The department missed that deadline, prompting the new lawsuit.

Iraq War veteran Rob Reynolds came to the West L.A. VA for PTSD treatment in 2018, met veterans sleeping on the streets outside and began advocating for them.

During Wednesday’s press event, he called this week’s Ninth Circuit ruling “long overdue.”

"There should never have been a lawsuit filed in the first place,” Reynolds said. “ They were using the property for everything but what it was intended for, and that's housing.”

The veteran plaintiffs argued that lack of on-campus housing prevented disabled veterans from accessing physical and mental health services at the facility.

As of late 2024, the VA said there were 307 veteran housing units open on the West L.A. campus and 461 units under construction.

Robert Reynolds (right), a veteran advocate with AMVETS, walks with Los Angeles County Sheriff Alex Villanueva as they tour the Veterans Row encampment along San Vicente Boulevard in November 2021.

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Commercial leases

The appeals court ruling invalidated most commercial leases on the property, including Brentwood School's 22-acre sports complex and an oil company's drilling license.

However, the court overturned the district court's previous invalidation of UCLA's lease for its baseball stadium. Rosenbaum said he plans to refile that portion of the case, which had been argued on different grounds.

Reynolds criticized local leaders for what he said was inaction at the West L.A. VA Campus. He said local officials’ personal connections to Brentwood School and UCLA played a role.

“ A lot of these special interest groups on the VA land have so much influence politically in Los Angeles,” he said. "That's why you've had a lot of our politicians remain quiet about this."

In May, President Donald Trump signed an executive order instructing the VA secretary to declare the West L.A. VA campus a national hub for homeless veterans and develop a plan to house 6,000 people there by 2028.

That housing goal is even more ambitious than the court order, but local advocates say they haven’t heard anything from the Trump administration since it was issued.

“They need to speak to the people that actually live on that property,” Reynolds said. “I'm hoping now that we have this Ninth Circuit ruling in, that we'll be able to have some more discussion with the administration and with the VA leadership to try to figure out what the next steps are.”

As a result of this week’s ruling, the case has been sent back to the District Court judge to implement the housing order and oversee construction

On a chilly December night in Sandy Spring, Md., dozens of people crammed into the Woodlawn Manor for a Victorian-era Yuletide dance lesson, the wood floors creaking under the uncertain steps of 21st-century people learning 19th-century English country dances.

"Every good party has dancing," said Angela Yau, a historical interpreter for the parks department who was teaching the dances — and the Victorians loved a good Yuletide shindig.

Angela Yau, a site manager for the Montgomery County parks department who also works in cultural and natural history interpretation, wears an 1840s-style dress while teaching Victorian dances to the room.

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The merriment was emblematic of how many think of Yule; today, it's synonymous with Christmas. But centuries ago, before crooners sang about carols being sung by a fire, Yule meant something different: a pagan mid-winter festival around the solstice, dating back to pre-Christian Germanic people.

It was particularly important to Scandinavian communities during that time of year, beset by late sunrises and early sunsets, according to Maren Johnson, a professor of Nordic studies at Luther College.

"All these kinds of winter traditions are tied very intricately into small communities," she said. "You develop between yourselves a folklore about this winter time and this period of darkness."

In this week's installment of "Word of the Week," we travel back in time to the origins of Yule festivals, and trace those earliest traditions to modern-day Christmas celebrations.

Feasting, drinking and animal sacrifices

Scholars of these early pagan festivals don't have much concrete evidence of what actually went on at them, according to Old Norse translator Jackson Crawford, because much of the written record comes much later from Christians. But what is clear, he said, was that feasting and drinking were abundant.

Terry Gunnell, a professor of folkloristics at the University of Iceland, agrees. Drinking copious amounts of ale was not only encouraged but required, he said, and animals were slaughtered as part of the sacrifices to gods and spirits typical of these early festivals.

"The snow is coming down the mountains and in a sense, the nature spirits are moving closer," he said — and people wanted to appease them.

And then, there was the oath-swearing. Crawford said this was one of the major hallmarks of early Yule celebrations as recorded in myths like The Saga of Hervör and Heidrek from the 13th century. In it, a man swears to the king of Sweden that he'll marry his daughter with no real prospects of doing so.

"But your oaths during Yule are kind of sacred, extra binding," he said. "So he has to try to fulfill it," even though he eventually gets killed.

Crawford thinks that this oath-swearing could be where the word "Yule" actually comes from. The earliest roots could come from Indo-European words for "speaking," he said, and then Germanic peoples came to use it for more judicial purposes like admitting, confessing or swearing.

There's other theories out there, though, the dominant one being that the word could come from the Old Norse word hjól, meaning "wheel" — as in the "wheel of the year" that keeps turning with the seasons, Gunnell said.

Yule gets co-opted into Christmas

Christianization of this part of Europe, however, changed how people celebrated Yule. The church began to align its own holidays with pagan celebrations, Gunnell said. Easter replaced the festival at the beginning of summer, for example, and St. John's Day replaced midsummer. "And then we hear in Icelandic source material that [Yule] was replaced with Christmas," he said.

"So what the church is really doing is to allow people to go on doing what they had done before, but now under a Christian name," he added.

Around the 900s, Crawford said, Scandinavians started saying "Yule" and "Christmas" interchangeably.

"I think it suggests that, fundamentally, both of them are basically parties," he said.

That's not to say that Christmas was the exact same as the Yule celebrations of old. There was a new emphasis, Gunnell said, not so much on winter spirits but "a period of joy with the birth of Christ." But much of the feasting and drinking spirit of Yule stuck around — and became Christmas traditions throughout much of Europe.

Fast forward to the Victorian era, where the spirit of merriment became embedded in English culture, thanks to two important cultural influencers: Prince Albert, who imported traditional Yuletide customs popular in his native Germany, and Queen Victoria.

The queen fell in love with the traditions, Yau of the parks department said. And since she was a fashion icon, "These Christmas traditions really spread from the royal couple out through England and out through the colonies and everywhere else." And, as cultural customs are wont to do, the traditions morphed — creating, among other things, Santa Claus.

Still making sacrifices — just sweeter

Although slaughtering animals to please winter spirits is perhaps less typical of modern Yuletide celebrations, the spirit of sacrifice still remains, according to Gunnell.

That's particularly true in Scandinavian Christmas folklore. People leave out porridge for nisse and tomte, small trickster spirits who live in local forests, around the winter solstice in hopes of placating them or receiving gifts. (Though these days, Johnson said, many Scandinavians also celebrate the Julenisse, more of a Santa Claus figure.)

In Iceland, there's not really a Santa Claus figure at all, Gunnell said. Instead, there's the "Christmas Men," also known as the Yule lads. As the stories have told it, the mystic men – with names like "Window Peeper," "Sausage Swiper," "Bowl Licker" and "Meat Hook" — come one by one down from the mountains by your community, play pranks and steal things from homes. (To be fair to them, they'll also leave presents in windows for children.) On top of that, they have an ogress mother, Grýla, who eats misbehaving children "like sushi for Christmas," Gunnell said.

And although he doesn't swipe sausages or eat children, Santa Claus is not a completely dissimilar figure.

"The idea of sacrifices remains in leaving out a little bit of sherry or whiskey for Santa Claus and some food for the reindeer," Gunnell said.

It's something to consider the next time you leave out cookies and milk.
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Carmen Peterson's son Ethan is a big fan of Elmo and Mickey Mouse Clubhouse. And although Ethan is nonverbal, he loves to sing along in his own way.

"He's a really fun-loving 8-year-old. He doesn't speak, but he gets his point across," Peterson says.

Ethan has a rare genetic disorder — Syngap1 — which, among other things, causes a kind of seizure that can make him drop to the ground without warning.

"Everything just kind of shorts out for a moment," Peterson says. "And the danger of that — and I've seen this — is him falling on hardwood floors, concrete, off of stairs, like all of these things."

She says he's gotten hurt and she's had to rush him to the emergency room.

Ethan takes a medicine called Epidiolex that prevents these seizures. But last holiday season, a thief stole it off the family's front porch in Charlotte, N.C.

Peterson remembers finding the empty box and then checking her Ring doorbell camera footage. "I see this guy walking off … and I am just livid," she says.

Then, she had to figure out how to get this medicine — worth $1,800 — replaced so her son didn't miss a dose. It turned out to be a challenge.

How many stolen packages?

December is a busy time for package deliveries and for porch pirates who steal them. Sometimes the thieves run off with mail-order medication instead of getting an iPad or a Labubu.

E-commerce took off during the pandemic, and December remains the busiest time of the year for package deliveries, according to the U.S. Postal Service.

Still, it can be tricky to get the whole picture when it comes to package theft.

As easy as it is to buy stuff online, getting it to customers is actually really complicated. That's because so many people and companies interact with a package before it's delivered, according to Ben Stickle, a professor of criminal justice administration at Middle Tennessee University.

"So it's really hard to get, you know, what happens from the point that you click a button to when it gets delivered, all put back together with enough detail to find out when and where these thefts are occurring and then actually do something about it," he says.

Stickle worked on a study with the Postal Service published earlier this year, and says that victims of theft wind up reporting it to different places that don't share information with each other or even necessarily record the missing package as "theft." And sometimes victims don't report it at all.

"There's a lot of packages stolen," he says, explaining that according to security research company SafeWise, it's about 250,000 packages every day. Stickle has worked with SafeWise.

The Postal Service report estimated that at least 58 million packages were stolen in 2024. "So what are the odds that one of those, unbeknownst to the thief, has some type of medication in it?" Nobody really knows for sure, he says.

Ways to lower theft risk

So what can you do? Stickle says scheduling deliveries for when you're home and having a delivery spot that's hidden are good ideas. Even a locker for your porch that doesn't lock is a good deterrent.

"If a thief can see that there's a package, even if it's an envelope on your porch from the roadway, it seems to be far more likely that it's going to be stolen," he says.

According to Express Scripts and Optum Rx, which are two companies that offer mail-order pharmacy services, medication theft is pretty rare.

CVS Caremark, another company that ships prescriptions by mail, said it offers customers package tracking to prevent theft, but didn't answer NPR's question about how common medication theft is.

Pharmacies, including Walgreens, say they offer order tracking and use discreet packaging to help prevent theft. Customers can also opt to require a signature when their medicines are delivered.

Making sure patients don't miss a dose is a top priority, says Stryker Awtry, the director of Loss Prevention and Transformation for Optum Pharmacy, part of Optum Rx.

"Especially during the holiday seasons when deliveries surge, we want to make sure we build in peace of mind for our customers," he says. "So if a theft were to happen, No. 1, contact the pharmacy right away."

He says to also report the theft to your prescribing doctor and local law enforcement.

A lost prescription replaced  

As for Carmen Peterson in North Carolina, when she called her insurer's pharmacy to get Ethan's medicine replaced, the answer was no. But Ethan missing a dose and having a seizure that put him in the emergency room again? Not an option for her.

"It's just like it's one of those things that you just don't have a choice," she says.

If forced to, she would have found the money to buy the medicine herself.

"It was just unfortunate that the … company was so ready and kind of willing to just wash their hands of it because they felt like they had done what they were contracted to do, which is deliver the medication."

That company, Liviniti Pharmacy, said it couldn't comment on the Peterson family's experience because of patient privacy laws.

Unwilling to give up, Peterson reported the theft everywhere and made noise about it — including on her local news stations. That worked. Jazz Pharmaceuticals, the company that makes the drug Ethan needs, saw the stories and replaced it for her within a week.

Now, she recommends getting important medicines delivered to a P.O. box, a workplace or just going to the pharmacy to pick it up yourself.

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