The Brief

Standing over a gas burner in his outdoor kitchen in South Pasadena, Hong Pham toasted an onion and a whole ginger root until they were smoky and black.

Every Vietnamese household needs a kitchen in their backyard or garage to do the “smelly cooking,” he joked, emphasizing that charring the aromatics is key to enhancing the flavor of miến gà, a Vietnamese chicken and glass noodle soup.

The dish is comfort in a bowl — and special to Hong and his family, who are among the diaspora of people who fled Vietnam after the war ended a half century ago and settled in places like California. Miến gà was one of the first homemade meals his family had together after reuniting at a refugee camp.

I had a miserable cold this winter and was searching for a recipe for miến gà when I found one posted by Hong and his wife, Kim Dao, on The Ravenous Couple, their popular food blog, YouTube videos and Instagram account.

Alongside the recipe, Hong shares a story his father, Tung, told him about the soup’s connection to April 30, the day Saigon fell to communist forces, and his life began to unravel.

Because he had served in the South Vietnamese Army, Tung was sent to a Viet Cong re-education camp as punishment for supporting the Americans’ war effort. He endured three years of starvation and hard labor, separated from his family.

Hong Pham serves miến gà at his home in South Pasadena.

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When he got out, Tung tried to make a living as a teacher, but he barely scraped by. In March 1980, he decided to escape, joining the exodus of Vietnamese refugees who fled their homeland by boat. Because he could only afford three spots on an overcrowded fishing boat, Tung took his two eldest kids — Hong, who was almost 6 at the time, and his 9-year-old sister, Tam — and left behind his pregnant wife, Ly, and another daughter, Hong Ngoc, who was barely two.

“My mom and dad were OK with splitting up the family, even though they had no idea when — how — at what point in the future, if ever, they would see each other again,” Hong said. “For them to make that decision [when they were] in their 30s was unimaginable to me.”

Hong and Kim started their blog 16 years ago when they were still dating. They were craving Vietnamese food and wanted to learn how to recreate the dishes their moms cooked for them. Hong’s mom cooked intuitively, using everyday kitchen tools like rice bowls to measure her ingredients, so he decided to write down her methods so he could follow her recipes precisely. Kim helped convert the amounts into the American system of cooking measurements.

This drew Hong closer to his mom, especially after he moved away from home in Michigan, where the family resettled after coming to America. He often calls her when he’s cooking to get her advice.

When he went to college and came home to visit during breaks, his mom often greeted him by asking, “Have you eaten?”

“I would just answer her yes or no, and didn’t think much about it. But now, as a parent, I know what she really meant. It was her way of nourishing us and showing her love and affection,” he said. “And so now that we both cook, we’re so much tighter because of our cooking.” 

As a daughter of Vietnamese immigrants, I can relate. My parents, brother and I traveled by plane to the United States in 1984 as part of a later wave of refugees who were admitted to the country under the Orderly Departure Program.

Whenever we call each other, my parents always first ask, “Have you eaten?”

I had been a longtime admirer of The Ravenous Couple and their culinary adventures. After finding the recipe for miến gà and reading his dad’s story, I reached out to Hong. He was as open and friendly as he seemed online, and he invited me to come cook with him.

Hong Pham picks fresh Chinese chives from his backyard herb garden in South Pasadena.

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Hong Pham picks fresh Chinese chives from his backyard herb garden at his home in South Pasadena.

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We moved from his backyard kitchen to his brightly lit indoor kitchen to continue making the soup. Hong called his mom on FaceTime at her home in suburban Detroit to ask how much dry bean thread noodles to use in the dish, because they quickly expand in water. I asked her to share her memories of her family’s flight from Vietnam.

Ly said in Vietnamese that after Tung left, she waited anxiously for news. Tung and the children went on a boat led by the same smuggling organization her other family members hired to get to a safer shore. The group was reputable, but there were reasons to worry: The journey was dangerous and an untold number of refugees lost their lives to dehydration, starvation, pirate attacks or rough seas.

About 10 days later, a man working for the leader of the smuggling operation came to her door. He said that during the journey to Thailand, Tung begged the leader to bring his wife and toddler on the next trip out of Vietnam, and he agreed.

Ly said she couldn’t afford to go, but the man urged her to quickly come up with a payment and leave while she was still five months pregnant.

“He told me if I refused to go, it was my fault because [the ringleader] was trying to keep his promise to my husband,” she said.

With her mom’s help, Ly borrowed enough gold — the most desirable currency in post-war Vietnam — from neighbors and friends to board a boat with about 90 other refugees, with Hong Ngoc on her lap.

Ly said the sea was calm and the boat was so overloaded that she could stretch her arm and touch the water. They quickly ran out of food and water, so she fed her daughter a citrus syrup she had made for the trip, so she wouldn’t cry from thirst and hunger.

They traveled for three days and two nights before landing on an island near the Thai-Cambodian border. Ly said authorities eventually transported her group to a refugee camp in Laem Sing, a district in eastern Thailand. She and Hong Ngoc arrived on April 30, 1980, five years after the Fall of Saigon. She recalled seeing Tung, Hong and Tam in the crowd of people rushing to welcome the latest load of survivors.

Hong Pham chars ginger and onion over his outdoor stove.

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Hong Pham chars ginger and onion over his outdoor stove to flavor the broth for miến gà.

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“We were so overcome with emotions, we just hugged each other and cried,” she said.

Vietnamese refugees consider April 30 a day of mourning. They call it “Black April” because it was the day they lost their country. But for the Phams, it was also a day of rebirth.

“So many people were lost at sea … so for our family to be able to reunite like that was really a miracle,” Hong said.

Because of the secrecy surrounding the escape, they never learned the name of the smuggling operation’s leader. He was only known as “Anh Bo.” Hong and his sister, Tam, said they wish they could thank him for bringing their family together.

“He could have taken anybody, but he kept his word. Even to this day, that means a lot,” Tam said by phone from her home outside Detroit.

Once reunited, the family stayed in Thailand for several more months so Ly could give birth. Tung named their new baby girl Tudo, or tự do, which means freedom in Vietnamese.

A photo of the Pham family in the early 1980s after they were resettled in Michigan.

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At the refugee camp, the family received daily rations of food. Ly said one day, each person received a piece of chicken, so she put everyone’s portion together to make miến gà.

In the blog, Tung described feeling grateful to eat miến gà with his family, reunited and free.

“Thinking what could have been and the remote odds of seeing my family together so soon, I ate this simple dish with such happiness,” he said. “It was the most satisfying and unforgettable meal I’ve ever experienced.”

Ly said she was thankful to her brother, who was the first in her family to arrive in the United States, for sending the money to the refugee camp so she could buy the noodles and other ingredients for the soup.

At home in South Pasadena, Hong used a whole chicken — head and feet intact — he bought from a fresh poultry store to make his version of miến gà. He placed the chicken in a boiling pot of broth, threw in the charred onion and ginger and reduced the stock to a simmer. Once the chicken was cooked, about 30 minutes later, he lifted it out of the pot and submerged it in a bowl of ice water.

A photo on the fridge shows Pham and his family at a refugee camp in Thailand in 1980 after they escaped Vietnam and before they resettled in the United States.

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Next, he placed the translucent noodles into a handmade ceramic bowl, ladled in the broth and seasoned it with pungent fish sauce. He garnished the soup with chicken, shiitake mushrooms, fried shallots, scallions and fresh chives picked from his herb garden.

He said his mom used to scoff at his precise plating technique and his insistence on pairing certain dishes with ceramic pieces that he made — a hobby he picked up during the pandemic — to make sure they “look pretty for the ‘Gram.”

It’s a generational difference, Hong said, because his mom had to cook for survival, whereas he has the luxury of consuming food “with more intention.” We gathered around his dining table and slurped miến gà with Hong’s daughters, Mira and Emi. The noodles were slippery and the soup had an intense chicken flavor combined with the umami of shiitake mushrooms.

After Tudo was born, the Phams were admitted to the United States as refugees and resettled in Michigan with the support of a Catholic charity. They rented a house in suburban Detroit. Tung worked as a janitor and assembled machinery parts at a factory, while Ly stayed home.

“When I came here, I didn’t know one word of English, and I didn’t know how to drive. I didn’t know anything,” she said. “But I tried to raise my kids and teach them Vietnamese so they wouldn’t lose their cultural heritage.”

Mira Pham, 7, helps her dad, Hong Pham, set the table.

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When the children went to school full-time, she went back to work as a butcher, a trade she did in the wet markets of Vietnam, this time at a Jewish deli. She also volunteered at her Catholic church, often by making and selling Vietnamese food to raise money for various causes.

“My children didn’t understand why I spent so much time in church,” she said. “I explained that before we left, I prayed to God that if He delivers our family to safety, I would do everything I could to serve my faith.”

The family started over with almost nothing.

Hong remembers wearing secondhand clothes for years because his parents were saving money to pay back their debt. For their first Christmas, his parents wrapped empty boxes and put them under a donated tree because they couldn’t afford to buy gifts.

“My mom mentioned that when we first arrived, the [sponsor] families didn’t know what we liked to eat and so they would give us canned peas, canned corn and things like that — and a lot of mashed potato flakes and macaroni and cheese,” Hong said.

Hong Pham dishes out miến gà at his home.

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She didn’t know how to cook any of it, and instead used whatever she could find at American supermarkets to recreate Vietnamese food.

“I think that was the ingenuity of that generation. She used all these American ingredients, but it was all made in a Vietnamese way,” he said.

Along the way, small acts of kindness helped the family survive.

When someone noticed that Tung was taking the bus to get from one job to another, they offered him rides. Later, a sponsor gave him a used car and taught him to drive.

“It was a collective effort, a lot of generous people in the community helped us get through a tough time,” Hong said.

Hong said his parents constantly reminded him and his siblings how lucky they were to be in the land of opportunity and achieve their dreams. The four kids graduated from the University of Michigan and went on to earn graduate degrees. Hong became a doctor, Tam an engineer, Ngoc a public health expert, and Tudo an attorney.

Though he lives far away from his parents, Hong and his wife stay connected to their heritage by speaking Vietnamese to their daughters and by sharing food with their community. They host cooking parties in their backyard to help raise funds for charities. More recently, they made an inventive version of banh mi with brisket and homemade pickles to support victims of the Eaton wildfire in nearby Altadena.

Emi Pham, 10, her sister Mira, 7, and their dad, Hong Pham, eat miến gà, a Vietnamese chicken and glass noodle soup garnished with shiitake mushrooms, scallions, fresh chives and crispy fried shallots.

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Hong said Tung is 85 and no longer able to speak coherently due to a stroke. Ly takes care of him. Hong said he’s glad he recorded Tung’s memories of miến gà years ago and regrets not doing more recordings while his dad was still able to speak. He said his dad was a great storyteller and had a knack for spotting Vietnam veterans wherever they went.

“He’d approach them really casually and thank them for their service, and next thing you know, they’ll have a long conversation,” Hong said. “He loved to share his stories and listen to other people’s stories as well.”

If his dad could speak, Hong said he would probably say that he’s “forever grateful to America for welcoming us as a family and as a whole community.”

He said he also thinks Tung would be sad about the country’s tough immigration policies under President Donald Trump.

“Part of me also would like to think he would be abhorrent about the current state of America, the freedoms that he escaped and risked his life and lives of his children for, slowly eroding away,” he said.

Today will be dry and warm. Expect temperatures in the mid-to-low 90s in some areas, as a heat advisory is in effect for much of L.A. County between 10 a.m. and 6 p.m.

Wind speeds between 30 and 40 miles per hour can be expected in the valleys. In downtown L.A. and along the coasts, the gusts will be a bit weaker, between 15 and 20 miles per hour.

The increased temperatures are fueled by northeasterly winds originating in Nevada’s Great Basin that have pushed their way into Los Angeles, resulting in moderate Santa Ana winds.

Bryan Lewis, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Oxnard, says to expect areas around downtown L.A. to hit at least 90 degrees.

“Pretty warm temperatures for this time of year, in general," he said. “Even all the way down to the coast, we're going to see some very warm temperatures, upper 80s to low 90s.”

Temperatures are expected to cool down for the next couple of days as the Santa Ana winds dissipate, but they’re likely to pick back up on Wednesday.

Higher temperatures — between 80 and 90 degrees — could last until Friday.

Across much of the United States and Canada, daylight saving time begins Sunday at 2:00 a.m. local time.

Most people will turn their clocks forward an hour, trading an hour of sunlight in the mornings for more daylight at the end of the day. When it ends, clocks will turn backward by an hour nearly eight months later to have more morning light in the darkest days of winter.

But British Columbia will switch their clocks for the last time — ushering in a new era of permanent daylight saving time. The switch was supported by "more than 90% of British Columbians," said David Eby, premier of British Columbia.

"The way that we live our lives now in the modern era, having an extra hour of sunlight at the end of the day, whether it's the winter or the summer, makes a big difference for people," Eby told NPR's Adrian Ma on All Things Considered.

While the idea may be a popular one among British Columbia residents, experts in sleep medicine and public health are not fans of the time change.

"Daylight saving time has been shown to have a lot of negative effects," said Emily Manoogian, a senior staff scientist at the Salk Institute and an executive member of the Center for Circadian Biology at the University of California, San Diego. "And actually the United States tried permanent daylight savings in the '70s for one year. It was so awful that they reverted it almost immediately."

People went to work in the dark and children walked to school in the dark. And then, "there were a few fatal car accidents," she said, which led to the reversal.

Eby acknowledged health risks, but added that people in his province are used to waking up in the dark and taking their kids to school in the dark during the winter.

"We're on the very western edge of the time zone, and so we have dark mornings anyway," he said. "People really want that hour at the end of the day."

Why daylight saving is bad for our bodies

While our modern world and lifestyles may favor permanent daylight saving, our biology supports a permanent standard time. That's because our internal circadian clocks — which control not just our sleep-wake cycle, but also our cardiac and metabolic pathways — are synced to daylight, according to Manoogian.

"Light is the largest cue to coordinate behavior," she said. When we wake up and our eyes detect sunlight, they send a signal to the brain to tell the rest of the body to wake up and gear up for the day.

"So when you're not getting light in the morning, your body thinks it's not morning yet," she explained. "And it's very hard to just force your body to wake up without that light."

Similarly, in the evenings, when it's bright outside, our bodies find it harder to go to sleep. And it's easy to get stuck in a cycle of later bedtimes and a tougher time waking up in the mornings. That cycle can affect our cognitive functioning during the day and our metabolism all day long. This has widespread public health impacts, said Manoogian. It can also lead to more car accidents, heart attacks and strokes in the week following the start of daylight saving time.

"We know that sleeping, eating, getting light at the wrong time is a huge risk for cardiometabolic disease," said Manoogian. "Every medical and scientific society would argue we should never go to daylight saving time. It was originally created to try to save energy, [but] evidence has shown it does not save energy."

A study by Stanford researchers published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in September 2025 found that switching our clocks twice a year takes a massive public health toll, primarily by driving up the number of strokes and cases of obesity per year. It also found that switching permanently to standard time would result in 300,000 fewer people having strokes and more than 2 million fewer cases of obesity.

"When we can realign better to our environment, we get better sleep," said Manoogian. "We have lower risks of almost any chronic disease you can imagine — cardiometabolic, cancer, even depression, bipolar disorder."

The Stanford researchers also found that permanent daylight saving reduced the number of strokes and obesity, but less so than permanent standard time. In other words, as Manoogian puts it, "the health benefits of standard time are pretty great."

Soften the blow of time change on your body

If you're concerned about how daylight saving time might affect your and your family's health, Manoogian has some tips to soften the transition on your body.

• Get enough light in the mornings: If the sun is out when you wake up, make sure you get enough light, said Manoogian. If it's dark when you wake up, at least turn on as many lights in your home as possible. 
• Prioritize getting enough sleep: Seven to nine hours of sleep is considered ideal for adults, with some people needing closer to seven and others needing closer to nine hours. You know what your body needs, so make sure you get that. "Consistency is also key," said Manoogian. So try to get the same amount of sleep every night. 
• Have consistent meal times: "Keeping a consistent eating pattern to the part of the day when you're active and best able to process food can have dramatic health benefits," she said. That might mean waiting an hour or two after you wake up to eat breakfast and keeping all meals to within an eight-to-10-hour window. "It can decrease Hb1C, which is kind of the gold standard for measuring blood glucose," she says. "It also is shown to decrease cholesterol in animal studies. It's shown to increase health span and even lifespan." 
• Ease kids into the time shift: "Usually what we do for our family is we try to shift like 20 minutes a day over like three days," said Manoogian, who has two children. "That can go a long way" toward helping kids' bodies to adjust to the shift forward.

Copyright 2026 NPR

When Tina Trahan first stepped into the Studio City house made famous by The Brady Bunch, she thought, “I have to have it.”

The art collector grew up watching the classic family sitcom and was struck by a rush of familiarity in the mid-century, split-level house used in the sitcom’s exterior shots.

The Brady Bunch house in North Hollywood, CA on Saturday, Aug. 16, 2025.

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“It feels like you walked into your childhood home when you were 10 years old,” Trahan said. “I thought, ‘No one can get this feeling anywhere else.’”

Her 2023 purchase has led to something more: The Brady Bunch house is now officially a Los Angeles landmark, putting it in the same league as the Griffith Observatory and the Hollywood Bowl.

The City Council last Wednesday granted the house at 11222 Dilling St. historic-cultural monument status — the culmination of a two-year campaign Trahan embarked on to preserve the house for future generations of fans.

Tina Trahan painstakingly recreated the sets of the Brady Bunch.

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“People are really, really connected to the whole TV show,” Trahan said. “It just made me realize, what if I get hit by a bus tomorrow? Is there anything I can do to preserve this?”

Now, as a historic-cultural monument, the house can’t undergo demolition or major changes by any future owners without city review.

The Zillow listing

The Brady Bunch, which debuted in 1969, isn’t even Trahan’s favorite sitcom. That honor is reserved for Three’s Company.

The living room has been recreated to look like the TV show’s iconic set, with the open staircase and mid-century décor.

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But growing up in front of the TV as a kid in the Chicago suburbs, she came to know The Brady Bunch episodes by heart from years of syndicated reruns.

Decades later, when she was on the hunt for a new house, she caught sight of the Brady Bunch house while scrolling through Zillow.

She stopped at a photo of an open floating staircase that looked just like the one the Brady kids barreled down on their way to the next family misadventure, always neatly wrapped up by episode’s end.

HGTV had put the house up for sale, after previously gutting the interior for a reality series with the original cast and rebuilding it to match the show’s sets.

Not everyone approved of the $3.2 million purchase, including Chris Albrecht, Trahan’s husband and the former HBO chief who oversaw shows like The Sopranos and Sex and the City in the late '90s and early 2000s.

Owner Tina Trahan had three elephant stuffed animals made for the girls' room until she settled on the right size.

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“He said, ‘Have you lost your mind?’” Trahan said. “He was under the impression that I wanted to move into it.”

But Trahan said she cares too much about preserving the house to ever live in it.

“What if someone drops a meatball on the sofa, or something?” she said. “I would have a nervous breakdown.”

Over the last couple of years, she’s added some 400 items to the rooms, easter eggs nodding to different episodes — like the flashlight that oldest brother Greg used to fake a UFO sighting and the stuffed giraffe in the room shared by the three girls. Trahan had three different giraffes made until she settled on the right size.

Fan destination

Trahan has also opened up the house for tours, raising hundreds of thousands of dollars for charities like No Kid Hungry, the John Ritter Foundation and Wags and Walks, from where she’s adopted elderly and disabled dogs.

She said the actors who portrayed the Brady kids — including Christopher Knight, who played Peter, and Maureen McCormick, who was Marcia — gamely take part in the fundraisers at the house.

The Brady Bunch cast members continue to support the show's legacy and appear at fundraisers.

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“They could not have found six people to better represent that show,” she said.

In the time that she’s owned the house, Trahan said she’s come to realize that Brady Bunch fans aren’t fading away, but continuing to grow in number.

The show has essentially been in nonstop reruns on various channels since its original run ended in 1974, and is also available to stream. Every day, fans of all ages make the pilgrimage to Studio City to take selfies in front of the house.

Tina Trahan sits on a Plymouth Satellite wagon she bought for the house. It's,like the ones the Bradys drove on the show.

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“I just don't want that taken away from people who it means so much to,” Trahan said.

So Trahan set her sights on landmark status, and brought in legal and preservation experts to help make the case. Among them was Heather Goers, an architectural historian who also worked on getting Marilyn Monroe’s Brentwood home designated as a historic-cultural monument in 2024.

Protecting a pop culture icon 

Trahan thought the team had an uphill battle, given the fact that the house was not very old (having been built in 1959) and that only the exterior was filmed for the show.

“I'm sure there are people that are like ‘But wait, that's not historical,'” Trahan said.

But then the nomination was approved by the Cultural Heritage Commission, which Trahan said surprised her by extending the historic-cultural designation to the interior, even though it had been thoroughly remodeled.

Then came approvals by the Planning and Land Use Management Committee of the City Council and finally the full council.

Tina Trahan's eye for detail extended to the backyard of the Brady House.

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“It was a relief because it’s been two years I’ve been working on this,” Trahan said. “It’s been a long, long road.”

So how does it feel to own a landmark? Trahan says not much has changed — except she now needs a new homeowner’s insurance policy.

Her insurer canceled coverage last week after news broke that the house had gained landmark status.

Historic homes are seen as pricier and trickier to insure — but a small tradeoff she's willing to accept to protect a piece of TV history.

Happy Daylight Saving, when time is bent so mere mortals can have more time to play in the sunshine.

It's a reminder of how much we treat the sun as an inalienable right here in L.A., as we emerge from months of long nights when darkness descends at the inconvenient hour of, say, 4:30 p.m.

For artists, filmmakers, writers, the light of Los Angeles has been a source of inspiration.

The late David Lynch was an avowed fan. He wrote about its transformative quality in his 2006 book of musings and reflections, "Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity."

"The light is inspiring and energizing. Even with smog, there’s something about that light that’s not harsh, but bright and smooth. It fills me with the feeling that all possibilities are available. I don’t know why. It’s different from the light in other places," Lynch recounted.

That same L.A. glow was memorialized in the New Yorker three decades ago by writer Lawrence Weschler, who chopped it up with a constellation of notable names in the arts, sciences and beyond — including the great Vin Scully — about the light that the writer "pined for every day" since leaving Southern California.

Actually, it's pollution

All this sweet talk rankles  Paul Wennberg, who teaches air pollution chemistry at Caltech. He and his research team have worked to reduce pollution in cities across Asia, Mexico and the U.S.

 "They're waxing poetic about the L.A. glow," he said. "A lot of it is caused by smog."

L.A. glow

Wennberg is not talking about the glorious magic hour sunsets, but the gentle sunlight we've come to associate with Los Angeles.

The kind of light that doesn't produce harsh, defined shadows. And why not? Because of the many tiny particles of smog in the air that are perfectly sized to ricochet light in all conceivable directions.

"It's all the pollution in the air that is scattering, as we say, redirecting the light from the sun," he said.

That process, Wennberg said, makes the air "glow, literally."

Lynch’s "bright and smooth."

"This is why artists say they like Los Angeles — it's because the light comes at us from all directions," he said.

And on really polluted days, Wennberg continued, the sky looks overcast. "It keeps us from having shadows."

That means we're actually getting less sunlight, says Suzanne Paulson, director of the Center for Clean Air and a professor at UCLA.

" It varies obviously from day to day, but it can be easily half the sunlight that is actually not reaching the ground because of the pollution," Paulson said.

The drastic difference on a non-polluted day — with its full direct sun casting hard shadows — can be seen on clear days, like during the Santa Anas.

Those winds can be “so strong that they come and basically scour out the whole basin and push all the smog off the coast," Paulson said. "And sometimes you can see this smog layer out over the ocean."

Even as the L.A. light continues its glow, both Wennberg and Paulson said the bad air we experience here in 2026 is nothing like what it was in decades past — thanks to the pioneering work done by the state and the city.

'L.A. smog'

The first major Los Angeles smog event happened July 26, 1943, and caused panic among the populace who feared the ominous dark haze was a Japanese chemical attack.

In essence, that was the birth of photochemical smog, often known as L.A. smog, distinct from other serious episodes that had happened in the winter elsewhere.

But how it was different chemically wasn't known until the early 1950s, when Caltech professor Arie Haagen-Smit discovered that certain tailpipe pollutants along with industrial emissions get baked by intense sunlight — and result in L.A. smog.

By then, the Los Angeles County Air Pollution Control District was formed, the first in the nation. It was merged with similar entities in Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino counties to create the South Coast Air Quality Management District in 1977.

"The air quality was horrendous," Paulson said.

But through hundreds of laws, from those regulating consumer products like lighter fluid or oil paint, to requiring reformulated gasoline and catalytic converters for cars, the air has become dramatically healthier.

"Over the years in California, we have really led the world and made what has been a crowning achievement," she said. " The air is 70, 80% cleaner than it was."

So much has been done, she said, that regulations have just about reached their limits.

"We've done all the easy things, and it's just really hard to find additional things that we can regulate to improve the air quality," she said.

Bigger changes — for example, electrifying more vehicles and appliances, and burning less fossil fuel — will be needed to curb pollution further. Because even at reduced levels, pollutants are still harmful, leading to not just respiratory illnesses but cardiovascular issues and environmental degradation.

Are we special?

So is the L.A. light unique?

Los Angeles's geological features — our mountains that trap heat, deserts that produce hot winds and coasts that create cool sea breezes — all contribute to pollution being held close to ground in a process known as inversion, Paulson and Wennberg noted.

And the stuff just sits there, stubbornly shrouding the city until the winds come to chase it away.

But no, the glow in L.A. isn't special, said Wennberg at Caltech, but our romanticization of it is. And if you are ever curious if pollution is around, he said just look at the ground.

" You'll see a shadow, but it'll be much less sharp," he said.  "When I see the really bad pollution here, it still makes me very sad. I think we need to, you know, make shadows great again."