The Brief

What brings Greg Reyes to this Walmart south of Savannah are the low prices. He and his wife keep a close eye on their limited budget; she's retired and he's disabled. Their grocery list is always the same. But the prices have been changing.

"I used to pay like $40 a year ago, and now we're paying like $60," Reyes says. In his bags today are some chicken, turkey and beef. Other things simply had to go. "We don't buy ice cream no more because it's expensive," Reyes says. "It's kind of sad, but we have to do it like that."

The cost of living in the U.S. rose 2.7% in December compared with a year before, according to Tuesday's federal data. That's a steady slowdown after a yearslong stretch of intense inflation, but still painful. The past year also brought a global trade war, as President Trump imposed sweeping tariffs on nearly all imports. And the world continued to grapple with extreme weather, from droughts to downpours.

All of this is showing up in our shopping carts.

Since 2018, NPR has tracked the prices of dozens of items at this suburban Walmart superstore. Walmart is America's most popular retailer and the world's largest, which gives it the power to negotiate with suppliers for some of the lowest and most stable prices.

Here's what we learned on our latest price-check visit, in December. (Or skip the analysis to see the full details of NPR's shopping cart.)

Prices in NPR's basket rose 5% on average last year

Almost half the items on NPR's shopping list got more expensive in 2025, including shrimp, Oreo cookies, Coca-Cola and Dove soap. Some price increases, notably on items made in China and Vietnam, appear to be tariff related. Other price hikes had to do with weather events affecting harvests of crops such as cacao and coffee beans.

Just under a quarter of the items on NPR's list got cheaper, including eggs, milk and Cheerios. And many packaged foods stayed the same after years of price hikes.

As affordability became Americans' top concern, big brands began to worry about shoppers switching to store-label competitors or skipping some purchases altogether. To entice weary shoppers, NPR found, Walmart offered more discounts in December than it had in previous years.

A few disclaimers about our method:

• We went through almost every aisle in this Walmart to come up with the 114 items. (The full table is below.) To account for possible changes in package sizes, we focused on the price per unit, whether it was an ounce of salsa or a square foot of aluminum foil.
  
• NPR reached out to the producers of all the items on our list that changed in price. Most companies did not respond. The few that did — including Kikkoman and Campbell's — noted that Walmart, as the retailer, has ultimate control over the prices that shoppers see on shelves.
  
• A Walmart spokesperson said in a statement: "We remain dedicated to providing our customers Every Day low prices, with the goal of having the lowest price on a basket of goods over time." A store, for example, might extract deals from suppliers or charge slightly more for several items in order to sell something else at a break-even price or even below cost.

Tariffs loom over store shelves

With tariffs being the biggest story in retail in 2025, signs of their impact inevitably showed up in Walmart's aisles. Though it's hard to pin any price increase on tariffs with certainty, the through line was noticeable.

Some of the biggest price jumps were on items imported from countries saddled with hefty tariffs: Walmart's store-brand paper folders made in China (up 46%), swai fish fillets from Vietnam (up 34%), Farberware's plastic measuring spoons made in China (up 19%) and Schwinn's infant bike helmet, which used to be made in China but is now made in Vietnam (up 18%).

Walmart, Farberware and Schwinn did not comment on the impact of tariffs to NPR, but several other companies did. Dole, whose canned pineapple from Southeast Asia got 25% more expensive, cited weather-related crop shortages and tariffs on goods imported from the region.

Reynolds Wrap, whose aluminum foil rose in price by 13%, called out "historic and sustained cost increases over the past year, driven by tariffs, global supply pressures, rising energy costs, and limited availability." Much of U.S. aluminum comes from Canada, and these imports now face a 50% tax.

Walmart in May warned that new tariffs would lead to higher prices, as Trump threatened 145% tariffs on goods from China. The White House later paused, changed up and even rolled back some of its trade plans, namely on food items. By August, Walmart officials said tariff costs were rising "each week," although the company was able to mitigate many of them. In November, incoming Walmart CEO John Furner said tariffs brought "less impact" than expected early in the year.

Climate chaos roiled many industries

Some of the items with the worst price hikes are repeat offenders: coffee, beef and chocolate. They, too, were affected by tariffs — such as beef and coffee coming from Brazil — but the main culprit was the weather.

At this Walmart, the price of Maxwell House ground Colombian coffee rose by 46% in 2025 and its breakfast K-Cups by 34%. The costs of Hershey's and Lindt chocolates jumped around 26%. A pound of ground beef went up 30%, and the store now prominently displays a cheaper option: a blend of beef and ground pork.

The cost of coffee beans has soared as climate change has brought erratic rainfall patterns, floods and droughts to farmlands. Cacao harvests, too, have come up short for three years straight; West African farmers, who grow most of the world's supply, have dealt with extreme weather, changing climate patterns and disease in their aging trees. And the U.S. beef supply is at its lowest in decades, driving cattle prices to record highs, in part because of drought.

Kraft Heinz (which owns Maxwell House), Hershey and Lindt & Sprüngli in statements all cited the unprecedented higher costs of key raw materials, adding that they've also absorbed or offset part of those costs.

Shrinkflation continues in the laundry aisle

When inflation peaked after the COVID-19 pandemic, some manufacturers stealthily raised prices by shrinking their products — shampoo, paper towels, chips and candy — while charging the same or slightly more. In 2022, for example, NPR's Walmart visit found that Dove soap bars had shrunk by a quarter of an ounce, while rising in price by a few cents. (Dove maker Unilever did not comment.)

Last month, NPR spotted one case of shrinkflation: Tide laundry detergent. But the company says it's actually efficiency.

NPR first spotted Tide selling less laundry detergent per bottle in 2022: The amount of liquid had shrunk to 92 ounces from 100 ounces before the pandemic, and the price had risen by a dollar. After that, the cost stayed the same, but the contents shrank to 84 ounces in 2024 and then to 80 ounces in December.

The label continuously promised enough detergent for 64 loads of laundry.

Procter & Gamble, which makes Tide as well as Head & Shoulders shampoo (whose price rose almost 18%), told NPR that both products saw "meaningful upgrades" in the past year. Tide specifically got the "most significant upgrade to its liquid formula in over 20 years," according to the company, with a "boosted" level of active cleaning ingredients and updated dosage instructions.

"The result is superior cleaning performance in a smaller dose," a Procter & Gamble representative said.

Good news! Some things are cheaper

The biggest price drop finally came for eggs after record highs earlier in the year due to the persistent bird flu. By December, the price of a dozen eggs at Walmart dropped 30%. The cost of butter also dipped, by almost 16%, thanks to a glut in dairy production.

And as inflation-weary shoppers tighten their belts, brands have started doing something they rarely do: lowering prices. PepsiCo (maker of Lay's, Cheetos and Tostitos) last month said it would cut prices to boost sales. General Mills (maker of Cheerios, Betty Crocker and Annie's) also confirmed it plans to discount roughly two-thirds of its offerings. NPR's price check found Cheerios costing 19% less than a year ago.

A Walmart spokesperson also told NPR that the chain has added more discounts (or "rollbacks," in Walmart parlance) than it had in the past two years. The company cited 13,000 of them in the first three quarters of 2025, of which about 2,000 became permanent price cuts.

Copyright 2026 NPR

This story first appeared on The LA Local.

After Inglewood systematically violated state law, a judge reminded the city it was required to release records on police misconduct and use of force — but rolled back an earlier ruling that would have required the records to be posted online.

Barring an appeal, the decision brings five years of legal wrangling between the city and the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California closer to a conclusion.

Inglewood won’t face serious consequences for the pattern of breaking California public records law, but the city must pay attorney fees for the ACLU and Trisha Shanklin, who joined the ACLU’s 2021 lawsuit. Inglewood police fatally shot Shanklin’s sister, Kisha Michael, and Marquintan Sandlin in 2016.

LA Superior Court Judge Amy Carter said the city will not have to proactively post the records online, which another judge had previously ordered the city to do for the next three years. Carter said during a Wednesday hearing that such a requirement would have to come from state legislators, not a judge.

Over the last decade, California lawmakers have expanded the public’s right to access police misconduct and use-of-force records, but Inglewood has thrown up a series of obstacles to that access.

The Inglewood City Council voted to destroy decades of internal affairs records in 2018 just weeks before one law went into effect, though Mayor James Butts denied the move was intended to thwart the law, according to LAist. The LA Times reported that the city nearly did it again in 2021 before being blocked by a judge.

This week’s court ruling found the city has routinely violated the law since then, missing deadlines, sharing incomplete records, and at times, failing to provide any documents at all.

Tiffany Bailey, an ACLU attorney, celebrated the decision and said it streamlines the civil rights group’s ability to get police records from the city in the future.

David Loy, an attorney with the First Amendment Coalition, said the case was a great win for the ACLU.

“These kinds of (public records) delays are not uncommon throughout the state,” Loy said. “I hope and believe this is a signal to other cities to get their house in order.”

Attorneys for the city declined to comment on the ruling, and Mayor James Butts did not immediately reply to written questions from The LA Local.

CalMatters maintains a searchable database of police misconduct and use-of-force records called the Police Records Access Project that includes records from the Inglewood Police Department.

The universe is a strange place — filled with exploding stars, ancient galaxies, and unseen worlds. Now, astronomers are about to get a brand new tool to explore it.

The $4.3 billion Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is scheduled for launch Aug. 30. Named for NASA's first chief astronomer, the observatory is expected to reveal new information about the expansion of the universe and discover multitudes of planets orbiting distant stars.

Roman, as it is known to its friends, has an unusual history. About 15 years ago NASA was making plans to build a space telescope that could, among other things, search for exploding stars known as Type 1A supernovas. These supernovas were used as a kind of cosmological measuring stick to uncover a mysterious force called dark energy that was causing the universe to expand — a discovery that earned the Nobel Prize in 2011.

Cosmologist Daniel Scolnic at Duke University says finding more of them would be key to better understanding that expansion.

As NASA was developing plans for this new telescope, a call came in from the government office in charge of surveillance satellites.

"The National Reconnaissance Office reached out to NASA," Scolnic says, "saying, 'We have this amazing satellite sitting in a hangar that we're not using. And what what do you guys think about instead of pointing downwards, we point upwards, and you guys use it?'"

NASA said yes. It took some substantial modifications, but now that old satellite is set to become NASA's next major space observatory.

Scolnic says that the new observatory could fundamentally change the scientific model that astronomers use to understand our universe.

"In the last few years, there have been measurements saying that model might be wrong — and that's something that Roman will absolutely nail, whether the model's right or wrong," he says.

Another goal of the telescope is to spend a month surveying all the stars in the Milky Way galaxy. Julie McEnery is Roman's project scientist. She says even though Roman has broadly the same sensitivity and sharpness of vision as the currently orbiting Hubble Space Telescope, its design lets it do things much faster.

"That one month of observations to survey our Milky Way galaxy would take about a century with Hubble," says McEnery.

Instead of focusing on a single object, Roman is designed to make catalogs of large swaths of the sky, and McEnery says these catalogs will be available to everyone, not just academics.

"You can be a teacher in a high school in Kentucky and your students have the opportunity to see Roman data at the same time as a professor in Princeton," she says.

One professor eager to get his hands on Roman data is Scott Gaudi at The Ohio State University. Along with colleagues, Gaudi developed a technique for detecting planets around distant stars. It's called gravitational microlensing, and it measures the way those planets bend the starlight that passes them by.

Albert Einstein described the idea in 1936 but thought it would be impractical. New technology has proven him wrong — and Gaudi expects Roman will find tons of planets that way.

"We're looking for planets that are just completely undetectable by any other method," Gaudi says. That includes planets at the center of our galaxy, "that are very analogous to our own solar system planets like Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune."

In addition to new planets, Roman should also reveal new galaxies, helping astronomers to get a better idea of the large-scale structure of the universe.

But predicting what will be Roman's greatest accomplishments over the course of its five-year mission is a tricky business.

"The history of astronomy really has shown that when you get a new capability, and especially a survey capability, you learn something new, something unexpected," says Wendy Freedman, an astronomer at the University of Chicago. "Often that turns out to be the most exciting part of a new facility. So I am completely open to what this telescope will find."

Copyright 2026 NPR

Michael Hyatt was photographing the new L.A. punk scene tearing up Hollywood when he got an offer few would refuse.

It came shortly after the band X released their seminal 1980 debut, Los Angeles. Singer Exene Cervenka and bassist John Doe had liked a photo Hyatt had taken of the Plugz.

“They asked me if I would photograph X,” Hyatt said.

For the first half of the ‘80s, Hyatt photographed X wherever he could. On their first national tour where he also drove the jury-rigged tour van. At the Whisky just months after the unexpected death of Exene’s sister. On a downtown L.A. rooftop, days after the band’s big Greek Theatre show.

Exene.

(

Michael Hyatt

/

Michael Hyatt

)

“I never pose people. I find a location, a backdrop and just let them be human beings,” Hyatt said. “People reach a point where they forget the camera —  that's when the good photographs happen.”

Hyatt’s works are compiled in a new book, X: On the Road & At the Crossroads, 1980-2024, with an accompanying exhibition opening at Beyond Baroque on Sept. 5 — where Cervenka will join Hyatt for a reading.

Exene Cervenka and John Doe in the Louisiana countryside in 1980.

(

Michael Hyatt

/

Michael Hyatt

)

A band built on chance encounters 

X’s story reads like a constellation of happenstances hurtling toward inevitability. In 1976, Doe and guitarist Billy Zoom answered each other’s ads in the Recycler. That same year at a Beyond Baroque poetry night, Doe met Cervenka and saw punk lyrics in her writing. Ray Manzarek of the Doors, after seeing X live, offered that very night to produce their debut album in 1979.

A year later, Los Angeles helped cement L.A. punk, with a sound and sensibility markedly different from contemporaries the Germs and Black Flag.

A release party marked by tragedy

For the album’s release party, Hyatt said, X played two back-to-back shows in April at the Whisky a Go Go. Before they went on stage, Cervenka was told that her sister had been en route to the show when she was hit and killed by a drunk driver.

Three months later, Hyatt took this portrait of the band after another show at the Whisky.

X at the backstage area of Whisky a Go Go in July 1980, three months after the sudden death of Exene's sister.

(

Michael Hyatt

/

Michael Hyatt

)

“I placed Exene against that plywood panel,” Hyatt remembered. “My goal, maybe on an unconscious level, was to capture the emotion related to the tragedy that happened three months prior.”

The iconic rooftop shot

A photo of X taken two days after their 1981 Greek Theatre show.

(

Michael Hyatt

/

Michael Hyatt

)

In August 1981, X played in front of a crowd of 5,000 at the Greek Theatre.

“ They had reached the height of their powers,” Hyatt said.

He wanted to capture that zeitgeist. So two days later, he met the group at the rooftop of their rehearsal studio, which Hyatt scoped out at a practice session prior to the big Greek show.

“I went up and I thought, ‘Wow, this is a fantastic spot,’” he said. “Got a little bit of the skyline off in the distance of downtown L.A., but you've got the Roosevelt Hotel right there too.”

After three rolls of film, Hyatt said one shot clearly stood out.

Four decades later, still at the front row

At X's Houston show in 2024, Hyatt photographed a married couple that went on a first date to see the band in 1980.

(

Michael Hyatt

/

Michael Hyatt

)

In 2024, X went on tour for their final album, Smoke & Fiction. One stop was Houston, Texas.

They’d played in Houston on their national tour in 1980, at a long-defunct punk venue called the Island.

In the crowd at the Island in 1980 was a young couple on their first date. A couple years later, Hyatt said, they got married.

“And there they were, 44 years later, right up front cheering on X — who they saw on their very first date,” Hyatt said.

Still together, wearing matching X shirts.

The sounds of Los Angeles are bringing together people from all walks of life to record and archive them, from the buzzing of a bees’ nest in Griffith Park to church bells echoing over goose honks in Echo Park.

And you can listen to these recordings tomorrow in Highland Park.

George Jensen founded the Los Angeles Field Recording Club a little over a year ago. He said it has attracted sound lovers with all levels of recording sophistication, from people using their phones to folks with professional recorders worth thousands of dollars.

A longtime radio guy with shows on dublab and KCHUNG radio, Jensen fell in love with preserving audio moments in the city and beyond after capturing the serene sounds of a cove in Big Sur.

“There’s a certain fluctuation of sound happening — a pulse you might say — in this city," Jensen told LAist. "Once people sit and be still for a moment, they hear it.”

About 20 club members meet up once a month at places like the purportedly haunted Greystone Mansion in Beverly Hills, a scrap yard in Sun Valley and a section of Griffith Park, where someone recorded a cacophony of bees buzzing around their nest.

Jensen, who works as a prop fabricator in the TV and film industry, said people are drawn to field recording for many reasons: Some love nerding out over the gear; others need the sound to embellish an art or music project.

The club's next endeavor, he said, is an interactive sound map where field recordists can archive their audio online for all to enjoy.

The club’s outings end up being a bit of an antisocial social club, Jensen joked.

“At the beginning, everybody meets each other... and then you go be by yourself and be quiet,” he said.

He added there's a meditative quality to field recording that hooks people.

“I think once people do it, they realize that you kind of stop and listen," Jensen said. "You become in the present. You’re forced to.

"I think there’s, like, a certain therapeutic thing that comes with it,” he said.