The Brief

It’s no surprise there’s an opioid crisis in Los Angeles. In just about five years, accidental fentanyl overdose deaths in L.A. County increased by nearly 1,300% — and it's happening across all demographic groups.

Fighting opioid crisis at consulates

Fentanyl-related deaths among Latinos has skyrocketed by 721% in seven years, according to the L.A. County Department of Public Health. Part of the problem is lack of education about the harms of the drug and its prevalence. Also, there’s little awareness, especially among immigrant communities, about life-saving solutions to overdoses like Narcan, also known as naloxone.

High schools and colleges here now have Narcan available to students. And soon Angelenos will be able to buy Narcan at stores like CVS and Ralphs without a prescription. L.A. County health officials want to capitalize on this momentum with Narcan accessibility and have forged a new partnership with Spanish-speaking consulates to spread awareness about the risks of fentanyl and the benefits of Narcan.

My colleagues Jackie Fortiér and Gillian Morán Pérez wrote about this new county public health program that sends community health workers to consulates to distribute Narcan, and train people how to use it to save someone who may be dying of an opioid overdose.

Community health worker Martha Hernandez told LAist that people are often surprised by what she tells them.

“I use myself as an example,” she says. “A lot of us go to our hometown, Tijuana is the closest one, and we go and get medication, especially pain killers. [I tell them] ‘a lot of them have fentanyl in the medications’ and you’ll see their wide open eyes, like ‘woah, that is true.’”

Read more about this initiative — and why it is needed — in my colleagues’ story.

Stay safe and cool, L.A. There’s more news below — just keep reading.

How To LA

We’re here to help curious Angelenos connect with others, discover the new, navigate the confusing, and even drive some change along the way.

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(After you stop hitting snooze)

• LA Metro subway lines B and D (also known as the Red and Purple lines) are now running more often. Every weekday, both trains will run every 12 minutes from about 6 a.m. and 9 p.m.
• Atwater Village just received $2.5 million from California to build a mulch wall that could reduce noise pollution from the freeways. But getting millions is just the first step. Daniel Martinez has more information on what else needs to happen. 
• Hopeful scientists are trying to replant about 4,000 Joshua trees at Cima Dome as a part of a project to save the yuccas after the York Fire inside the Mojave National Preserve. 
• California is pulling back on its electric car rebate program in favor of targeting low-to-middle income buyers. It's expanding an initiative next year to give subsidies only to lower income buyers to encourage electric car purchases.
• Have you ever been confused at the “referendum” terminology on your ballot? Lucky for you, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a proposal that might make the language on statewide ballots a bit easier to understand. 
• Feeling bored? Well, if you ever wanted to cosplay as Alice in Wonderland, you can finally get your chance at the Shakespeare Club of Pasadena these next couple of weeks. If you’re into food history, attend the TASTE OF: LA Pop-Up Museum in downtown L.A. this Thursday through the weekend.  Or be amazed by the Drag Show exhibition at Cal State Long Beach on Thursday night. Check out these events and so much more on this week’s list of best things to do. 

Wait! One more thing ....

How to get around L.A. without a car

The spokes of a bicycle.

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Joel Saget

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AFP via Getty Images

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We all know Los Angeles is a car-centric city but, if you haven’t noticed, a lot more people are moving around the city on two wheels.

How To LA producer Evan Jacoby is one of those guys who uses his bicycle a lot, not only for recreation but also to get to work. He’s been living without a car for a couple of years now.

So how does he actually do it?

Metro helps. He puts on a helmet, rides his bike, all to feel the exhilarating, fresh wind hit his face. Then he usually hops on a train to get to work. In this episode of How to LA he talks about why he gave up his car and shows us exactly how he makes the commute to work — rain or shine. You’ll also learn he’s not alone. A lot of folks are opting to go car free in the car capital of the world.

Listen to all of the How to LA episodes here.

The Justice Department found Thursday that the law school at the University of California, Los Angeles, illegally considered race in admissions.

The announcement follows a similar finding against the university’s medical school and comes as President Donald Trump’s administration ramps up scrutiny of colleges’ processes for selecting students. The administration also has accused the UC Berkeley Law School and the medical school at the University of California, San Diego, of illegally discriminating against white and Asian applicants.

The UCLA School of Law said in a statement that it was committed to making admissions decisions in compliance with all applicable laws.

“Students are admitted through a comprehensive, merit-based review process that considers each applicant’s achievements and experiences,” the statement said. “We are confident in our process.”

Affirmative action in college admissions has been illegal since a 2023 Supreme Court ruling forbade it. The same ruling said colleges could continue to assess how applicants’ backgrounds might speak to broader characteristics, but Trump has accused colleges of using applicants’ personal statements and other proxies to consider race in admissions — which conservatives view as illegal discrimination.

The Justice Department’s investigation found UCLA’s law school discriminated against white and Asian American students by favoring Black and Hispanic applicants in its 2023, 2024 and 2025 incoming classes. Its analysis found the mean LSAT score was lower for admitted Black applicants than for admitted white applicants.

The department also said admissions staff at the law school instructed applicants during recruitment efforts, including one called the “Diversity Admissions Open House,” how to reveal their race in essays.

“Like many of its peer institutions, UCLA Law School runs a two-tiered admissions system whose academic bar for acceptance shifts up or down depending on the color of your skin,” said Harmeet Dhillon, head of the department’s Civil Rights Division, in a news release.

California voters ended affirmative action in college admissions in a 1997 ballot measure. In a brief filed in the Supreme Court case, the UC system said the change led to a precipitous drop in underrepresented minorities, especially at the system’s most selective campuses. The brief said UC went on to implement a range of race-neutral measures to increase diversity.

The Trump administration also has sued over the main UCLA campus’s response to allegations of antisemitic harassment. The administration’s latest finding sets the stage for a voluntary resolution to bring UCLA into compliance with the Justice Department’s legal interpretation or, if none can be reached, potential legal action.

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The Associated Press’ education coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

Artist Hedy Torres asked a 20-something student from Cal State Northridge to sit for a portrait nearly a decade ago. Using charcoal on paper, she drew the dark-haired young man in black and white — but she deliberately kept the portrait unfinished.

The idea was that she would complete the piece if her subject, a DACA recipient named Lino de Jesús Pérez Cuevas, ever attained lawful permanent residency.

And now he has.

DACA, which stands for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, is a program that provides two-year work permits and deportation relief for people who were brought to the U.S. as children. The permits can be renewed, but the program does not grant a pathway to citizenship. 

In late September, Pérez Cuevas — who is now married, a father, a green card holder and an adjunct instructor at his alma mater — sat with Torres once again.

Torres’ project involves interviewing subjects as she sketches them. This year, she invited the public to watch her complete the portrait as she spoke to Pérez Cuevas about what it took for him to get a green card and what that means for his life.

About two dozen people gathered at a community center in West Hollywood’s Plummer Park to see her add details to the piece that speak to the passing of time.

“I just wanted to make people empathetic to what [immigrants] go through during this process,” she said. “You have to be very patient. There is a lot of uncertainty.”

Responding to the potential loss of relief

Pérez Cuevas, who was born in the Mexican state of Oaxaca, was brought to the U.S. by his parents when he was 2.

When Torres drew him in 2017, he was pursuing a master’s degree in kinesiology at Cal State Northridge. That year, then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced intentions to rescind DACA, which had enabled him to set goals without the fear of being deported. A 2020 Supreme Court decision allowed the program to continue.

Torres was once undocumented herself, so she understood the 2017 announcement was earth-shattering for the approximately 800,000 people who were then in the program, she said.

The original, unfinished portrait of Lino de Jesús Pérez Cuevas.

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Hedy Torres

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That year, Torres was also a student at CSUN, working toward a master’s in fine art.

She recalled recently that she wanted people to see DACA recipients as people, not numbers. And so, for her master's project, she proposed creating portraits of DACA beneficiaries.

The portraits would be rooted in interviews conducted as she drew her subjects. Leaving them unfinished, she said, would symbolize the precarity of the moment.

The pieces would have enough detail for viewers to see the subjects’ faces clearly, particularly their eyes and expressions. Other elements, including their bodies and clothing, would be more of an initial sketch.

The university greenlit her project and gave her a grant to pursue it. There was just one problem: Torres had to convince reticent DACA recipients to share their stories.

Building trust 

When Torres first messaged Pérez Cuevas about the project, he ignored her for two weeks, he said. But because they had a mutual friend, he eventually agreed to meet with her.

“I was trying to see whether this person was just an academic trying to complete a project for her own benefit, or whether she really cared about the community,” he told LAist.

They met at a coffee shop. Pérez Cuevas learned about the artist’s journey from the Mexican state of Colima and everything she’d lived through since.

Before 2015, for example, an undocumented person in California could not get a driver’s license. When she was undocumented, Torres was stopped by police and had her car impounded. She said she had to cobble together thousands of dollars to get her car back from a tow yard.

Pérez Cuevas could relate. He had experienced the same thing.

He decided to trust her.

After she drew him, Pérez Cuevas helped Torres connect with more DACA recipients at the university. She drew four other portraits, which were also left unfinished.

These works were acquired by the university, with the agreement that Torres would be able to borrow and complete them when — and if — her subjects attained lawful permanent residency.

Community members watch Artist Hedy Torres update the portrait at Plummer Park in West Hollywood.

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Julia Barajas

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LAist

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‘A sense of freedom’  

As she worked on the portrait, Torres added soft lines rendered in charcoal to the image of Pérez Cuevas’ face, along with a robust mustache. And she continued the interview.

“What did you imagine your life would be like when you were young?” Torres asked.

Thinking back to high school, Pérez Cuevas said he realized then that not having a social security number barred him from decent-paying work.

“I didn't really understand what I was doing with my life,” he said, adding that he used to not think higher education was for him even while he was at CSUN. “My state of mind was really dark back then.”

He credited a college counselor with helping him navigate school. He earned his degree in 2017.

Pérez Cuevas said he has intimate knowledge of what it’s like to live with constant uncertainty: not knowing how he would pay for college because he did not qualify for federal financial aid; not being able to travel outside the country; and waiting anxiously for federal officials to make decisions on immigration laws that could transform his life.

“I can't stress enough how difficult it is psychologically to wait because it's something that can revolutionize your life,” he said. “You're betting your whole life on this approval and just that suspense of waiting, waiting, waiting, living with that anxiety.”

Torres completed her portrait of Pérez Cuevas in September 2026. Four other portraits remain unfinished.

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Julia Barajas

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LAist

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U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services continues to process renewal requests for existing DACA recipients, but the agency is no longer approving first-time applications.

Under the second Trump administration, DACA recipients are also experiencing significant delays with renewals. Some have lost their jobs. Recipients have been deported. According to the agency, the median processing time for DACA renewals was one month in 2023. Currently, it’s taking seven months to process most cases.

Pérez Cuevas said he was able to adjust his immigration status after marrying a U.S. citizen and consulting with an attorney. His lawyer helped him secure a document that allowed noncitizens to travel abroad and seek legal re-entry.

“Did getting permanent residency give you a sense of freedom, a freedom you probably didn't have when you were under DACA?” Torres asked him.

“Absolutely,” Pérez Cuevas said. “The biggest freedom was psychological freedom. You have this weight that you've been carrying all these years that finally just gets thrown off your shoulders.”

One of the things he feared most was long-term separation from his parents, he said.

When his mother and father migrated to the U.S., they did not see their own parents — his grandparents — for 40 years, Pérez Cuevas added. After his parents moved back to Mexico during the pandemic, he feared they would also go decades without seeing each other.

But having a green card enables him to travel and see his family.

Pérez Cuevas told Torres that, paradoxically, the threat of losing DACA made him “weirdly ambitious."

He said he doubled down on his studies and took on every internship he could. He figured that if the U.S. decided to deport him, he’d still have his education and work experience.

“Even on the days where I didn't necessarily have the greatest energy or the greatest state of mind, I showed up for myself,” Pérez Cuevas said.

Southern California is expected to see the longest heat wave of the season.

The National Weather Service has issued an extreme heat warning for the greater Los Angeles area from Friday through at least next Thursday, and forecasters say it’ll likely extend beyond that.

Temperatures are expected to be in the mid-90s to mid-100s, even in coastal areas.

“Unfortunately, we don't really see an end to it as far as we can tell, and that's probably the biggest thing we wanna highlight, is that while we have had hotter events this season already, this one might be the longest-lasting,” said Ryan Kittell, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service.

Kittell said they expect to see a few daily records to be broken.

Southern California saw a record-breaking 10-day heat wave in the summer of 2022.

What does the hot weather mean for fire risk? 

Forecasters say conditions likely won’t meet the threshold for issuing red flag warnings (extremely dry air and windy conditions), but the risk of fire is still going to be high during the heat wave.

“It’s still concerning, and if a fire were to get started in the wrong area, it could grow pretty fast,” Kittell said. “ We do have a history of large fires in similar environments with similar heat, similar time of the year.”

As of Thursday afternoon, Southern California Edison said nearly 10,000 customers in parts of Riverside County were under consideration for power shutoffs, which are used to reduce the risk of electrical equipment starting a fire.

How do we manage through the heat? 

Kittell said people should make plans to stay cool during the long heat wave, and check in on neighbors who are elderly, or on families with young children.

Officials say residents should limit outdoor activities to the early morning hours, stay in air-conditioned places in the afternoon and evening hours, and stay hydrated.

When Naoko Takei Moore, the author of Simply Donabe, was growing up in Tokyo, some of her earliest memories were of the family donabe.

Donabe, which means “clay pot” in Japanese, is an earthenware cooking vessel that has been part of Japanese home cooking for centuries.

On weekends, her mother would set the donabe on a tabletop burner at the center of the table, with the broth already made and the ingredients prepped. She would let Moore, then about 4, add them to the pot.

"It made me feel like I was cooking it," Moore said. "I was a hero."

Her late mother had one piece of advice about the pot: “Just let the donabe do the work for you."

That’s what Moore wants to do at our latest Cookbook Live at the Crawford in Pasadena on Thursday Oct. 8, in partnership with the James Beard Foundation.

What a donabe can do 

"Just let the donabe do the work for you," Moore's late mother used to say.

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Matt Russell

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Courtesy Naoko Takei Moore

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Because the clay is porous, a donabe heats slowly and retains heat long after the flame is off, allowing savory, umami-rich flavors to build without heavy seasoning. It handles almost anything: hot pots, rice, braises, soups, stews and steamed dishes.

"If you have good ingredients, you really don't need to cover up the flavors with so many different things," Moore said.

In Japan, it's often served as a communal pot meal, set at the center of the table so everyone can cook and eat together.

Donabe in L.A.

When Moore moved to L.A. in 2001, she found that her friends loved sushi and ramen, but thought Japanese home cooking was too complicated. The donabe dinners she hosted changed their minds.

On a trip home to Tokyo, she tasted rice cooked in a donabe made by Nagatani-en, an eighth-generation kiln in Iga founded in 1832.

"Oh my gosh, what is this about this particular donabe?" she remembered thinking. She contacted the kiln and began importing its pots.

Moore's West Hollywood shop, TOIRO, carries an array of artisan donabe that she selects herself.

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Courtesy Naoko Takei Moore

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Moore launched TOIRO in 2008 as an online import business, shipping orders from her basement and teaching donabe classes in her home kitchen. She opened the West Hollywood shop in 2017.

"First I had to start by telling people how to pronounce it," she said. (It's doh-nah-bay.)

Now, she said, major publications print "donabe" without translating it, and in 2015 she co-wrote her first book on the subject. Simply Donabe is her second.

What's cooking Oct. 8

Naoko Takei Moore's new cookbook, Simply Donabe: Japanese One-Pot Recipes.

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Courtesy Naoko Takei Moore

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For Moore, the upcoming cooler weather means hot pot season.

"The season is changing, and it's getting cooler, which I love," she said. "I love making all different kinds of hot pot dishes."

Onstage, she'll make a chicken-and-lemon hot pot from the new book, with sweet saikyo miso, kabocha squash, enoki mushrooms, spinach and thinly sliced lemon.

"I hope you'll be surprised how simple it is," she said. "And I hope you get to smell it."