The Brief

I don’t know about you, my friend, but every time I step outside, I immediately want to hop in a pool. The longer, hotter heat waves driven by the climate change crisis are NO JOKE, and Angelenos like those in Pacoima — one of the hottest neighborhoods in the San Fernando Valley — have been looking for solutions.

How did Pacoima's cooling down project go?

One possible solution the city started last year was painting asphalt with a special coat of paint that reflects solar radiation instead of absorbing it. For the How To LA podcast, my colleagues Brian De Los Santos and Erin Stone visited some of the uniquely painted basketball courts and parking lots at Hubert H. Humphrey Park last year.

Now, a year later, Erin is back to let us know how that initiative between GAF Cool Community Project, Pacoima Beautiful and the city of L.A. is going.

While the verdict on the long-term success of “cool paint” technology is yet to be determined when it comes to our experience with heat, Melanie Paola Torres, a community organizer with Pacoima Beautiful, said residents are seeing this as a productive, effective endeavor.

“We’ve seen things that do work,” Torres said. “So we just keep hoping to add and stack onto that and really create a climate-resilient community.”

And the Pacoima community is not just stopping with cool pavements. Read Erin’s story to find out what they want to do next for the neighborhood’s residents.

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.

Listen Now

More news

(After you stop hitting snooze)

• While Los Angeles County officials tout their ability to move 300 incarcerated youth to Los Padrinos juvenile hall before the July 23 deadline, youth justice reform advocates and family members of those incarcerated are concerned the issues within the system won’t be fixed. 
• We know Bruce Lee as one of the world's greatest-ever international action stars, but what do you know about his actual life in Los Angeles? My colleague Josie Huang spoke with Lee’s daughter Shannon about the iconic Chinese American movie hero’s short, impactful life for the 50th anniversary of his death. You’ll also see some old family pictures. 
• Someone recently won the $1 billion Powerball jackpot inside a small store in the downtown L.A. fashion district. It was the third largest Powerball prize in our nation’s history. The winner has not come forward. 
• During a recent bike trip in the Santa Monica Mountains, my colleague Jacob Margolis noticed something unusual. What looked like a serving of cooked spaghetti was actually discovered as dodder, a parasitic plant that sucks up water and nutrients from nearby plants. 
• Pretty soon, you might notice some major changes to your electric bill. California regulators are considering an income-based plan. CalMatters’ Wendy Fry has the five things you need to know. 
• The ongoing Writers Guild of America and SAG-AFTRA strike is now affecting other businesses that are a part of Hollywood, like costume companies. My colleague Fiona Ng wrote about the instant economic impact of the worker stoppage. 
• The FDA recently approved Opill, the first daily oral contraceptive that will be available OTC, but how much would it cost and what will insurance coverage look like? KFF Health News’ Michelle Andrews answered some questions you may have.

Wait... one more thing

Enter The World Of Barbie

Irene lacayo, 35, mother to, Crista Ramirez,5, pose inside a Barbie box at the World of Barbie in Santa Monica on June 25, 2023.

(

Julie Leopo

)

Wear your hottest pink outfits and get all your girls together to go inside the World of Barbie in Santa Monica. The exhibit presents all things Barbie just in time for Greta Gerwig’s highly anticipated Barbie movie, which comes out today.

Listen to the latest How To LA podcast episode about how Barbie has always been an authentic California girl. And make sure you listen to the LA Made: The Barbie Tapes podcast where co-hosts Antonia Cereijido and M.G. Lord talk about the history behind the world’s most popular doll.

Olivia Sanderfoot stands on a flower-freckled hillside in Amherst in Western Massachusetts. She listens for a moment — and a volley of birdsong flutters forth.

An Eastern Wood-Pewee. A goldfinch. A downy woodpecker.

"It's just magical," she says with an air of reverence. There are birds foraging among the flowers. Fluffy fledglings are darting about, learning the ways of the world.

"Every day that I get to start birding is a good day," she says. "If you want to get the widest range of species and hear the most songs, you want to be out here in the morning."

Sanderfoot, a global change ecologist at Cornell University, knows that for the birds that live here, not every morning is this idyllic. Over the summer, this area was suffused with toxic smoke from distant wildfires in Canada. It's an increasingly common problem, even in places untouched by flames. Fire season is starting earlier, lasting later, burning more land — and as a result, producing far more smoke.

"Smoke can blow hundreds to thousands of miles away from that burn site," Sanderfoot explains. "That means that the footprint of a smoke event greatly exceeds that of any fire. How do birds deal with that?"

This is the central question animating Sanderfoot's desire to form a new field of study called "smoke ecology." The goal, she says, is to understand how the smoke billowing off of wildfires may be disturbing wild places and creatures — and whether anything can be done to prevent possible harm.

Air today, gone tomorrow

Sanderfoot's curiosity about how birds cope with smoke emerged in 2018 when she was living in Seattle and wildfires blazed in Eastern Washington. "The air smelled acrid," she recalls. "The city was just blanketed in this sickly yellow, gray haze."

She was told it was a one-time event — yet the same thing happened two years later.

"I remember walking outside and my eyes were just burning," Sanderfoot says. "And I thought, 'What on earth are animals doing? Are they OK?'"

An adult bluebird sits atop a nesting box containing its chicks at the Mass Audubon's Drumlin Farm Wildlife Sanctuary.

(

Aaron Gouveia/Mass Audubon

)

Very little was known apart from anecdotes — like the absence of birdsong or the arrival of droves of birds to a backyard, famished and parched.

"Smoke is a toxic soup of substances," she says. "It's not just about what [birds are] inhaling, which is inevitably bad for them. It's also about how the cues that they use to navigate their world are upended when it gets smoky outside."

To puzzle out what was going on, Sanderfoot realized that she needed to collaborate with researchers from a range of other disciplines, including conservation biology, statistics, ecophysiology and atmospheric chemistry.

"Real-world problems don't map cleanly onto the same academic silos that have been set up for decades," says Tracey Holloway, an atmospheric chemist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the lead of NASA's Health and Air Quality Applied Sciences Team, and a colleague of Sanderfoot's. "We need to be tackling new problems with new partnerships."

For instance, in order to understand what birds are inhaling, one has to know what's moving through the air in time and three-dimensional space. "It depends on which way the winds are blowing," says Holloway, "what chemical processes are happening in the air, and also patterns of rainfall and where the emissions are coming from." The science depends on air quality monitoring, satellite data, and evermore sophisticated computer modeling.

Birds are especially sensitive to smoke in large part because of how they breathe. A human being has soft lungs that allow inhalation and exhalation of air. By contrast, birds have rigid lungs surrounded by a collection of air sacs that act like bellows, pushing air continuously through the system.

"This allows birds to take up about twice as much oxygen with each breath that they inhale compared to us," says Sanderfoot. "This means that they're vulnerable to all the other things that are in the air, too."

Morgan Tingley, an ecologist at UCLA, is another member of the burgeoning smoke ecology cohort. "What we're trying to do is getting smoke to be recognized as a disturbance in and of itself distinct from fire that is worthy of our concentrated attention," he says.

For much of his career, Tingley has studied wildfires — events with a clear start and stop, and defined borders. But the smoke produced by those wildfires can present its own unique set of problems, as it can spread far from the original blaze.

"Smoke is extremely hard to predict and it's highly variable," he says. "It can be there one day, one hour, and gone the next. Which means that it's hard to actually disentangle what its impacts are because you can't really control it."

This means that it's not possible to anticipate where smoke will appear, or when. Scientists also prefer not to subject animals to smoke intentionally.

So when it comes to studying wildfire smoke and birds, the trick is to gather data everywhere. To do so, the researchers rely on legions of amateur birders and professional conservationists and ornithologists across the country who are already on the ground collecting data when smoke happens to blow in.

Big army, little birds

One such individual is Pam Sowizral, the bird project coordinator at Mass Audubon's Drumlin Farm Wildlife Sanctuary in Lincoln outside of Boston. On a sunny morning in late August, she walks up to a bluebird nest box and gently raps on the outside.

Pam Sowizral is one of the legions of birders and conservationists across the country who are already on the ground collecting data about birds when smoke happens to blow in.

(

Ari Daniel

/

NPR

)

"Always give a little knock first," she advises quietly. "Let them know you're coming." When she lifts the side panel, she reveals two feathery puffballs huddled on a bed of pine needles. These baby bluebirds are the last of the season here.

Sowizral says that nearly every year for the last 20 years, three times a week in spring and summer, she and her volunteers check the bird boxes here and count the nests and the eggs and how many chicks fledge. They check when the weather's good, when it's bad (within reason) — and when the smoke rolls in.

"Those periods of time when the smoke was here, the air somehow felt a little different," she says. But "that didn't stop us from doing our usual monitoring of our boxes."

That's key. Nationally, counts like this one, which is part of Cornell University's NestWatch project, provide a portrait of bird activity and behavior before, during and after smoke events.

Two feathery puffballs huddle on a bed of pine needles in a nesting box. These baby bluebirds are the last of the season.

(

Ari Daniel

/

NPR

)

Sanderfoot of Cornell University says she's using these kinds of observations, alongside observations of breeding behavior, to help her understand how birds are coping with wildfire smoke in a variety of places.

She's revealed three distinct strategies, depending on the species and the individual birds. They either hunker down and stay put, fly away, or shift their behavior — by not vocalizing as much or venturing out less often, say.

"This could be an attempt to mitigate their exposure," says Sanderfoot. "It might also be how they are forced to respond if they feel unwell."

In addition, she and her colleagues have observed that repeated exposure to smoke appears to impair the body condition of a variety of birds, leading to lower weight overall.

"They all respond in different ways," she says. "And we need to figure out what those ways are and how effective they are in order to design effective conservation strategies for a rapidly changing world."

This is one of Sanderfoot's top priorities: determining what might constitute what she calls smoke refugia for birds — safer spots where they can hunker down until conditions improve. "I want to know where birds are going when it's smoky," she says, "what resources they're seeking out, and what we could provide to help them during a risky time" — like water and perhaps shelter or food.

"I would like to be able to give people something they can do to help," she says.

Sanderfoot's personal experience with wildfires didn't end in Seattle. "I almost feel like the smoke is following me," she says.

In early 2025, she and her family fled the fires in Los Angeles, where they were living at the time. And this summer, she watched as a blanket of smoke descended upon parts of the U.S., including Ithaca, where she lives now, blowing off the remote Canadian infernos. She says she doesn't think it's a coincidence.

"Let's put it this way," she says: "We can expect that the future will be smokier."

It's a fact that's true for birds and people, which means that what Sanderfoot and her colleagues learn about smoke ecology may reveal a clearer way forward — for us all.

"By learning more about birds," she says, "I think we might learn something about how we can take care of ourselves and each other."

Copyright 2026 NPR

This story first appeared on The LA Local.

Despite an intense heat wave scorching Southern California this week, temperatures will begin to cool, just in time to enjoy car-free streets in Boyle Heights for CicLAvia this weekend.

On Sunday, Oct. 11, a 6.5-mile stretch of road will be closed to cars from Mariachi Plaza to Echo Park for CicLAvia’s Heart of L.A., encouraging residents to enjoy open streets in their neighborhood. This year, Boyle Heights Beat and The LA Local will be tabling at CicLAvia to share more about our community-centered reporting.

Whether you choose to walk, run, or roll, be sure to enjoy the fresh air, drink plenty of water, and wear sunscreen (and don’t forget your helmet if you’re on wheels!). 

Here’s what to know about street closures, local gems to explore across the neighborhoods and how to get reimbursed for parking. 

Cyclists and pedestrians head down 1st Street during CicLAvia on Oct. 15, 2023.

(

Andrew Lopez

/

Boyle Heights Beat

)

When is it and what can I expect? 

CicLAvia Heart of LA will take place Sunday, Oct. 11 from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. 

Participants can expect to see local gems along the route, restaurants and vendors, and event hubs featuring activations and water refill stations.

What is the route? 

The route spans 6.5 miles through Boyle Heights, the Arts District, Little Tokyo, Downtown, Chinatown and Echo Park.

(

Courtesy of CicLAvia

)

What kind of vehicles are allowed at the event?

Only people-powered vehicles are allowed, including bikes, scooters, skateboards, and rollerblades.

Motorized wheelchairs and mobility devices for people with disabilities are allowed. E-bikes are allowed with some restrictions. See the full guidelines here.

What streets in Boyle Heights will be affected?

Stretches of 1st Street, St. Louis Street, Boyle Avenue, Whittier Boulevard and the 6th Street Bridge will all be closed to car traffic. Check out the full event map here.

Street closures will begin as early as 4 a.m. on the day of the event. Streets are expected to reopen by 6 p.m.

(

Courtesy of CicLAvia

)

Parking and transportation 

No street parking is allowed along the CicLAvia route from 1 a.m. to 6 p.m. on Sunday. Driveways along the route will also be inaccessible from 7 a.m. to approximately 6 p.m. on Sunday, so be sure to plan ahead and move your car before 7 a.m. if you need to use it. 

According to the CicLAvia website, cars will be towed if they are parked along the event route.

If you live or work directly on the route, CicLAvia says you may be reimbursed up to $20 per vehicle for any parking costs incurred from 8 p.m. on Saturday, Oct. 10 through 6 p.m. on Sunday, Oct. 11.

To request reimbursement:

• Email a copy of your parking receipt and proof of residence or employment to info@ciclavia.org with the subject line “Parking Reimbursement.”
• Reimbursement requests must be submitted within 30 days of the event date.

All buses that usually run along the CicLAvia route will be detoured on the day of the event. A full list of bus detours can be found here.

In Boyle Heights, these Metro stations are located less than half a mile from the route:

• Pico Aliso, E Line – 0.4 miles
• Mariachi Plaza, E Line – less than 0.1 mile
• Soto, E Line – 0.3 miles

Where to find Boyle Heights Beat

Be sure to check out a range of event hubs, local gems, shops and restaurants along the route using this interactive map. And come say hi to the Boyle Heights Beat team—we will be stationed at the Mariachi Plaza Hub from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m.

The White House clarified Donald Trump's comments at a Monday night rally, explaining that the president was not insinuating that he wanted Iran to attack U.S. cities but instead wants to prevent Tehran from having that capability.

White House Communications Director Steven Cheung said on social media Tuesday that the president's comments have been misunderstood and misrepresented in a “media freakout” that is “not rooted in reality.”

Trump was discussing the Iran war and the resulting high gas prices that have become a midterm liability for Republicans during his remarks in Nebraska when he mentioned the possibility of an Iranian attack on U.S. soil.

“It’s a small price to pay for keeping the world safe, keeping our country safe,” he said of the war and its economic fallout. “They can take out a city. Let ’em take out Los Angeles, let ’em take out San Diego. This is a very small price to pay.”

The commentary, including Trump's casual mention of the two California cities, was delivered in the familiar meandering style that he uses at campaign rallies, when he speaks for extended periods — often an hour or more — and is only occasionally following prepared remarks on a teleprompter.

Critics, including California Gov. Gavin Newsom, seized on his statements. The governor, a Democrat who could run for president in 2028, called Trump “deranged and dangerous” for, in Newsom's framing, “saying our foreign enemies should ‘take out’ Los Angeles and San Diego.”

Cheung, in his response Tuesday, said it was obvious that Trump was not calling for such an attack.

“The media freakout over President Trump’s comments is not rooted in reality,” he said. “He was clearly stating U.S. cities would have been threatened if a nuclear Iran hadn’t been stopped. America is safer because of the President.”

Cheung added that Iran “has no nuclear, no navy, no air force, and no money.”

Still, at least one Republican politician shared Newsom’s interpretation.

“As a Navy veteran, I served to protect Americans, not write off American cities as an acceptable price of war,” Jim Desmond, the Republican congressional nominee in a metro San Diego district, wrote on social media, adding that “no American family should ever be treated as collateral damage.”

Trump has often criticized U.S. cities as he campaigns, especially the largest areas that lean heavily Democratic. At a recent North Carolina rally, he described the state's cities as “blood-soaked killing fields.” North Carolina's violent crime rate ranks in the middle third of states, according to FBI statistics.

Iran has said that it’s not pursuing nuclear weapons, but has enriched uranium to near-weapons-grade levels that have no civilian purpose.