The Brief

You might be asking yourself, what even IS a basic girl? They’re a gal (of any gender) who loves a themed event, coordinated outfits, a good charcuterie board and, in the fall, pumpkin-spice lattes, cute pictures at the pumpkin patch for Insta, and the movie Practical Magic.

We all know someone like this and, maybe, it’s even YOU.

Unleash your inner basic girl

There’s no better time to bring out your inner basic girl than October. What’s not to love? Los Angeles might not exactly have a fall season, but there are places around the city where you can experience that autumn coziness we all crave, get into the spooky spirit, and of course, enjoy pumpkin-spiced everything.

How to LA recently went on a witch hunt around L.A. for the best spots to go full on basic girl fall mode. Here are some of our picks:

(Disclaimer: None of these suggestions are underground, edgy, “cool,” or all that unique. But it’s not meant to be. That’s the beauty of being basic! It is simply a straightforward, cute, wholesome good time. And by following this itinerary, you too can get into the spooky season spirit, even in an L.A. heat spell.)

Treat yourself to a pumpkin spiced latte

Did you know this quintessential fall drink started at Starbucks exactly 20 years ago? To celebrate it's big birthday, stop by "Starbies" and enjoy all your favorite fall spices, some sweetness and most importantly: caffeine. If it’s one of those 90-degree fall days, get it iced. No excuses.

But you should know that Starbucks started a revolution. Now you can find the PSL at many of your local coffee shops in town. Our favorite? The Pumpkin Milk latte at Superba Coffee & Tea. No, this isn’t sponsored, it’s just really good. There are four locations throughout L.A., and they’ve got THIS seasonal latte through the new year.

Visit a pumpkin patch

You might think pumpkin patches are just for kids, but that means you’re not thinking basic enough. Pumpkins are a quintessential fall decor must for any basic girl’s home, front porch, or even office desk.

There are a few iconic, old school pumpkin patches in the area, like Tapia Bros Farm in Encino, Underwood Family Farms in Moorpark, and Tanaka Farms in Irvine where you can pick your pumpkin straight off the vine.

To keep it super local, we suggest: Mr. Bone’s Pumpkin Patch in Culver City. Open 9 a.m. - 9 p.m. until Oct. 29. $10 entrance, reserve tickets here.

Pro tip: Pumpkin patches are really photogenic. A perfectly basic, basic-girl insta story awaits.

How to LA's Brian De Los Santos and Megan Botel pose with their pumpkins at Mr. Bones Pumpkin Patch in Culver City

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Explore the spooky forests of Carved at Descanso Gardens 

As if Descanso Gardens at night weren’t spooky enough, Carved is an annual fall event that features forests of lit-up jack o'lanterns, spooky music serenading your walk through the gardens, a giant Day of the Dead ofrenda honoring those who’ve died, a hay maze, and of course, refreshments.

“Just let yourself be a kid again,” says Gary, who attended Carved with his boyfriend, Matt. “This is a very special place.”

Open everyday 6-10 p.m. through Oct. 29. $30-$40 for adults and $20-$25 for kids. Less for members. Buy tickets here.

Pro tip: A great second date spot. There’s a lot going on, so it’ll never be awkward, and there are little intimate hideouts where you can get a moment alone and connect

Carved at Descanso Gardens

Descanso Gardens hosts one of the many fun and spooky fall events around Los Angeles

The Dia de Los Muertos interactive altar at the Carved event hosted by Descanso Gardens

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Megan Larson

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Carved at Descanso Gardens

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Megan Larson

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How to LA's Meg Botel and Biran De Los Santos smile for the camera while enjoying Carved at Descanso Gardens

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Take a haunted hayride

Go to what’s known as L.A.'s best haunted house and take an hay ride through the fictional town of Midnight Falls at Griffith Park. Get lost in the “Hellbilly Halloween” maze, partake in some axe throwing or zombie apocalypse paintball and watch a Theatrical Macabre Experience from beyond the grave.

Open now. Prices start at $29.99 on select nights through Oct. 31. Tickets are on sale here.

Celebrate Oktoberfest in Huntington Beach. 

Again, basic girls love a themed event. Get dressed in your Bavarian outfits — traditionally, dirndl for women and lederhosen for men — and stroll through the cobblestone streets of Old World Village. Hear some live music, feast on some traditional German bratwurst, enormous pretzels, sauerkraut and pound cake, and have some official Oktoberfest beer.

Open Wednesdays through Sunday until Nov. 5 at Old World Huntington Beach. Free entrance, unless you want to reserve a table for $100. Get tickets here.

Basic girl bonus: cocktails

All of these suggestions have been very cute and wholesome. But some of our basic girls might want to turn up the heat a little bit after dark, and wear their little halloween costumes or favorite cashmere sweaters for a stiff drink.

Here are some of the best places you can get a spooky themed cocktail in the city:

1. Beetle House in Hollywood 
2. Potions and Poisons in Koreatown 
3. The Cauldron in Buena Park  
4. Lily Rose in DTLA

At Signature Post in Burbank, Mariella Abaunza, the post-production company’s executive vice president for business development, shows off a photo of her talking to Gov. Gavin Newsom at the recent signing of AB 2319 at the Television Academy in North Hollywood.

Marielle Abaunza holds a photo of her and Gov. Gavin Newsom at the signing ceremony for California's new stand-alone post-production tax credit.

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She was there with the coalition that lobbied for the creation of a new stand-alone tax credit for post-production work done in California.

“It definitely restored my faith in government. ... Advocacy works,” she said.

It was a sizable coalition. Abaunza is president of the California Post Alliance, the post-production industry’s trade group. Leaders of the Motion Picture Association and the Editors Guild were there too.

The post-production tax credit is aimed at stopping the flight of TV and film work to other states and countries, attracted by generous tax incentives.

While there are existing tax credits for filming in California, under the new law, productions qualify for a 35% to 50% tax credit if post-production work such as editing, color correction, scoring and sound mixing is done in California, even if the filming was done outside the state.

But industry advocates acknowledge there’s a weakness in the law: Proponents initially asked lawmakers to set aside $100 million for the post-production tax breaks. By the time Newsom signed the bill into law, that amount had been drastically reduced to $10 million.

“That's going to get used up in a couple days. … It's not hard to allocate $10 million in post-production in California,” said Stephen Weizenecker, an entertainment lawyer based in Atlanta who advises TV and film productions on how to take advantage of tax credits in U.S. states and overseas.

But he said that regardless of the much lower cap, the credits will make California more competitive.

Abaunza hopes it will be a boost for Signature Post. The 6-year-old post-production company, which mixed sound for films and shows like  "Everything Everywhere All at Once," "American Fiction," and "Lessons in Chemistry," has been experiencing a slowdown, like many others.

“We're still ahead of the game, and we still have the largest concentration of post-production talent of anywhere in the world,” Abaunza said of Southern California.

But she said that post-production advantage has been eroded by new facilities and worker talent in the U.K. and Canada, among other countries.

Monica Levinson, executive producer of FX’s "Love Story," "Say Nothing," and many other TV and film projects, points out that those countries have another advantage: a lot more government social services.

She compared that to the U.S. “The one thing that this country has are unions, and it has health insurance, and it has pension plans, and the things that need to be put into the budgets of productions,” she said.

Weizenecker also noted that as much as producers might want to keep production in California or the U.S., they may not be the ones making the decisions about where work is done.

“ If Netflix only gives you so much to spend on the production, including post,” he said, “you're gonna go where it's the most cost-effective.”

Federal game changer

While the California tax credit is a step in the direction of keeping productions in the state, a much bigger tax credit is now making its way through the federal legislative process that may be even more transformative.

It’s called the Motion Picture, Television and Entertainment Revitalization Act and was co-authored by U.S. Sens. Adam Schiff, a Democrat from California, and Tim Scott, a Republican from South Carolina. President Donald Trump has also said he supports it.

If the bipartisan birth and early life of the bill isn’t enough to raise eyebrows, what it promises may be: a 20% federal, labor-based tax credit to U.S. TV and film productions where 75% of the days spent on principal photography happen in this country.

The bill would also favor post-production work and extend benefits to productions in some rural areas and places affected by disasters.

Marielle Abaunza is executive vice president of business development for Signature Post in Burbank.

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“These things could be real game changers to bring back the work here,” Levinson said. She’s the co-chair of the legislative committee for Producers United, a 3-year-old group that advocates for established TV and film producers. That position led her to join the coalition of groups working to get the federal bill passed.

TV and film production and post-production used to be dominated by California, and L.A. County in particular. But Hollywood, as it refers to what you see on the big and small screen, is a national business now.

“Everybody in this country is behind this federal incentive. And therefore, that's why it's become such a bipartisan effort because there's production in every state right now,” Levinson said.

Supporters have not said how much less money would go to public coffers if this federal tax credit passes.

A long-running court battle between California veterans and the Trump administration will continue, as federal officials consider asking the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn a lower court’s order to build more housing for unhoused L.A. veterans.

A federal appeals court on Thursday agreed to temporarily pause the order to construct more than 2,500 new housing units on the Veterans Affairs campus in West L.A.

Mark Rosenbaum, an attorney with Public Counsel representing the plaintiffs, told LAist the delay could spell life or death for unhoused veterans, especially as the region braces for strong El Niño-driven storms.

“These are veterans who risked their lives and suffered both the visible and invisible wounds of war,” Rosenbaum said. “What the government is saying to them is, you're supposed to stay on the street."

VA officials did not immediately respond to LAist’s request for comment.

Veterans' lawyers in a court filing called a possible appeal to the Supreme Court a “hopeless shot.”

“The government has lost every time they have taken this to court. No court has ruled for them on any of these matters,” Rosenbaum told LAist. “This is part of the administration’s war on its own veterans, and it’s time for that war to come to an end.”

Could long-running case end up at the Supreme Court?

The litigation was initiated in 2023 by L.A. veterans struggling with homelessness. The case has centered on the 400-acre V.A. campus, which U.S. District Judge David O. Carter has ruled should offer more housing to the approximately 2,250 veterans experiencing homelessness in L.A. County.

In 2024, Carter ordered officials to add thousands of temporary and permanent homes, and end leases with UCLA, a private K-12 school and an oil drilling company, which he said did not serve the needs of veterans.

An appeals court last month blocked the federal government’s efforts to halt the housing construction. But veteran advocates knew that federal officials could ask for further delays as the case winds through the courts.

VA officials now have until Dec. 10 to decide whether to appeal their fight to the Supreme Court. Judges with the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals told lawyers for the federal government that if they do not decide to appeal by Dec. 10, “the stay will be lifted immediately.”

The Los Angeles Unified School District shortened the application window for specialized academic programs this year, and will no longer accept paper forms.

Applications for the district’s magnet, dual language and affiliated charter schools for the next academic year opened Oct. 1 and are due Nov. 6, 2026.

How does it work?

If you want your child to attend their neighborhood school, enrollment is fairly straightforward. There’s a separate process for the district’s specialized programs called Choices.

There are two windows to apply — on-time and late. The latter consists of all the spaces left after families who applied on time accept their offers.

Here’s the timeline for the 2027-28 school year:

• Sept. 2026: School fairs start.
• Oct. 1, 2026: Choices application opens.
• Nov. 6, 2026:  Deadline to apply online.
• Dec. 1, 2026:  Late applications begin. 
• February 2027: On-time applicant results sent. 
• March 5, 2027: Deadline to accept or decline school offers for on-time applicants. School assignments for late applications follow the processing of on-time applications. Students may be offered a spot through the start of the spring semester. 
• Aug. 12, 2027: The school year begins.

LAUSD will no longer accept paper Choices applications. If families do not have a computer, they can use a smartphone to complete an application. LAUSD will also allow families to use computers at school parent centers.

How to prepare

Every child within LAUSD boundaries is assigned a school — find yours through the district’s “resident school identifier.”

But there are also hundreds of other programs available through the Choices process.

Those include:

• Magnets: Programs on a specific theme, such as science, math, language, advanced studies or art. These programs were originally established to integrate segregated schools and have a unique “points” system to prioritize applications. 
• Dual language or immersion: Students learn in English and in a second language such as Spanish, Mandarin, Korean or Armenian. 
• Affiliated charter schools: District-run schools with more freedom to try different types of teaching or other programs. 

No one type of school is inherently better than another, and no one metric defines a great school — there are many factors beyond test scores to consider, and we go over some of those here.

By far the most frequent piece of advice we’ve heard is to go on an in-person school tour if possible.

“The very best thing that people can do is go to the school and try to watch the way that educators interact with students, the way that students interact with each other, and the way that families are included or not in the life of a school,” said Jack Schneider, a University of Massachusetts, Amherst, education researcher and parent. “Once you do that, you really get a sense of what kind of place kids are going to school.”

Some schools post tour information online, but you may need to call for details.

LAUSD also hosts fairs, organized by geographic region, where multiple schools table and share information about their programs, through mid-October.

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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