The Brief

Kristen Bell knows what an audience wants.

Mostly, they want her to be herself, plus a little bit of the character she's playing at that time.

Veronica Mars, Sarah Marshall, Eleanor, Joanne — all of her characters have a degree of thoughtfulness, quirkiness and smarts. Traits that Bell herself exhibits.

It's an equation she says she's been crunching throughout her career. "Emotional math," she calls it.

Bell sat down with the host of LAist's AirTalk, Larry Mantle, in studio this week to discuss the emotional math she brings to her characters. Plus, the trajectory of her career, taking creative control and staying true to herself throughout.

The following is an abbreviated version of her on-air interview.

Kristen Bell as Joanne in episode 209 of “Nobody Wants This.”

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Erin Simkin

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Netflix

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Mantle:  Share with us a bit about the pleasure you've taken, presumably, in the creative arc of your career.

Bell:  Well, if I'm being brutally honest, I think I've tripped over a lot of these opportunities. I mean, Ted Danson gave me the best piece of advice once when we were working together. He said, "No one knows what they're doing except for a few people. So find the smartest people in the room and hitch your horse to them."

When I started out on Veronica Mars, I certainly stumbled into the brilliance of that show. But it taught me a lot, and I attempted to sponge up everything. That's where I learned how to do comedy. I had not trained in comedy at all.

 I fought that for a while, trying to be everything to everyone. I was like, whoa, what's the next indie movie that's going to go to Sundance? All the things you read about in the trades. My husband said to me once, "Stay in your lane, like ... just do what you're good at. You are a weird, quirky person. Let that come out."

Ted Danson and Kristen Bell in "The Good Place." (Courtesy of NBC)

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Mantle:  Let's talk about how you find that edge between bringing these aspects of yourself and the character that you're doing. I understand you're playing to strengths here, but what are the ways that you walk that line?

Bell: To me,  acting is emotional math. I'm not necessarily a method actor. I don't bring it home. To me, I feel like I can close my eyes and see how to make a math equation that will bring the audience on a ride.

And part of that is playing something authentic and being real, right? Not robotic. I look at most of acting in numbers. How much sympathy do you need in this scene? How much empathy? How revolting can you be? And it's all percentages in my head. So I start by saying, "It's gotta be 50% me and 50% the qualities of the character I'm playing."

Mantle:  I do wanna ask you, as well, Kristen, about faith being a part of The Good Place. Of course, issues of faith were center in that. And in Nobody Wants This, your character is agnostic and dating a rabbi. So faith is central. Is that just sort of coincidental?

 Bell: It was coincidence that Nobody Wants This happened to have a faith and belief aspect, as well. But you can insert any line of demarcation between two people into these characters.

So he happens to be a rabbi and she's agnostic. But you could insert socioeconomic backgrounds. You could insert any faith. It could be blue and red. And can they make a relationship when they have differing beliefs? It could be anything.

 The common ground is always more acreage than the differences. And people forget that. It's so easy to forget.

I think that's what I love about you and your work so much, Larry. You are able to keep the truth.

Season 2 of Nobody Wants This premieres Oct. 23 on Netflix. Listen to Larry Mantle and Kristen Bell's full conversation here:

You can listen to Kristen Bell's debrief of her conversation with Larry below:

Laylah Rivers had already been a paratrooper in the U.S. Army and worked at various tech companies across the West Coast. But when she enrolled at a Los Angeles community college at 31, she was just another freshman — alongside students nearly half her age.

Luckily, West Los Angeles College has a program that acknowledges students’ prior work experience. The college gave her seven credits, the equivalent of about two classes, after she provided a copy of her military transcript and evidence of computer courses she took while working at Amazon. “Of course, with 13 years of experience, I should get more credit for what I’m doing,” she said. “But I’m grateful.”

Since 2017, California’s community colleges have slowly expanded the number of ways that students can get school credit for their prior work experience, and Gov. Gavin Newsom has made it a priority, in part by approving over $34 million in related state funding in recent years. By 2030, the California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office wants at least 250,000 students to have earned college credit for their work or other “prior learning" experience, and in January, Newsom proposed putting an additional $37 million toward it.

But many colleges use their own internal methods to track the credits they award, so there’s no authoritative system showing how many students across the state have actually been served. The chancellor’s office operates a public dashboard, which says that over 40,000 students in California have received at least one credit for pre-college work or education in the past few years. Samuel Lee, a senior adviser to the community college chancellor who oversees the dashboard, said the real total is roughly twice that, though he couldn’t provide any exact figures.

Laylah Rivers at West Los Angeles College in Culver City, on Jan. 29, 2026.

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Ariana Drehsler

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Among the students who count toward this 2030 goal are those who gain credit by taking Advanced Placement, or AP, exams — which have existed for decades. What’s new is awarding students credit for work experience, such as computer courses or military training. Because it’s so new, “it’s taking the colleges a while,” Lee said. “Some are nowhere and some are really down the road.”

Historically, veterans have benefited the most from these credits, but students with professional experience in plumbing, first aid, foreign languages and hundreds of other skills can also qualify, either by showing an industry certification or taking an exam. At Cabrillo College in Santa Cruz, for instance, students can get college credit for wine courses if they can prove sufficient knowledge in French, Italian or Spanish wines.

Just a few additional credits can save students over $14,000, according to one California study. These students are more likely to graduate, too.

Because she’s a veteran, Rivers’ education and living costs are supported by the federal government, including through the GI Bill. These benefits only last a few years so every class she can skip saves her time — and ultimately money that she can put toward her future education.

Want to get ahead in tech? Get a degree

Even without a college degree, Rivers was doing well in tech, making over $70,000 a year, first at Amazon Web Services and later as a support engineer at a startup.

California’s tech industry has been vocal about dropping degree requirements for jobs, but research by the Burning Glass Institute shows that employers still prefer college graduates, even when college education isn’t a requirement.

“Computer science is really male-dominated, white-dominated,” said Rivers. “I’m a Black woman, but it’s hard to get my foot in the door. Even though I have 13 years of experience, they move the goalpost.” When the startup she was working at was sold to another company in 2024, she enrolled at West Los Angeles College, hoping to eventually transfer to a four-year institution, get a degree and land a management job in the tech industry.

But Rivers didn’t know that any of her prior work could translate into college credits until months after enrolling, when a college dean noticed her military and computer science experience.

“I think it should just be built into the registration process instead of people having to find out about it,” she said. “It took me a whole semester to figure it out.”

Laylah Rivers at West Los Angeles College in Culver City, on Jan. 29, 2026.

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Ariana Drehsler

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CalMatters

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The Technology Learning Center building at West Los Angeles College in Culver City, where Laylah Rivers has taken computer and IT courses.

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Ariana Drehsler

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CalMatters

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Starting last fall, West Los Angeles College made it a requirement that all transfer-oriented students learn about opportunities to get credit for prior work experience, either during meetings with a college counselor in the first semester or at orientation, said Allison Tom-Miura, the dean of academic affairs and workforce development for the campus. “This is a big equity issue,” she said. “How can we help students from repeating courses that they do not need?”

In 2018, the state Legislature passed a law that would eventually mandate that every college adopt a policy for awarding students credit for prior learning or work experience, but colleges received little or no funding to implement it. They scrambled to create systems to assess students’ work experience and streamline the process of petitioning for credit, according to interviews with community college leaders across the state.

Administratively, the process is still tricky today. Students need to submit evidence of their work experience, which faculty then evaluate and translate into an equivalent course at the college. Most students gain credit by showing a military transcript, a certification or by taking a test, but sometimes, in more subjective fields such as photography, faculty assess a student’s portfolio.

Lee’s statewide system lists the skills and certifications that community colleges already recognize so that students can petition for credit more easily. But he said that only about half the state’s 116 community colleges are actively participating in the effort.

Getting all colleges on the same system

Often, Lee is on tour, visiting colleges across the state, sometimes meeting with a school six or seven times in an effort to promote his credit tracking system or otherwise improve the way they log students’ credits.

Last month, he sat on stage at a conference in Sacramento to present about the benefits of a shared tracking system alongside the interim president of Palomar College, Tina Recalde. Like many schools in the San Diego metro area, Palomar College has a high number of enrolled veterans and was an early advocate for awarding additional credit to them. In their joint presentation, Recalde said her college has given over 3,600 students credit for work or other prior learning experiences.

But that data doesn’t appear on Lee’s platform or any other public dashboard. Palomar College has its own system for processing the additional credits, which it created before Lee’s platform existed, said Nichol Roe, the college’s dean of career technical and extended education.

Soon, nearly all schools will have to begin logging information on the same platform. The Legislature approved a budget last year that guarantees $50,000 to every community college campus that wants it. In return, the colleges that receive the money agree to use certain aspects of Lee’s data system and to screen all veterans and incoming students for potential additional credits.

College of the Sequoias in Visalia said it doesn’t need the money and chose not to apply, according to its president, Brent Calvin.

Lee said that every other college applied for the funding by the deadline and that he would “gladly” make an exception for College of the Sequoias. “Our goal is not for them to meet the deadline,” he said. “Our goal is to get people funding and support.”

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

This story was originally published by Boyle Heights Beat on Feb. 3, 2026.

Boyle Heights artist Robert Vargas unveiled a new mural Tuesday titled “Songs My Father Taught Me,” depicting a handcuffed mariachi and a child as the Eastside continues to grapple with the effects of ongoing immigration raids.

The mural, located at the corner of 4th and Mathews streets, shows the wrists of a mariachi handcuffed, the red, white and green colors of the Mexican flag are visible on his charro suit. Beside him, a child wearing a T-shirt featuring a patriotic cartoon bald eagle looks on while holding a guitar.

It’s one of five murals Vargas plans to paint this week as part of his “#WeAreHuman” initiative, which he said features images that show “truth and resiliency in our culture, and hopefully empower us and give us strength,” according to an Instagram Reel announcing the unveiling.

At the unveiling on Tuesday, about two dozen people watched as Vargas put his finishing touches on the painting. In attendance was East LA-born actor Edward James Olmos, who called the work “a great statement to who we are as a people.” “We will rise way beyond this,” he said.

For Vargas, the full message lies in the small details of the painting, including the wedding band on the mariachi’s finger, the eagle on his jacket facing the cartoon eagle on his son’s shirt, the guitar the boy is holding and the somber look in his eyes as he watches his father being detained.

“When I see this image, I see myself. I see brown faces, I see representation…but I feel heartbreak,” said Michelle Lopez, who was at the unveiling. “Seeing his father hand off that guitar to him, the passing of the torch. …To see the two eagles facing each other, ‘How is one eagle illegal?’” Lopez said.

The mural at 2426 E. 4th St. was unveiled about a week after the Eastside was hit with some of the heaviest immigration activity it had experienced since the raids began last June. A few blocks north on Mathews Street and Cesar Chavez Avenue, a man identified by his family as Abraham was detained by four masked agents in a driveway. According to his nephew, Chris, who witnessed the incident, Abraham had been standing on the sidewalk when agents approached him. Two days later, his family said, Abraham was back in his hometown of Puebla, Mexico.

Vargas is known for his large-scale murals across LA and internationally. In Boyle Heights, his giant, three-panel mural near Mariachi Plaza immortalizes the late Dodger legend Fernando Valenzuela. In Little Tokyo, a 150-foot-tall mural of Shohei Ohtani honors the Japanese baseball star. Vargas also painted a second mural of Ohtani in his hometown of Ōshū, in the northern prefecture of Iwate.

The intersection of 1st and State streets in Boyle Heights has been dubbed “Robert Vargas Square” in recognition of the artist’s work and ties to the neighborhood.

Participants in this year's field test of the 2030 census may be asked about their U.S. citizenship status, the Trump administration revealed Thursday.

The proposal, which is part of a regulatory filing for the test, comes months after President Donald Trump — in the middle of a redistricting push for new voting maps that could help Republicans keep control of the U.S. House of Representatives — put out a call on social media for a "new" census that would, for the first time in U.S. history, exclude millions of people living in the country without legal status.

In Congress, a growing number of Republican lawmakers are backing similar controversial proposals to leave out some or all non-U.S. citizens from a set of census numbers used to determine each state's share of congressional seats and Electoral College votes.

According to the 14th Amendment, those census apportionment counts must include the "whole number of persons in each state."

And in federal court, multiple GOP-led states have filed lawsuits seeking to force the bureau to subtract residents without legal status and those with immigrant visas from those counts. Missouri's case goes further by calling for their exclusion from all census counts, including those for distributing federal dollars for public services in local communities.

Results from the 2026 test are not expected to be used to redistribute political representation. Instead, the test is designed to inform preparations for the next once-a-decade head count in 2030, which include a report on the planned question topics that is due to Congress in 2027.

The planned questionnaire for the test comes from an annual Census Bureau survey that is much longer than recent forms for the national tally. It's not clear why the bureau is using the American Community Survey to test methods for the census. Spokespeople for the bureau and its parent agency, the Commerce Department, did not immediately respond to NPR's requests for comment.

In addition to citizenship status, the form asks about people's sources of income, whether their home has a bathtub or shower, and whether the home is connected to a public sewer, among other questions.

The form, however, does not reflect changes to racial and ethnic categories that the Biden administration approved for the 2030 census and other federal surveys, including new checkboxes for "Middle Eastern or North African" and "Hispanic or Latino." A White House agency official said in December that the Trump administration is considering rolling back those changes.

On Monday, the bureau announced major cutbacks to the census test, which is now set to take place between April and September and involve around 155,000 households in Huntsville, Ala., and Spartanburg, S.C.

As with all surveys conducted by the bureau, federal law bans the agency from putting out information that would identify a person to anyone, including other federal agencies and law enforcement.

Still, many census advocates are concerned the Trump administration's plan will discourage many historically undercounted populations, including households with immigrants and mixed-status families, from participating in the field test at a time of increased immigration enforcement and murky handling of government data.

Previous Census Bureau research has found that adding a citizenship question would likely undermine the count's accuracy by lowering response rates for many of the least responsive populations.

During the first Trump administration, the U.S. Supreme Court blocked a citizenship question from being added to the 2020 census, while declining to rule on whether the president can carry out an unprecedented exclusion of people without legal status from apportionment counts.

In one of its new filings to the White House's Office of Management and Budget, the bureau says the form for this year's census test "will ask no questions of a sensitive nature." Whether its proposed questions move forward is now for OMB to decide.

Edited by Benjamin Swasey
Copyright 2026 NPR