The Brief

I consider myself an unlikely surfer.

A few years ago, I — a middle-aged Black woman in search of mini-adventures — put on a wetsuit, rented a big foam surfboard and took some lessons.

What surprised me was how freeing it felt. Not because I was any good, but because I didn’t feel a need to be. It was enough just to be outside, in the ocean, trying something new.

Something a little unexpected.

I’ve had several surf sessions since that first one, but last week was different. I had a lesson with Nathan Fluellen, founder of A Great Day in the Stoke, a free event in Orange County billed as “the largest gathering of Black surfers in history.”

The fourth annual festival is set for Saturday in Huntington Beach.

“Every year it’s growing, and it’s exciting to see it grow at a rapid pace,” Fluellen said.

The all-day event has many objectives, according to its founder: showcasing Black surfers, providing lessons and promoting water safety.

Organizers say the event is about creating a space where representation is the norm, not the exception.

“My surf dreams were deferred,” said Fluellen, who is Black, in an interview after my surf lesson. “I didn’t see anybody that looked like me.”

He imagined more than a few children and teens have floated the idea of surfing to parents and friends, only to be told it’s not something Black people do.

“Because they never saw it,” he said. “So if you don’t see it, you can’t believe it.”

Origins of the festival

Fluellen, a travel influencer and TV host who lives in Los Angeles, was in his mid-30s when he took up the sport. He’s now 44.

As a child growing up in Chicago, Fluellen had seen surfing in movies — the original Point Break is a favorite — and they sparked an interest, he said. But that gave way to basketball — he was growing up in the Bulls’ home city in the era of Michael Jordan after all.

The spark reignited when he got the opportunity to meet Zulu surfers in Durban, South Africa.

“It was just pure joy,” he recalled. And he couldn’t wait to go back.

Now, the event he founded draws hundreds to the water.

Nathan Fluellen, founder of A Great Day in the Stoke, an annual festival in Huntington Beach that celebrates Black surf culture

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Dana Littlefield

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LAist

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The idea for A Great Day in the Stoke was prompted, in part, by paddle outs Fluellen and other surfers held starting in 2020 to honor the lives of slain Black men and women, including George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor.

“It was cool at first,” he said of the paddle outs, noting they were among the few opportunities he had during the COVID-19 lockdowns to see people in person. “But then, I just got exhausted of paddle outs because it was a reaction to tragedy. And then, I was just like, ‘Man, we need something to celebrate our existence.’”

The festival’s name was inspired by a famous photo titled “A Great Day in Harlem,” taken in 1958 by photographer Art Kane. The photo featured 57 jazz musicians posing in front of a brownstone. Four decades later, in 1998, photographer Gordon Parks captured a similar image — this time with nearly 200 rap artists and producers — titled “A Great Day in Hip Hop.”

Fluellen swapped in the word “stoke” because it’s rooted in surf culture.

Representation matters

Fluellen said A Great Day in the Stoke is part of a larger movement to amplify access, equity and inclusion in surfing and promote health and wellness.

He chose Huntington Beach because it’s known as Surf City USA, home to both the International Surfing Museum and the US Open of Surfing.

He said the city has welcomed the event, which attracted hundreds of attendees its first year.

Devon James, a 24-year-old surfer and content creator from Pasadena, was at the event four years ago. He’s been surfing since he was 9.

“The first one was rad just because it was so new and everyone was, like, to the nines, going 100 percent,” he said. “Just the community as a whole really showed out.”

Attendees at a previous A Great Day in the Stoke event in Huntington Beach.

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Courtesy A Great Day in the Stoke

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James said A Great Day in the Stoke is about providing a space for freedom of expression in the water.

“We have people coming in from all over the country,” he said. “It’s truly just a celebration of surf culture and just an opportunity for inclusivity. And I think that’s what I love about it.”

My surf session

To avoid the crowd gathering for a special event in Huntington, my lesson took place just down the coast in Newport Beach.

The weather was as close to perfect as I could hope for. The air was hot, and the water was cold, but not too cold.

Fluellen started with instructions on how to lie on the big, foam surfboard, paddle with my arms and pop up to my feet. He asked if my stance was “regular,” with my left foot forward and my right foot back, or “goofy,” the opposite.

“Regular,” I said, sounding a little too confident.

Fluellen carried on with the lesson: “Your head controls where you’re going. So if you look straight, you’ll go straight. If you look to the left, you’ll go to the left. Look to the right, you’ll go right. Look down, you’re going down.”

I laughed nervously.

No need to worry about paddling, he said, because he’d wait for a wave and push me into it. All I had to do was stand up.

Easier said than done, I thought.

What followed was me trying and failing again and again to catch small waves as they rolled to the shore. In the end, I had sea water in my mouth and sand in my ears, but I managed to stand — briefly — at least once.

And that felt like success.

“You’ve got good mechanics,” Fluellen told me later. “You’ve got to just keep practicing, keep coming out. … You know, practice makes perfect.”

Luckily for me, perfection’s not required.

LAist Associate Producer Brandon Killman contributed to this report.

Los Angeles Dodgers owner Mark Walter and multiple insurance companies he owns have been sued, alleging they failed to disclose an ongoing federal probe to customers while directing policyholders’ money into Walter’s other companies.

The lawsuit lists Walter, Delaware Life Insurance Co., Clear Spring Life and Annuity, TWG Global Holdings and Walter’s Guggenheim Partners investment firm as defendants.

Ira Rosner, a 67-year-old Florida man, brought the class-action lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Miami on Wednesday. He purchased a policy from Delaware Life in April and he had until late May to withdraw his money without penalty. However, the company did not disclose the investigation to him until June,

Rosner is seeking a jury trial in the lawsuit that seeks damages for negligent misrepresentation, breach of contract and aiding and abetting fraud.

TWG Global didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on the lawsuit.

Walter has been under investigation since last year by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Manhattan and the Securities and Exchange Commission following a whistleblower complaint regarding alleged misrepresented loans made between companies within his business portfolio.

TWG Global Holdings is the holding company through which Walter controls Delaware Life, Clear Spring Life and Annuity Co. and his stake in Guggenheim Partners. TWG Global denied any wrongdoing involving the probe in a statement last month.

Walter and co-owner Todd Boehly sold their stakes in English Premier League club Chelsea this week. Last month, Walter agreed to sell the Los Angeles Lakers in a surprise move less than a year after buying the NBA franchise from the Buss family. The deal is under review by the league.

The Dodgers have been adamant that Walter has no plans to sell the baseball team.

Compton Unified Superintendent Darin Brawley has won a national education prize recognizing his leadership in improving student achievement in the district.

Brawley will receive the 2026 Harold W. McGraw Jr. Prize in Education, which includes a $50,000 award, at a ceremony in New York City in November.

The McGraw Center for Education Leadership at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education, which administers the prize, cited the “extraordinary impact” of Brawley and the two other recipients. Brawley won for his work in K-12; prizes are also awarded for higher education and lifelong learning.

“At a time when schools and communities are confronting profound educational challenges, three visionary leaders are demonstrating what meaningful change can look like,” the McGraw Center said.

With about 20,000 predominantly low-income Black and Hispanic students, Compton was singled out nationally for test scores in math and reading that did not fall back during the COVID-19 epidemic and continued to exceed the national and state averages since.

The center noted that Compton’s graduation rates increased from 58% to 94%, and college acceptance rates exceeded 95% during Brawley’s 14 years as superintendent. It also highlighted the district’s expanded college and career pathways and innovative industry and community partnerships.

Last year, EdSource detailed an unusual drama program at Compton’s Dominguez High. Another EdSource article this year highlighted the inclusion of student-centered “calming corners” and learning stations in school renovations.

The McGraw prize, named after the CEO of the McGraw-Hill education publisher, has been awarded since 1988. Other recent California recipients have included Debra Duardo, Los Angeles County schools superintendent; Jody Lewen, president of Tamalpais College, who introduced academic programs at San Quentin Rehabilitation Center; Stanford University professor and researcher Roy Pea; and Sol Khan, creator of a worldwide free online education and tutoring platform.

The higher education prize went to Shai Reshef, who founded the University of the People, the first nonprofit, tuition-free, accredited online university, and the lifelong learning prize was awarded to Michael Webber, a nationally recognized professor of mechanical engineering and public policy at the University of Texas at Austin.

This story was originally published by EdSource. Sign up for their daily newsletter.

This story first appeared on Long Beach Post.

Inside three water tanks in a tucked-away room at the Aquarium of the Pacific, biologists are tasked with bringing back a population of frogs that once thrived across the state’s mountainous streams but has since reached the brink of extinction.

It’s a program that’s nearly closed out its fifth year with a major milestone: more than 1,000 frogs raised and released into the wild.

That’s more than five times as many mountain yellow-legged frogs — named for the lemon-hued streak along their hind legs — believed to be in the wild when last recorded in 2019, reduced to small pockets of wild streams in the San Gabriel, San Bernardino and San Jacinto Mountains. By the time the frog was listed under the federal Endangered Species Act in 2002, fewer than 100 adults remained in Southern California. A count in 2020 put the number at about 188 in the wild, though biologists say that figure has almost certainly shifted since.

The species’ collapse is tied to a compounding list of threats: wildfire, mudslides, pesticides, fungal disease, habitat loss and the appetites of non-native trout, bullfrogs and crayfish. It’s a decline so severe that biologists consider the species among the rarest vertebrates on Earth.

Staff at the Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach are working to change that math, one tadpole at a time.

In the latest release, about 653 of the endangered frogs were returned to their native mountain habitat by staff from the Aquarium of the Pacific, the Los Angeles Zoo and the U.S. Geological Survey. Of those, 394 had been head-started at the aquarium — its largest release of the species yet, bringing its total to 1,032.

The frogs were bred at the Los Angeles Zoo’s breeding program, then transferred to Long Beach as tadpoles, where aquarium staff reared them through metamorphosis into froglets and frogs. The process typically takes one to two years, though the species can remain in its tadpole stage for up to five years, making a given frog’s age something of a mystery even to the people who raised it.

A tadpole chills by the rocks in a tank at the Aquarium of the Pacific, where it is being raised before being released into the local mountains, Tuesday, Sept., 15, 2026

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Thomas R. Cordova.

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Long Beach Post

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Inside the aquarium, the water is engineered to mimic the mountains it’s standing in — kept near 60 degrees in summer, the temperature currently found in the streams the frogs call home, and cooled to around 52 degrees in winter, with reduced UV exposure to simulate the season’s shorter, dimmer days.

The aquarium’s involvement began in 2021, in the aftermath of the 2020 Bobcat Fire, which tore through the central San Gabriel Mountains and destroyed an estimated 95% of the frog’s remaining usable habitat.

“They had salvaged some tadpoles from the fire-impacted areas, and they ended up bringing a handful of them here,” said Erin Lundy, with the aquarium’s conservation team. “And then we also had some captive-bred ones from the L.A. Zoo that year, and that was our first group.”

Since then, the team has expanded to include the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the U.S. Forest Service and the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, which help monitor populations and oversee releases.

Erin Lundy from the Aquarium of the Pacific looks into a tank at frogs as she gets them ready to be released into the local mountains Tuesday, Sept. 15, 2026

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Thomas R. Cordova

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Long Beach Post

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As the aquarium’s tadpole numbers have grown, some are now sent to the Santa Ana Zoo each October to continue growing until they’re ready for reintroduction. Frogs are carefully separated by genetics and population of origin, so each can be released back into its native range and preserve healthy genetic lines.

“I think that we have some responsibility to give the animals the best chance that they could possibly have,” Lundy said, “but this is certainly a species that without a good amount of human intervention would not exist to this day.”

Much of the aquarium’s work is now focused on an even more elusive threat than fire: chytrid fungus, a microscopic pathogen that attacks the keratin in amphibian skin, blocking the salt absorption frogs rely on and eventually causing cardiac arrest. It has driven amphibian populations to collapse worldwide, and mountain yellow-legged frogs appear especially vulnerable to it.

“Some amphibian species over time have developed a resistance to chytrid, and so part of the intention of growing so many animals is hoping to find what gene that is that introduces some chytrid resistance,” Lundy said. Researchers are testing whether frogs can be inoculated before release, or whether introducing different microbes to their skin might help them fend off the fungus on their own.

Tadpoles swim in a tank at the Aquarium of the Pacific as they are raised before being released into the local mountains, Tuesday, Sept., 15, 2026

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Thomas R. Cordova

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Long Beach Post

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Lundy has now been on three of the aquarium’s release trips, watching frogs she has cared for — some for years — carried up into the mountains and set loose into the streams they were bred to repopulate. It is, she says, a strange kind of joy.

“It’s a little bittersweet because, oh no, I’ve been taking care of you for so long, but that is the point, so it feels a little bit like Christmas Day,” Lundy said.

Not every frog leaves the same way. Some, she said, shoot off into the current without so much as a pause. Others linger at the water’s edge beside her for a few minutes before finally disappearing beneath the surface.

“Almost feels like they’re saying goodbye,” she said.

Keno’s Restaurant in Anaheim Hills is a family-run business with a vintage feel — and a 15-pound burrito on the menu.

General Manager Shauna Reyes joined Austin Cross on AirTalk, LAist 89.3's daily news show, to talk about what customers can expect at the decades-old steakhouse that has a cafe twist.

About the owners

Vintage photos of Keno's, back when it first opened, and was a 24-hour restaurant.

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Courtesy Greg Rogers

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Keno's originally opened in 1972, gaining enough popularity to expand into a small chain of restaurants. Gus Cooper helped build and operate the Anaheim Hills location since its opening in 1980. The Anaheim Hills location eventually changed hands to Gus' nephew, Steve Cooper, in 1993. Steve Cooper and his family have been running Keno's ever since.

What it's like being a Keno's customer

Photo of Keno's lounge and steakhouse section.

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Courtesy Greg Rogers

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According to Reyes, the ambiance and customer connections are what set Keno's apart.

You can experience the cafe, with a bustling diner feel, or step into their steakhouse, which has a fireplace Reyes says was inspired by the Peppermill in Las Vegas.

Restaurant details

• Keno’s has a live event schedule that includes solo acoustic sets and a Frank Sinatra cover artist.
• In addition to the 15-pound burrito, you can also find a 32-ounce Tomahawk steak on the menu.

Menu items we tried

• The Lumberjack Breakfast
• Monte Cristo
• California Chicken Sandwich
• Tomahawk Steak
  

What should we try next?

What should we try next?