The Brief

As you walk into Maydan Market in West Adams, your eyes immediately catch the giant copper-covered hearth at the center of the space. Those flames are the heart of L.A.’s newest food hall, providing the heat and smoky flavor for several of the restaurants housed within.

“ Here, the idea is anybody that wants to cook on the fire, can,” said Rose Previte, founder of Maydan Market. “It's sort of the equivalent of our well.”

Rose Previte, founder of Maydan Market, LA's newest food hall, which is also home two one of her two restaurants, here and in Washington, D.C., both named Maydan.

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Yusra Farzan

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Maydan Market has big ambitions. It hopes to reinvent the way L.A. restaurants do business, even as it pays homage to Previte's travels across the world — inspired by the souqs of the Middle East, the night markets of Mexico and Seoul. It also houses the second location of Previte’s flagship Washington, D.C., restaurant, Maydan.

“America just got sidetracked and like usual, did something a little off track and made the market a food court in a mall,” she told LAist. “I'm trying to bring us back to the OG way of doing this.”

Why Maydan matters

Restaurants provide a window onto the culture of a place. And in L.A., they've long served as a connector for the different communities who call the city home.

But, in recent years, this landscape has become fragmented.

The COVID-19 pandemic followed by the Hollywood strikes have led to the shut down of food institutions across the region — over 150 in the City of Angels alone. These shutdowns come as the result of consumers shifting to food deliveries and the high cost of running a restaurant — produce, rent, labor ... it’s all adding up.

Enter Maydan Market, where all the restaurants share resources.

Breads bake up on the walls of a common, circular oven located at the heart of the marketplace.

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Courtesy Ashley Randall

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Maydan Market

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“ We share labor, we share a lot of the things that break businesses, utilities in California are crazy expensive,” Previte said. “This way, possibly we all might be able to do just a little bit better by helping each other.”

In a city like Los Angeles, where you'd have to brave traffic to get to your destination and then drive some more looking for parking, Maydan Market offers a microcosm of the many cultures that call Los Angeles home — all in one place.

And the central fire plays into that notion.

Read more: Food fight — Here's why I think Orange County has a better food scene than Los Angeles

Inspired by Previte’s upbringing

Previte grew up in a small town of about 3,000 in Ohio. Neighbors, she said, would stop by unannounced with vegetables from their garden that would be quickly cooked into dinner. This, Previte said, was reminiscent of her later travels to Syrian villages on the Turkish-Syria border on a “kebab research trip.”

“ I went to multiple villages where there was a shared oven,” she said. “As Americans we take for granted that everyone just has large appliances to bake.”

By sharing resources, Previte said, she hopes Maydan Market will offer a different business model for running a restaurant, “ where it's not so competitive” — but there's still plenty of room for success.

Deau Arpapornnopparat is chef and owner at the Thai barbecue restaurant Yhing Yhang BBQ, located within Maydan Market.

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Deau Arpapornnopparat is chef and owner at the Thai barbecue restaurant Yhing Yhang BBQ, inside Maydan Market. Running a restaurant is hard work, he said, and often newcomers do not find the support they need to navigate challenges. Maydan Market is an “amazing” chance for restaurant owners to share the space, including the kitchens, the fire and even table, chairs and cutlery, he said.

 ”Everyone in L.A. should come and take a look and then experience for yourself,” Arpapornnopparat said.

Why it's L.A.'s newest 'central square'

“I didn’t think twice,” chef Alfonso “Poncho” Martinez of Lugya’h by Poncho’s Tlayudas, also located inside Maydan Market. Martinez ran the Oaxacan street food pop up in South Los Angeles for nearly 10 years known as Poncho’s Tlayudas, which has now evolved into a permanent fixture within Maydan Market.

“Without fire, you can’t live,” Martinez told me while standing by the hearth watching as staff carefully prepare giant, thin tortillas folding them atop the smoldering heat.

Alfonso “Poncho” Martinez of Lugya’h by Poncho’s Tlayudas, where the tortillas are fresh — and enormous.

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And that fire is the heart of the “maydan” or the center town square. Previte picked up the term from her travels to Ukraine but the word “maydan” also appears in the Arabic, Farsi and Hindi languages.

In Kyiv, the center square was known as Independence or Freedom Square, but everyone called it “maydan.”

“And it was so powerful there because people came there to mourn a national catastrophe. They came to celebrate something and they also came to rebel,” Previte said. “And I want all those feelings to exist in my restaurants all of the time.”

Inside Maydan Market, LA's newest food hall

Maydan Market, she said, is her “resistance” as immigration enforcement ramps up under the Trump administration.

“We're really proud of what L.A. is and all the communities that have made a home here and if we can do one little part in preserving that and protecting it, then we're doing our job,” Previte said. “Between my two cities, D.C. and LA, it's two of the hardest cities right now for the immigrant communities that support us and make us survive every day that open the doors of this restaurant every day.”

Here’s a closer look at the restaurant concepts you will find inside the marketplace — and a few of the things I ate on my recent visit there:

Maydan

The mushroom kebab dish of LAist Reporter Yusra Farzan's dreams alongside the grilled halloumi topped with dukkah.

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Possibly the best dish I have had all year was at the Middle Eastern restaurant here, Maydan. The oyster mushrooms kebab was coated in a spicy zhoug sauce and then cooked over the central flames, perfectly charred and served on a bed of Kurdish tahini (the sesame flavor nutty and really coming through) and shatta sauce. Halloumi is typically a cheese I tend to pass over — blame the copious amounts I ate as a child growing up in the Middle East — but I couldn’t pass up the chance to wrap a few bites topped with Egyptian peanut dukkah on tone flatbread (similar to laffa). It was a sweet, soft, spicy flavor bomb. These dishes were served as part of the tawle experience ($95 per person). Tawle meaning table in Arabic is a communal dining experience where dips, appetizers and a main are brought to the table in a set menu so conversation can flow and community can be built.

Lugya'h by Poncho's Tlayudas

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  The tlayuda is smoky, earthy comes and brimming with Oaxacan cheese.

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  Courtesy Kort Havens

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  Maydan Market

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Lugya’h by Poncho's Tlayudas specializes in Oaxacan cuisine. I had never had a tlayuda before and was pleasantly surprised by how large the tortillas were — almost the size of my face! As I picked up the tasajo version ($25) — thin flank steak served alongside a large tortilla with black beans and quesillo cheese — Martinez quickly stopped me. The dish has lard and seeing my headscarf, he rightfully guessed I don’t eat pork. Quickly, he whipped up a mushroom version sans the pork fat. Smoky, earthy and brimming with Oaxacan cheese, definitely a dish I will be going back for.

Yhing Yhang BBQ

Cooked until golden, with specks of dark brown, the chicken wings ($10) from Yhing Yhang BBQ, from chef Deau Arpapornnopparat of Holy Basil, appear unassuming. But after one bite I was transported to night markets in Asia. Seasoned with hints of lemongrass and cumin, the chicken wings come paired with a basil leaf hot sauce. The star, however, was the chef's take on a chili paste with an umami shrimp punch. Since this was a marketplace and a melding of cultures, I may have put that chili paste on every dish I had that evening (after I sampled them for the story of course!).

Maléna by Tamales Elena

Pozole ($27), a hearty Mexican stew, is the star of the show at this coastal Afro-Mexican restaurant. However, they all came with a pork base so my colleague Joshua Letona, who joined me on assignment, offered to do a taste test. After neatly piling the stew with jalapeno slices, crumbling cheese and squeezing lime, he dug in. “Pretty damn good,” he said. Enough said.

Club 104

This space will offer a rotating residency to different chefs from across Los Angeles. Currently, Chef Mel of Melnificent Wingz is serving wings and Southern food, such as buttermilk biscuits and macaroni and cheese.

Sook

Previte’s Middle Eastern market will offer grab and go lunch options such as a wrap or a salad. Patrons can also shop for products such as Lebanese olive oil, Palestinian za’atar, Kurdish tahini and even skin care products.

Compass Rose

Another of Previte’s offerings, Compass Rose is a coffee and cocktail bar serving Georgian Khachapuri or cheese bread, breakfast sandwiches and pastries.

Mini-lightning strikes created by whirling dust devils on Mars have been detected accidentally by the microphone on board the Perseverance rover.

The chance discovery is direct evidence of a form of lightning on Mars, researchers say in a report published in Nature. They describe how the rover's microphone picked up signs of electrical arcs just a few centimeters long, which were accompanied by audible shockwaves.

"There's been a very big mystery about lightning on Mars for a long time. It's probably one of the biggest mysteries about Mars," says Daniel Mitchard, a lightning researcher at Cardiff University in the United Kingdom, who wasn't part of the research team but wrote an accompanying commentary for the journal.

"The key thing here," he explains, "is that we actually have a rover on the surface of Mars that appears to have detected something that fits our idea of what we think lightning on Mars would look like."

Besides Earth, flashes of lightning have been seen in the atmospheres of Jupiter and Saturn, and lightning has also been detected on Neptune and Uranus. But finding lightning has proven more elusive on our closest planetary neighbors — even though experimenters in the 1970s did lab work that suggested lightning should exist on Mars.

For example, when researchers put volcanic sand into a flask and pumped it down to Martian atmospheric pressures, swirling the sand in the flask created a glow that could be seen in the dark, says Ralph Lorenz, a planetary scientist with the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory.

The glow came from electrical charges caused by the friction between the bits of sand. If you had a bigger buildup of electric charge, he says, that could produce a more sudden discharge, like what happens with spark plugs in a car, or on a larger scale, lightning. After all, even on Earth, lightning can occur in turbulent clouds of volcanic ash.

"So there's no reason that blowing dust or sand on Mars shouldn't become electrically charged," says Lorenz.

Recently, he and some colleagues were reviewing audio picked up by the Perseverance rover, a car-size robot that's been trundling around the Red Planet since 2021. It's got a microphone, and a few years ago scientists reported hearing the sounds of a whirling dust devil passing over the rover.

Besides the wind and the hiss of the dust, Lorenz says, there was a brief sound of a snap or crack in the middle of the encounter. "We just assumed it was a big sand grain or a small gravel grain just, you know, hitting the structure," he says.

But not too long later, one of their team members attended a science conference and heard a talk about atmospheric electricity. "I thought that if there were discharges, we could hear them. And then, I remembered this recording," says Baptiste Chide, who is with the Institut de Recherche en Astrophysique et Planétologie in Toulouse, France.

So he did some experiments here on Earth, using an electrostatic generator, to see how electric discharges would affect the microphone. What he saw was the same signals that had been captured on Mars; there was a distinctive pattern of a brief electrical interference followed by the acoustic signal of a shockwave.

Fifty-five such events were picked up by the microphone over two Martian years, the researchers say, and the sparks were usually associated with dust devils and the fronts of dust storms.

The electrical arcs would feel and sound like strong static electricity sparks, says Chide. If an astronaut was on Mars, it might be possible to see them, although "small discharges are hard to see in strong sunshine, and it's the sunniest times of day that have most dust devils and maybe most of the strong discharge events. That said, some events were at night," he says.

The researchers think it's important to study this atmospheric electrical activity to understand the hazards it could pose to future robotic or human missions. While most space hardware is designed to be robust, they note that the Soviet Mars 3 mission landed during a dust storm and only operated for about 20 seconds on the surface before suddenly and mysteriously ending its transmission.

"Something changed in 20 seconds," says Lorenz. "Could it have been an electrical discharge event? I don't think we can rule that out."

Copyright 2025 NPR

You don't have to walk by a dog park to know that domestic dogs come in all shapes and sizes. From 2-pound Chihuahuas to 150-pound Newfoundlands, chunky Labradors to slender Vizlas, our canine companions are some of the most physically diverse mammals on the planet.

It's commonly believed that this vast range in physical attributes is a product of the Victorian era, when kennel clubs started selectively breeding dogs to produce certain characteristics roughly 200 years ago.

A new analysis of hundreds of prehistoric canine skulls, spanning the last 50,000 years, shows it emerged much earlier.

"By about 10,000 years ago, half of the amount of diversity present in modern dogs was already present in the Neolithic," said Carly Ameen, a bioarchaeologist at the University of Exeter and one of the lead authors on the new study. "So very early on in our relationship with dogs, we not only change them from wolves but they begin to change amongst themselves and generate a lot of diversity."

To determine when those changes happened, Ameen and a team of international researchers created 3D models of 643 skulls of ancient and modern dogs and wolves. The models allowed them to discern subtle changes in the skulls' shape over time.
The results, published in the journal Science, show that by nearly 11,000 years ago, just after the last ice age, dog skulls were already different from those of wolves. They were shorter and wider. But perhaps more surprising, Ameen said, is that the dog skulls were already different from each other, meaning that the switch from wolf to dog had to have happened much earlier.

"The relationship between wolves and dogs had to already have been ongoing," she said. "It's not an instantaneous change — the dog comes from the woods into your house and changes the shape of its skull."
Those kinds of changes typically accumulate slowly, over many generations.

Scientists have long wondered when the domestication of dogs first started. Dogs are believed to be the first domesticated species — before cows, pigs, sheep, or plants like wheat.

The new study doesn't answer the question but "it narrows the window," Ameen said, and gives us insights into how humanity's mutually beneficial relationship with dogs physically changed them over time.

That relationship was the focus of another new study, published in Science, that used ancient DNA from dogs to find that humans were traveling with — and even trading — domestic dogs in Eurasia for at least the last 10,000 years.
The study's lead author, Minmin Ma, a researcher at Lanzhou University in China, said it makes sense that prehistoric hunter-gatherers were bringing dogs with them during migrations because they could assist with hunting.
But for prehistoric farming and pastoral societies that raised animals like cattle, sheep and horses, "dogs weren't particularly essential in that economic sense," she said. And yet, their study found that those groups made the effort to bring dogs with them during migrations too.

"Although the roles [dogs have] played varied across different periods, they have consistently been close companions to humans," Ma said. "We should cherish this bond even more."
Copyright 2025 NPR

This story was originally published by Boyle Heights Beat on Nov. 26, 2025.

The LA Phil on Wednesday said it secured new donor funding that would allow it to fully continue the Youth Orchestra Los Angeles program at Esteban E. Torres High School in East LA, just days after community outcry and Boyle Heights Beat reported that programming at YOLA’s Torres site would be reduced.

“YOLA is fundamental to the LA Phil’s mission of sharing the transformative power of music, so we are thrilled our donors recognized that this funding provides vital access to music education for the East LA community,” said Kim Noltemy, president and chief executive officer of the LA Phil, in a statement.

“Joining together, we have and will continue working tirelessly over the coming months to ensure we remain in a position to support this program, because it is more important than ever,” Noltemy added.

Programming was set to take place through Dec. 12, with orchestra rehearsals scaled back from four to two days per week. Parents said cuts at Torres involved beginner programs. They were also told that all instructors at the Torres site would be removed except for the conductors.

In response, families and community members held meetings and launched a campaign on Instagram, urging the LA Phil to save the program at Torres.

In a press release, parents noted that cuts come at a time when communities like East LA are grappling with fear and instability due to immigration raids that began over the summer. YOLA, they said, has been a safe space. They emphasized that no other YOLA site in LA “is being cut or reduced due to ‘funding.’”

“Only Torres — the site serving East LA’s predominantly Latino community — is affected,” they said in the release.

Students and parents share their concerns about cuts to YOLA programming at a meeting Wednesday at Esteban E. Torres High School.

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The announcement of programming reduction comes as staff at all YOLA sites filed for union representation with the American Federation of Musicians of the United States and Canada, according to the YOLA United Teaching Artists Instagram page.

YOLA, which was founded by the LA Phil, provides free instruments and ensemble training for thousands of young musicians who are 5 through 18 years old. The after-school program operates at sites across LA, including in Inglewood, Rampart District and Rampart/MacArthur Park. YOLA at Torres serves 165 students who attend East LA area schools, such as James A. Garfield High School and KIPP charter schools.

In the statement, the LA Phil said its board is working to “ensure the program is positioned for lasting success.”

“We will evaluate whether Torres remains the best and most sustainable location for YOLA programming after this school year,” the statement read.

The LA Phil also said it is establishing a parent advisory committee “to maintain consistent dialogue with YOLA families as future decisions are made.”

“We know how difficult and disruptive the initial decision to reduce the YOLA program at Torres has been for students, families, and teaching artists, and we are deeply apologetic,” Noltemy said in the statement. “We are profoundly grateful to the generous donors who made it possible for us to continue this essential program.”

Often described as housing of last resort for some of the city’s poorest renters, single-room occupancy buildings in Los Angeles are operating at a financial loss — and losing more money every year.

That’s according to a November report from Enterprise Community Partners, an affordable housing nonprofit. The report surveyed 39 buildings across California. It found that only two — both located in San Francisco — have positive cash flow.

All of the L.A.-area properties are run by organizations that keep buildings financially afloat by digging into their own budgets, making up for rental income that isn’t enough to cover operating costs.

“Owners that are carrying these properties are really trying to make them work,” said Marc Tousignant, who oversees vulnerable populations for Enterprise’s Southern California market. “They're really at the front lines of ending homelessness.”

Losses have tripled

The buildings surveyed in the report contained more than 3,000 single-room occupancy units in total. These are bare-bones apartments, usually just a bedroom without a private bathroom or kitchen.

Many are located in old residential hotels, often in downtown L.A.’s Skid Row neighborhood.

The report found building owners have needed to triple the amount of money they’re advancing per unit over the last five years. Losses cost organizations an average of $971 per unit in 2020. Now, that figure is up to $2,866 per unit.

Some, like the storied Cecil Hotel, have struggled to attract tenants. The report found an average vacancy rate of 20% in the surveyed buildings. Some of the aging properties are unattractive to prospective tenants because of deferred maintenance or damage caused by residents with untreated mental health issues.

“There have been discussions around, should we just abandon this model and convert them completely?” Tousignant said. “But they are really serving, I think, an important role.”

What could turn them around?

The two buildings in San Francisco that are financially healthy both have project-based vouchers through the city’s Section 8 program. These vouchers help tenants pay for rents in the building, and the vouchers cannot be transferred to other properties.

Tousignant said this approach could help improve the financial outlook for buildings in L.A.

“Unfortunately, in L.A., we haven't really been dedicating any new project-based vouchers to older or existing buildings,” he said. “They've really been going towards newer buildings.”

Rehabilitation is another approach that could improve vacancy rates at the buildings. The estimated cost of fixing up each single-room occupancy unit was $165,000 on average, according to the report. Some of those plans could involve converting units into studio apartments, complete with kitchen and bathroom facilities — though that could involve reducing a building’s total number of units.

“It's this sort of trade off,” Tousignant said. “What's more important? Making these complete units or losing a little bit of affordability in terms of the amount of units?”

Tousignant said if the affordable housing field doesn’t find solutions to these problems, more buildings could find themselves in court-ordered receivership, with tenants facing an uncertain future.

That’s the situation the Skid Row Housing Trust found itself in, before developer Leo Pustilnikov bought its troubled portfolio of buildings.