The Brief

New York City's contentious mayoral race has gained international attention after 33-year-old Zohran Mamdani toppled political heavyweight Andrew Cuomo in the Democratic primary last month.

That race — and the general election to come — focused on several familiar campaign issues, including affordability, housing, public safety and transit.

But one key topic stood out to many observers: child care.

Access to affordable child care was a regular talking point throughout the campaign, unlike past races in New York and across the country. Child care advocates in New York and California told LAist this signaled a change in political discourse, and that Los Angeles should take note.

" I don't recall seeing a mayor's race where universal child care played such a major role," said Margaret Brodkin, the founder of Funding the Next Generation, an organization that supports ballot measures to fund child care programs across California.

"I think there is political momentum to recognizing the importance of child care in making life affordable for families in cities and all over the country," she added.

Mamdani has promised free care for all children ages 6 weeks to 5 years and a baby basket for each New Yorker that would include an assortment of free items like diapers and baby wipes.

Mary Ignatius, the executive director of California group Parent Voices, said she was inspired by his campaign and its simple messaging.

" It was unapologetic," she said. "There was no need to go into details or a 10-point policy plan. It was just putting out a vision of what working families need to create equitable access to a life of dignity and joy and happiness that we all deserve."

How child care gained political momentum in NYC

Leading up to the primary in New York, candidates offered voters their version of a better future in which families facing sky-high costs could afford to take care of their young children.

A new nonprofit, New Yorkers United for Child Care, gained such prominence during the race that mayoral candidate Brad Lander pointed to its success on election night.

"The winner of this campaign months ago was New Yorkers United for Child Care," Lander said from Mamdani's victory party.

Allison Lew, a community organizer with that group, said it formed less than two years ago in part in response to New York Mayor Eric Adams cutting programs like 3-K, New York City's free preschool program for 3-year-olds.

Since then, she said, the organization has gained 6,000 members, including parents and parents-to-be. The group has led rallies at City Hall and distributed petitions for universal child care at playgrounds.

" There's no faster way to radicalize a parent than take away their access to child care that they can afford," she said.

Last week, Adams made a deal with the City Council to expand investments in child care and afterschool programs after initially threatening to cut back on some programs, according to local news reports. That includes $10 million for free child care for children 2 years old and younger. In April, Adams announced funding for an "After School For All" plan to expand afterschool programs.

Political efforts in California

The issue of child care has also gained political momentum in California, where recent ballot measures to raise local taxes or allocate a portion of the city budget to fund child care have been successful locally in Pomona and throughout Sonoma County. In San Francisco, early educators recently received substantial pay bumps because of a new commercial property tax.

Mary Ignatius with Parent Voices said the election in New York makes her hopeful that more California lawmakers will take up child care as an issue.

"It would be a lot easier if our lawmakers would invest," she said. "[because], you know, we can go county by county, but that's also going to leave out a lot of people."

Statewide, universal transitional kindergarten — which allows children to start a free two-year kindergarten program at age 4 — kicks in this fall. But overall, access to care for young children is still far below what's needed. As of 2023, fewer than half the number of children in California under 5 had regular child care, according to UCLA's Center for Health Policy Research.

Many child care advocates said reforming the system takes time, not just political momentum.

Marcy Whitebook, the founder of Berkeley's Center for the Study of Child Care Employment, noted that New York City already is building off of a long history of investment in child care programs like public preschool.

" I'm glad there's is this attention, it's long, long, long overdue in my opinion. But it's a political issue," she said. "So whether or not it rises to the point where people are really willing to make an investment and sustain that investment…it's got to be something you keep really pushing for."

Storylines about abortion and conversations about it showed up on television 65 times this year, on prestigious dramas like The Pitt and Call the Midwife, on reality shows such as W.A.G.s to Riches and Love is Blind and on lowbrow animated comedies like Family Guy and South Park. That's about the same as last year. In 2024, TV shows featured 66 such plotlines.

But in the past few years, there's been a significant drop in the number of characters who actually went through with an abortion. 37% obtained an abortion in 2025, a 14% decline since 2023.

That's according to the annual Abortion Onscreen report. It comes from Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health, a research program on abortion and reproductive health based at the University of California San Francisco.

"I think there still is a lot of stigma, even in allegedly liberal Hollywood," says researcher Steph Herold. She says the report, which has come out for about a decade, reflects a profound lack of accurate representation of abortion use in America. For example, she points to research showing that about 60% of real life Americans who seek an abortion deal with some sort of barrier.

"But only about a third of people who are characters on screen face any kind of barrier to abortion," Herold said. "Whether it was not being able to come up with the cost of the abortion, not having somebody to watch their kids or cover for them at work, having to deal with clinics that are miles away, or in other states having insurance that wouldn't cover the cost." Most TV shows in 2025 depicting women struggling to get abortions focused on legal obstacles in the past and present.

On TV, 80% of characters seeking abortions are upper or middle class, but in real life, most abortion patients struggle to make ends meet. "This [disparity] obscures the role that poverty plays in obstructing access to abortion, and perhaps explains why we so rarely see plotlines in which characters wrestle with financial barriers to abortion access," the study says.

This year, a teenager on The Pitt sought abortion pills to end her pregnancy — one of only three stories depicting medication abortion out of 65 plotlines about abortion this year. That's another disparity between representation on-screen and real-world numbers: research shows that abortion pills account for the majority of abortions in the U.S. Another difference: only 8% of people seeking abortion on TV are parents. In real life, most abortion patients have at least one child.

It is unrealistic, says Herold, to expect TV to perfectly reflect current abortion use in the U.S., but she said she was disappointed by certain trends. Fewer characters this year received emotional support around their abortions, and more shows, she said, including Chicago Med, 1923, Breathless and Secrets We Keep featured plotlines that emphasized shame and stigma around abortions, especially because of religion. These storylines, the report says, "both obscure the diversity of religious observance among people having abortions, portraying religious patients as exclusively Christian, and also only associating religion with prohibiting abortion, instead of being a meaningful or supportive part of someone's abortion decision-making and experience."

But even though abortion has long been a hot-button political issue, Herold says millions of Americans have had some sort of experience with abortions. "Whether it's having one themselves or helping a daughter or a friend," she said, adding that stories that reflect a diversity of abortion experiences will be familiar to many viewers.

One bright spot, she added, was that television is doing a better job of reflecting the racial realities of abortion. A slight majority of characters in abortion plotlines are people of color — and although they are by far the majority of abortion seekers in real life, this marks a notable improvement from a decade ago, when TV shows more often portrayed women seeking abortions as wealthy and white.

Geminids, the strongest meteor shower of the year, hit a peak this weekend, sending over 150 meteors per hour through the night sky tonight and Sunday.

Vanessa Alarcon, an astronomical observer at the Griffith Observatory, says despite being the best and brightest every year, these meteors don’t tend to get many fans.

" It's usually not as heavily attended, I think because it's a lot colder in the winter. So it's definitely a deterrent, but technically, it's more meteors per hour than the Perseids are," Alarcon said.

The Perseids are typically visible between July and August, but this summer, they were mostly drowned out because of light pollution from the full moon.

Alarcon says it will be a different story this weekend.

" The Geminids ... there's about a 25% crescent moon. So it's actually going be even better than the Perseids," Alarcon said.

Where to go for the best view

For the best viewing experience, you'll have to brave the cold of the deserts and mountains at night, but it should be worth the trip.

"You should go to a darker sky," Alarcon said. "And basically, you just want to get away from the city lights — anything away from the city lights is going to be an improvement from trying to watch it at home."

When to best see it

The Geminids are notable for being exceptionally bright, burning like fireballs for several seconds. The meteors can be seen after 8 p.m. tonight, Alarcon said, peaking between 1:20 and 2:20 a.m. and visible until 5:20 a.m.

Anyone will tell you that these are tumultuous, borderline-apocalyptic times for the film industry. Box office is down. The threat of AI looms. Billionaires and tech giants are laying waste to what remains of the major Hollywood studios. I'm not entirely sure how to square all this bad news with my own good news, which is that I saw more terrific new movies this year than I have any year since before the pandemic. True, most of those movies weren't from here, but all of them played in U.S. theaters in 2025, and all of them are well worth seeking out in the weeks and months to come.

1. Sirāt

The best new movie I saw this year is a breakthrough work from a gifted Spanish filmmaker named Oliver Laxe. It's a nail-biting survival thriller, set in the desert of southern Morocco during what feels like the end-times. It's a little Mad Max, a little Wages of Fear, and all in all, the most exhilarating and devastating two hours I experienced in a theater this year. Sirāt also features the year's best original score, composed by the electronic musician Kangding Ray.

2. One Battle After Another

Paul Thomas Anderson's much-loved, much-debated reimagining of Thomas Pynchon's novel Vineland is an exuberant mash-up of action-thriller and political satire. One Battle After Another stars Leonardo DiCaprio in one of his best and funniest performances as an aging revolutionary drawn back into the field. He leads an ensemble that includes Teyana Taylor, Benicio del Toro, Sean Penn, Regina Hall and the terrific discovery, Chase Infiniti.

3. Caught by the Tides

Caught by the Tides is an unclassifiable hybrid of fiction and nonfiction from the Chinese director Jia Zhangke. Drawn from a mix of archival footage and newly shot material, it's a one-of-a-kind portrait of the myriad transformations that China has gone through over the past two decades.

4. Resurrection

Resurrection, another structurally bold Chinese title, is a bit like an Avatar movie for film buffs. Placing us in the head of a shapeshifting protagonist, the director, Bi Gan, takes us on a gorgeous, dreamlike odyssey through various cinema genres, from historical spy drama to vampire thriller.

5. My Undesirable Friends: Part I — Last Air in Moscow

My No. 5 movie is the year's best documentary: My Undesirable Friends: Part I — Last Air in Moscow, from the director Julia Loktev. It's a sprawling yet intimate portrait of several Russian independent journalists in the harrowing months leading up to President Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine in 2022. As a portrait of anti-authoritarian resistance, it pairs nicely with my No. 6 movie.

6. The Secret Agent

The Secret Agent is an emotionally rich, sneakily funny and continually surprising drama from the director Kleber Mendonça Filho. Set in 1977, it lays bare the personal cost of dissidence during Brazil's military dictatorship.

7. Sound of Falling

Although not a horror film, exactly, this German drama qualifies as the best and spookiest haunted-house movie I've seen this year. Directed by Mascha Schilinski, Sound of Falling teases out the connections among four generations of girls and young women who have passed through the same remote farmhouse.

8. April

April, from the director Dea Kulumbegashvili, is a tough, bleak, but utterly hypnotic portrait of a skilled OB-GYN trying to provide health care for women in a conservative East Georgian village. It may be set far from the U.S., but the difficulties these women face would resonate in any setting.

9. On Becoming a Guinea Fowl

Directed by Rungano Nyoni, this Zambian film is a subtly mesmerizing drama about a death that takes place in a middle-class household, setting off a chain of dark revelations that threaten to tear a family apart.

10. It Was Just an Accident

It Was Just an Accident, which won the Palme d'Or at this year's Cannes Film Festival, is a shattering moral thriller from the Iranian director Jafar Panahi. It centers on a group of former political prisoners who are given a rare chance at retribution. In the past, Panahi has been a prisoner in Iran himself, and earlier this month, the government sentenced the director in absentia to a year in prison. I hope that Panahi never sees the inside of a jail cell again, and that his movie is seen as far and wide as possible.
Copyright 2025 NPR

In the wake of the Eaton Fire, Altadena and Pasadena’s music community have really shown up to support fire survivors, especially fellow musicians who lost instruments and record collections.

That effort continues this weekend with a special donation concert at a Pasadena record store, with the aim of getting vinyl records back in the hands of survivors who lost their collections.

“You know, our name is Healing Force of the Universe, and I think that gives me a pretty clear direction… especially after the fires,” said Austin Manuel, founder of Pasadena record store, where Sunday’s show will be held.

The record donation effort is the brainchild of musician Brandon Jay, who founded the nonprofit Altadena Musicians after losing his home and almost all of his family’s instruments in the Eaton Fire. Through Altadena Musicians’s donation and registry platform, Jay said he and his partners have helped some 1,200 fire survivors get their music instruments back.

Brandon Jay.

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Robert Garrova

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Now, that effort has fanned out to restoring vinyl record collections.

“All of that stuff evaporated for thousands of people,” Jay said. “Look at your own record collection and be like, ‘Wow, what if that whole thing disappeared?’”

You might know Jay from several bands over the years, including Lutefisk, a 1990s alt-rock band based in Los Angeles. He and his wife, Gwendolyn Sanford, composed music for TV shows, including Orange is the New Black and Weeds.

Jay plans to play some holiday tunes at Sunday's record donation show (which LAist is the media sponsor), along with fellow musician Daniel Brummel of Sanglorians. Brummel, who was also a founding member of Pasadena’s indie-rock sensation Ozma, said he was grateful to Jay for his fire recovery work and to Manuel for making Healing Force available for shows like this.

Brummel, who came close to losing his own home in the Eaton Fire, recalled a show he played at Healing Force back in March.

Ryen Slegr (left) and Daniel Brummel perform with their band, Ozma, on the 2014 Weezer Cruise.

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Even Keel Imagery

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“The trauma of the fires was still really fresh,” Brummel said. After playing a cover of Rufus Wainwright’s “Going to a Town,” that night — which includes the lyrics “I’m going to a town that has already been burnt down” — Brummel said his neighbors in the audience told him the rendition hit them hard. “It felt really powerful. And without that space, it just wouldn’t have occurred.”

Details

Healing Force of the Universe Record Donation Show
Featuring: Quasar (aka Brandon Jay), Sanglorians (Daniel Brummel) and The Acrylic.
Sunday, Dec. 14; 2 to 5 p.m.
1200 E. Walnut St., Pasadena
Tickets are $15 or you can donate 5 or more records at the door. More info here.