The Brief

For Fatmah Muhammad, Astralab is a home away from home. 

The community space sometimes feels safer than the confines of her home, where she sits alone watching the constant reports of violence and death flash across her screen — reminders that her homeland of Palestine is being torn apart by war.

There isn’t much she can do from thousands of miles away, so she and hundreds of others find solace in the refuge that Astralab provides. 

And the space is at risk of closing.

After nearly two years in the Westlake neighborhood, the founders of Astralab say they’ve been told to leave. The news arrived abruptly as the founders said they were in talks to extend their lease with their landlord JMF Development.

The building manager had even thanked them for bringing life into the studio and creative office space.

“We’ve been great tenants and kind neighbors. We’ve really built a space for people to come and to gather and not just grieve, but also joyfully be together,” said Yusuf Misdaq, co-founder of the third space venue that borders Koreatown.

“But they just took it off the table and gave us no response since then,” he said.

For Fatmah Muhammad, Astralab is a home away from home.

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Hanna Kang

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Located in the Granada Buildings — a block-long Mediterranean and Spanish Colonial Revival complex on La Fayette Park Place with open courtyards and greenery — Astralab sits as a kind of refuge in an otherwise blighted stretch of the neighborhood. 

In February, Astralab received a 60-day notice to vacate. Co-founder Christina Lila said they are now working with a pro bono lawyer to challenge the landlord. 

When reached by phone, a person at the real estate office declined to provide his name and questioned why anyone was asking about the notice to vacate. 

“Why is this a story? I don’t know why I’m even entertaining this conversation,” he said. 

He said Astralab’s tenancy ends April 19 and that they would need to vacate the space. The real estate company did not respond to requests for comment via email. 

'Community is medicine'

While all are welcome at Astralab, the space was created to provide refuge with a specific community in mind.

Lila is half Iranian and Misdaq is originally from Afghanistan. The community space was meant to cater to people from Southwest Asia and North Africa, or the SWANA region, who often feel unmoored away from home.

“We really saw the lack of cultural centers in America, frankly. And while working in the SWANA region, I saw the vibrant cultures and the community love and how powerful it was,” Lila said. “It feels like there’s almost a psychological torture in America, and you can’t get the medicine. Community is medicine, and we just don’t have it as much here.”

For Fatmah Muhammad, Astralab is a home away from home.

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Muhammad said that sense of community is what drew her to Astralab.

“My kids have performed cultural songs and dances there. That place just reminds me of who we are and it just gives me that comfortability of being there,” she said.

Muhammad, who owns Knafeh Queens, a dessert shop based in Rancho Cucamonga, has also hosted workshops at Astralab, teaching people how to make the dessert and sharing its history.

“I’ve rarely been able to find spaces like this that I barely have to put effort into. I always show up as my full self, but there’s something really special about Astralab and how welcoming they are to everyone regardless of background and faith,” she said.

Shortly after opening, Astralab quickly started hosting a steady rotation of gatherings, drawing people from across Los Angeles and beyond. Some nights are quiet, with poetry readings or small group discussions, Lila said. Other nights spill into the courtyard.

“We host regular bazaars where we open our courtyard, and there’ll be 30, 40 creators and so many people, artists, musicians, healers — we have a ‘Silk Road’ type of space where people will come and put their creations — all sorts of different medicines and jewelry and things like that,” Lila said.

More than 200 artists, musicians and small business owners have participated through those events over the last two years, according to the founders. Astralab is sustained through event-based income and the bazaar, Lila said, but most paid events include sliding scale or free tickets for those who could not otherwise afford to attend. 

For Fatmah Muhammad, Astralab is a home away from home.

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Misdaq can tell that people often visit carrying the weight of what’s happening back home.

“With Iran being so prominent, people are coming in tears. We’ve had a lot of grieving events where people can just come and just be,” he said.

But “a lot of dance happens here, a lot of celebration happens here. It’s not all sad. In fact, it’s mostly joyful, actually,” Misdaq adds.

'A drop of solace'

Parisa Nkoy, an Iranian-Congolese organizer, had been following Astralab online before visiting earlier this year. She has used the space to host workshops connecting struggles across the world, including Congo and Palestine.

Earlier this year, she led a teach-in on Congo, inviting Congolese organizers who do advocacy work for refugees and immigrants.

“We did a little presentation and a workshop, and then we were able to connect to Palestine as well. It was a fundraiser as well to raise money that we donated to folks on the ground in Congo and I just don’t know that I could have found another space that would have been as comfortable for me to do that,” she said.

“I think that that’s super important and we need more of that, not less of that,” she said.

Neighbors say they haven’t seen similar action taken against other tenants.

“As far as I know, no one else here has gotten something like this just randomly. I mean, most people will move out on their own accord if they can’t pay rent. We’ve only really had positive interactions with them,” said Eric Gorvin, who runs a branding agency next door.

“Every time they’ve had an event, it’s been really respectful people. It’s always community-driven,” he added. “I didn’t know much about that community until meeting them, and it’s been really refreshing to have them around.” 

The founders say they haven’t been given a reason for the notice to vacate, but they believe it’s due to their pro-Palestine stance. 

“We’ve basically been speaking a lot about the genocide in Palestine, and we’ve used our platform to try and not shy away from that too much, but we also do a lot of other things besides that,” Misdaq said.

“We just had a Passover [seder] led by a Jewish mystic, and it’s a testimony that we feel the world needs right now where there can be an alliance of all these different people,” Lila said.

“We can share the beauty of our uniqueness together,” she said.

The founders said they invested most of their personal savings into creating Astralab and had only recently moved beyond breaking even. Lila said that milestone would have allowed them to begin offering new programs.

“We’ve become a home to so many people separated from their families during these wars, our space gives people a drop of solace while watching their homelands being bombed,” they said.

“If we have to, we’ll be nomadic, which is kind of appropriate maybe in some ways for our people. So maybe we’ll take it on the road for a little while before we find a space if they do kick us out,” Misdaq said. 

Astralab will host HAYAT, a Middle-Eastern/Persian celebration of dance and music on April 18. More details can be found on their Instagram page, @astralab_la .

Everyone knows the frustration of bad sleep on a hot night, tossing and turning in the sheets as the hours slip away.

That experience is becoming more common thanks to climate change, according to a new study from the research organization Climate Central. The analysis finds that on average, people around the world lose about 56 hours, or seven full nights of sleep each year to uncomfortably warm temperatures. About 10% of that lost sleep—roughly 5 hours—can be pinned to human-driven climate change.

"Summertime is hot. It's always been," says Kristina Dahl, the lead scientist at Climate Central. "But climate change is making them hotter, and making nights hotter. So it's really amplifying the sleep loss that would happen naturally."

The study looked at temperature records from 1,300 cities around the world. The Climate Central team knew from a study published a few years earlier that the amount of time people sleep is tightly tied to overnight outdoor temperatures. So they could extrapolate the total time people spent sleeping based on the temperatures where they lived. That number represented the real sleep people got in a world that has been heated up by climate change.

Then, the Climate Central researchers used a climate model that presents a hypothetical world: one where human-driven climate change hasn't happened. The researchers could estimate temperatures in all those same locations—and see how much people would have slept in that cooler scenario.

The difference, Dahl says, isn't enormous for each person: it's on the order of 5 hours a year so far. But that number has doubled since the 1970s, and it will continue to rise as climate change marches onward, she says.

That's in part because overnight temperatures have crept upward much faster than daytime ones. The causes are complex, but one factor is the shape of the atmosphere: At night, the layer of air closest to the ground, where people actually live, is short and compact. During the daytime, that layer expands. Heat absorbed during the day gets trapped into that compact band of air during the night, pushing temperatures up.

Sleep is tightly tied to temperature. Sleep laboratory studies consistently show that hotter and more humid conditions degrade sleep quality. People's ability to fall asleep in the first place decreases, and the sleep that does occur gets fragmented and less restorative.

Particularly, says sleep doctor Daniel Rifkin from the sleep consultancy group Ognomy Sleep, the type of sleep that leads to dreams: REM.

"If it's too hot," he says, "your REM sleep is extremely broken, and we lose our dreams."

Sleep lab studies helped scientists understand the best temperature conditions for sleeping indoors. But until recently, it wasn't clear how real-world weather conditions affected people's sleep.

But a few years ago, environmental data scientist Kelton Minor and his colleagues set out to figure out that relationship. They collected sleep data from nearly 50,000 Fitbits around the world, along with detailed overnight temperature data from sleepers' locations.

"The warmer it gets, the less that people sleep," says Minor— especially once nighttime temperatures crept above about 50 to 59 degrees Fahrenheit. Beyond that, Minor and his colleagues found, "every additional increase per degree on that hot side leads to progressively less sleep."

The new Climate Central analysis used Minor's sleep-temperature relationship to estimate climate-induced sleep loss.

Sleep is already a precious and threatened commodity, says Minor. In 2015, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention declared sleep problems like disorders and simple insufficiency to be a public health crisis.

So far, the climate impact adds up to just a few minutes a day during summertime. But because the relationship between sleep loss and health is so strong, the cumulative impacts of that loss on public health could be significant, says sleep doctor Rifkin. The impacts also fall hard on people who don't have access to cooling technologies such as air conditioning, or who can't afford to run them.

"Heat really finds the vulnerable people first," he says. "It affects those the most that need the help the most."

He recommends doing whatever possible to cool your sleep space. If nothing else is possible, sticking your feet outside the sheet or blanket can help your body shed heat and cool down enough to sink into sleep.

Beyond those recommendations, Dahl says one of the best sleep aids isn't a pill or a meditation app, but cutting back on burning fossil fuels, the primary driver of climate change.
Copyright 2026 NPR

Artist Betye Saar, whose work reflects Black identity, culture and spirituality, died Sunday morning in Los Angeles at 99.

Saar’s death was confirmed Monday by relatives. She would have turned 100 this week.

A central figure of the 1960s Black Art Movement, Saar pioneered assemblage boxes, or sculptures made of found objects, and reclaimed Jim Crow-era memorabilia as powerful totems of Black liberation.

“Her symbolically rich body of work has evolved over time to demonstrate the environmental, cultural, political, racial, technological, economic and historical context in which it exists,” according to Roberts Projects, the Los Angeles gallery that represents her.

Saar began her career in design and shifted to art at age 35. She continued to make art into her 90s. She grew up in Pasadena and was part of a community of Black artists in nearby Altadena; she often cited Simon Rodia’s Watts Towers as an early source of inspiration.

Saar’s practice incorporated painting, printmaking, sculpture and found objects including dolls, washboards and other antiques. Boats, clocks, cages and altars recur in her practice, as well as symbols of the occult and cosmology. She often referenced her astrological sign of Leo in the form of lions, punctuating many works.

“Her appropriation of Black collectibles, heirlooms and utilitarian objects are transformed through subversion,” the gallery said. “Among the older generation of Black American artists, Saar is without reproach.”

Made in 1969, “Black Girl’s Window,” was groundbreaking. Still, it wasn’t widely celebrated until decades later, and it was acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2019.

“There weren’t that many galleries in Los Angeles at the time and there certainly weren’t any for Black artists,” she once said in an interview.

“The Liberation of Aunt Jemima,” created in 1972, is one of her most important works. It features memorabilia she collected that denigrated Black people, included a “mammy,” or 19th century minstrel character who smiled while serving white slave owners.

In Saar’s hands though, the figure is reclaimed: She smiles, but holds a rifle and has a hand grenade.

It came in response to the 1968 assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis, Tennessee. Saar said King’s death “triggered a rage within me, and the mystic transformed into the warrior.”

“I had a lot of hesitation about using powerful, negative images such as these — thinking about how white people saw Black people, and how that influenced the ways in which Black people saw each other,” Saar said. “What saved it was that I made Aunt Jemima into a revolutionary figure.”

After more than 130 years, Quaker Oats announced it would retire its Aunt Jemima brand in 2020, acknowledging the logo and its origins were “based on a racial stereotype.”

Saar taught and mentored generations of Black artists, including painter Kerry James Marshall.

Though Saar’s work was exhibited in a 1975 solo show at the Whitney Museum of American Art, in the decades that followed large institutions have exhibited her work only sporadically. In 2019 though, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and MoMA mounted concurrent solo shows.

In spring 2026, Saar was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

“She had boundless energy for making art. I think she had a lot to say and was tired of the art world being dominated by white males,” said Angela Robinson Witherspoon, who produced and directed a documentary in 2023 on Saar’s life. “Betye Saar: Ready to Be A Warrior” features interviews with John Legend, Tina Knowles and other prominent voices.

“She was raising her three young daughters and she wanted to be part of the Civil Rights Movement,” Robinson Witherspoon said.

“Let’s Get It On: The Wearable Art of Betye Saar,” which focuses on costume design, is currently on view at Roberts Projects in Los Angeles, and there are 26 of an eventual 100 dolls on view at The New York Historical in Manhattan.

Associated Press writer Anna Furman contributed reporting from Los Angeles.

International students in Southern California say new visa time limits imposed by the Trump administration don’t square with the realities of trying to complete a degree in four years.

Under the new rules, there is now a limit to how long international students can remain in the country, as opposed to remaining in the U.S. for as long as it took to complete their degree program.

Department of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin said in a statement that the previous rules allowed thousands to become “forever students” by perpetually enrolling in courses to avoid departure. LAist has reached out to the department about how many of these students are in Southern California.

California State University spokesperson Amy Bentley-Smith said international students from over 160 countries “add to the rich diversity, voices, and perspectives that enrich our campuses.”

Rachel Zaentz, senior director of strategic and critical communications at the University of California Office of the President, told LAist in a statement that the new policy “significantly changes the way international students have studied in the U.S. for decades.”

“The prior Duration of Status rule provided international students and scholars with the time needed to complete their studies, conduct research, teach, train and work, provided they maintained their nonimmigrant status, in support of the country’s global competitiveness and innovation economy,” she added.

Studies have also shown that international students help boost colleges’ financial footing since they aren’t eligible for aid.

In a letter to DHS , the UC Office of the President said international students contributed $6.4 billion to California’s economy during the 2023-24 academic year and supported more than 55,000 jobs.

Katherine S. Newman, UC System Provost and executive vice president for academic affairs, wrote that the then-proposed visa limits would deter international students from pursuing doctoral programs in the U.S. and instead turn to countries like China, which has been heavily investing in doctoral programs.

Additionally, the letter highlights how students take varying times to complete their degrees. The new changes set limits to four years for visas with an option to apply for extensions. But Newman wrote that the graduation rate for almost 90% of incoming freshmen is six years.

Adding to worries 

Reva Kaneri, a graduate student from India pursuing a degree in data science from the University of California, San Diego, said the new rules affects her mental health.

Reva Kaneri, a graduate student from India, is pursuing a degree in data science from the University of California, San Diego.

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“It adds a layer of uncertainty and pressure that international students already live with,” she said. “As someone who simply came here to pursue an education, build a career, and experience a new country, that uncertainty can be scary at times.”

The new visa limits, she said, reduces the flexibility international students had to find a job.

Kaneri took out a loan to pursue her degree so she wouldn’t be a financial burden on her parents.

“At one point, I genuinely thought I’d have to give up on my dream because every door seemed closed,” said Kaneri, who also worked on campus as a teaching assistant to help cover some of her tuition.

But, she said, it’s worth it.

“I honestly didn’t want to settle for average. I wanted to learn from some of the best people in the world. The U.S. has an incredible tech ecosystem, from Silicon Valley to Seattle and beyond, and many of the world’s leading technology companies are headquartered here,” Kaneri said. “I wanted the opportunity to work with talented people, network with founders and innovators, and absorb as much as I possibly could. For the goals I had, I felt there wasn’t a better place.”

For Rohit Nair, an international student from India pursuing a master’s degree in business analytics at USC, finding a job is not optional.

Rohit Nair is an international student from India pursuing a master’s degree in business analytics at USC.

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He took out a loan of around $87,000 to come to the U.S. to study. But if he doesn’t get a job in the U.S. after graduating, it would be impossible for him to pay it back in Indian rupees.

“ I would be in generational debt if I take that step,” he said.