The Brief

Some 30 years ago, two students from Bell High School fell for each other while bonding over technology and their shared dreams of starting a youth center on the southeast side of Los Angeles County.

At the time, Emma Hernandez and Cesar Zaldivar-Motts were aspiring engineers, but they struggled with the curriculum because they weren’t properly prepared for the in-depth scientific knowledge needed for college-level courses.

Both eventually switched majors — Hernandez studied computer science while Zaldivar-Motts focused on political science — but once they got their degrees, they returned to the community to give back. Zaldivar-Motts is CEO of a regional nonprofit housing organization, and Hernandez leads the Southeast Community Development Corporation.

Cesar Zaldivar-Motts and Emma Hernandez at the Bell Technology Center.

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Now, the couple is finding creative ways to engage kids in STEM at the Bell Technology Center, just two blocks away from where they first met. That includes launching a new six-week academy where students get to build their own ham radio for free and from scratch.

“We're finally pursuing that dream of providing this after school resource,” Zaldivar-Motts said.

Digital divide

The high school sweethearts want to encourage more local teens to become engineers, scientists or even teachers of STEM programs.

Data show the area is among the hardest hit by California’s digital divide, which is the gap between people who have modern digital skills and easy access to technology, and those who do not.

Kids are learning the very basics of how electricity and circuits work.

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Zaldivar-Motts said the class is a “stepping stone to encourage them to explore robotics, 3D printing, computer coding, and other STEM activities.”

"We've learned you can't just lecture to kids," he explained. "We need to excite them in the beginning so they can stay with us long-term.”

Together, the couple welcomes about a dozen middle school and high school-aged students on Saturday mornings for a crash course on electronics. By the end of the six-week academy, the kids and teens will have the basic skills needed for more advanced courses on robotics and computer programming — an opportunity they might not have otherwise gotten at school or at home on the southeast side.

“Many schools don't have the funding to provide these after school programs, to provide an electronics class or a robotics class,” Zaldivar-Motts said. “So as nonprofits, we come in and fill that gap, and help reduce the digital divide that we face here in the community.”

How the academy works

The academy starts with an introduction to amateur radio, also known as ham radio. It’s a licensed radio service that allows people to communicate with each other over the airwaves without using the internet or cell phones.

Instructor Cesar Zaldivar-Motts said the goal is to pique the kids’ interest in STEM.

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Zaldivar-Motts said while it’s an older technology, the goal is to pique the kids’ interest in electronics. But it does have its uses today — like if the internet goes down in an emergency. In an earthquake-prone L.A., it feels especially relevant.

Once they’re hooked, students learn the basics of how electricity and circuits work. They get hands-on training with soldering machines. It can be dangerous work, according to 10-year-old Santiago Ramirez, who recently burned his finger while soldering a wire to a circuit board.

By the end of the six-week academy, the kids and teens will have the basic skills needed for more advanced courses on robotics and computer programming

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“I thought that part wasn’t hot so I touched it,” he said pointing to the soldering iron. “And when you get burned, trust me, you’re going to get white on your finger.”

Santiago and his 11-year-old brother, Sebastian, have been attending classes at the Bell Tech Center for years. Most of the participants are from around the southeast, including 10-year-old Koda Hall. He said he plans to “show off” his radio at school and hopes to become an engineer one day.

Parent Hector Corzo sat with his daughter, Sofia, while she practiced soldering for the first time. He said he wants her to continue to learn new skills, even if she doesn’t plan on becoming an engineer in the future.

“I've always told her to be open minded,” Corzo said. “Because you never know. It’s better to have it and not need it, than need it and not have it.”

Parent Hector Corzo helps his daughter, Sofia, practice her soldering skills.

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The students managed to assemble a majority of their mini radios by week four of the academy. Zaldivar-Motts said he will start to introduce more advanced concepts and techniques in the Saturdays to come.

“Next week we're going to wrap up the radio building project and then work on Arduino [software] which can control sensors, motors, lights, and measure temperature and distance,” he said.

When asked what the kids might use their new radios for, many said they would show off the project to their classmates.

"Last time I built [one] I showed it to my fourth grade class," Santiago said. "And I talked about it so I was basically my teacher but... about the radio."

The Los Angeles Metro’s Board of Directors voted Thursday to re-approve the Dodger Stadium gondola, clearing the path for state agencies and the city of L.A. to provide necessary sign-offs before shovels hit the ground.

The decision came after protesters showed up en masse, forced officials to retreat to an earlier-than-scheduled closed session meeting, and won their demand for a dedicated period of public comment on the project before the vote.

The gondola is not a Metro project. Rather, the transportation agency was tasked with preparing environmental studies and approving the project under the California Environmental Quality Act.

Following Thursday’s vote, Zero Emissions Transit, the nonprofit developing the gondola, said the California State Parks Commission will consider amending the L.A. Historic State Park general plan and the city of L.A. will “evaluate land use permits.”

L.A. County Supervisor Janice Hahn was the sole “no” vote on the gondola Thursday. At a Metro committee meeting in November, when the gondola was last discussed, Hahn said she wanted to “lean into” expanding, electrifying and making more efficient the Dodger Stadium Express, the existing Metro bus system that shuttles baseball fans to games.

If built, Metro projects the gondola will carry a maximum of 5,000 visitors every hour from Union Station in downtown L.A. to Dodger Stadium. The proposed route has an intermediate stop at L.A. Historic State Park.

The one-mile, one-way trip would last 7 minutes, according to Metro.

Wasn’t this already approved?

Yes. For the most part, Thursday’s vote was not materially different from last February, when the Metro Board of Directors initially approved the gondola.

Then, in May, following two separate lawsuits alleging inadequacies in Metro’s environmental documents for the gondola, the California Court of Appeal directed the countywide transportation agency to review ways the project’s construction noise could be mitigated.

The vote Thursday was to re-certify the project and its environmental documents with the added evaluation, which Metro released for public comment in September.

Developer faces an uphill battle with the city

L.A. City Council last month voted 12-1 on a resolution opposing the gondola.

“People from Solano Canyon, Chinatown [and] Lincoln Heights have asked me to step up and help preserve green space and help preserve their privacy and to not acquiesce to a billionaire,” L.A. City Councilmember Eunisses Hernandez, who authored the resolution, said to LAist at the Metro meeting on Thursday. “I hope the mayor can hear us and see us.”

Mayor Karen Bass did not sign the resolution.

As a member of Metro’s Board, Bass voted in favor of moving forward with the gondola.

Red versus Blue in the Metro Board room

After Metro accepted the unsolicited proposal for the gondola in 2018, community members formed a formidable opposition campaign known as Stop the Gondola.

At Thursday’s meeting, they were dressed in red, equipped with a megaphone, banners and signs and supported by anti-gondola L.A. City Council members, including Hernandez, Ysabel Jurado and Hugo Soto-Martinez.

Local residents and activists used the one hour-long public comment period to highlight the effects construction and operations will have on nearby neighborhoods and L.A. Historic Park. They rejected Metro and the project developer’s claims that the gondola is a viable transportation option, instead calling it a “boondoggle.”

During public comment, Phyllis Chu asked the Metro Board of Directors whether they serve a “billionaire developer” or their constituents.

The “billionaire developer" refers to Frank McCourt, the former owner of the Dodgers. McCourt still owns some parking lot real estate near the stadium, and some critics believe the aerial tram is part of McCourt’s vision to develop the area.

Zero Emissions Transit, along with its allies from organized labor and business groups, say the gondola would provide an environmentally friendly transportation option for baseball fans, local residents and park-goers.

Dodger Blue-clad supporters also showed up at Thursday’s meeting and responded to the opposition with chants of their own. They walked in a procession around the Metro Board room holding up signs with a blunt message: “Build the Gondola.”

Zero Emissions Transit said in its news release that “nearly 18,000 individuals and more than 400 businesses in Chinatown, El Pueblo, and Lincoln Heights have signed up to support the project, and a recent poll found 72% of Los Angeles County residents support the project.”

Swooping, swirling, gleaming, sculpted — Frank Gehry made buildings we'd never seen before. The architect behind the Guggenheim Museum in Spain and the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles transformed contemporary architecture. He died Friday at his home in Santa Monica, Calif., after a brief respiratory illness, according to his chief of staff. He was 96.

Gehry won all the top awards — including the Pritzker Prize and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In 1999, when the American Institute of Architects gave him their Gold Medal, Gehry looked out at an audience that included contemporary gods of building — Philip Johnson, Richard Venturi, Michael Graves — and said, "it's like finding out my big brothers love me after all."

"He was probably the only truly great artist I've ever encountered who desperately cared what people thought of him and that people loved his work," says Gehry's biographer Paul Goldberger. The architect got his share of criticism — "accusations that he made crazy shapes and paid no attention to budget."

But the praise was louder, because his striking buildings made people happy.

"I love the relationship with the clients," said architect Frank Gehry. In Bilbao, Spain, where he designed the groundbreaking building for the Guggenheim museum, "people come out and hug me," he said.

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A woman walks inside the Louis Vuitton Foundation in the Bois de Boulogne in Paris.

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With 12 huge glass "sails," the Louis Vuitton Foundation takes the form of a sailboat among the trees of the Bois de Boulogne in Paris.

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"I've always been for optimism and architecture not being sad," Gehry told NPR in 2004. "You know, a building for music and performance should be joyful. It should be a great experience and it should be fun to go to."

There was exuberance in his work. The swoops and swirls — made possible with aerospace technology — lifted the spirits of viewers used to post-war modernism — strict, boxy glass and steel buildings that looked imposing and unwelcoming.

Gehry says he found that style, cold, inhuman and lifeless. "I thought it was possible to find a way to express feeling and humanistic qualities in a building," Gehry said. "But I wasn't clear about it until I started experimenting, quite accidentally, with fish forms."

He loved the shape of fish, and the way they moved. He drew them all his life, an inspiration that began in his grandmother's bathtub in Toronto.

"Every Thursday when I stayed at her house, I'd go with her to the market," he recalled. "And there would be a big bag of some kind filled with water that we would carry home with a big carp in it. We'd put it in the bathtub. I'd sit and watch it and the next day it was gone."

Those carp were turned into gefilte fish — a classic Jewish dish — but stayed in Gehry's memory long past suppertime. He translated their curves and motions into architecture. In Prague, Czechs call his elegant design for an office building "Fred and Ginger" — two cylindrical towers, one solid, the other glass, pinched in at the waist, like dancers. His Disney Hall and his Guggenheim museum swell like symphonies.

Gehry's whimsical towers in Prague have earned the nickname "Fred and Ginger."

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"He really wanted you to feel a sense of movement," Goldberger says. "A building is a static thing, but if it feels like it's moving, for him that was more exciting."

The Guggenheim — a billowing swirl of titanium in gold and sunset colors — excited viewers. After it opened in 1997, Gehry said everyone who came to him wanted a Guggeinheim. But Gehry wasn't interested.

"Like all great artists, he wanted to keep pushing himself and move forward," Goldberger says. "He did not want to copy himself. He did not want to do that building again."

The Guggeinheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain and The Disney Hall in Los Angeles (it opened in 2003, a swoosh of silver stainless steel, 1/16th of an inch thick) are Gehry's signature buildings. But they're a far cry from his early work. His own 1978 residence in Santa Monica sports common materials. If clients couldn't afford fancy — marble, say — he'd use cheap.

Gehry constructed the Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles out of stainless steel. "We're living in a culture, in a time where movement is pervasive," he said. "Everything is moving. And so if we hook onto that and use it as part of our language, our architectural language, there's some resonance for it."

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Inside the Disney Concert Hall.

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"He started using plywood and chain link fence and corrugated metal," Goldberger says.

Those buildings got attention. But the later ones made him a star — and a term was coined: Starchitect. Goldberger says Gehry hated it.

"He didn't really hate fame," Goldberger explains. "But he was too smart to sacrifice everything for it."

Gehry kept faithful to his vision. He turned down jobs that didn't feel right and imagined others that got built, were widely admired, but sometimes didn't live up to his imagination.

"You know, what's in my mind's eye is always 10 times better than what I ever achieve because the dream image can leak ..." Gehry said with a laugh. "But in terms of its public acceptance it's beyond anything I ever expected. I've never been accepted before like this."

Gehry received a National Medal of Arts from Bill Clinton and a Presidential Medal of Freedom from Barack Obama. The New Yorker called Bilbao "a masterpiece of the 20th century." Architect Philip Johnson said it was "the building of the century." And the public (with some exceptions, of course) adored the work.

"He made great architecture accessible to people," Goldberger says, and that re-shaped their sense of what buildings could be.

He describes Gehry's work as "one of those extraordinary moments where the most advanced art intersects with popular taste. That only happens very rarely in the culture, in any field."

It's been said that architecture is the message a civilization sends to the future. With walls that are shaped and sculpted, and buildings that look joyous and free, Frank Gehry's is a message of humanism and hope.

The author of this obituary, Susan Stamberg, died in October 2025. The story was updated and reviewed before publication.

Shannon Rhoades edited the audio of this story. Beth Novey adapted it for the Web.
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The State Department is instructing its staff to reject visa applications from people who worked on fact-checking, content moderation or other activities the Trump administration considers "censorship" of Americans' speech.

The directive, sent in an internal memo on Tuesday, is focused on applicants for H-1B visas for highly skilled workers, which are frequently used by tech companies, among other sectors. The memo was first reported by Reuters; NPR also obtained a copy.

"If you uncover evidence an applicant was responsible for, or complicit in, censorship or attempted censorship of protected expression in the United States, you should pursue a finding that the applicant is ineligible" for a visa, the memo says. It refers to a policy announced by Secretary of State Marco Rubio in May restricting visas from being issued to "foreign officials and persons who are complicit in censoring Americans."

The Trump administration has been highly critical of tech companies' efforts to police what people are allowed to post on their platforms and of the broader field of trust and safety, the tech industry's term for teams that focus on preventing abuse, fraud, illegal content, and other harmful behavior online.

President Trump was banned from multiple social media platforms in the aftermath of his supporters' attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. While those bans have since been lifted, the president and members of his administration frequently cite that experience as evidence for their claims that tech companies unfairly target conservatives — even as many tech leaders have eased their policies in the face of that backlash.

Tuesday's memo calls out H-1B visa applicants in particular "as many work in or have worked in the tech sector, including in social media or financial services companies involved in the suppression of protected expression."

It directs consular officers to "thoroughly explore" the work histories of applicants, both new and returning, by reviewing their resumes, LinkedIn profiles, and appearances in media articles for activities including combatting misinformation, disinformation or false narratives, fact-checking, content moderation, compliance, and trust and safety.

"I'm alarmed that trust and safety work is being conflated with 'censorship'," said Alice Goguen Hunsberger, who has worked in trust and safety at tech companies including OpenAI and Grindr.

"Trust and safety is a broad practice which includes critical and life-saving work to protect children and stop CSAM [child sexual abuse material], as well as preventing fraud, scams, and sextortion. T&S workers are focused on making the internet a safer and better place, not censoring just for the sake of it," she said. "Bad actors that target Americans come from all over the world and it's so important to have people who understand different languages and cultures on trust and safety teams — having global workers at tech companies in [trust and safety] absolutely keeps Americans safer."

In a statement, a State Department spokesperson who declined to give their name said the department does not comment on "allegedly leaked documents," but added: "the Administration has made clear that it defends Americans' freedom of expression against foreigners who wish to censor them. We do not support aliens coming to the United States to work as censors muzzling Americans."

The statement continued: "In the past, the President himself was the victim of this kind of abuse when social media companies locked his accounts. He does not want other Americans to suffer this way. Allowing foreigners to lead this type of censorship would both insult and injure the American people."

First Amendment experts criticized the memo's guidance as itself a potential violation of free speech rights.

"People who study misinformation and work on content-moderation teams aren't engaged in 'censorship'— they're engaged in activities that the First Amendment was designed to protect. This policy is incoherent and unconstitutional," said Carrie DeCell, senior staff attorney and legislative advisor at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, in a statement.

Even as the administration has targeted those it claims are engaged in censoring Americans, it has also tightened its own scrutiny of visa applicants' online speech.

On Wednesday, the State Department announced it would require H-1B visa applicants and their dependents to set their social media profiles to "public" so they can be reviewed by U.S. officials.

NPR's Bobby Allyn and Michele Kelemen contributed reporting.
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