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The most important stories for you to know today
  • How effective are they?
    Illustration of 1 women and men in various states of walking or running with wweighted vests on.

    Topline:

    It seems like you can't go anywhere without seeing someone wearing a weighted vest. Some say the accessory can help with weight loss and maintaining bone density and muscle. So is there any truth to these claims? We looked at the research, and here's what we found.

    The evidence: There just aren't that many studies of weighted vests, and the ones that do exist do not bear out many of the claims made on social media — especially around bone density and muscle strength. One small study compared people walking with weighted vests with those who walked without them and found no significant difference in bone health. Another small study did find some benefits for people who wore weighted vests while engaging in resistance workouts, but the study doesn't make clear whether the vests or the exercises were the cause of healthy bone growth.

    But is it good for cardio?: There are some cardiovascular benefits to adding weight to your workout, says Roger Fielding, who studies exercise science at Tufts University, especially if weighted vests make the difference between someone exercising or not exercising at all. He says that he has seen worse buzzy fitness trends and that the risks of not exercising — especially for older adults — are significant.

    It seems like you can't go anywhere without seeing someone wearing a weighted vest. They're at the gym, on hiking trails, in public parks and on social media feeds, where influencers claim wearing one can do incredible things for your health.

    "The benefits to walking with a weighted vest are insane," one paid promoter, theashleywill, said in a recent post on TikTok . "Your posture, your bones, increased calorie burn, your strength, your endurance," she continued. "I could go on and on and on."

    Other social media influencers stress benefits for women who are in perimenopause or menopause , when bone density declines and women are more vulnerable to breaking bones. The vests, they say, can help maintain bone and muscle strength even as you age .

    All the attention is having an impact. Market research shows a growing demand among consumers, with the global market expected to reach $313 million by 2031.

    So is there any truth to these claims? We looked at the research, and here's what we found.

    The claim

     

    Weighted vests offer a host of fitness benefits including improved posture, weight loss, improved cardiovascular health and increased muscle and bone growth.

    The evidence 

    There just aren't that many studies of weighted vests, and the ones that do exist do not bear out many of the claims made on social media — especially around bone density and muscle strength.

    "All physical activity is good, so I don't want to demonize anything that is going to make people more active," says Lauren Colenso-Semple , who studies exercise science at McMaster University in Canada. However, she says, a lot of the marketing that promotes walking with a weighted vest promises results for bones and muscles. And "then when we actually look at the data, it really doesn't support the use for that," she says.

    One small study compared people walking with weighted vests with those who walked without them and found no significant difference in bone health. Another small study did find some benefits for people who wore weighted vests while engaging in resistance workouts, but the study doesn't make clear whether the vests or the exercises were the cause of healthy bone growth.

    Colenso-Semple says there is a much more well-established body of research showing that the best way to improve strength is to exercise a muscle through its full range of motion using significant resistance , as in a bicep curl with hand weights or a squat with a barbell.

    "That's the stimulus that is going to say, 'Hey, let's incorporate more amino acids into the muscle and actually grow,'" says Colenso-Semple.

    Walking and running — with or without a vest — doesn't stress the muscle enough to make it grow significantly, she says.

    While walking with a weighted vest won't necessarily cause any damage, she says, she worries that people will do it instead of other proven exercises for building strength and notes that she "was floored" when her mother's endocrinologist suggested she use one recently.

    Weight-bearing exercises are better, says Monica Christmas , an OB-GYN in Chicago who specializes in treating women in menopause.

    "I always say if you gotta pick one in one day, I pick the weight-bearing stuff. That's at least what I do for myself," she says. "I would tend to steer them towards things that I think would be a better use of their hard-earned dollars."

    Resistance training with weights, Pilates and exercises for balance are all things she regularly recommends for patients in this stage of life.

    "Without rigorous testing, these seem like a novelty item that will provide people with the illusion of embracing wellness while making the purveyor wealthy," says Nanette Santoro , an OB-GYN in Colorado who treats women in menopause. Santoro says she's suspicious of people making money off claims to help women in this stage of life. There's "way too much of that going on in the menopause world these days."

    The nuance

    Weighted vests may have some benefits for cardiovascular health, says Roger Fielding , who studies exercise science at Tufts University. " It will increase your energy expenditure, your oxygen consumption — all those vascular responses will go up," he says. "And they'll go up proportionally to how much added weight you're putting on."

    Walking with more weight, Fielding points out, requires burning more calories. "It's certainly a reasonable approach to being more physically active," he says.

    Some people say they just like the experience of wearing a weighted vest. "I have noticed benefits," says Katie Brodnik, who runs workshops on menopause in Boulder, Colo., and says she considers the weighted vest a "tool" to help her feel more confident and stronger.

    "Everyone knows I mean business on my walk around the neighborhood," she says. "And every time I see a 70-year-old neighbor walking around with their vest on, I holler, 'Nice vest!!'"

    The bottom line

    The research does not support claims that weighted vests improve muscle and bone strength — other exercises such as weightlifting have shown to be far more effective.

    That said, at least one expert doesn't rule out the possibility of future studies that could demonstrate more value. Fielding says it "wouldn't be surprising" if a future study showed that weighted vests helped maintain bone mass.

    There are some cardiovascular benefits to adding weight to your workout, says Fielding, especially if weighted vests make the difference between someone exercising or not exercising at all. He says that he has seen worse buzzy fitness trends and that the risks of not exercising — especially for older adults — are significant.

    "If it's something that motivates you to be more physically active," says Fielding, "have at it."

    But if you're happier exercising without the weight, that's great too.
    Copyright 2025 NPR

  • Emmy-nominated host to speak in Long Beach
    A man with dark skin wears a grey hoodie on a stage.
    Baratunde Thurston speaks onstage during The Future of Us session at AfroTech Conference 2025.

    Topline:

    Emmy-nominated host and writer Baratunde Thurston explores what it means to be human in the age of AI in his upcoming show at the Carpenter Center in Long Beach this weekend. Thurston spoke with "Morning Edition" host Austin Cross.

    About Baratunde Thurston: Thurston hosts the podcast “Life with Machines”. He was also the producer at The Daily Show with Trevor Noah and director of digital at The Onion.

    What does humanity have to do with it? “I think if we can remember this beautiful dance between our individuality and our community membership … our imperfection and our finiteness, that we can see those as gifts and as beautiful differentiators that make us more human,” Thurston said. “The machines may be here to help us remember that part of ourselves.”

    Want to go? Doors open for “An Evening with Baratunde Thurston” at 7:30 p.m. Saturday at the the Richard and Karen Carpenter Performing Arts Center at 6200 E. Atherton St. in Long Beach. Tickets start from $43.73 through the Carpenter Center website .

    Here’s his conversation with Austin Cross: 

    Listen 4:55
    Emmy-nominated host Baratunde Thurston explores what it means to be human in the age of AI

    ''

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  • Urban Orchard is 1 of 3 parks to open recently
    A middle-aged man with light skin tone and white hair and short beard wearing a tan jacket and yellow collared shirt and black pants stands at a podium in a park on a sunny day.
    Steve Costley, Parks and Recreation director for South Gate, celebrates the opening of Urban Orchard Park.

    Topline:

    Urban Orchard Park officially opened this summer — a brand new green space for the city of South Gate and Southeast L.A. as a whole. Two other newly renovated parks also opened this year in South Gate.

    How did they do it? The Urban Orchard project cost more than $31 million and took more than 10 years to complete. The funding all came through state, county and federal grants, as well as private donors. The project came to fruition via multiple partnerships between the city and the private and nonprofit sectors.

    Parks are difficult to build: Limited space, expensive land, historic pollution, lack of funding, permitting, other red tape — there are many obstacles to building a new park in Southern California. “ South Gate is not a rich community. We don't generate that much revenue on our own, so we're very reliant on partnerships,” said Vice Mayor Joshua Barron.

    Read on ... to meet people who are already using the new park.

    Maria Mendez walks her little white dog, named Peluche, on a wide dirt path in the city of South Gate’s newest park.

    “Me gusta mucho el parque porque tenemos este sembradío de aguacates, limones y venimos a hacer ejercicio en las mañanas,” she said. She loves it for the avocado and citrus trees, and because she can exercise in the mornings, she said.

    The park has sycamores and oaks too, a small wetland, a playground and throughout, winding walking paths. Mendez said she and Peluche come here most days. It’s convenient because the park is right next door to the mobile home park for seniors where she lives.

    An older woman with medium brown skin tone wears jean capris, a sleeveless shirt and wide brimmed hat while walking her little white fluffy dog in a park.
    South Gate resident Maria Mendez and her dog, Peluche, walk the paths of the Urban Orchard every day.
    (
    Erin Stone
    /
    LAist
    )

    This park, though, is in a bit of an odd location.

    “If you look around, you'll see you are in between the 710 Freeway and the L.A. River,” said Steve Costley, the city of South Gate’s director of Parks and Recreation. “Not a natural space to think, ‘Hey, let's go plant a park.’”

    The park is called the Urban Orchard — 7 acres of renovated city-owned land sandwiched between the freeway and the river. To get there, you have to wind through industrial businesses. The din of the freeway is constant.

    But under the new trees and next to the engineered creek and wetland, there’s the sound of birds and water.

    Urban Orchard Park officially opened this summer — a brand new green space for the city and Southeast L.A. as a whole. Two other newly renovated parks also opened this year in South Gate.

    So how did the small city do it?

    A need for more green

    South Gate is home to about 100,000 people, 95% of whom identify as Latino, according to census data. The average household income is less than $75,000 a year. And city residents have some of the least access to nearby nature — just 3% of the city’s land is made up of parks, one-fifth the national average, according to data analyzed by the nonprofit Trust for Public Land .

    “We're one of the very high-needs cities in all of L.A. County that doesn't have enough park space,” Costley said. 

    Lower income communities of color across the region and the country have disproportionately less access to green space than wealthier, whiter communities.

    “Parks are what we love. Parks are what I think people need. I think parks make a city into a community,” Costley said.

    Parks can also boost life expectancy , improve air quality and cool neighborhoods as climate change makes heat waves worse . The Urban Orchard will go even further, helping to address food insecurity as well.

    Though the city is still working out the details, a grove of 200 citrus trees, along with vegetable beds and an avocado orchard, will be a source of fresh produce for seniors living in the mobile home park next door.

    A woman with medium dark skin tone wearing a black skirt and shirt smiles under sunny skies in a park.
    Dayana Molina, community organizer with the nonprofit Trust for Public Land, which helped fund and design the new Urban Orchard Park.
    (
    Erin Stone
    /
    LAist
    )

    “We were really trying to address and bring the vision of the community through this process,” said Dayana Molina, a community organizer with the Trust for Public Land, which helped design and fund the new park. “So we heard about food insecurity. We heard about not enough shade.”

    Not only is the Urban Orchard adding green space where it’s badly needed, but it will also recycle stormwater. The 1-acre constructed wetland cleans runoff from the L.A. River and stores water in a large reservoir the city built under the citrus orchard, providing 70% of the park’s irrigation.

    Any overflow will return to the river channel, cleaner than before. Eventually, the hope is that native fish can be introduced to the park’s wetland and streams.

    “This is not just a South Gate park, it's really a regional project that is bringing benefits to the whole region,” Molina said.

    Residents — and wildlife — are already benefiting.

    An older man with light skin tone wears a black T-shirt and tan hat in front of a pond and power lines above.
    Dale De Julio, a retired truck driver who lives next door to the Urban Orchard, now walks there every day and loves to observe the birds.
    (
    Erin Stone
    /
    LAist
    )

    Retired truck driver Dale De Julio lives in the mobile home park next door to the new Urban Orchard. He remembers when the land was an empty dirt lot. He never used to go for walks near his home. Now, De Julio walks the park every day.

    “ This has given me an incentive to get out and walk around,” De Julio said. “I need that now that I'm retired.

    He said after years of driving trucks all over the country, seeing countless sights but never having the time to stop and appreciate them, the park is a place he can finally do that.

    Just the other day, he said, he even saw a blue heron, a bird he’d never seen in the area before.

    How to build a new park

    Limited space, expensive land, historic pollution, lack of funding, permitting, other red tape — there are many obstacles to building a new park in Southern California.

    The Urban Orchard was no exception, and the process was not cheap or quick. The park ultimately cost more than $31 million and took more than 10 years to complete.

    The funding all came through state, county and federal grants, as well as private donors. The project came to fruition via multiple partnerships between the city and the private and nonprofit sectors.

    “ South Gate is not a rich community. We don't generate that much revenue on our own, so we're very reliant on partnerships,” said Vice Mayor Joshua Barron.

    UCLA research has found that public-private partnerships are essential to the success of greening projects such as the Urban Orchard.

    “This really requires, as the proverbial saying goes, a village,” said UCLA professor Jon Christensen, who led that research and studies equitable access to green space.

    The Urban Orchard, he added, “is a real testament to the dedication and persistence and creativity that is required to build new parks in Los Angeles.”

    That creativity included cobbling together funding from a variety of sources, including $3 million from the federal Land and Water Conservation Fund, nearly $8 million from the State Water Resources Control Board, more than $4 million from the state’s Rivers and Mountains Conservancy, nearly $7 million from local Measure W funds, $5 million from Caltrans, Proposition 68 funds, more than $700,000 from the Conservation Corps of Long Beach, and private donations.

    A young woman with dark skin tone plants lettuce in a vegetable bed wearing a hard hat, white gloves and royal blue long sleeved shirt.
    Joy Chancellor, 19, of South L.A. plants lettuce in one of the vegetable gardens at the Urban Orchard in South Gate. She's a corpsmember with the Long Beach Conservation Corps, which will maintain the park for its first three years while training young people in environmental jobs.
    (
    Erin Stone
    /
    LAist
    )

    The first three years of maintenance will be carried out by the Long Beach Conservation Corps, training young people from the area in environmental jobs. The city will have to find a way to pick up the maintenance tab after that.

    “It was not a smooth process. It never is when we have complicated pieces of land adjacent to the L.A. River,” said Nola Eaglin Talmage, the Trust for Public Land’s Parks for People program director. “We've got all kinds of different public funding streams, all with different timelines, all with different requirements.”

    Eaglin Talmage said a new county motion brought by Supervisor Lindsey Horvath could help streamline the process. And state efforts such as Proposition 4 are also essential to making these types of efforts possible, especially as federal funds for environmental projects dry up under the Trump administration.

    “The passing of Prop. 4 is one of the reasons why we'll be able to continue to build green space in Los Angeles,” Eaglin Talmage said.

    A bigger reform idea

    A dirt path and tree stump seating in a park.
    Places to sit and enjoy nature in the new Urban Orchard Park in South Gate.
    (
    Erin Stone
    /
    LAist
    )

    South Gate Vice Mayor Barron said there’s another way for small cities to have an easier time building projects that benefit the public — updating outdated tax revenue laws.

    “Last year, our residents and businesses paid over $80 million in property taxes, but yet the city of South Gate was only allocated about $5 million of that,” Barron said.

    Currently, South Gate receives just 6.14% of property tax revenue collected within the city — a percentage set in 1978 through Proposition 13. After Proposition 13, the state created a formula to divide that tax among counties, cities, schools and special districts, with each city’s share based on its pre-1978 property tax base – a formula that still governs allocations today and mostly benefits wealthier cities with higher property values. That hurts cities like his, Barron said.

    Only the state legislature can update that formula, something Barron is pushing for.

    “One of the things that I really wish that we could look at is helping cities like South Gate, like Bell, like Cudahy, Maywood — the Southeast L.A. region — be a little bit more self-sustainable,” Barron said.

    “All we're asking,” he added, “is to be able to be self-sustainable and not have to always rely on grant money to be able to get projects off the ground.”

  • LA divorce attorneys assess the Hulu series
    Two white women stand at what looks like a marble welcome desk. Kim Kardashian is the woman on the left with shoulder length black hair, wearing sunglasses, a wine red leather coat and gloves. Next to her is Naomi Watts, with a short blonde bob haircut, pulling down her sunglasses and wearing a grey cape with large gold buttons and carrying a black clutch purse.
    Kim Kardashian and Naomi Watts in a scene from “All’s Fair.”

    Topline:

    If you’ve heard about the new Hulu show All’s Fair , chances are that you know it stars Kim Kardashian, Naomi Watts, Niecy Nash-Betts and Glenn Close as high-powered divorce lawyers in Los Angeles. And chances are that you’ve also heard: the reviews are not good . We turned to women who really are divorce lawyers in L.A. to get their professional assessments of the show.

    The ratings system: We asked L.A. divorce attorneys to watch the first three episodes and give us their ratings (on a scale from 1 to 5) of the show's accuracy and enjoyability.

    Read on… for what they found “really interesting,” “important,” “very realistic,” or “not true.”

    If you’ve heard about the new Hulu show All’s Fair , chances are that you know it stars Kim Kardashian, Naomi Watts, Niecy Nash-Betts and Glenn Close as high-powered divorce lawyers in Los Angeles. And chances are that you’ve also heard: the reviews are not good .

    In fact they're so bad some people are checking out the show just for that reason . And here at LAist, we're some of those people.

    But as journalists, we also were interested in the facts. Or “Just the facts, ma’am,” to misquote another law-related TV show set in L.A.: Dragnet, created by and starring Jack Webb (the Kim Kardashian of his day).

    To get the facts, we turned to women who really are divorce lawyers in L.A. Attorneys Demetria Graves and Emily Rubenstein had heard of All’s Fair.

    “ People are bringing it up a lot, including clients and potential clients," Rubenstein said.

    However, they hadn’t yet checked it out for themselves before being contacted by LAist.

    Both said they do enjoy a good legal drama, though Rubenstein said she much prefers true crime documentaries to scripted shows. Graves cited Law & Order and the TV One true crime show Fatal Attraction as some of her favorites.

    “I love the shows,” Graves said, because she gets to watch someone else handle a case that she’s not actually involved in. “It’s not my case, so it’s a good time for me.”

    She and Rubenstein generously agreed to watch the first three episodes of All’s Fair and share their professional assessments of what the show gets wrong and what it gets right (cue the Law and Order gavel sound ).

    The L.A. of "All’s Fair"

    The series is set in L.A. and there are some scenes set in recognizable local landmarks in the first episodes, including the historic Bradbury Building , the Venice Boardwalk and the Petersen Automotive Museum. So, points for accuracy there.

    But Rubenstein said the office spaces — some of them dark and library-like — didn't look like L.A. to her: “No one's law offices in L.A. look like that. No matter what level [of] attorney you are [...] I've not been in many East Coast law offices, but it gives more of that vibe.”

    A woman with long black hair wearing a blue/gray suit and holding a document in white gloved hands. She's sitting at a round marble table across from a woman whose back we see. She's wearing a brown silk top and has long black hair. Behind them are bookshelves .
    Kim Kardashian in a scene from "All's Fair" on Hulu.
    (
    Ser Baffo/Disney
    /
    Disney
    )

     “Most L.A. law offices are more airy, and looking out into the hills instead of being such a mahogany cave,” Rubenstein added.

    The fashion: Gloves, gloves, and more gloves (plus visible thongs)

    As for the show’s over-the-top fashions, which have garnered a lot of attention, Graves said she gets why a TV show set in L.A. would lean into that.

    “The clothing is beautiful, the aesthetics are beautiful," she said. "However, I don't know how realistic it is for most attorneys.”

    The attention-grabbing, or unconventional, fashion choices the characters make — like wearing gloves — didn’t ring true for Rubenstein, either.

     ”For people who are constantly typing and using pens, gloves are not really that convenient of an accessory,” she said.

    As for Kardashian’s character Allura Grant wearing a skirt suit with a cutout to expose a thong, Rubenstein said, “ I've never seen a lawyer ass out in a thong in the office the way that Kim Kardashian was in that scene in the conference room.”

    But the inaccuracy also didn’t really bother her: “It’s one of those things that made me kind of giggle, which I think is just part of the show. I think it's supposed to be sort of campy. The fashion is a huge element of that. And yeah, I mean, aside from that one example, it did give me some inspo for my own courtroom fashion, so I'll thank them for that.”

    The drama and personal life element? Lawyers say: Somewhat accurate

    “What I did like is it did shed light on women having their own practices, women having their own firms,” Graves said. “What happens sometimes when you become very successful, what that can potentially do to your own personal relationships. So some of those things I am very happy people do get to see, because I think that is very realistic.”

    The hard work involved, the complicated natures of the cases, the “sisterhood” and support among colleagues or mentors (like Glenn Close’s character) and mentees, all rang true to Graves.

     ”The emotion of the clients, true to that extreme? I don't know,” Graves said. “But the emotion, absolutely all of that is true.”

    The storyline where Watts’ character is reluctant to marry her boyfriend, partially because of how many marriages she’s seen end badly in her work, also seemed pretty true to life, Graves said.

    “You know how bad it can go, you don’t want to be in that,” but she added, “you try not to let it lead your personal life.”

    A man and woman sit at a round restaurant dinner table holding hands. The man, on the left, is wearing a gray suit and black shirt. The woman is wearing a black shirt or dress. Drinks and plates are on the table and a statue of a gold woman reclining on a piece of furniture is behind them.
    O-T Fagbenle and Naomi Watts in a scene from "All's Fair."
    (
    Ser Baffo/Disney
    /
    Disney
    )

    The sexism

    The premise of the show is that the leading women were not being respected at their male-dominated firm, so they decided to strike out on their own, start a women-led firm and only represent woman clients.

    Graves currently works independently and Rubenstein heads up an all-women family law practice, but both represent clients of all genders.

    As for the idea that women lawyers may not be taken as seriously, Graves said, “ I will say some of the ‘good old boy’ club [or] network or however you wanna call it, that still exists today. And just in the climate that we're in, it gets really nasty in the world of family law because there's so many emotions, so much going on.”

    Both said the reasons that people would seek out a woman lawyer (or not) can also lean on stereotypes.

    When people want a lawyer who will really “ fight and throw the book, some people equate that with men attorneys,” Graves said. Women, meanwhile, can be viewed as “softer” and operating with “more compassion.”

    Rubenstein said sometimes a sense of female empowerment is important to a woman client, and it is meaningful to them to have a woman represent them. But “on the flip side, men and women can both be sexist, right? And so there are women who are going to seek male attorneys [...] And then men also seek out women attorneys, I think for good reasons and bad reasons.”

    “I think some men perceive that if they are represented by a woman attorney, let's say in a domestic violence dispute, that that's going to give them some kind of credibility, or leg up,” Rubenstein said.

    “Personally, I think rather than looking at the gender of the attorney, the most important thing is to choose someone that you feel the most comfortable with because it is intimate and vulnerable,” Rubenstein said. “So it's really about being aligned on that more than any of the superficial things, whether it's gender or religion or sexuality. Everyone's an individual, right? So you could end up with a woman attorney who's fabulous or not. Someone being a woman or not is not gonna make the difference. But there are a lot of preconceived notions about that.”

    The law, best practices and "emotional justice"

    As for the accuracy of how the show presents the law or lawyer terminology, neither attorney we talked to had major accuracy complaints, though to be fair, the show tended to keep things fairly general, at least in the first three episodes, and focused a lot on the characters’ personal lives.

    But both pointed to something a client of Watts' cahracter said about needing a California lawyer because that’s where she was married.

    “ That's not true,” Rubenstein said. “It's about where you live at the time of the divorce. Even if you got married in California, if you have not lived here for six months, you can't get divorced here.”

    Though, if people have second homes and there’s a dispute about where someone lives, that can complicate things.

    As for Watts’ decision to fly across the country after getting a distressing call from an emotional potential client in New York, Graves said she would never recommend it.

    “It's probably best to let things kind of calm down first before you insert yourself,” Graves said. “And to that client as well, it's probably best to calm down first before you contact your divorce lawyer.”

    Graves said she always recommends clients have someone to go to for emotional support who is not their lawyer.

    “ I tell my clients all the time, I think it is imperative to have a support system outside of your divorce lawyer while going through this process,” because leaning on your lawyer for that “can get very expensive and we are here to handle the business of all of what's going on,” she said.

    Somewhat related to that, Rubenstein said her advice to clients is that  they're “not going to get emotional justice through the legal process,” in part because California is what’s called a “no-fault” state, “ meaning that you don't have to prove that someone did something wrong to get divorced.”

    In the show, though, “they do focus on that. I get it. It's better TV. It's so much juicier if you get this emotional vindication and win.”

    But she said her fear in watching that as an attorney is “that I do spend a lot of time explaining to people that I understand how painful certain things are that have happened, and that those things are not going to impact the final result. And that's very difficult news to deliver because people are expecting justice. They're expecting there to be some kind of punishment for bad behavior [...] So I think it can give people kind of a false hope of what to expect will actually happen.”

    The final verdict!

    Asked to rate All’s Fair on a scale of 1 to 5 for both accuracy and enjoyability, Graves said she’d  give her “lawyer answer”: “In terms of accuracy for the average divorce lawyer, I would say about a 2. But for those that represent the 1% of the 1%, it might be actually very accurate. That's just not my experience.”

    In terms of enjoyability, just as a TV watcher, she said she’d give the show a 3.

    “I love the look, I love the fashion. I love the glitz and glamour of it all. So for those reasons, a 3,” she said.

    Rubenstein declined to give an enjoyability score (“It’s just not my genre”), but in terms of accuracy she said she’d say 3, because while there were some legal facts that weren’t exactly right, and she could see some people being “self righteous about the details” and giving it a 0, “the accuracy that at least was most meaningful to me was that lawyers do have lives, and that we're all human.”

  • SGV food cart makes jianbing guozi just like home
    A crepe is being cooked on a griddle. It's half folded over, and on top of the brown crispy exterior, green herbs are being sprinkled
    Yu Ji Stone Mill Chinese Crepes sells the $10 made-to-order street snack in Rowland Heights.

    Topline:

    Chinese crepes, or jianbing guozi, is a traditional street snack hailed from northern China. It's now popping up in Southern California — like at this food cart in Rowland Heights.

    The ingredients: Yu Ji Stone Mill Chinese Crepes makes their jianbing with a millet and mung bean batter, eggs, with options to add a variety of items including deep fried dumpling skin, beef franks, scallions and corianders.

    Freshly cooked: The crepe is made fresh to order, right off the griddle. The owners recommend eating it within 10 minutes — be careful not to burn your mouth!

    Read on to learn more about this centuries-old snack and how the SGV food cart got its start.

    I am standing in front of a homespun food cart on a dusty side street next to a strip mall in Rowland Heights, the sun beating down from high up, watching as the proprietor makes circles with a millet and mung bean batter on a big round griddle.

    “We got everything from China,” says Cong cong Li, referring to that heavy duty piece of cookware, with two gas-powered burners running underneath. Way back in the day, Li says, people used wood fire to make the street snack she's making now.

    A woman wearing a mask and a baseball cap putting a freshly made crepe into a bag. She is behind a food cart parked on the street.
    Yu Ji Stone Mill Chinese Crepes, selling $10 made-to-order street snack in Rowland Heights.
    (
    Fiona Ng
    /
    LAist
    )

    She cracks a couple of eggs over the thin, now crispy layer of batter, which Li says they grind with a stone mill themselves at home. Then a sprinkle of black sesames. Next come the scallions. Then the deep-fried dumpling skin. Li finishes my order off with the requisite sweet bean sauce.

    She scoops the scalding hot Chinese crepe right off the griddle into a bag – so fresh it burns to the touch – just like the very first time I had jianbing guozi.

    The first bite

    It isn’t everyday I get to see this traditional Chinese snack made right in front of me. In fact, the first – and last – time was some 20 years ago when I was leaving Beijing.

    Literally, leaving after spending months in the country. To mark the occasion, I decided to take a series of public buses to the airport, an idea that quickly became less cute when I got off at the final stop – and the airport was nowhere in sight.

    I dragged my luggage and sheepishly followed the handful of people also hauling bags on a long, long trek to close that last stretch, the sun beating down from high up.

    That was when I spotted a homemade food cart selling a kind of a wrap I'd never had before on the side of the road.

    Hungry, tired and feeling more than a little lost, I watched as the proprietor made circles with the batter, cracked eggs over it, then drowned it in sauces and herbs.

    One bite – a mouthful of soft, crispy, earthy flavors – was all it took. I am no foodie but it was the best food I had ever had in my life.

    Ever since, I have been searching for that same taste in the San Gabriel Valley.

    The SGV crepe cart

    Li and her husband have operated their Yu Ji Stone Mill Chinese Crepes cart near the intersection of Jellick Avenue and Colima Road in Rowland Heights for more than two years, working daily from 11 a.m. to 8:30 p.m.

    Before, Li said they were making Chinese crepes at different night markets and festivals around the San Gabriel Valley. Eventually, they struck out on their own for a simple reason.

    “We have to feed our family,” Li says, laughing, in Mandarin.

    The crepe, jianbing guozi (煎饼果子) in Chinese, is a common street food in the couple’s hometown of Shandong Province. The traditional breakfast snack is said to hail from the city of Tianjin, a little further north. An exact date isn’t known; many sources cite the year 1933 as the first time it was mentioned in a newspaper, but its existence most likely predated that reference by centuries.

    Li says jianbing guozi is common now in many areas across China – customized according to local taste – and of course the snack inevitably travelled well beyond the country.

    A woman in a hat and mask behind a street food cart. Customers are waiting.
    Cong cong Li at the Chinese crepe food cart she and her husband started in Rowland Heights.
    (
    Fiona Ng
    /
    LAist
    )

    The search

    I didn’t learn its Chinese name until several years after I returned to L.A. and that knowledge set me off on a quest of sorts. The San Gabriel Valley, I figured, has got to have it, right?

    It wasn’t one of those epic, exhaustive, obsessive searches , but I always did keep an eye out. Internet searches turned up nothing for many years, and friends also drew blanks.

    But by the late 2000s, I noticed the snack creeping up in reviews at this or that restaurant. Now it’s found in many more places. There’s even an entire shop, Me + Crêpe , dedicated to that single dish in Pasadena. Last time I had it was at Tai Chi Cuisine in Irvine, recommended by a Chinese foodie. It was great, but the decorum of being served at a restaurant was ... different.

    The discovery

    An egg wrap with a fried, crunchy dumpling wrap sticking out from inside.
    The finished product.
    (
    Fiona Ng
    /
    LAist
    )

    Fast forward to a week ago. I spotted on Instagram a food cart with a big griddle, tossing me back to that fuzzy, serendipitous day in Beijing. I had to go check it out.

    And on this weekday early afternoon in Rowland Heights, the vibe is right — pure street food culture. Customers drive up or dash from their parked cars to put in an order – some biting into the steaming hot wrap right away. When their stand first opened, Li says the majority of their customers were Chinese. Now it's more evened out, as word spreads.

    Which is how Angel Cueva found the spot, driving from Whittier after seeing a video on social spotlighting the operation.

    “ I don't know, maybe just the cart, the preparation, just looked like it had a lot of good stuff in it, Cueva says. “ When I seen this, I was like, I got to try this.”

    Cueva was on the go and said he’d eat it in his car. He texted me later to say he loved the crepe. I took that message to Li.

    She says when her family first came to the U.S. more than a decade ago, it was impossible to find authentic jianbing – the way it was made in their hometown. That prompted her husband to come up with a recipe, which he taught Li.

    “While supporting our family, we want to promote Chinese food culture,” Li says. “The delicacy has hundreds of years of history. It’s a testament to the wisdom of our ancestors.”

    A paper with a list of ingredients like millet and mung beans on a list. It says, "best eaten within 10 minutes."
    A list of ingredients for the Chinese crepes sold at Yu Ji Stone Mill Chinese Crepes in Rowland Heights.
    (
    Fiona Ng
    /
    LAist
    )

    Location: 1648 South Jellick Ave., Rowland Heights, CA 91748
    Hours: Daily 11:00 a.m. to 8:30 p.m.