This is an archival story that predates current editorial management.
This archival content was written, edited, and published prior to LAist's acquisition by its current owner, Southern California Public Radio ("SCPR"). Content, such as language choice and subject matter, in archival articles therefore may not align with SCPR's current editorial standards. To learn more about those standards and why we make this distinction, please click here.
ICYMI: Kehinde Wiley To Paint Obama's Official Portrait

- Follow LAist on Twitter, on Instagram, and like us on Facebook. And to get the top stories mailed to you, sign up here.
- Kim Masters (Hollywood Reporter editor-at-large and break-er of the story that brought down Amazon exec Roy Price) pens a chilling Columbia Journalism Review essay about the "Gawker effect" and all the ways her Price story was silenced, at multiple outlets.
- Here are the New York Times' new social media guidelines for staffers (also lol @ the NYT's Deputy Managing Editor getting called out on Twitter for not knowing how to properly make a Twitter thread... when announcing the social media guidelines... on Twitter).
- On being a car-less protester in St. Louis, and the intersection of transit and social equity.
- Kehinde Wiley—a groundbreaking artist who "creates history as much as he tells it" with his Old Master-style portraits of African Americans—has been commissioned to paint former President Barack Obama's official portrait for the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery. God, we had it good for a few years, didn't we, America?
- The Catalina Express ferry is ending its free birthday rides program at the end of the year. Nothing gold can stay, not even free ferry rides on your birthday.
- The New York Times' Styles section has a story on neon signs as home decor, so I guess we can all agree that trend is officially o-v-e-r.
- Here is the heartbreakingly good opening credit sequence to Midnight Cowboy, complete with Harry Nilsson's heartbreakingly good rendition of "Everybody's Talkin'":