Checking in on the city's annual May Day march, serial killers have phased out and given way to another danger, pop-up lessons in affordability.
LA's May Day march challenges Trump administration's immigration policies
Teen pregnancy rates in LA County's foster care system are shockingly high. Here's what's being done
Teen pregnancies have been declining in recent decades, but that's not the case for all young women; 58 percent of L.A.'s female foster youths have experienced at least one pregnancy by the age of 19.
Now, the county is partnering with youth groups to launch the Los Angeles Reproductive Health Equity Project for Foster Youth in an effort to curb the numbers
In honor of National
& national teen pregnancy prevention month, we’re launching
. A new campaign aimed to reduce unplanned pregnancies for youth in foster care.
— Hilda Solis (@HildaSolis)
In honor of National #fostercaremonth & national teen pregnancy prevention month, we’re launching #LARHEP. A new campaign aimed to reduce unplanned pregnancies for youth in foster care. pic.twitter.com/Xb7ocEnSfj
— Hilda Solis (@HildaSolis) May 1, 2018
Why foster youths experience higher rates of teen pregnancies
“Two-thirds of the young people in foster care who are becoming pregnant are saying that those pregnancies were unintended,” said LeGras. “When we’re talking about foster youth having children, the predominant narrative is that they are trying to fill a void, but the data actually flies in contradiction to that.”
Trauma
Childhood trauma including past sexual assault can play a role in how young people relate to their reproductive health.
“Young people, by virtue of feeling a lack of control of their life, may also feel a lack of control about their reproductive decisions,” LeGras said.
Uprooting
Kids in foster care can get shuffled from multiple group homes and foster families while growing up. Along with moving homes,also comes a change in school making it tough to guarantee consistent sex education in the classroom. All the moving around means that by the time foster youth reach adolescence, they likely lack consistent adult supervision and guidance when it comes to "the talk," not to mention, a lack of trusted adults to ask about sensitive questions.
Even if kids get to stay more or less in the same environment, not all care givers in the foster care system are equally knowledgeable of their obligations. “There are some environments that obviously you do have more responsible adults interacting with the young person and others you don’t,” said L.A. County Supervisor, Hilda Solis. “What we’re trying to get to right now is how can we improve upon that to make sure that we are leveling the playing field and giving the right information and guidance and support.”
By law, foster youths are supposed to be guaranteed reproductive healthcare, but there’s no comprehensive method of ensuring that actually happens. Caregivers may not be aware of their responsibilities in that capacity, such as providing transportation to receive health care services.
How L.A. County and partner organizations can decrease teen pregnancies in the foster care system
Address inherent challenges
A lot of the work required to reduce pregnancy rates among foster youth has to do with improving the quality of care within the system in general. “Our work is about dismantling the systemic barriers that young people in foster care face with regard to accessing reproductive health care and services,” LeGras said.
Sexual education and access to healthcare
The initiative will focus on educating providers and youth of their rights and reproductive options. “Making sure that there are check-ups, that there are valuable tools made available to theses young women and they fully understand what choices they have," said Supervisor Solis. "And that is what I think is lacking right now."
Comprehensive support
There will also be a continued focus on supporting expecting parents within the system so they can complete their education and move onto fruitful lives. "We have conferences for young parents in foster care," said LeGras. "They have a roundtable of supportive adults to help them plan out the next steps in their lives including their educational goals, career goal, their future family planning goals to ensure that they have their wrap-around support needed.”
It's a two-way street
“Young men also need to get that comprehensive sex education," said LeGras. "The adults that are in their lives also need to be providing that information to young men just as much as young women.”
Developing social infrastructure before disaster strikes
Anaheim Mayor Tom Tait is part of something called the Mayor Exchange Program, which recently brought him to Puerto Rico. The island is still recovering from a massive hurricane that swept through the area last September.
One month later, Anaheim had its own disaster to deal with as a massive wildfire swept through the city, burning 7,500 acres and damaging or destroying two dozen homes. Here's what Tait learned about disaster response and recover from visiting the devastated island.
Cultivating a culture of kindness
Something we've been working on since I've been mayor is creating a culture of kindness, which is about bringing people together through neighborhoods and kind acts and developing a sense of community. Neighbors helping one another during and after the disaster.
Social infrastructure
We have more challenges here in So Cal. A lot of it is we're designed mostly around the automobile. It's not conducive for people sitting in their front yards and getting to know their neighbors for when bad things happen. There's just not enough emergency personnel to go around. It's important to know there's a doctor ten doors down, a nurse two doors down or someone with a construction company who has tools to help people get out of their collapsed home. If those things are happening after the disaster, we're in trouble. Social infrastructure needs to happen before the disaster. If we're connected we can all get through it together. It's this idea of strength through unity.
You can never be too prepared
In Puerto Rico, they thought they were pretty prepared. With hurricanes, you have an idea they're coming. They said they were nowhere near prepared enough. This idea is being prepared for the unexpected. We talk about 72 hours of water and food. In reality, it needs to be maybe 30 days' worth if we had a big earthquake. As far as supplies, they had less than half what they needed.
What’s behind America’s grim fascination with murderers?
Manson, the Hillside Strangler and the Golden State Killer. They're some of the quintessential California serial murderers who struck terror into the lives of Californians throughout the 1970s. Last week's capture of one of them, the suspected Golden State Killer, has cast a light onto a past threat that has all but vanished today: the serial killer.
Roots of the serial killer obsession
According to Harold Schecter, a professor at Queens College who studies crime, the fascination surrounding serial killers stems from cultural anxieties. This is evidenced by the crimes that captivated society throughout the decades.
One of the things I've discovered as a historian of crime is that there are these kinds of signature crimes that define certain eras that the public becomes very obsessed with. Those symbolize anxieties that are very prevalent at the moment.
In the 1930s it was an obsession with gangsters and kidnappings. In the 1950s, it was a fear of juvenile delinquency hysteria. In the 1970s and '80s it was the "unleashing of the sexual id" and all the "dangers" that brought along with it. These underlying fears were often projected onto the figure of the serial killer.
But today, a new danger has taken the place of the serial killer.
As the serial killer fades, the mass murderer rises
Serial killers aren't altogether gone, but the fear and hysteria surrounding them are. Instead, a new kind of figure has taken its place: the mass murderer.
"The mass murderer has supplanted the serial killer and the cultural imagination," Schecter said. "When 9/11 happened, there was a sudden anxiety that you can die in public at the hands of what they call a human time bomb at any moment."
Schecter said it's a cyclical fear that changes every few decades to address the underlying anxiety society may be feeling at that moment.
Can the cycle be broken?
The fascination with these killers, both serial and mass, is nothing new or unique to society. Even before there was such a thing as the media to sensationalize the crimes, people were captivated by violence.
"This is nothing new or unique to our society, or a sign of any kind of moral decay or degeneration. The fascination with lurid, sensationalistic crime is just a human phenomenon."
So, are we trapped in a neverending cycle of true crime obsession?
"I think the instinct toward violence is as integral to who and what we are as a species as the sexual instinct," Schecter said. And it's that drive that continues to fuel the obsession. But don't feel too bad. Schecter explained that as a society we seem to be growing, and in many ways we're less violent than we used to be. His evidence? Those gruesome first-person shooter games.
To me, violent video games are a sign of how much more civilized we've become because we are now allowed to explore and vent our violent impulses in this virtual way, whereas in the not-so-distant past, you wouldn't sit down and play "Halo" or "Call of Duty." You would go and watch somebody be executed.
So until we live in a violent-crime-free utopia, don't expect the violence fascination to go away.
Online retailer Brandless is popping up in West Hollywood – but not to sell you anything
If you stop and look inside the storefront just past the intersection of La Cienega and Melrose in West Hollywood, you’ll see pristine shelves of color-coordinated, brightly packaged products. There are boxes of crackers, containers of body scrub and tubes of shampoo and conditioner – but in two weeks, it will all be gone.
E-commerce company Brandless is taking over the space for 12 days to host a “Pop-Up with Purpose,” where customers of its online business and those who have never even heard of it can interact with the company and its products in real life.
Brandless sells 300 items centered around “values” like organic, gluten-free or non-GMO. Most of its products are at the pop-up. There’s gluten-free pizza crust mix and tree-free bath tissue made from bamboo grass and sugarcane. They’ve even got chef’s knives.
Each product is just $3.
The idea is that quality products don’t need to cost as much as customers usually pay for them. So Brandless cuts out what it calls “the brand tax” – all of the markups that get added on by middlemen when customers use traditional retail channels.
But pop-up visitors won’t be able to buy any of these items – at least not in person.
“They’re not for sale because you can open your iPhone and buy them there,” said Brandless co-founder and CEO Tina Sharkey. “It’s really to experience it, to touch it, to smell it, to taste it.”
Sharkey and her co-founder Ido Leffler started Brandless in July 2017, with headquarters in San Francisco and Minneapolis. Now they ship products daily throughout the United States – which is why the pop-up is more of an experience than a store.
There are multiple playful backgrounds for Instagrammable moments and speakers on topics like wellness and food photography, not to mention tasting stations and samples for visitors to try out the products Brandless sells online.
The choice to bring Brandless products to a real-life event is not surprising, said Vanitha Swaminathan, a professor of marketing at the University of Pittsburgh’s Katz Graduate School of Business.
“The issue with digital native brands is often consumers want to be able to touch and feel and experience them in offline settings too,” she said.
Swaminathan thinks more e-commerce companies will start developing a footprint in real life, like Amazon’s presence at Whole Foods.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if many digital native brands start to do this, primarily because they want to sort of broaden their ability to connect with their consumers and engage with their consumers,” she said. “I certainly think there’ll be other examples of this going forward.”
If the Brandless concept and website feel millennial, Sharkey said their target customer is everyone, regardless of age or what area of the country they live in.
“These are family managers, working professionals, college students, people living on a budget, people who have choice,” Sharkey said.
But Brandless chose L.A.’s West Hollywood to hold its first pop-up because of the foot traffic.
“We wanted to go to a place where there were a lot of people that were just in the hood,” Sharkey said. “People we hadn’t met yet, people who could come in and see what we were doing because there’s such great energy on the street.”
Shantel Zorilla lives just down the street from the pop-up. She was walking by when the $3 signs caught her eye. She asked if it was a joke.
“I just was like, ‘What is all of this?’ Cause they’re products that I use and then I was like, ‘All three dollars?’ ” Zorilla said. “And the packaging is really cute.”
Zorilla said she’ll be back to taste, feel and touch what – until now – has only been a virtual experience.
The Brandless Pop-Up with Purpose will be open from May 1 to May 13 in West Hollywood, with different workshops and speakers every day. Tickets are $9 and include a selected event and other pop-up activities.
California Republicans get by with a little help from Mike Pence
California's vulnerable Republicans could be getting a little help from Vice President Mike Pence.
Pence and House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy hosted a high-dollar gathering in Beverly Hills last night. Donors shelled out between $10,000 and $100,000 to rub elbows with the Republican leaders.
The Sacramento Bee's Emily Cadei says that money could get funneled to embattled incumbents through a special fundraising committee. She says that, while there are limits on how much an individual can give to a campaign, the caps are much higher for these groups.
This is one of the key ways that Republicans are helping protect vulnerable members. This is a new landscape. In 2014, the Supreme Court sort-of struck-down the cap that individual donors could give in federal donations in a given election. There are ample opportunities for some of the wealthiest individuals in the country to write really big checks, and it's helping some of these Republicans keep up with Democrats who are going bonkers with their fundraising as part of this anti-Trump resistance.
Janelle Monae shares her truth in 'Dirty Computer'
Every week, Take Two has the latest music to get your feet tapping. This week, music supervisor Morgan Rhodes shares her picks.
Artist: Janelle Monae
Album: Dirty Computer
Take A Byte
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kuWyu7ipsJ8
Don't Judge Me
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BYlW67CMRKM
Morgan says:
Janelle Monae's "Dirty Computer" is a sonic open look into the open book that is her life, her passions, her art. With its pop/funk sensibilities, and Prince-influenced vibe, it's a journey towards truth— bold, self-assured truth.
Artist: Elohim
Album: Elohim
I Want You
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQgfdN14oyI
Hallucinating (Mariachi Version)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5HVQ2BAc6E
Morgan says:
Elohim's self-titled debut is transparency set to electronic beats. It is raw and honest with songs like "Panic Attack" and "Insecure" and a sound that's dreamy. Her truth may be heavy, but it feels light.
Artist: The Internet
Roll (Burbank Funk)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SIqvRzEIqIo
Morgan says:
It's been three years since the Grammy-nominated Ego Death dropped, but The Internet is back with a head-nodding bouncer that's sure to rock the dance floor and the skating rink. Roll (Burbank Funk) is everything you didn't know you needed right now.
Artist: Children of Zeus
Album: Slow Down/All Night
All Night
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0GVdODprShQ
Morgan says:
Children of Zeus' "All Night" is a little bit hip-hop and a whole lot of soul. Beatmaker Konny Kon links up with artist Tyler Daley to produce a sound that hearkens back to the early days of neo-soul, using classic samples and slow tempo vocals to give the song a "back in the day" feel.