UCLA in the News lists selected mentions of UCLA in the world’s news media. Some articles may require registration or a subscription. See more UCLA in the News.
UCLA announces ambitious Hip Hop Initiative | Los Angeles Times
The initiative aims to amplify and multiply the conversation on hip-hop culture across artistic disciplines “by way of artist residencies, community engagement programs, a book series, lecture series, an oral history and digital archive project, postdoctoral fellowships and more” … Noting that it’s been a half-century since Bronx disc jockey Kool Herc planted the seeds of hip-hop, [UCLA’s H. Samy] Alim asks, “If we’re 50 years in, how are people going to understand culture 50 years, 100 years from now? We have to institutionalize the kind of study and rigorous analysis of the culture so the story gets told.” (UCLA’s Cheryl Keyes is also quoted; UCLA’s Shana Redmond, Bryonn Bain, Adam Bradley, Robin Kelley, Tabia Shawel, Samuel Lamontagne and Kelly Lytle Hernandez are cited.)
Audiences of color kept Hollywood afloat in 2021 | NBC News
But the newest Hollywood Diversity Report from the University of California, Los Angeles, released Thursday shows that Latinos barely saw themselves represented, in front or behind the camera in last year’s top films. Ana-Christina Ramón and Darnell Hunt, experts at UCLA’s Division of Social Sciences, examined the top 252 English-language films based on box office receipts and streaming data from 2021, the second year in which the Covid-19 pandemic forced movie studios to adopt hybrid release strategies. (Ramón and Hunt are quoted. Also: National Public Radio, CNN, Agence France-Presse, ABC’s “Good Morning America” and The Root.)
Identity crisis for the Oscars | Los Angeles Times
“You might say the academy has kind of lost its original purpose in the studio era, because there just aren’t that many films in theaters,” said Jonathan Kuntz, a film historian at UCLA’s School of Theater, Film and Television.
Oscar win a victory for LGBTQ community | USA Today
Ariana DeBose capped a stunning awards season by winning the best supporting actress award for her role as Anita in “West Side Story” — becoming the first openly queer Afro-Latina to win an acting Oscar … “Another first has fallen,” Darnell Hunt, dean of social sciences at UCLA and author of the Hollywood Diversity Report, says of the win.
Boston may introduce restrictions on picketing | Wall Street Journal
In Boston, the proposed ordinance is bolstered by a past U.S. Supreme Court decision that allows bans on targeted residential picketing as long as they are content neutral and leave open alternative channels such as marching through a neighborhood, said Eugene Volokh, a First Amendment scholar at the University of California, Los Angeles. “Most people’s view is that you can express your views … but you shouldn’t bring it to that person’s home,” he said.
Understanding the vaccine-hesitant | Bloomberg
According to Kristen Choi, a registered nurse and an assistant professor at the UCLA School of Nursing, some of her colleagues objected to the frantic pace of the vaccine development, suspecting that corners were cut. Others had witnessed what they viewed as shoddy experiments within their own institutions. That fed their skepticism. “Nurses are not declining because they don’t understand research,” Choi tweeted. “They’re often declining because they do understand research.”
After Echo Park Lake eviction, few found stable housing | Los Angeles Times
Such recollections — and questions about the rationale for continuing to clear encampments — are the subject of a troubling new report on what happened at Echo Park Lake. With the help of activists, researchers at the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy found that only 17 people received long-term housing out of 183 identified as living at the encampment. (UCLA’s Ananya Roy is quoted. Also: KTLA-TV, KNX-FM and LAist.)
Latinos to bear brunt of cuts to COVID relief programs | Los Angeles Times
(Commentary by UCLA’s Arturo Vargas Bustamante) Even without the cuts to COVID spending by the government, it is important to determine what policy responses are needed federally and in California to address the health inequities Latinos and other people of color face, all of which were made worse by the pandemic. We need to prevent these injustices from reoccurring should there be a new COVID-19 surge, or in the inevitable case of a new pandemic.
Asian elders less happy than elders of other races | NBC News
Asian American elders experience significantly lower life satisfaction and receive less emotional support than their peers of other races, according to a recent study published in the Journal of the American Board of Family Medicine … “We know it’s a common misconception that Asians are doing better than other racial groups,” Riti Shimkhada, the study’s lead researcher and a senior research scientist at the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research, told NBC Asian America. “There’s much that we don’t know about our older adults, and these results show they aren’t doing as well as people may perceive.”
Alaska pollution holds clues for other Arctic climates | Associated Press
Another experiment led by Sarah Johnson, a graduate student and researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles, used a special device to measure trace gases or pollutants at different heights in the atmosphere. The instrument, called a Long Differential Optical Absorption Spectrometer, collects information by beaming light from a parking garage to reflectors set at different heights in Fairbanks, and then studying the information that comes back. (Johnson is quoted.)
Big population drops in L.A, San Francisco | Los Angeles Times
Although the COVID-19 pandemic probably played a role in less immigration, the number of international migrants has been steadily declining for several years, said Paul Ong, director of the Center for Neighborhood Knowledge at UCLA. “It’s a combination of those things, but certainly it was happening before the pandemic,” Ong said. “In some ways, it’s part of what we see historically in terms of immigrants — that they do settle and cluster in a few areas and cities, but over time they move away. And when they move away, they sponsor new relatives coming in further away from the original core.”
Difficulty of assessing current pandemic risks | New York Times
Anne Rimoin, an epidemiologist at U.C.L.A., said she worried that there was another, new factor at play too: pandemic fatigue. She has been tracking a highly transmissible coronavirus subvariant that’s fueling a surge in Europe and becoming increasingly common here. “Everybody is ready for Covid to be over,” Rimoin told me. “It’s like a kid in the back seat of a car saying, ‘Are we there yet? Are we there yet?’ We’re not there yet.”
The ‘deglobalization’ of Moscow | Washington Post
For Russians, “it’s a feeling of deep gloom, kind of a horrified reaction as they see all these Western and global companies abandoning” the country, said Daniel Treisman, a professor of political science at UCLA. “So much of culture is bound up in the products we use, the movies we see,” he said. “All of this leaves the Russians who’ve grown up in this new internationalized environment feeling isolated, cut off.”
GOP focuses on crime in SCOTUS confirmation hearings | Washington Post
A 2021 analysis by economists Evan K. Rose of the University of Chicago and Yotam Shem-Tov of UCLA found that while serving time behind bars reduces the likelihood that someone will reoffend in North Carolina, there are diminishing returns to longer sentences. They concluded that “shortening sentences overall but sending a larger fraction of offenders to prison can generate meaningful reductions in recidivism.”
SCOTUS confirmation hearings rife with partisan baggage | Salon
Throughout his hearings, Bork repeatedly claimed that his rulings were being mischaracterized by Democrats, leading Republicans to believe that the former nominee had been personally maligned. But Adam Winkler, a professor at the UCLA School of Law” firmly disputed that narrative in an interview with Salon, arguing that that Bork was “not the subject of personal character assassination.”
Daily coffee tied to longer, healthier life | HealthDay News
“Observational analyses have shown that coffee drinking is associated with lower rates of cardiovascular events and lower all-cause mortality compared to individuals not drinking coffee,” said Dr. Gregg Fonarow, director of the Ahmanson–University of California, Los Angeles, Cardiomyopathy Center.
What we know about the new omicron subvariant | CNN
“BA.2 appears to be more transmissible, maybe even 50% to 60% more transmissible. But it does not appear to cause more severe disease,” said UCLA’s Anne Rimoin (approx. 0:35 mark).
UCLA as an L.A. cultural destination | KCET-TV
But if you’ve been there and done that, and you’re looking for a new place to explore without spending all day in the car, why not head to the Los Angeles neighborhood of Westwood and explore a cultural destination that’s one of the city’s best kept secrets? I’m talking about the campus of the University of California, Los Angeles — a.k.a. UCLA. This campus may be one-tenth the size of Griffith Park — but within its 400+ acres, you can also find a planetarium, space artifacts, two sculpture gardens, two landmarks built to look like an Italian basilica, flowering trees and diverse botanical wonders, and much, much more.
Long COVID could have inequitable impact | CalMatters
The general experience (of patients) is that they’ve been seen by numerous providers in the community. They feel frustrated,” said Dr. Jeffrey Hsu, a cardiologist who is on a team of physicians treating patients at UCLA Health’s long COVID program. “They’re told it’s anxiety or to be patient, that symptoms will get better on their own.”
