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.
L.A. needs new generation of Latino leaders | Los Angeles Times
“For a long time, Latino and Mexican American communities have had a choice to make about where they’re going to stand in relation to white supremacy and whiteness,” said Kelly Lytle Hernández, a professor of history and African American studies at UCLA. “And in those tapes, you’re hearing a certain set of commitments to white supremacy.”
Mystifying lesson of L.A. City Council audio leak | San Francisco Chronicle
While Black and Latino voting patterns have subtle differences across various regions, often they align on legislation that can make the state a more equitable place, according to a report published in 2021 by the UCLA Latino Policy and Politics Initiative and the UCLA Asian American Studies Center. The report examined official ballot data from nine counties, including Los Angeles, with large Asian American and Latino populations.
Racist remarks: Hurt, betrayal among L.A.’s Indigenous | Associated Press
Informal studies indicate several hundred thousand Oaxacan immigrants live in California, with the largest concentration in Los Angeles, said Gaspar Rivera-Salgado, director of the University of California, Los Angeles Center for Mexican Studies. Demeaning language is often used against Mexico’s Indigenous people. It is “the legacy of the colonial period,” Rivera-Salgado said of Spanish rule long ago.
A revealing racist rant in L.A. | New York Times
As Paul Barragan-Monge, the director of mobilization for the U.C.L.A. Latino Policy and Politics Institute, explained this week about Hispanic power in California, “Despite making up 39 percent of the state population, they only constituted 18.4 percent of executive appointments in the governor’s leadership cabinet.”
Why are prominent L.A. Latinos saying racist things? | Washington Post
(Analysis by UCLA’s Efrén Pérez, Alisson Ramos, Crystal Robertson and Bianca Vicuña) This week, racist comments by Los Angeles City Council President Nury Martínez, council members Gil Cedillo and Kevin de León, and labor leader Ron Herrera — all self-identified Latino progressives — hit the national news. Although some might have been surprised to hear four prominent Latinos express anti-Black prejudice, this sentiment exists widely among many other members of this ethnic group.
More L.A. City Council seats won’t cut corruption | KCRW-FM’s “Greater LA”
“This is, in my lifetime, the longest sustained period of instability caused by a number of things in city government,” says Zev Yaroslavsky, former member of LA City Council, former LA County supervisor, and now director of the LA Initiative at UCLA’s Luskin School of Public Affairs. He says the leaked audio of Nury Martinez, Gil Cedillo, Kevin de León, and Ron Herrera doesn’t represent LA. (Yaroslavsky was also interviewed by KPCC-FM’s “AirTalk.”)
L.A. is running out of water. Will leaders act? | Los Angeles Times
Gregory Pierce, co-director of the Luskin Center for Innovation at UCLA, said Los Angeles is “somewhat of a leader” when it comes to water recycling, and that Hyperion may be the DWP’s “largest investment since the Mulholland days.” The project “is a little bit late, obviously, but I think it will be early enough to avoid complete disaster in terms of people actually running out of water and having to ration much more radically than we are right now,” he said.
Bringing health care to the streets of L.A. | Los Angeles Times
UCLA Health has also launched medically equipped vans to visit encampments, shelters and other sites where unhoused people are gathered, aiming to bring a range of primary, urgent and specialty care to the streets.
Alex Jones to pay $1 billion in defamation cases | Washington Post
Eugene Volokh, a law professor at the University of California at Los Angeles and an expert on the First Amendment, said he could not recall another defamation case with damages of this size. “It does send a message that juries care about reputation and care about lies — especially when they’re about people who are sympathetic,” said Volokh. “It’s hard to get more sympathetic” than the Sandy Hook families.
Transplant of human brain tissue into rats could help study disorders | Washington Post
“I’m not entirely surprised by the findings, but it’s super cool,” said Bennett Novitch, a member of the Broad Center of Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research at the University of California at Los Angeles, who was not involved in the study. In 2021, Novitch and colleagues developed organoids that produced brain waves, the electrical pulses that brain cells use to communicate with one another.
Bob Thompson uses art history to consider social injustice | Los Angeles Times
At three-feet-square, “The Circus” isn’t the largest painting in the deeply absorbing survey of Bob Thompson’s brief but intensely productive career. (He died in 1966, a month shy of his 29th birthday.) Often, as the newly opened survey of 50 paintings at the UCLA Hammer Museum indicates, he worked large, and sometimes at almost mural scale.
Conservatives want control of California school boards | EdSource
John Rogers, a professor of education at UCLA, says the state is at a dangerous inflection point when it comes to school board races. If people don’t pay attention to school board races and vote in them, they open them up to manipulation from outside funders, he said. “The extent to which school boards can be captured by anti-democratic interests is a real danger,” he said.
Socioeconomic status affects sense of belonging in academia | Science
The study’s findings, though not surprising, could point to one reason why there are so few faculty members from lower SES backgrounds, says Jennie Brand, a professor of sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles. In August, she and her colleagues published a study in Nature Human Behaviour reporting that U.S. faculty members grew up in neighborhoods with median household incomes 24% higher than the national average. “The professoriate is, and has remained, accessible disproportionately to the socioeconomically privileged,” she and her colleagues wrote.
Can Mediterranean diet cut dementia risk? | Healthline
There are many factors contributing to dementia and cognitive decline, with lifestyle, genetics, and diet all playing a role. Dana Ellis Hunnes, PhD, MPH, RD, clinical dietitian at UCLA Medical Center, adjunct professor at UCLA’s Fielding School of Public Health, and author of “Recipe for Survival,” said the Mediterranean diet may possibly reduce dementia risk due to its high levels of antioxidants and anti-inflammatory compounds that are naturally occurring in plant-based foods, healthy monounsaturated fats, whole grains, nuts, and seeds.
Easier to do research with cocaine than weed | Slate
“When I sit down to write a grant or when I start to brainstorm about really interesting scientific ideas, I know at this point I cannot think about what would be the highest-impact study from a public health perspective,” explains Ziva Cooper, the Director of the UCLA Cannabis Research Initiative. “I first have to think about what study drug I can get my hands on that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) would approve me giving to people, and how I can mold a study around what is actually available.”
UN vote on Russian annexations in Ukraine | CNN International
“It is, of course, disappointing that India and South Africa saw fit to abstain from the vote, rather than condemning the illegal annexation of these territories. But I think 143 states that very clearly condemned what Russia is doing, that’s a very strong statement that maybe the others will come around to that, eventually,” said UCLA’s Daniel Treisman.
