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.
Bruins fan out across L.A. for volunteer day | Los Angeles Times
UCLA’s annual volunteer day expanded this year, uniting more than 2,000 Bruins and Trojans in more than 60 volunteer projects. Hundreds of volunteers honored veterans Saturday by cleaning headstones at the Los Angeles National Cemetery. (Also: KNBC-TV, KABC-TV and KNX-FM. UCLA Chancellor Gene Block was interviewed by KNX-FM; UCLA’s Emily Ives was interviewed by KABC-TV.)
Angelenos’ mental health is suffering | Los Angeles Times
This year the Los Angeles County Quality of Life Index, an annual survey that measures Angelenos’ satisfaction with their lives, fell 5 points compared with last year. At 53 out of a possible 100, it was the lowest score since UCLA started the survey in 2016 … “What it said to us is that county residents aren’t happy,” said Zev Yaroslavsky, the UCLA professor and former city councilman who oversaw the project. “There is an anxiety level here that is unprecedented in my lifetime.”
Nixing parking could lead to more housing | Los Angeles Times
Citing the need to address California’s twin crises of housing affordability and climate change, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a bill that bars local governments from mandating parking spaces as part of most development near transit stops … “This is one of the biggest land-use reforms in the country,” said Michael Manville, an urban planning professor at UCLA’s Luskin School of Public Affairs, adding that only Oregon has done something similar.
Mixing and matching new COVID boosters | Los Angeles Times
“The best booster for you is the one that you can get — either the Pfizer or the Moderna can be used, and they can be mixed or matched,” said Dr. Robert Kim-Farley, epidemiologist and infectious disease expert at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health. “If there’s shortages of one, you should not have hesitancy to take the other.” (Kim-Farley was also interviewed about COVID mask requirements by “KNX In Depth” — approx. 16:35 mark.)
Housing crisis leaves UC students struggling | Los Angeles Times
About 9,400 students systemwide were denied university housing this fall because of shortages … This fall, UCLA opened two new apartment buildings providing 3,446 beds — allowing it to become the first and only UC campus to guarantee housing for four years to first-year students and two years for transfer students. UCLA has the largest student housing stock in the UC system, with nearly 23,000 beds on and off campus.
Below-average wildfires in California, but season’s not over | CNN
“When people talk about this, they’re often talking about the acreage burned and actually not only does it not tell the whole story, but it arguably doesn’t tell most of what’s important about why we care about wildfires in a societal context,” [UCLA’s Daniel] Swain told CNN. “Just because the acreage burned has been less than in recent years, the impacts of these fires have actually still been really high.”
‘Social-emotional learning’ a new target in school battles | NPR
In the last year, in states across the country, parents and community members have increasingly been fighting the teaching of social-emotional learning in schools – largely because social-emotional learning has become linked with another flashpoint in public education: critical race theory, or CRT. Critical race theory, a decades-old legal framework, is the concept that racism goes far beyond the individual: It is systemic and deeply entrenched in our laws, policies and institutions. Nearly 900 school districts experienced anti-CRT protests between September of 2020 and August of last year, according to a report released this year from the Institute for Democracy, Education, and Access at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Companies should unbundle ‘ESG’ and ‘DEI’ | Bloomberg
ESG [environmental, social and governance] didn’t even provide a reliable template for how to deal with an obvious evil such as Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Stephen Bainbridge of UCLA Law School points out that European corporations with major operations in Russia prior to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine typically had higher ESG ratings than those who were not operating in Russia. Unrealistic expectations invite a backlash just as certainly as contradictory aims entail strategic confusion.
Election-denying Republicans running for state office | New York Times
Richard L. Hasen, a law professor at U.C.L.A. and a leading election law expert, cautioned anyone who might ignore such candidacies. “First of all, just running these races politicizes even further the office of secretary of state,” he told me. Additionally, Mr. Hasen said that having a candidate on a statewide ballot making “constant false claims of massive voter fraud can’t help but create more doubt about election integrity in the minds of a lot of people.”
More trans teens choosing ‘top surgery’ | New York Times
Michael is part of a very small but growing group of transgender adolescents who have had top surgery, or breast removal, to better align their bodies with their experience of gender … In the past decade, the number of people who identify as transgender has grown significantly, especially among young Americans. Around 700,000 people under 25 identified as transgender in 2020, according to the Williams Institute, a research center at the University of California, Los Angeles, nearly double the estimate in 2017.
Inequities in access to long COVID care? | New York Times
At the University of California, Los Angeles, Dr. Nisha Viswanathan finds that she disproportionately sees long COVID patients in her post-COVID clinic who are well off and adept at navigating the health care system and — in a few cases — can even arrange a private jet to fly from their home to Los Angeles. If coronavirus was a disease of the vulnerable, COVID-19 follow-up has become a luxury of the well resourced. (Viswanathan is quoted.)
California: Time to curb light pollution | Mercury News
(Commentary by UCLA’s Travis Longcore) In fact, light pollution has increased by nearly 50% over the past several decades not only in California, but also around the world. If that’s a tragedy for humans, it’s a disaster for birds and other wildlife. Light pollution harms plants, animals and insects by disrupting breeding, foraging for food, pollination and migration. Light attracts nocturnally migrating birds and diverts them from safe migration routes to human environments, where they are more susceptible to collisions with buildings and other human-made structures.
Cement reproductive rights in California’s Constitution | CalMatters
(Commentary by UCLA’s Cary Franklin) The quest by anti-abortion lawmakers to strip pregnant people and their families of the power to make reproductive decisions and to give that power to the government leaves us all vulnerable — especially since the June ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court threatens not only abortion rights, but all rights protected under the right to privacy.
How fasting can and can’t improve gut health | Time
While that work has helped established links between intermittent fasting and weight loss, as well as other benefits, it’s not yet clear when (or if) fasting can help fix a sick gut. “I would still consider the evidence moderate,” says Dr. Emeran Mayer, a professor of medicine and founding director of the Goodman Luskin Microbiome Center at the University of California, Los Angeles. “[Fasting] looks like a prudent way to maintain metabolic health or reestablish metabolic health, but it’s not a miracle cure.”
Language a barrier to care for many Asian Americans | Pasadena Star-News
Compared to other racial groups, Asian Americans are 50% less likely to seek out mental health services, according to a 2021 article by UCLA Health … Data disaggregation is important to truly understand the needs of the many communities under the umbrella term: AAPI, said Riti Shimkhada, a senior research scientist at the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research. “You can take that information and start to drive community action or interventions to address those very specific needs,” she said.
This is the key to achieving ‘time affluence’ | Forbes
‘Time poverty’ is endemic: a 2015 poll by Gallup found that 61% of working Americans reported not having enough time to do what they wanted … “If only I just had a few more hours in the day…” you might find yourself daydreaming wistfully. But would this actually help solve the problem? This is something that Cassie Mogilner Holmes, a psychologist and professor at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management — and a busy working mother who constantly felt time-poor — set out to investigate. And while her project focused on leisure time, it has interesting implications for our working lives, too.
Referendums and nuclear threat in Ukraine | CNN
“I think there are two things. One is exactly what you suggest: Once they can annex these territories, claiming that the local population asked for that, then they can apply the military doctrine that says you can use anything up to and including nuclear weapons to defend Russian territory if there’s an existential threat to Russia,” said UCLA’s Daniel Treisman (approx. 1:25 mark).
DACA: We need doctors-in-training like me | Los Angeles Times
(Commentary by UCLA’s Yadira Bribiesca) I am a proud undocumented medical student attending the UCLA School of Medicine — a reality that still seems like a dream. It is a reality because of the 2012 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals policy, or DACA. However, the DACA program and its beneficiaries remain in jeopardy as the policy could be ended by a court ruling any day now.