Los Angeles Times

The Golden State’s development coincided with an brief period of coastal calm, making the shoreline seem more stable than it is. Now that erosion, flooding, and rising sea levels are reshaping California’s coast, how will residents confront their new disturbing reality? Seawalls and sandbags can only protect so much.

How a retired school teacher and a former Army staff sergeant work together to study and protect a small colony of Pacific seahorses in the waters off of Long Beach, California. “And if you’ve never seen a seahorse in the wild before, you will feel honored and awed, as if you’ve just seen a unicorn beneath the sea.”

As his mother enters hospice care, Gustavo Arellano pays tribute to her life and to her cooking, trying to preserve the memory of his favorite dish.

Thanks to Los Angeles’ enormous multi-culturalism, residents inhabit very different cities along this rapidly changing stretch of East Hollywood. Here food is both a symbol of peoples’ differences and their common ground.

Because southern California doesn’t have enough problems.

In Roma, Texas, a major thoroughfare for illegal immigration on the Texas-Mexico border, encountering Border Patrol agents and the immigrants desperate to evade them is an inescapable part of life. Residents repeatedly face legal and ethical questions: Do you help, and, if so, whom? The immigrants or the Border Patrol? Almost daily, they weigh fear against compassion, resentment against concern.

You might not have heard of it, but Low End Theory is famous to fans of underground hip-hop and electronic music. The club night’s performers, DJ Nobody, Thundercat, Nosaj Thing, Flying Lotus and Tokimonsta, have shaped music far beyond LA’s beat scene, attracting the attention of performers like Kendrick Lamar and Thom Yorke. After twelve years, divided by a rape allegation, it ended. Here’s a dispatch from the final performance, and a look back.

“In my mind, there remains the impression of a tidal wave, and when it’s gone, you’re happy that you’re still alive.”

When Debra Newell met John Meehan for a first date, she thought he was handsome, and kind, but shabbily dressed, and a little strange. When they married in Las Vegas less than two months later, she kept her family in the dark. It was only after she learned about his past that she began to fear for her life, and the lives of her children.

An expose on sweatshops in Los Angeles that exploit mostly undocumented workers, paying them less than minimum wage to work in slave-like conditions, and the loop-holes protecting retailers that use these sweatshops for their house brands — including Forever 21, TJ Maxx and Marshall’s.