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How to have the best Sunday in L.A., according to Charlie Puth

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How to have the best Sunday in L.A., according to Charlie Puth

When pop singer-songwriter Charlie Puth first began visiting Los Angeles in the early 2010s, he remembers landing at a house near Mount Olympus with an incredible view. Though he‘d only recently become a legal adult, he’d already built a following as a YouTuber, posting covers and singing intro songs for popular creators on the platform. That day in Laurel Canyon, he looked out over the sprawling metropolis.

“And in a very like ‘Entourage’ way, I was like, I will live here one day, and I will make it in the city,” he said.

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In Sunday Funday, L.A. people give us a play-by-play of their ideal Sunday around town. Find ideas and inspiration on where to go, what to eat and how to enjoy life on the weekends.

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Fast-forward to today, the Grammy-nominated hitmaker has charted 13 Billboard Hot 100 songs, worked with everyone from Elton John to Selena Gomez and is considered underrated by the most famous pop star in the world. As of this week, he also has his own heavily-improvised six-episode Roku Original comedy series, “The Charlie Puth Show,” where the New Jersey-native parodies the absurdity of the entertainment industry.

“We poke fun at that the egregious, unapologetic agents saying, ‘You’ve sold millions of records, but it’s time to do a reality show,’ ” he said.

And up until a recent move to Santa Barbara, Puth fulfilled his dream of living in Los Angeles, where he still often spends Sundays chasing caloric Valhalla and doing “the opposite” of his job so he “can remain sane.” Below, the “Hero” singer shares his ideal Sunday in Los Angeles.

This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for length and clarity.

7 a.m.: Rise and sweat

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I’m waking up. I walk down either Carla Ridge or run up Loma Vista, up in Trousedale [Estates], and get exhausted. That’s about an hour. Just get a good sweat.

8 a.m.: One shake, two shake

I immediately cancel out that wonderful workout with a big breakfast burrito from Dialog [Cafe] and a date shake. But I’m not going to Dialog. I’m Postmating it and tipping my driver well.

I’m very hungry. I’ve just run up a huge mountain, so I’m eating that and simultaneously ordering the Paul Saladino raw shake from Erewhon. The meat one. I love that shake. And I always get a bone broth from Erewhon, too. So the day hasn’t even started, and I’ve spent an absurd amount of money on ordered food. I’m living in La La Land.

9 a.m.: Pool hang

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I take a shower, and if it’s nice out, I’m fortunate enough to have a pool, and jump in that. Maybe see what a couple friends are doing.

10:30 a.m.: Group brain rot

I love having company over. I’ll call my friend Adam, I’ll call my friend Jeff, who works at my record label, and we will just watch brain-rot TikToks.

You don’t want to know stuff that I show my wife. Brooke [Sansone]’s, like: ‘I don’t even know what kind of response I can garner up for this.’ I’m looking at a meatball — and it has two eyeballs on it, like Stick Stickly from Nickelodeon. And it says “Meatball Martin is calling you.” And there’s a sound of like an iPhone ringing. And that’s the TikTok. My friends and I just die laughing. [We can spend] easily, nine hours [doing that]. We’ll start to get headaches from being on our phones too much.

I hope you weren’t thinking that, ‘Oh, I go up Runyon Canyon or Fryman Canyon, where I go to the Getty. I go to Zuma Beach. I go to the Greystone Mansion or I go down to South Central and get some really great homemade brisket. Or we go to Woon on the East side, Silver Lake and then at night, dancing.’ I know all those amazing places exist. I go to all those places during the week. It’s just Sunday, and so I just want to be home.

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12 p.m.: Get him to the Greek

It’s Sunday, so we’re ordering Matū cheesesteaks in Beverly Hills. Right on the dot at noon. It’s a delicious option for lunch. And if we’re feeling adventurous, we will take the car and go down to Go Greek on Bedford [Drive] and just get an after-cheesesteak yogurt. It’s an upscale frozen Greek yogurt place. It’s a local place and it is really good.

[Building a yogurt cup] starts healthy, but then come the gummy worms and the chocolate chips.

3 p.m.: Mall crawl

I’ll put on a little hat, some sunglasses and we’ll run to the Westfield Mall down in Century City. We’re moving slow, a lot of food’s in us.

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It’s the best mall ever. We don’t even buy anything. We just walk around. Walking is such a reward after going through that insane parking garage to get into that mall. I just like to be among the people and not get noticed and not have it be a big deal. It kind of grounds me.

We’ll probably stay there for like 45 minutes and then take the car to Silver Lake, where the real eats are at.

5:00 p.m.: The feast continues

We go to Burgers Never Say Die. They have soft serve too. I’ll get chocolate vanilla swirl with a side of four burgers and cheese sauce. They have really good cheese sauce there. I don’t know how they do it. Actually, yes, I do. I know how they do it. They fry their french fries in beef tallow, which is what McDonald’s used to do, and that’s why they taste so crispy and nice.

That’s when I take my hat off, because we’re in Silver Lake, and you see everybody doing the same thing as me and my buddies. So we’ll just eat that on the hood of the car.

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7:00 p.m.: Artisanal Diet Coke and a movie

Then we’ll, you know, we’re in L.A., so we’re driving a lot. And if it’s not too traffick-y, which it shouldn’t be, we’ll hit the 405 and get off at the Palisades. And there’s actually a movie theater in the Palisades Village. The last thing I saw there was “Tick, Tick… Boom!” with Andrew Garfield. [Sings “Come to Your Senses”]

They have really, really good Diet Coke there. It just remains crispy. It’s way different than having it out of the can, fresher than the bottle. It’s mixed within the machine. And it just remains spicy. I drink Diet Cokes by the sleeve. It’s like, I’m a Pez dispenser of Diet Coke.

9 p.m.: Evening snack

Since we’re on the West side, we might as well. If we’re still hungry, we’ll go to Eduardo’s [Border Grill], which is a really, really wonderful burrito spot.

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9:45 p.m.: Fourth dessert

Then we’re ending the evening with more ice cream. We’re going to the Bigg Chill in Westwood. I love Los Angeles. Living in Los Angeles changed my life. It also changed my weight.

Anybody reading this, you can eat whatever you want in Los Angeles, you can go to Matsuhisa. You can do your Nobu. You can do anything you want, as long as you run up Loma Vista. That’s how you burn the cals.

10 p.m.: Demo tape drive

After that, we are driving around looking at all the nice houses in either Hancock Park or on Beverly in Beverly Hills, just listening to demos. A lot of my friends are in the music industry, so we’re just listening to what songs are coming out, what songs they’re working on, what songs I’m working on. All my records are basically mixed in the car, even if the sound system is a little wonky, I still want to hear it on a car stereo sound system, because that’s how people are going to listen to the music.

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That’s the great thing about L.A., is that you can just remain inspired, because there’s creatives all around.

I don’t know a ton about Hancock Park, but I do admire how the streets are kind of an S-shape curve. And I did research on it one day. Why are the streets like that? [It’s] so people don’t drive quickly. That’s how it was designed a really long time ago. They could have easily made the road straight, but it’s more dramatic for the road to be an S-shaped curve, I guess.

11 p.m.: ‘Toks and Sopranos

Anticipating that Monday is going to be a pretty busy day, I try get back home at like 11 to shine the night off with some last-minute brain rot ’Toks. And say goodbye to my friends and watch “Sopranos” with my wife. I think James Gandolfini is one of the best actors of our time. May he rest in peace.

It’s a series that I can watch over and over and over again, because it’s based on where I’m from, New Jersey, so I feel some sort of affection towards it. It’s just seeing the intro of Elizabeth, N.J., which is what you see when you land at Newark Airport and all the factories. There’s something that is just very reminiscent of home, even though I didn’t live at the factory.

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12 a.m.: Bedtime

I do my best to just not look at the phone, but it never works. I’m sure I get 30% less great sleep. But that’s a wonderful Sunday to me. Sunday full of relaxation.

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'Orbital' by Samantha Harvey wins 2024 Booker Prize

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'Orbital' by Samantha Harvey wins 2024 Booker Prize

Samantha Harvey has won the 2024 Booker Prize for her novel Orbital. “I am not what you would probably call a space nerd by any stretch,” she told NPR in 2023. But ever since childhood she’s been fascinated by the experience of astronauts.

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Samantha Harvey has won the 2024 Booker Prize for her science fiction novel Orbital. The novel follows six astronauts as they orbit the Earth for one day of their nine-month space mission.

The Booker Prize is considered the most prestigious literary award for English fiction published in the UK and Ireland. Previous winners include Margaret Atwood, who won twice for her novels The Testaments and The Blind Assassin, and Paul Lynch, who won the 2023 Booker Prize for his book Prophet Song.

Orbital by Samantha Harvey

Orbital beat five other finalists on the Booker shortlist: Held by Anne Michaels, Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner, The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden, Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood and James by Percival Everett.

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Harvey’s astronauts – who hail from the U.S., Russia, Italy, Britain and Japan – see 16 sunrises and sunsets in the 24-hour time span of the novel. In 2023, Harvey told NPR’s Ari Shapiro that watching Earth orbits via videos from the ISS helped inspire the book: “I was so overwhelmed by the extraordinary beauty and strangeness of our planet,” she said.

Harvey wanted Orbital, “more than anything, to be a book about beauty, and about joy, and about … the rapture of looking at something so beautiful that also happens to be our home.”

Orbital also won the Hawthornden Prize for imaginative literature and was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction and the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction.

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TMZ TV Hot Take: Chloe Fineman Says Elon Musk Made Her Cry On 'SNL'

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TMZ TV Hot Take: Chloe Fineman Says Elon Musk Made Her Cry On 'SNL'

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Chronic itch is miserable. Scientists are just scratching the surface

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Chronic itch is miserable. Scientists are just scratching the surface

“There’s actual studies that show that itching is contagious,” journalist Annie Lowrey says. “Watching somebody scratch will make a person scratch.”

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We’ve all had bug bites, or dry scalp, or a sunburn that causes itch. But what if you felt itchy all the time — and there was no relief?

Journalist Annie Lowrey suffers from primary biliary cholangitis (PBC), a degenerative liver disease in which the body mistakenly attacks cells lining the bile ducts, causing them to inflame. The result is a severe itch that doesn’t respond to antihistamines or steroids.

“It feels like being trapped inside your own body,” Lowrey says of the disease. “I always describe it as being like a car alarm. Like, you can’t stop thinking about it.”

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PBC is impacts approximately 80,000 people in the U.S., the majority of whom are women. At its worst, Lowrey says, the itch caused her to dig holes in her skin and scalp. She’s even fantasized about having limbs amputated to escape the itch.

Lowrey writes about living with PBC in the Atlantic article, “Why People Itch and How to Stop It.” She says a big part of her struggle is coming to terms with the fact that she may never feel fully at ease in her skin.

“I talked to two folks who are a lot older than I was, just about like, how do you deal with it? How do you deal with the fact that you might itch and never stop itching? … And both of them were kind of like, ‘You put up with it, stop worrying about it and get on with your life,’” she says. “I think I was mentally trapped … and sometimes it’s like, OK, … go do something else. Life continues on. You have a body. It’s OK.”

Interview highlights

On why scratching gives us temporary relief

Scratching, it engenders pain in the skin, which interrupts the sensation of itch and it gives you the sense of relief that actually feels really good. It’s really pleasurable to scratch. And then when you stop scratching, the itch comes back. And the problem is that when you scratch or you damage your skin in order to stop the itch, to interrupt the itch, you actually damage the skin in a way that then makes the skin more itchy because you end up with histamine in the skin. And histamine is one of the hormones that generates itch within the body.

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On the itch-scratch cycle

Histamine is an amazing chemical that does many, many, many things in our body and it’s part of our immune response. It leads to swelling so the body can come in to heal. And the scratching is meant to get whatever irritant was there off. And the itch-scratch cycle ends when the body heals. So I think that that’s all part of a natural and proper cycle. That’s part of our body being amazing at sensing what’s around it and then healing it. But we have some itch that’s caused by substances other than histamine. We’ve only started to understand that kind of itch recently. Similarly, we didn’t really … understand chronic itch very well until recently. And we’re in a period, I’d say in the last 20 years, of just tremendous scientific advancement in our understanding of itch. 

On why itching is contagious 

There’s actual studies that show that itching is contagious. So watching somebody scratch will make a person scratch. There’s this interesting question: Are people scratching empathetically in the way that we will mirror the movements of people around us, in the way that yawning is contagious or crying can be contagious? But it turns out that, no, it’s probably a self-protective thing. If you see somebody scratching, there’s some ancient part of your body that says that person might have scabies, that person might have some other infestation. I’m going to start scratching to get this off of myself because scratching is in part a self-protective mechanism. We want to get irritants off of the body, and that’s in part why we scratch.

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On thinking of itch as a disease

When scientists said that itching is a disease in and of itself, what they meant was that chronic itching changes the body’s own circuitry in a way that begets more chronic itching. That implies that itching is not just a side effect, it’s a body process in and of itself. And so instead of just being a symptom … itch itself can kind of rewire the body and can be treated as a condition unto itself. And a lot of dermatologists see it that way. It’s often a symptom, often a side effect, but sometimes it’s really its own thing in the body.

On the social stigma around itching

If you saw somebody scratching themselves on the subway, would you go sit next to them? No, of course not. Just instinctively, I think you have that self-preservation mechanism. … It’s a really deep thing: Don’t get scabies. Don’t get bed bugs. Don’t get ticks on you. … I don’t think that people are trying to be cruel. I think there’s something deeply hardwired in there. … Like, don’t approach the mangy dog that looks like it has fleas all over it. Don’t approach the human that’s compulsively scratching themselves, which is socially coded in the same way that, like, chewing with your mouth open is. It’s not something that is an attractive thing to do.

On considering why so little attention paid to itch compared to pain 

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Pain is so awful and I would never say that there’s something ennobling about pain. But I think that there’s a certain amount of social respect [given] to people who are going through [pain], and itching — you kind of sound like a Muppet. … You look like a dog with fleas. It’s embarrassing to scratch yourself in public. It’s inappropriate to scratch yourself in public. I think people just kind of don’t take it very seriously. I’ve also thought a lot about how, like, if you had a chronic itching support group, everybody would come into it and then just start scratching themselves, and then make everybody else itchier by being in the simple presence of people who are itchy. It’s something that people suffer through alone.

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On finding acceptance 

I do think that even if I can’t quite come to terms with the itch, I have come to much better terms of the gift of being in a body that is getting sick, the gift of being in a body at all. … I always want to be careful to note … that I don’t think that illness is any kind of gift. And I don’t think that there needs to be upsides to bad things happening to people at all. But I do appreciate the insight that I’ve had into myself, even if I wish that I never had occasion to have it. …

You can endure a lot. Your body is going to fail you. It can feel completely crazy-making and obsessive and miserable. And you can survive it. You can just keep on breathing through it. You can do really amazing, wonderful things. And again, that’s not to say I think that it’s worth it, or that I’m taking the right lesson away from it. … Not everything needs to be a lesson. You don’t need to respond to things that are unfair and difficult in this fashion. But writing the piece led me to a much greater place of acceptance, and I really appreciated that.

Monique Nazareth and Anna Bauman produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Carmel Wroth adapted it for the web.

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