Lifestyle

Let your freak flag fly at this wildly inclusive weekly L.A. skate party

Published

2 years ago

June 12, 2024

Let your freak flag fly at this wildly inclusive weekly L.A. skate party

It’s a Tuesday night in mid-May, and dozens of people are rolling into a parking lot just south of the Santa Monica Pier. Most are on skateboards of all shapes and sizes. A few are on roller skates, scooters and bicycles. One dude rides in on a mountain bike armed with a toy gun that blows bubbles, enveloping the woman on skates he’s pulling behind him with a rope.

It feels like a party is about to start. The sun is still high in the sky and the breeze blows off the ocean. Gotye’s “Somebody That I Used to Know” is bumping from a knee-high amp as women, men and nonbinary folks congregate and coast on the pavement on their wheels of choice. Most are 20-somethings and 30-somethings.

A few minutes before 7 p.m., a lean 29-year-old with shoulder-length dirty blond hair, a backward turquoise ball cap and a pink tie-dye shirt, cuts the music and speaks into a microphone.

Brandon DesJarlais makes his way down the grassy hill during a meetup with Vibe Ride LA at Ocean View Park.

“Who’s living their best life? That’s what we’re here to do,” Brandon DesJarlais says to the crowd of 50 who are here for Vibe Ride, an event he created to skate, dance and connect with other people. Tonight they’ll travel together for about 1.7 miles to the Venice Skate Park, stopping along the way for bursts of revelry before turning around and heading back as the sun dips below the Pacific.

DesJarlais is a pro longboarder who created a nonprofit called Beyond the Board in 2021 to empower people and build community through skateboarding. His desire to share the joy of the sport tracks with the greater longboarding community’s reputation for being relaxed and inclusive — in part because the longboard’s shape makes learning the sport easier and less-trick-based.

“Longboarding is everything that’s not traditional street skating or vert skating,” said Don Tashman, the founder of L.A.-based longboard manufacturer Loaded Boards. “It’s inclusive. It’s diverse. It doesn’t have a defined clothing or culture or music. It is a catch-all … it’s a tool to spread stoke.”

Shontel Anestasia holds onto her skateboard.

Kayla Drake stands in a circle for a meet and greet while wearing her roller skates.

Tonight DesJarlais acts as the DJ, emcee and Pied Piper of the event. He goes over the night’s itinerary before suggesting that the crowd form small groups for an icebreaker. All the while he stands in front of his pastel-painted bus, named the Shred Sled, which is reminiscent of the vehicle that Ken Kesey’s followers, known as the Merry Pranksters, used to travel the U.S. in the 1960s. (He’s even lived in the vehicle, both to save money and while completing three Beyond the Board national tours where he visited more than 25 states and hosted 250 events.)

After introductions, he passes the microphone to one of his co-organizers, Daniel Chiu. The health coach and event producer offers a short, guided meditation with just a smidge of woo and a few deep breaths before the group heads south.

Finally, DesJarlais leads the group to the bike path along the sand, with the amp resting on the front of his board, pumping out tunes like War’s “Low Rider,” Peaches & Herb’s “Shake Your Groove Thing” and Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger.”

As they cruise along, the group spreads out. Most are on longboards. There are plenty of people who are new to skateboarding tonight, some of whom ride longboards provided by one of Beyond the Board’s sponsors, Landyachtz. Vibe Ride is a no-one-left-behind event with a sweep trailing the flock to ensure no one gets disconnected.

Kayla Drake rides her rollerskates with the group.

A group of mostly skateboarders ride along the boardwalk.

Kayla Drake rides her rollerskates with the group. Skateboards are lined up along a “Beyond the Board” bus. A group of mostly skateboarders ride along the boardwalk.

Many Vibe Riders simply head from point A to point B. Others make soulful turns, or “carves,” that recall an expert surfer riding a wave. A few groove up and down their boards as they roll, otherwise known as “dancing” (a popular style of longboarding).

The vibe tonight is especially social. Skaters chat as they glide. At one point, the group stops for a “hill bomb” — racing from the top of a small grass hill to the bottom. At the next, in front of the Adda and Paul Safran Senior Housing in Venice, the dance party kicks into overdrive. The Jackson 5’s “I Want You Back” blares from the amp, as a woman on the building’s third floor appears in a window to see what the commotion is about. Observing the party, she smiles and waves with both hands.

Even as the group embraces a carefree playfulness, DesJarlais is sure to lead by example. When he passes by a five-piece jazz band playing on the bike path, he cuts the music so as not to interrupt them. Participants look out for one another, calling out upcoming bicycles and sandy sections. When a Vibe Rider spots dog poop on the path, they fade back and block it, ensuring participants won’t ride over it.

The idea for the Vibe Ride came about during the early stages of the pandemic, when DesJarlais and Chiu met while skateboarding in Santa Monica. At this moment of intense isolation, the two came up with a shared goal: “To get people outdoors to connect with other people,” said Chiu.

The first official Vibe Ride was in January 2022. Only about 10 people showed up. But as the group connected with other skate-centric communities, including the inline and roller skate group the Skate Hunnies, its size and network began to grow.

In addition to the weekly Tuesday rides, the group also gathers for one-offs. DesJarlais estimates they’ve hosted more than 200 events. His dedication stretches beyond organizing and attending the rides. He’s even “flowed,” or given, folks longboards — on the condition that they ride them regularly.

One of those recipients is Vu Le, whom DesJarlais met 2 ½ years ago.

“The vibe is whatever you want it to be,” says Le, as his knee-length, burgundy silk robe flows behind him like a cape while skating down the bike path.

Josefina Chebaia first attended the Vibe Ride in April after a friend introduced her to the event. The Argentina-born artist was just learning to skateboard and loved how supportive the group was.

“There’s so much joy, so much happiness and so much healing,” she said. “Everyone feels that sense of belonging.”

Two people laying on their longboards in the light of a streetlamp.

At the end of the ride, some people head home while others head toward the post-ride taco truck meetup. Chiu hangs back with his 7-month-old Husky, Serene, who trotted alongside him during the ride..

“If you want to find an open, welcoming community to skate with or learn to skate with and to do it by the beach, this is the place,” he says, before he and Serene drift off into the distance.

Lifestyle

Homelessness is more common than you think. : It’s Been a Minute

Published

4 hours ago

July 15, 2026

Press Room

Homelessness is more common than you think. : It’s Been a Minute

The real spectrum of housing insecurity

Annika McFarlane/Getty Images/Getty Images

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Annika McFarlane/Getty Images/Getty Images

Who counts as homeless in America?

If you ask the Department of Housing and Urban Development, around 750,000 people are homeless in America. If you ask the Department of Education, that number shoots up into the millions. What does this discrepancy tell us? And how do our cultural ideas about homelessness shape who we see as homeless, and who gets help? To find out, Brittany talks with Dr. Margot Kushel, Director at the UCSF Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative, and Dr. Molly Richard, assistant professor in the Department of Public Health at the University of Rhode Island’s College of Health Sciences.

Want more deep dives on cultural taboos? Check out these episodes:
The truth about men on the ‘down low’
Why can’t we be normal about polyamory?

Support Public Media. Join NPR Plus.

Follow Brittany on Instagram: @bmluse

For handpicked podcast recommendations every week, subscribe to NPR’s Pod Club newsletter at npr.org/podclub.

This episode was produced by Corey Antonio Rose. It was edited by Neena Pathak. We had engineering support from Josephine Nyounai. Our Supervising Producer is Cher Vincent. Our Executive Producer is Barton Girdwood. Our VP of Programming is Yolanda Sangweni.

Lifestyle

They just completed all of L.A. Times’ 101 Best California Experiences — and we’ve got questions!

Published

5 hours ago

July 15, 2026

Press Room

They just completed all of L.A. Times’ 101 Best California Experiences — and we’ve got questions!

By December of 2023, Paul Preston realized that his girlfriend Susan Huckle was a big fan of road trips and lists. So for Christmas, he gave her L.A. Times’ ”101 Best California Experiences” zine, a traveler’s bucket list highlighting my top destinations throughout my four decades of traveling the state.

The gift, I’m delighted to hear, was a hit.

Preston and Huckle went through it and checked off locations they’d seen already. Then they hit the road.

And now, after two and a half years of roaming the state between work assignments, they’re back to report that they’ve covered all 101 locations on that list. Though the two have also traveled beyond state lines, the quest to cover California “totally informed our lives for the last two or three years,” said Huckle, who sent me a note of thanks after ticking the last box.

After the note arrived, I was eager to call them and learn more. I caught the couple, of course, in the middle of a day trip.

Susan Huckle and Paul Preston set out to visit every spot on the L.A. Times’ 2023 list of “101 Best California Experiences.” Along the way, they got married in Yosemite Valley.

(Nick Wuthrich)

“We’re out exploring,” Preston said. “So you’re getting what we’re about.”

They’re also now married. That happened last July in Yosemite Valley, which, yes, was on the list.

Huckle, 41, an actress, a host on “L.A. This Week” on Channel 35, a Universal Studios performer and an author, grew up in Santa Maria on California’s Central Coast.

Preston, 56, is also an actor. He leads movie location tours and hosts podcasts, movie trivia nights and special events. He grew up and went to college on the East Coast, so he had fewer California miles under his belt when the couple met in 2020.

Their California 101 travels began in early 2024 with a trip to Paso Robles, where they saw the green slopes along Highway 46, Morro Rock and the elephant seals at Piedras Blancas near Hearst Castle.

“And then,” Preston said, “we just kept going.”

Some of their most satisfying stops, the two agreed, were places they hadn’t heard of, such as Orange Works in the Central Valley town of Strathmore and Angel Island State Park, sometimes known as the Ellis Island of the West. Huckle called Angel Island “a marriage of natural beauty with great, powerful, historic information.”

By early this year, there were only a few destinations left to check.

In April, they did the Indian Canyons and Sunnylands estate near Palm Springs, the Integratron near Joshua Tree and the Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art & Culture in Riverside. In June, they rafted the South Fork of the American River, along with stops in Old Sacramento and, last of all, Columbia State Historic Park. Then they made their own favorites lists.

Susan Huckle’s top 10:

Yosemite Valley
Badwater Basin
Mammoth Mountain
Angel Island State Park
Cheech Marin Center
Joshua Tree National Park
American River South Fork
The Marshall Store on Tomales Bay
Santa Cruz Island
Sunnylands

Paul Preston’s top 10:

Yosemite Valley
Hollywood Bowl
Griffith Observatory
Catalina
Mammoth Mountain
American River South Fork
Erick Schats’ Bakery in Bishop
Huntington Library and Gardens
Palm Springs Aerial Tramway
Balboa Park, San Diego

Now that they’ve seen so much of the state, I had questions. For one, which spots not on the list would they have included?

Alcatraz, they agreed. Also, as an admirer of redwoods, Preston liked Calaveras Big Trees State Park. As an avid cyclist, Huckle liked the 22-mile Marvin Braude Bike Trail from Torrance to Pacific Palisades.

And was anything on the list a disappointment?

“The Carmel Mission,” Huckle said quickly. “It’s beautiful and the missions are an important part of California history.” But she said the mission’s account of its own history seemed “whitewashed,” saying little about the Native loss and trauma that historians are increasingly recognizing in accounts of the missions.

Said Huckle: “I was like, ‘C’mon guys, nobody really thinks this any more, right?’”

Now that they’re done with the Times’ “101 Best California Experiences,” what what will shape their next trips?

They have a list for that. Huckle picked up an L.A. guide, Danny Jensen’s “Secret Los Angeles,” and the couple plans to start where the book does, with the Triforium, a many-colored sculpture that went up outside City Hall in 1975 (and once featured music).

After that? Maybe the Faces of Elysian Valley, a traffic circle sculpture that Huckle said “looks like Easter Island in the middle of Cypress Park.”

That will leave only about 138 more destinations in the book to cover.

If anybody can do it, it’s these two.

Lifestyle

‘The Trojan Teddy Bear’: The promise and peril of childhood in the age of AI

Published

16 hours ago

July 15, 2026

Press Room

‘The Trojan Teddy Bear’: The promise and peril of childhood in the age of AI

In A.I. Artificial Intelligence, Monica introduces Teddy to David. The seemingly ordinary teddy bear quickly reveals himself to be an intelligent companion capable of conversation and emotional support.

Warner Bros. Pictures

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Warner Bros. Pictures

Back in 2001, Steven Spielberg released an underrated scifi movie named A.I. Artificial Intelligence (yes, the title is a bit redundant). The movie, which loosely borrows from Pinocchio, tells the story of a family who adopts a robotic boy programmed for love, and that robot’s heartbreaking quest to become a real boy.

Much of the technology in A.I. remains elusive. We’re probably not anywhere close to building androids that can convincingly pass as Haley Joel Osment — or Jude Law, for that matter. But some of the AI products imagined in the movie are starting to look surprisingly plausible. Take Teddy, an animatronic teddy bear. Teddy can walk, talk, make decisions, and respond to the needs and emotions of people around him. He’s more than just a toy. He’s an intelligent companion and protector for children.

Today, a slew of technology companies are developing AI companions that sort of resemble Teddy. The most intelligent AI chatbots still live on digital screens, but a wave of startups is giving them bodies — creating dolls, action figures, and robots that can serve as companions for kids.

What happens when kids grow up with AI?

AI is already a part of childhood. Recommendation algorithms curate what many kids watch and listen to. Chatbots stand ready to answer questions like, “Are monsters real?” or “Why is the sky blue?” They can help with homework, tell bedtime stories, or even feel like a friend. And companies are racing to embed AI into toys, nurseries, classrooms, and eventually robots that live alongside families.

In a new book, Human Raised: Nurturing Connection, Curiosity & Lifelong Learning in the Age of AI, author Dana Suskind grapples with what the rising tide of artificial intelligence means for raising kids. On the one hand, she acknowledges that the technology offers promise as, for example, a productivity enhancer and time saver for parents, a monitoring and research tool that can give parents and scientists valuable data on child development, and an interactive tutor that might help some kids learn.

But Suskind worries about what happens if AI begins replacing the kinds of human interactions that young brains evolved to learn from.

In fact, Suskind says, her original, working title for the book was, “The Trojan Teddy Bear,” a warning that AI companions may seem cute and cuddly — but they carry hidden risks for child development. She ultimately went with Human Raised because she wanted to emphasize the positive — and irreplaceable — role that parents, teachers, and caregivers play in molding young ones.

“If we want children to be able to continue to connect with each other and with other human beings, to be able to think critically, to be able to navigate the human world, we’re gonna need to make sure that kids have a distinctly human-raised early childhood,” Suskind says.

Suskind is a professor of surgery and pediatrics at the University of Chicago Medical Center, where she directs a program aimed at giving kids hearing with cochlear implants. After she began doing this incredible work — literally helping children hear — she noticed that some kids who had the procedure went on to understand spoken language and talk with relative ease, while others had a much harder time. Hearing alone wasn’t enough. And that led her to dive into neuroscience and social science to understand why.

The brain development of young kids, Suskind learned, is heavily influenced by the back-and-forth interactions they have with their parents and caregivers during the first several years of their life. And she grew concerned that there is a big population of kids who aren’t getting the enriching communication their brains need. And so she founded the TMW Initiative, a research center that helps parents create the kinds of brain-enriching environments that children need to reach their full potential. (You can read more about Suskind’s biography and previous work in a Planet Money newsletter from 2022).

Why Dana Suskind is sounding the alarm

With the explosion of AI, Suskind has grown alarmed by a rush to introduce an unprecedented technology into kids’ lives without careful reflection and rigorous scientific study about its effects on young minds. She is especially concerned about AI companions and other systems that interact socially with children, which she fears many people will use to substitute for the human interactions that children need most.

Since the dawn of civilization, humans have used technology to make raising children a little easier. In Human Raised, Suskind traces that history back to prehistoric times, when mothers used woven slings to carry infants while they worked. Over the centuries, new technologies — like television and tablets — have eased the burdens of caregiving or helped keep children occupied. Many of these technologies have also been greeted with fears that they would rot kids’ brains.

But Suskind argues AI may mark a fundamental shift. Interacting with a chatbot or intelligent teddy bear is more than just a kid glued to a television or an iPad watching Sesame Street or Paw Patrol. AI systems carry on conversations that can feel strikingly human. They respond to kids’ questions, emotions, and fears. They create a kind of synthetic social relationship — one that, Suskind argues, may shape developing minds in ways that, until recently, only humans could.

Suskind cites the research of renowned University of Washington developmental psychologist Patricia K. Kuhl. Kuhl proposed what’s known as the “social gate” hypothesis — the idea that children’s brains are biologically primed to learn through social interaction. Studies have shown, for example, that babies learn language much better from a live person than from a screen. Neuroscientists and psychologists suggest that’s because social interactions engage the brain in ways passive media does not. The sing-song way adults naturally speak to babies, smiles and other facial expressions, gentle touch, eye contact, and back-and-forth exchanges all appear to help open that social gate and facilitate learning and healthy brain development.

While artificial intelligence is no match for human educators and caregivers, Suskind argues, it is capable of opening the social gate in young children in ways that previous technologies could not. That makes AI a potentially extraordinary educational tool — but also a potentially dangerous one.

Companies design AI systems with their own goals, which could include maximizing your kids’ engagement, keeping their attention, collecting data, and making money. They don’t have the same priorities as parents. And while those systems may imitate human interaction, Suskind argues they cannot recreate everything that makes human relationships developmentally valuable.

“Eye contact, shared laughter, patient answers to ‘why’ questions activate ancient neural circuits designed for connection,” Suskind writes. “These exchanges provide a form of nourishment no algorithm, however sophisticated, can match.”

Human relationships are also messy and filled with emotions. Parents misunderstand their children. Kids get frustrated. Families argue, reconnect, and then smooth things over. Suskind argues that those imperfect interactions — and “the productive struggle” they create — are how children learn resilience, emotional regulation, flexibility, and how to navigate real relationships.

Unlike most humans, AI systems can be endlessly engaging, infinitely patient, and relentlessly affirming. Interactions with them often feel frictionless. Suskind worries giving young kids considerable exposure to them may make them less prepared for the messy, unpredictable nature of real human relationships.

AI as junk food for the young mind

Suskind compares AI relationships to ultra-processed food. “ If all you eat is fruit snacks, which is a synthetic version of fruit, when you actually eat the real fruit, you’re gonna be like, “Hmm, it’s not quite as sweet,” she says.

AI could eventually be programmed to try and mimic real parents and caregivers even more closely. But Suskind argues that the problem isn’t simply that today’s AI falls short of human relationships. It’s that AI represents a fundamentally new kind of social experience for children — one that already raises concerns based on what we know about child development and whose long-term effects remain deeply uncertain.

Suskind uses an analogy from the 19th century, when a German chemist named Justus von Liebig created one of the first infant formulas, hoping to replicate the nourishment of human milk. But when a French physician tested the formula on four newborns, all of them died within days, and the episode sparked a fierce controversy.

The lesson, Suskind suggests, is that we should be cautious about engineering substitutes for something as biologically, emotionally, and socially complex as human caregiving before we understand how those substitutes shape children’s development.

Given so much uncertainty about this rapidly evolving technology and its potential effects on kids, Suskind spends a lot of the book offering parents a practical guide for safely navigating child-rearing in the age of AI. She emphasizes that it’s especially important to shield kids from AI during their first years of life.

“Older children and adults encounter AI with already-built neural scaffolding, but young children are still wiring the very circuits that shape future learning and relationships,” she writes. “Introducing AI during this sensitive period presents a fundamentally different challenge with greater potential for harm.”

Suskind is open to the idea of using AI to enhance education for some kids — but only as a tool that enhances, rather than replaces, humans. She argues that human caregivers are the best way to cultivate what she calls “the Human Edge,” a set of social, emotional, and cognitive skills like “critical thinking, interpersonal connection, genuine creativity, empathy, and resilience.”

But, like time-crunched parents who rely on screens to buy themselves some time today, there may be growing temptations to outsource parts of child-rearing to AI, especially considering the fact that childcare is incredibly expensive. Suskind worries that, over time, a fully human-raised childhood could become a kind of luxury good — much the way fresh, healthy food often is today. Families with the time and resources would provide rich human interaction to their kids. Everyone else might increasingly rely on cheaper, more convenient AI substitutes.

And children raised largely by AI might not only lag socially, emotionally, and cognitively, but, ironically, they could also be less prepared for an AI-driven economy.

Suskind points to a recent essay by the University of Chicago economist Alex Imas. Imas argues that as AI automates more cognitive work, human jobs may be increasingly concentrated in what he calls “the relational sector” — occupations where humans are valued for qualities that make them distinctly human, from education to health care to hospitality, the arts, and therapy.

If that’s true, then the traits children develop through a human-raised childhood won’t just matter for their social lives. They may also become an economic advantage. In a world increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence, the most valuable skills may be the ones that are the most deeply human.