Lifestyle

Need to get rid of your junk and your consumer guilt? There's a subscription for that

Published

2 years ago

January 15, 2024

Need to get rid of your junk and your consumer guilt? There's a subscription for that

Since her usual hazardous waste disposal site closed last year, Dashiel St. Damien has accumulated 20 pounds of batteries and a bag full of lightbulbs.

St. Damien, 46, a designer who lives in Mount Washington, knows these items shouldn’t go into her usual curbside bins, but has struggled to find a new, convenient place to drop them off. So the months ticked by, and the bulbs kept piling up.

This week, for a small fee, her mess will finally be cleared. St. Damien has scheduled her first pickup with Ridwell, a subscription service that picks up and disposes of hard-to-recycle trash. For $18 a month, a driver will come to her home biweekly and collect her batteries, light bulbs, plastic mailers and even clothes.

Paying for the service on top of her usual trash collection, she said, is worth it for the positive environmental impact — plus her own feelings of relief. “It’s such an easy thing to do,” St. Damien said. “There are so many big problems that I feel so helpless about, but this is just one small thing.”

Ridwell is part of a new class of businesses, catering to environmentally-conscious consumers, that position themselves as middlemen that can help keep waste out of landfills, and — as a positive side effect — make consumers feel better about the junk they generate.

Ridwell is expanding its services across L.A. as the country is emerging from its peak holiday waste season, where shipping boxes and their foam innards are filling trash bins and unwanted holiday gifts clutter homes.

Ridwell specializes in collecting and safely disposing of hard-to-recycle items including batteries, light bulbs and plastic film.

(Ridwell)

A Ridwell subscription starts at $14 a month for biweekly pickups, and the company promises that goods get “sustainably reused or recycled.” Tricky trash finds its way to specialized plants for safe disposal, while items with the potential to be reused are donated to organizations that need them. There are more expensive tiers for those with more waste and complicated materials to recycle; the plan that recycles foam costs $24 a month.

“People are starting to ask more questions, like, ‘Where did the stuff come from to produce my stuff?’” said Ryan Metzger, Ridwell’s CEO.

Metzger had the idea for Ridwell in 2018 after he initiated a modest “recycling carpool” with neighbors in Seattle. Faced with the challenge of finding disposal options for batteries, Metzger took the initiative to gather batteries from neighbors and call around to find a facility that could safely get rid of them. That first pickup quickly expanded to include trips to recycle light bulbs, electronics, plastic bags and Halloween candy. Word spread beyond the neighborhood.

“It’s often up to consumers to drive change in a positive way,” Metzger said.

Ridwell now has more than 90,000 members and offers its services in the Seattle, San Francisco, Atlanta, Austin, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Portland and Los Angeles metro areas. The company is expanding into a dozen more Los Angeles neighborhoods this week, including West Hollywood, Studio City and Central L.A.

The company finds community partners for goods that have the potential to be reused, like toys, clothes and pet supplies. In Los Angeles, these partners include Wags & Walks, Out of the Closet and Baby2Baby, among others. “Our model is to seek out partners that have specific needs,” Metzger said.

Hard-to-break-down plastics — think Amazon mailers, chip bags and pet food bags — usually have to travel farther to special plants .

There is growing consumer awareness that not every plastic with the chasing arrows symbol on it is created equal. Many plastics put into citywide recycling bins go to landfills. St. Damien said subscribing to a service like Ridwell can help curb the common practice of what she calls “wishcycling,” or tossing something into the recycling that might not actually be recyclable. (“I fret about these things terribly,” she said.)

Linda Sanoff, 69, who lives in Hancock Park, has noticed her fair share of wishcyling in her neighborhood. “The city doesn’t take Styrofoam and I know people are putting Styrofoam in their blue bins and it doesn’t get recycled.”

January is a big month for trash. Waste haulers for the city of Los Angeles collected 2.04 tons of cardboard in December 2022; in January 2023 that number soared to 16.42 tons, according to data from the city’s sanitation department. In the weeks after Christmas, Ridwell sees a spike in its collection of batteries, holiday lights and many types of plastics.

Eco-conscious consumers know that the ideal way to deal with waste is to generate less of it to begin with, but most have a hard time reaching a true net-zero lifestyle. Some subscribers said Ridwell is helping them close that gap.

“I think we just owe it to our children’s future to just keep as much out of the landfills as possible,” said Bonnie Zucker, 52, who lives in Pacific Palisades. “In some ways, it’s unfortunate that companies like Ridwell have to exist, because we do have so much waste.”

Zucker prioritizes making eco-conscious choices in her everyday life. Outside of her day job as a psychologist, she volunteers with Resilient Palisades, a local environmental group. Most of her Ridwell pickups so far have consisted of multilayer plastics from packaging, plastic film and empty bags of the Pirate’s Booty her teenage son likes to snack on.

She has been impressed with the range of items that Ridwell will rehome. “They’ll do old eyeglasses and give them to, say, veterans organizations, or old pet supplies to give to animal shelters,” she said.

Although California is a national leader in its efforts to reduce plastic trash, experts agree there is more to be done. The state banned single-use plastic grocery bags in 2014 and will go further with a broader phase-out of plastics starting next year. But in 2021, Californians still generated 76.7 million tons of trash, 46 million of which ended up in a landfill, according to estimates from CalRecycle.

Similar waste disposal businesses are cropping up nationwide in response to consumers’ growing awareness, and guilt, about their own consumption habits and the shortcomings of our current systems. Rabbit Recycling, which works in the Philadelphia metro area, operates similarly to Ridwell and also offers one-time pickups.

TerraCycle, a New Jersey-based company, uses an a-la-carte business model. The company sends its customers boxes they can fill with certain types of waste for a fee. These boxes can either be left at a company drop-off point or shipped back to TerraCycle to dispose of.

Perhaps the best selling point of all is the convenience of a door-to-door service. “I mean, the city, thank goodness, has a recycling program, but it doesn’t take so much stuff that Ridwell does,” said Sanoff. “And now I don’t have to drive to UCLA to recycle batteries.”

Lifestyle

Sunday Puzzle: Vowel Renewals

Published

3 hours ago

March 29, 2026

Press Room

Sunday Puzzle

NPR

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NPR

On air challenge

I’m going to give you some seven-letter words. For each one, change one consonant to a vowel to spell a new word.
Ex. CONCEPT –> CONCEIT

1. REVENGE

2. TRACTOR

3. PLASTIC

4. CAPTION

5. SCUFFLE

6. POMPOMS

7. MOBSTER

8. LINKAGE

9. TEMPERS

Last week’s challenge

Last week’s challenge came from Joseph Young, of St. Cloud, Minn. Name an animal. The first five letters of its name spell a place where you may find it. The last four letters of this animal will name another animal — but one that would ordinarily not be found in this place. What animals are these?

Challenge answer

Stallion —> Stall, Lion

This week’s challenge

This week’s challenge comes from Peter Gordon, of Great Neck, N.Y. Name some tools used by shoemakers. After this word place part of a shoe. The result will be the subject of a famous painting. What is it?

If you know the answer to the challenge, submit it below by Thursday, April 2 at 3 p.m. ET. Listeners whose answers are selected win a chance to play the on-air puzzle.

Lifestyle

L.A. summons the spirit of glam-surrealist artist Steven Arnold

Published

4 hours ago

March 29, 2026

Press Room

L.A. summons the spirit of glam-surrealist artist Steven Arnold

The sun, played by Love Bailey, and the moon, played by Logan Wolfe.

He has been described as a magician and “being of light.” As Salvador Dalí’s kindred spirit and protégé. As the Andy Warhol of the West Coast. The artist Steven Arnold ought to be a household name. The exhibition “Cocktails in Heaven” at Del Vaz Projects in Santa Monica, which opened this week with a party co-hosted by Karen Hillenburg and Christine Messineo of Frieze, is a hopeful step in this direction.

On Monday night, the gallery transformed into a replica of Arnold’s legendary home and studio in Los Angeles, known as Zanzabar, which has been compared to Warhol’s Factory for the luminaries it attracted (Timothy Leary, Debbie Harry, Ellen Burstyn) and the creative synergy it inspired. Throughout the ’80s and into the early ’90s, Zanzabar was host to queer gatherings and parties, as well as surrealist photoshoots with exquisite paper-cut set designs that Arnold entirely made from hand. “My house is a temple for me. It’s a religious space, it’s where the creativity happens,” he says in the 2019 documentary made on him, “Heavenly Bodies.” Arnold died at the age of 51 in 1994, from AIDS-related complications, and left behind a mind-bending body of work that is now housed by ONE Archives at the USC Libraries.

Steven Arnold "Cocktails in Heaven" exhibition at Del Vaz Projects.

At Del Vaz, characters from Arnold’s ethereal photographs and films came to life in performances directed by artist Tyler Matthew Oyer: At the door, two French waiters, dressed in Mozart wigs and original coats hand-painted by Arnold, checked off guest names from an 8-foot scroll. Inside, performers dressed as the sun and moon — their mostly nude bodies spray-painted gold and silver — languorously laid over a banquet table abundant with crudités, conjuring a scene from Arnold’s most famous film, “Luminous Procuress,” which was projected on the wall. In the courtyard, a bodybuilder posed as a live version of Michelangelo’s “David” sculpture. It was an ode to the joyous, maximalist world that Arnold meticulously and affectionately built in both life and art — because for him there was no distinction, art was life.

Steven Arnold, "Angel of Night," 1982, featuring model Juan Fernandez.

Steven Arnold, "Intersection of Dreams," 1985

Every detail of the party came from something found in Arnold’s archive. The artistic director of the exhibition, Orrin Whalen, planted a few of Arnold’s actual belongings in the warm room where his photographs and drawings hung: his ornate metal bracelet rested on a seashell, and replicas of his red leopard print business cards fanned open on the front table. “Cocktails in Heaven” is also the title of Arnold’s unpublished memoir and became the source material for the party’s chef, Gerardo Gonzalez, who scanned for passages where the artist mentioned his favorite foods — mainly hors d’oeuvres and copious glasses of Vermouth.

Guests on Monday included fashion and art world luminaries, including artists Ron Athey and Joey Terrill, designer Zana Bayne, former Hammer Museum director Ann Philbin, and jewelry designer Sophie Buhai, who mingled under the dangling grapevines and in a tent where upside-down paper umbrellas suspended from the ceiling. The dress code was “Complete Fantasy Conglomerata Divina Magnificata,” and the crowd did their part wearing feathered hats, leopard-print tops, golden sequinned dresses and polka-dotted face paint. It was only fitting to pay homage to Arnold this way, a fashion icon in his own right who was once voted the best dressed man of Los Angeles by L.A. Weekly.

The evening signaled that this is not the type of show that will deaden an artist behind glass vitrines. “We can summon artists’ spirits through gatherings,” says Jay Ezra Nayssan, founding director and chief curator of Del Vaz Projects, which is also Nayssan’s home. “This opening is an aspect of a project that should be equally important as the exhibition itself … Queer culture is carried not only through scholarship but through laughter, perfume, embrace and touch, through dinners and concerts — and whatever forms are waiting to be invented.”

Waseem Salahi, left, and Elisa Wouk Almino, Editor in chief of Image Magazine.

Actor Charlie Besso, left, and director Luke Gilford.

Lifestyle

‘The Comeback’ is back. That’s something to Cherish

Published

15 hours ago

March 29, 2026

Press Room

‘The Comeback’ is back. That’s something to Cherish

Lisa Kudrow as Valerie Cherish in The Comeback.

Erin Simkin/HBO

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Consider Valerie Cherish, the perennially desperate-to-be-seen, desperate-to-be-loved Hollywood C-lister played by Lisa Kudrow. Valerie, bless her, reenters our collective lives once every decade, like the census.

And like the census, her return always assumes the form of an appraisal, a ruthless and clear-eyed taking of stock. In The Comeback‘s original 2005 season, Valerie donned a cupcake costume and pratfalled her way through the rise of reality television, starring in both a corny sitcom and its making-of documentary. In 2014, a second season found Valerie headlining a prestige HBO series about that sitcom, auguring the fusillade of high-end, self-satisfied streaming dramedies that were about to pummel an unsuspecting populace into submission.

In this third season, she’s still out here hustling. Sure, she’s got an Emmy under her belt, and she’s been booked and busy, but there are signs of trouble — she and her husband (Damian Young) have downsized from their Brentwood mansion to a West Hollywood apartment. Her publicist-turned-manager (Dan Bucatinsky) seems even more checked out than baseline. She’s hired a social media consultant (Ella Stiller) and has even started (ominous chord, shudder) … a podcast.

As we meet her, she’s older, wiser but still essentially Valerie: Blithely optimistic, hungrily opportunistic. She’s still desperate for attention — but the precise nature of the attention she’s craving these days has subtly but significantly shifted. It’s no longer enough for Valerie to be seen; now, she wants — expects, demands, even — to be heard.

She remains ridiculous, thank God. And Kudrow once again imbues her with the physicality that has come to define Valerie’s essential self: She’s still going through life nodding like a bobblehead, still punctuating just about every sentence with a “right?” or a “yeah?” or a “y’know?,” because it’s a learned response. If the world refuses to affirm her in any way — and somehow it continues to find endlessly novel ways to do just that — then she’ll just affirm her own darn self, yeah? Right?

But something happens in the first episode of the new season that efficiently signals how much has changed for Valerie. The setup is classic The Comeback: She’s agreed to star as Roxie in Chicago on Broadway (after receiving assurances that her choreo will be the “dumbed down, Real Housewives version”). Rehearsal isn’t going great — her director and fellow dancers are mean, catty and dismissive (apart from one gay guy, whose words of praise Valerie seeks out like a homing missile — which checks out).

What happens next is quietly remarkable, given the Valerie Cherish we’ve come to love/cringe-in-sympathy-with over The Comeback‘s previous seasons. She doesn’t chirpily ignore their insults and blithely soldier on. She doesn’t try to excuse and minimize their bad behavior so she can take advantage of the opportunity they’re affording her. No, she calls them out, and she quits. (More accurately: She finds a ready, contractually viable excuse to quit — same difference, I’d argue.)

This isn’t the Valerie we used to know. When an opportunity to star in an AI-written sitcom arises, she doesn’t knock over furniture to lunge at the chance, as she would have before. She refuses (at first), she seeks assurances that actual writers will be involved (they will, sort of), and she steps up as the show’s executive producer as soon as it becomes clear she’s the only one involved who cares about the cast, the crew and the quality of the show itself.

There remain plenty of opportunities for Kudrow to make us laugh at Valerie, but as the season progresses, we find ourselves rooting for her more than ever. That’s because Kudrow has altered Valerie’s fuel mixture a bit. She’s always been acutely self-aware, she’s always known when she’s being disrespected, but the Valerie of seasons one and two was perfectly content to swallow other people’s low opinions of her if it meant she got some time in the spotlight.

Now, that self-awareness is matched to something besides her default, pathologically sunny perseverance; it’s married to defiance, and to action.

She stands her ground against a costume designer (Benito Skinner) who sees her as camp and nothing more (yet another of The Comeback‘s knowing digs at its rabid gay fanbase). She agrees to play nice with a network executive (Andrew Scott) until she, very publicly, doesn’t. And when her dour husband starts flailing on his own reality show, Valerie draws on her vast reserves of experience on both sides of the camera to show him how it’s done.

But a self-actualized Valerie affects the show’s comedic chemistry, and there are times when the season can’t quite manage to sustain its satiric bite. On two occasions, the show’s pitched disdain for Hollywood phoniness and hollow ambition falters, and something akin to sincerity peeks out from behind the mask. In one, a beloved real-life Hollywood comedy legend delivers a short monologue to Valerie about why AI can never replace real comedy writers, because comedy needs broken people. In another, a cast member from The Comeback‘s first season returns simply to assure Valerie that she is a good person, a wonderful person, and that she is in no way in the wrong.

On both occasions, seasoned viewers will be patiently but eagerly awaiting the turn, the rug-pull, the reveal that such abject, wet-eyed earnestness will of course get swatted down, because this is The Comeback. But the turn never comes, the rug remains firmly in place and we are left to grapple with the knowledge that we’ve just been exposed to the creators’ true intent, delivered with a gravid plainness, without anything even resembling the gimlet-eyed take we’ve come to, well … cherish.

But you know what? Fine. Who knows if Valerie will return in ten years’ time to once again Cassandra us all about the state of the entertainment industry? Who knows, in point of fact, if there’ll be an entertainment industry for her to return to? I forgave those moments of uncharacteristic ingenuousness because I managed to convince myself they felt valedictory, triumphant — a few discordant bars within Valerie Cherish’s swan song.

Which, as viewers of The Comeback’s definitive, beloved, iconic Season 1 finale will remember, is “I Will Survive.” Because it could never be anything else. Y’know?

This piece also appeared in NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour newsletter. Sign up for the newsletter so you don’t miss the next one, plus get weekly recommendations about what’s making us happy.

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