Rebekah Brandes

CUT Beverly Hills, the flagship location of Wolfgang Puck’s fine-dining steakhouses, has a Michelin star and a menu that boasts savory bone marrow flan, three choices of sturgeon caviar from France, and a wide variety of prime-cut, grass-fed beef. But no one has eaten there for months and won’t again until July because, according to Puck, they don’t have enough staff to reopen.

Andrew Frame couldn’t fathom why armed men, guns drawn, were pulling him out of bed early one morning. It was 1997, he was 17, living in Las Vegas, and the men with the guns, it turned out, were FBI agents. While they handcuffed him and proceeded to toss his apartment, Frame wondered if maybe his roommates had gotten mixed up in some crazy criminal activity. It never occurred to him—not for a moment—that it might have had something to do with the time, back when he was 15, that he had hacked into NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

The resulting five-minute films are diverse and beautiful thematic meditations. Sometimes funny, sometimes poignant, they tackle subject matter ranging from mental illness and meetings with mystics (“Your energy is dry” “Dry? I drink a gallon of water a day and I mind my business!”) to bereavement and the struggles of gig work. The material is both timeless and topical; one film is told through the eyes of a high school senior learning lines for a Zoom production of The Tempest as her parents struggle to keep their Chinese restaurant afloat in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Her dating profile said she was obsessed with BTK, but you thought that was a sandwich. On your first date, she dusted you for the prints of past lovers, then pinned you to the wall and did a full body search. The first time she met your folks, she served a complete replication of Aileen Wuornos’s last meal. You love her with all your heart, but you still don’t quite have a handle on... Dating a True Crime Fantatic. (Art by Gideon Kendall)

Angelenos are used to paying a premium for the privilege of driving the 405, but with the recent spike in costs, more L.A. motorists are turning to apps like GasBuddy, which uses GPS and crowdsourcing to display the cheapest (and most expensive) gas in the user’s vicinity.

His lilting cadence, his majestic white bouffant, his poetic monologues, and his aggressively awkward interview questions... No disrespect to Josh Mankiewicz or Andrea Canning, but Keith Morrison is the best Dateline correspondent, and everybody knows it — not just Bill Hader.

The four-day workweek is quickly becoming a global phenomenon — hundreds of companies on at least four continents have adopted the concept, and there’s even a search engine that job seekers can use to find remote opportunities with aligned businesses. Research has shown the shorter week can improve employee well-being without any loss in revenue or performance. But how do leaders and employees actually tackle the shift away from the traditional five-day, 40-hour structure?

When journalist Monica Corcoran Harel shared an ad hoc personal ad titled “My mom has no friends” to Nextdoor last summer, she was hoping it might lead to a few meetups for her mother, Veronica Chaberski. Fast forward a year, though, and not only has the post bolstered Chaberski’s social calendar, but it also prompted the formation of an online community — and motivated Harel to write a now-viral essay that triggered a Hollywood bidding war.

Fly above the white peaks of one sprawling French ski resort during winter, and you may catch a glimpse of Simon Beck’s mystical alpine masterpieces: enormous geometric patterns the English artist creates in the snow using a compass and his snowshoes. When he’s not traveling the world to stamp out his complex designs — he’s done so in the United States, Canada, Japan, Chile, and Argentina — Beck, 65, lives at France’s Les Arcs resort. There, on the snow-covered frozen lakes, he makes the majori

Is Los Angeles jonesing for the return of professional women’s soccer? Some high-profile and deep-pocketed Hollywood females backing Angel City Football Club, L.A.’s first women’s soccer team in 12 years, are about to find out. Cofounded by actress-activist Natalie Portman with venture capitalist Kara Nortman and tech entrepreneur Julie Uhrman, the club boasts an array of celebrity investors and pledges—besides fielding world-class players—to bring female empowerment to the game.

While the brothers have exhausted all of their appeals, Rand claims to have uncovered a letter Lyle sent to a cousin prior to the murders detailing his father’s abuse. New evidence like that may motivate the boys to file a writ of habeas corpus, which would allow a final chance to request their freedom. Overturning the case would be a long shot; still, having an army of implacable 20-year-olds take up your cause never hurts. “I would never diminish the ability of a movement to gain legal traction,” says celebrity criminal defender Mark Geragos.

The prologue of criminalist Paul Holes’s new book, Unmasked: My Life Solving America’s Cold Cases, which comes out April 26, reads a bit like a simulacrum of a Raymond Chandler novel—a hard-boiled investigator gone rogue, haunted by his unsolved cases, throws back bourbon in a Hollywood Blvd bar, trying to, as he writes, “flip the switch.” But after a few chapters, the retired Contra Costa County Chief of Forensics’ memoir grabs its reader in a stranglehold and proves more fascinating than fiction and darker than any noir narrative.

In his series Working America, native Californian photographer Sam Comen captivates with slow-motion video portraiture of immigrants and first-generation Americans, capturing the beating heart of America’s working class in his images. This July, Comen’s portraits and his accompanying interviews with his subjects are featured in Grand Park as one of five immersive installations entitled Portraits of Freedom: Building a Life in L.A.

Last week, Apple announced several new projects to combat systemic racism and advance racial equity in the US. The events of recent years have forced many United States citizens to reckon with the disturbing truth that they are still far from living in a post-racial world—an idealistic yet naive notion that arose amid the promise and optimism that accompanied Barack Obama’s historic win. Today, when racism is more prevalent than ever, it’s clear that people want change, and not just in the form of shareable memes.

Olivia Colman has two streaming hits right now, The Lost Daughter and Landscapers, but I have worshipped this woman since the early '00s when she was improvising as a chain-smoking housewife with Martin Freeman on Bruiser and cracking me up as the alcoholic love interest on Peep Show. She's wickedly funny on talk shows, she's won a bunch of awards, and she legit seems like a down-to-earth person.

For the first time ever, scientists have recorded mega-powerful blasts of radio waves emitting from within the Milky Way. Astrophysicists first discovered these millisecond-long outbursts, called Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs), in 2007, but until now they have only been observed in sources outside our galaxy. The origin of these bright blasts of energy in our own little (gigantic) swath of stars? A magnetar. Which is… an intergalactic villain from whom the all-powerful space robot Voltron must save humanity! Just kidding. It’s a massive dead star, and one of the strongest magnets in the universe.

A high-end eatery in Santa Monica has admitted to masquerading factory-farmed meat as grass-fed and sourced locally from their own sustainable farm. A former employee of Belcampo Restaurant & Butcher Shop on Wilshire Boulevard posted a series of Instagram stories Sunday from within the restaurant. “They are lying to your face and charging $47.99/lb for Filet that is either USDA choice and corn-fed or from a foreign country,” he writes in a caption overlaying footage of him speaking into the camera.

If you bloomed into tweenhood in the 1990s and wanted your ears pierced, you probably had it done by a bored college kid at your local Claire’s. Until recently, the old-school mall chain has seemingly been the default location for the service. Thankfully, though, the piercing scene is evolving and you no longer need to ride an escalator or pass an Auntie Anne’s to get that devil-may-care cartilage ring. You’ve got options!

Picture Making the Cut meets Hip-Hop Evolution, and you’ve got something close to The Hype, a new competition reality show premiering on HBO Max on August 12. Following the now-ubiquitous format that Project Runway popularized almost two decades ago, the show features a posse of budding streetwear designers, all decked out in their own creations, competing in timed challenges in which they create original looks. The main difference between this show and its predecessors is that you’ll see Wiz Khalifa smoking multiple joints on camera, a white girl from Kentucky arguing with judges about why it’s OK to mix blue and red gang colors on a street jacket (“I bring people together with my work”), and the cast driving up in low-rider cars to deliver their finished outfits. And that’s just one episode. In other words, it’s good TV.

OnlyFans, the popular subscription-based content company known for providing direct-to-consumer porn that creators can charge for, caused a major ruckus last week after announcing that it would no longer allow sexually explicit conduct on its app. Fired-up adult film stars and amateur content creators quickly took to Twitter to denounce the company’s stunning decision, but it now seems the uproar may be premature.