The Jay Stephen Hooper Memorial Heliport sits on top of a brutalist brick-and-concrete building, the C. Erwin Piper Technical Center, across from Union Station in downtown Los Angeles. It’s an area where trains, buses, and highways all converge, and where the sounds of helicopters coming and going are barely noticeable above the din of engines and the smell of exhaust. From the ground, the heliport is barely visible. The best view of it is nearby, from the Cesar Chavez Bridge, over the Los Angeles River, which, in this part of the city, is just a low stream of water in a giant concrete aqueduct. From there, looking over a rail yard, one can see the helicopters parked at an angle on the roof, and the blinking of video monitors inside of an observation tower. On a recent evening, just before sunset, a police helicopter alighted, paused for a few minutes with its propeller spinning, then took off again.
The C. Erwin Piper Technical Center is the headquarters of the Air Support Division of the Los Angeles Police Department, which, according to the L.A.P.D., is the largest local airborne law-enforcement unit in the world. The division has seventeen helicopters in its fleet and more than ninety employees, and keeps at least two helicopters airborne for twenty hours a day or more, if deemed necessary. The aircraft are a constant part of the L.A. backdrop, like palm trees and traffic. A cluster of them hovering might indicate a crime or an accident, but one would have to be motivated to find out for sure. In addition to the L.A.P.D. patrols, there are also many news helicopters in L.A., plus the choppers of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department’s Aero Bureau and of the Fire Department, and private helos ferrying the very wealthy. These other helicopters are identifiable on radar apps you can download onto your phone, but L.A.P.D. helicopters aren’t always labelled on these apps, which can make them difficult to track. They are often black with a white stripe down the middle, somewhat orca-like in appearance. At night, they blink with green and red lights, or beam blinding Nightsun spotlights toward the ground. The division’s mascot is a cartoon buzzard, in apparent honor of their tendency to circle. Rare is the day in central L.A. when you go without seeing one. They have made their way into movies—“Blue Thunder,” “Boyz n the Hood”—and into the city’s psyche.
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In the past few years, as public sentiment toward the police has shifted, the L.A.P.D.’s helicopters have also come under scrutiny. Photograph by Stuart Palley
“It seems like we’ve been battling climate change for decades and made no progress,” Dr. Hannah Ritchie says. “I want to push back on that.” Ritchie, a senior researcher in the Program on Global Development at the University of Oxford and deputy editor at the online publication Our World in Data, is the author of the upcoming book, “Not the End of the World.” In it, she argues that the flood of doom-laden stats and stories about climate change is obscuring our ability to imagine solutions to the crisis and envision a sustainable, livable future. That brighter story is one Ritchie, who is 30, builds by pointing to the progress being made in areas like deforestation, air cleanliness, and the falling cost and rising adoption of clean-energy technologies. “For a long time I felt helplessness, that these problems were massive and unsolvable,” Ritchie says. “It’s important to counter those feelings. We need to go much faster, but there is a lot of progress to acknowledge and lessons to learn.” The year 2023 was the hottest on record — horrible wildfires, catastrophic flooding, ongoing loss of biodiversity, carbon emissions continuing to rise. I look at that and think, Boy, this is bad. How do you interpret the year we just had? We probably see it in a similar way. It has been an incredibly bad year. To some extent, it’s been anomalous. We’ve gone from having three consecutive years of La Niña, which tends to have a cooling impact, then rapidly flipped into an El Niño, which has a warming effect.
Which doesn’t take us away from the fact that we have a warming planet, but I also see the flip side, which is lots of positive things happening.
What feels most productive to me is not to stare at the bad stuff and say, “This is bad,” but to look and say: “This is positive stuff. How can I try to contribute to accelerating the good outpacing the bad?” Something like a third of Americans say climate change should be a top priority for the president and Congress.
1 You don’t need anyone’s permission to chase your dreams. You only need your own permission because you are the one that can create the roadblocks in your life or open up the way for your success. 2 Time runs out quickly, but those who make the worst use of their time are the first […]
Alyssa Carson is an American doctoral student and space enthusiast who wants to become an astronaut and travel to Mars. She is also an ambassador for MarsOne, a mission to establish a human settlement on Mars. Carson has attended multiple space camps, including U.S. Space Camp in 2008, and has visited every NASA visitor center. In […]
The Shift is a Christian science fiction thriller written and directed by Brock Heasley. It is a loose adaptation of the Book of Job. I had no clue what this movie was about. being a fan of one of the stars motivated me to add The Shift to my “have-to-see” list. I was not disappointed. […]
Carving out time for mindfulness often feels like an indulgence, but it’s necessary. And unlike everything else on your to-do list, there are simple ways to pause and reset—like the 4-7-8 breathing technique. A controlled breathing pattern intended to help the mind and body relax, the 4-7-8 technique has helped many transition from a stressful storm into a more focused, present self.
“Breath work is an active meditation that helps reframe the nervous system’s response to trauma and triggers,” says Jasmine Marie, founder and CEO of Black Girls Breathing. “Decreasing anxiety and stress and regulating the nervous system’s response to anxiety and stress are some of the many benefits experienced by those who incorporate the practice into their daily and weekly routines.”
The benefits of deep breathing are plentiful. Research has found that slow, conscious breathing exercises, like the 4-7-8 technique, are linked to mental function, in that they can enhance emotional control and psychological well-being.
So what is 4-7-8 breathing?
The 4-7-8 breathing method, also referred to as “relaxing breath,” is based on principles of pranayama, the ancient yogic ritual of directing energy through control of the breath. While breathing techniques of this nature have been developed over centuries, the technique known as 4-7-8 breathing specifically is credited to American doctor Andrew Weil, who had a particular focus on alternative medicine. The simple technique involves breathing in for four seconds, holding the breath for seven seconds, and then breathing out for eight seconds.
When the billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk sat down for his profanity-laced interview at The New York Times’s DealBook Summit in late November, his petulant dropping of F-bombs received a lot of attention. Less noticed but far more revealing was his evident disdain for a humble word beginning with the letter T. “You could not trust me,” Musk said, affecting an air of tough-guy indifference in his shearling-collared flight jacket and shiny black boots. “It is irrelevant. The rocket track record speaks for itself.”
Musk wasn’t being pressed on “the rocket track record” — after all, the number of civilians in the audience who were in the market for a spaceship was presumably few. But though he seemed loath to acknowledge it, the question of trust is at the core of X, the social media platform he acquired in October 2022, and where he recently replied to an antisemitic post with the words “You have said the actual truth.” (Calling it “literally the worst and dumbest post that I’ve ever done,” he still hasn’t removed it.)
Asked at the summit to comment on his trustworthiness, Musk rattled off statistics about launching rockets into orbit and boasted about making “the best cars.” (More than two million of those cars have since been recalled under pressure from regulators concerned about the Autopilot software.) But he resisted reflecting on how getting people to engage on X — which is built around information and social relationships — might be qualitatively different from getting earthlings to Mars. There were moments when his defiance shaded into incomprehension. The word “trust” didn’t seem to compute.
One of the first changes Musk made to X was to stop putting as many resources into maintaining the trust he valued so little. He started charging for a blue check mark, which had reliably signaled (at no cost) that a notable account was “verified” and not an impersonation. (The only thing a blue check mark reliably signals now is that someone is willing to pay Musk $8 a month — or maybe not, since he has comped the marks for some celebrity accounts.) He gutted the platform’s content moderation team. He reinstated accounts that had been suspended for peddling hate speech and harmful falsehoods about vaccines.
In the world, human beings are facing various problems. People who are full of greed, anger, and ignorance are seen to be fighting with each other in words and deeds. As the fighting continues, various problems such as civil wars, wars of aggression, and wars of aggression are occurring. As world peace is being destroyed, humans are facing unbearable problems. Innocent children and women are not getting the rights they deserve and deserve. I can't think of one thing every time. What is it? The United Nations. If we look at the responsibilities and duties of the United Nations, I think it is not suitable for solving the problems that are happening in the world today. In fact, the United Nations and the World Security Council, such an organization must rule the world, must be able to give orders, and must have various ways to obey orders. There must be no organization that can influence more than that organization. There should be experts from each country. They can even dominate the superpowers like the US, China, and Britain. Only then will global peace be achieved quickly. Now, if a country with power develops more militarily, economically, or socially than its own country, then powerful countries will jealously seek out enemies and wage war. Or they will attack with fighter jets. In this, innocent people are losing their lives. No one understands the value of a life. You should think about how to achieve global peace by controlling these. If the US continues to be the permanent president of the UN, world peace will never be achieved. If you think carefully, no one sees that they are working for the common good, but for their own benefit, for the benefit of their own country. The permanent president of the UN and the Security Council has rejected this, As a young Rohingya, I have come to realize that only by electing the president and secretary from among the countries in the world through a secret ballot system and governing the world fairly can we achieve global peace. The United Nations and the Security Council are organizations in which any country must govern, give orders, and make them obey their orders. For example, only when a defendant is tried in court can we hold the leaders of the countries in check and control them, can we achieve global peace smoothly. Otherwise, it will not be easy for powerful countries to use various excuses to end this war every year, every year, for the benefit of themselves and their countries. No country's leaders pay any attention to the words of the United Nations and the Security Council. If we look at it in practice, look at the Rohingya issue. Myanmar is a small country. Even that country has been under siege for 8 years. What action can be taken? Why is the UN and the Security Council Powerless? Without such Power, how can the organization bring about global peace? Everyone should think about it. Whether there is a veto or a strong one, all countries in the world can only achieve global peace if they are subject to the UN and the Security Council. Seek peace in the quiet embrace of nature. Peace is an indispensable need of the human race. It is not as if one person can kill another person, and it is as if one country can attack another country, but instead of trying to build peace, we must try to destroy the peace now, and the world is getting hotter and is on the verge of collapse. I especially appeal to all the world experts to urgently try to bring about peace in all parts of the world. Mr, Noor Muhamed Arkhan Rohingya Youth Myanmar
Film and Writing Festival for Comedy. Showcasing best of comedy short films at the FEEDBACK Film Festival. Plus, showcasing best of comedy novels, short stories, poems, screenplays (TV, short, feature) at the festival performed by professional actors.
In the past few years, as public sentiment toward the police has shifted, the L.A.P.D.’s helicopters have also come under scrutiny. Photograph by Stuart Palley
