11 holiday pop-up bars to visit in Southern California this season
Los Angeles Times Like Spirit Halloween stores, Christmas-themed pop-up bars are a ubiquitous part of the holiday season, except instead of getting spooked by animatronic ghouls and 12-foot-tall skeletons, you get to cozy up next to real (and fake) fireplaces, sit at...
MAXWELL: Neo-Soul Grows Up
SF Weekly Maxwell isn’t supposed to be talking — at least not to me. When I catch him on the phone on a Wednesday morning in November, his press agent tells me that I’m lucky to be speaking with him. Normally, the singer takes vocal rest on the days that he has shows,...
VALERIE JUNE: Follow the Signs to Mother Earth
SF Weekly In 1976, a commercial showing a man in a wife-beater zooming down the highway while chucking trash out of his dingy, white convertible flickered across television screens throughout Tennessee. In the background, a tune by country singer Ed Bruce played,...
DAVID CROSBY: The Legendary Rocker is as Feisty as Ever
SF Weekly It’s the middle of the week and David Crosby is sitting in his home office in the Santa Ynez Valley, staring out his window. “I’m looking out at a beautiful, green valley,” Crosby says. “The trees are just starting to bud out new leaves and the places...
Throne of Terror: Celebs Who’ve Died on the Toilet
SF Weekly (part of the "Toilet Issue") Ah, the bathroom: one of the most important, but least loved rooms in a house. We never stay in it for very long — the toilet website MaP Testing found that most people use the restroom six to eight times each day for a total of...
Cover Story: Finding a Place in Homophobic Hip-Hop
SF Weekly (cover story) It’s an unusually warm Sunday in October, and half a dozen women mill around the Chabot Space and Science Center in East Oakland, in a room designed to look like a Mission Control. Dressed in black latex, metallic fabrics, and colorful wigs,...
Like Mixtapes? Love Vinyl? This Company Combines Them
LA Weekly Sometime in early September, a few hundred people around the world received in the mail a flat, cardboard box containing a heavily padded, highly anticipated vinyl record. Ostensibly, those same few hundred people slipped the record out of its astral-themed...
The coolest gifts for people who love repping their L.A. neighborhood
Los Angeles Times Los Angeles is so big and sprawling, a puzzle board of cities within cities, that using one name to tie them all together isn’t really fair. Tell someone from out of state that you live in L.A. and you’re not really saying much. But share your...
YG — “Who Do You Love?”
The many ways in which rapper YG has left an indelible footprint on pop culture and why he's "Still Brazy." SF Weekly YG knows how to make headlines. In 2013, the Compton rapper, born Keenon Jackson, inspired legions of high school students to ditch class and...
Bacteria on babies depends on delivery
Los Angeles Times, print edition Concern about a newborn’s bacterial flora is not a topic you’re likely to hear discussed in the waiting room of the maternity ward — but that may change. A new study has found that the way in which babies are delivered exposes them to...
Effect of call-based counseling rings true
Los Angeles Times The therapist-patient relationship is crucial to people battling depression, addiction, weight gain and diabetes. But that relationship might not always have to be in person to be effective. Over the last decade, numerous hospitals and clinics have...
How Reggae Fest Is Bringing Authenticity Back to Nightlife
Eventbrite The party scene is an ever-evolving, ever-changing beast. But the basic ingredients for throwing a successful soirée are fairly consistent: good music, good drinks, and lots of dancing. CJ Milan, the founder and mastermind behind Reggae...