UCLA In the News August 24, 2020

UCLA In the News lists selected mentions of UCLA in the world’s news media. Some articles may require registration or a subscription to view. See more UCLA In the News.

MGM remakes Orion Pictures | New York Times

But power in Hollywood still belongs almost exclusively to white men. “There are almost no people of color in the film industry who have the power to say, ‘This movie is getting made and by this person,’” said Ana-Christina Ramón, an author of studies about Hollywood hiring that are published annually by the University of California, Los Angeles.

Goldman Sachs gets its own font | New York Times

David Nimmer, a UCLA professor and a lawyer who has argued copyright issues before the Supreme Court, said he didn’t think Goldman would ever try to enforce the disparagement clause…. “This would be like an author saying anyone can quote from her book, unless it’s in a negative review. There’s no court that I know that has applied a strictly anti-First Amendment view squelching criticism based on copyright law. And I hope they would draw a line in the sand.”

What stickers reveal about Mexican American music | NPR’s “All Things Considered”

Agustin Gurza of UCLA’s Frontera Collection has been studying stickers affixed to old 78 rpm records. It has allowed him to uncover a history of Mexican American music in the United States.

How will Kamala Harris influence voters? | KPCC-FM

“I think that we saw the record-breaking fundraising after VP Biden announced Senator Harris as his running mate. I think that’s going to create a war chest that can really penetrate all voters during a coronavirus pandemic where it’s frankly not easy to vote for all Americans,” said UCLA’s Sonja Diaz. (Diaz was also interviewed about the Democratic National Convention on KTLA-TV.)

Democratic National Convention concludes | KCAL-TV

“The whole convention has been trying to create a big tent to invite people from the left side of the spectrum, the center, and even the Republican side of the spectrum. They’d done a good job at making that case to the American people. I think optimism and hope and possibility is what Joe Biden is all about,” said UCLA’s Zev Yaroslavsky.

In El Salvador, Tampa company plays major role | Tampa Bay Times

In the 1950s and 1960s, El Salvador was touted in international investment circles as a source of cheap labor, said Cecilia Menjivar, a sociology professor at the University of California, Los Angeles who specializes in Central American studies. “This has always been understood as a very unequal relationship between the two countries,” she said.

The risk of preterm birth rises near gas flaring | The Conversation opinion

(Commentary co-written by UCLA’s Lara Cushing) Low-income communities and communities of color here bear the brunt of the energy industry’s pollution, our research shows. And we now know those risks also extend to the unborn. Our latest study documents how women living near gas flaring sites have significantly higher risks of giving birth prematurely than others, and that this risk falls mainly on Latina women.

How to manage the risks of pandemic-era child care | NPR

“Everything is about risk mitigation right now,” says Dr. Anne Rimoin, a UCLA Fielding School of Public Health epidemiologist who specializes in emerging infectious diseases. “So you have to think carefully about where you’re putting your kids and who’s taking care of them and make the best decision that you can based on the options available to you.”

Have L.A.’s homeless people dodged a COVID-19 catastrophe? | Los Angeles Times

“Social distancing is what everyone does with homeless people,” said UCLA associate professor Randall Kuhn, co-author with Culhane of the early paper. (UCLA’s Anne Rimoin and Dr. Robert Kim-Farley are also quoted.)

What campuses can learn from COVID testing results | CNBC

Dr. Russell Buhr, assistant professor at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA says there are several additional lessons schools should learn. “First, unsanctioned socialization is going to happen no matter what. You can reduce it by enforcing with severe penalties, but even then it will happen,” he says. “Second, we can’t let perfect be the enemy of better. Harm reduction is a very well-established technique in public health promotion that could go a long way here. Third, without the appropriate testing and contact tracing, and without wide-scale adoption and availability of things like face coverings and masks, this will be a lot worse.”

What reopening might (safely) look like | KPCC-FM’s “AirTalk”

“The governor has set some standards and criteria to be met. We want to be below the 100 infections per 100,000. And we’re still, in L.A., 239 per 100,000. So we have a ways to go,” said UCLA’s Dr. Robert Kim-Farley (approx. 1:35 mark).

Eastern medicine on the western frontier | LAist

“Most people in this country only relay the idea that Chinese medicine is acupuncture and acupuncture is pain control,” said Dr. Ka-Kit Hui, the director of UCLA’s Center for East-West Medicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine. “A lot of people do not realize that Chinese herbal medicine can be used to treat infections [such as SARS].”

Belarus, explained: How Europe’s last dictator could fall | The Conversation

Daniel Treisman, a political scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, analyzed 218 episodes when autocracy was replaced by a more democratic system between 1800 and 2015 and found that in three-quarters of cases the path to democratization included one or more mistakes by the incumbent. The most common errors are based on faulty information and miscalculating the outcome of a problematic situation.

Why some people get terribly sick from COVID-19 | Scientific American

“It goes from a fire hose at eight years old to a leaky, dripping faucet when you are 80,” explains immunologist Kenneth Dorshkind, a professor of pathology and laboratory medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles. Older adults maintain populations of these essential immune cells in the lymph nodes and spleen, but “they develop defects with age, so they don’t function as well,” he says.

The hunt for COVID-19 treatments has researchers optimistic | Medical Xpress

We’re making headway, and it’s through tremendous collaboration—just an all-hands-on-deck type of approach,” said Dr. Judith Currier, chief of the division of infectious diseases in the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles. Already, she said, there have been promising studies on remdesivir, which stops the virus from replicating, and dexamethasone, a steroid that helps fight inflammation.

Older adults with depression show resilience during pandemic | ScienceDaily

“We thought they would be more vulnerable to the stress of COVID because they are, by CDC definition, the most vulnerable population,” said Helen Lavretsky, M.D., a professor-in-residence of psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences at the Jane and Terry Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA. “But what we learned is that older adults with depression can be resilient. They told us that coping with chronic depression taught them to be resilient.”