Share: South Los Angeles, 1992. Four LAPD officers were on trial for criminal excessive force, caught on video beating a man named Rodney King. Every Black person in the city was keeping an eye on the trial. Lynell George was a journalist at LA Weekly, working on an unrelated story about the Great Migration and the landscape of Louisiana migrants, which is one of the largest migrant groups to California from the south. “I’m sitting in this Louisiana [style] restaurant with this older woman and …
ASPCC’s ‘cozy’ Harry Potter party post-election is cringe
Share: My memories of ‘Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows’ are intense. Like millions of other millennials, I had been in line to buy the book at midnight on its release day, both younger siblings at my side. At the time, our parents were going through a divorce. So when we happily left the bookstore with our prize, we found ourselves caught in the middle of parental politics that left the three of us briefly homeless. It was 1:00 a.m. and we were welcome at …
Technology committee seeks instructors interested in AI closed captioning project
Share: The District Technology Committee is launching a pilot program in PCC’s Winter 2025 term to explore the possibility of AI close captions and transcripts of recorded materials, such as videos or professor’s recorded lectures. The committee is working with a grant from Echo Labs, a research laboratory developing AI-powered accessibility tools. The grant will allow them to work with up to 50 hours of recorded material. As of the committee’s meeting on Oct. 16, the committee is looking for instructors who would be interested …
Top 5: Let the Courier pick a movie for your Halloween party
Share: Picking the perfect movie for your Halloween party is an art in itself. There are a thousand things to consider: how scary is too scary? Do my guests appreciate gore? Do we want a movie we can laugh with, or will that kill the mood? Whatever your spooky needs, the Courier staff got together and figured out our collective favorite movies for the season. Every movie below had at least three Courier staffers excited to recommend it, and we even spent the weekend watching …
Pride Center students say yes to Halloween with Jordan Peele’s ‘Nope’
Share: Plastic pumpkins and cloth ghosts joined the collection of rainbows and Pride flags in the Pride Center on Tuesday, Oct. 29. Students got comfortable amid the decorations as the Center’s staff prepared the room for our spooky movie viewing. The bookshelf, along with its collection of gay histories and biographies, includes a collection of rulebooks for the fifth edition of Dungeons and Dragons. “That,” says a voice behind me as I browse the rulebooks, “Is how you know for sure there are gay nerds …
Fan faith in Yamamoto can move mountains
Share: The Dodgers just won the most important series of their entire season. Playoffs might be continuing, but after consecutive seasons of playoff disappointments, the National League Divisional Series had become a physical and psychological wall for the team and their fans. Why bother talking about Ohtani and the World Series if the Dodgers couldn’t even make it past the NLDS? Victory against the Padres was vital. A loss would show that nothing had changed, that the Dodgers were still irrelevant past October. So the …
Counting blessings, counting wins: Lancers streak continues into conference play
Share: The Lancers soccer squad has reached five wins in a row on Friday after a fast-paced victory over the Bakersfield College Renegades. But it was the timing of the win streak more than anything else that elevated this victory into a critical one. Yes, the Lancers had won the last four matches. But with the beginning of conference play scheduled for Tuesday, Friday’s match could change the tone of the whole season. Win, and the Lancers would be carrying the velocity of five wins …
From the Archive: Even in the 30’s, we knew Jackie Robinson was special
Share: [Editor’s Desk, 2024: When we reached the 1930s in this by-the-decade retrospective, we knew we wanted to find a story about Jackie Robinson. The college and city are both rightly proud of Robinson having been from here, but how much of that was obvious hindsight? We were concerned that our past articles might have been part of the racist system that marginalized black athletes. Did our historical peers respect Robinson as they should have? It turns out, the sports writers in our past knew …
Board approves meager money bump for PCC faculty
Share: The PCC Board of Trustees approved an agreement last month that will increase the salary of all college faculty, full-time and part-time, by 1.07%. Full-time faculty who perform services during the 2024-2025 academic year will receive an additional one-time payment of $2000. Part-time faculty who work in the semesters of Fall 2024 and Spring 2025 will receive an additional payment of $1000 per semester worked. The agreement between the Pasadena Area Community College District and the PCC Faculty Association follows a negotiation process that …
‘Carried on a million prayers’: Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson brings her story to LA
Share: In the darkness of the Wilshire Ebell Theater, Ketanji Brown Jackson describes when she was sworn in—the moment that Chief Justice Roberts immediately shifted from casual conversation to solemn gravitas. “Are you prepared to take the oath?” Roberts asked her. Jackson drew a deep breath to steady herself. She looked at the two Bibles she was swearing on. One was the Jackson family Bible, an heirloom from her parents. The other was the Bible once owned by John Marshall Harlan, which has been signed …