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Beats: Business, Tech, Startups, Art, Culture, Horror, Los Angeles, History, Crime, Gaming, Entertainment, VR, Food, Travel

See my Authory profile here for my most recent clips or select clips below:

What's Your Weirdest Niche Obsession? 

"At a Chicago board game cafe, I listened to presentations on forgotten Sanrio characters, brain-spotting to process trauma, and cemetery photography, interspersed with interactive quizzes on animal facts and etymology. That’s Show & Tell for Grown-Ups, where anyone can share their niche interest or current obsession. Founder Mary Doctor likens it to the rabbit holes we fall into on social media, but with the possibility of genuine connection." 

Forget LinkedIn, Vamo helps find “cracked” engineers on GitHub

"Bolun Li learned the struggle startups face recruiting top engineers when he founded Zogo, a financial literacy platform. Great coders, he told The Hustle, “are not great at marketing themselves” on LinkedIn. A lot of gifted candidates are left undiscovered, and that’s the problem Li’s latest startup, Vamo, is trying to solve. It’s an AI-powered B2B recruiting platform that surfaces top developers from their public GitHub repositories, where their raw code — not their pedigree — is on display." 

The Economics of Pumpkin Patches

“People have gravitated toward the odd stuff over the years: warts, odd shapes, different colors,” says Mark Craven (no relation to Wes — we asked) of Craven Farm in Snohomish, Washington. “You plant a little bit of everything because you never know what’s going to be hot that year.”

Koi Division Is the Fish-Themed Joy Division Cover Band the World Needs Right Now
Donning black clothes and plastic fish masks, they wind their way through Joy Division covers with modified lyrics that explore the daily, often baleful, goings-on of the sea. Their shows incorporate a bubble machine and display a beachy version of the iconic Unknown Pleasures album art behind them. Though it might seem as if they’re mocking, there is a reverence behind the humor.

Immersive Audio Allows for Virtual Trips and Visceral Thrills

You emerge from a warm pool into a bioluminescent cave. A woman suggests you let go of your cumbersome human body and sink into the soil, small and weightless. You’re inside someone’s lungs; they rise and fall, the thud of their heartbeat a comforting metronome.

Take ‘Buffy’ Star Amber Benson’s Tour of L.A.’s Witchiest Houses

Benson’s tour takes us to five “witch houses” from Culver City to Burbank. Their Storybook architecture makes them ideal settings for fantastical and otherworldly stories, though their actual histories are equally interesting. 

A Pop Culture History of Dracula

Dracula became a household monster in 1931, when Universal released its seminal horror flick of the same name, directed by Tod Browning and starring Hungarian-American actor Bela Lugosi in the title role. It is Lugosi’s Dracula that spawned legions of cape-wearing devotees and what some consider the first true goth rock anthem.

Popular L.A. Food Mashups and Why We Love Them

We still line up for Kogi’s beloved bulgogi burritos, while newcomer X’tiosu Kitchen’s fusion of Oaxacan and Lebanese cuisines makes waves in Boyle Heights. Yong Chen, a history professor at UC Irvine and the author of “Chop Suey USA: The Story of Chinese Food in America,” believes part of fusion food’s pull in L.A. is because Los Angeles (and the Southland in general) is “an important destination for immigrants.” We have a culinary diversity here that makes it easy to share. However, Chen notes that every cuisine is, in some way, a kind of fusion food.

A ‘Saw’ Maestro Goes to “Trippy” Places With Immersive ‘Theatre Macabre’

It’s hard to find an immersive show that grants its audience more than limited agency. Though often highly interactive, most shows barrel along without significant input from their viewers. That’s why Theatre Macabre from filmmaker Darren Lynn Bousman (Saws II, III, and IV) is so ambitious. It promises guests a series of choices that morph the narrative as they’re made, using a spiderweb of a script that employs about 40 characters and exceeds 400 pages.