Jessica Koslow

Jill Weiss Ippolito’s love story is the stuff movies are made of. The film synopsis would read: She was a kid in juvenile hall. Not once, but three times she fell from a second-story building. At 18, she broke her third lumbar and wore a back brace for a year. At age 29, she had to have her left arm rebuilt in metal and began practicing yoga to heal. Nick was a student in her class, where he developed a crush and a strong practice. They fell in love, married and founded the South Pasadena-based nonprofit, UpRising Yoga, which offers yoga life skills training to incarcerated youth.

So, about two months ago, when an invite to participate in 2026 America’s Favorite Couple (AFC) contest popped up as she was scrolling in the wee hours of the night, Ippolito thought, why not? She would love to share her story with Variety magazine, win $20,000 to help fund UpRising Yoga and have a dinner date with AFC Ambassadors Jeff and Emilie Goldblum. . . .

Read the entire article at Pasadena Weekly.

All Eagle Scouts must complete an Eagle Scout Project, but not every project catches the attention of the higher-ups at the Western Los Angeles County Council Scouting America. Seventeen-year-old Agustya Karadkar has been part of Troop 1 West Los Angeles for about 3 1/2 years. He is currently a senior at Loyola High School of Los Angeles and an Eagle Scout, the highest rank in the Scouting program of Scouting America. This summer, he spent his break leading a community donation drive to create care kits for children receiving treatment at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles (CHLA).

Recently, a member of Karadkar’s family became seriously ill, which steered the focus of his scout project in its current direction.

“It kind of woke me up to the realization that these kids may not be enjoying themselves because they’re going through treatment,” Karadkar said. “I’m hoping this will put a smile on their faces, a smile on their family’s faces, as they are tackling all these challenges in their lives.” . . .

Read the entire article at The Argonaut.

In 2014, Jade Marlin, a former minor league baseball player and current fashion designer, decided he wanted to give back to the community he loved: Pasadena. With his mom and a friend, he partnered with Shiners Children’s Hospital and Gold’s Gym for a Christmas toy giveaway. The following year, he officially launched Jade Marlin Foundation, and next Saturday, on Aug. 15, it will host its third annual backpack and school supplies giveaway event on North Lake Avenue.

Born and raised in Riverside, Marlin would often tell his mom that he wished they had moved to Pasadena.

“It’s just a beautiful city, the people—I love the vibe, the Rose Bowl,” he said. “I wanted to start my foundation in Pasadena. We gave out a thousand toys at the first giveaway, and next thing you know, I had so much love in Pasadena. I started reaching out to the city officials and networking at mixers. It’s like Pasadena is my second home—the City of Roses.”

Read the entire article at Pasadena Weekly.

Dre Ramirez is 35. She’s a fifth-generation Angeleno who lives in Downtown LA. After working in marketing for a decade building large-scale campaigns for brands that most people would recognize, one day, she realized she was spending eight months at a time behind a laptop. Her life was consumed with her art, and although she loved the career that she had built for herself, she was lonely. She hadn’t realized how isolating her work was or how quiet her life had become.

“I was like, I need to reach out and make friends,” Ramirez shared. “I just spent the last 10 years building a career and building experiences for all these people, and I somehow lost me in all of that.”

Posting on social media was already a big part of her job in content production. So, she figured, as embarrassing as it was, why not post looking for friends? . . .

Read the entire article at LA Downtown News.

Mark Ruegg is the youngest of 10 kids. That’s just the first fantastic fact about him. He has 21 nieces and nephews and 40-plus great-nieces and nephews. He was a dancer who traveled the world and fell into his current profession of child wrangling by chance. Most recently, he is a Stage 4 pancreatic cancer survivor. His latest scans show no detectable tumors in his pancreas or lymph nodes, and, in his doctors’ words, his liver looks “almost as good as new.”  

“It’s been pretty remarkable,” said Ruegg. “My oncologists and doctors can’t explain it. It’s been 2 1/2 years, and I’m showing no evidence of disease. Cancer has been the greatest gift of my entire life, and it’s changed my lifestyle.”

Ruegg grew up in Akron, Ohio, born nine years after his next youngest sibling. . . .

Read the entire article at The Argonaut.

Troy Alsobrook and David Thomas have fairly similar life stories. They are both LA natives who met playing football at Martin Luther King Jr. High in Riverside. They both moved to the desert to attend rival colleges, then to the Midwest, then back to LA — and both are passionate about beach clean-up, which their nonprofit, DAILY dEPOSITSx, has been hosting quarterly for the past three years in Playa del Rey. The next one is July 5.

Their differences are in the details: Alsobrook went to Mt. San Jacinto College and Thomas attended College of the Desert in Palm Desert. Thomas moved to Colorado. Alsobrook ended up in Kansas.

Back in LA, the two found themselves looking for outlets to maintain a healthy lifestyle. Their bond had always been over sports and physical activity. Thomas lived in Culver City and Alsobrook in Torrance, so Playa del Rey beach was a good middle ground meeting spot. . . .

Read the entire article at The Argonaut.

Caroline Paules and Karin Najarian are both young, ambitious and think about the local — and global — housing crisis a lot. At least eight hours each day. Both have been directly affected by the national emergency; Paules more directly as the occupant of the lone house standing on her block after the Eaton Fire in Altadena.

As a team of two, they are using different tactics to help solve the problem: Paules as an engineer and Najarian as an architect. They are the CEO and COO, respectively, of Nova Cottage Co., a new affordable housing startup headquartered at tech incubator Idealab Studio in Pasadena.

UN-Habitat predicts that by 2030, 40% of the world population (about 3 billion people) will not have access to adequate, safe and affordable housing. . . .

Read the entire article at Pasadena Weekly.

On Dec. 26, 1927, Hollywood’s elite arrived for the screening of the silent film, “My Best Girl” starring Mary Pickford, at the grand opening of DTLA’s United Artists Theatre on Broadway. Almost a century later, invited guests mingled inside the majestic movie palace to celebrate the relaunch of STILE DTLA, the design-forward lifestyle hotel in the storied United Artists building.

Food and drinks flowed inside the cultural-historic landmark as the hotel team explained the changes made to the property since 2023, when it officially changed its name from the Ace Hotel to STILE DTLA.

LA-based interior design firm Design, Bitches transformed the hotel’s 182 guest rooms, which now include skincare products made in Korea exclusively for STILE, Copper Cow Coffee and Harney & Sons tea. On the first and second floor, SparkHouse will soon offer state-of-the-art studios and collaborative workspaces through private membership. The rooftop bar, Somewhere Special, has been upgraded, and The Goodie Shop in the lobby, which includes a cassette library and Walkman listening program, has been revamped. . . .

Read the entire article at LA Downtown News.

After spending 28 years editing other people’s books — more than 500 across every nonfiction genre — Marisa Solis decided to write her own. She and her co-author, Elizabeth Dougherty, penned a book for the first time about writing a book for the first time.  

Solis and Dougherty will be reading from and signing “The Complete Expert-to-Author Guide: Plan, Write, and Publish Your Nonfiction Book” at Vroman’s Bookstore on July 14.

Although Solis is currently a freelance editor and book coach, she did not always think she would help other people express themselves with words. . . .

Read the entire article at Pasadena Weekly.

Anand Pandian was born and raised in the United States, and like many people, he has been increasingly concerned about the direction things are going in the country, especially as someone whose parents came to America with the hope of finding a better life for themselves and their children.

“The xenophobic, anti-immigrant rhetoric of these last years was disturbing to me,” said Pandian, the Krieger-Eisenhower professor of anthropology at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

He put his skills to work and did what he knew how: He wrote his fifth book, “Something Between Us: The Everyday Walls of American Life, and How to Take Them Down,” for which he will receive the 2026 Zócalo Book Prize on June 25 at ASU California Center Broadway. . . .

Read the entire article at LA Downtown News.