Author Archives: Jess Rodgers

Everybody went to Africa this summer. Just turn to E! or flip through the pages of Us Weekly and you’ll see exactly what I mean. Brad Pitt did a TV special on poverty and AIDS in Africa. Ashley Judd is in Self Magazine dishing about her recent AIDS awareness trip to Africa with singer India.Arie. […]

It was about this time last year that I learned how to knit. My roommates, K. and K.T., and I had moved into our new apartment. And since we were all going home for most of August, we didn’t want to set up the cable before we left. Naturally, we were ecstatic to find that […]

In 1997, a war broke in a rural Chinese province near the Tibetan border. But it wasn’t a war over politics or religion ““ it was a battle between towns over who had the right to declare itself Shangri-La, the place that inspired the fictional town in James Hilton’s 1933 novel “Lost Horizon,” in order […]

Walking down from the dorms to go to places like Starbucks and Diddy Riese was considered a big Friday night excursion when I first came to UCLA. I would walk down with a big herd of freshmen and we felt as though we had really gone out and done something exciting ““ but maybe that […]

When second-year computer science student Angie Yen was looking up the lineup to WHFS’s annual music festival, she was startled to learn the station no longer existed. A Spanish language station had succeeded the Washington/Baltimore rock station’s frequency on the FM dial. But WHFS still has a presence on the airwaves of an FM talk […]

Cellist Maya Beiser prefers not to have an orchestra or even a piano back her up during her solo performances because she’d rather do the solo lines, vocals and accompaniments herself. The cellist, notorious for playing to multi-track recordings while singing, will perform, among other pieces, the Los Angeles premiere of Steve Reich’s “Cello Counterpoint” […]

The first time Michael Alden saw the music video for his group’s country Billboard chart single, he was in Dykstra Hall. Alden, a third-year music student, along with his sisters, identical twins Lauren Mills and Dana Burke, who graduated from UCLA in 2002, make up Malibu Storm ““ a country group whose success has snowballed […]