Parents eager to know when their children can shed their masks in school learned Monday they’d have to wait another two weeks for an answer. Dr. Mark Ghaly, the state’s top health official, said he would reassess the data on Feb. 28 and possibly offer a future date for easing school mask rules, even as millions of Californians will be free to go maskless nearly everywhere else starting Wednesday. The decision sets California apart from other Democratic-led states that have moved to end their school mask mandates. A.P. | L.A. Times

Politico: “Newsom cannot go where teachers unions aren’t ready.”

Other coronavirus developments:

The Western drought is the worst in at least 1,200 years.

New research found no megadrought on record as severe as the 22-year period starting in 2000. Until last year, the record was held by a megadrought in the late 1500s, but the intense drying of 2021 pushed the current drought into new territory. Park Williams, a UCLA bioclimatologist, said we should expect it to get even worse. “It really is time for us to get real about how much water there is for us to use,” he said. National Geographic | N.Y. Times

Remember the abundant snowpack of December? It’s plummeted to 73% of normal. @Weather_West | Water.ca.gov

UC Berkeley may have to cut its fall 2022 class by one-third, or about 3,000 seats, and forgo $57 million in tuition after a judge ordered an enrollment freeze, the university said Monday. The ruling resulted from a lawsuit brought by a neighborhood group that accused UC Berkeley of exacerbating the city’s housing crisis. The university houses only 22% of its undergrads and 9% of its graduate students, the lowest rate in the UC system. Berkeleyside | L.A. Times

On Monday, San Francisco’s district attorney, Chesa Boudin, accused the city’s police force of using DNA from rape victims to identify suspects in unrelated crimes. He cited the case of a woman recently arrested for a property crime based on her DNA collected years earlier during a rape examination. No one appeared to defend the practice: Police Chief Bill Scott called Boudin’s comments “concerning,” and Supervisor Hillary Ronen said she was already preparing legislation to limit how DNA evidence is used. S.F. Standard | SFist

Peter Thiel, the Sillicon Valley billionaire, has reemerged as a key financier of the Make America Great Again movement. Last month, he hosted a fundraiser at his Miami Beach compound for a conservative candidate challenging Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming. She was the face of “the traitorous 10,” Thiel said, according to people with knowledge of the event. All of them had to be replaced, he said, by conservatives loyal to the former president. N.Y. Times

In a legal complaint against UC Davis, a doctors group accused researchers of subjecting monkeys to gruesome experiments funded by Elon Musk’s company Neuralink. In a typical example, one monkey had holes drilled in its skull and electrodes implanted in its brain, the complaint said. Of 23 monkeys, at least 15 died or were euthanized, according to the group. Musk has said he envisions Neuralink one day making humans hyperintelligent and allowing paralyzed people to walk again. Sacramento Bee | KCRA

When any employee leaves Apple, the company records their final job title as “associate,” a junior role — no matter if they were senior engineers or managers. That practice, say employment experts, is bizarre, and it causes problems for former workers as they try to advance their careers in new jobs. A spokesman declined to say why Apple does it. One writer offered a guess: “Apple isn’t fond of losing talent to competitors, and is willing to discourage it however they can.” Washington Post | Input Magazine

Over the summer, city officials projected optimism after clearing the homeless encampments that crowded the boardwalk in Venice Beach. But locals and activists say while the tents are gone, dozens of people who rejected offers of housing slipped away, taking up residence in alleys, joining encampments that already existed, and starting a new one on the median of Venice Boulevard. “The crime hasn’t stopped, and the sound of people in need hasn’t stopped,” said resident Cari Bjelajac. L.A. Times

“We’re often ignored. We’re often mistreated.”

Sometimes passengers yell at him, an LA Metro bus driver said. Some have spit in his face. So he’s not surprised that LA Metro, which collected $1 billion in pandemic funding this year, has been unable to hire enough drivers at a starting wage of $17.75 an hour. The agency is 450 drivers short. In December, it hired 11 people — and 32 left. KCRW

The Super Bowl champion Rams will parade through Los Angeles on Wednesday, but some are calling for a joint celebration. The Lakers and Dodgers both won championships in 2020, but never got parades because of the pandemic. On Monday, Cody Bellinger and LeBron James were among those publicly supporting the idea. “City of Champions,” James tweeted. L.A. Times | CBS Sports

The photo of Los Angeles above was captured in January by the photographer Anas Hinde. It offers evidence for Lawrence Weschler’s classic 1998 paean to Los Angeles, “L.A. Glows,” in which he argues that soul of the city is its light. An excerpt:

“The day of that infamous slow-motion Bronco chase — actually, it was already past sundown here in New York as I sat before the glowing TV in our darkening kitchen, transfixed by the unfurling stream of bob-and-wafting helicopter images, hot tears streaming down my cheeks — my eight-year-old daughter gazed for a while at the screen and then over at me, at which point, baffled and concerned, she inquired, ‘What’s wrong, Daddy? Did you know that guy?’

“‘What guy?’ I stammered, surfacing from my trance, momentarily disoriented. ‘Oh, no, no. I didn’t know the guy. I don’t give a damn about the guy. It’s that light! That’s the light I keep telling you girls about.’ You girls: her mother and her. That light: the late-afternoon light of Los Angeles — golden pink off the bay through the smog and onto the palm fronds. A light I’ve found myself pining for every day of the nearly two decades since I left Southern California.”

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Weschler revisted his essay in a 2016 video. 👉 New Yorker (~5 mins)