Panicked, and still at home, I whip through our email exchange to double-check the time of our rendezvous; I was certain we had set the time for 6 p.m.

We had. But Clarke, professional in every way, simply arrived early—I had warned him that the entrance to the bar in L.A.’s Toluca Lake neighborhood is a bit tricky to find—the only signage is a red light over a door in an alley.

When I arrive, I spot Clarke on a leather couch hunched over a tome about the history of Marvel Comics.

With a big grin, Clarke shakes my hand and explains that he didn’t mind getting there early—he’s getting school credit for his MBA course at American Jewish University to read the book on comic book history.

Comic books are not merely entertainments in themselves—they are the foundation of much of our TV, our films, our culture. Clarke and his partner, Walter Bryant, hope to diversify the fictional landscape of the entertainment industry in all media, starting with their comic book stories, animated content, and books targeting young adults.

Clark and Bryant were frustrated with not only the lack of ethnic and gender diversity in comics, but also the reliance on violence, explicit language and sex to keep readers interested.

With this in mind, they decided to try something shockingly out-of-step with mainstream comics: Rely on a compelling story, complete with heroes who fall well outside the bounds of the archetypal characters common in the comic book world.

“We wanted to see women and people of color have the starring roles in comic books,” he says. “I mean, every time a magic ring or hammer falls from the sky, it can’t go to the same white guy in New York. By the numbers, there should be way more Indian and Chinese superheroes, so we decided to get into the comic game to change it ourselves.”

A quick Google search of “women in nonviolent comics” makes it clear that if you’re a young teen (or the parent of one) seeking any sort of well-written fantasy or sci-fi series that is nonviolent with strong female or ethnic characters and also religiously secular, there’s very little to choose from.

And while Marvel Comics has a series of comics for younger teens, they still follow the same white-male-centric tropes as the industry standards. This is why Clarke’s stories are paving the way for a new type of superhero story.

Clarke, the 25-year-old son of a pastor, grew up (and still lives) in Arleta, a small L.A. community adjacent to Pacoima. He went to Los Angeles Baptist High School and then received his undergraduate degree in criminology at Cal State Northridge.

So how did Clarke, who planned to go into federal law enforcement, end up pursuing an MBA and writing a comic book series?

The recession.

“While I was in school pursuing criminology, the federal government had a hiring freeze and the economy collapsed. I even had an internship with the sheriff’s office on a really cool task force, and they told me, ‘We like what you do. Can you do it for free?'”

He declined the offer.

Instead, halfway through college, Clarke decided to start his own business, a “nerd-news website thing” with his friend, Bryant. It was never meant to be anything other than a fun side project. On one small tab on the site, they created their own comics. Soon, the tab grew so quickly that it cannibalized the rest of the website, and Off Shoot Comics was born.

Clarke, who acts as head writer, comics creator, and chief creative officer, tells me Off Shoot is celebrating its fifth anniversary this year. While Clarke had always loved writing, he never seriously thought about pursuing it professionally. But when the Batman film, The Dark Knight hit the billion-dollar mark, he re-evaluated. “I thought, some guy wrote that out of his face, so let me go and try that!”

The comic book industry is a multi-billion dollar-money-making machine, with Marvel (purchased by Disney for $4 billion dollars) and DC Comics (owned by Time Warner) holding the lion’s share of the market.

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It’s nothing I haven’t heard before, but it sounds weightier coming from the president of nonprofit public radio station KUSC-FM; classical music, after all, stridently resists change. The bar Barnes has chosen, The Stocking Frame, looks brand-new, with high ceilings, polished wood floors, and a studiously hip vibe. There’s even a plant growing out of a patch of dirt next to our table.

Barnes tells me that the pace of change in L.A. suits her style. “I love change. I like to do new things. I’m not a maintenance manager,” she says. “If someone needs a maintenance manager, I’m not their person. I’ll go crazy.”

Barnes grew up in North Carolina. “I joke that my background’s 100 percent white trash—but it’s not a joke,” she says, explaining that her father didn’t have a birth certificate and grew up without heat, electricity, or running water. Her mother was the daughter of a West Virginia coal miner.

“Music became a way of expressing emotion in an environment where it was not the norm,” she tells me.

Barnes started playing clarinet in fifth grade and studied the instrument through graduate school. She was planning a career teaching clarinet at the college level when she was diagnosed with TMJ, a jaw disorder that made long hours of practice painful.

She switched gears to study musicology at Notre Dame University, but soon discovered that academia wasn’t the right fit either. So, armed with two master’s degrees and knowledge of what she didn’t want to do, Barnes turned to What Color Is Your Parachute? Following advice from the job-hunters’ bible, she called around to interview people in career fields she thought might be interesting. She connected with the program director at the classical public station in Chapel Hill, where she grew up—and found a job in a small town in northwestern Iowa, where “there were many more ears of corn than people.” That was almost 30 years ago, and Barnes has been in radio ever since.

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He rides a motorcycle, but Jesse Gomez, dressed in a dark, collared shirt and fiddling with his smartphone at Mercado, his Santa Monica eatery, doesn’t strike me as an outlaw. And, I soon find out, contrary to what Bourdain would have me believe, the restaurant business is no longer the Wild West, either.

Bourdain described degenerate kitchen staff and managers serving up nearly spoiled seafood to clueless customers. But at the four restaurants Gomez owns in Los Angeles—his family’s Highland Park restaurant, El Arco Iris; downtown’s Yxta; and two locations of Mercado in Santa Monica and Fairfax—his customers are incredibly savvy. “We can’t put mediocre stuff out there,” Gomez explains. When it comes to food, drinks, and service, today’s diners know what they want and what they’re willing to pay for it.

Although he was born into the business and grew up working alongside his family at El Arco Iris, which his grandparents started in the 1960s, Gomez is a restaurant owner for and of our current, food-obsessed age. He’s a serious businessman who loves the creative side of running restaurants—purchasing the art on the walls, collaborating with architects and designers, and occasionally offering input on a dish. And although he operates restaurants all over town, including a new “Mexican seafood joint” opening in Eagle Rock this summer, he’s still obsessively focused on the details. He loves having his hands in the food, the drinks, the managing of people, and crunching the numbers to figure out how much you can charge for a cocktail if you buy a bottle of tequila for $20. With that smartphone in his hands, he shows me how he can adjust Mercado’s lights and music up and down as we sit in a booth in the restaurant’s still empty mezzanine at 5 p.m. on a Monday evening.

This is technically Gomez’s day off, although he interviewed a potential manager for the new restaurant over lunch, and he treats our drinks like he’s working, drinking water as I sip a blood orange margarita. After living in Los Feliz and Silver Lake for over a decade, he recently moved to Venice. “I got the idea in my head after we opened in Santa Monica and I was here seven days a week,” he says. “I envision, on a Saturday night, working here, and starting my weekend going home, hanging out, and enjoying being close to the water.”

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The elevator at Santa Monica Place has a dedicated button for the Redwood Grille, and I am deposited directly into the restaurant foyer. It’s no food court. I’m surrounded by sleek wood and glass, big brown leather banquettes, and windows that stream in light through palm trees. Stephen Francis Jones is sitting at a table inside, but we head to the back patio, which has a nautical vibe, thanks to dark blue cushions and sail-shaped awnings that provide both shade and drama.

Jones explains that the restaurant’s Canadian owners didn’t want diners to feel that they were on the third floor of the mall (though I personally like the view of the Third Street Promenade from up here). He tells me that once the sun goes down, the birds of paradise in planters around the patio cast shadows on the sails above us. The sails wink at the proximity of the ocean, and Jones adds that the design is also inspired by the contoured, curved ceilings at the new Tom Bradley International Terminal at LAX.

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“It’s very New York for L.A.,” Bojarsky tells me, explaining why she likes the restaurant. “It’s a glorious thing to be in an artistic space that’s sort of open and cool and imaginative.”

I want to talk to Bojarsky about why the people of L.A. don’t give back to Los Angeles—and about what they do care about. She’s made a career working out both sides of this knot. Right now, she runs a salon series, the Foreign Policy Roundtable, which brings entertainment higher-ups together around world issues; she’s an editorial consultant for Los Angeles magazine and their CityThink platform on the future of L.A.; and she advises broadcasting entrepreneur Norman J. Pattiz on his work with the Academy of Music at Hamilton High School—he funded a new auditorium—and the University of California, where he is a regent.

For Bojarsky, being part of the city’s civic culture is a no-brainer. At 8, she was handing out buttons for Robert F. Kennedy outside Nate ’n’ Al’s in Beverly Hills. She otherwise missed the activism of the 1960s, but Bojarsky tells me that she and her friends “were raised to believe in tikkun olam”—the Hebrew phrase that means “repair the world.” She and a friend, as kids, dreamed of being nonprofit lawyers in Carmel—and living in a one-bedroom rat-infested hovel there.

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The low-slung, shingled roof of A Restaurant sits at the entrance to the stretch of PCH known as Mariner’s Mile—about the best place in Southern California to hear tales from the sea. And Grant Livingstone is just the person to tell those tales.

“As a sailor, this is my kind of bar,” the compact 56-year-old Aliso Viejo resident declares, setting down his Johnnie Walker Red, neat. “This place has got a story to tell. It’s got character. It’s got depth.”

Livingstone’s parents are from Scotland, but he was born in Inglewood and grew up in Huntington Beach and Irvine. (He does bust out a perfect brogue when he’s telling the one about almost getting in a bar fight in Glasgow during a family reunion.) The son of a merchant mariner, he’s been at sea his whole life—much of the time thousands of miles from shore. But for the past quarter-century or so, his job has involved getting nail-bitingly close to shore.

Livingstone is a senior harbor pilot for Jacobsen Pilot Service, the private company that holds the exclusive contract to steer massive ships into and out of the Port of Long Beach. All those massive cargo ships and tankers you see anchored within sight of shore every time you go to the Aquarium of the Pacific? They’re waiting for a little pilot’s launch to pull up alongside and deliver Livingstone or one of his colleagues, who steer these 950-foot-long behemoths safely up to the pier.

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“Yo, Is This Racist?,” created on a whim in 2011, is a fairly simple operation that is intended to be serious but funny. One part is a Tumblr blog, updated roughly every couple of hours, consisting of user-generated questions about whether something is racist or not. Ti’s answers are usually brief, rarely polite, and often sprinkled with profanities. (One example: “Just be like, ‘Yo, I don’t talk to fucking racist assholes.’”)

The other component of Ti’s project is a regular 10-minute podcast on which Ti and a guest, usually a comedian, answer a series of questions left on voicemail by anonymous listeners. “If you have to ask a stranger on the Internet whether or not something is racist, then it is probably racist,” Ti jokes.

It’s a Saturday afternoon, and we are the youngest customers by a good 40 years at Taix, a French restaurant and lounge. “It’s a weird place,” Ti says with a smile. Taix has been a fixture of Echo Park since the 1920s. It is a dimly lit place with exposed brick walls and a glass wine cellar next to the bar. We are sitting in leather chairs at a round table in the lounge. Behind the bar, a flat-screen TV plays sports highlights, flanked by the tops of decorative wine barrels. Ti started coming to Taix with friends to watch the presidential debates last fall. Now he just likes to come here to hang out. It’s close to his house.

On this day, Ti has come from the gym, wearing jeans and a white T-shirt with a gray chevron design. He leaves his sunglasses on the table next to his beer and looks a little flustered at first. But he quickly focuses as he describes his work.

Ti is somewhat vague about his definition of the term “racism”—perhaps deliberately so, since defining the term’s boundaries is part of what keeps his project going—but it’s safe to say he rarely errs on the side of narrowness. Racism can encompass everything from the horrific, like crosses on fire, to the trivial, like giving your pet a Japanese name. While sociologists might make distinctions between terms like “prejudice” and “racism,” Ti prefers not to get too academic about it. He tries to keep the conversation casual enough to avoid “spending the entire time arguing about the definition of the word.”

When I ask him whether he thinks the term “racist” is overused, he runs his hands through his hair and thinks. But I sense the answer is pretty obvious to him. “The only people who feel the word racist is overused are people who are doing racist stuff,” he finally says. “If you are the victim of racism, it’s not used enough.”

Creating this blog hasn’t changed Ti’s generally left-leaning politics. “There’s probably a good chance that my views are going to stay the same, if not continue to radicalize,” he says with a laugh. But he stresses that he is not a professional; he doesn’t do research, and a lot of the guests on the podcast are just friends of his, although people like comedian Paul F. Tompkins occasionally stop by.

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As long as I’ve known him, the skinny kid from Kansas has been cheery. We first met more than 20 years ago, when he was working with a friend of mine in Chicago. He was always the cheeriest guy at the party, quick-witted but never mean or bitter. Since then, we’ve seen each other a few times, and, as with most friends you meet in the crucible of youth, the friendship is well forged and picks up easily. He’s smiling even though I’ve asked him to meet me at a bar, rudely forgetting that he’s quit drinking.

The Backstage in Culver City looks like an outdated ’70s-style saloon from the neighborhoods of a Midwestern city, ripped and plunked into sunny L.A.—dark wood, dark leather, dark paneling, tiny pool table, karaoke machine, insufficient lighting, and all. It’s one of the few likable bars I have found in Los Angeles, and I spent many nights here escaping the media circus of the O.J. trial back in the ’90s. In honor of those times, I order a vodka and cheap beer. Lehr orders an O’Doul’s.

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Don’t get me wrong. I don’t mean to suggest that Baer is claustrophobic or that the Denver native is eager to be stuck in a New England village. But a small town cut off indefinitely (or at least long enough to serve as fodder for 13 first-season episodes) is as enticing a laboratory for a public health wonk as it is for a storyteller—of which Baer is equal parts.

“The meme of being stuck under the dome allows us to explore in stark ways how we relate to finite space and resources,” Baer says over a beer at Hollywood’s Cat & Fiddle Pub.

We sit outside by the courtyard fountain, on a chilly June evening that has me wondering if there’ll be heat lamps under the dome. The pleasant Cat & Fiddle compound, more Mediterranean than English in feel, was built in 1929 as a movie studio wardrobe, then went on to be a commissary for nearby studios. Its website boasts that scenes of the “original Casablanca” were filmed here, which begs the question of whether there was more than one Casablanca.

It’s a bit of a fluke that Baer—an Emmy-nominated executive producer and showrunner of NBC’s ER and Law & Order: Special Victims Unit and CBS’ A Gifted Man—is a Hollywood star. A Harvard M.D. (with two other Harvard master’s degrees under his belt, in sociology and education), Baer claims that the plan was to be a pediatrician in Boston and that he’d probably be doing that now if “John” hadn’t called.

The John in question was Baer’s buddy John Wells, ER’s executive producer, who asked Baer to help him write a medical drama that would be authentic, medically and scientifically. “John was the first one to invite doctors into the writing room,” Baer says, a practice that is now standard.

Baer spent seven years on ER, followed by 11 producing Law & Order: SVU. For him, the challenge and opportunity was always to deploy storytelling on behalf of public health or pressing societal problems. He talks about episodes almost like editorials, with a takeaway message delivered in a compelling storyline. ER was an unparalleled vehicle for educating the public about breast cancer, organ transplants, emergency contraception, and any number of other medical issues—often in conjunction with local NBC newscasts following each episode.

I ask Baer if this is the golden age of TV, and his answer is an emphatic no. The days when a show like ER could regularly bring together 30 or 40 million viewers are a distant memory, and Baer doesn’t buy into the conventional wisdom that the proliferation of niche outlets has resulted in more sophisticated content across the board. He says network shows like ER, Hill Street Blues, and NYPD Blue were as edgy and groundbreaking in their day as the cable fare being obsessed over today by far fewer people.

“Yes, there may be more violence and nudity,” Baer acknowledges, “but I don’t necessarily see more wrestling with tough issues.” Corporate malfeasance is one broad subject Baer finds all too absent on television. 

SVU tackled gun control and rape kits; ER portrayed a Mormon woman with seven kids getting an abortion and was the “first and last” show to feature an HIV-positive character. Homeland gets deserved kudos for depicting a bipolar character with a great deal of nuance, but, as Baer points out, “we did that on ER with Sally Field.”

Baer does tip his hat to The Wire. “The Wire had operatic quality,” he says. “It managed to be both larger than life and ring true. And it provided an eye into worlds we hadn’t seen before.”

The fact that Under the Dome has debuted in late June is itself a testament to how much TV viewing has changed. When Baer’s SVU first went on the air in 2002, it had an unglamorous 10 p.m. Friday slot yet still commanded a bigger audience than any TV drama today.

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Chaudhary was the official White House videographer during Barack Obama’s first term. In other words, he was like your annoying friend who is constantly taking photos and posting them to Facebook, except he was capturing history.

No matter your politics, it’s hard not to think, “Wow, hanging with the president all day and shooting YouTube videos. How’d he get that sweet gig?” The simple answer: By being a total nerd in his youth.

Chaudhary attended a Junior State of America summer session as a 16-year-old and stayed in touch with a girl he met there named Kate Albright-Hanna. Kate went on to become a producer at CNN, the first to shoot her own video, most famously footage of Howard Dean’s notorious “scream” on the evening of the 2004 Iowa caucus. Four years later, she signed up to work for the Obama campaign.

This is part of a storied but accelerating tradition, of course, of political leaders bringing in journalists to help shape their story. And in this age of social media, political campaigns and the White House often cut out the middlemen (the pack of journalists trailing politicians) and tell their stories directly to the American people.

To help in this effort, Kate called her nerd camp buddy, Arun, who’d been inspired by Michael Moore to combine his interests in film and political advocacy.

Arun was then teaching at New York University. He signed up, thinking simply, “I can help.”

At first, Kate and Arun were the official documentarians of the campaign. But when they were recording a simple birthday message Obama made for a volunteer (a video meant for an internal audience), they realized, as Chaudhary puts it, “that the in-between was more interesting.” They decided to focus less on formal events and more on the intimate moments that would make potential supporters feel like they were a part of the campaign.

Chaudhary would wait for the then-senator to be introduced at rallies, and when the crowd was at maximum volume, the candidate would turn to the camera to say hi. I asked if Obama, famously private, minded the ever-present camera. “No,” says Chaudhary, “he got it right away,’ recognizing the impact intimacy would have on his relationship to the voter.

Once in the White House, the job changed, as did Chaudhary’s wardrobe, up to a point. Typically a very casual dresser, Chaudhary wore a suit, but kept wearing his low-top sneakers, and his explosion of hair. He no longer reported to the communications team. He was official archivist, reporting up through the non-political staff.

As our second beer arrives, Chaudhary tells me that presidents can’t really say no to the White House photographer. Presidents have adjusted how they used those photos while in office. (Harding and LBJ made themselves more available; Nixon and Clinton were more controlling, though no less interested in trying to use images to their political benefit). But video was still so new that there were no rules, and President Obama could say no. That Chaudhary had been on the campaign made the president more receptive. Chaudhary, in the course of killing all my hopes for gossip about the president off-camera, says, “He’s the same guy in private and in public,” so he didn’t worry it would catch him doing something wrong.

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