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Transpacific Routes:
Long Beach resident and community organizer Marin Yann has decided, after an entire decade of writing about it, to tell his story.
Cakewalk:
Growing up in the '70s, the Dodgers were my rock stars. Things have changed.
West Is Eden:
In these graduating times, cause for celebration and remembering: smeary handprints won't forever stay messy or small.
Where We Are:
The "undecorated shed" that was the mass-produced tract house changed the American landscape, with consequences that are still to be fully appreciated.
Where We Are:
| Image from the author's collection Bill Deverell handed me a book the other day, with the recommendation that the author had put together a good story. The book is Building Home: Howard F. Ahmanson and the Politics of...
West Is Eden:
We all crave reassurance, the knowledge that a scrap of us will last beyond the flare of our life.
Where We Are:
Skid Row is a "Petri dish" for cultivating human misery. That now includes a strain of tuberculosis that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had tagged as unique to downtown. What began as a "health crisis" has become a "moral crisis."
Transpacific Routes:
Only in America could people whose heritage hails from within and around the world's largest continent be considered a single demographic group.
Where We Are:
It's summer. Ladies are lunching and window-shopping. Limousines are lined up on Wilshire Boulevard. Chauffeurs are idling in front of Perino's.
Cakewalk:
I find that black support for marriage equality is real, but it's not a given--or a gimme.
Notes of a Native Daughter:
Susan Straight recalls the history of Riverside's Our Lady of Guadalupe and introduces the people who have kept the parish alive all these years.
Where We Are:
A professor of Architectural History takes my hometown tour, where the everyday nearly always fails to be ironic and the quotidian does not always disappoint.
Where We Are:
For a few hours this week, we (meaning our avatar Voyager 1) might had slipped the surly bonds of the solar system. It turns out we didn't.
Where We Are:
The Sahara mustard -- a fast-growing invasive weed -- has begun to crowd out desert wildflowers. Ecologies and economies are at risk.
Cakewalk:
Black L.A. could certainly use change. Maybe we're not thinking big enough.
Where We Are:
AEG is off the market, its leadership in disarray. What's to become of Farmer's Field? Only the NFL knows.
West Is Eden:
We are a strange and sometimes beautiful species.
Notes of a Native Daughter:
The Nova, primer-gray like raincloud, was an icon that everyone wanted to see, to honor the owner who would never finish restoring it. Officer Crain was sitting in the passenger seat of his patrol car 32 days ago when he was shot and killed by former LAPD Officer Christopher Dorner. Hundreds of people showed up Sunday for a memorial car show.
Where We Are:
How long, like a dull echo, does a killing reverberate? For a death in an onion field in Kern County, it's been fifty years.
Where We Are:
Out on the "great flat" of the Los Angeles Basin, winners and losers in dozens of city elections were tentatively adding up what their voters intended.
SoCal Focus is a daily blog about the people, places and issues in and around Southern California.
I Am Los Angeles: Strings of Success
Sasha is content just to be living his life on his own terms, doing something he thoroughly enjoys: building and playing guitars.
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