Mehammed Amadeus Mack

Since Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses earned him a death threat, the fatwa has come to symbolize fundamentalist Islam. What was once simply a religious ruling or opinion, often issued in response to a specific query, the fatwa has increasingly become a tool for advancing personal, pragmatic, and political agendas. This......

Since Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses earned him a death threat, the fatwa has come to symbolize fundamentalist Islam. What was once simply a religious ruling or opinion, often issued in response to a specific query, the fatwa has increasingly become a tool for advancing personal, pragmatic, and political agendas. This......

If you’ve ever been fishing for radio stations on the return end of a road trip, catching the evening Metropolis signal on KCRW means you’ve re-entered the L.A. orbit, with all the spacey connotations that it entails. I started listening to Metropolis, hosted by Jason Bentley, in my latter high......

Long before the Venice canals became a red-tiled, Spanish villa retirement paradise, but around the time when 500 of our beloved and diseased ducks were murdered by the Department of Fish and Game, my neighborhood used to have edges, not hedges. “Don’t you mess with the heroin-addict lady at the......