University of Michigan

Los Angeles Has America's Most Polluted Air?

L.A is the capital of many things. Few of them are good things. At least not lately, it seems. A day after it was announced that Los Angeles is America's traffic-congestion Mecca once again (breaking news, that), we bring you the American Lung Association's annual "Most Polluted Cities" list:

UCLA Is A Top 5 Value Among American Public Universities, Princeton Review Says

There are times in life when cheaper is not necessarily better: when you're choosing a doctor, a life-mate or, perhaps, an institution of higher learning. In this case, we'll give UCLA props. It keeps scoring big lately: The Westwood campus was recently named one of the best schools in the world by ... More >>

USC Professor Uses Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit to Teach Students About War

When Professor Patrick James was 13, he picked up The Lord of the Rings. It took him less than three days to finish reading the trilogy. Years passed and James entered academia. Although his discipline is international relations, he wanted to bring the books that captured his attention to the class ... More >>

Flamin' Hot Cheetos Under Fire: Schools Seek to Ban the Spicy "Crack" Snack

School districts in California, New Mexico and Illinois are trying to ban the popular snack "food" Flamin' Hot Cheetos because they say it is a health hazard to students. That includes elementary schools in Pasadena -- the principal of Andrew Jackson Elementary there told KTLA News that if students ... More >>

Bicycle Friendly Award For Los Angeles, Home of The Hit-And-Run

A recent University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute study found that twice as many cyclists are killed by cars in L.A. as they are nationally. Bad news for the bike set? Not at L.A. City Hall, the home of magical thinking. City officials planned to announce this morning that ...

University of California Urges U.S. Supreme Court to Uphold Affirmative Action

Just call us the Bleeding Heart State: Yesterday, leading up to a U.S. Supreme Court decision in Texas that will determine once and for all the constitutionality of considering race in university admissions, California Attorney General Kamala Harris joined the nation's most prestigious public unive ... More >>

Drip.FM Is HBO for Music Nerds

[Editor's note: Jeff Weiss's column, "Bizarre Ride," appears on West Coast Sound every Wednesday. Be sure to also check out the archives.] It's hard to pinpoint the date when the music industry stopped speaking like a shell-shocked trench poet, but the sky quietly quit falling. Last year, album sal ... More >>

Mark Gurman, Apple's Toughest Beat Journalist, is High School Teen From L.A.

Apple has been known to have thin skin when it comes to journalists who expose its secrets. Remember when an iPhone prototype ended up in the hands of a Gizmodo journalist and his home was searched by cops? Yeah. But maybe the behemoth from Cupertino has met its match in the form of a high schooler ... More >>

UCLA Business School Wants to Privatize, Forgo Tax Dollars

As the UC and Cal State systems struggle with budget cuts and increasingly unhappy and unruly student bodies, one UCLA school is bucking the trend and actually inviting more cuts. In fact, UCLA's Anderson School of Management wants zero tax dollars: It's asking to be cut off from the system almost ... More >>

Sex on Camera

Ashley Huizenga is an academic-minded singer and performance artist. She wants to get you off

Julia Holter Talks Ekstasis And Recording Stuff Like Chatter and Fireworks

Budding indie pop artist Julia Holter spent nearly three years making her forthcoming album Ekstasis, and it seems to have paid off as it's positioned her among other L.A. indie-pop notables and scored her favorable notices from outlets like Pitchfork and NPR. Of course the 27-year-old Cal Arts gr ... More >>

Jeremiah Tower's Cookbook Collection

JeremiahTower.comJeremiah Tower on the beach​Cookbook collectors, get moving. Speed is necessary if you're going to snag a choice book from the collection that celebrity chef Jeremiah Tower has sold to Omnivore Books on Food in San Francisco. "They've gone fairly quickly," says rare book exp ... More >>

Marijuana Use Among Teens at Highest Level in 30 Years

​Legalizing medical marijuana might be good for grannies with glaucoma, but there's been, at the least, a correlation between the rise of legit weed and teen toking. The latest Monitoring the Future survey of teen drug use in America finds that "daily marijuana use is now at a 30-year peak le ... More >>

Cholesterol Study: Eat More Cheese, Less Butter

Flickr/_gee_cheeses​Sorry Paula Deen, but a group of Danish researchers say that when it comes to cholesterol, cheese is less harmful than butter. A new study led the scientists to believe that cheese does not hurt cholesterol levels as much as other animal fats. Researchers at the Universit ... More >>

American Kids Are on Drugs, Just Not Their Own Teens, Parents Say

​We've come to the conclusion that America is the land of magical thinking. Maybe that's why we remain so great: We see no evil, except in "others" (right, Iraq?). We want a balanced federal budget, but we don't want rich people and corporations to pay their fair share of taxes in order to ge ... More >>

Women Drivers Are Worse Than Men, According to Study

Sean Dreilinger​In the battle of the sexes, nothing gets women riled up like the words, "You can't drive! (And neither can your mother)." The proper response to that jab, of course, is, "Well you drive too fast. (And your father's a jerk)." So, in the war between a deliberate female driver a ... More >>

7 Most Annoying Driving Habits of L.A. Men

Nothing to see here. Jerk.​In response to the Informer's own post today on a study showing women are worse drivers than men, the fairer half of this news blog has one thing to say: Science is sexist. Just because the University of Michigan found that women were overrepresented in crashes "in ... More >>

L.A. City Council Says You Don't Have to Pay Your Red-Light Camera Tickets (and Never Did)

F that.​Update: The L.A. City Council has unanimously voted to eliminate the city's red-light camera program. Tickets will cease to be issued this Sunday. (Not that you have to pay them up until then, either. Stupid.) For all y'all inquiring about other cities in L.A. County: Details at botto ... More >>

Jay Beeber: Folk Hero Stops L.A.'s Red Light Cameras

Jane Junn: Poll Dancer

Cookbooks for the Cause: Culinary Historians Present "The Old Girl Network"

From the Anne Taintor collection.​Bra burning, Rosie the Riveter, even the Pill: all these are symbols that come to mind when we think of women's lib. But cookbooks? We didn't realize they were on the list. However an upcoming event hosted by the Culinary Historians of Southern California will ... More >>

Death, Money and Megaraves

Why Los Angeles politicians embrace a growing Ecstasy phenom that kills

FAIRY-y Tales

Proposition 8: Thirteen Out-of-State Attorney Generals Don't Want California Gays to Get Married, Join George Wallace in History Books

Prop. 8 supporter and Alabama Attorney General Troy King​With the appeal hearing for the Proposition 8 lawsuit set for Monday, December 6, we thought it would be a good time to look into the out-of-state attorney generals who stuck their noses into California's business and filed a friendly b ... More >>

Jack Johnson: Hit the Ice, Jack

The Idea Man: Motherfuckers of Invention

Razor-thin loyalties in Kevin King’s comedy-drama

Long Winters' Michael Shilling Hits Rock Bottom With First Novel

Meet the Blood Orphans, Silver Lake should-have-beens that never actually were

Game Over

Quakes, asteroids, mass extinction — when the end comes, will it come from below, above or within?

The Theresa Duncan Tragedy

A writer–game designer and her boyfriend commit suicide, and a façade falls away

He's Not Your Father's Jerry Brown

Zen Buddhism aside, the new attorney general is pro-developer and tough on crime

Train

All of Me

Heather Raffo’s one-woman show takes her out to Iraq, and into herself

Steven Vincent’s Final Days

Dealing with threats in Iraq

4 Ways to Find Out What’s Really Happening in Iraq

The Terrorists Within

Be afraid, be very afraid

Memory and Manipulation

The trials of Elizabeth Loftus, defender of the wrongly accused

Electromash

Who’s on First?

The Baghdad Hand (Over) Job

The Sputtering Riordan Machine

Remaking L.A. from the outside in

The Doctor is In

Rolling with people-powered Howard Dean from the highs and lows of spring to the triumphs of summer

Letters

Affirming Truth

But the court in the very near future could see things differently

Bad Heart, Plenty of Guts

Ron Sossi, and his enduring Odyssey

Admission to the Feast

Generation X law students, affirmative action and the lonely battle for equity

Almost Being There

Dental x-rays, flowers and the museum of jurassic technology

Raves on the Run

Feds jack up sentences, enforcement against Ecstasy

After Seattle

Free-trade protests coming soon to a city near you

L.A. Times Who Knew? Department

Out on the Web

GeoCities founder David Bohnett just wanted to make the WWW a community. Now he's worth $350 million.

Conservative Collapse

From Gingrich to Lungren, the right is routed