Erin Aubry Kaplan

Prior to April, I had never taken a cruise. But I had always wanted to. I liked the sheer indolence of the word — rhymes with ooze and lose, as in your worries — as well as the ridiculously romantic notions I associated with pubescence and Saturday-night episodes of The......

Illustration by Shino Arihara I first met Martin Ludlow in 1986, when he moved to L.A. from Ohio and roomed with his childhood friend, whom I knew through a good friend and ex-roommate of mine. Ludlow was 22, eminently likable and, to my surprise, very knowledgeable about politics. I had......

Illustration by Shino Arihara Sometimes you can pick and choose funerals, almost like weddings, based on rapidly calculated fallout — first cousin’s a must, cousin’s second husband that I saw maybe twice in the last 10 years a maybe — but the funeral of Celes King III prompted for me......

Photo by Ted Soqui Once upon a time, in a civic galaxy that now seems very far away, there was a theater called the Inner City Cultural Center, housed in a complex on the edge of L.A.'s unglamorous Pico/Union neighborhood that nonetheless proved a rare nexus of the city's mobile......

Illustration by Shino Arihara When I was in my middle teens and beginning to feel some oats as a critical thinker, I divided the world into two sets of people: those who got Electric Light Orchestra and those who didn’t. I didn’t set out on purpose to construct a character......

Illustration by Shino Arihara In these sorrowful times that threaten to remain so for the unforeseeable future, I've had to acknowledge there is only so much grief to go around. My response to war has been necessarily uneven: Iraq's myriad horrors either blur obligingly into a background of newsprint and......

The downtown rally last Friday looked every inch like a student anti-war protest that has grown more common in the last month — cheers, chants, signs depicting bloody gravestones of the anticipated dead, a culminating march to a nearby government building. Except that this day in Pershing Square the chants......

Illustration by Shino Arihara I am an affirmative-action baby. At least, I think I am; though everybody talks about it as if its beneficiaries wear scarlet letters or armbands, affirmative action is invisible to all but those privileged few — employers, college admissions officers — who actually keep the gates......