Erin Aubry Kaplan

Illustration by Shino Arihara LATELY, WITH ALL THE SANCTIMONIOUS, WAR-JUSTIFYING dreck flowing out of the White House — the kind of talk absurdist playwright Eugene Ionesco was doubtless referring to when he coined the phrase "cascades of caca" — I've been feeling newly grateful for media outlets that aren't afraid......

Just when I thought it was officially impossible to convince anybody beyond my Rolodex that economic development in black Los Angeles is still hampered by the modern permutations of race, along comes Michael Berler. Berler is the unlikeliest of believers. He hardly looks the part: White, born and raised in......

During one of Senator Trent Lott‘s press conferences last week, which I believe was apology attempt number five, CNN busily conducted a viewer poll. In the wake of Lott’s rare example of undisguised modern racism, which not only exposed the Achilles‘ heel of the Republican Party but opened a window......

The end of the year is as good a time as any to reflect on death. The idea may offend more than a few revelers who live for the season, but I’ve always thought that if we could actually experience a December that isn‘t artificially backlit by Christmas and the......

Earlier this year, walking among rows of student artwork as a juror in an annual countywide competition, I was stopped in my tracks by a portrait of a pitcher straddling a mound. Baseball was one of my great adolescent loves. For innings and months and languorous seasons at a time,......

DONNA WARREN RECALLS THE EXACT MOMENT OF her political conversion with both the pragmatism and spiritual fervor that the phrase implies. It was 1992, and Warren was attending one of countless community forums held across South-Central during the long, gray aftermath of the civil unrest. She fell into a conversation......

Illustration by Shino Arihara ACCORDING TO A LONG, SOBER PIECE THAT RAN RECENTLY IN U.S. NEWS & World Report, the parks and monuments charged with officially remembering the Civil War are now willing to acknowledge that the war was fought over -- deep breath now -- the institution of slavery......