Erin Aubry Kaplan

Michael Anderson is an architect and developer who has lived under a great gray cloud of disappointment ever since I‘ve known him. We met in 1993, shortly after the riots, when I was a green reporter covering the Crenshaw district and he was 34 and brimming with ideas about how......

I was planning to recuse myself from commenting on the Bernie Parks brouhaha, chiefly because so much is being said so often, by so many. Yet while the Parks dialectic has ranged from turgid to trenchant -- more of the former, unfortunately, and less of the latter -- I can’t......

Photo by Ted SoquiHard to imagine. The phrase is uttered in Compton, where the unimaginable happens with almost mundane frequency, but this past week, if somebody with only hazy entrepreneurial instincts had collected a dollar every time a citizen remarked — or shouted, or hissed, or mumbled — “hard to......

Illustration by Shino Arihara In the beginning, I only knew that a kid was sick. It was like one of those tragic but instructively hopeful stories that often appear in the Los Angeles Times’ Southern California Living section at around a thousand words, about somebody dealt a rotten hand by......

1. The seizing of the Watts Health Foundation by state regulators, putting in doubt the future of one of the very few insurance safety nets for the poor. Created in the wake of the �65 riots, the foundation adopted what former director Clyde Oden Jr. called a holistic approach to......

One of the great peeves of my adult life has been an underdeveloped understanding of the phrase giving back. Black people place a particular, non-negotiable emphasis on giving back -- though how much we actually do it is highly debatable -- and the older I got and the more certain......

Several years ago a woman I met at a writers’ soiree tried to calf-rope me into saying I was a feminist. She argued that as long as I didn‘t disagree with some basic feminist precepts -- independence, gender equality, equal pay -- I was a feminist by deductive reasoning. She......

On the morning of September 11, I leave a message on the answering machine of Randy Newman‘s manager. “Is that second interview we scheduled still on?” Nobody calls back. A thin veil of clouds yawns open to lovely weather, a sparkling blue-and-white mirror image of New York City, minus the......