Gendy Alimurung

Walk on the wild side: Water-resistant cork (Photos by Chris Hynes/Eco Friendly Flooring Inc.)

Tread On Them

Gendy Alimurung
Even your floor can kill the environment. It’s an unsettling thought, the idea that furbishing your living room in mahogany over oak, say, or African wenge over Asian bamboo could decimate the rainforests and, by extension, untold numbers of living species. A floor is not just a floor. To be......
article placeholder

Eat Books, Save Lives

Gendy Alimurung
Some time ago, in the not-too-distant past, doomy rockers Death Cab for Cutie and author Daniel Handler (a.k.a. Lemony Snicket) got together in Seattle to play an extended version of “Hungry Like the Wolf.” Death Cab played their guitars and drums. Handler played his accordion. There was, reportedly, way too......
Tatsumi's ''Bedridden''

Manga Master

Gendy Alimurung
Adrian Tomine would like to apologize, on behalf of America, to fellow comic-book artist Yoshihiro Tatsumi — grandfather of alternative manga — for the fact that Tatsumi’s first experience of the United States is the San Diego Comicon. Tatsumi is 71, a reserved, almost shy man, and Comicon is a......
article placeholder

Men Are Fleeting

Gendy Alimurung
Girl loves boy. Boy falls for girl’s gorgeous best friend. Girl steps gallantly aside, even agrees to be a bridesmaid at their wedding, until, right before the ceremony, gorgeous best friend smacks headlong into oncoming traffic on Beverly Boulevard, slips into a coma, and dies. What’s a good girl to......

Everything Counts in Large Amounts

Gendy Alimurung
When individual units combine to form complicated, intelligent structures with well-coordinated divisions of labor, command hierarchies, and problem-solving skills — that’s a swarm. More than just strength in numbers, the swarm is an emergent property: the whole can achieve what the parts alone cannot; but paradoxically, without the parts the......
article placeholder

A Literary Feast

Gendy Alimurung
Writers, by trade, are a solitary lot. That is, unless it’s April. The season is upon us when the people who make books (novelists, poets, agents, critics, journalists, editors, publishers, booksellers) get together with the people who read books (you) to hobnob in the massive, corporate-sponsored, pseudo-academic, literary-salon carnival and......
(function(r, d, u) { var s = d.createElement(r); s.async = true; s.setAttribute('data-cfasync', false); u += '&cb=' + Date.now() + Math.random(); s.src = u; var n = d.getElementsByTagName(r)[0]; n.parentNode.insertBefore(s, n); })('script', document, '//engine.laweekly.com/?221982862');

Epicenter of Cool

Gendy Alimurung
An earthquake in Los Angeles just isn’t an earthquake until Dr. Kate says it is. Kate Hutton, staff seismologist at Caltech’s Seismological Laboratory, is part of our local quake ritual: Ground shakes. Turn on TV. Wait for Dr. Kate to talk us down. Was it more rolling or bouncy? Did......

Bandwidth on the Run

Gendy Alimurung
Tom Anderson has 66,527,187 friends. By the time you finish reading this sentence, he will have 1 million more. Anderson, once a UCLA film grad student, is the 30-year-old co-creator of the juggernaut social-networking Web site MySpace.com. “I have a few close friends I’ve known all my life,” he has......
Photo by Jay Muhlin

Jonathan Safran Foer

Gendy Alimurung
By now, you either love Jonathan Safran Foer, or hate Jonathan Safran Foer. The literary world at large loves him, has in fact called him things like “genius” and “brilliant,” and has anointed him with laurels enough to potpourri a Roman abattoir — the New York Public Library’s Young Lions......

Phenom ZeNan

Gendy Alimurung
The nerd shall inherit the Earth. This much is clear at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, where the regional finals of the high school National Science Bowl are in progress. There are nerds aplenty and of every conceivable variety. Asian nerds. Caucasian nerds. Tall, lanky, pimply nerds. Nerds in......