Marc B. Haefele

What kind of political race puts the challenger on the defensive? Exactly the kind of contest you had until recently for the highest-paid law-enforcement job in the county. In the battle for the almost $250,000-a-year post of sheriff, the hound - insurgent Lee Baca - seemed to be running from......

What, after all, do we mean when we say Hollywood? The rest of America speaks of a film capital, a land of cinematic dreams and commercial mythologies, of chancy but infinite opportunity. But we locals know this idealized zone really isn't located anywhere. The real geography of movie and TV......

Two demises on last Wednesday's front page. One death was literal: Tom Bradley's, at 80 years of age. The other was political: 14th District Councilman Richard Alatorre's, at 55. What a contrast. Bradley died at 80 after over 50 years of public life: He came closer to representing most of......

No one really wants the future anymore. It certainly wasn't always thus. I was raised on the future's Jetsonian pledges: commercial space travel, personal air cars, picture-frame TVs on walls. And its threats: first, the Red menace and total nuclear annihilation, and then an ecological doom that somehow included California's......

Almost the last time I saw Tom Bradley, I didn't recognize the slumped old man in the far corner of the City Council, whispering to a few friends. It was 1994, and he hadn't been in City Hall since his retirement the year before. He'd returned for what seemed a......

Some say the world will end in fire; some say it will end in ice. Others say the new city-charter effort will fizzle away for causes utterly unrelated to its objective of making the city run better. There was, for instance, that disruptive proposed bill of rights. No, I don't......

I'd really hate to have to forgo the affectionate mail I get every time I write about the Ballona Wetlands/Playa Vista controversy. But it seems I can stop beating this particular dead horse for a while. Since the anti-Playa forces' wrong-way win in federal court - provoking a decision that......

Herewith a local conundrum: Why has no Los Angeles politician been arrested, sentenced and jailed for corruption for almost 60 years? Is it because, ever since the 1937 Frank Shaw scandals that dumped a mayor, a police chief and, ultimately, most of a City Council, they've all been so clean......

Here's a good example of the law of unintended consequences. You may have read how U.S. District Judge Ronald Lew's decision earlier this month that halted grading at the future Playa Vista site actually applies only to 16.1 acres of "permitted area" - that is, an area in which no......