Marc Cooper

NOW THAT SUMMER VACATION HAS BEGUN, YOU can bet students from Jefferson High in South-Central L.A. are pleased to be back home. No more prolonged stints of sitting on counters or standing in classrooms without enough chairs. No more humiliating "service classes" -- doing menial work for teachers who show......

”I‘m pissed at him,“ says a former Hicks ally from the Multi-Cultural Collaborative. ”Guess he just wanted to be in the winner’s circle. He got tired of fighting and sold out.“ It‘s probably fair to say that the above sums up the current view of Hicks among mainstream African-American activists......

SANTIAGO, CHILE -- I AM FINALLY DOING MY part in the war against international terrorism. I spent the morning touring the site of this country's most notorious concentration camp and killing field: the cold, cement basement of the massive National Stadium. Thousands of Chileans were at one time warehoused, interrogated,......

WATCHING HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of dollars roll in during a Westside fund-raiser for a completely worthy liberal cause last Saturday night, I was reminded how -- a decade after the 1992 riots -- Los Angeles remains starkly divided and often deaf to its deeper rhythms. In the park-sized back yard......

In the Age of Geraldo, it seems almost an anomaly that a rumpled, 56-year-old professorial British-newspaper foreign correspondent could draw a string of standing-room-only throngs to American university auditoriums. But that’s exactly what the London Independent‘s Middle Eastern correspondent Robert Fisk has been doing from Chicago to Los Angeles, generating......

Photo by Ted Soqui YOU REMEMBER WARD CONNERLY. He touched off a political earthquake in 1996 when California voters -- by a nearly 10-point margin -- ratified his Proposition 209, which outlawed affirmative action in state hiring and contracting, and in college-admissions policy. Now, the 63-year-old UC regent has authored......

In the Brentwood patio of Dutton‘s Books last weekend, under appropriately foreboding gray skies, I gathered with friends and admirers of author A.J. ”Jack“ Langguth to celebrate the new paperback editions of his two masterpieces. Patriots: The Men Who Started the American Revolution, first published two decades ago, smartly tells......

I knew it was all over for Dick Riordan two weeks ago as I watched conservative Kansas Senator Sam Brownback get turned into the entree at a red-meat Republican luncheon supposedly in his honor. This poor guy Brownback, usually 10 degrees to the right of the NRA on most issues,......