Sara Catania

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Uncanny

Sara Catania
Photo by Anne Fishbein DIONYSUS: Have you ever felt a sudden lust for soup? HERACLES: Soup! Zeus-a-mercy, yes. Ten thousand times. —Aristophanes, The Frogs (405 B.C.) The word restaurant comes from a sign above the door of the first European eating establishment, which declared, “Boulanger vends les restaurants magiques,” that......

Heating Up

Sara Catania
There was a time, not too long ago, when a new, potentially polluting operation could move into a low-income area and set up shop with nary a peep from the residents. Maybe that‘s what Sunlaw Energy Partners thought when it applied in August to build a major power plant in......

Let Them Eat Cars

Sara Catania
When her husband left, Rocio Barba’s minimum-wage job did not bring in enough to cover the care of her two children, the mortgage, the car payment and the credit-card bills. Single mom Antoinette Soto lost her position as a school- district office clerk, and found herself unable to pay her......

Downey to Power Plant: Drop Dead

Sara Catania
Photo by Slobodan Dimitrov For the past seven months, the company that wants to build a power plant the size of Dodger Stadium has wooed the city of South Gate. Sunlaw Energy Partners has sponsored picnics in the park, sent out glossy, bilingual mailers and made lots of promises. They’ve......

Power Play

Sara Catania
Photo by Slobodan Dimitrov IT WAS THE END OF A HOT, SMOGGY SUMMER DAY in South Gate, and Wayne Gould had a tough job ahead of him. He had come to convince the locals that their small, heavily industrialized city -- already saddled with nearly two dozen state-designated toxic hot......

It’s Not Easy Being Green

Sara Catania
Photo by Debra DiPaolo"GET IN THE CAR. GET IN THE CAR." On a summer afternoon so hot and dry that the oxygen seems sucked from the air, Sharyn Romano and Sylva Blackstone are rushing from Hollywood to the only place that's even hotter -- the Valley -- to stage an......

Child Abandonment

Sara Catania
The shoe saleswoman at the outlet mall hovered, arms crossed. She did not offer assistance, only stood and stared. My friend and I were trying on sandals: red-leather slides with square toes, impossibly tall cork-heeled platforms, shiny brown thongs. We were taking our time, pulling box after box off the......

See No Evil

Sara Catania
Phot by AP/Wide World Celebrated journalist Seymour M. Hersh first earned his investigative stripes in 1969, when he uncovered the My Lai massacre and refused to let the story die. His account of the U.S. military atrocity in Vietnam was rejected by major news outlets, so Hersh and a friend......
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Remaking Public Radio

Sara Catania
It’s 8 a.m. and you‘re stuck in work-bound gridlock. The commercial news station you’re tuned to is airing a half-hour ad assault, so you fiddle with the dial, taking a hard turn to the left in search of a public-radio respite. You land at 89.9 KCRW and Morning Edition, the......

''Crimes We Abhor''

Sara Catania
In less than a week, barring an unforeseen act of God or the governor, the state of California will, in semi-secrecy, poison a man and kill him. So certain is the fate of Darrell Keith Rich that his attorneys did not even bother to attend a pro forma hearing that......