Survival, Revivalle

Robert Lloyd
ABC's Prey is a "Darwinian" thriller about a recently evolved race of not-quite-humans who, because "two species cannot occupy the same evolutionary space," are constrained by natural law - it's nothing personal - to kill all Homo sapiens in order to survive. (In which business they proceed - classical alien......
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Divided We Stand

Steven Mikulan
Although the American century arrived with the myth of its melting pot, today we live in a culture riven by identity politics and their dissonant vocabulary. It's no riddle why; while certain categories of people may enjoy more civil rights than they did 100 years ago, they also remain fairly......

Zealots Target Sierra Club

Sara Catania
"No nation in human history ever undertook to deal with such masses of alien population," declared the Atlantic Monthly, blaming immigration for the debased standard of living of many Americans, and warning that further admittance of the "vast hordes" could destroy the soil, the land, the very air Americans breathe......
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Missing Voices

Alan Rich
Caught up in the charms of Ervin Schulhoff's First String Quartet - as played by the Petersen Quartet at the Doheny Mansion last week in one of the Da Camera Society's "Chamber Music and Historic Sites" concerts - I found it was hard to avoid shedding a tear for what......

Riordan’s Back

Marc B. Haefele
Dick Riordan did the right thing by California last week - counter to the urgings of rich business friends and certain ranking egos at the Los Angeles Times, he declined to run for governor. You could follow his reasoning. Competing against Jane Harman and Al Checchi, Republican Riordan wouldn't get......
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Great Britten

Alan Rich
Any critic worthy to wield a poisoned pen must be obsessed these days with drawing up lists: major events and masterworks of the decade, century and millennium now oozing toward their closure. I am not prepared to predict that Benjamin Britten's name will appear on many of these lists, yet......
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The Little Girl With a Big Head

Mary Beth Crain
Just before Christmas, amid a jumble of half-built sets and strange props that make you feel like you're in the middle of a junk shop, an early rehearsal for a production of Oscar Wilde's most misunderstood work, Salome (which opened last week at Actors' Gang Theater), is in full swing......
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Salad

Sandra Tsing Loh
I had my first salad in the fall of 1976. I was 13, the standard age when American girls have their dietary privileges torn away from them - their All-Access Passes to the Universal Amphitheater of food abruptly voided, if you will. I'd spent that last summer of unconditional self-love......

Welfare’s Phantom workers

Erin J. Aubry
For the past two years, George Priest has done part-time work for the finance division of the county Department of Public and Social Services, researching welfare-fraud cases on microfiche. It's the kind of desk job that would be the envy of many a welfare recipient who, faced with tough new......
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Feinstein Lite

Harold Meyerson
This year, California will experience a new kind of election. And as of last week, it may just have a politician who'll be able to exploit it. In June, Californians will encounter a primary ballot unlike any seen in this state since the '40s. Under the open-primary law passed by......