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Bread

Michelle Huneven
I love bread. I'm drawn to it the way a love-starved child is drawn to anyone remotely kind. I love its soft, fragrant interior, the random structure of crumbs, the color and shalelike texture of a good crust. If there is no bread in the house, to my mind there......
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A Tale of Three Parties

F.x. Feeney
Truman Capote was a born writer who died a celebrity, a downfall that has always seemed particularly painful to me because it was Capote the writer who changed my life. I was 20 years old: For three years, I'd been wrestling with the quicksands buried under every sentence I wrote,......
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Objet d’art

Carmine Iannaccone
In 1912, Pablo Picasso took a piece of oilcloth printed like chair caning and glued it into one of his paintings. In so doing, he not only helped invent a new technique - collage - he also helped open the floodgate on all the unconventional materials and practices that artists......
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Eros-ion

Tim Parks
If Brahma is a more endearing creator than Jehovah, it is because he wasn't pleased with what he had made. He found the world dull and dusty. Death was the answer, suggested Shiva. Living forever, people were bored. A time limit would galvanize, give dignity. But in that case some......
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The Art of Artifice

Steven Leigh Morris
Who says Anton Chekhov was a kind, compassionate man? I think he was a sadist and, even in death, remains one - lulling actors and directors into his moody, atmospheric worlds before pinning them to the stage and driving a stake through their hearts. To see evidence of such Gothic......

The Statewide Dick

Marc B. Haefele
Here's a question for you: How could Richard Riordan neglect Los Angeles even more than he already does? The answer: become governor. For that matter, could anything do more to revive the Northern California secession movement? Or at least leave the state - and, with it, our city - teetering......
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Literary L.A.

David L. Ulin
JERVEY TERVALON sold his first poem to Scholastic magazine while he was still in junior high school. "'My God,'" the Pasadena resident remembers thinking, "'I can make money at this.' And I've been deluded ever since." Raised in Los Angeles, he attended Dorsey High School and UC Santa Barbara, where......
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Dizie With Anticipation

Jonathan Gold
So how do you eat this?" Margaret said, pointing at her very first serving of the Iranian stew dizie, a complicated concoction involving little bowls of soup, of mashed stew, of powerfully sour pickled vegetables, of fresh herbs.     "You tear up pieces of this bread," said the waiter......
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Very Serious Sex

Judith Lewis
We need to encourage every Internet site, whether or not it has material harmful for young people, to label its own content . . . to help ensure that our children don't end up in the red-light districts of cyberspace. -President Bill Clinton, summer 1997 Whether Monica S. Lewinsky was......

Globular

Robert Lloyd
There are undoubtedly, even in this tinselly town, people who live unimpressed by celebrity. But not so many that it, you know, matters. The Spice Girls still rule the world, and you can't assume an attitude superior enough to change that. People, Vanity Fair, The National Enquirer all subsist on......