article placeholder

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......
article placeholder

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......

Global Vision

David Moberg
When Thailand's baht collapsed last July, it seemed an event of no great significance, a pebble plopped into the sea of global finance. Today, the ripples are beginning to wash up on California shores, and nobody knows if they portend an economic tsunami or just some rough surf. But then,......

Double Fault

David Davis
Peter Fischer, the pediatric endocrinologist who helped coach and mold tennis star Pete Sampras, will be sentenced next week to six years in state prison for molesting children. Under a plea bargain, Fischer has admitted guilt on two counts of unlawful penetration, while 11 other counts against him will be......

A City Hall Telenovela

Sam Gideon Anson
Mixing personal loyalty and political business is nothing new to Eastside City Councilman Richard Alatorre. That's how he built the city's smoothest-running political machine and how he became the most adept operator in City Hall. But now, by his own account, the mix of personal and political has brought the......

Rent Rage

David Cogan
Santa Monica has long been on the front lines in the civil wars over rent control. That contest was decided last year in Sacramento, but reports from the beach city suggest that landlord-tenant relations have again deteriorated into street fighting. Assault, racism, death threats and larceny are just a sampling......
article placeholder

Highway 65 Revisited

Chuck Eddy
So I get this 12-inch record in the mail; front cover proclaims "Not if You Were the Last Dandy on Earth!" The vinyl itself has no artist names or song titles or words at all on its white label. The A-side does appear to be an actual song, but the......
article placeholder

Literary L.A.

David L. Ulin
Stereotypes die hard, of course, and if any city understands this, it's Los Angeles. Witness the national fawning over the new Getty Center - as if the superficial daughter of a great, cultured family had finally brought home a boyfriend who could speak the King's English. One of L.A.'s more......
article placeholder

Literary L.A.

David L. Ulin
SUSAN FALUDI exploded into public consciousness in 1991 with the release of Backlash, which reported what she described as an undeclared war on feminism. The book grew out of an article she wrote debunking Newsweek's infamous "man shortage" story of 1986. Born in New York, Faludi calls herself "one of......