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Mostly Magical Mozart

Alan Rich
Well, that was more like it. After a season pretty far down in the operatic dumps so far, our aspiring if not yet perfect company has rediscovered enchantment at the most likely fountainhead, the music of Mozart. Last week's Magic Flute, even braving the Friday-the-13th curse for its opening night,......

The Way of the Dinosaurs?

LA Weekly
In the years following its 1988 debut, the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Culver City struggled to survive, and its founder, a deceptively straight-faced fellow named David Wilson, was known to occasionally solicit business by serenading passing pedestrians with his accordion. Lately, Wilson's eclectic assemblage of the weird and wonderful......

Hole

Joe Donnelly
It's 5 a.m. in Los Angeles and I've decided to go in search of the perfect donut. I'm not sure what the perfect donut will be - I have my ideas - but I don't want to prejudice myself. I want to be open to the possibilities - a tabula......
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The Best Things in Code Are Free

Judith Lewis
To those of us who never pay for software anyway, Netscape's announcement, on January 21, that it was about to distribute its browser for free meant exactly nothing. Except for a Quicken financial-planning program I bought in the box for a friend one Christmas, I have never been to a......

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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Security to the Stage

Donnell Alexander
His figure emerges from darkness in the hour before sunrise. He's there in the parking lot of the 7-Eleven, a backpack tight on his puffy white work shirt. His shoulders hunch forward in mimicry of a purposeful walk. The lunch-money kid. Nice, neat Afro, just like his mother told him......
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Come and Get These Memories

Dan Epstein
"Standing in the Shadows of Love." "Bernadette." "Baby I Need Your Loving." "This Old Heart of Mine." "You Can't Hurry Love." "I Hear a Symphony." "(Love Is Like a) Heat Wave." "Nowhere To Run." "Jimmy Mack." If you have a working set of ears, you probably already have more than......

A Tin-Pot Dictator Is Being Inflated

Harold Meyerson
Iraqi dissident KANAN MAKIYA, a fellow at Harvard's Center for Middle Eastern Studies and a visiting professor at Brandeis, is author of four books on Iraq, among them Republic of Fear, which is widely considered the authoritative account of Saddam Hussein's regime. Born and raised in Iraq, Makiya found that......