Los Angeles' Shuttered School Yards

Marc B. Haefele
The mayor of Los Angeles and I have this thing going. Well, maybe you could better call it a casual relationship. Richard Riordan keeps telling me (along with the rest of the world) that his top priority as mayor is to help the Los Angeles Unified School District. And I......

The Shootist

Jane Hunter
Former Irwindale Reserve Police Officer Glenn Yee was sentenced to 16 months in prison on June 10 in Los Angeles, the stiffest sentence meted out so far in the case brought against four members of a gun club accused of plotting terrorist attacks around the Southland. Yee, who patrolled Irwindale......
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My Own Private Nuremberg

Steven Mikulan
Guilt, even more than misery, loves company, which may explain why we often lose sight of the separate sources of collective evil. (The old problem of not being able to see the trees for the forest.) Modern Europe's greatest crime had many partners, but rather than try to focus on......
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Calamity of Excellence

Brendan Bernhard
He may be one of our leading magazine journalists - on staff at The New Yorker since 1981, a frequent contributor to Harper's and The Atlantic Monthly - but Lawrence Weschler is not very happy with the state of the art. In fact, he's horrified - and thinks we should......

Ace in the Hole

David Chute
Jose Giovanni has been a convict, a novelist, a screenwriter and a film director, specializing in the French policier and crime genres since 1958. But he's been a movie actor only once, when a producer decided that the performers in a certain picture didn't look "noir" enough. "Put Jose in......

When She Was Bad

Ella Taylor
Scarlett: Oh Ashleh, Ashleh, ah lerve you, truly ah do. Ashley: It's no use, Scarlett. You're strong and mighty and modern, while I, I am nothing but a droopy feeb, fit only for Saint Melanie. Run along now with Rhett and make a fortune in the lumber trade while the......

With a Bullet

Manohla Dargis
Steven Soderbergh's Out of Sight is a sexy, funny, cool breeze of a film, the kind of effortless Hollywood entertainment we haven't seen much of since Cary Grant got old. The source of this skewed romantic comedy - don't let the gun in the poster fool you - is a......

Rev. Callaghan runs wild

Marc B. Haefele
It's gone forever now, but once there was a residential complex as close to paradise as such a place could ever be. Not far from the ocean and adjoining undeveloped hillsides, it had great views, cheap rents, funky old wooden units, lots of trees and shrubs, and a cooperative spirit......
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The Best of Counter Intelligence

Jonathan Gold
While the contributions of South America to world culture may include the magical realist novel, Che's groovy beret and Lambada: The Forbidden Dance, the continent's role in world cuisine has gone largely unremarked. Without South America, there would be no potatoes or tomatoes; Thai food would still be seasoned with......
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Something Old…

Alan Rich
You have to admire the thinness of the line that sometimes separates the very old from the very new. Here at hand, for example, are recent discs that demonstrate some interesting across-the-centuries coincidences. On a Nonesuch collection called, simply, Early Music, the Kronos Quartet creates believable soul mates (or, at......