Thinking L.A. »

Why Asian-Americans Shouldn’t Chuck Affirmative Action Out the Window

By | June 9, 2015

A group of Asian-American organizations recently held a splashy press conference in Washington to announce that they will file a federal complaint against Harvard University. Their allegation: Harvard and other Ivy League universities make admissions decisions based on racial quotas and stereotypes, in ways that effectively cap the number of Asian-American students who make it to their elite institutions.
The complaint seems plausible, and it has …

Connecting California, Thinking L.A. »

The Real Fault of San Andreas Is How It Maligns Californians

By | June 4, 2015

After sitting through a matinee of the new earthquake disaster movie San Andreas, I experienced my own dark seismic fantasy: as the Big One hits California, a giant hole opens up in the ground under Burbank, and Warner Bros. disappears into it forever.
I had been prepared—by the foreshocks of advance publicity—for Warner’s San Andreas to be a dumb film full of pseudoscientific nonsense about …

Thinking L.A. »

Can We Prevent the Next Germanwings Crash?

By | June 3, 2015

Over two months after co-pilot Andreas Lubitz deliberately crashed a Germanwings plane into the Alps, airlines and regulators are still debating how to prevent such a tragedy from repeating itself. Recently, in his first newspaper interview since the crash, Lufthansa’s CEO suggested random medical checks on pilots. If only it were so simple.
As a captain for a worldwide charter company based in Southern California, I …

Thinking L.A. »

Why Kids Need to Dig in the Dirt Again

By | June 1, 2015

Kids today have it all, it seems, except time to be themselves. Their lives are so intensely choreographed from one activity to the next, and their scarce downtime so consumed by all their different-sized screens. It’s no wonder they no longer get a chance to master one art kids used to excel at: using their imagination to turn free time into an adventure.
America was …

Connecting California, Thinking L.A. »

How the 2016 Senate Race Will Divide California

By | May 28, 2015

Are you a Kamala or a Loretta?
Attorney General Kamala Harris and Congresswoman Loretta Sanchez—the two leading candidates for the state’s open U.S. Senate seat next year—confront Californians with a choice. But it’s not a choice about competing policies or political visions. Californians don’t have political arguments about what we believe anymore. Harris and Sanchez are both Democrats, and we’re a one-party state (Republicans are dying …

Thinking L.A. »

The Potential for Life on Jupiter’s Moon

By | May 27, 2015

This week we are one step closer to understanding a world in our solar system that I believe has the best chance of supporting life beyond our own planet. NASA has just announced details about what instruments a space probe to Jupiter’s moon Europa will carry when it makes multiple flybys of that world in the next decade.
It has taken us more than 400 years …

Thinking L.A. »

How Do You Measure a Teacher’s Worth?

By | May 21, 2015

Imagine one morning, coffee in hand, you head to the website of your local newspaper, type in your name, and up pops how you rank in relation to your colleagues at work. The ranking is based on some mysterious statistical model but the message is clear—you don’t measure up. Now imagine the sting of public humiliation when you run into your neighbors, colleagues, and family …

Thinking L.A. »

Manifest Destiny Behind Home Plate

By | May 20, 2015

Tabitha Soren isn’t a fan of baseball—and yet, she’s attended more than 100 games across the U.S., stood outside dozens of dugouts, and sifted through stacks of trading cards. It’s not the sport that interests her, but how baseball acts as a metaphor for the fantasies of America, from our fierce individualism to Manifest Destiny.
Soren, a Berkeley-based photographer and former correspondent for MTV News, spent …

Thinking L.A. »

Parched Californians’ Lukewarm Response to Free Water

By | May 19, 2015

Sometimes you can’t even give water away, even in a time of drought.
Maybe it was the rain in Southern California that week. Or maybe it was because people couldn’t be bothered to find buckets of appropriate size. Or maybe local residents just aren’t that desperate yet.
But only a handful of people showed up at South Pasadena High School this past Saturday when school district …

Connecting California, Thinking L.A. »

Why California Needs More Police

By | May 14, 2015

You wouldn’t know it by watching all the news about police-community conflict, or by going to protests against police racism and militarization, or by tracking all the Sacramento legislation on the use of force by law enforcement. But California’s biggest problem when it comes to policing remains the same:
There isn’t enough of it.
Of course, issues of police misconduct are real and serious, as recent stories …

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