Thinking L.A.

I have tried a lot of boba tea. And when I say “a lot,” I mean I’ve visited over 200 tea houses that sell these beverages—teas in a variety of flavors, typically served on ice and featuring chewy tapioca balls—in the last year.
You counted right: In a typical week, I visit two to four different L.A.-area boba tea houses. A few months back, for …

Remember the days when computers were a passing fad and information was derived from dusty encyclopedias after hours of searching? Me neither. I was born in 1998. By the time I was 14, my teachers stopped asking if we had a computer and Internet available because they had become a necessity. By now, at age 16, I can code a website, use Photoshop, and do …

2014 was not an especially good year for the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach.
Adjacent to each other on San Pedro Bay, the two ports are collectively the nation’s largest maritime gateway and indispensable economic engines for Southern California. Although they combined last year to handle more shipping containers than in any year since the Great Recession, they were beset with logistical and …

To live in Inglewood is to live constant change. In my lifetime, I have seen the Forum transformed from championship basketball venue to mega church to top concert destination.
Residents of Inglewood have big and persistent dreams for the place they call home and raise their children. This is true of most cities, but the latest changes in Inglewood may finally put those dreams within …

What does genocide mean? What are its causes? And what kind of actions can be taken—in the U.S. and elsewhere—to stem this horrifying, ongoing global problem? Kal Raustiala, director of the UCLA Burkle Center for International Relations, opened a discussion about genocide, and how the world reacts to it, by posing these questions in front of a full house at the Goethe-Institut Los Angeles, at …

I didn’t set out to write a book about the 1992 L.A. riots. In fact, if anyone had told me I’d end up writing a novel featuring 17 different first-person narrators that spanned all six days of the riots—from April 29 to May 4—the scale would have terrified me, and I might have quit before I began.
It all started with Payasa. A gang-involved girl growing …

A century since the systematic slaughter of 1.5 million Armenians, and over half a century since 6 million Jews were killed in the Holocaust, mass atrocities continue to take place across the globe, without any sign of stopping.
In March, human rights investigators for the United Nations disclosed that the Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria’s persecution and killings of Yazidis, a religious minority in …

Most people collect things, whether it’s casually or compulsively. You might accumulate many pairs of a favorite brand of shoe. Or you might be a Deadhead on a mission to stockpile Jerry Garcia bootlegs.
My own collection consists of unique items that are very personal, though they’re not an actual part of my life. I collect what’s known as “vintage ephemera”—postcards and letters, photographs and …

The 1992 riots are what first drew me to work in South Los Angeles. I was a civically minded college kid back then, with an attraction to social and economic justice issues. At that time, South L.A. was brimming with newly formed organizations aimed at ameliorating the tensions behind that year’s explosion of civil unrest sparked by the acquittal of officers in the Rodney King …

I dreaded Saturday mornings when I was growing up. That’s because while other kids were waking up to watch cartoons or making movie plans with friends (so I imagined), I was ritually dragged into the Armenian markets of Los Angeles by my mother, who bought food as if it was a competitive sport.
“Get up, we’re going shopping,” she would say. She never meant at …