Thinking L.A.

On November 20, 2014, President Obama gave a historic speech on immigration. Despite how profoundly personal this issue is to me, I didn’t watch. For the past decade, I have deliberately avoided any mention of immigration reform—hearing or reading about it causes my chest to tighten and my stomach to churn.
The topic inevitably brings me back to a window in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico in …

On April 28th, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in an omnibus case about whether same-sex couples are allowed to marry in all 50 states in this country. The probability of the court ruling in favor of legalization likely played a role in the Indiana and Arkansas controversies over the passage of their Religious Freedom Restoration Acts at the beginning of April.
Proponents …

My name is Kamala and I’m the leading candidate for U.S. Senate in California, even though polls suggest that more than half of Californians are still learning my name, and how to pronounce it.
I, Kamala, am also a Muslim Marvel heroine a wrestler, a courtesan in Siddhartha, the German poet Hermann Hesse’s book on Buddhism and enlightenment, and an ape woman (more on that later). …

Forgive me for bragging, but my front lawn looks a lot worse than yours.
As the drought deepens and the state water board revises its plans for mandatory restrictions this week, California’s lawn culture has flipped, dirt-side up. With outdoor watering being called a society-threatening scourge, your local community pillars, once celebrated for lawns and gardens even greener than their money, run the risk of becoming …

My introduction to the West Los Angeles neighborhood my parents called “So-ta-ru” came in the 1970s when we visited relatives there. I still am unclear on exactly how we are related—it was definitely on my mother’s side and it may go back to some village in Hiroshima. But for my immigrant mother, these relatives were her only blood relatives in the United States.
The first thing …

Talking openly with children about sensitive subjects is hard. It always has been. In my parents’ generation, the three-letter taboo was S-E-X. My older sister was 13 when my dad gave her “The Talk” for the first time. It was the ’80s, and my dad dodged it like any educated man of his time. He tossed her a sex-education book and said, “Read this, but …

Could a new pro football stadium help California beat its drought?
That’s the ambitious goal of the latest stadium proposal to appear in Los Angeles. The project—details of which are only now becoming public—would provide more than merely a home for the National Football League’s Jacksonville Jaguars, who are looking to leave their smaller market in North Florida. The proposed stadium would double as one of …

Why do we laugh? The obvious answer is because something is funny. But if we look closer at when and how laughter occurs in ordinary social situations, we see that it’s not so simple. For example, speakers tend to laugh more than listeners, and when people laugh together, often nothing was said at all. Depending on the context, laughter can mean all sorts of things, …

There’s nothing cool about me.
I’m a 6-foot tall gangly writer who likes to visit museums on vacation. I don’t snowboard, or run extreme triathlons, and I rarely know when the Super Bowl is on. But in 2007 and 2008, my second child, James Keefe, then a forward for UCLA’s basketball team, made it possible for me to have prime seats at one of the …

I just had the best birria of my life. This is not an understatement. It is a claim I make as a shameless momma’s boy whose mom cooked birria once a week—and as the lucky boyfriend of a cooking school graduate who was born and raised in Jalisco, the birthplace of this spicy goat stew, where I visit and eat at least once a year. …