Thinking L.A.

I have been in love since the age of 4. The object of my lifelong passion is the universe, which I first recognized when a meteor streaked through the sky over my home in Toledo, Ohio. At 12, I had my first encounter with dwarf planet Ceres, gazing in delighted wonder at a faint dot of light amidst the stars in my small telescope. It …

When it comes to diseases, we never seem to worry until they capture the attention of the media or affect us personally. Today, as new cases of measles turn up in California, I feel a sense of dread—and déjà vu.
Between January 1988 and December 1990, Southern California saw 12,434 cases of measles. Los Angeles County was the first to report its problem in …

The town I live in is lonely. So lonely I could cry. So goes the refrain from one of Thee Midniters’ hits, and such is the feeling in my heart now that DJ Art Laboe has been taken off the air in Los Angeles because his station changed formats. HOT 92.3, which played old-school R&B, has become REAL 92.3, “LA’s Hip-Hop N’ R&B” station. If …

Just this past week, historic talks were held in Washington with the goal of inching closer to a goal that, for decades, has been unimaginable: restored diplomatic relations between the U.S. and Cuba. It’s been 54 years since those ties were severed—and there are a number of thorny issues to work out before the U.S. and Cuba will reopen embassies in each other’s countries, or …

Just a few days after an Academy Awards ceremony that host Neil Patrick Harris joked honored “Hollywood’s best and whitest,” entertainment insiders at a “Thinking L.A.” event co-presented by Zócalo Public Square, UCLA, and UCLA’s Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies addressed the lack of diversity in the industry head-on. In front of a full house at the ArcLight Hollywood, they discussed why …

A bag of popcorn just might be the best metaphor to describe the race to represent the 4th District on the Los Angeles City Council. There are many candidates, 14 in all, popping up to represent an area that stretches (roughly) from the San Fernando Valley to Hollywood, but none of them are particularly well-known beyond the confines of campaign mailers, slate cards, and sample …

My guess is that few people in the audience at the Zócalo/KCRW screening of Mayor Eric Garcetti’s favorite movie Airplane! will recognize the man who hails a taxi at LAX at the beginning of the film. He was not an actor but a major California political figure when the movie was made in the late ’70s. And Howard Jarvis’ influence—as the leader of California’s famous …

Most young women born in the 1940s were raised on the nursery rhyme indicating little girls were made of “sugar and spice and everything nice.” My childhood vision of the future was to have 30 children and somehow find time to serve as a missionary in India.
But in the summer of 1966, after reading the exploits of Jack Kerouac and Ken Kesey, the thought of …

It had been a good year for Lois Mace.
She and her husband, only three years beyond college, had bought their first house. A solid redbrick and clapboard Cape Cod, it sat on a leafy street named for a character out of a Longfellow poem. In its driveway glistened a new sedan, silver-gray with a burgundy roof and whitewalls, a gift from her father, a Ford …

The 2015 Oscars broadcast will reflect the demographics of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences voters—who are overwhelmingly older Anglo men—but it won’t reflect the demographics of the rest of the country. All 20 acting nominees are Anglo, and all the directing and screenwriting nominees are male. The Academy Awards may not tell the whole story, but they certainly indicate that many American …