Recently I did a presentation to the staff of the Western Center on Law and Poverty about the search for the narrative. The idea being…
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The real world event of what’s been called the Cochabamba Water Wars found its way into two recent feature films. Cochabamba is the third largest…
Winston Churchill once said that history is written by the victors. For centuries, the histories of Africa and Latin America were told via the pens…
He’s walked back what he said, as the saying goes. But on May 15 when answering a question on Meet the Press about the Medicare…
Professor Elizabeth Warren strikes me as a smart, cool customer. I’ve only seen her on the tube on the Daily Show and the NewsHour, but…
I was once asked by a book editor to come up with an outline for a novel set in a slightly futurized Los Angeles. It…
I have no set idea of what Utopia looks like and I blame my youth on this. In fact, I can point to the day…
Photo by Slobodan Dimitrov While it’s odd to think of Los Angeles as fitting in the theme of a Resistance City, there are hardcore struggles…
Our federal deficit is hovering somewhere around $14 trillion. A deficit, as anyone who has had to maintain a household budget will tell you, is…
David Simon, creator and executive producer (with former Baltimore detective Ed Burns) of The Wire, wrote of two competing myths in America in an introduction…
I believe as I’ve mentioned previously, I’m not that into public spaces, though I have nothing against them personally. But there is one such public…
No doubt I’m the last cat who should be writing about public space. I mean here at home in Los Angeles I rarely think about…
At nearly 139 square miles in size, Detroit is larger than Boston, Manhattan and San Francisco combined. Home to some two million at one point,…
Recently, mystery and thriller writer Christopher Rice posted a piece on the Daily Beast’s book section entitled Why Crime Novelists Don’t Get Woman. You see,…
This Saturday, April 17, in honor of Earth Day, there will be activities in South L.A. This is a good thing, of course, as all…
Big time developer Ed Roski Jr. has plans to bring professional football, and by that I mean American smash mouth football, not soccer, back to…
As mentioned in my previous post – back to the future of dystopia – with an emphasis on re-zoning sci-fi style. I can’t cite the…
James Cameron has a baseball cap with the letters HMFIC on its crown. As this is a family-friendly site, I won’t spell out what those…
In some quarters, including the Colbert Report (though I must give props to brother Colbert for mentioning this on his show ‘cause otherwise I wouldn’t…
As a freelance prose and comics writer, I sweat a lot about where my next paycheck is coming from. Half my day, and I’m being…