By Joan Didion THERE IS SOMETHING UNEASY IN THE LOS ANGELES air this afternoon, some unnatural stillness, some tension. What it means is that tonight a Santa Ana will begin to blow, a hot wind from...
The Last Newspaper Reader in America My college journalism professor demanded such dedication in pursuit of accuracy and definitive facts on each assignment that I still hold the profession in much...
‘Terms of Endearment’ followed ‘The Last Picture Show’ with great fanfare, but it was his Pulitzer Prize-winning ‘Lonesome Dove’ that cemented his legacy as one of America’s best...
The recent death of Ali MacGraw's ‘Love Story’ co-star Ryan O’Neal left us all with a nostalgic appreciation of the heartthrobs whose heartbreak ending sent the country out of theaters in...
Separated by 50 years but united by Hollywood, wildfires, and the endless hum of 'the deal,' two writers share a bath in Los Angeles. On Monday I took a bath with Joan Didion. She was gracious, took...
The Boy Who Loved Lint At a preschool in town, the teachers still talk about a boy named Trey who had special powers. It wasn’t magic, though that’s what his classmates had called it. The...
When I was a young boy growing up in the suburbs of southeast Houston, every Christmas Eve I would sneak out onto our screened front porch and stare into the night sky as I tried to spot Santa’s...
On making crumbles in a time of war. I have been finding it increasingly difficult to do…well, just about anything these days. I know I’m not alone. The horror, the grief, the paralysis, the...
By TONY CASTRO ON THE MORNING OF JANUARY 20, 2009, I am about 75 yards away from where Barack Obama would soon place his hand on the Bible used by Abraham Lincoln at his 1861 inauguration and...
So I had come to the Rio Grande, symbolic of the border of my existence and the two sides of who I was. And right now I wanted to be neither. I AWOKE TO FIND MYSELF WITH a young woman I’d met the...
Alejandra Campoverdi explores many things familiar to first-generation kids: the invisible inheritances passed onto us from our family, being a “parentified child,” imposter syndrome,...
I read about the bookseller in Long Beach that had become trapped when the shelves in his store collapsed on top of him. I didn’t need to ask which books fell on him. I already imagined that he...
AS A DEPUTY EDITOR OF THE LATE AND SOMETIMES lamented Los Angeles Herald Examiner paper, back then under the editorship of Jim Bellows, I occasionally was asked to look at gossip items...