When Jackie Elliot made the switch to teaching, from a career in public health, she was 36-years-old and by no means a naïf - she understood that public education was not in the best possible shape. Still, in 1986 as a novice teacher at Pacoima Elementary School in L.A.'s San...

Public education is royally screwed up in Los Angeles, as in urban centers the country over, and in L.A. it's heartening to watch a groundswell of outrage shape itself into action. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa's gallant play for control of the embattled school district was struck down by the courts, but...

In The Bourne Ultimatum, amnesiac superspy Jason Bourne (Matt Damon) finally confronts the CIA schemers responsible for erasing his memory and reprogramming him as the ideal assassin. Audiences flocked to watch Bourne on opening weekend -- it was the biggest August opening ever, taking in over $70 million -- and...

It's a terribly confusing time to be a young journalist, but you won't hear many of us complaining out loud. Jobs are too precious, corporate owners too fickle. "It's witch-hunt city around here lately," a young Los Angeles Times staff writer emailed me yesterday, when I mentioned this post....

It poured rain on a recent Sunday in Washington D.C. My girlfriend Katie and I were visiting my 88-year-old grandmother, staying in her apartment in the suburbs, but this Sunday we drove our rented Toyota into the district to do the requisite monument tour. Normally there would be crowds,...

I began writing poetry as soon as I learned to write - it became a salve, a means of connection, a mode of reckoning with the contradictoriness of life. Occasionally, a line from some long-forgotten verse leaps into my consciousness, clear as day, as if to impart relevant wisdom...

Do you remember 'Kosovo Boy?'

I refer, naturally, to the massively popular NPR series "Emails from Kosovo," and specifically to Finnegan Hamill, the Berkeley teenager whose email correspondence with pseudonymous Adona - an imperiled ethnic Albanian teen who miraculously found an internet connection in the war torn region...

I pay less attention to what politicians say, more to how they say it. I'm looking for humanity, somewhere beneath layers of handlers and speechwriters and general hoopla - for fragility, for an indication that these folks and I share the same kind of DNA. Yes, policy stuff matters,...