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Patt Morrison, who pens the weekly "Patt Morrison Asks" column, is a writer and columnist for The Times, for which her work has spanned ...

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Patt Morrison

Patt Morrison

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Floyd Abrams, America's free speaker

Floyd Abrams, America's free speaker

June 12, 2013

Where there's smoke arising from a free-speech matter, you're likely to find the fiery attorney Floyd Abrams. He's blazed a trail for freedom of the press from the Pentagon Papers case to protecting reporters' sources. He's just as incendiary when he's fighting forced warning labels on cigarettes and championing the Citizens United court decision. Abrams' memoir, "Friend of the Court," arrives as news media and government are again at loggerheads over reporters' phone records and revelations-by-leak of widespread domestic surveillance — all burning issues for him.

  • Brian D'Arcy, DWP union's power guy

    June 5, 2013

    Sometimes L.A. politics seem like patty-cake, but when Brian D'Arcy gets in the game, the game gets serious. He's a third-generation union man, and the union he heads, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 18, is the DWP's biggest and a huge player at City Hall. In some quarters, the IBEW's DWP contracts — worth as much as six figures — are a symbol of overweening union power. The political action committee he co-chairs and the IBEW supports, Working Californians, cobbled together the largest amount spent on behalf of Wendy Greuel's mayoral bid, about $4 million. The IBEW isn't crying "uncle." D'Arcy has zest for the fray and one gear: forward.

  • Alan Trounson, California's Dr. Stem Cell

    May 29, 2013

    In 2004, with President George W. Bush dead set against stem cell research, California just went ahead and did it. Voters made stem cell research a state constitutional right, and endorsed $3 billion in bond sales for 10 years to cement the deal. CIRM, the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine created under Proposition 71, has become a world center for stem cell research, and its president is Australian Alan Trounson, a pioneer in in vitro fertilization. As Proposition 71 approaches its 10-year anniversary, Trounson offers a prognosis.

  • Jonathan Fielding, the public's MD

    May 15, 2013

    If you've got your health, the cliche goes, you've got just about everything. If you've got public health duties, you're responsible for just about everything from mosquitoes (West Nile carriers) to hygiene (wash your hands for as long as it takes to sing "Happy Birthday" twice). Dr. Jonathan Fielding heads L.A. County's Department of Public Health, which is bigger than some states' health departments. A pediatrician by training and the head of the county's health programs since 1998, Fielding is such a believer that he and his wife, Karin, turned savvy investments into a $50-million gift last year to UCLA's School of Public Health. Here he takes the temperature of the medical and political aspects of his work.

  • Ruben Barrales, party guy

    May 8, 2013

    When President Obama told students in Mexico that without the support of U.S. Latinos he would not be president, he wasn't talking about the GOP's Ruben Barrales. But Barrales gets the message. He is the son of immigrants, and San Mateo County's first Latino supervisor. Mexico gave him its Ohtli medal, for his work on behalf of Mexican Americans. Once a Democrat, he went to work in the George W. Bush White House and ran San Diego's regional chamber of commerce. His principal task now, as head of GROW Elect, is cultivating Latino Republican elected officials in California, not exactly fertile soil for the GOP of late. He has his ideas why, and what to do about it.

  • Isabel Allende, a life of letters

    May 1, 2013

    Somewhere between her Chilean family's life-or-death political realities and its intuitive, fantastical imagination is where Isabel Allende writes. Where she lives is the Bay Area, arriving in California about 25 years ago with a famous surname she's gone on to burnish, novel by novel. As perhaps befits an emigre author, Allende's books are routinely translated into two dozen languages. Here she muses in English about what the future of the written word holds for authors like her, and for the readers who love them.

  • Elie Wiesel, history's witness

    April 23, 2013

    It was a fine April day last week that found Elie Wiesel at Chapman University; it was a fine April day too, 58 years earlier, when the gaunt, teenage Wiesel found himself alive and suddenly free to walk out of the Buchenwald concentration camp. In the decades since, Wiesel's impassioned writing and speaking have won him a Nobel Peace Prize, and a large place in the public intellectual discourse about the Holocaust and the human condition. They have also brought him to Chapman each spring for the last three years as a distinguished presidential fellow, meeting with students and faculty to keep the significance of the Holocaust green in their minds.

  • Quentin Kopp, no longer on board this bullet train

    April 16, 2013

    There's a short piece of Bay Area freeway, Interstate 380, named for Quentin Kopp, which is ironic considering that he's beaten the drum for public transit — specifically bullet trains — for years. But then again, he's always been a contrarian, as a Superior Court judge, a San Francisco supervisor and a state senator. He also headed the California High-Speed Rail Authority. The man nicknamed the "Great Dissenter" is dissenting now over the course of his beloved bullet train, created on paper in 2008 with a bond measure, Proposition 1A. Its prospects have been slowed considerably by lawsuits, the latest from the state itself, a preemptive bring-it-on legal action called High-Speed Rail Authority vs. All Persons Interested. Kopp is among the very interested, and the not very happy.

  • Dodger great Carl Erskine: Pitching equality

    April 9, 2013

    Jackie Robinson changed baseball and the nation that loves it on April 15, 1947, when he became the first black player to walk onto a major league ball field. He changed Carl Erskine's life in March 1948, when Robinson, by then a Brooklyn Dodgers star, sought out the minor leaguer after watching him pitch and told him, "You're going to be with us real soon!" And so he was — they were teammates through much of he Dodgers' legendary 1950s. The Robinson biopic "42" is mostly about matters that happened before they met, but Erskine knows what happened afterward: He pitched and won the first Dodger game in L.A., retired in 1959 to his hometown in Indiana, and watched the nation gradually understand the life lessons he later wrote about in "What I Learned from Jackie Robinson."

  • The new head of the county's troubled jail system discusses reform.

    April 3, 2013

    The Los Angeles County jail system is, in a way, two systems. There's the one Sheriff Lee Baca says he yearns for, a place where you do your time but also get help, a place enriched with educational and mental health programs. And there's the one under scrutiny by the FBI, a federal grand jury and others over allegations of brutality and mismanagement. Terri McDonald is now in charge of them both. After a quarter-century in the state prisons, from prison guard to manager of the massive "realignment" of prisoners, McDonald will be opening the investigatory and disciplinary books on the jail, with an eye to realigning it.

  • Megan P. Tatu, a good soldier

    March 27, 2013

    Soldier, Megan P. Tatu has your back. And just about anything else you might need. The two-star Army Reserve general has just taken charge of the 79th Sustainment Support Command, the modern iteration of an Army logistics branch that is a year older than the Declaration of Independence. The 79th is headquartered in Los Alamitos, not far from Tatu's Laguna Niguel home. Reservists are part-timers who, as Tatu says, give taxpayers 19% of the Army's strength for 4% of its budget. She's the highest-ranking woman commander in the reserves on the West Coast, at a moment when women in the military is a trending topic.

  • The Magic Castle's Milt Larsen: Why humans need magic

    March 20, 2013

    Milt Larsen is a master of two kinds of magic. There's the abracadabra kind that his magician parents brought him up on, and the sort he began practicing with his late brother, Bill — the magic of preserving buildings, including the Variety Arts Theater downtown and the Mayfair Music Hall in Santa Monica. The capper is the Magic Castle. Here, 50 years ago, the Larsens — presto-changeo — turned a banker's home into a members-only clubhouse for grown-up magicians and their fans. Larsen has three cable radio shows (old comedy and even older music), but his passion for magic has made his Castle his home.

  • Bill Rosendahl, happy warrior

    March 6, 2013

    Robert Kennedy was a young Bill Rosendahl's hope for the White House, but Kennedy's rival, Hubert Humphrey, practiced the "happy warrior" style of politics that represents the principles Rosendahl has embraced. As he leaves the Los Angeles City Council after two terms, his eight years in office (and a diagnosis of cancer, now in remission) have not extinguished Rosendahl's cheerfulness, but they have given his warrior side an instruction booklet.

  • L.A.'s mayors: A cast of characters

    March 3, 2013

    One was nicknamed "Pinky," for rather obscure reasons. Another, for lamentably obvious ones, was known as "Horse Face," and the military buddies of a third called him "Old Chubby Cheeks."

  • LAPD Chief Charlie Beck's side

    February 27, 2013

    In the three-plus years since Charlie Beck put on the chief's badge at the LAPD, his goal has been to consolidate a modern, multiethnic, publicly responsible 10,000-officer department, as envisioned in the rattling reforms of 15 and 20 years ago. The chief's recent trial by fire was about one ex-probationary cop named Christopher Dorner and the manhunt that ended in Dorner's death, consumed millions in law enforcement dollars and ate up, for the moment at least, some fraction of the goodwill the LAPD has been working to bank. With investigations launched into Dorner's claims and the LAPD's use of force, Beck sizes up the fallout so far.

  • Dan Goods, JPL's science seer

    February 20, 2013

    When artist Dan Goods arrived at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, they gave him a six-month shot. In May, he'll have been there 10 years as JPL's "visual strategist." He glued soda bottles to the roof of his Taurus to create music on an m.p.h. pipe organ. At JPL, his "Out There" sign (recycled computer-box parts) conjures the infinite in a meeting space and plaster hands he installed in the library hold curious objects. He once drilled a hole through a grain of sand to demonstrate the size of our galaxy, and then put that grain of sand in six rooms of sand that represent the universe. Anything to make abstract science into something you can see.

  • Susan Love, doctor/patient

    February 13, 2013

    And now, she is the patient. For decades, as a surgeon, researcher, professor and medical celebrity of sorts, Susan Love has led the charge against breast cancer and for women's health. She served on President Clinton's cancer advisory board. She set up a research foundation. Her book on breast cancer is on the short shelf for clinicians and counselors. And last June, when, like so many women, she was feeling and doing fine, the diagnosis came. Except it wasn't breast cancer but leukemia. The woman who has battled one kind of cancer on behalf of millions of women finds herself fighting another kind, on her own

  • Al Gore, still energized

    February 6, 2013

    Al Gore hails from Tennessee, but when he comes to California next week, he'll be coming back to his spiritual home. In 2000, Californians gave him a double-digit lead — 1.3 million votes — over George W. Bush for president. His documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth," won an Oscar. California's GOP governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, signed the nation's most groundbreaking greenhouse-gases law. Californians buy the Prius; the rest of the country buys Ford trucks. Gore arrives amid the hoo-hah over the half-billion-dollar sale of Current TV to Al Jazeera, and touting a hefty new book magisterially titled "The Future." He must think that California, of all places, is ready for it.

  • Richard M. Walden, Operation USA's charity buccaneer

    January 30, 2013

    Almost on impulse, almost 35 years ago, Richard M. Walden and a friend rounded up six tons of relief supplies and a jet to ferry them to Vietnamese boat people in Malaysia. Thus was Operation California — now Operation USA — born. A Times headline soon called him the "charity buccaneer," a red-tape-slashing contrarian who fretted about the "international web of neglect," and who still has sharp words for relief efforts unmet and relief agencies that don't measure up. He has steadfast celebrity supporters, like Julie Andrews, but the advent of social media that let anyone text a few bucks to Lady Gaga's favorite charity in the middle of a concert has made things harder for brick-and-mortar charities like Operation USA. Walden soldiers on, boldly going where too many charity-come-latelies can only try to go.

  • Rep. Raul Ruiz, an Rx for D.C.

    January 23, 2013

    You'd almost think that someone had stapled several

  • Jackie Lacey, for the prosecution

    January 16, 2013

    It's a tidy coincidence that Jackie Lacey, newly elected as Los Angeles County's first female and first African American district attorney, is a graduate of the city's Susan Miller Dorsey High School, named for L.A.'s first female schools superintendent. Lacey was sworn in in December, and she's now ensconced in the D.A.'s offices on the criminal courthouse's 18th floor, where her picture will join those of 160 years' worth of white men who've held the title, among them Gen. George S. Patton's father. Her predecessor, Steve Cooley, stocked the bookcases with volumes by his friend, crime novelist James Ellroy. Lacey's books run to leadership, like one she's assigned to her new team, "Death by Meeting." She wears a black-and-white beaded bracelet spelling out WWJD. Tweaked a little, it's what L.A. wants to know about its new D.A.: What will Jackie do?

  • The Rose Parade grows up

    January 1, 2013

    It's just a parade, after all, a once-a-year parade, so in the grand scheme of things, the Tournament of Roses Parade doesn't matter — until it does. And it does.

  • Johnathan Franklin, UCLA's running man

    December 26, 2012

    Johnathan Franklin has gone through a lot of nicknames. There's "Jet Ski" for his speed in his Pop Warner football days, and "Hollywood" for his season-two gig on the reality show "Baldwin Hills." The latest handle for the UCLA star is "Mayor," because that's what he wants to be one day — the mayor of Los Angeles. The running back who's broken rushing records when he's on the field has cajoled his teammates into registering to vote when he's in the locker room. He plans to get to his personal goals the way he gets to the goal line: with focus. His last chance to apply that in a Bruins uniform comes Thursday in the Holiday Bowl in San Diego.

  • Herman Wouk, a novel force

    December 19, 2012

    The year Herman Wouk was born, Woodrow Wilson was in his first term in the White House, the Lusitania's sinking was on the front page and "The Birth of a Nation" was playing in silent movie theaters. In the 97 years since, with such books as "The Caine Mutiny," "Marjorie Morningstar and "The Winds of War," Wouk became a force in American letters, and in film and television as well. His latest novel, "The Lawgiver," tells the tale of a Hollywood struggle to make a movie about Moses. Wouk's modern story about the ancient and long-lived biblical hero unfolds via text messages, emails and plain old-fashioned letters. And he's made himself and his late wife, Betty Sarah, characters in the book. Wouk is a devotee of Skype, which is how he talked to me from his Palm Springshome.

  • Eloise Klein Healy, L.A.'s first poet laureate

    December 12, 2012

    It's a match made in heaven — or heav'n, as a poet might write. Eloise Klein Healy and the city of Los Angeles share a birthday, Sept. 4, and now, for a couple of years, they'll officially share a future. Healy has been named the city's first poet laureate, tasked with writing for big occasions and with making poetry a public matter. She's a Valley gal, to wit, Sherman Oaks, with her partner, Colleen Rooney, and their Portuguese water dog, Nikita. The founder of the MFA program at Antioch University, she has foraged deeply for poetic material in the city's weave of cultures and freeways. Her next collection, "A Wild Surmise," comes out in March.

  • Tara Kolla, L.A's down-to-earth urban farmer

    November 21, 2012

    Tara Kolla was born in Inglewood but grew up in Europe. She came back to Los Angeles, to a half-acre Silver Lake plot, where she decided to try her hand at "urban farming." Her neighbors objected, so now she mostly works other people's land, and works to further the cause. We met in Hidden Canyon, the aptly named acres in Glassell Park whose owners invited Kolla to cultivate and grow market flowers. Here are rows and beds of hyssop, black-eyed Susans, honeywort, zinnias, mums and ornamental cotton flowers. I plucked a boll of what I'll call "Glassell Park long staple." Because of people like Kolla, laws have changed to permit farming, of a sort, all around town. What was once the single most profitable agricultural county in the nation may just be coming back, one urban plot at a time.

  • Alvin Roth, Nobel matchmaker

    November 13, 2012

    Alvin Roth earned his 2012 Nobel Prize in economics for market design and matching theory — creating ways to pair "buyers" and "sellers" happily and fairly when price isn't a primary consideration. For instance? Kidney exchanges, in which cost can't legally play a role but donors and recipients with just the right assets and needs still must find each other. Roth's algorithms can be used to make good matches in even the thorniest situations: bringing the lovelorn together with potential mates, and bringing together the right charter and public schools with the right students.

  • Sheila Krumholz -- she follows the money

    November 6, 2012

    It was a California politico, Jesse Unruh, who nailed the relationship between dough and democracy: "Money is the mother's milk of politics." Where does it come from, and where does it go? Sheila Krumholz makes it her business to tell us. As executive director of the nonpartisan, nonprofit Center for Responsive Politics, she monitors the witches' brew of federal lobbying and loot at http://www.opensecrets.org which names donors and tracks categories like earmarks, interest groups, even contributions by ZIP Code. Just before election day, she talked about this year's political cash cows, and the 20-plus years she's spent following the Watergate admonition to follow the money.

  • Mac Taylor, California's prop master

    October 31, 2012

    Whoever it was who coined "Lies, damn lies and statistics" didn't trust numbers. You won't find Mac Taylor subscribing to that. He's the state legislative analyst; his name is there in your ballot pamphlet as the source of independent information about ballot measures and their potential cost to taxpayers. He's had the top job in that office for four years, but the California native joined the effort, fresh from Princeton with a master's degree in public affairs, the same year Jerry Brown was elected governor — the first time. He presides over the fiscal Google of Sacramento, a calm think tank in the shark tank of the Legislature's partisan passions.

  • Douglas Kmiec on keeping the faith

    October 24, 2012

    Talk about tests of faith. Douglas Kmiec is an influential Roman Catholic scholar, a veteran of Ronald Reagan's Justice Department and a Pepperdine University constitutional law professor. What he's gone through in the last handful of years, he sums up pretty well with the title of his latest book, "Lift Up Your Hearts: A true story of loving your enemies, tragically killing your friends, and the life that remains.'' His interfaith work earned him President Obama's appointment as ambassador to Malta. During his tour, he engineered the seagoing escape from Libya of Americans in February 2011 as civil war erupted, but he was criticized over his interfaith advocacy — and eventually resigned. Last month's killings in Benghazi have made Kmiec think more deeply about religion, politics and his own mission.

  • Linda Dishman -- preserving L.A., a building at a time

    October 17, 2012

    Been to a concert at the Wiltern? Toured downtown's movie palaces? Love the Central Library? You can thank the Los Angeles Conservancy that they're still here. And for 20 of the conservancy's 34 years, Linda Dishman has been its executive director, fighting the wrecking ball and trying to keep historic buildings from being threatened in the first place. The organization's nearly 7,000 members make it the biggest local preservation group in the country, and proof that Angelenos see plenty worth preserving in what people too often think of as a tear-down city.

  • Linda Dishman — preserving L.A., a building at a time

    October 17, 2012

    Been to a concert at the Wiltern? Toured downtown's movie palaces? Love the Central Library? You can thank the Los Angeles Conservancy that they're still here. And for 20 of the conservancy's 34 years, Linda Dishman has been its executive director, fighting the wrecking ball and trying to keep historic buildings from being threatened in the first place. The organization's nearly 7,000 members make it the biggest local preservation group in the country, and proof that Angelenos see plenty worth preserving in what people too often think of as a tear-down city.

  • An exit interview with Rep. David Dreier

    October 10, 2012

    David Dreier was 26, still living in a dorm at Claremont McKenna College and working as a college administrator, when he ran for Congress the first time, in 1978. He lost then but never thereafter. Sixteen times, Dreier was elected to the House of Representatives from a San Gabriel Valley/San Bernardino County district. He became the youngest-ever chairman of the Rules Committee, mastering the machinery of the House. But in February, he announced he would not seek reelection. He leaves behind a sharply redrawn district, and a Congress he insists is not so awfully different from the one he entered more than half his life ago.

  • Salman Rushdie, freedom writer

    October 3, 2012

    In the 1990s, he was the world-famous novelist few people officially laid eyes on. Of Salman Rushdie's dozen-plus novels, it was "The Satanic Verses" (1988) that raised a hue and cry and sent him undercover: Its supposedly sacrilegious portrayal of the prophet Muhammad brought Rushdie a fatwa, a death sentence, from Iran's Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (it was lifted in 1998). The writer came to L.A. to accept the Library Foundation of Los Angeles' literary award and to talk about his new memoir of his underground years, "Joseph Anton." He and the book have arrived just as the blowback from "Innocence of Muslims" has caused us all to confront the questions that commandeered a decade of his life.

  • Abderrahim Foukara, Al Jazeera's U.S. translator

    September 26, 2012

    How do you convey to the world the American ideal of free speech or curious turns of phrase like "stump speech" and "gerrymandering"? Abderrahim Foukara does it daily, as Al Jazeera's bureau chief in Washington. I first met the Moroccan-born journalist at the 2008 Republican convention, where he told me that he had explained John McCain as "maverick" to his Arab-language audiences as a bird that flies a distance from the flock. Now, at a parlous moment in the relationship between there and here, I asked the man who reports U.S. thinking to the Arab world to do some illuminating in the other direction.

  • E.O. Wilson -- much more than 'the ant guy'

    September 19, 2012

    Myrmecologist E.O. Wilson had been out "anting" before we talked during the Sun Valley Writers Conference. He found some specimens to send back to Harvard, where he made his reputation researching insect colonies and a lot more, including sociobiology, the study of social organization as an aspect of evolution. One of sociobiology's pillars, "kin selection," explains why organisms sacrifice themselves: to ensure that their family genetic legacy endures. But now Wilson is relishing upsetting the kin selection apple cart with work he says proves that it's not just relatives but groups with other common goals that inspire self-sacrifice, an insight that provides an evolutionary basis for all kinds of human collaboration.

  • The long hike from an Iranian prison to home

    September 12, 2012

    Two years ago, Californian and citizen of the world Sarah Shourd was released from prison in Iran after an intense international campaign to free her. A bit more than a year later, that effort, including pressure from the State Department, Oman (the "Switzerland of the Middle East") and even Iraq and Venezuela, also won the release of Shourd's then-fiance, Shane Bauer, and their friend, Josh Fattal. The three Americans had been hiking in 2009 in Iraqi Kurdistan when they were snatched at the Iranian border and accused of spying. Ever since, in jail and out, they've been in the world's spotlight. They'll tell their story in a book next year — and here, as Shourd marks her second anniversary of freedom.

  • Marcus Allen: An insider's view of football

    September 5, 2012

    The college football season just kicked off, and L.A. still has to cheer for any pro team but its own. Running back Marcus Allen was a standout in college and the pros: a Heisman Trophy winner at USC, then a record-setter with the Kansas City Chiefs after a contentious but stellar stint with the L.A. Raiders, where his clash with team owner Al Davis was as epic as anything on the field. Now he figures large in a new "The Pro Football Hall of Fame 50th Anniversary Book," and as a CBS analyst, as well as a man with a lot to say about the state of the game.

  • Antonio Villaraigosa's goals for L.A. and beyond

    August 29, 2012

    In a corny old movie, they'd illustrate this bit with pages flying off a calendar: Antonio Villaraigosa has about 10 months left as mayor of Los Angeles, and although his name is bruited about for higher office, City Hall is where he says wants to be. Not that that will keep him from presiding as chairman of the Democratic convention next week in North Carolina, checking out the competition in Florida this week and campaigning for President Obama. But then it's back to pushing toward the goal line in L.A., on transit, trees, parks, education and now the city's unsettling pension crisis. Tick, tick …

  • Elon Musk of SpaceX: The goal is Mars

    August 1, 2012

    As shipments go, it was routine — about half a ton of supplies — except it was delivered by the first commercial flight to the International Space Station. SpaceX partnered with NASA in this new model, the brainchild of Elon Musk, who's behind Tesla electric cars as well. He left South Africa at 17, earned two U.S. undergraduate degrees and then made serial piles of dough pioneering online payment systems, including the one that became PayPal. Musk's persona inspired aspects of Tony Stark in the"Iron Man," but Musk's aspirations seem more like Buzz Lightyear's — to infinity, and beyond.

  • London calling for Olympian Angela Ruggiero

    July 18, 2012

    Valley native and four-time ice hockey Olympic medalist Angela Ruggiero — one gold, two silvers, one bronze — was elected in 2010 by her fellow Olympians to the Athletes Commission of the International Olympic Committee. She's one of 12 athletes designated to speak for the wrestlers, runners, swimmers, skaters and all the other competitors in the hierarchy that governs the Games. Next week's London Olympics are her first as a member of the IOC, but she's already working far ahead: on the 2018 Winter Games in South Korea, on the 2016 youth Olympics in Lillehammer, Norway, and on her MBA at Harvard, her alma mater. The proponent of women's sports is off the competitive ice but on the larger Olympic team.

  • Vin Scully, pitch perfect for the Dodgers

    July 11, 2012

    Oh, that voice! It comes out of the TV, it comes out of the radio, it comes out of the man sitting across from me in the cafe behind the press box at Dodger Stadium. Courtly and indefatigable, Vin Scully has been calling Dodger games since Harry Truman was president and the Dodgers were suiting up in Brooklyn; he's in his 63rd season of sounding every shade of Dodger Blue. As the team passes midseason, it's time for the voice of Dodger baseball, the man who actually does talk a very good game.

  • Post & Beam's well-seasoned restaurateur, Brad Johnson

    July 4, 2012

    Foodies tend to move like flocks of birds, swarming a chic eatery, and then — swoop — off to the next. One of their newer perches in Los Angeles is in a part of town that hasn't had much of the food spotlight. Post & Beam opened on New Year's Evein Baldwin Hills, an area with as many economic ups and downs as the hills and canyons that give the neighborhood its name. Restaurateur Brad Johnson has cut the ribbon on some flashy restaurants in his native New York and in Los Angeles; now his foray into L.A.'s best-known black middle-class neighborhood gives him food for thought.

  • Walter Mosley, L.A.'s easy writer

    June 27, 2012

    You can take Walter Mosley out of Los Angeles — in fact, Mosley did so himself, moving to New York decades ago — but you can't take L.A. out of Walter Mosley. The master of several genres keeps the city present, from his Easy Rawlins detective novels set in black postwar Los Angeles to the Greek-myths-in-South-Central elements in one of the two novellas in his latest volume. Mosley appeared to wrap it up with Rawlins in "Blonde Faith" in 2007, but five years later, he's found more for his most famous detective to do, just as Mosley has for himself. He has a fledgling production company, B.O.B. (for "Best of Brooklyn") Filmhouse, and still writes with one foot in 212 and another here in 213.

  • Patt Morrison Asks: Norman Lear, TV's seriously funny icon

    June 20, 2012

    Television comedy can probably be divided into two eras: B.L. and A.L. — Before Lear and After Lear. Norman Lear's seminal 1970s sitcoms —"All in the Family" and its offspring, from"Maude" to "The Jeffersons" — used the laissez-passer of comedy to bring politics, race, abortion and sexism into the nation's living rooms, and made Archie Bunker a virtual member of all of the nation's families. Then in 1981, Lear founded People For the American Way. In Washington, on Thursday night, the organization celebrates the upcoming 90th birthday of the man who pushed the TV definition of family and praises his own wife and six kids as "the greatest family in the history of families."

  • Jessica Yu's 'Last Call at the Oasis' made her a water activist

    June 13, 2012

    If you want to say that Jessica Yu burst onto the film scene in 1993 with her short "Sour Death Balls," you'd be almost literally right. The film is almost 10 minutes of people trying to handle the disgusting confection. Yu's work wins accolades, including a short-documentary Oscar for "Breathing Lessons," about a writer who spent most of his life in an iron lung. Now she's brought her California chops to bear on"Last Call at the Oasis," a feature-length documentary on water waste, water quality and water manipulation not just here — where more than half of our drinkable public water goes to water lawns and plants outside our homes — but the whole, not-so-wet world over.

  • Anne Gust Brown: Much more than California's first lady

    June 6, 2012

    Compared to the glamour and swagger of the Schwarzenegger/Shriver years, California's present governor and his wife are a couple of homebodies with a touch of the workaholic. Indeed, some Californians may be surprised to know that Jerry Brown has been married for the last seven years — to a woman he'd dated for 15 more. Anne Gust Brown is a Stanford grad and Bay Area lawyer who spent years as an executive at the Gap before she joined her husband's campaigns and his staff as an unpaid aide, first when he ran for attorney general and now, in his return to the governorship after nearly 30 years. She is often joined at the Capitol offices by the first dog, Sutter the corgi.

  • Michael Dukakis, Prof. Politics

    May 30, 2012

    The man who made his political bones handling Boston's blizzard of 1978 has spent the last 17 winters in the sunshine glow of UCLA. Michael Dukakis, the former Massachusetts governor and the 1988 Democratic presidential candidate for president, is a visiting professor at UCLA's Luskin School of Public Affairs, launching young people into the public service careers he endorses so passionately. UCLA is where he staged his last fervent campaign rally the day before he lost toGeorge H.W. Bush; the day after the election, he was back at his governor's desk. As California votes in its primary, Dukakis puts his mind to the Golden State's political workings, and the nature of a presidential campaign.

  • The National Teacher of the Year on what makes a great teacher

    May 16, 2012

    The class clown from Mr. Gadberry's high school art class has made good — and how. Rebecca Mieliwocki teaches seventh-grade English at Luther Burbank Middle School in Burbank — but not next year. Instead, she'll be on the road as the National Teacher of the Year. It took her a long time to get to the classroom — she once worked as a floral designer, doing the flowers for Elizabeth Taylor's private jet — and eventually to the White House, where a fellow teacher, President Obama, crowned her as a national teaching treasure. Before she takes off, Mieliwocki is speaking at commencement at her teaching alma mater, Cal State Northridge — and right here.

  • Nathan Fletcher, San Diego's renegade ex-Republican

    April 28, 2012

    A computer programmed to design a promising young Republican politician would probably spit out Nathan Fletcher. Marine; Iraq combat veteran in Iraq; smart; athletic; married to a well-situated Republican; two little boys, adopted; two dogs, ditto. Perfect — except now there's no "R" after his name. Fletcher was elected to the state Assembly from San Diego County in 2008, and he is running for San Diego mayor in a nonpartisan race that is nonetheless drawing partisan lightning. Since Fletcher changed his party registration to "decline to state," which got national coverage, polls have him second in the June 5 primary, just behind openly gay Republican council member Carl DeMaio, who won the GOP endorsement over Fletcher. His critics say his party switch is politically calculated; Fletcher says it's just about getting the job done.

  • Reading, no batteries required

    April 22, 2012

    Tenderly, the lover caressed his beloved. So pale, so smooth. He tilted his head forward, the better to inhale that scent — rich and enticing. Fingertip to spine, feeling every contour, he pressed his face closer — and turned a page.

  • Rodney King, 20 years after L.A.'s riots

    April 21, 2012

    In 21 years, his name has appeared in the Los Angeles Times on more than 7,000 occasions. Sometimes it's as himself, Rodney King, the victim of now-fabled LAPD abuse the world got to see, the plaintiff in a civil lawsuit, the hapless guy getting stopped yet again on some speeding or DUI beef, the man on the celebrity rehab show. And sometimes it's as "Rodney King," the accidental symbol and the rallying cry on police abuse issues. Some of the biggest institutions in Southern California — the Los Angeles Police Department, the city itself — were changed because of the beating King took in 1991 and the beating the city took in 1992 in the riots that followed the acquittal of the officers charged in his beating. Has the man himself changed? On the 20th anniversary of the riots, his book, "The Riot Within,"' written with Lawrence J. Spagnola, is letting us, and King himself, find out.

  • Patt Morrison Asks: James Cameron, a man overboard

    April 14, 2012

    The Challenger Deep, a fissure in the Mariana Trench in the Pacific Ocean, lies farther below the Earth's surface than Mt. Everest reaches above it. And James Cameron, the science-enthralled director and underwater explorer, made it his Lindbergh moment, soloing humankind's deepest-ever plunge last month in a purpose-made submarine fitted out — natch — with 3D cameras. One hundred years ago today, the world's most famous accidental deep dive took the ocean liner Titanic to the bottom of the Atlantic. Cameron made that story into the film "Titanic." I spoke with him just before his epic descent, and asked him to ruminate on the ship that disappeared in 1912 and his own disappearing act into the ocean depths. You know what they say — whatever floats your boat.

  • Patt Morrison Asks: Blue blood, Peter O'Malley

    April 7, 2012

    In 1938, after voters recalled L.A.'s crooked mayor, Frank Shaw, it's said that someone planted a sign on the City Hall lawn: "Under new management." The new ownership of the Dodgers needs no sign. The purchase, by a Chicago financial service company at a record price, has been heralded in every way but skywriting.

  • Patt Morrison Asks: Jonah Lehrer, brain teaser

    April 1, 2012

    Zombies in movie theaters, zombies on television — a whole lot of us have brains on the brain. And so, in a substantially different way, does Jonah Lehrer. He's put himself at the crossroads of neuroscience and the humanities with books like his first, "Proust Was a Neuroscientist," and other volumes delving into the neuro-mysteries of the way the brain makes decisions and the way creativity works. Here in his native Los Angeles, the second-largest neural mass in the nation, Lehrer applies himself to sorting out the hard-wiring and the software that make up the stuff between our ears.

  • Patt Morrison Asks: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar -- still hooked

    March 24, 2012

    Only his number is retired — 33, in the Lakers' purple and gold that Kareem Abdul-Jabbar wore to glory on the basketball court. The rest of him is still working away, most recently on his latest book. At UCLA, in blue and gold, Abdul-Jabbar was a standout, an All American and player of the year — and a history major, which has served him well in his literary career. Some of his books have made it to the bestseller list, and this one, "What Color Is My World? The Lost History of African-American Inventors," is a children's volume with adult appeal. But in the midst of March Madness, he's still watching the game he mastered, though two of his favorites are already out: Lehigh and Long Beach.

  • Patt Morrison Asks: Carl Guardino, Silicon Valley's big wheel

    March 10, 2012

    The last time I saw Carl Guardino, the head of the Silicon Valley Leadership Group, he was in a wheelchair after a biking accident encounter with some skateboarders. The wheelchair is probably the only form of transportation Guardino doesn't like. He was appointed to the state transportation commission by a Republican governor and reappointed by a Democratic one. That pretty much sums up the way SVLG works: It's about policy, not politics, and the issues are broad: from math education to affordable housing to opening a patent office in Santa Clara County. He commutes 32 miles a day by bike — good training for the marathon work of making life more livable for everyone, from waiters to millionaires, in what was once called "the Valley of Heart's Delight."

  • The head of the Motion Picture Assn. of America talks piracy, politics and box office as the Oscars draw near.

    February 25, 2012

    Hollywood loves comeback stories. Will SOPA/PIPA be one of them? The anti-piracy bills that were working their way through Congress with Hollywood's blessing got tanked by a massive online campaign — petitions, website blackouts, even T-shirts. From 1981 until 2010, Christopher J. Dodd was a Democratic senator from Connecticut. A year later, as head of the Motion Picture Assn. of America, he was dealing with SOPA/PIPA fallout. Showing up at the Oscars — which he will do — is just the tip of the MPAA job. Dodd has arranged matinees for veterans at MPAA's theater in D.C., worked on film trade matters, and postelection, he'll try out an anti-piracy law sequel. Will it be boffo for all sides?

  • Patt Morrison Asks: Dodgers dugout doc Sue Falsone

    February 18, 2012

    The Dodgers' pitchers and catchers will show up at Camelback Ranch in Arizona in a few days for spring training. And so will Sue Falsone. She won't be in the stands; she'll be in the dugout and the clubhouse, with the guys. She's the Dodgers' new head athletic trainer and physical therapist — and she is the first woman to become head trainer in any of the four major professional sports.

  • Westminster: Malibu's wire fox terrier Eira goes for the double-crown

    February 13, 2012

    I’m a mutt fancier myself -- or "multicultural canines," as my dogs prefer -- but like millions of other lovers of canines of all kinds, I’ll be tuning in Monday to watch the Westminster Kennel Club dog show, the 136th.

  • Patt Morrison Asks: Hard lessons with Michelle Rhee

    February 11, 2012

    No one, it seems, is lukewarm about Michelle Rhee; she's a pass-fail figure, inspiring or polarizing.

  • Queen Elizabeth II's diamond jubilee, and all that

    February 5, 2012

    The first Queen Elizabeth was standing under an English oak tree when she learned that she had become queen.

  • Patt Morrison Asks: Pocho pundit Lalo Alcaraz

    February 4, 2012

    Every presidential campaign turns out to be a quadrennial godsend for editorial cartoonists, but for Lalo Alcaraz, 2012 is a jubilee year. Herman Cain, chowing down at a Miami restaurant, asks, “How do you say ‘delicious' in Cuban?” Newt Gingrich uses “bilingual education” and “language of living in a ghetto” in the same sentence. And then there's Mitt Romney, son of a Mexican-born Mormon who also ran for president of the United States. Or the “United Estates,” according to Romney's mysterious alter-Tweeter, @MexicanMitt, who's muy simpatico with his staunch “supporter” Alcaraz.

  • Patt Morrison Asks: The Internet Archive's Brewster Kahle

    January 28, 2012

    Brewster Kahle has the gleeful air of a man who has just found something wonderful and wants to tell his friends all about it. And his friends are the 2 billion people, and counting, who are on the Internet every day.

  • Patt Morrison Asks: Alice Waters

    January 21, 2012

    Little bistro, huge impact. Like a different sort of miracle of the five loaves and two fishes, Chez Panisse, the landmark Berkeley restaurant, and its founder and guiding spirit, Alice Waters, have leveraged a small temple of slow, local and organic food into a massive force in the culinary world. Now that appetite for a new/old food culture has begun to register on the public's consciousness, if not always on its plate. Waters is clearing her table of most everything but the Edible Schoolyard Project: If we are what we eat, she wants children in class, on the playground and in the cafeteria kitchen to change their identities by the forkful.

  • Patt Morrison Asks: Diane Keaton

    January 14, 2012

    If you're lazily inclined to define Diane Keaton by the crossword-puzzle-sized word "actor," you need to get out more. Add to that her work as director and producer, photographer, restorer of venerable houses, board member of the Los Angeles Conservancy and, perhaps above all, as a daughter -- as revealed by her daughter-mother memoir "Then Again." Little Diane once sat in a neighborhood theater on North Figueroa and watched her mother being crowned Mrs. Highland Park, and wished it were her up on stage instead. In time, she stood on the world stage as a winner of an Academy Award. Her strong connections to her late mother -- like her mother's dreams of art and beauty -- inform Keaton's own identity in the here and now.

  • Patt Morrison Asks: Doris Day

    January 7, 2012

    Add it all up, and Doris Day's singular singing voice has spent more than 11 years on the Billboard charts. Her three dozen-plus films made millions of fans and dollars. And now, after nearly two decades of living below the radar in Carmel, Doris Day is back on the charts. "My Heart" is a baker's dozen of songs from the vaults, many produced by her late son, Terry Melcher, who worked with the Byrds and who co-wrote and sang "Happy Endings" on the CD, and sang a second song on it with his mother. The proceeds from "My Heart" go to the Doris Day Animal Foundation, which supports her work protecting animals (that's a rescue dog in the 1993 photo). For that, she's broken a long silence, with a little catch in her voice when she speaks of her departed loved ones -- and, now and again, with that unmistakable throaty Doris Day laugh.

  • Patt Morrison Asks: Two from the 'typosphere'

    December 31, 2011

    There'll be a pair of Pasadena institutions along Colorado Boulevard for New Year's -- the Rose Parade, and a company marking 100 years in business. Anderson Business Technology, nee Anderson Typewriter Co., has bucked two trends: It's been a one-family operation all along, and it's managed to leap from the age of slammed return levers and carbon paper to ctrl.alt.delete. Don Anderson and his son, David, are chairman and president, the second and third generations in the firm. Change has been crucial to their century of success, and yet a romantic roll call of anachronistic mechanical brands -- Royal, Underwood, Smith Corona, Olivetti, Sholes and Glidden, Hermes -- still connects the Andersons to the "typosphere," where poet Charles Bukowski's manual Olympia stars on a mouse pad, and composer Leroy Anderson's whimsical "The Typewriter" stars on YouTube.

  • Patt Morrison Asks: Connie Rice

    December 24, 2011

    Connie Rice was 13 and her father was a test pilot at Edwards Air Force Base when the family drove from the high desert to church at First AME in L.A. She saw the city's ghastly gray air and said to herself, "Well, I'll never live here." Not only has she lived here for more than two decades, her work is about making "here" livable -- survivable -- for those in what she calls L.A.'s "kill zones." Her efforts at healing the wounded heart of L.A.'s civic life, mending the broken ties among police and power structure and the public, as well as her long journey here -- Harvard, death row cases, a passion for tae kwon do -- are laid out in her book, "Power Concedes Nothing." The title, from a Frederick Douglass quote, is an insight into her role in the story of the city where she never thought she'd be.

  • Patt Morrison Asks: Robert Reich, Pre-Occupied

    December 17, 2011

    Robert Reich has worked in a lot of big white buildings -- in the Senate, as an intern to Robert F. Kennedy; in the office of then-Solicitor General Robert Bork; in the Ford and Carter administrations; and as labor secretary to President Clinton. Now the political economist works in another set of big white buildings, teaching at UC Berkeley, where his "Wealth and Poverty" class is as overbooked as a bargain flight to Paris, and where he dotes on his 3-year-old granddaughter, to whom he dedicated his latest book, "Aftershock": "To Ella Reich-Sharpe, and her generation."

  • Patt Morrison Asks: James Cuno, guiding Getty

    December 3, 2011

    Along the 405 is L.A.'s version of a shining city on the hill -- a castle of culture in all its incarnations. The Getty Trust is more than its collections and museums; it's about worldwide research, preservation and philanthropy. Its new chief, James Cuno, blew in four months ago from the Windy City, where he headed the Art Institute of Chicago and, before that, Harvard's art museums. Cuno regards himself as something of a California kid, spending his teen years at Travis Air Force Base and later heading the Grunwald Center at UCLA. Now he's got a world-class arts complex, the world's biggest arts budget and big hangovers from the Getty's time of troubles.

  • Patt Morrison Asks: Tiffany Shlain, wired in

    November 26, 2011

    Like one of those faster-than-light particles that's gone before you can see it, filmmaker and tech innovator Tiffany Shlain zips from the virtual to the real and back again. The Bay Area native whom Newsweek named one of the women shaping the 21st century has been into technology since she and Silicon Valley were both kids. Fifteen years ago, she founded the Webby Awards; well before Twitter, no acceptance speech could be longer than five words. She delivered more than that last year in a commencement speech at her alma mater UC Berkeley, exhorting students to embrace the quality that she claims as her own guiding light: "moxie" -- a long-ago patent medicine turned soft drink whose name has become synonymous with the human recipe for being "bold ... and a little outrageous."

  • Patt Morrison Asks: 1st prosecutor, Luis Moreno-Ocampo

    November 19, 2011

    Luis Moreno-Ocampo has more than a billion clients. He is the first prosecutor for the International Criminal Court, whose authority to prosecute those who commit crimes against humanity, war crimes and genocide is acknowledged by more than 110 nations. (But not the United States -- the U.S. signed the treaty, and then "unsigned" it.) Before he joined the ICC, he was famous for prosecuting politicians and generals for mass murder in his native Argentina. With his nine-year ICC term nearly finished, the first of the international cases he's filed -- against Congolese warlord Thomas Lubanga -- still awaits a verdict. In Argentina, he had his own reality show; now, he's the subject of a new Canadian documentary, and his role is the subject of worldwide interest.

  • Patt Morrison Asks: Well versed, Dana Gioia

    November 5, 2011

    In 2003, Dana Gioia walked onto the battlefield that was the National Endowment for the Arts and brokered a peace. He chaired the NEA for six years, longer than the Civil War. The George W. Bush appointee increased the agency's budget and worked to broaden its mission and demographic reach. Gioia is a widely published poet and essayist, a Stanford MBA and a Southern Californian who's come home, as professor of poetry and public culture at USC, whence all of California is a stage.

  • Patt Morrison Asks: Canon lawyer, Bert Fields

    October 29, 2011

    Who wrote Shakespeare? Sounds like "Who's buried in Grant's tomb?" Yet about 150 years ago, people on both sides of the Atlantic began asking how an otherwise obscure William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon could have crafted the most brilliant works in the English language. Most scholars regard this as an annoying sideshow; and only more annoying now that the film "Anonymous" has been released, purporting that Shakespeare was just a front for the pen and brain of the Earl of Oxford.

  • Patt Morrison Asks: George Regas, keeping faith

    October 22, 2011

    Yep, that was George Regas in that photo — the man in the purple ecclesiastical robe and handcuffs. The rector emeritus of All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena chose to get busted this month outside the downtown federal building protesting the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. A few days earlier, scores of mostly conservative ministers across the country had deliberately defied the IRS ban on candidate endorsements by tax-exempt churches. Regas had tripped that wire inadvertently seven years ago, with a sermon that caught the IRS' ear and could have cost All Saints its tax exemption. He's retired from the pulpit, but time has not staled nor circumstance withered Regas' appetite for engagement.

  • Patt Morrison Asks: Benefit buster Lanny Ebenstein

    October 15, 2011

    Lanny Ebenstein wants you to vote to kneecap the state's public workers unions by banning their right to collective bargaining. Other measures scrambling to qualify for the November 2012 ballot would drop the hammer specifically on public employees' pensions or increase their retirement age, but Ebenstein's may be the most uncompromising. Ebenstein, a lecturer in economics at UC Santa Barbara, believes that it's too cozy for unions to be bargaining with bosses they've likely campaigned to elect -- and the state's economic doldrums are one result. An eight-year veteran of the Santa Barbara school board and the author of volumes about conservative economists Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek, he's now got a metaphorical book he wants to throw at public employee unions.

  • Patt Morrison Asks: The brain, Alfredo Quinones-Hinojosa

    October 1, 2011

    Here's a Hollywood pitch for you: Leading U.S. neurosurgeon started life as a struggling Mexican boy who made it from illegal-immigrant California farmworker to Harvard Med. Not buying it? You should. Dr. Alfredo Quiñones-Hinojosa was that kid and is that man -- associate prof, surgeon and head of the brain tumor stem cell lab at Johns Hopkins. His work puts him, passionately, on the cutting-edge of brain cancer research, and his life wedges him, reluctantly, into the immigration quarrel. He tells his story -- his traumas and triumphs, and his patients' -- in an autobiography, "Becoming Dr. Q," and here, now.

  • Patt Morrison Asks: New master Ed Ruscha

    September 24, 2011

    Most of the dozens of art spaces now showing off Southern California art history weren't even around when Ed Ruscha set up his easel and his style in Los Angeles in the 1950s. Ruscha's classic, defining works are keystones in Pacific Standard Time, a series of exhibitions whose 1945-to-1980 range takes a stab at framing two of the biggest and most elusive concepts around: "art" and "Los Angeles." Ruscha's vision has had a defining hand in both.

  • Patt Morrison Asks: Balloteer Kim Alexander

    September 17, 2011

    The first California election that Kim Alexander cast a ballot in was a pip; voters decided 16 state propositions -- on creating a state lottery, capping welfare, limiting campaign contributions -- and gave their former governor, Ronald Reagan, a second term in the White House.

  • Patt Morrison Asks: Memorial man Peter Walker

    September 10, 2011

    Berkeley landscape architect Peter Walker has designed bigger projects than the 9/11 memorial in New York, but probably none has carried more weight. The opening of the eight-acre plaza Sunday marks 10 years since the terrorist attacks, and almost as many years since Walker joined with architect Michael Arad to finalize a monument for ground zero. The design -- down to plaza lights like the model Walker is holding -- demanded as much attention to emotion as to aesthetics and engineering. With work on One World Trade Center and the museum still in progress, it is the memorial that will first meet the public eye and, if it succeeds, affix in the public heart the harrowing sorrow and transcendent memory of 9/11 for as long as such monuments endure.

  • Patt Morrison Asks: U.S. Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis

    September 3, 2011

    Ahigh school counselor in La Puente once told Hilda Solis' mother that the girl really ought to forget about college and become a secretary. Well, so she has. Hilda Solis is the U.S. secretary of Labor. The daughter of factory workers and ardent union members became the first in her family to get a college education. She brought to D.C. a no-bones-about-it track record from the California Legislature, where she raised the minimum wage, raised the bar for worker protections and raised some hell for environmental laws.

  • Patt Morrison Asks: The poet, W.S. Merwin

    August 27, 2011

    An Idaho resort hotel's verdure is not the wild tumble around W.S. Merwin's beloved Hawaiian home, but disciplined grass and orderly stands of trees. Not, perhaps, the sort of trees Merwin had in mind when he wrote, "On the last day of the world I would want to plant a tree." But the Sun Valley Writers' Conference bears an annual crop of words and ideas, and Merwin is here as a master gardener of that. He just ended a year's term as the nation's poet laureate. He has to his name two Pulitzer Prizes and more than 30 books of poetry and prose, and a hand-planted forest at home of rare and endangered palms. The Merwin Conservancy is dedicated to keeping his works green -- the ones he created with words, and the natural ones that exist before and beyond them.

  • Patt Morrison Asks: The Possibilian, Kevin Kelly

    August 13, 2011

    This is a Klein bottle, a kind of Mobius strip rendered in glass. The man holding it has a brain not unlike these confounding items, possessed of unusual twists and multidimensional turns that can be challenging for lesser mortals to get their own heads around. Kevin Kelly began reflecting on the techno-Internet world before most people even knew it existed. A co-founder of Wired magazine, and still its "senior maverick," his brainstorming writings influenced the films "Minority Report" and "The Matrix," but that's the stuff he has already done. It's the stuff Kelly still wants to do -- and to take the world along him -- that boots him up.

  • Patt Morrison Asks: Inside guy, Buck Henry

    August 6, 2011

    Buck Henry arguably made his showbiz debut at the age of 2, when his mother, the silent film star Ruth Taylor, took him to the Paramount lot to show him off. She denied then that she wanted him to go into movies. Sorry, Mom. Henry has become a polymath of directing, acting, and for my money, especially writing -- "The Graduate"; "Catch-22"; that fine dark comedy of manners, "To Die For"; TV's "Get Smart," with Mel Brooks; and a generation later, the seminal "Saturday Night Live" -- which he hosted for a then-record-setting 10 times. He beavers away on screenplays, plays and sundry prose; I pestered him into a lunch interview in West Hollywood. It was engagingly packed, with talk of the pleasures of "Hamlet" in German and a Hollywood/not Hollywood commentary on passing paraders, delivered with spare humor as dry as the natron used to stuff mummies. Hey -- isn't there a script in there somewhere?

  • Patt Morrison Asks: Breakup artist Laura Wasser

    July 30, 2011

    Seriously? Someone in L.A. who doesn't want to show up on TV?

  • Patt Morrison Asks: Janice Hahn, born to run

    July 23, 2011

    The last time there was nobody by the name of Hahn in L.A. politics, there was a man by the name of Truman in the White House. Now Janice Hahn moves her political game from the Los Angeles City Council to a place down the road from the executive mansion: Congress. Daughter of legendary county Supervisor Kenneth Hahn, sister of former Mayor James Hahn, the Democrat won the special election to replace Jane Harman in the coastal/South Bay 36th Congressional District. I talked to her en route from the airport into Washington, less than 48 hours before her swearing-in. She's been to Washington before, but she was seeing it with different eyes: "Mr. Smith" eyes. At one point, she exclaimed, "I'm looking at the Washington Monument right this second; oh, there's the White House! Oh very cool!" Can she keep her cool in the overheated climate of Capitol Hill -- and keep her seat next year?

  • Patt Morrison Asks: Donald Heller, death-penalty advocate no more

    July 16, 2011

    'Remanded" -- taken into custody. In his career as a New York prosecutor and a federal prosecutor in California, Donald Heller has asked the court to remand guilty defendants countless times. He helped put away Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme, who tried to assassinate President Gerald Ford, and a big-time heroin dealer, a man Heller believed destroyed many lives. At the dealer's sentencing hearing, the prosecutor remarked that were the death penalty an option, he would volunteer to "throw the switch." After that, a law clerk called him "Mad Dog," and the nickname stuck. Heller left the U.S. attorney's office in 1977 -- the "remanded'' sign was a farewell gift -- but he didn't give up his law-and-order cred. He's the author of the Briggs initiative, a 1978 ballot measure (named for its sponsor, state Sen. John Briggs) that broadly expanded the kinds of murders eligible for capital punishment. It helped make California's the most populous and expensive death row in the nation. But for more than a decade, Heller has been saying it's time to stop. Now a defense attorney with a mostly white-collar clientele, he testified recently at the state Capitol about the need to undo his legal handiwork, which has changed so many lives -- and ended some.

  • Patt Morrison Asks: Spirit guide Kenny Kingston

    July 9, 2011

    Everybody knows that newlyweds William and Kate are in town this weekend. But Kenny Kingston says he knows how that royal marriage will work out. The self-styled Psychic to the Stars who has hosted lucrative infomercials, TV shows and hotlines says he consulted with the likes of Lucille Ball and John Wayne on this side of life, heard from Elvis and James Dean on the other side, and knows Marilyn Monroe from both sides -- she gave him the table and chairs where we sat and talked in his Studio City home. He learned his craft from his grandmother, his mother and his mother's friend, psychic devotee Mae West. And Los Angeles' wide embrace of every branch of spiritual endeavor made Kingston his own kind of celebrity. With collaborator Valerie Porter, he's still writing books and is about to launch an Internet radio show into a world, seen and unseen, that has changed substantially since he first offered it his psychic insights. I'll quote the usual fine print: It's for entertainment purposes.

  • Patt Morrison Asks: Albert Carnesale, Professor Nuclear

    July 2, 2011

    As a matter of fact, he is a nuclear engineer. And through all of the titles Albert Carnesale has taken on in the upper reaches of academia -- professor and provost of Harvard and dean of its Kennedy School, chancellor of UCLA, where he is still a professor -- one thread has been a constant: his work on the science and the political science of matters nuclear, both peaceable and belligerent. He now serves on the Blue Ribbon Commission on America's Nuclear Future, which presents its draft report to President Obama at the end of this month. Its task is to make recommendations on just about everything touching nuclear power and fuel in this country. And he recently wrapped up work on the Committee on America's Climate Choices, analyzing the options in a climate-changing world. His joke bomb clock freaked out more than one Secret Service agent scoping out his Harvard office in advance of visits from various dignitaries. It's also a reminder of how our clock -- the nation's clock, humanity's clock -- is ticking away.

  • Patt Morrison Asks: Rosetta man Ahmed Zewail

    June 25, 2011

    It's as if he has a superhero secret identity: On the Caltech campus, Ahmed Zewail is a mild-mannered Egyptian American professor of chemistry and physics who won the Nobel Prize for cracking the secrets of molecules with femtosecond spectroscopy (a femtosecond is to a second what one second is to 32 million years). In his other identity, he is Egypt's only Nobel laureate in science, a national hero and the inspiration for Egypt's new technical and academic complex, the Zewail City of Science and Technology. And he is one of a council of elders guiding the transition to democracy in his native Egypt -- a novel experience in a nation with millenniums of history.

  • Patt Morrison Asks: Comics genius Stan Lee

    June 11, 2011

    My comic book tastes ran to Classics Illustrated. Seriously, what's scarier than the graphic images of "Crime and Punishment" and Raskolnikov -- the existential "superman," not the caped one -- whacking the pawnbroker with an ax? Can I, then, hold my own with Spider-Man's spiritual father, Stan Lee, a genius of comics for 70 years? The progenitor of scores of graphic heroes and villains, "starred" on the Hollywood Walk of Fame this year, he's huge at the summer box office, with "Thor," then "X-Men: First Class" and, due out in July, "Captain America: The First Avenger." Twentysomethings may be kings of entertainment, but Lee is the emperor. He's chairman emeritus of Marvel, the venerable comics company that's grown multimedia and merchandising wings; he works with Disney through his POW (Purveyors of Wonder) Entertainment company. He's crafting a Chinese feature-film superhero, and he searches for real people with superhero powers on the History Channel. Biff! Bam! Boom! "I don't want anyone to think I'm retired," Lee says.

  • Writing home: Brando Skyhorse

    June 4, 2011

    Bookshelves real and virtual are stocked with volumes about Los Angeles and Southern California written by people who parachute into a Westside guest house for a few weeks, hit the hot spots and high spots, then write with voice-of-God authority for audiences who wouldn't know the Grapevine from grape juice.

  • The go-to guy: Peter Ueberroth

    May 21, 2011

    So here's Peter Ueberroth, L.A.'s Olympic champion, chairman of the Newport Beach investor company the Contrarian Group, sharing his office with someone else -- his border collie, Koot, for Kootenai, the Idaho county where Ueberroth found him abandoned. Koot can be regarded as a small-scale version of the rescues that Ueberroth has been called on to make in his career. Besides formidably managing the 1984 Games, he has ridden to the help of South Los Angeles after the 1992 riots, run Major League Baseball and arranged the buyback of the Pebble Beach golf course from the Japanese. Ueberroth's a Californian by choice, not by birth, like another eminent Californian, John Wooden, whose name is on an award Ueberroth receives next week, one he regards more as encouragement than reward.

  • Lender 2.0: Kiva's Premal Shah

    May 14, 2011

    I could just see the eyebrows rising around the room. I was moderating a panel on philanthropy not long ago, and on my left, Premal Shah, the president of Kiva.org, was talking animatedly about how much fun Kiva donors had, competing with each other, in teams, to see who could do the most good. Fun? This is not your father's philanthropy. Shah"s online matchmaking philanthro-banking site lets people in the donor door for as little as $25. Kiva posts loan appeals from thousands of worldwide "entrepreneurs" on the site -- Shah doesn't call them "the needy" or any other such term. Prospective lenders log on, pick their favorites and a match, in the form of a loan, is made. Shah himself is among Silicon Valley's "PayPal mafia," young men and women who took know-how from working at PayPal to their own pursuits. In his case it was Kiva, a Swahili word meaning "unity" or "agreement" -- $25 at a time.

  • Joe's Joe: Joe Coulombe

    May 7, 2011

    I was traveling to Washington early in the George W. Bush administration and asked a friend who was working in the White House whether I could bring her something from L.A. Was there anything she really, really missed? Yes, she said: Trader Joe's Mt. Baldy trail mix.

  • The survivor: Oscar winner Branko Lustig

    April 30, 2011

    Mazel tov to the bar mitzvah boy -- 65 years late. Branko Lustig has two Oscars and a slew of film and television production credits, among them "Schindler's List" and "Gladiator" and "Black Hawk Down" and the TV miniseries "War and Remembrance." He also has a number, A3317, from his years as a young Croatian Jew imprisoned in Nazi concentration camps.

  • Book smart: Ken Brecher

    April 23, 2011

    For Ken Brecher to say that being the president of the Library Foundation of Los Angeles is the best job he's ever had -- well, that speaks volumes. Consider that he's run the Sundance Institute, the Boston Children's Museum and a major Philadelphia philanthropy; that he's an anthropologist with a Rhodes scholarship and two research tours in the Amazon on his resume. The British playwright Christopher Hampton used Brecher's field notes for his play "Savages." He landed in Los Angeles as a theatrical "anthropologist in residence" -- a.k.a. associate artistic director -- at the Mark Taper Forum, exploring the then-uncharted territory of local subjects and underserved audiences.

  • Rodarte's Kate and Laura Mulleavy: Fabricators

    April 16, 2011

    Their story is like a "once upon a time," but envision Cinderella in a lace gown that's been painted on by Caravaggio and then run through a paper shredder. There are actually two Cinderellas, Kate (with bangs) and Laura Mulleavy, sisters who don't yet have 60 birthdays between them. They famously still live with their parents in Pasadena, and in half a dozen years, the exquisite, subversive couture of their Rodarte label, created and produced in their downtown L.A. studios, has taxed the style cliches of critics and fashion lovers alike (see the fashions at latimes.com/rodarte). This year, they've been invited to Florence for the women's branch of the influential Pitti Uomo trade show in June. A forthcoming book, "Rodarte, Catherine Opie, Alec Soth," displays some of the California images that have inspired them. And almost anything, from a lapidary dessert display in a downtown bakery to the menacing light of a Tornado Alley wheat field, can fire the imaginations of the young ladies from Pasadena.

  • Jane Harman: Out of the fray

    April 9, 2011

    Jane Harman has a new address -- on Pennsylvania Avenue. No, not that address. She's the new honcho at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Starting in 1992, she won nine elections in Southern California's coastal 36th Congressional District -- some of them squeakers, the last one a blowout -- before she quit. In those years, the moderate Democrat carved her way through the clashing waves of the political surf: pro-choice, pro-gun restrictions for her Venice constituents, pro "smart" defense programs and a flag-burning ban for more conservative voters in towns like Torrance. She's been quoted as saying she was the best Republican in the Democratic Party. Harman has left a pretty safe Democratic district for the candidates running in the May 17 primary to replace her. In spite of that D.C. office, she'll be voting in the 36th -- but she won't say for whom.

  • Timothy Naftali: Nixon's checker

    April 2, 2011

    Timothy Naftali is the kind of learned guy you'd want on your team when you play "Trivial Pursuit" -- a game that, like Naftali, originated in Canada. But for years, his home and his career have been in and about the United States -- books and studies on espionage, counter-terrorism, the Cuban missile crisis, U.S. intelligence. And now he is director of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library. That would be the new Nixon library, the one operated under the auspices of the National Archives. The old, private Nixon library's spin on the president, especially about the Watergate episode, prompted the feds to refuse to transfer control of tapes and documents -- until Naftali and the National Archives took over to make the library a nonpartisan scholarly and educational resource. The post he accepted five years ago requires some of the same diplomatic and historical skills he's studied, and others. The exhibit that must demonstrate all of this transparency opened this week -- the Watergate gallery, symbolized by what Naftali's holding, one of the Watergate wiretapping "bugs."

  • Jeff Gordon: Big wheel

    March 26, 2011

    Any sport is ultimately all about the numbers, right? Here's Jeff Gordon -- four-time winner of what's now called the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series, three-time Daytona 500 winner, first driver to reach $100 million in series winnings -- and all I really want to say to him is, ''Wow! 190 miles an hour! Wow!''

  • Henry Segerstrom: Arts centric

    March 19, 2011

    That guy Jack, of beanstalk fame? He was small potatoes. If you want real magic from beans, look no further than what has become of the lima bean and dairy empire of Orange County's Segerstrom family. It morphed into the gold of commercial real estate, and at its 24-karat center is South Coast Plaza. In an age when people list shopping as a pastime, the high-end mall attracts almost as many people a year as the non-shopping National Mall in Washington.

  • Jamie Oliver: Food fighter

    February 26, 2011

    Jamie Oliver presses a "happy cow" veggie burger on me with the fervor of a believer handing out religious pamphlets. He asks me whether I love it, but his smile is pure certainty that I will -- and even love him for making it. He's stepped out from the kitchen at Patra's, a Glassell Park drive-through where his crew is taping footage for "Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution," a TV show that's not just about healthy food but also about converting skeptics and unbelievers. The chef who's been made a Member of the Order of the British Empire has an empire of his own -- TV shows in several dozen countries, foundations and charities, restaurants and books. His crusade for quality food in schools and homes has changed British food-itudes and menus. He's brought himself, his cameras and his good-food ardor to L.A., with an emphasis on kids. But the LAUSD has closed its cafeteria doors to him, so far. Characteristically, he's found other projects and causes, like his offerings at Patra's; as the man from Essex asks anxiously, "How's that slaw salad with your burger, luv?"

  • University of California President Mark Yudof: The BMOC

    January 15, 2011

    Mark Yudof became president of the University of California in 2008. Some timing. Since then, the university has seen its state funding, which accounts for about 13% of its operating budget, cut again and again.

  • Salam Al-Marayati: The translator

    May 22, 2010

    Salam Al-Marayati began working at the Muslim Public Affairs Council more than 20 years ago, and his is a job that only seems to get more demanding

  • Richard Riordan, unleashed

    May 8, 2010

    Richard Riordan spent eight years as mayor of Los Angeles, but he didn't start his civic engagement with L.A. when he was sworn in, and he didn't end it after he was termed out. Since then, he's become part tribal elder, part fun uncle, but just now the City Council isn't sending any love his way. It's pretty irked by Riordan's warnings that the city may have to resort to bankruptcy to save itself.

  • Landon Donovan: Goal oriented

    April 17, 2010

    I've read that some people call Landon Donovan the Kobe Bryant of soccer; I wonder if the day will come when people call Bryant the Landon Donovan of basketball?

  • Father Gregory Boyle: Life among the homies

    April 10, 2010

    I should have known better than to try to interview Father Gregory Boyle on his home turf, at the Homegirl Café in the Homeboy Industries building on the edge of Chinatown. It was like trying to interview Elvis in the lobby of the Flamingo Hotel.

  • Stewart Brand: Earth man

    April 3, 2010

    I almost started this conversation by asking Stewart Brand, "So . . . what's on your mind?" But who's got that kind of time?

  • Ralph Fertig: Cog of justice

    March 20, 2010

    Since he was in elementary school more than seven decades ago, Ralph Fertig has been, by history's long calculus, one of the good guys -- a civil rights Freedom Rider, a fighter for the down-and-out and disenfranchised from Washington to Los Angeles, and more recently on behalf of the Kurdish minority in Turkey.

  • A.J. Duffy: Teachers' choice

    March 13, 2010

    It tells you a lot about what A.J. Duffy brings to the game that he got his job as president of United Teachers Los Angeles by trouncing the incumbent, which had never before happened at the union.

  • Gloria Steinem: The founder

    March 6, 2010

    You know what they say about March -- comes in like a lion, goes out like a lamb.

  • Sheldon Epps: Play it again

    February 26, 2010

    The Pasadena Playhouse has had more close calls than Pearl White, more farewells (and miraculous recoveries) than Sarah Bernhardt. And here we go again.

  • Steve Cooley: L.A.'s D.A.

    February 20, 2010

    Steve Cooley's isn't a face that's all over YouTube or the nightly news, and he's fine with that. In spite of the celeb cases that have come through the county district attorney's office -- the decades-long case against Roman Polanski and murder cases like Phil Spector's (convicted) and Robert Blake's (acquitted, which prompted Cooley to declare him nonetheless "guilty as sin" and the jury "incredibly stupid") -- Cooley is more in Hollywood than of it.

  • Bill Patzert: SoCal's weatherman

    February 13, 2010

    I'm always telling the skeptics that Los Angeles does too have four seasons: They're called fire, flood, drought and quake.

  • Michael A. Barbour: The roadie

    February 6, 2010

    Maybe the last time a San Diego Freeway construction project got this much attention was back in the 1950s, when a man named L. Ewing Scott was convicted of murdering his socialite wife. According to urban legend, he hid her body in the newly poured concrete of the Sunset Boulevard offramp (northbound) of the San Diego Freeway.

  • Mark Ridley-Thomas: Gospel of Mark

    January 30, 2010

    I've really never known a Los Angeles without Mark Ridley-Thomas around and running something.

  • Ed Begley Jr.: Big green man

    January 23, 2010

    I once tried to pick up Ed Begley Jr.

  • Robbie Conal: Political animal

    January 16, 2010

    I'm always flabbergasted by the foaming fury with which some people regard the painter and guerrilla poster artist Robbie Conal. Over the years, letters-to-the-editor writers have said, "Conal is a cancer on society" and, "He should be behind bars, not in an art gallery."

  • Rick J. Caruso: A work in progress

    January 9, 2010

    Los Angeles is full of a lot of private moguls and a lot fewer public moguls, and Rick J. Caruso is one of the latter -- an immaculate, slightly Italianate master of his universe, with a bit of a retro vibe. The retail superstar conceived and built the Grove, the Americana at Brand and the Commons at Calabasas and is laboring on projects in Montecito and near the Santa Anita racetrack. But he has also thrown himself into civic life, as head of two of the city's most powerful boards, the DWP and the Police Commission, as a charitable force and as a man in the political mix as a possible candidate for mayor. The Grove and its ilk may not be your cup of tea. Caruso has been slammed for creating a cleaned-up alternative retail reality, but millions disagree with you. In 2006, according to Los Angeles magazine, more people hit the Grove than went to Disneyland.

  • Warren Christopher: Mr. Secretary

    December 5, 2009

    Warren Christopher sounds so, well, diplomatic. The former secretary of State sometimes prefaces his observations with "it seems" and "I think" -- as considerations rather than pronouncements.

  • Sheila Schuller Coleman: The reverend daughter

    November 7, 2009

    Iwas 7 or 8 years old, reading my way through my kiddie encyclopedias, when I infuriated my Sunday school teacher by suggesting that the miraculous parting of the Red Sea was simply low tide. At that age, Sheila Schuller was working for her father's fledgling church. On Sunday mornings, she thumbtacked the Sunday school lessons to the wooden picnic tables at the Garden Grove drive-in theater where the Rev. Robert H. Schuller preached sermons from atop the snack stand.

  • Michael Jackson: Sir radio

    October 31, 2009

    You have only to hear the voice to recognize who owns those pipes: talk-show host Michael Jackson, the original issue, with more than half a century on the radio. During the BL era -- Before Limbaugh -- he reached millions of ears on several continents and was, for about three decades, the monarch of Los Angeles' AM talk radio. Jackson wears a coat and tie on the radio, in perfect keeping with the urbane, civil, informed discourse that earned him a place in the Radio Hall of Fame, an honor from the queen of England and a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. That star was smothered in flowers this summer by music fans who mistook it for the other Michael Jackson's.

  • Leonard Kleinrock: Mr. Internet

    October 25, 2009

    The Internet, like victory, has many fathers. One of the best known is Leonard Kleinrock, a computer science professor at UCLA. He was in the campus computer lab 40 years ago, on Wednesday, Oct. 29, 1969. At 10:30 p.m., he and his colleagues were working on a computer the size of an old-fashioned phone booth when they sent the first computer message. It was launched via a packet-switching mathematical theory Kleinrock had conceived for transmitting data. The message traveled from UCLA to the Stanford Research Institute on a system set up through a Defense Department program. It was a Sistine-ceiling moment, a lightning spark of the Computer Age. Today, Kleinrock is still at UCLA, and so is that computer, the IMP, the Interface Message Processor. It will be the centerpiece of the forthcoming Kleinrock Internet Museum and Reading Room, not far from Kleinrock's office. As the now widely Webbed world marks its 40th anniversary, here's a bit of what it means to Kleinrock.

  • Ayaan Hirsi Ali: Feminism's freedom fighter

    October 17, 2009

    For five years she's lived under the threat of death from Islamic radicals, and in those five years, she has become an acclaimed and provocative author on matters about Islam and the West. Ayaan Hirsi Ali was born into a Somali Muslim family and eventually made her way to the Netherlands as a refugee.

  • Jerrianne Hayslett: Trials and errors

    October 3, 2009

    Fourteen years ago today -- shock and awe. After 16 tawdry months of the Simpson case wallpapering the public square, a Los Angeles criminal court jury found O.J. Simpson not guilty of the hideous murders of his ex-wife, Nicole, and her friend, Ron Goldman.

  • Ken Burns: The public's filmmaker

    September 26, 2009

    Ken Burns is a matchmaker with a camera. He has introduced Americans to themselves, to their history, with documentaries such as "The Civil War." He also used the "pan and scan" camera technique to make still images of the long-dead seem alive on the television screen.

  • Susan Feniger: Spice girl

    September 19, 2009

    Restaurant years are like dog years. If a restaurant survives one year, it's like seven in the real world. So when two women chefs make a go of it for nearly 30 years -- not only one restaurant but several, and TV and radio cooking shows, cookbooks, merchandise, catering and a heavy schedule of fundraisers for their favorite charities -- it's nigh on miraculous. Susan Feniger is one-half of the Too Hot Tamales; with her business partner and friend, Mary Sue Milliken, she's entered the pantheon of L.A. überüber-chefs, with Mexican-inspired restaurants Border Grill and Ciudad. Knowing when to hold 'em and also when to fold 'em is a mysterious skill even among restaurateurs, and both Feniger and Milliken possess it (though many Angelenos still mourn the end of their first hole-in-the-wall effort on Melrose, City Cafe). As of this spring, Feniger has also struck out on her own with Susan Feniger's Street, serving her versions of street food. She makes a daily loop among her restaurants, new and old, and the Brentwood house she shares with her life partner, filmmaker Liz Lachman, and alights at Street to talk shop.

  • Phil Angelides: The Columbo of Wall Street

    September 12, 2009

    One very scary year ago this week, we were tipping headfirst into an economic black hole that threatened to suck down the global economy. How did it happen? Congress has created a 10-member citizens commission to find out. At its head is Phil Angelides, Democrat and millionaire businessman who served as California's state treasurer for eight years and then lost his bid for governor in 2006. Lately he's been working with Magic Johnson to create a fund to fix up and "green up" affordable rental housing for working families. Now he'll be spending a couple of weeks a month in a rented office on Pennsylvania Avenue between the International Monetary Fund and the White House. It's called the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, but in the ways of Washington, these things can end up bearing the names of their chairmen -- the Pecora Commission, the Warren Commission. So by Dec. 15, 2010, we'll have the full report from what will surely be known as the Angelides Commission.

  • Maria Elena Durazo: Labor of love

    September 5, 2009

    With about 92% of private-sector jobs non-unionized, the old "union movement" has become the new "labor movement," one of outreach as much as contract negotiating. In Los Angeles, some of that work falls to Maria Elena Durazo. She succeeded her husband as head of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, AFL-CIO, a year after he died, at 53, in 2005. On Labor Day weekend, she considers the state of the labor movement and her role in it.

  • Gloria Molina: L.A.'s 'first Latina'

    August 29, 2009

    Gloria Molina's life has been one of contradictions: the famous feminist politician from East L.A., the career policymaker/politician who still feels like an outsider. She can claim many "firsts," a lot of admirers and a lot of political foes. The first Latina elected to the Legislature, to the Los Angeles City Council, and the first woman and Latina elected to the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, where she'll likely be until she is termed out in 2014. Her reputation is one of picking fights, but she also picks her fights -- killing a proposed prison in East L.A. in the 1980s, watchdogging cushy government pensions and perks and budget practices, and looking out for Los Angeles' poor, of which she was once one herself, the eldest of 10 kids of a poor Mexican immigrant. You may see her only in TV news clips, jabbing a finger on some point. There's more, and some slow-mo, to GloMo.

  • Vincent Bugliosi: Taking on Charles Manson

    August 8, 2009

    Vincent Bugliosi has moved on, but the world hasn't. Forty years after the impossibly grisly Tate-LaBianca murders, he is still "the Manson prosecutor." This, in spite of his many books since, arguing with magisterial fury about the JFK assassination, the O.J. Simpson trial, the Bush vs. Gore case and now the Iraq war.

  • Theodore B. Olson: Legal eagle

    July 25, 2009

    When you've pleaded a case before the United States Supreme Court, your memento, your trophy, is a white quill. Some lawyers get one and treasure it forever. Ted Olson has enough to fletch an eagle, and he hopes to add one more -- legalizing same-sex marriage. During the Republican glory years in Washington, Olson was a GOP pillar: at the first meeting of the Federalist Society, on the board of directors of American Spectator magazine, stalwart of the Reagan administration. It was Olson who argued George W. Bush's case to the Supreme Court in Bush vs. Gore in 2000, securing the presidency. He grew up and was educated in California, elementary school through law school, and lived on the Palos Verdes peninsula before going all Beltway on us. And now he's back at his old law firm and working with an old adversary, David Boies, who argued Al Gore's side of the 2000 election. They've launched a challenge to Proposition 8 that could find them together again before the high court -- but on the same side, arguing that same-sex marriage should be part of mainstream America. Who'da thunk it?

  • Jane Goodall: Chimp change

    July 18, 2009

    Chimpanzees and humans share about 95% of their DNA. If affinity and awareness count, Jane Goodall may have a smidge more. As the world's most renowned primatologist, her work has changed what we think of our primate brethren as thinking and feeling creatures, toolmakers, peacemakers and warmongers.

  • Kevin Starr: Making history

    July 11, 2009

    I made the acquaintance of Kevin Starr's books long before I made the acquaintance of Kevin Starr. "Golden Dreams: California in an Age of Abundance, 1950-1963," the eighth volume in his serial love letter to California, is arriving in bookstores this weekend.

  • Mavis Leno: More than just talk

    July 4, 2009

    For my money, the funny Leno is the one who's not on TV. Mavis Nicholson Leno is swift with the wisecrack, and she has this big, hearty, irresistible laugh that you suspect makes her her husband's best audience. But there's a fierce focus in her that I first saw about 10 years ago, after she'd begun working with the Feminist Majority on behalf of women in Afghanistan. That was well before most Americans could place Afghanistan on a map, much less knew what vileness the Taliban was up to. Leno may be the most ardent American champion Afghan women have, taking her crusade for literacy and healthcare to the news media and to Capitol Hill. When she spoke to me at the Feminist Majority offices in Beverly Hills, she was preaching to the choir. What she wants is a lot bigger choir.

  • Karen Bass: Madame Speaker

    June 27, 2009

    Since California added term limits to the political rule book in 1990, the piece of furniture occupied by the speaker of the California Assembly has become both a musical chair and an ejector seat. We've had nine speakers in 14 years. Karen Bass is the latest, a Los Angeles Democrat and the first black woman in the job. She was elected to the Assembly in 2004. She became speaker a year ago, and she'll have to pack up and be gone next year. When I first met her, she was a physician's assistant and a community organizer, crusading for foster care and against the myriad liquor stores in South Los Angeles. Sure, today she sits next to the governor in the "big five" meetings -- but with the ticking clock of term limits and the most hellacious budget in decades, I think of the speaker's job now as much like the Woody Allen joke about two women chatting at a resort: "The food here is so awful." "Yes, and such small portions." Bass dishes it out, and takes it.

  • Benjamin Jealous: Mr. Rights

    June 20, 2009

    Benjamin Jealous hears it so often that I'm sure he just lets it slide off by now: "You weren't even born when ... " Fill in the blank with your favorite milestone of recent racial history in this country -- when Rosa Parks sat down on the bus, when the Civil Rights Act passed, when the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. But at age 36, the California native and the youngest president of the NAACP was certainly present for the biggest milestone of all -- Barack Obama's election. In a few weeks, Jealous will preside over the NAACP's 100th anniversary convention. He's a Rhodes scholar who went to work for a scrappy Mississippi black newspaper that was firebombed for its exposes. He has organized voter registration drives, run a human rights program at Amnesty International -- and, when he had time, used to run marathons.

  • Jean-Lou Chameau: Cooking up ideas

    June 13, 2009

    I hope Jean-Lou Chameau gets to sleep late this morning. Friday, at his third graduation ceremony as president of Caltech, he also announced $30 million in gifts to that singular institution, where Albert Einstein and Richard Feynman worked their mighty brains. Caltech has raked in oodles of Nobel Prizes. Its operation of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory has sent its renown beyond Earth. And its students have pulled off both brilliant research and inspired pranks. The long-ago dismantling of a Model T and the reassembling of it in a student's room, where it was discovered with the motor running, is so well known that President George H.W. Bush kidded around in his 1991 Caltech commencement speech about students reassembling Air Force One in the lobby of his hotel. The school's eighth president is a civil engineer with an interest in earthquakes from a village in Normandy. It had fewer residents than Caltech's undergraduate population of about 900. Now he works at the roll-top desk that belonged to Caltech's first president, the Nobel-winning physicist Robert A. Millikan. It is, says Chameau, "humbling."

  • Laffit Pincay Jr.: Horse sense

    May 30, 2009

    I am laying one finger on the Kentucky Derby trophy. It is small, smaller and far less flashy than a lot of the other trophies on Laffit Pincay Jr.'s shelves -- much less gaudy than any of my parents' bowling trophies. It doesn't need to be flashy: Hello, it's the Kentucky Derby. Pincay won it in 1984. The little horse on top is broken, and he sets the cup aside to have it fixed. Then his cellphone starts ringing: The ringtone is an old song with the line, "No more love on the run," which strikes me as sad because Pincay, 62, has been out of the running since 2003, when he injured his neck in what turned out to be his last race. For seven years, he was the world's winningest jockey; now, he'd rather sing the praises of his son, broadcaster Laffit Pincay III, who talks about the ponies on TV instead of riding them. Next Saturday's Belmont Stakes, the last jewel in the Triple Crown, is raking in bets and headlines for the sport of kings. But in Southern California, Hollywood Park may be bulldozed, Santa Anita is on the block and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is talking about cashing in on Del Mar racetrack's seaside real estate. It's a good time to hear one of racing's most renowned jockeys on life in a sport that's having problems in the far turn.

  • Daryl F. Gates: Clear blue

    May 23, 2009

    At 82, Daryl F. Gates still looks as if he could pass the training physical for the Los Angeles Police Department, which he joined as a rookie 60 years ago and ran as chief for 14 years. When he says that his name was on the front page of The Times more than any other Californian during those years, he's probably right. Gates made headlines because he made waves. His legendary set-tos with politicians and the Police Commission were combustible theater. His tenure as chief overlapped Tom Bradley's as mayor, and there was no love lost between the two; by the 1992 riots, they weren't on speaking terms. Gates' LAPD career carried him from driver for Chief William H. Parker to Parker's right- hand man and heir. He was the last chief to earn the job through the civil service system; since Gates, chiefs have been appointed, with term limits. Now there's talk of lifting those term limits so the current chief, William J. Bratton, could stay on for five more years -- making his tenure one year longer than Gates'. When we met, he brought me a cup of Starbucks, and before I asked the first question, he referred to a 1982 Times story about his plan to ban one of two LAPD chokeholds. In seven years, 16 people had died in police chokeholds, 12 of them African American. Gates told The Times then he suspected some blacks had a medical condition that made them more susceptible than -- and this stirred an outcry for his resignation that never disappeared -- "normal people."

  • Eli Broad: A Broad view

    May 16, 2009

    I'm enough of a workaholic to recognize another one, even if I have to do it from a long way off and by the back of his head. That's Eli Broad up ahead. The man who hates the b-word -- "billionaire" -- prefers the p-word, "philanthropist." With his wife, Edythe, he plays on a bigger board than a hundred average workaholics: in education, science, the arts and L.A.'s civic life. His foundation writes checks to charter schools, Teach for America, a zealous arts program that lends the Broads' collections to museums around the world. The lifted-eyebrow crowd finds fault with his unapologetic big-checkbook activism, but nobody can doubt that the Broads help circle L.A. on the cultural map. Around town, he's Eli, maybe because, like Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, some people aren't sure how to pronounce his surname (it rhymes with "road"), and maybe because he's joined that exalted one-name pantheon. And, for a guy with so much on his plate, he's a pretty fair dancer. I know: I won a bet asking him to dance at the City Hall rededication seven years ago. (And hey, you guys still haven't paid up; you know who you are.)

  • Hugh Hefner: The Bunny man

    May 9, 2009

    I've been in this room in the Playboy Mansion before. As I recall, the painting on the wall was a topless portrait of his wife, Kimberley, mother of his two teenage sons, from whom he is now separated. Now it's just Hefner, painted in Tudor robes, in the style of Holbein. In person, he wears his singular uniform of pajamas and slippers. The girls cavorting outside have changed, but he has not. At 83, he is part of the 20th century cultural pantheon, the subject of " Hugh Hefner: Playboy Activist and Rebel," an in-the-works documentary by an Oscar-winning filmmaker. He remains "creative director" of the family business, Playboy Enterprises (his daughter, Christie, stepped down as chief executive in December). A cable TV show about life with his trio of blondined girlfriends has made him more famous now than he was as the renowned and sometimes notorious founder of Playboy, which, compared with some 21st century smut, is practically decorous. The man who put the "he" in "hedonism" says he's proud of liberating women as well as men from the sexual cage of the 1950s.

  • Laura Chick: California's eagle eye

    May 2, 2009

    If I were writing her business card, it would read, "Kicking butt in sensible shoes since 1993." Laura Chick has enemies. I am not one of them. The woman who's leaving Los Angeles City Hall after two terms on the City Council and two as city controller is stepping up to the appointed job of inspector general of California's $48-billion share of federal stimulus money. Editorial writers have praised her as an eagle eye in a green eyeshade, a grandma turned pit bull. A Toronto newspaper column said Canada needs its own Laura Chick. From her City Hall office, where her unsparing audits have left few stones unturned or uncast, she's just moving into her new quarters near the state Capitol. There, she's arranged "Morgan shelves" for pictures of her 6-year-old granddaughter and, arriving soon, her voodoo doll collection.

  • Identity theft hits close to home

    March 12, 2009

    Now it's my turn to be a statistic.

  • I'd like my CEO well-done, thanks

    February 5, 2009

    Oh, I want it. I want it bad.

  • Villaraigosa's next race

    January 22, 2009

    Whoa, there. Don't let the inauguration lull you into a false sense of ease. You're not finished with voting yet.

  • Capping off the inauguration

    January 18, 2009

    It's the closest thing to a crown that America's small-r republican first ladies get -- the simultaneously regal and egalitarian Inauguration Day hat.

  • California's budget breaking point

    January 15, 2009

    If what it takes to fix California -- to fix everything about the way it raises money and spends it -- is to let it wreck itself first, then maybe we have to let that happen.

  • Is public access TV dead?

    January 8, 2009

    Your remote control isn't screwed up. As of now, there really is nothing on some cable channels.

  • L.A.'s 'Hail a Cab' experiment

    January 1, 2009

    If there's a peak mating season between those oddly matched species, the Angeleno and the taxicab, it surely came at about 2 o'clock this morning, New Year's Day, when "Auld Lang Syne" almost rhymed with "DUI."

  • California has no room for good Samaritans

    December 25, 2008

    Uh, gentlemen? You three wise men? As your lawyer, I'm advising you not to go there.

  • Should we tax pot?

    December 4, 2008

    Barack Obama is probably getting more letters than Santa Claus this year.

  • Cherie Blair gets personal in 'Speaking for Myself'

    November 5, 2008

    If you believed half the snarky descriptions the British press has slung at Cherie Blair, you'd have expected her to arrive in Southern California astride a broomstick, accompanied by flying monkeys.

  • A case of elective compulsive disorder

    October 30, 2008

    At last, the end of crazy is in sight. Come Tuesday night, maybe we can all ... just ... stop.

  • Disney's California Adventure redo

    October 23, 2008

    Fake? We've got nothing against it here. California practically took out the patent on fake. The ingenious faked fantasy world of movies, the virtual technological reality of Silicon Valley and the virtual human reality of the Silicone Valley of the Dolls -- we own fake, baby.

  • 3 no-good propositions

    October 16, 2008

    Here's how difficult it is to put something in the U.S. Constitution: You need the approval of two-thirds of Congress and three-quarters of the states. This is why the Constitution only has 27 amendments, and nearly half of those came with the original Constitution.

  • Is two more hours of Dubya two too many?

    October 9, 2008

    Here's your Stetson, what's your hurry? Americans can't wait to see the back of George W. Bush. Will they feel the same about him at the box office?

  • The 'Bradley effect' in 2008

    October 2, 2008

    If I had a nickel for every time some pundit has opined about Barack Obama and the dreaded "Bradley effect," I could rescue Wall Street.

  • Kicking our addiction to O.J.

    September 25, 2008

    If O.J. Simpson whined in the Mojave Desert (Nevada side), and no one was around to hear him, would he still make a noise? Do we care?

  • Californians are far away at this convention

    September 4, 2008

    The sage of St. Paul, the radio storyteller Garrison Keillor, has a tender spot for California -- so tender that perhaps one day he'll launch "A Coastal Home Companion" as a winter replacement series for his "A Prairie Home Companion."

  • Between 'crazy' and 'committed'

    February 14, 2008

    It's Valentine's Day, and one family is showing its love by showing up in court. Britney Spears' parents plan to ask a judge to keep her under their care and supervision. Try finding a hearts-and-flowers card for that -- "To our daughter, we love you, please go back into the hospital."

  • If Hillary taps Antonio

    February 7, 2008

    Los Angeles, I've always got your back, don't I? So here's how I see this election going down for us:

  • Early birds miss the point

    January 31, 2008

    Now aren't you sorry?

  • After Johnny Grant

    January 17, 2008

    The last time I talked to Johnny Grant was just before Halloween. A couple of venerable actors had been perplexed that our friend Norman Corwin, the founding father of radio drama and subject of an Oscar-winning documentary, did not have a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. I called up Johnny in his Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel penthouse. Hollywood's honorary mayor for life professed astonishment that Corwin was a man without a star. Get me the paperwork, he said, and I'll take his name to the committee personally, immediately.

  • Britney's Law? Not so crazy

    January 10, 2008

    Wouldn't it be something if the giants of mental healthcare reform in California turned out to be three men named Lanterman, Petris and Short -- and a pop singer by the name of Britney Spears?

  • Ready for their close-ups?

    January 3, 2008

    This can't be a joke because there's a writers strike on and jokes are out for the duration. So in all unscripted seriousness, I ask, could Hollywood really be smarter than Washington? Is it possible that movie people are savvier than political people?

  • Rooting for trees

    December 20, 2007

    What a lousy time to be harping about how there aren't enough trees in the world.

  • In a drought, who you gonna call?

    November 22, 2007

    For starters, the name's all wrong.

  • Who needs writers?

    November 8, 2007

    It's Day Four of the Writers Guild strike, and here's how to tell that the striking writers haven't so much as picked up a Bic: Their picket-line chants are crappy.

  • Blackwater: Not in our backyards

    October 4, 2007

    If you turned on C-SPAN on Tuesday and thought for a moment that you'd punched in some all-action-movie channel by mistake, I can't blame you.

  • The GOP's fairness fakery

    September 27, 2007

    A show of hands: What words do you associate with Americans? No, not "no money down." Name one quality we like to think matters most to us.

  • Mitochondrial politics

    September 20, 2007

    Here's what to watch for at next week's GOP minority-issues presidential debate at a historically black college in Baltimore: empty chairs. All four top Republicans have "scheduling conflicts."

  • His story won't die

    August 23, 2007

    Daniel Pearl's name you know. Chauncey Bailey's, you probably don't. Both men were murdered presumably because of what they did for a living.

  • Taken for a ride on Air Arnold

    July 19, 2007

    HOW SELFISH of me not to have noticed. I had absolutely no idea that Arnold Schwarzenegger was so hard up. He's practically the Oliver Twist of governors. He's so needy that there's a charity devoted almost exclusively to helping him out.

  • A law for bad humans

    July 5, 2007

    HONESTLY, PEOPLE. Here it is, the day after Independence Day, and some "independent" citizens you all are, still expecting someone else to clean up after you.

  • Ho-ney, I'm ho-ome ...

    June 28, 2007

    AND NOW IT'S time for another episode of "I Love Chelly," about that wacky, lovable brunette who's married to a handsome, up-and-coming city attorney who wants to make it big in politics.

  • I don't care about Antonio's breakup

    June 14, 2007

    MAYBE I NEED to call a doctor. It might be a virus. Or an allergy.

  • Green guilt trip

    June 7, 2007

    DON'T YOU LOVE IT when the auto industry starts talking in corporate tongues? The most astonishing idiocies come out of its collective mouth: No, no, no, we couldn't possibly put in seat belts. Air bags? Who'd want to pay for air bags?

  • The $3-a-day diet

    May 24, 2007

    LOSE WEIGHT on $3 a day! Ask me how!

  • Drought, the sequel, is here

    May 17, 2007

    HEY, ALL YOU sequel fans! Last week, it was "Spider-Man"; tomorrow "Shrek" and next week another "Pirates of the Caribbean." And I'm sure you'll be lining up for the most spectacular sequel of all, "Drought III: The Thirst."

  • Let them eat Dodger Dogs!

    April 12, 2007

    OPENING DAY at Dodger Stadium. Out on the fresh, emerald field, it was all about the RBIs and the ERAs.

  • The $1 federal budget

    March 22, 2007

    I WAS WORKING on my taxes at the time, so I was probably already hysterical, but something on the 1040 form got me giggling: the $3 checkoff for the presidential election campaign fund.

  • Does L.A. need another downtown?

    March 1, 2007

    DON'T HATE ME, Eli Broad. I'm just asking the question here: Do we really need a new downtown?

  • Patt Morrison for president!

    February 15, 2007

    MY FELLOW Americans: Today I am announcing that I am not testing the waters. I am not forming an exploratory committee. I am not studying the possibility. I am not embarking on a listening tour.

  • No case, no justice

    January 25, 2007

    BY NOW, Charupha Wongwisetsiri has been cremated and her mom has moved out of the Craftsman condo in Angelino Heights where 9-year-old Charupha was shot as she stood in the kitchen.

  • Who wants a deep-dish Olympics?

    January 18, 2007

    THE LAST TIME L.A. landed the Olympics, it was because nobody else wanted them.

  • Insurance is enough to make you sick

    January 4, 2007

    IT'S A GOOD thing I have health insurance, because I thought my ticker was going to give out when I read this: Health insurance companies will not sell policies, at any price, to hale and healthy people who have, or had, some pretty trifling ailments. Hemorrhoids. Varicose veins.

  • Adopt a homeless Angeleno

    December 21, 2006

    NICE AND WARM? Got enough to eat? Not addled by booze or drugs, or saddled with some mental disorder? Maybe you've even got a house key on your keychain?

  • The phantom congresswoman

    December 7, 2006

    THAT FRESHMAN California congresswoman, Sherri Davis — she does get around, doesn't she?

  • Patt Morrison: Vote for Cal!

    November 23, 2006

    IT'S TAKEN ME all this time to get rid of the disgusting aftertaste of the midterm election TV ads, with their artificial colors and flavors — cloying, bitter, sour, stupid. (Is stupid a flavor? It should be.)

  • Patt Morrison: Arnold lacked the guts to oppose Prop. 83

    November 16, 2006

    I USED TO THINK something was wrong with Iowa. So many Iowans left the Hawkeye State to come here. Maybe it was all that corn. Maybe it was the early presidential caucuses.

  • Patt Morrison: PR for the Homeless

    October 12, 2006

    SUDDENLY, FINALLY, there's some real money finding its way to the homeless.

  • Patt Morrison: The Funniest Movie You Can't See

    October 5, 2006

    SO WHICH will be harder to spot this season — Mark Foley campaign signs or movie ads for "Idiocracy"?

  • Patt Morrison: Memo to Congress -- Voting Is a Right

    September 28, 2006

    EARLY ON election day last June, someone broke into a poll worker's garage in the Central Valley town of Sanger and stole 1,000 blank ballots and two voting machines. Sinister, no? Florida 2000! Ohio 2004!

  • Patt Morrison: Border Fence Is Borderline Insanity

    September 21, 2006

    WHAT, no land mines?

  • Patt Morrison: Owning O.J.

    September 7, 2006

    SWEAR TO DeMille, this is going to be the most frightening story that Hollywood has come across since the news burst upon El Mundo de Movies that a private eye named Tony Pellicano was supposedly eavesdropping on some quite glamorous and private telephones.

  • Kill Barbie

    June 22, 2006

    IT'S TIME to kill off Barbie.

Photos

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Billboard Music Awards 2012
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'Dark Shadows' premiere
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'The Lucky One' premiere
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