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Tim Rutten |
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Were you thinking of having your car washed this weekend? Well, let the Prius or Bentley go dirty for another week and consider spending just $10 on a "virtual carwash," the proceeds of which will go to save the lives of some of our city's most imperiled young people.
The culture of celebrity giveth and the culture of celebrity taketh away. If you don't believe it, just look at Sarah Palin and Michael Jackson.
On July 3, 1776, John Adams wrote a famous letter to his wife, Abigail, back in Massachusetts.
When Tuesday's hearings in Sacramento on proposed changes in California's method of executing convicted murderers veered into a discussion of why solutions to the state's budget crisis ought to include the abolition of capital punishment, it was another example of how divided our attitude on this issue remains.
Given his recklessly eccentric and peripatetic personal life, Michael Jackson's premature death seems almost foreordained -- one of those deaths Yeats had in mind when he wrote of a friend's lost son: "What made us dream that he could comb gray hair?"
Twenty years ago, the world was transfixed by an image of courageous resistance -- a lone young man standing in the road before a column of Chinese army tanks moving into Tiananmen Square to crush the students and others who'd gone there to demonstrate for reform.
It is time to end the 8-year-old federal consent decree that already has spurred the Los Angeles Police Department's remarkable transformation from an institution essentially at war with much of the city into one that -- on most days, in most places -- does its best "to protect and to serve."
The late C. Wright Mills had a certain segment of America's Cold War foreign policy establishment in mind when he coined the description "crackpot realism."
In 1865, with the Confederacy in extremisin extremis, Jefferson Davis bludgeoned appalled rebel lawmakers into accepting Robert E. Lee's request to recruit black troops into Northern Virginia's depleted army ranks. One outraged Southern diarist accused Lee and Davis of surrendering "the crown jewel of our independence." A die-hard legislator argued that if blacks were allowed to fight alongside white soldiers, "then everything for which we have fought has been a lie."
You can hang any number of shiny baubles on a mistake, like ornaments on a Christmas tree, but when you're done, all you've really got is a bad idea -- with glitter.