Biography

Meghan Daum is the author of the essay collection My Misspent Youth (Open City, 2001) and the novel The Quality of Life Report (Viking, ...

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Meghan Daum

Meghan Daum

Levi Johnston: He's hot, he's cute, he's playing hardball

Levi Johnston: He's hot, he's cute, he's playing hardball

November 19, 2009

I'm not proud of this, but I sort of love Levi Johnston. I know he's an opportunistic buffoon. I know he's a grammatically challenged, Playgirl-posing, pistachio-shilling (yes, he made a commercial for nuts) media pawn who's not only taking the low road but ripping the pavement to shreds.

  • Cyclists and motorists on collision course

    November 5, 2009

    On Monday, Dr. Christopher Thompson, the driver who abruptly stopped his car in front of two cyclists last summer, was found guilty of six felonies and a misdemeanor. The trial, which lasted three weeks and captivated the cycling community, revealed a particularly virulent form of road rage. Christian Stoehr suffered a separated shoulder and Ron Peterson shattered several teeth and broke and nearly severed his nose when the two hit the back of Thompson's Infiniti sedan on Mandeville Canyon Road.

  • Suddenly, America digs farming

    October 29, 2009

    Farming, which many city folk once associated primarily with children's books and distinctive if not entirely flattering tan lines, is suddenly in vogue. Never mind that most of the food we eat comes not from cozy acreages reminiscent of the setting of "Charlotte's Web" but from big corporate operations. Never mind that census data tell us that fewer than half of family-run farms show a positive net income (in other words, most farmers need day jobs). Even though farming no longer quite makes it as "a way of life," it's somehow become the next best thing (or maybe an even better thing): a lifestyle.

  • Columbine, O Magazine and suicide

    October 22, 2009

    The November issue of O Magazine (that's the Oprah Magazine) features a series of articles about how to be "your true self," a guide to do-it-yourself hair coloring and -- thud -- an essay by Susan Klebold. In April 1999, her son, Dylan, along with his classmate, Eric Harris, killed 12 students, a teacher and themselves in a massacre that would thereafter be known simply as Columbine, the deadliest high school shooting in the nation's history.

  • Shriver and her cellphone

    October 15, 2009

    As scandals involving the Kennedys go, Maria Shriver's failure to use a hands-free cellphone device while driving is a bit, well, anticlimactic.

  • Writing an end to the policy of 'don't ask, don't tell'?

    October 8, 2009

    Essay contests don't generally get a lot of mainstream attention. The Secretary of Defense National Security Essay Competition, for example -- whose past winners and finalists have penned papers titled "Planning Convergence" and "Nation Building: A Joint Enterprise" -- has never made media waves. Until this year: "The Efficacy of Don't Ask, Don't Tell," the winning entry, is a breakout hit.

  • Polanski's pain isn't penance

    October 1, 2009

    How lousy has Roman Polanski's life been? His mother died at Auschwitz; his pregnant wife was murdered by the Manson family; and in 1978, after pleading guilty to unlawful intercourse and serving an evaluation period in the Chino state prison, he says he learned that a judge who had led him to believe that he would serve no more jail time actually was considering a long sentence, followed by deportation. On the eve of his sentencing, the acclaimed director of "Rosemary's Baby" and "Chinatown" fled the U.S. and never returned.

  • Carrie Prejean vs. Perez Hilton

    April 25, 2009

    It's been a notable week in not-really news. Songstress Susan Boyle, who supposedly delivered us from our shallowness by belting out a showstopper without the help of hair dye or eyebrow tweezing, continued to make headlines. The former vice presidential candidate's grandbaby daddy, Levi Johnston, went on "Larry King Live" and managed to say and be asked almost nothing. And Earth Day, with its myriad opportunities for celebrities to talk about CFL bulbs, filled talk shows like so many Styrofoam peanuts in a cardboard box.

  • The recession heats up romance novels

    April 4, 2009

    Amid the ceaseless reminders that the economy is in a persistent vegetative state, it's easy to forget that some industries and products are thriving. U.S. News & World Report, which recently released its list of "10 Winners in the Recession," says that Hershey's chocolate increased earnings by more than 50% last quarter and the Burpee seed company has said it expects sales to increase by 25% in 2009 (and this was before the first lady's organic-gardening initiative).

  • Michelle Obama's no-win role

    March 28, 2009

    I'm having a hard time forming an opinion about First Lady Michelle Obama, mostly because there are already so many out there, and they're almost uniformly inane.

  • Curse you, Zillow!

    March 21, 2009

    If you've looked up your home value over the last year or so, you know the experience is not unlike weighing yourself after eating a large meal. The number is simply wrongThe number is simply wrong.

  • Happiness is in your mind -- and wallet

    March 14, 2009

    Oh, no. Here comes another study about happiness. We can't seem to do enough of these paeans to cheerfulness. In the last few months alone, the British Medical Journal suggested that having a happy close friend boosts our own odds of being happy by 25%; the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological

  • The age of Friendaholism

    March 7, 2009

    Thwarting the age-old theory (and high school coping mechanism) that unpopularity in adolescence portends wealth and success in adulthood, a new study from the University of Essex in Britain has shown that the more friends you have in school, the more money you'll earn later.

  • The day the talk died at KLSX

    February 28, 2009

    For those of us who like to listen to people rant, whine and talk about their gastrointestinal problems on the radio, the last week has been a sad one in Southern California. KLSX, which had been the region's only all-talk FM station since 1995, abruptly changed its format to Top 40 music on Feb. 20. The switch, according to executives at its parent company, CBS Radio, was an effort to attract younger listeners.

  • Refusing to toe the Oscar party line

    February 21, 2009

    Irealize what I'm about to say is a form of blasphemy in this town: I hate the Oscars. I hate everything about them: the gazillion awards shows that precede them, the obsession with the gowns and their designers, the scenery-chewing movie performances they inspire and, most of all, the parties.

  • Doomed by your name?

    February 7, 2009

    If you read "Freakonomics," the popular 2005 book that applied economic theories to non-economic issues, you probably remember the mention of African American twins named OrangeJello and LemonJello (pronounced a-RON-zhello and le-MON-zhello).

  • Eight is more than enough

    January 31, 2009

    Ihave octuplet derangement syndrome. Ever since Monday, when an unidentified woman gave birth to eight babies at Kaiser Permanente Bellflower Medical Center near Los Angeles, I've been obsessed. And not in a good way.

  • Dream dad: one job too many for Obama

    January 24, 2009

    Which image of President Obama with his daughters is your favorite? Is it the goofy-faced shot riding bumper cars with Sasha at the Iowa State Fair? Is it one of the photos snapped on the beach when the family vacationed in Hawaii in August? Or is it the moment that Sasha, talking to her father on a huge screen during the first night of the Democratic National Convention, punctuated his remarks with "I love you, Daddy," a declaration sure to claim a permanent spot in the annals of political campaign adorableness?

  • Obama's poet

    January 17, 2009

    This time last year, on the snowy campaign trail in New Hampshire, Hillary Rodham Clinton took a swipe at her opponent Barack Obama with the quip, "You campaign with poetry, but you govern with prose."

  • Ashley Madison's secret success

    January 10, 2009

    'Life is short. Have an affair."

  • Fictional memoirs

    January 3, 2009

    How did Herman Rosenblat, a 78-year-old Holocaust survivor and seemingly sweet old man, become the pariah of publishing? He spent upward of 15 years telling this story: As a teenager at a German concentration camp in 1945, he encounters a girl on the other side of the camp's fence who tosses food to him daily. The two never speak, but she gives him the strength to survive. Settled in New York 12 years later, Rosenblat finds himself on a blind date with a Polish woman named Roma Radzicki whose family, she says, lived near the camp during the war. Despite incalculable odds, Radzicki turns out to be the girl from the fence. He proposes to her on the spot, and they remain married today.

  • Burger King's body spray

    December 27, 2008

    You know you're in the throes of hard economic times when one of the most talked-about gift ideas of the holiday season is body spray from Burger King. You heard me right. There's a new burger in town, and it's not a burger at all. It's a fragrance called Flame by BK (pour hommespour hommes, presumably).

  • Barack Obama has added you as a friend on Facebook

    December 20, 2008

    Despite common assumptions that President-elect Barack Obama's Cabinet nominees are told of their selection via personal phone calls, The Times has learned that the famously tech-friendly Obama is actually notifying his picks by "friending" them on the social networking site Facebook. Requests to Obama for comment on the following transcript have gone unanswered, though he did "poke" us just as this went to press.

  • Recession-free Christmas ads

    December 13, 2008

    Tired of reading grim news about the economy? Then skip the articles and go straight to the ads. It's December, after all; the season of lights, gift giving and glossy magazines and newspaper supplements that smell like Glade PlugIns and weigh enough to break your toe.

  • From YouTube to Carnegie Hall

    December 6, 2008

    For every bassoonist or violist who's bemoaned his exclusion from that celebrated form of artistic democracy known as "American Idol," the dark days are over. No, Paula Abdul probably will not be waxing befuddled on the finer points of Mozart concertos. But YouTube has announced plans for something possibly even scarier: the YouTube Symphony, the "world's first collaborative online orchestra."

  • Life on our own L.A. fall line

    November 29, 2008

    Congratulations Southern Californians, autumn -- or something resembling it -- has finally arrived. It's been a long, dry, flame-engulfed road, but I'm glad to say (and I hope this won't jinx it ) that we probably won't hit 95 degrees again for at least five or six months.

  • Bushes' books

    November 22, 2008

    If you thought exiting your last job was painful, because you had to stand around eating sheet cake and acting excited about your impending "freelance projects," imagine being an outgoing president. Not only do you have to give up your career, move out of your house and bid farewell to your jumbo jet all on the same day, you're expected to embark on one of the most onerous tasks known to humans: writing a book.

  • Dog days ahead for the Obamas

    November 15, 2008

    In case you hadn't heard, Barack Obama's daughters are getting a dog. They were promised one after the election regardless of the outcome and, as the president-elect noted at his first news conference, the subject is generating "more interest on our website than just about anything." He said this in the same somber tone with which he also discussed Cabinet appointments and Iranian nuclear proliferation, referring to "criteria that need to be reconciled" (the need for a hypoallergenic dog and a preference for a shelter dog) and calling it "a pressing issue in the Obama household."

  • Gratitude with attitude

    October 11, 2008

    Question: What prize was recently characterized by one of its winners as "mundane"?

  • Straight talk expressed

    September 20, 2008

    On Sept. 12, the writer David Foster Wallace, who was 46, died by hanging himself in his Claremont home. A formidable intellect and a virtuosic craftsman whose following seemed cult-like despite being too large to really qualify (several of his books were bestsellers), Wallace had been a professor of creative writing at Pomona College since 2001.

  • Obsessed? Addicted? It's politics

    September 13, 2008

    Are you experiencing disturbing, election-related thoughts? When you close your eyes at night, do the colors of CNN's "magic" electoral map dance in your head like red and blue sugarplums? When you get in your car and hear the same talk-radio personalities saying the same things they said the last time you got in the car, do you wonder what day it is? Are you getting carpal tunnel syndrome from hitting "refresh" at political websites and blogs? Are you aware that most of these sites refresh automatically, yet you find yourself clicking the navigation bar because new information about Sarah Palin's other baby, the alien dinosaur, might have surfaced seconds ago and you can't wait that long to read about it? Are you at once totally sick of election news and insatiably hungry for more? As a result, are you sick of yourself?

  • Greetings from the energized GOP base

    September 6, 2008

    Sure, I spent much of the last week in a state of apoplexy at the hypocrisy and cynicism of the political process in general and the Republican Party in particular. But I can't say those were the very first thoughts that came to mind when Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin was introduced to the world Aug. 29.

  • A few PUMAs on the loose

    August 30, 2008

    Now that the Democratic National Convention is over, have all the PUMAs gone back to their dens? Is it safe to jog in the mountains or are rabid, ravenous Hillary Rodham Clinton supporters still crouching in the chaparral, patiently waiting until November, when they'll avenge their candidate in one deadly pounce?

  • Roy Den Hollander's war on feminism

    August 23, 2008

    This week, while you were distractedly waiting for one of the presidential candidates to just go ahead and pick Michael Phelps as his running mate, a Manhattan lawyer sued Columbia University for discriminating against men.

  • In China, a pretty face wins

    August 16, 2008

    China's never been known for its stellar policies on little girls. But this week, its female trouble in Beijing has been especially vexing. There are, of course, the rumblings about members of the Chinese women's gymnastics team who appear younger than the International Olympic Committee's age requirement of 16. But that controversy has been put on the back burner by the fracas surrounding Lin Miaoke, the 9-year-old who lip-synced "Ode to the Motherland" during the opening ceremony.

  • I'm nonplussed, maybe

    August 9, 2008

    Ineed to say something. And even though I'm going to refrain from typing in all caps, I urge you to pretend I did.

  • All together now

    March 29, 2008

    You know a nation is in trouble when the worst epithet its citizens can hurl at each other is the title of a folk song: "Kumbaya," an African American spiritual whose name (and chorus) translates from the Gullah dialect as "come by here."

  • Why we still need Clinton

    March 8, 2008

    Admit it, Obamaphiles, there was a part of you that was a teeny bit relieved about the outcome of Tuesday's primaries. As much as you think you want Hillary Rodham Clinton out of the picture so you can love your man with uninterrupted, full-time ardor, you're just not quite ready to cut Clinton loose. She's just too fundamental, too necessary, too much like a sofa you think you hate but, while attempting to move it through the doorway, realize is crucial to the look and feel of the room.

  • Booming sense of pride

    March 1, 2008

    I'm not going to pretend I knew what Michelle Obama meant when, at a rally in Milwaukee, she said that "for the first time in my adult lifetime, I'm really proud of my country." She later said she meant she was proud of people "rolling up their sleeves" and "trying to figure this out," which I take to mean she wasn't so sure either.

  • Finding Mr. Good Enough

    February 23, 2008

    In the march issue of the Atlantic magazine, sandwiched between an article about Chinese Internet technology and a review of modernist art criticism, lies a seven-page essay called "Marry Him! The Case for Settling." Its author is Lori Gottlieb, a 40-year-old Los Angeles writer and single mother who admits that the idea of finding Mr. Right, a notion she once harbored, was in fact a bill of goods. Young women in search of marriage and family, she writes, should think seriously about resigning themselves to Mr. Good Enough.

  • Chelsea's rant control

    February 9, 2008

    Maybe you were privy to an e-mail that was circulated, perhaps, by Chelsea Clinton this week. According to a post Tuesday by Emily Bazelon of the online magazine Slate, the e-mail's subject heading was "a must read ... send to every woman you know." The body of the e-mail was a pro-Hillary screed by the famous 1960s- and 1970s-era feminist Robin Morgan (author of the iconic "Sisterhood Is Powerful" anthologies) called, "Goodbye To All That (#2)." The essay was dated Feb. 2 and appeared (and can still be read) on the website for the Women's Media Center, a nonprofit feminist media watchdog organization that Morgan helped found.

  • News from the Department of Depression

    February 2, 2008

    Misery really does love company. How else to explain our endless fascination with studies about why it's so much easier to worry than be happy? In the last few years, researchers have provided us with all manner of mood-related news, much of which has gotten more ink than civil unrest in Third World countries (and no wonder; that stuff is really depressing).

  • A house is more than an ATM

    January 26, 2008

    If real estate in 2008 has a fashion corollary, it's the Member's Only jacket. Like those elasticized, cotton/poly zip-ups that were all the rage in the 1980s, houses and condos -- at least those purchased in the last few years -- have gone from must-have items to invitations for public mockery.

  • High-definition anxiety

    January 19, 2008

    Say what you will about society's shallow preoccupation with physical appearance, no one can accuse us of not sweating the details. Never was this more clear to me than a few years ago, when I visited a "laser spa" at a dermatologist's office in the hope of lightening a small (and, in retrospect, inconsequential) scar on my knee. Without looking at my chart, the porcelain-skinned, flawlessly made-up "laser spa technician" led me into the treatment room, gestured toward a hulking machine worthy of the Starship Enterprise, glanced up at me and asked, "Just your face today?"

  • Hillary's gotta have it

    January 12, 2008

    Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton may have clawed her way out of an abyss in the New Hampshire primary on Tuesday, but the shadows over her campaign are a reminder that the path she's forging is still in the deep woods.

  • Leno writes a wrong

    January 5, 2008

    In hopes of learning the true -- and possibly mystical -- value of writers, I did something Wednesday I hadn't done in years. I watched the "Late Show With David Letterman" and "The Tonight Show With Jay Leno" all the way through (thanks to DVR technology). The occasion, of course, was the programs' return to the air after two months off because of the ongoing Writers Guild of America strike.

  • The gift card shuffle

    December 29, 2007

    Who cares that holiday spending fell short of expectations this season? The real shopping is happening right now.

  • Tracking the mild coyote

    December 22, 2007

    In the last few weeks, a buzz has developed around a weblog called the Daily Coyote. It features the comments and photographs of Shreve Stockton, a 30-year-old woman living in a one-room cabin in an undisclosed "town of 300 people" in Wyoming. The focus of the blog is Charlie, a 9-month-old coyote that Stockton took in when he was orphaned shortly after birth. Feeding him goat's milk from syringes and then baby bottles (he promptly chewed the nipples off), Stockton has raised him from a tiny fluff ball that cried unless he could sleep in her bed to a long-snouted, giant-eared, 25-pound almost adult coyote that still sleeps in her bed. Oh, and her cat, Eli, sleeps there too.

  • Knocked up but not out

    December 15, 2007

    When I was in high school during the Reagan years, teen pregnancy wasn't just taboo, it was the worst possible situation you could find yourself in. Equal parts personal tragedy and quasi-criminal act, getting knocked up (not to be confused with knocking someone else up, which might have been a tiny bit cool) was the ultimate wrong move -- not least because it was preventable in so many ways.

  • Save the world: stay married

    December 8, 2007

    The American obsession with striking out on our own, with poster children as varied as John Wayne and Mary Tyler Moore, appears to be at odds with our other current obsession: saving the planet.

  • The Red Cross' latest emergency

    December 1, 2007

    I just took an informal survey and discovered that a lot of people are under the impression that the American Red Cross is a religious organization. Maybe it's the cross that's throwing them (though it's really more of a plus sign), or maybe it's the fact that the 126-year-old disaster relief agency acted more like the morality police than an international humanitarian organization this week. After losing two presidents in the last six years -- Bernadine Healy resigned in 2001 amid accusations about the mishandling of donations for 9/11 victims; Martha J. Evans stepped down in 2005 after the Red Cross' response to Hurricane Katrina was deemed inadequate -- yet another leader has made a scandalous departure.

  • No more reading the readers

    November 24, 2007

    One of the many uses of air travel is the opportunity it provides to take a snapshot of the public's reading tastes. Sure, bestseller lists rank what's popular, but if you want to do more detailed market research -- to know what kinds of people are reading what kinds of books, and how many pages into them they fall asleep -- there is no better vantage point than the aisle of a jetliner. It is from there that my extremely scientific research has produced data suggesting the following: Readers of mass-market thrillers often wear Dockers and polo shirts bearing company logos; readers of books like "Rich Dad, Poor Dad" can often be found in business class or first class (it works, folks!); and, almost without exception, there will be a young person in the last row traveling with nothing but a knapsack and reading Camus for the explicit purpose of striking up a conversation with a sexually desirable fellow passenger.

  • Pictures imperfect

    November 17, 2007

    Readers of this newspaper were mesmerized this week by staff photographer Luis Sinco's two-part series about Lance Cpl. James Blake Miller, the man behind his now famous portrait, "Marlboro Marine." Taken in 2004 during the battle of Fallouja, the photograph shows a weary Marine staring into the morning sun. His face is smeared with mud, the bridge of his nose is bloodied, and a cigarette dangles from his lips with a Bogart-style insouciance we rarely see anymore.

  • Things have never been better for kick-ass bloviators.

    November 3, 2007

    Is it just me, or has it become super-cool to be a blowhard? Everywhere I turn, it seems someone's speaking a bit too loudly, going on slightly too long and imparting ideas dressed up with dropped names, self-serving anecdotes and sanctimonious chest-thumping. And you should hear what I run into when I leave my house.

  • Cliche and cataclysm

    October 27, 2007

    Whenever California burns or shakes or collapses in mudslides, a cavalcade of familiar noir-isms comes along for the ride. Social critics wax nihilistic about impermanence as a permanent state of mind. Inevitably, Joan Didion quotes blow in like the Santa Anas themselves, offering up heavy doses of the line about the winds forcing an acceptance of "a deeply mechanistic view of human behavior." Inevitably, references will be made to Nathaniel West's "The Day of the Locust," to Raymond Chandler's "Red Wind," even to Steely Dan lyrics.

  • The Porn Age's unsexiness

    October 20, 2007

    It's been a tough couple of weeks for porn. On Oct. 12, two Arizona men were sentenced to more than five years in federal prison for generating pornographic e-mail spam, a venture in which they'd sent out millions of e-mails and earned more than a million dollars.

  • Did 9/11 kill feminism?

    October 6, 2007

    Because I seem to be one of an ever-dwindling handful of women under 50 who still call themselves feminists (and, therefore, am allowed to make fun of feminists with impunity), let me say this: Anyone who blames the weird, conflicted state of contemporary womanhood on the cultural fallout of 9/11 isn't just burning her bras but smoking them.

  • Live and let live -- nah . . .

    September 22, 2007

    As the proposed two-year moratorium on new fast-food restaurants in South Los Angeles wends its way through the City Council, the zoning debate over a long-planned Orthodox synagogue continues to simmer in Hancock Park. In both cases, the hullabaloo can be heard for miles. What can be learned from this? Not much other than a) if there's anything we fear more than poor people, it's poor people with high cholesterol, and b) freedom of traffic flow trumps freedom of religion. And, let's face it, we're not even too sure about those.

  • Should kids be seen?

    September 15, 2007

    On Wednesday, CBS will premiere "Kid Nation," a reality show that puts 40 youngsters, ages 8 through 15, in a New Mexico "ghost town" for 40 days without electricity, indoor plumbing or adult supervision. While six weeks off the grid may sound like exactly what today's over-mediated, nature-phobic, hyper-parented kids need most, some people are suggesting that the finer points of the arrangements are more reminiscent of "Oliver Twist" than a Sierra Club camping trip.

  • Defending Jerry Lewis

    September 8, 2007

    I never thought I'd find myself defending Jerry Lewis. Like a lot of people of my generation (and, unless you live in France, the one before that and quite possibly the one before that), my brain just isn't wired to appreciate the charms of his act, which has always struck me as about as close to dental drilling as comedy can get. But now that we've spent the better part of a week chastising the 81-year-old for saying, in the 18th hour of his Labor Day Muscular Dystrophy telethon, all or most of the verboten word "faggot," part of me is feeling just a wee bit French.

  • Our wonder of Wonder Bread

    September 1, 2007

    As a cultural icon, Wonder Bread has always been pretty tiresome. Occupying that dismal, overhyped semiotic space between authentic Americana and ironic pop artifact, its one of those products (see also Spam and Pez) that's been usurped by its own kitsch factor. For every middle-aged cornball who tries to capture his lost youth with mawkish allusions to Wonder Bread, there's a tattooed hipster ironically wearing a Wonder Bread T-shirt. And you kind of want to kill both of them.

  • American Apparel's ick

    August 25, 2007

    I've been looking at American Apparel's advertisements for years now, and I'm still not sure what I think about them.

  • Death by numbers

    August 18, 2007

    On any given day, an average of 148,000 people will die. That means over a million people have died in the last week. Nearly 5 million have died since around this time last month, which, incidentally, was exactly when we were briefly bombarded with the news that 199 people were killed in a Brazilian airliner crash.

  • When Hillary met Robert

    August 11, 2007

    When letters written to a friend by a college-aged Hillary Rodham resurfaced in the news a few weeks ago, her mention of a certain "Dartmouth boy" with whom she spent an evening in 1966 piqued notable interest. But last week, the New York Times reported that the mystery date was none other than Robert Reich, former secretary of Labor under Bill Clinton. In a post on his video blog, Reich called the encounter a "presidential summit" ("She was the president of her freshman class at Wellesley, and I was president of my sophomore class at Dartmouth," he explained.) and said they went to the Michelangelo Antonioni film "Blow Up."

  • The case for conspiracies

    August 4, 2007

    Since the May release of his 1,612-page book, "Reclaiming History," criminal prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi has been appearing on everything from C-Span to "The Colbert Report" telling the world that JFK's death had nothing to do with a government conspiracy. By most accounts, he's made a pretty airtight case.

  • The little black dress of 'responsibility'

    July 14, 2007

    IN CASE YOU haven't heard, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa takes full responsibility for his relationship with Telemundo newscaster Mirthala Salinas. Not some responsibility, not partial responsibility, not indirect responsibility. Full.

  • Little voices of distraction

    July 7, 2007

    HAS THE WHOLE country been sucking on helium balloons?

  • Who killed Antioch? Womyn

    June 30, 2007

    ON JUNE 12, the board of trustees of Antioch College, the famously countercultural institution in Yellow Springs, Ohio, announced that the campus would shut down next year. The decision is a result of declining enrollment, insufficient alumni support and facilities so neglected that, according to several reports, some buildings don't have hot water. Earlier this year, a number of faculty members were laid off. Meanwhile, student enrollment, which had been about 2,000 in the college's 1960s heyday, has dwindled to about 400.

  • 40-love, or 20-love?

    June 23, 2007

    A "GREAT SOCIAL experiment" has commenced on Monday nights on NBC: a reality show called "Age of Love." The idea is to find a mate for Australian tennis star Mark Philippoussis, a 6-foot-5 former GQ cover boy who, according to the show, "has everything except someone to share his life with."

  • Our blond obsession, from Di to Paris

    June 16, 2007

    ADMITTEDLY, there's something uncanny about the publication of "The Diana Chronicles," Tina Brown's book about the princess of Wales, just as America's own blond headline-grabber, Paris Hilton, was making her way (back) to jail. It makes it too tempting to draw all sorts of parallels between the two women. And we all know who wins that contest.

  • Down the aisle and over the top

    June 9, 2007

    I JUST TYPED "bride" into the search engine on Amazon.com and got 132,398 results. Some referred to fiction titles like "Brideshead Revisited," but the vast majority were nonfiction field guides to femininity. There was "The Conscious Bride," "The Buff Bride," "Chicken Soup for the Bride's Soul" and something called "And the Bride Wore White: 7 Secrets to Sexual Purity." And that was just from the first few pages of the list.

  • Dr. Death, American icon

    June 2, 2007

    I'VE ALWAYS BELIEVED that someday there will be a Jack Kevorkian postage stamp. Granted, it will be a first-class stamp that costs $3; that's how far into the future we're talking. But considering we've already had a Richard Nixon stamp, who says you need charisma to grace the upper right corners of America's envelopes?

  • Without smoking, films lose some fire

    May 19, 2007

    THE PORTRAIT photographer Marion Ettlinger once told me that the worst thing to ever happen to her art form was the demise of smoking. A cigarette, after all, not only gives a subject something to do with his hands, it seems to provide an uncanny cure for camera shyness, allowing a facial expression and a physical posture to integrate into some ineffable moment of truth.

  • Does getting him a beer count as work?

    April 28, 2007

    IF YOU'RE ONE of those women for whom the only hobby more satisfying than aromatherapy wreath-making is complaining about how men don't work hard enough, I'm afraid your lament license has just been revoked.

  • Why doesn't Harvard love me?

    April 9, 2007

    IN THE LAST few weeks, the anxiety of high school seniors awaiting news of their college fates seems to have spilled over into the general population. It's easy to see why. UCLA received more than 50,000 applications, more than any other university in the country, and accepted just 11,837 of them. Harvard turned down 91% of about 23,000 hopefuls, 1,100 of whom had perfect SAT math scores. Acceptance rates for Stanford, Yale and Columbia were 10.3%, 9.6%, and 8.9%, respectively. That means thousands of valedictorians and people with grade-point averages of 4.0 or higher were passed over in favor of whatever form of superhuman DNA now constitutes a worthy Ivy Leaguer.

  • Dreaming your dream house

    March 26, 2007

    I HAD THE DREAM again the other night, the "extra room" dream. I walked out of my bedroom and instead of being deposited into the living room, which adjoins my bedroom in real life, I entered a long hallway that led to at least two or three other rooms I'd never seen before. "Wow," I thought. "My house is so much bigger than I thought! What's with all the bellyaching about having no space for guests? And why have I been using my sun porch as an office/dining room/tool shed?"

  • Documentaries or propaganda?

    March 19, 2007

    IN CASE YOU haven't noticed, documentaries are hot. No longer the domain of university film leagues and vintage un-P.C. jokes — "How many lesbians does it take to screw in a light bulb? One to turn the bulb and 20 to make a documentary about it" — nonfiction films are cheap to make and increasingly free of the esoteric artiness, and sometimes outright pretentiousness, that gave the genre its elitist reputation.

  • Sleep at your own risk

    March 12, 2007

    YESTERDAY marked the start of daylight saving time, a month early this year. The theory is that it will help conserve energy, but most of us know this is part of a vast conspiracy (possibly the work of government officials who know all about those aliens who come into our bedrooms and probe us) to keep us from getting enough sleep.

  • Echo Park in Mexico

    February 24, 2007

    I SPENT LAST Sunday in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, with a group of more than 500 Americans gawking at the designer homes of other Americans.

  • Fame-iness

    February 17, 2007

    WHY IS IT THAT MOST celebrities in the culture today are people I've never heard of? I always thought fame had to do with being well known to the public, with being easily recognized on the street, with being, you know … famous.

  • I'm with Cupid

    February 10, 2007

    WHAT HOLIDAY is dreaded more than Valentine's Day? Not enough of an excuse to eat a big meal or take a day off from work, but more than just a vehicle of the greeting card industry, it's an anxiety trigger of the most insidious order. So cloaked in cheesy packaging it makes Groundhog Day look downright sacred, this annual nod to Cupid is a cultural mandate not only to have a nervous breakdown but to feel like an idiot for doing so.

  • What Hillary's humor reveals

    February 3, 2007

    THIS WEEK, Hillary Clinton tried out a joke in Iowa. "We face a lot of evil men," she told voters in Davenport. "People like Osama bin Laden come to mind. And what in my background equips me to deal with evil and bad men?" Clinton then smiled big and chortled, cueing the audience that this was not an oral presentation in a women's studies class but, indeed, a joke.

  • Doggy gentrification

    January 27, 2007

    COYOTES MAY have invaded the otherwise orderly confines of Hancock Park adjacent, but where I live, in Echo Park, we've got an even more vexing problem: domestic dogs.

  • Wanna be happy? Expect the worst

    January 20, 2007

    WHEN PEOPLE ask me why I'm so negative, I always tell them I'm simply looking out for my best interests and everyone else's. Like instant mashed potatoes (which, let's face it, are often better than real mashed potatoes), negativity gets a bad rap. Everywhere you look, someone's waxing fustian about the power of positive thinking.

  • Adam Carolla's genius -- spoiled

    January 13, 2007

    THE TIME HAS COME to talk about Adam Carolla. Because you're reading the Op-Ed page of the Los Angeles Times, there's a good chance you're only vaguely aware of him as a host of cable shows you don't like or radio programs you don't tune in to. Maybe you've seen the bus ads for KLSX radio's "The Adam Carolla Show," which bill him as an "American Genius." You probably thought this was idiotic hyperbole. I'm here to tell you it's not. I'm also here to tell you not to listen to his show. Not now.

  • The books that read women

    January 6, 2007

    Sprinkled among the novels and political tracts I received for Christmas was a clothbound piece of candy called "The Female Thing." It was written by Laura Kipnis, a Northwestern University professor best known for 2003's "Against Love: A Polemic," and its cover is a frontal photo of a woman's toned, depilated thighs, hips and belly, one hand posed sassily on her hip and the other holding a thin leaf over her privates. Naturally, I plucked it from the stack immediately, leaving Richard Ford and Jimmy Carter to lie in pitiable wait.

  • Half the resolution is optimism

    December 30, 2006

    AS WILL BE reported ad nauseum over the next few days, one of the most common New Year's resolutions is "get in shape." Exercise demands many things — patience, discomfort, the ability to ignore people who make weird humming sounds on the StairMaster — but the main requirement is time. So, needless to say, I was elated when my boyfriend showed me an ad for the ROM (Range of Motion) cross-training machine that he'd torn from an in-flight magazine.

  • As the solstice turns

    December 23, 2006

    MOST CLICHES, particularly those related to Los Angeles, are rooted in some semblance of reality. But the notion that the L.A. region is a vast strip mall whose only outdoor attractions involve surfing and driving around in convertibles has always irked me. Last month in Ojai, which is close enough to the city that you'd think people would know better, a woman who knew I was from L.A. saw my dog sniffing some tree roots and said, "I bet he doesn't get to do that very often."

  • Shopping for Person X

    December 16, 2006

    THE MORE WE LEARN about our loved ones, the less we know what they want from life — not to mention for the holidays. According to a new study, this is the reason couples give each other such lame gifts. In what won't come as a surprise to at least half the people having meltdowns in department stores this weekend, researchers have found that the chances of selecting a gift that the recipient actually wants run in inverse proportion with our degree of intimacy with that person.

  • My dinner with Joni

    December 9, 2006

    IT'S ALMOST ALWAYS a bad idea to meet your heroes. No matter what variety of fan you are — there are two kinds: those who innocently hang posters on the wall and those for whom the idol's life and work has been permanently absorbed into the bloodstream — meeting an object of devotion comes with a terrible risk. Having elevated them to a level where there's barely any oxygen left, they have no place to go but down.

  • Meghan Daum: The State of Student Activism

    October 14, 2006

    THE EVENTS at Columbia University on Oct. 4, in which about a dozen students stormed a stage where the founder of an anti-illegal immigration group was speaking, didn't exactly resemble those of April 1968. There were no arrests, no soundtrack by the Grateful Dead, no occupation of the president's office. But considering that most young people are considered to be politically apathetic, you have to credit the Chicano Caucus and the International Socialist Organization for trying.

  • Meghan Daum: $4k Cat Is Nothing to Sneeze At

    October 7, 2006

    IT IS A TRUTH universally acknowledged that cats make some people sick. As a person who would no sooner pet a cat than stick her hand in a tree shredder, I consider this a law of nature.

  • Meghan Daum: Finally, It's Dad's Fault

    September 9, 2006

    THERE WAS some dark poetic justice to a study released this week finding that fathers over 40 were six times more likely to produce autistic children than fathers under 30. As grim a subject as autism can be, the idea that, for once, fathers rather than mothers are seen as responsible for abnormalities in children — because of age, no less — was nothing short of revelatory.

  • Coulter's a satirist -- really?

    June 24, 2006

    LIFE IS HARD for satirists. Like high school poets or people who get aroused when they put on furry mascot costumes, no one understands them. Back in 1729, Jonathan Swift was almost universally reviled when he suggested, in "A Modest Proposal," that the antidote to urban squalor was to eat the children of poor Irish immigrants and use their skin to make "admirable gloves for ladies and summer boots for fine gentlemen." If only Fox News had been around; Sean Hannity would have dined out (so to speak) for weeks on the skirmish.

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