A selection of published pieces that remain topical, important, fun, or some combination:
August 24, 2021/June 8, 2021 — A two-parter in Red Canary magazine on the rancid culture of U.S. fire departments that leaves many women and African Americans on the outside looking in — or worse. Part one focuses on a captain in Orange County, California, who has fought tooth and nail just so women firefighters can have their own bathrooms and not wait for the men to finish showering first. Part two follows the story of a firefighter in Washington state whose union tried, unsuccessfully, to stop her speaking out about the egregious mistreatment of her colleagues.
April 22, 2021 — What Richard Thompson’s entertaining memoir about his youth tells us, and does not tell us, about the formation of one of the most consequential guitarists and songwriters of the past half century. In the Los Angeles Review of Books.
January 9, 2021 — Why the notorious trial of the Chicago 8 is still burningly relevant, as long as you don’t take Aaron Sorkin’s word for it. In the Los Angeles Review of Books.
November 17, 2020/January 23, 2021/June 15, 2021 — How the well-heeled city of Santa Monica lost control of public order on one traumatic, spectacularly mismanaged day. A two-part investigation in Los Angeles magazine, plus a follow-up column in the Santa Monica Daily Press. Links here to Part 1 and Part 2. Daily Press column here.
January 26 and January 30, 2020 — A two-parter on gentrification, the future of Los Angeles, and a cultural battle over the street art of Highland Park in the northeastern suburbs of the city that has become a proxy for many other modern-day anxieties. Part one, in The Guardian, focuses on the murals. Part two, part of a package in Los Angeleno, asks broader questions about the affordability of the quintessential 21st-century city and how to minimize the damage of rapid urban change.
July 21, 2019 — How the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors sank her life savings into bailing an asylum seeker out of immigration detention — and quickly inspired others to follow suit. In The Guardian.
January 19, 2019 — How California’s public schools, once among the country’s finest but now challenged by budget shortages, labor disputes and a fast-growing charter school movement, fell into disrepute and disrepair. The usual explanation — that it has to do with caps on property taxes — is not the whole story. In The Guardian.
September 19, 2018 — Why Sikhs in the United States are uniquely prone to racist violence, and what they are doing to counter it. In The Guardian.
May 18, 2018 — California’s “jungle primary” could throw the 2018 mid-terms into acrimony and confusion. Why does the top-two system work so poorly and what can be done to fix it? An op-ed in the Los Angeles Times.
March 6, 2018 — In the wake of the Parkland school shooting, law enforcement experts look at the repeated patterns of failure that characterize many similar mass-casualty events and suggest what they think needs to happen to prevent such failures in future. Gun control legislation is not on the list, although keeping at-risk individuals away from firearms certainly is. In the Guardian.
November 17, 2017 — Why serving on a jury came as a pleasant surprise and a much-needed restorative in the importance of fact and evidence in our post-truth age. In the Los Angeles Times.
July 24, 2017 — Now that we are well into the second hundred days of the Trump presidency, what are we dealing with, exactly? An aberration, an embarrassment, a chaotic comedy of errors? Or the prelude to full-blown fascism? In the Los Angeles Review of Books.
December 30, 2016 — The strange case of Sherri Papini, the northern California housewife kidnapped, tortured and released again without explanation or even a dollar in ransom. In The Guardian.
November 25, 2016 — Doctors see a new condition in immigrant children: fear of Trump. In The Guardian.
July 31, 2016 — The courts belatedly cry foul over voter ID laws being adopted by Republican-controlled state legislatures across the country and mitigate some of the risk of Democratic votes being suppressed in key swing states in November. In The Guardian.
April 22, 2016 — Why the Utah Republican Party’s experiment with online voting in its primary was a disaster and a warning to others tempted by the lure of convenience over ballot security. In The Guardian.
January 27, 2016 — The fascinating, alarmingly perilous sport of freediving, whose participants seek the ultimate high by plunging to the depths and having their lungs wrung out like wet laundry. My review of Adam Skolnick’s One Breath: Freediving, Death, and the Quest to Shatter Human Limits. In the Los Angeles Review of Books.
January 5, 2016 — My profile of Edward Blum, a one-man wrecking crew who has figured out how to bypass Congress and appeal directly to the Supreme Court to demolish voter protections and affirmative action on behalf of his conservative funders. Revealingly, even he wonders if he’s gone too far. In The Guardian.
December 10, 2015 — How the latest spate of mass shootings, including the Isis-inspired massacre in San Bernardino, California, is forcing criminal profilers and behavioral psychologists to reassess their thinking about “mission-oriented mass violence”. In The Guardian.
November 29, 2015 — One side-effect of America’s epidemic of gun violence is that its police agencies know better than anyone how to respond to mass-casualty shootings — knowledge put to use in last November’s shocking attacks in Paris and in Mali. In The Guardian.
November 19, 2015 — The sinister brilliance of Coca-Cola and Pepsi, which founded an entire industry on sugar water, and why it’s so hard to do anything to stop them wrecking our public health. A review of Marion Nestle’s Soda Wars. In the Los Angeles Review of Books.
October 11, 2015 — The lively campaign, more than sixty years after the end of World War Two, to exonerate the so-called “Port Chicago 50”, munitions workers who survived a horrifying explosion in northern California only to be convicted of mutiny when they refused to return to work under similarly dangerous conditions. In The Guardian.
September 23, 2015 — The controversial legacy of the world’s newest saint, Father Junipero Serra, whose California missions in the late 18th century were once described as “picturesque charnel-houses”. In The Guardian.
August 22, 2015 — The topsy-turvy power politics that allows California’s most powerful water broker to grow almonds in one of the driest corners of the state and enjoy brimming irrigation canals when his immediate neighbors are gagging for water in the fourth year of drought. In The Guardian.
June 25, 2015 — What Islamist extremists and white supremacists who carry out mass shootings have in common and why they represent an entirely new threat, for which labels like “terrorism” are largely unhelpful. In The Guardian.
May 19, 2015 — In which I sketch out my love affair with Albania, Europe’s accidental country. A review of Fred C. Abrahams’ compelling recent history, Modern Albania. In the Los Angeles Review of Books.
August 2, 2014 — My portrait of Colorado’s nascent marijuana industry, where sharp-eyed business entrepreneurs jostle with potheads who can’t quite believe it’s all now legal. In The Observer.
March 29, 2014 — The “conscious uncoupling” of Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin and how it fits into the long Californian tradition of New Age self-realization. In The Observer.
February 11, 2014 — What the Amanda Knox murder trials reveal about Italian justice, the domain of “elegant partisan nontruth”. In the Los Angeles Review of Books.
November 7, 2013 — Separating fact and fiction in the gruesome, fascinating, and much-mythologized murder of Matthew Shepard. My review of Stephen Jimenez’s The Book of Matt. In the Los Angeles Review of Books.
October 6, 2013 — The nightmare of long-term solitary confinement, and why American prisons can’t seem to kick the habit despite horror stories, hunger strikes, and unequivocal international condemnation. In the Los Angeles Review of Books.
May 13, 2013 — On re-reading The Great Gatsby, and the differing natures of British versus American privilege. At Zocalo Public Square.
November 17, 2012 — Why America doesn’t seem that interested in celebrating its victory in the Cold War. My review of Jon Wiener’s engaging travelogue, How We Forgot the Cold War: A Historical Journey Across America. In the Los Angeles Review of Books.
September 12, 2012 — The outrageous case of Don Siegelman, the former Alabama governor stitched up and thrown in prison by his political enemies, who is still awaiting a pardon from President Obama. In The Guardian.
February 2, 2012 — Why online voting is a really, really bad idea, for the Oscars or any other kind of election. In The Guardian.
December 8, 2011 — The extraordinary battle over Richard Nixon’s legacy at the Nixon Presidential Library in Yorba Linda, California. In Pacific Standard.
April 16, 2009 — Why everything we think we know about the Columbine school shootings turns out to be wrong. In The Guardian.
February 21, 2004 — How did Jean-Bertrand Aristide, once a symbol of hope and humility for Haiti’s abused and dispossessed, come to be as reviled as the dictators he once campaigned to overthrow? My profile, on the eve of his removal from power, in The Independent. (Note: the third paragraph should be one sentence, not two.)
July 1, 2003 — The greatest meal ever, or just the most tantalising? Why dinner at The French Laundry was like Wagner’s Liebestod on a plate. In The Independent.
May 31, 2003 — A portrait of an American monster: an obituary notice for Richard A. Gardner, the father of an insidious junk-science theory called Parental Alienation Syndrome. In The Independent.