My father's very public life as Famous Amos was the opposite of that of his ex-wife, my mother Shirley, who was fighting a very private, solitary battle with mental illness.
If you take medication with a glass of tap water, you may be getting more medicine than your doctor prescribed.
The accidental shooting of two Gardena High School students here in L.A. is a reminder of the price we pay for urban violence and the degree of terror many of our students face getting to and from school.
My father purchased the Hotel Shangri-La in Santa Monica in 1983 and I had the privilege of growing up in and around an LA institution.
Our New Year's resolution is to put a little more tiger into our Western tank of parenting... just as soon as we recover from another weekend of sports games and sleepovers.
Our homes are a mirror of who we think we are; why not set them up to be a mirror of who we want to be?
Before you dive in with the first person you meet at an open house simply because you think they're "nice," it's a good idea to stop and think.
To cut one of the most effective publicly-funded programs that can dramatically improve a city's economic state, and pour in new jobs, just does not make sense.
Science fairs, those time-tested incubators of future American scientists and engineers and a national fixture for generations, are in trouble.
We had the honor of celebrating with Barclay Butera at his fabulous new namesake store.
Given Long Beach Opera's history of contemporizing operas, and with this production of Medea characterized as "triple murders in a warehouse," will this be the company's most ambitious season ever?
Although SB 6 is sitting on a wall, its Humpty-Dumpty election rules do not have to fall.
Mark Fisher calls it "gravity-inspired photography," and often it involves capturing images of brave/insane people skiing down 60 degree slopes on rugged, remote mountains.
On a recent visit to Los Angeles I was overjoyed at the creativity, ingenuity, business savvy and pure chutzpah of a green service project presented on the streets -- called Seed Bombs.
Seven years ago, the Ella Baker Center's Books Not Bars Campaign started calling for closing California's youth prisons. People laughed in our faces.
The mood in my household of war refugees was subdued immediately after we heard of the shooting. Our thoughts went back to our years living in El Salvador during the civil war.
While the effects of an individual's mental state are impossible to predict, the effects of loose gun laws are not.
Californians must make a choice to either reduce government spending through reduction of services or to extend the 2009 tax supplement about to expire.
As well as he writes when he is focused on architecture, Nicolai Ouroussoff's review of Broad the museum and Broad the patron isn't worth the paper and pixels it is written on.
Xorin Balbes, 2011.01.19
