Search

1 DESIRE 'When you see a plane, there's a bit of hope, of wondering: Where are those people going?' says cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki of this shot beneath an LAX flight [...]

MALIBU doyen May Rindge may have lost the battle to keep Pacific Coast Highway from traversing her property, but she instilled a fighting spirit in those who came after her. [...]

YOU'VE ALMOST GOT to feel sorry for the activity tracker on Dr. David Agus's wrist--the thing must be exhausted. The USC professor of medicine and engineering regularly speaks at the [...]

Think of America's great historic cities and savannah, Santa Fe, and Boston spring to mind--each deeply rooted in mythology, each blessed with strong architectural bones. Brooklyn deserves the same stature. [...]

Who: Bill Paxton What: Actor, Big Love Where: Frying eggs in Ojai In a thunderstorm quaint Ojai radiates even more warmth than when the sun is shining. The actor Bill [...]

LAST JUNE I spent a weekend with friends who own a home in the mountains above Tehachapi. On a walk I spotted a pretty rock that looked like pink quartz. [...]

1) Wild child LEO CARRILLO BEACH * WHERE MOLHOLLAND HIGHWAY collides with PCH and leather-clad bikers roar up the coast to Neptune's Net is one of California's most welcoming stretches [...]

IF YOU'VE CHECKED this page with any regularity over the past seven-and-a-half years, you already know I was born here, raised here, and educated here. Leading a magazine whose name [...]

A FEW MONTHS before the New Hampshire primary, I was talking with a friend about the presidential election. I had a hunch, I told her, that Donald Trump would go [...]

THE FIRST FAX machine I ever saw was as big as a refrigerator. The owner of a computer company my sister worked for in the Valley demonstrated it for me [...]

MY 12-YEAR-OLD SON is too young to be clamoring for a cup of morning joe, but for several months now he has refused to take the day's first sip of [...]

THE RESPECT I have for teachers is immeasurable. I saw first-hand how my father, who taught theater at Hollywood High School, changed the course of so many lives; when I [...]

FOR ALL THE TIME I spend looking at a screen, my life is still full of moments when only an old-school mode of communication will do. I read the morning [...]

* THE RAMS HAVE returned to Los Angeles, and I'm rooting for them as I would never have dared the last time they were my hometown team. In the late [...]

IN THE RAMP-UP to our wedding (gasp, almost two decades ago), my husband and I enrolled in an Introduction to Judaism course at a Culver City temple. My husband didn't [...]

* BY MY ESTIMATE there are three neighborhoods in L.A. with instant name recognition--no matter where you are--because of the gilded lifestyle they connote: Hollywood, Beverly Hills, and Malibu. People [...]

* THE PRIMARY races this election season have left me worried that I'm slipping into middle-aged cynicism. So I decided to text my 24-year-old nephew, Chase, whom my husband and [...]

* I WILL TALK to any one about anything, and not just for the purpose of reporting a piece. I often strike up conversations with strangers, too, though I'm partial [...]

EVERYTHING AROUND US--well, everything other than traffic--is galloping forward (or upward) at a startling pace. There's technology, of course. Try as we might, it's impossible to keep up with each [...]

* THE 2001 REMAKE OF Ocean's 11 was on TV the other evening when I was flipping channels (an old-fashioned habit in this era of entertainment on demand, but not [...]

THE ARROYO SECO PARKWAY--also known as the 110, the first freeway in the western United States--opened in 1940. Angelenos have since considered it their birthright to roam the region with [...]

People are really surprised when I tell them I grew up in Los Angeles, because I'm an albino, practically, and I seem like an intellectual, I guess. They'll be like, [...]

FEELING NOSTALGIC ON A recent Sunday, I drove by my first--and only--L.A. apartment. It was in Los Feliz. I signed the lease in 1992, when I'd landed a fulltime job [...]

* I LIVE IN the hills, so I expect wildlife encounters. Driving home recently from a fundraiser that ran late, I watched a coyote sprint across a wide swath of [...]

EVERY MONTH IN L.A. STORY, we ask a celebrity to tell his or her own tale. In this issue we switched up the concept and devoted 43 pages to the [...]

* ON A THURSDAY in June, I called my husband and suggested a spontaneous night out at our local comedy club, the Ice House in Pasadena. I didn't know who [...]

* WHERE TO GO on our summer vacation? My husband and I asked our 11-year-old son, Isaac, to decide. Someplace beachy, we nudged. Hey, doesn't Italy look nice? His answer [...]

AMONG THE MANY embarrassing relics I've saved from my wonder years, two highlight signs of early TV addiction. The first is a cassette I labeled THEMES--TELEVISION. On it I captured [...]

FLYING HOME FROM New York this winter, I was seated next to a loquacious lawyer who had been visiting family. We charted about careers, our UC alumni status (he said [...]

* IN A LOT of ways it's the Lakers, not the Dodgers, who have long been our Yankees; the Clippers have never been our Mets. The scrappy Mets somehow remained [...]

A HORSE CORRAL may not seem a natural place to start a story about L.A.'s future, but here goes. My son, Isaac, began riding several years ago at Children's Ranch, [...]

A FEW MONTHS AGO, midway through one of the meandering weekend hikes I take with my husband and son, we reached the summit of a ridge in Montecito Heights, an [...]

OUT OF TOWN on business and in need of a quick pick-me-up, I wandered into a blow-out salon in Washington, D.C., last year. The service I sought--a stylist washing and [...]

ANNE BOLEYN'S execution in Hilary Mantel's Bring Up the Bodies is described with unforgettable imagery. The Vegas interlude in Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch is so vivid, I was convinced I [...]

* PLAIN AS DAY, my maternal great-great-grandfather stares out at me from my computer screen. Bald, in a high collar, his small eyes piercing through his pince-nez, John A. McNaughton [...]

* MY FAMILY often visits Disneyland. The Anaheim theme park was a touchstone of my childhood, and I'm ensuring that it plays the same role for my ten-year-old son. On [...]

BEING THE LITTLE sister of two brothers, I got thrown around a lot whenever I insinuated myself into one of their games. I ate the dirt in tackle football and [...]

MANY OF US have a favorite gas station or dry cleaner. But we'd never talk about and defend those places as passion-ately as we do our favorite restaurants. Why? Because [...]

THE FIRST night my morn slept at her assisted-living facility was the first time in years that I didn't fall asleep in my own house, worried about her welfare ten [...]

BUT FOR MY aversion to gore, guns, and human misery, I might have made a damn good detective. Or at least a well-versed one. Crime stories, whether gleaned from fiction [...]

WHEN THE landscape planner Mia Lehrer invited me to kayak the L.A. River this summer, I was skeptical. Was there an area of the concrete channel that was deep enough [...]

FROM THE STONE fruit saturated in sunshine at the local farmers' market to the travertine flanks of the Getty Center spotlighted in a rising moon, L.A. does not lack for [...]

AS EDITOR-IN.-CH I EF. I always hope that every issue of this magazine will eventually become an artifact. This month we .explore how the 1980s fundamentallychanged L.A. For inspiration 1. [...]

I ATTEND THE occasional Shabbat service and observe Jewish holidays at our local temple. I didn't convert when I married, but it's been important to me to raise my son [...]

SEVERAL YEARS AGO the magazine began hosting breakfast conversations with Angelenos of interest. At my invitation, 75 people or so gather before work to hear me talk about the future [...]

ONE RECENT Saturday afternoon, my nine-year-old son, Isaac, pointed out the car window to the Verdugo Mountains and asked, his voice high-pitched and eager, 'How tall are those radio towers [...]

FOUR DAYS INTO 2014, I lost my mom, Ruthe Powell Melton. She was 83. Born in Hollywood, she was my role model, joke supplier, shoulder to cry on, and closest [...]

I DON'T SPEND muchtime at sea--like, practically none--but I am an explorer. A few years ago, while driving back from a dinner at the old-school Dal Rae steak house in [...]

WHEN I'M TRAVELING and I tell someone I'm from LA.. I brace myself for the inevitable question: 'Aren't you afraid of earthquakes?' Of course I am. When you're nice and [...]

THE MOVIE business has faced challenges since the moment D.W. Griffith unfolded his director's chair downtown in 1913. Television was supposed to kill it off, then Betamax tapes and video [...]