“It was the end of the story of John DeLorean as part of the American Dream—how a humble kid from Detroit could rise to the very top.”
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Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
What It Means For a Lucha Libre Wrestler To Be Unmasked
Unlike most sports, pro wrestling is unconcerned with numbers. Nobody seems to have a win-loss record. In lucha libre, the truly important matches, the bouts that make up one’s official record, are not even world championships. They are, rather, Mask vs. Mask matches, or Hair vs. Hair, or Hair vs. Mask. Luchadores wager their masks or their […]
Posted inMember Pick, Nonfiction, Story
The House of Mondavi: How an American Wine Empire Was Born
The story of a family’s winery that changed Napa Valley forever.
Posted inEditor's Pick
The Northridge Earthquake: ‘Like a Punch Delivered from Below’
Revisiting the Northridge earthquake two decades later. Before Hurricane Katrina, it was considered “costliest natural disaster in U.S. history”. As recalled by Richard Andrews, director of California’s Office of Emergency Services at the time: I took a turboprop plane with Wilson and the head of the California Highway Patrol from Sacramento to Los Angeles. We […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
The Tip of the Spear
A journalist reexamines what happened to him more than 20 years ago during his five-year investigation of the Church of Scientology for The Los Angeles Times: “One morning my wife, a kindergarten teacher, was leaving for work when a process server sent by the church’s lawyers jumped out from behind a hedge with a subpoena […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
Branded for Life
What it’s like for an actor to become a TV commercial megastar—forever associated with a brand, for better and worse: “On the day of the audition, roughly 30 actors showed up. When it was Olcott’s turn, he flashed his big, ecstatic smile. The director loved it, and Olcott got the job. In February, on a […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
South L.A., Twenty Years Later
On riots and race. What has changed, and what’s still bubbling under the surface, 20 years after the riots in South Central Los Angeles: “The L.A. Riots (or uprising, civil unrest, or rebellion, depending) are often considered the first ‘multiethnic’ riots. As a pivot point of race and urban relations, they constitute a resonant moment […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
How My Aunt Marge Ended Up in the Deep Freeze
A strange real-life murder inspires a new film starring Jack Black and Shirley MacLaine. How does the victim’s real family feel about being the subject of a black comedy? “I was living in Los Angeles when Aunt Marge was murdered in 1996 and hadn’t been to Carthage, where I was born, in quite a few […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
Insider Baseball
On the 1988 presidential campaign: “Among those who traveled regularly with the campaigns, in other words, it was taken for granted that these ‘events’ they were covering, and on which they were in fact filing, were not merely meaningless but deliberately so: occasions on which film could be shot and no mistakes made (‘They hope […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
Palantir, the War on Terror’s Secret Weapon
Depending where you fall on the spectrum between civil liberties absolutism and homeland security lockdown, Palantir’s technology is either creepy or heroic. Judging by the company’s growth, opinion in Washington and elsewhere has veered toward the latter. Palantir has built a customer list that includes the U.S. Defense Dept., CIA, FBI, Army, Marines, Air Force, […]
