All Essays

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  From the Other Coast

  On poetry and riot.

  Lytton SmithDec 2, 2011
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  Deconstructing Wendy

  This play unfolds, as so many contemporary dramas now do, over the medium of email.

  Deborah Frost, Joy HorowitzNov 25, 2011
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  A Serious Man Whose Love Will Last

  It is ironic that Ovid had barely finished his long poem when his exile was decreed.

  Bruce WhitemanNov 24, 2011
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  Zimbabwe and the Politics of Impunity

  Mugabe’s denials can and should now be read as a chilling reminder that the depths to which his regime has sunk today had already been charted

  Alex LichtensteinNov 23, 2011

• Notes on Hack

  A Hack comic is a sheep in wolf’s clothing, “poking fun,” never “killing.” He is the jester who won’t risk the king’s displeasure.

  Nov 20, 2011
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  Three Novels

  By Nightfall, like The Hours, is chock full of literary reference, especially Thomas Mann (Death in Venice), not Virginia Woolf.

  Susan Salter ReynoldsNov 19, 2011
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  The Things We Carry

  I wondered if O’Brien’s words, like explosive devices hidden in the humid jungles, had triggered these awful images, or if Iraq simply played forever in Mike’s head, a fractured repetitive loop.

  Jocelyn HeaneyNov 18, 2011
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  Books That Made Us: The Phantom Tollbooth

  The adventure in The Phantom Tollbooth doesn’t change; it’s the meaning we find in it that evolves.

  Chelsey PhilpotNov 17, 2011

• The Educational Lottery

  Education is as close to a secular religion as we have in the United States.

  Nov 15, 2011

• Brumaire

  On Occupy Cal and the fight over public education in California.

  Nov 13, 2011

• The Battle of the People’s Kitchen

  At first I was skeptical about Occupy Riverside. But the more I heard about what was going on downtown, the more enthusiastic I became.

  Nov 13, 2011

• Crimson Front

  I heard a student exclaim, "This isn’t a protest or demonstration — it’s a process."

  Nov 13, 2011

• Letter From Oakland

  It was decided, a species of what we might call a “postmodern general strike” will come lumbering out of the revolutionary textbook.

  Nov 12, 2011
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  People's Libraries

  Writing my book, I kept asking myself: Why haven’t we fought back? Why don’t 21st century writers organize?

  Jason BoogNov 12, 2011
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  Big Tent

  As the tent city grows, a community has sprouted, igniting human interaction in ways that are often anathema to Los Angeles’s sprawl.

  Sonali KolhatkarNov 12, 2011
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  Another L.A. Look

  A symptom?! Why does a book celebrating the talents of individual Los Angeles artists suddenly go all Fernand Braudel on us

  Peter PlagensNov 11, 2011