Most of us have probably known somebody like Elaine Castillo. The smartest person in the class, the person who held forth with assertions that didn’t invite discussion but a kind of acclamation. You interjected at your peril, inviting exposure of your intellectual inferiority. While you were digesting point A, she was deeply into point B
If you ask any Californian to describe the Ellis Act and the Costa-Hawkins Act, you’re at least as likely to get a blank stare as an informed exegesis on two state laws that have had—and are continuing to have—a destructive effect on the supply of affordable housing in the state’s urban areas. That’s too bad,
I recently finished reading Citizen, Simon Schama’s long, densely detailed history of the French Revolution. I came to the book by way of Hilary Mantel’s A Place of Greater Safety, a novel that views the French Revolution through the lives of three historical figures who played major roles in that turbulent upheaval. Mantel, author of
Father’s Day is just around the corner, which means an outpouring of greeting-card-style sentiment presumably designed to create the kind of warm feelings induced by pictures of babies and pets, accompanied by selective memories of parental benevolence that whip up sales of dubious gifts and those aforementioned cards. The reality—that too many fathers are absent
Note: After reading Vladimir Nabokov’s The Defense some years ago, I became interested in the use of chess as a major element in works of fiction, possibly because I was trying–unsuccessfully, it turned out–to improve my decidedly mediocre skill at the game. I read a number of novels and stories and wrote the following essay
The first illegal immigrant I hired for my construction crew was a small, dark man named José, from the Mexican state of Oaxaca. He called himself a Zapotec, and despite his slight stature he had no difficulty toting ninety-pound sacks of cement or spending an entire day digging a trench. My Spanish was almost as
This is the story of Jack and Nancy Wright. It is also the story of mansionization, the term of art for tearing down modest, perfectly livable houses and building what are pejoratively called “McMansions” in their place. In the Venice district of Los Angeles where my wife and I have lived for thirty-two years, this
An enduring mystery to me is how–and why–Iowa became a pivotal cog in the machinery of picking a presidential candidate. I’ve lived in California since the late 1970s, but I was born and raised in Iowa, went to college and got married and had a child in Iowa, and worked for five years as a