Genius (Still) At WorkReuben Martinez of the relocated Librería Martinez offers his top 10 summer readsThe economic crisis has slammed us... More >>

Bad FaithWilliam Lobdell’s Losing My Religion describes how Orange County Christianity lost its most ardent journalistic supporterConsider... More >>

Graphic ContentComics best kept from the kidsDon’t tell my parents, but I discovered adult comics when I was still a kid. It was the tail... More >>

Keeping SecretsA psychoanalyst represses a murder in Hanif Kureishi’s Something to Tell YouThose who believe that shrinks are as neurotic... More >>

Cartoon NoirAbandoned Cars considers the wreck of the American dreamNoir, be it film or fiction, is as American as street racing and serial... More >>

Reality ShowIn Natsuo Kirino’s new novel, a murder forces four Japanese students to get real MTV’s long-running reality show The... More >>

Time PieceThe future, now past, looks like the present in the newest Philip K. Dick anthology The problem with fiction set in the future is... More >>

You, Too, Can Be Creative!Cartoonist Lynda Barry’s how-to makes being an artist easy Why is it that most classes in creativity stifle the... More >>

All-American Boy Sonny Bravo gets laid, learns to drive a stick and confronts racism in The Flowers Using a 15-or-so-year-old Mexican-American... More >>

Bedfellows Sex seduces science in Mary Roach's Bonk Sex and science have a natural affinity. After all, doesn't just about everything we learn... More >>

Lisa Alvarez's Summer Reading List Cowboy gunplay, High Sierra poetry, the Inland Empire and more! By day, Lisa Alvarez is the chairwoman of the... More >>

Blowin' Balloons Bass Cathedral bubbles with jazz F. Scott Fitzgerald's "jazz age" aside, the relationship between America's "indigenous"... More >>

Mock the Vote Convicted Republican operative tells how to manipulate the electorate We've always given Orange County Republicans credit for... More >>

Sympathy  for the Devils The Stones, filmmaker Kenneth Anger and Charles Manson come together in Sway The 1960s were all about peace and... More >>

You Don't Need  a Weatherman . . . Students for a Democratic Society chronicles the winds of change in the 1960s The 1960s were all about... More >>

Ouch! New book on torture devices brings the pain Jesus Christ and The Hunchback of Notre Dame were my gateway to a fascination with torture. It... More >>

Gonzo Goes On . . . And on and on and on Three years ago, Hunter S. Thompson put a bullet in the back of his throat and through his brain... More >>

I've always wondered: If love is blind, why is sex so much better with one's eyes open? There's an essay in Do Me: Tales of Sex & Love From... More >>

It's unclear what President George W. Bush knew of Palestinian life when he visited the occupied city of Ramallah on the West Bank a few weeks... More >>