Yearly fires part of LA culture


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Remember Prometheus? He stole fire from the gods and gave the gift to mankind. As a result, he was sentenced to the grisly fate of having his liver eaten by a bird every day while chained to a lonely rock. It must have been hard for the poor guy to watch his own guts be […]

Summer camps spark transition into adulthood


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This weekend, I flew across the country to my favorite city in the continental US: Boston. Say it with me now, “Baawston.” There, I did a few of my favorite things: I devoured some lobster bisque, spent a few hours at Newbury Comics and even enjoyed some of the best crab cakes I have ever […]

Facebook profiles speak the truth


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Bob Marley’s religion is love. Mine is a YouTube video. According to my Facebook, I place my faith in a 90-second clip of Arcade Fire’s performance in an elevator. In actuality, this is not entirely the truth — I love many other bands just as well. Also according to Facebook, my “activities” are solely “Twitter.” […]

Proper office attire a must in working world


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Anyone who works in the world of 9-to-5 professionalism is forced to abide by a dress code with some basic rules that apply to employees all the way from Little Rock to the Big Apple. In many offices — my New Jersey law office included — the attire is set as “business casual.” The term […]

Contemporary children’s films attract adult audiences


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A nagging paranoia sometimes gnaws at the back of my mind when I’m seated in the most public of confessionals: the movie theater. I briefly felt this subconscious anxiety during a recent showing of Hayao Miyazaki’s new animated film, Ponyo. The Japanese master’s latest — a story of an innocent friendship between an imaginative young […]

LA cemeteries have an aura all their own


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At 10 a.m. on Saturday, Aug. 29, Michael Jackson will finally be buried. It’s about time, especially after more than a month of public mourning that manifested itself in a larger-than-life mural of his visage on Vermont Avenue, a fashion spread in the Fall Fashion issue of Harper’s Bazaar and countless broadcasts of his decades […]

Internet savvy makes you cooler than you think


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Hi, I’m Jen. I like the Internet, music and all things pop culture. I keep up with my news (think Pitchfork and Twitter, not so much CNN), and I tend to be the one my friends count on to show them YouTube’s next overnight sensation. It might sound pretentious, but I consider myself to be […]