June 2002: A white woman named Valinda Elliott accompanied her boss on a business trip through the Arizona desert. When their car broke down and the boss suffered heatstroke, Elliott lit a signal fire to alert a passing helicopter. Unfortunately, the fire grew into a larger blaze. At the same ...

Predictions are risky for a columnist. And I’m already on thin ice, having been soundly humiliated by my November 2020 column “Madison Cawthorn: He’ll Never Rub His Balls in Another Man’s Face.” Boy, is my face red (though not as red as the face of Cawthorn’s friend). But one ...

At 92 years old, George Soros is the last human experientially connected to the Holocaust who’s still actively taking lives. Sure, there are a few elderly ex-Nazis being dragged before German courts, but they’re insignificant (secretaries, bookkeepers) and their murderous exploits, if any, ...

Being blackmailed by my Mexican gardener should’ve made me angry. To my surprise, it kinda didn’t. This week: a good old-fashioned L.A. noir involving plots, plans, and plants. Call it Shrubble Indemnity. Like most Beverly Hills homeowners, I don’t do my own gardening. Sure, I’ve been ...

Anger can be constructive; it can motivate people to fight noble battles and right egregious wrongs. Anger can also be nonconstructive. It can distract people from genuine problems while driving them to unproductive extremes. Nonconstructive anger often starts with a fiction. Like how a false ...

Golem tales always follow the same template: A Jew builds a monster of clay to destroy his enemies, but in the end the golem turns on its creator. In 2019, in a piece that generated unintended national controversy, I wrote about immigrant golems. This week, I’ll examine the homegrown ...

A lesson from my casting director years: An actor’s instincts are more important than talent when it comes to landing a part. At an audition, you have to be able to read the room. If the room is loose and jokey, joke along. If you sit there like a cadaver, you won’t get a callback. Conversely, ...

You people, I swear. For months I’ve been longing to write my magnum opus about the superb 2021 post-Covid Taiwanese zombie film The Sadness and its impact on Sino-U.S. relations. Sure, that column would be of no interest to you, and sure, it would only be one sentence long (“The superb 2021 ...

Thirty-five-year-old Nicole Mokeme was Portland, Maine’s BLM superstar. She founded “Rise and Shine,” a woodsy retreat where “BIPOCs” could gather and rant about whitey. As Mokeme stated on her website, “as the awareness of white terrorism began to rise, black youth suggested the need ...

You’d think saving babies would be enough. Dobbs saved the babies. What more does the right need? “We won; pop the bubbly.” But that’s not how the right’s wired at the moment. Sure, saving babies is great and all, but the MAGA right’s too distracted to appreciate the victory. They’ll ...