Published in the LA Weekly

Been to Hollywood in the past ten, twenty, forty years? Has it changed? Did you recently, as I did, marvel that in front of Grauman's Chinese every morning they roll a life-size, worse-for-the-wear plaster statue of Marilyn Monroe to the curb so that the tourists may gawk? Read on.

People are shocked Laura Albert recorded their conversations? Come on. Once they "knew" (flexible concept) there was no JT, the idea that Laura had and would act honorably should have gone right out the window...

On December 12, 1948, Nancy Schorn was born into privilege. Her father was the chief financial officer of the plumbing conglomerate American Standard. The family lived on a five-acre estate on Long Island’s North Shore, in Cold Spring Harbor, a town not unlike Daisy Buchanan‘s West Egg: Nancy was a member of three yacht and country clubs, and, like Daisy, was considered by one admirer to have been “the most beautiful person I had ever seen . . . "

Published in the LA Weekly

Published in Newsday

My review of American Heiress, in which author Jeffrey Toobin unpacks what we know and think we know about the Patty Hearst kidnapping, and argues an excellent case for Hearst being the ultimate opportunist — or a young woman so morally pliant she bent whichever way the wind blew.

We have watched two others die, they wizened like apples; I flew across the country for the first death, to be at Dave’s bedside. I watched him die. I had seen someone die before but not like this. There was so much beauty at the moment of death, near audible like a sip through a straw rushing into the night, the skin on his face going taut in an instant, and the color of beeswax.

Watching the RNC and DNC conventions, those mixing the Kool-Aid and those drinking it was clear. This made me think of the first sociopath I was obliged to try to make sense of. Here, a clip from Destination Gacy, the story of when I drove cross-country with Rick Gaez, a pen pal of John Wayne Gacy, to visit the serial killer shortly before his execution.

Published in the Wall Street Journal

One of the things I love best about reviewing books for the Wall Street Journal is seeing the titles my editors give the reviews. The piece that runs tomorrow, about a father-daughter adventure in the Arctic? "Go Play Outside." 

This piece, about the deep intellect of the octopus, had me reading out loud to my husband before we were out of bed.

Published in Newsday

 of Justine van der Leun's extraordinary new book, We Are Not Such Things, in Newsday. 

We hadn’t seen Daphne in six months. For five years before that, we’d seen her daily, gardening, or taking her car on as many as a dozen short trips a day, so many we’d joked she was a “gramma drug dealer...” 

Seven years ago today, Amanda Stott-Smith dropped her son Eldon, age four, and daughter Trinity, seven, from the Sellwood Bridge in Portland, Oregon... 

Published in Newsday

People make romance of being young in New York, but it's never an easy time. If it exhilarating to have no money and bad sex, to mythologize beautiful people and walk home over bridges at 4 a.m., we might consider why we do these things...

What grown man crawls into bed with his seven year-old daughter and forces her to suck his thumb? Or maybe the more important question is, why? 

Love, desire, quantum physics and hotness at The Liquor Store (not a real liquor store) in Portland

Published in Oregon Business

Are those coming from out of state to make money on Oregon cannabis visionaries or carpetbaggers?

Published in The Wall Street Journal

The battle for Malibu included marauders on horseback, bootleggers, sheep slaughtering and dynamite. But trying to hold back progress was always a lost cause.