Patt Morrison

Despite California's kumbaya vibe, a deep lode of hate and racist one-upmanship undergirds Southern California.

The controversy over the West Los Angeles VA campus is a classic L.A. fight -- one over land. And this happens to be some of the juiciest land in the city.

Nearly half a dozen such schools operated in California, taking Native American children from their families and purging them of everything that made them Indian. The program officially ended in 1969.

When a Medfly quarantine in L.A. ended this summer, you could be forgiven for asking, "A what quarantine?" This is the tale of California's long fight against an agricultural pest.

In Southern California, a long time has passed since our famed citrus crop dominated the landscape. The orange groves have instead gone to housing developments, nearly every one.

Your driving-directions app that bosses you around like a back-seat driver is squeezing the life out of Loyd Sigmon’s name and his namesake baby: the SigAlert.

KTLA, KFWB, KTTV, KNX — you know the call letters of local radio and TV stations and probably have a jingle or two stuck in your head. But where did this broadcasting alphabet soup originate?

How do you say “locavore” en francais? When Olympic athletes and members of the press sit down to dine on the bounty of France next month, some of what’s on their plates will have been grown and gardened and harvested — from underground garages to road medians to rooftops — in Paris. Not every course of every meal, not by a long shot. Perhaps a microgreens or endive salad, with shitake mushrooms? Serving up 13 million Olympics meals and snacks, all exclusively Parisian-made, is beyond the reach…

Welcome home. Not your home. Probably not a place you’d even want to be your home. But welcome to some of the Houses of Los Angeles — notorious, historic and just plain fabulous. So many superb and significant houses have slipped through L.A.’s civic fingers and into the steel scoop of a bulldozer, yet the city has just chosen to make a stand in Brentwood, preserving in perpetuity as a cultural-historic monument an otherwise undistinguished 1929 Spanish-style house that actress Marilyn Monroe bo…

Over and over again, they stretch out their spindly little matchstick fingers into the mighty Pacific, and over and over again, they get their knuckles rapped. Rapped, broken, burned, smashed to bits. And yet what do they do? They keep sending those fragile digits out into the ocean, like a middle finger defying the elements. And that, in sum, is the history, the nature and the character of the piers we have built and rebuilt, have loved and lost, along the California coast for more than a centu…