Singular Magazine is running a four-part series I wrote on ethnic neighborhoods in Los Angeles. The second stop is Koreatown, where high-tech billboards and dense high rises collide with soothing tea houses (my favorite is Hwa Sun Ji Tea & Coffee) and mineral spas specializing in ancient healing arts.  The timing of this piece is [...]

You’re in a place where exotic smells waft from sidewalk cafes.  All around you, signs are scrawled in foreign scripts and people speak in unfamiliar languages.  Food-market bins are crammed with piquant spices and unusual produce.  Colorful curios line the shelves of neighborhood boutiques.  Surely, you’re very far from home.  Or, you’ve just stumbled into [...]

As a teenager growing up in Orange County, I knew how to get to two and only two places in L.A.: the Third Street Promenade and La Cienega Boulevard. On the rare occasions that my friends and I escaped the ‘burbs, these were the two places we journeyed to in order to — in our [...]