LA Observed is a website devoted to independent reporting, informed commentary and selective linkage on Los Angeles news, media, politics, business, books and other topics. The site went live in May ...

Los Angeles car culture never saw anyone like Big Willie Robinson — or needed anyone quite so much. In the mid 1960s, when baby boomers were racing hot rods and fighting each other and the cops all ...

Jim A. Beardsley is an independent archivist and historical research specialist in Los Angeles who began researching Newport '69 while pursuing his master's degree in history at Cal State Northridge.

With Ayn Rand in the media conversation around Paul Ryan and the Republican convention, here's a look at the home that Rand used to occupy in Northridge. And what a house it was — if it still existed, ...

The longtime SoCal sportswriter and columnist (and talk radio host) Doug Krikorian, laid off by the Press-Telegram in 2011, has shown up in the pages of the rival Long Beach Register.

L. Ron Hubbard in 1950; crowd at Dianetics seminar in L.A. the same year. Sappell and Welkos hunted down the facts regarding Hubbard's trumped-up military record: his false claims of having received a ...

Susan Atkins was the Charles Manson follower who used the knife on actress Sharon Tate on Cielo Drive in 1969. After she died this past September, Orange Coast Magazine writer Shawn Hubler began ...

Sunday's New York Times revives a classic Los Angeles sports media incident — the time that KLAC radio reporter Paul Olden asked Dodgers manager Tom Lasorda what he thought of Cubs' left fielder Dave ...

Until I read Steve Martin's enjoyable new memoir, "Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life," I never would have connected him with Diane Arbus. He's funny and somewhat dark, but always struck me as fairly ...

Media and blog coverage of the South Central Community Garden mostly celebrates a story line of plucky, poor South L.A. residents banding together in agrarian fellowship to stand up to ...

Rodger Jacobs has a profile in Xbiz of Eric Edwards, said to have acted in adult films from the 1960s to the 1990s and recently both homeless with a thirteen-year-old son and suffering from ...

Gary Dretzka of Movie City News knew Brenda You, the L.A. writer who apparently committed suicide over the weekend, and adds some needed texture to her story in an unpublished ...