Turn any corner in Los Angeles, and a mural may appear: Our Lady of Guadalupe gracing a bodega wall, or chamber musicians eight stories tall on a downtown parking structure. The Homeboy Industries mural, “Jobs Not Jails,” is found at Learning Works, at 1916 E. First St. in Boyle Heights.

Editor’s Blog
Surge Control
In late November 1860, 10 years after statehood and the Gold Rush, botanist William Brewer, an Easterner, arrived in Los Angeles with the California Geological Survey to travel the state of California and study its natural resources.
Follow the Star
Look to the heavens on a cloudless, moon-free night: That expanse of stars has sparked the biggest thoughts the human brain can think. How strange to learn that, in galactic terms, we see only over our backyard fence.
Rite Now
Commencement is a rare moment that is both end and beginning. The day seems stretched by its gravity, its hours elongated by ceremony. But the rite, a tenuous instant in time, passes. It doesn’t last long.
The Farm Round-Up
Yesterday, Jan. 24, Brenda (Kirsch) Frketich ’06 was included in a front-page Washington Post story about women farmers. She earned a bachelor’s degree in business administration at LMU and now runs Kirsch Family Farms, which has been in her family…
The Gift of the Dead
The last gift of a Jesuit may be one given after he dies.
The Skyline and the Man
Today marked the passing of one of the most gracious public figures I have ever met: Stan Chambers. Over the course of six decades, Chambers become a symbol of the news business at its best as well as one of…
The River Journey of 1959
We learned this week that freelance writer Sandra Millers Younger hauled in an award for LMU Magazine on the strength of her writing. Younger wrote “Operation Huck Finn,” a feature in our fall 2013 issue about a group of students…
The Work of Ponzi
Working as an editor can often seem a gray existence. Sometimes I go for weeks with my nose buried in text, the stuff that makes the pages turn gray. If the universe of the publishing profession could be expressed…
Consider the Desert
A flight east from Los Angeles will usually cross, miles above at a cool altitude, the Mojave Desert. From on high, its dusty, flaky expanse looks as if every ounce of water has been leeched out, leaving behind dry, emptied rivulets.