LA Observed

Subscribe to this Podcast:

LA Observed covers the week's top stories in LA media, politics and culture, sharing breaking news when it's available and tying up loose ends on the topics that Angelenos have been discussing all week.

RECENT SHOWS

Times Are Tough

Legacy Player:

Just because gas prices have dipped back down below four dollars a gallon in most parts of LA doesn't mean that you can call off the recession...

more…

Special Order 40

Legacy Player:

Well, May 1 came and went without incident in Los Angeles. It's always a good thing when we get past May Day without a half-million people marching down Wilshire Boulevard. Or the LAPD busting reporters' heads in MacArthur Park....

more…

Bookish LA

Legacy Player:

I suspect that, by now, just about everyone has heard the claim that Los Angeles is the biggest and most vibrant book selling market in the country...

more…

Writing Noir LA

Legacy Player:

If Los Angeles has a native literary genre, it would have to be noir fiction. Think of all the hard-boiled, cynical detectives, private eyes and freelance mystery solvers we associate with LA...

more…

Mirthala Speaks

Legacy Player:

We finally heard this week from Mirthala Salinas. Her side of last year's messy affair with the mayor of Los Angeles, Antonio Villaraigosa...

more…

They're Killing Us

Legacy Player:

f you aren't one of the four million or so people who live within the formal limits of Los Angeles, you probably don't pay much attention to the L.A. City Council...

more…

Coliseum Party

Legacy Player:

Now that I've written books about Los Angeles history, I sometimes get labeled a historian. I'm still not used to it. You mean me, I wonder, looking around to see who they really mean...

more…

Emergency Room Doctor

Legacy Player:

You've probably been hearing that, after several years of improving numbers, the murder rate in Los Angeles has jumped. By 27 percent. Gangs are slaughtering each other. And -- worse -- people with no involvement picked randomly off the street...

more…

Her Ex

Legacy Player:

It's probably hard for many of you to imagine this. But Los Angeles used to be a real newspaper town. Before television and the Internet, there were newsrooms downtown full of feisty scribes in fedoras who scrapped and battled for scoops...

more…

I See Dead People

Legacy Player:

This doesn't happen to me very often. But this morning I was thinking about, of all people, Lindsay Lohan. It wasn't her nude spread in New York Magazine. Though, I admit I did look when that came out a few weeks back...

more…

LA North

Legacy Player:

I took a nice trip the other day to the farthest edge of Los Angeles. The outer limits of the LA empire are a four hour drive from City Hall. It's my favorite part of the city, even though -- legally -- it's not part of Los Angeles at all...

more…

Sam Was Here

Legacy Player:

I finally got to meet LA's newest media mogul last night. Face to face. We even shook hands...

more…

The Rock

Legacy Player:

At 11 o’clock this morning, the Los Angeles TV stations that do news switched live to the funeral of a cop...

more…

One Woman, One Vote

Legacy Player:

Reporters who spend a lot of time covering election campaigns can turn cynical about the system. Listening to the same carefully crafted talking points and messages over and over can do that to you...

more…