The Los Angeles Michelin ratings are out! No three-star restaurants for LA, and many Angeleno foodies are already complaining about the non-starred status of places like Lucques, Grace, and JAR. They couldn't get Ackroyd? Meryl Streep will be playing Julia Child in the upcoming movie adaptation of the book "Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen." The sequel will be based on Carol Cooks Keller, hopefully. The kids over at... more ›

Gearing up for another War on Christmas, combative conservative columnist David Horowitz and the College Republicans are calling out to their hate squad and killing Halloween (not to mention a week of breast cancer awareness month) with what they've dubbed "Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week." Ann Coulter, recently listed as charging a $25,000 speaker fee by the Premiere Speakers Bureau (and now "call for fee") will speak in the name of Islamo-Fascism Awareness tomorrow night at USC.... more ›

On Monday evening, the winner of the 2nd annual Polaris Music Prize will be announced. This is not earth shattering news because many don’t even know what it is. The Polaris Music Prize is Canada’s equivalent to the U.K.’s Mercury Prize. It is an award given to the best Canadian album of the year, regardless of genre, sales, or record label. The winner receives $20,000 cash and a bevy of publicity. The initial jury... more ›

One of our favorite summer tv shows is CBS's "Big Brother", a reality show where they put a bunch of people together in a house and make them live together in the valley and vote each other out until there's just one winner. Cameras are everywhere, and almost every move is documented 24/7 and broadcast via the Internet. CBS broadcasts edited versions of the progress twice a week, and Showtime airs live footage from... more ›

8:00pm Going Back to New Orleans UPN/KCOP - Music icon Deacon John Moore documents the unique culture of the Big Easy. 9:00pm Against the Tide: The Battle for New Orleans CNBC - The business side of the New Orleans recovery effort. 10:00pm Still Waiting: Life After Katrina PBS/KOCE An African American/Creole family returns to New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina, hoping to hold on to their bayou culture. 10:00pm DIY to the Rescue: Katrina Rebuild... more ›

Angels 3, Devil Rays 0 - LAnaheim avoided the sweep in Tampa and ended a three game losing streak. Kelvim Escobar's fifth straight win came on 7.2 innings of scoreless work. The Halos had three doubles in the game, but haven't gone yard in 114 innings. Mets 13, Dodgers 9 - The Dodgers slipped into a first place tie with San Diego, but it wasn't due to a lack of offense. The team had 19... more ›

Beckham Watch - The British are coming! The British are coming! Wait! The British are here! And they're drop dead sexy. Tonight's Action - Games are back! After a longer All Star break than most, the Angels will welcome the Texas Rangers at 7:05pm. Ten minutes later, the Dodgers will get underway in San Francisco. The Blue Crew joins three players (Martin, Penny, and Saito) who were already in town for the All Star game.... more ›

Thousands of video game addicts, cosplayers and booth babe fans shed tears last year when the Entertainment Software Association announced that it would be scaling back the size and focus of future E3 Expos. The game industry and fan bacchanalia had previously attracted a record attendance of over 60,000 visitors and 400 companies in 2006. Instead of being held at LA's own Convention Center, the "more intimate" show will take place this year in... more ›

MTV to Bloggers: We sort of like you but not enough to give a shit about your coverage. LAist to MTV: We sort of like you but not enough to give a shit about your programming. When LAist was invited by MTV to live-blog the 2007 Movie Awards from an on-site "blogging tent," we asked ourselves one crucial question: is this going to be a cool opportunity to offer readers a unique perspective on the... more ›

MTV, the network whose prescient forays into reality programming placed it in the vanguard of youth-oriented television, has decided that since this little ole thing called the Internet is catching on big with the kids, the way to capitalize on the immediacy of Web 2.0 is to brodacast the annual Movie Awards* live and (more importantly) allow schlubs like me high-stakes online journalists to live blog the event. This means that you'll get to see... more ›

Dear LAist, Did you see Entourage last night? When Drama drove to Variety to beat the ass of the TV critic Paul Schneider, was that really Michael Schneider who also is a critic at Variety, appears on E!, and runs the Franklin Avenue blog? Also, where can I get that AD/HD shirt? Nancy, North Hollywood Dear Nancy, We thought the same damn thing! However, if we had tuned into the Franklin Ave. blog on... more ›

The LAPD's civil rights consent decree just got extended this past summer for another three years. Do videos like this and witness accounts help end this decree and get more officers back on the street instead of desk duty for consent decree paperwork? Not really. Here is some excerpts from Daniel Hernandez's blog: "The sight of cops standing shoulder-to-shoulder menacingly holding batons drew more onlookers, which drew more cops, which drew more onlookers. The... more ›

magazine. more ›

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Halberstam died yesterday in a car crash in Menlo Park, CA. He was 73. Halberstam’s work as a journalist ranges wide and delves deep. He covered the Korean War, the Vietnam War and civil rights but he was also fascinated with the humanity and spectacle of sports. He did not simply document the history he lived through – he explained complex societal constructs and cultural shifts in a way that anyone could easily understand. He was one of the only journalists who questioned the Vietnam War early on and it was this same questioning – throughout his life and his work – that allowed him to uncover facts that other journalists side-stepped. more ›

He likes to tear the heads off small animals and he's a practicing philatelist (it sounds dirtier than it is), but there's plenty we don't know about Karl Rove. Or should I say MC Rove? Bush's phone tapping, attorney firing, pro-torturing Chief of Staff had a chance to rock it on the mic at the 2007 Radio-Television Correspondents Dinner,* and rock it he did! Bear with the clip. The rapping doesn't stat until 5:42, but... more ›

CNN is reporting that Arab news services are reporting that Saddam Hussein has been executed for not being Saudi, Chinese, Sudanese, or North Korean. He was killed this evening (morning in Iraq) for murdering 148 Shiites and not for wiping out tens of thousands (if not hundreds of thousands) of Kurds; once again the Bush Administration has prematurely rushed to judgment in regards to Saddam. But what's worse is, despite this being the Information... more ›

- "I think that blogs should die a sudden death," Jared Leto said while wearing mascara. - Best Week Ever - "I'm not sure I can stomach continuing to read National Review." - The Corner - The mid-term election has hit an all-time low when Al Franken's face is photoshopped on the body of a man wearing adult diapers. - Think Progress - AZ GOP Congressman one of the Foleyish men with a Page Problem?... more ›

The New York Times has launched a new Best Seller List for Political books and it's available online only. This move is surely meant to drive more traffic to their site and also the political list being online will hit a smaller number of people - including those who are say savvy to politics, being online, and the New York Times. So just what are the pundits reading these days? Here are this week's... more ›

Meet Daniel Hernandez, one of this LAist Interviewer's most elusive targets. He's only 25, but he's already an important voice in the Los Angeles media. Always on the go, we've been chasing him for an interview for the past year. We're glad our persistence paid off because Daniel has a keen sense about what's really interesting about this city. We first noticed Daniel's writing when he wrote a piece about the endangered graffiti art... more ›

In what must surely be a blow to video gaming enthusiasts, scantily-clad women, fans of scantily-clad women and, of course, the City of Los Angeles, the Entertainment Software Association announced Monday that they are going to scale back the size and scope of E3 convention next year. In fact, the convention, the video gaming industry's largest, most-likely won't be at the LA Convention Center either. Instead, it will take place at various hotels around... more ›

Last summer Fox's Rupert Murdoch bought LA Internet start-up MySpace for $600 million; now, almost a year later, Fox execs are speculating that the social networking phenomenom is worth about five times that, according to the British site The Observer, which wrote two stories today about the media giant.

MySpace is one of those online places where young people hang out - though 'swarm' might be a more accurate term for the kind of 'social networking' that goes on there. It is fantastically popular with teenagers, who use it to link up with online 'friends'. And it has been growing at internet speed. When Murdoch bought it last July, it had 16 million visitors. By the end of 2005 it had 29 million and currently claims to have 55 million registered users. more ›

No Pulitzers. No Peabodys. No Duponts. more ›

LAist is an avid consumer of news media, the kind that comes in papers, on the internets, TV and, this LAist-er especially, ye olde NPR. We like that NPR ain't no Fox News: no diatribes, no right-wing harangues. So we were taken aback by the rampant use of "illegals" in NPR's coverage of yesterday's immigration rallies and marches. more ›

everbody loves jack mccoy: Shows like "Law & Order" are helping Angelenos trust lawyers more, according to a recent study by a jury consultant in Manhattan Beach. The more TV people watched, the more they found lawyers trustworthy. But it's a marginal improvement: lawyers still only beat building contractors and CEOs. More trustworthy than lawyers? Professors, judges, journalists, movie producers, actors, pharmaceutical salespeople, television writers and jury consultants. more ›

If you like blogs (safe guess, since you're here) and have any interest in the media, you might want to shell out $10 tomorrow for the panel discussion at the LA Press Club. It's called Watching the Watchdogs: LA's Media Websites and will be moderated by blogger-turned-LA Times staffer Matt Welch. Panelists include LA Observed's Kevin Roderick, LA Radio's Don Barrett and Ron Feinman. They'll talk about how they keep tabs on local media and how they get those secret memos. We're curious about what they'll say, but also what the crowd thinks: will they conclude that blogs have a meaningful role, or that they're irrelevant? Plus, the press club always has booze — journalists know how to throw a panel discussion. Boozing/networking begins at 6:30pm, panel at 7:30. The LA Press Club is at 4773 Hollywood Boulevard. more ›

David Brown, the former host of the public radio show Marketplace, was an avid Tab drinker. When he left the LA-based show for Texas, empty Tab cans were left with sad staff as personal momentos. Turns out his Tab habit wasn't an eccentricity: it was a journalistic tradition. The New Yorker wrote last month of an elite group of talented, powerful journalists who all cherished their low-cal pink '70s beverage. All of them were thrown for a loop by the newly remixed Tab. more ›

The microphones are on in the CBS-2 webcast booth on the edge of the red carpet, and they're complaining about the lack of celebrity juice that's come by. "It's only 4," the hostess Lisa Joyner says. She must have watched the SAG Awards because she's in lavender just like all the Desperate Housewives. She's just spent a few minutes talking to Miss California, who can be picked out by the not-so-subtle "Miss California" banner draped across her body. more ›

When the LA Alternative Press asked LAist to write 400 words "In Defense of Blogs" for a sidebar for their Blogs vs. Zines article, I did, somewhat reluctantly. I was once a Zinester: I spoke on zine panels, a zine sent me to SXSW (twice). But I stood up for blogs. Well, the paper didn't print my sidebar; instead, they used parts of it in the article; the issue is not yet online. Here it is, with actual links. Zines, try that. more ›

NBC has taken considerable flack for its censorship of Grammy award-winning R&B star Kanye West on "A Concert for Hurricane Relief." Specifically, NBC deleted the following statement from the musician during the West Coast feed: "George Bush doesn't care about black people." more ›

With tabloid journalism often going for the least common denominator and reguarly attempting to connect dots where dots aren't available to be connected -- it's amazing something like this hasn't happened already. more ›