As we reported earlier, the two-month Writers Guild of America strike is nearly over. WGA-East members voted heard about the proposal earlier and West members weighed in at 7 p.m. Some are already questioning the deal, but most expressed relief that the work stoppage is about to come to an end. Stay tuned to LAist for excellent coverage. A man was shot this morning in North Hollywood by an alleged gang member who approached......

A review of Adrian Tomine's new graphic novel, Shortcomings....

Come out to the L.A. Music Center Plaza Wednesday night and see beauty under the stars! It’s a school night? You have to work early the next day? Phooey! TRUST ME ON THIS…you’ll want to make an exception for this special evening. David Michalek’s Slow Dancing is an outdoor exhibit of video portraits featuring the worlds leading dancers. Slowed down in “hyper slow motion”, the films projected on large 16-foot screens celebrate the grace......

The best plays and musicals are the ones that challenge, trasnport and entertain. If our senses, our norms our challenged when watching a show, or we are transported to another place and time where we can completely escape our current reality, or, at the very least, if we come away with a few well-earned laughs then the creators and actors have done their job. Following this line of logic, Q utterly failed. ...

Indiana Pacers star power forward Jermaine O'Neal wants to be traded to the Lakers. Bad. Even Southern California is starting to feel the pinch of congestion and overcrowding. Frustration with a lack of action at the federal level has prompted states to enact a raft of new immigration laws in the first 6 months of 2007 - more than twice the number that was passed during the same period last year. A North Hollywood......

If you’ve missed all the bright orange book ads and have ducked all the media coverage (New York, The New Yorker, Vogue), you’re one of the few readers who hasn’t heard of The Manny, alleged to be this summer’s Devil Wears Prada: chick-lit for the beach, right-coast division. It’s a simple story: Glam Park Avenue working wife juggles her high-powered network news job, her sullen, money-obsessed lawyer husband, and three adorable children. She hires......

The LA Times has nominated five books in each of nine different categories for the 2007 Los Angeles Times Book Prizes. In the weeks leading up to the Festival of Books where the winners will be announced, LAist will take a quick look at each category and will wax poetic on a few favorites (or least favorites) along the way. The Beautiful Fall is a nominee in Current Interest. In 1954, two fledgling fashion......

The New Yorker's Jane Mayer looks inside the mind of Joel Surnow, co-creator and producer of "24," and at the goings on behind-the-scenes of his San Fernando Valley production shop and LApocalypse (relax... it's only TV) incubator. Whatever it takes, yo. Happy Friday!......

Last night I had a dream I was walking on an empty freeway with a martini in one hand and a beedog in the other. Bathrobe clad with a cigarette dangling from my mouth like Valley of the Dolls meets The Color of Money, I flag down Mr. T, who is speeding by on a tractor while singing “Private Eyes,” by Hall and Oates. We exchange knock-knock jokes and arrive at an oceanfront condo......

Right on the heels of LAist's discovery that Greg Allen has been archiving New Yorker.com articles, The New Yorker writer Hendrik Hertzberg graces us, via the Writer's Bloc series, with his presence on Thursday, August 5, 2004 at the Writer's Guild Theatre, 135 South Doheny Drive in Beverly Hills, at 7:30 PM. Hendrik Hertzberg, a regular contributor to The New Yorker, has a new book titled Politics, which is a collection of "observations and......