Monday
February 18, 2019
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Tom Zoellner

Tom Zoellner  is an associate professor of English at Chapman University. He is the author of four nonfiction books, most recently Train: Riding the Rails That Created the Modern World, from the Trans-Siberian to the Southwest Chief, and is the politics editor of The Los Angeles Review of Books.

No Harmony in the Heartland

Two small towns in northeast Iowa are caught up in the national struggle over immigration

by Tom Zoellner | Monday, December 03, 2018

Trinidad and Tobago: The Showman

Popular anxiety about rising crime has buoyed the TV show “Crime Watch”

by Tom Zoellner | Monday, September 07, 2015

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THIS WEEK’S ARCHIVE PICK

School Survival

by Anne P. Beatty

As L.A. teachers prepare to go on strike, we’re revisiting an essay by Anne P. Beatty about her time teaching high school in South Central Los Angeles, where her homeroom class often paused for a moment of silence to mourn students who had died in drive-by shootings. Her students knew that this was not the case in wealthier school districts. “They knew that somewhere there were schools with computers that worked, just as they knew that somewhere it was safe to walk through the streets at night,” Beatty writes. “They knew it wasn’t normal for 16-year-olds to die.” But what she found shocking, her students had to learn to endure. “Apathy was involved in giving in to the violence, and there was despair over the prospect of a better future.”