Editorials, letters to the editor, and other community opinions about Santa Monica.
Historian and futurist, Nils Gilman, wrote a piece earlier this year in his substack, “Small Precautions”, positing that, although the words “secret police” tend to conjure up images of the Gestapo or the Stasi or the KGB, should we place…
In the late 70s, when I first became involved with the Sojourn Shelter for Battered Women and Their Children, the first thing co-founder Ariana Manov did was to take all of us volunteers through an in-depth training on the wide-spread…
In trying to write that portion of my life that intersected with our global experience of the pandemic, I couldn’t seem to get the phrase “she’s come all undone” out of my head. Everything we took for granted had begun…
The Land of Broken Toys In each of the continuing films of Pixar’s Toy Story franchise, we have been introduced, in several ways, to the fates of broken toys. In Toy Story 1, we meet the mutant toys, who have been broken and…
The following is a submission from Santa Monica Forward. Santa Monica Forward is proud to endorse Caroline Torosis, Eli Gill, and Brett Morrow for Santa Monica City Council in November 2026, three leaders with the record, urgency, and expertise to…
Councilmember Dan Hall’s latest newsletter argues that Santa Monica’s tourism industry is showing encouraging signs of recovery but faces significant headwinds that require the city to adapt its long-term strategy. While visitor spending, hotel performance, and major events have helped…
There are two prevailing theories about the origin of the term “face the music”, a phrase widely used to express the experience of having to face the consequences of your actions and accept the punishment. The first theory stems from…
Weak Tea I don’t often find myself asking AI about the behavior of men who might be insecure about their masculinity. (How’s that for an opening sentence?) However, I just couldn’t help myself when I began to add up the…
I could see that people all around the world were becoming alarmed at the negative direction our country’s leadership was heading when I Googled “signs of a dictatorship” and so many American sites showed up, I couldn’t possibly read them…
On Thursday, May 21st, as almost everyone breathing in this country knows, Stephen Colbert aired his last live show on CBS. The cowardly, obedient new dictatorship at the network, overseen by the latest toady, Bari Weiss, decided that Colbert was…
“No better day to ride the D (train) than election day,” posted Tom Steyer Tuesday morning at 11:12 a.m. on X. The problem isn’t that Steyer talked about transit on election day. The problem is that he waited until election day. California voters…
“How the mighty have fallen.” So writes King David, in 2 Samuel 1:19, lamenting the deaths of King Saul and his son, Jonathan. This mournful passage, often called “The Song of the Bow”, was originally quoted as a portion of…
Juliette van der Meijden is an Urbanist & Strategic Advisor specializing in regenerative city building. She can be reached at juliette@curatedbyjuliette.com. All images in this piece are of Emscher Park Nord in Germany. “Make no little plans; they have no…
Remember when the white house wrecking ball made fun of a person with a disability? Oh, which time, you ask? Well there was the crass mocking of NYT reporter Serge Kovaleski for his denial to ratify the white house squatter’s…
British author and playwright, W. Somerset Maughm, once wrote, “Impropriety is the soul of wit.” This observation came to mind as I watched Stephen Colbert prepare to leave CBS, and again, as I read numerous news reports of the hounding…
