Editorials, letters to the editor, and other community opinions about Santa Monica.
Cooper Crane is a public historian studying the history of infrastructure and transportation in Southern California. His current research includes the history of the Los Angeles metro, and the development of infrastructure along the Santa Ana River, the largest river…
Ted Winterer is a former Mayor and City Councilmember and chair of Santa Monicans for Reliable School Funding I recently read that “Massachusetts, with no significant natural resource extraction industry, has leveraged its highly educated workforce and research institutions to…
The following is a letter to the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District from Superintendent Antonio Shelton concerning a new math curriculum recently approved for SMMUSD. At the April 23 SMMUSD Board of Education Meeting, the Department of Educational Services, math…
The following is a submission from the Big Blue Bus. Big Blue Bus is celebrating Bike It! Walk It! Bus It! (BIWIBI) Week by offering free rides to Santa Monica K-12 students from Monday, May 4, 2026, through Friday, May 8, 2026. BIWIBI Week is held twice a…
Columnist Peggy Noonan wrote, a few days ago in the Wall Street Journal, that the middle-of-night-blogger-in-chief had “met his match” in taking on Pope Leo. She quoted early TV religio-celebrity, Bishop Fulton Sheen, whose live TV show regularly drew more…
t’s going on 15 years since the movement to convert Santa Monica Airport into a Great Park began. Back then, in the early twenty-teens, the focus was on making sure Santa Monica could close the airport. This was because the…
The term “cosplay” was coined as a portmanteau of “costume” and “play” to describe the burgeoning practice of buying or making costumes so you can pretend to be your favorite anime or streaming character, not only by wearing the clothing,…
Sam Shapiro-Kline is the co-chair of Santa Monica Forward. Image: 711 Colorado via Santa Monica Community Corporation. For years, Santa Monicans have looked at rising rents as an unavoidable reality, yet the latest data tells a different story. As of…
Image via Freepic. Shawn Landres PhD, a Senior Fellow at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs, is a second-term Santa Monica Planning Commissioner and former chair of the Planning and Social Services commissions. The views expressed here are his…
AI Wrote That On the morning of Easter Sunday, the current white house mental case sent another in his tirade of ever-changing and unhinged threats to Iran about the Strait of Hormuz blockade. This one, however, was filled with expletives…
The ancient legend of the Fisher King, which formed much of the basis for T.S. Eliot’s epic poem, The Wasteland, is one of the lesser known tales in the quest stories of King Arthur and his Round Table. Like many of…
The following is from a special edition of the Councilmember’s Newsletter. It is reprinted with permission. Interested in more? Subscribe here. A “Plain English” Guide to the Fiscal Year 2024-2025 Annual Comprehensive Financial Report Here is the BLUF (Bottom Line,…
For Pete’s sake—invoke the 25th Amendment! Adopted after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the 25th Amendment to our Constitution provides a path for succession in the event that “the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties…
If you drive, walk, or bike around Santa Monica, you’ve seen them: white and yellow plastic bollards—those flexible posts meant to protect bike lanes or tighten corners—lying flat on the ground, mangled by the tires of a passing SUV or…
Quite randomly today, I settled on writing about two not-so-much-in-the-news issues on the agenda of the most incompetent secretary of defense in the history of our country. In an obvious attempt to dumb down our future military leadership so that…
