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Around 8 p.m. on Wednesday night, the 300 people who have been occupying the lawn of Los Angeles City Hall for the past three weeks split themselves into two hostile camps.

Occupy LA’s decision-making body, the General Assembly, has been responsible for conducting the encampment’s business. As in most other cities, the participating members handle everything from ensuring the nightly meeting take place to doing financial research on Los Angeles-based bankers to cleaning up the trash. But on Wednesday, a large group of dissenters decided to occupy the General Assembly’s usual outdoor meeting space and assert themselves as the new regime. One man, standing at the center of the swirling and increasingly unruly crowd, yelled into a megaphone, “You don’t represent us anymore! We’re taking over! We’re the People’s Forum!” Rumblings of dissent and palpable animosity had been mounting in the camp throughout the afternoon. Informal meetings were held around the clock to hotly debate an issue that had factionalized the camp: weed. READ MORE

Entering into the well-known "nesting" stage of pregnancy, Beyonce doesn't seem to be doing much lately except staying around the house and making terrific, high-end music videos. Three weeks after "Countdown" had us all WHOOHOO-BEYONCE!!!-ing, here she is mowing the lawn behind her trailer home at midnight in a yellow fur coat and bikini bottoms. It's a shame the video is not the version of this song that features a typically phenomenally guest verse from Andre 3000. But J. Cole is okay, too. And WHOOHOO-BEYONCE!!! READ MORE

When I heard the “We Are the 99%” slogan, I worried. I am movement-skittish. I don't like being spoken for. Anytime I hear the language of political clichés, whether about “workers” or “job creators,” my ears shut down. I know those vocabularies, and I don't agree with the worldviews that produce them.

So I didn't go to Occupy Oakland during the two weeks it was a camp in the Frank Ogawa/Oscar Grant Plaza. My partner, who doesn't share my qualms, went frequently. He would come home and tell me about what he'd seen: the media center powered by an electricity-generating bicycle, the daycare center, the full-time kitchen, which fed all the members of the camp, many of them homeless. He told me about the library and the tiny “community garden” of potted plants. He told me how interesting it was to watch this small impromptu community struggle, not only with the police and with the city, but also, because it refused to shut anyone out, with the problems that characterize Oakland itself: mental illness, health and environmental issues, poverty, racial tension, need.

I listened with enormous interest, but I still didn't go. At the risk of making this too much about me, I need to make my beliefs and reasons clear, such as they are (and were):

• I do not believe the police are evil.
• I do not believe in utopian societies.
• I distrust extremists of whatever stripe.
• I believe inflammatory rhetoric shuts down rational thought.
• I was (and remain) afraid of nighttime Oakland—the desperate Oakland that Occupy Oakland insisted on caring for and actually living with.
• I am lazy, prone to migraines, and unwilling to be cold, wet, uncomfortable and in constant danger of arrest. READ MORE

"RainbowVision has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, wracked by financial problems and an increasingly bitter dispute between its residents and management. Its problems mirror those of many other gay retirement communities around the country that have either failed to open or fallen on hard times, victims of a weakened housing market, a deflated economy and, in some cases, poor business decisions."
—Ugh, now we're all just going to die on the streets, with all our cats and cute furniture, while you straight people have all the resentful children to barely support you in your older years.

This book is set in a type that has planted eggs in other books and then moved on. This is considered bad parenting in some circles, to drop trou and move on, to not offer any financial support, but that is how things are done around here, how one builds character. One egg will eventually become a famous musician; another will be able to accurately predict weather patterns. Occasionally, an egg can only get as far as middle-management, but that’s okay. Everyone has a role to play. READ MORE

"One is sometimes tempted to think that the generation which has invented the ‘fiction course’ is getting the fiction it deserves. At any rate, it is fostering in its young writers the conviction that art is neither long nor arduous, and perhaps blinding them to the fact that notoriety and mediocrity are often interchangeable terms."
—Edith Wharton, in the 1920s, from The Writing of Fiction.

"For years, scientists have examined the anatomy of woodpeckers' skulls to find out how they pull off their powerful pecking without causing themselves harm. The birds have little 'sub-dural space' between their brains and their skulls, so the brain does not have room to bump around as it does in humans. Also, their brains are longer top-to-bottom than front-to-back, meaning the force against the skull is spread over a larger brain area."
—Birds are stupid. Who cares if they injure their brains? They'd probably be better off going through life in a terminal state of concussion, anyway. The less aware that they're eating grubs all day, the happier they must be. READ MORE