Thursday, December 1, 2011
Opinion: Persian Tay-Sachs
In the story, a young prince in an old and distant kingdom is mesmerized with salt.. . .
Wednesday, November 2, 2011
Opinion: Oh, to be young and stupid again
By Gina Nahai
I was 21 years old, a first-year law student at USC, when I walked by a trailer parked on an empty lot off McCarthy Way on the downtown campus. It. . .
Wednesday, August 31, 2011
Opinion: In praise of falsehood
By Gina Nahai
What is it with people telling the truth all the time? I don’t mean under oath, or even in response to a question that has been posed to them.... . .
Tuesday, August 2, 2011
Opinion: Culture clash
By Gina Nahai
In case you were too busy watching Congress make a fool of itself last month to have noticed, a parallel, no-less-wrenching debate was raging in the. . .
Tuesday, July 5, 2011
Gina Nahai: What Remains
By Gina Nahai
We were exchanging “memorable aunt” stories, and my friend, who’s a trial attorney, had a clear lead over all the rest of us.. . .
Wednesday, June 1, 2011
Staying true to our own heritage
By Gina Nahai
I once wrote a novel about an Iranian Jewish woman who grows wings and flies away from her husband’s home.. . .
Wednesday, March 30, 2011
Purple Eyes
By Gina Nahai
It’s four o’clock in the afternoon, and I’m walking down a busy sidewalk in an upscale neighborhood in Tehran. My mother and her friend have. . .
Tuesday, March 1, 2011
The solitude of the Arab soul
By Gina Nahai
“This,” I thought, “is what the surface of Mars must look like.”. . .
Wednesday, February 2, 2011
Tehran to Cairo
By Gina Nahai
It all looks dauntingly familiar — the spectacle on the streets of Cairo and elsewhere in Egypt. People in the streets, buildings on fire, a. . .
Wednesday, January 5, 2011
Conspicuous consumption — What don’t we get?
By Gina Nahai
Not long ago, I happened to be standing next to a guy at the Apple store in Century City. I was waiting by the register to pay for a new charger for. . .
Wednesday, December 1, 2010
Glitterati no match for ‘This Lovely Life’
By Gina Nahai
May I make a suggestion for a great Chanukah or Christmas gift? Or recommend a selection for your book club? Or offer a proposal for making time. . .
Tuesday, September 28, 2010
Tales of Iranian nights, and days
By Gina Nahai
Friday night at dinner, we were talking about a guy, a Muslim friend of my grandfather’s, who had — very literally — come back from the dead.. . .
Tuesday, August 31, 2010
Secrets of the murderous human heart
By Gina Nahai
David Scott Milton, 50-some years old, Jewish, is alone in a locked room with a young Nazi. They’re in the library of the Maximum Security Yard of. . .
Wednesday, August 4, 2010
Sex, Shopping and the Second Half of Life
By Gina Nahai
It so happened, the other night at a dinner in Bel Air, that I found myself sitting next to the author Judith Krantz. I had met her only minutes. . .
Tuesday, June 1, 2010
Becoming American
By Gina Nahai
The bride, tall and beautiful, is half white, half African American. The groom, no less attractive than his new wife, is half Russian, half Iranian.. . .
Tuesday, May 4, 2010
Family Still Asking, ‘Where Is Adam?’
By Gina Nahai
Thursday morning, Adam woke up, took his medication and vanished. Just like that. A drop of water in the desert at high noon. A 34-year-old man with. . .
Tuesday, March 2, 2010
People of the Book Grapple With Growth of New Technology
By Gina Nahai
I’ve been spending a lot of time at the Beverly Hills library. I go there almost every day, laptop in hand, impelled by the irrational idea that. . .
Wednesday, January 6, 2010
The Plight of the Iranian Jewish Divorcée
By Gina Nahai
A hundred years ago in Iran, my great-grandmother, Tavoos Khanum (later known as Mrs. Peacock), made history by becoming the first Jewish woman ever. . .
Wednesday, December 2, 2009
An Airport, a Vet and a Catch-22
By Gina Nahai
Did you know that, if you’re a member of the United States armed forces, a war injury could be considered a self-inflicted wound? Say you’re. . .
Thursday, November 5, 2009
How to Rescue the Resort
By Gina Nahai
Have you noticed how the people who work in luxury hotels never actually use the word “hotel” to refer to the place? They call it “The. . .
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
Let’s Set Our Sights Higher
By Gina Nahai
Two things I learned on the first day of Rosh Hashanah this year: 1. An Iranian Jewish man in Los Angeles recently risked life and limb to save a. . .
Wednesday, July 29, 2009
Skid Row Poetry Gives ‘Slam’ New Meaning
By Gina Nahai
A few weeks ago, one of my students, Andrew McGregor, sent me an e-mail to ask if I would serve as a judge at a poetry slam he was staging in Los. . .
Wednesday, December 31, 2008
Solving the riddle
By Gina Nahai
In Los Angeles and New York and elsewhere in the West, families who had left Iran "for the summer," to"wait out the troubles" and "return in time for. . .
Wednesday, December 3, 2008
What is art good for?
By Gina Nahai
I wonder every time I go into and out of the office, what art is for? To capture the truth of a person or a thing? To tell that truth in unexpected. . .
