Articles by Tim Rutten

Now in his 60th year, Peter Ackroyd is one of those forces of literary nature that British letters regularly seems to throw up – 14 novels, five works of nonfiction, 10 biographies (some of them very fine), two collections of poetry and two of criticism, a play, television scripts and even a clutch of children’s books. Read more

It’s an article of faith in U.S. politics that, when it comes to the popular vote at least, Catholics determine the winners in our presidential contests. Read more

James M. McPherson is the most important historian of the most important event to occur in these United States since the Revolution and the framing of the Constitution – the Civil War. Read more

Alan Greenspan is surprised … Read more

We now know that the Los Angeles Police Department’s crime lab is a virtually perfect engine of injustice. Read more

It once was said of James Joyce that he had abandoned everything about the Scholastic philosophy of the High Middle Ages that suffused his education – except its basic principles. Read more

Our criminal justice system essentially grades on the pass-fail system, and, as anybody who watched O.J. Simpson’s first trial will recall, the Los Angeles Police Department has a history of flunking science. Read more

Eight thousand years ago, the Tongva and Tataviam peoples, who made their homes in what we now call the Los Angeles Basin and the San Fernando and San Gabriel valleys, did exactly what many of us have been doing for the last few days: They inhaled the bone-dry air of a wind-scoured fall afternoon and watched the hillsides above them burn. Read more

THE FIRST recognizable English-language novels of espionage were published in the first decade of the 20th century – and both have been continuously in print ever since. Read more