How Do You Actually Help a Suicidal Teen?

As he talked, more children were waiting at the hospital’s Psychiatric Emergency Services, six floors below. The PES (pronounced Pez) is the first stop when children and adolescents come to Western Psych’s emergency department after passing through security and handing over their phones and bags. To fill out forms, they have to use soft, bendable…

The Secret to Mastering Your Cocktail Order

“Double Scotch, single-malt.” I tried my best to get the words out confidently, hoping to channel Patrick Dempsey’s character, Dr. McDreamy, on “Grey’s Anatomy.” If a three-ounce pour of single-malt Scotch whisky was good enough for a suave television neurosurgeon, then it was good enough for me, a squeaky 19-year-old with his big brother’s ID…

Read Your Way Around Los Angeles

At about the same time Didion was settling into a home in Malibu and writing about our notorious Santa Ana winds, Luis J. Rodriguez was joining a street gang. Rodriguez’s memoir “Always Running: La Vida Loca, Gang Days in L.A.” is set in the gritty suburban sprawl of the San Gabriel Valley. It is an…

Where Vegetarians Are Always Welcome

New York City is full of restaurants that deliver the unexpected. A nearly 80-year-old Jewish deli run by a Yemeni family, scallion pancake burritos lowered from someone’s fire escape by bucket, bagels to rival New York’s delivered from Connecticut. After all, isn’t that why we live here? The ever-present possibility that something exciting could be…

Richie Shazam’s Book of Self Portraits

For Richie Shazam, becoming a Bollywood princess was not a manifestation. It was a realization. The model, photographer and director thinks that the term “manifestation” has become a buzzword that removes accountability, she explained in Ludlow House, a social club on the Lower East Side, in between puffs from her turquoise-colored vape. “You could say,…