Tuesday shorts

Any late-comers will go at the bottom, as usual.

• Gustavo Arellano rates the new crop of Latino-oriented glossies in the OC Weekly. He gives Bello the edge over Tu Ciudad, at least in part because the former mag is coming out of Santa Ana. Their gabacho equivalents, he writes, are Vanity Fair and Los Angeles, respectively. Fuego is the weakest of the lot: "Veers too much between cheesecake shots of chicas with pert nipples and defiant shout-outs against Latino exploitation. Make up your mind—are you down with la raza or up for mexploitation?"

• Mickey Kaus catches up to last month's New York Times Magazine paean to Nic Harcourt of KCRW and registers a few objections in Slate. He bolds this: "Like the L.A. Times, Harcourt's KCRW empire of the 'semipopular' is a Southern California institution that seems terrific to gullible East Coasters who don't have to live with it every day."

• Robert Gelfand at The American Reporter uses a Mona Charen column to compare the op-ed pages of the Daily Breeze and the Long Beach Press Telegram: "The other noteworthy point is that where the Breeze serves up a dreary menu of Kemp and Charen week after week with a little bit of Tom Elias tossed in, the Press Telegram offers a more balanced mix. Long Beach readers get to read the liberal Molly Ivins along side conservative Thomas Sowell. Ivins is hardly ever picked up on this side of the bay. There is one other difference between the two editorial pages that really stands out. It's hard to put this delicately, but Kemp and Charen are just a lot less smart than Will and Sowell and Ivins."

• Joel Kotkin has a piece in the new Fortune (let's make that Forbes, the international edition) suggesting that the influence of cities is waning globally.

• Deanne Stillman had an op-ed piece about wild horses in yesterday's Boston Globe.

• Councilman Eric Garcetti speaks to the Current Affairs Forum at a breakfast on July 15 at the City Club downtown.

• The Metroblogging network that started in Los Angeles has added Philadelphia, Berlin and Lahore. They now have thirty cities going.

• The debate over whether this past rain year was L.A.'s wettest on record goes on—even though it pretty definitively was not the wettest. Meanwhile, LA.com was there when last night's fireworks at Echo Park caught a palm tree on fire.

• Ex-L.A. Times foreign correspondent Stanley Meisler sold an autobiography of UN Secretary General Kofi Annan to Wiley, says Publishers Lunch.