Los Angeles
Story Stream
Lou Mathews Knows a Tale or Two About ‘Hollywoodski’ January 27, 2025
Lou Mathews is unequivocal in his devotion to Los Angeles and its environs. “I love it — and I don’t understand people who don’t,” says the welcoming, white-bearded Mathews, 78, during a recent interview at his longtime Beachwood Canyon home conducte...
Not a Cautionary Tale January 24, 2025
IF THERE WERE a magic pill, would you take it? Every disabled person I know has been asked this question, or else posed it to themselves. Once, I would have dismissed the hypothetical as a cruel thought experiment. Stuttering, which is genetic and ha...
The Winners and Losers of the 2025 Oscar Nominations January 24, 2025
The lead-up to the 97th Academy Awards has been anything but ordinary. Last week, the Oscar nominations were delayed on account of the devastating wildfires across Los Angeles. “We will get through this together and bring a sense of healing to our gl...
Los Angeles and the Literature of the Apocalypse January 22, 2025
I don’t believe in prescience. I don’t believe, for instance, that when Octavia E. Butler began to write her 1993 novel, “Parable of the Sower,” she was working with a kind of second sight....
An Absurdly American Life January 20, 2025
For two and a half years, David Lynch delivered a daily weather report on his YouTube channel. In the final video, posted on December 16th, 2022, Lynch opens the routine report shaking his phone camera while delightfully proclaiming, “If you can beli...
Fairytale in the Supermarket January 15, 2025
On April 27, 1979, workers in the production, trucking, shipping, and kitchen departments at Erewhon Trading Company voted to form a union affiliated with Local 925 of the Services Employees International Union (SEIU). Discontent had been brewing for...
When the Fire Comes January 14, 2025
As the fires in Los Angeles continue to multiply, the closing sentences of Joan Didion’s essay “The Santa Ana” have begun to pop up in news stories and on social media. “Los Angeles weather is the weather of catastrophe, of apocalypse,” Didion wrote ...
LA Inferno January 10, 2025
Upon the hills in LA where dreams are sown every day,The fiery winds have fiercely blown.Torn so many from their home.A golden land, now wreathed in flame,Which government is to blame.Where whispers cry and scream Help us we’re all aflame.Homes and l...
The New York City Subway Is a Madhouse. And a Miracle. January 07, 2025
I travel frequently between Los Angeles and New York City, often taking a redeye flight into JFK. The final leg of this journey is nearly always the subway, specifically the A train, which runs the longest subway route in the city, spanning 31 miles ...
My Machine and Me January 06, 2025
ONCE A DAY, at a random time, my laptop webcam photographs me. A masochistic ritual that still startles: to open a new Google tab and see my own face. I dash off a response to the prompt—What are you thinking about?—and this capture is added to my pe...
The Bad Habits of Eve Babitz August 26, 2024
In the mid-50s, when Eve Babitz was 13 years old, she asked her mother, Mae, if she would buy her a leopardskin rug. “A real one, you know?” Babitz’s sister, Mirandi, reminisces on a video call from her home in Los Angeles – laughing at her elder sib...
A Match Made in Memes August 23, 2024
Brittany Menjivar interviews actor, filmmaker, and meme admin Peter Vack about his debut novel, “Sillyboy....
Jim Harbaugh’s Been Born Again in L.A. August 21, 2024
First-year Los Angeles Chargers coach Jim Harbaugh was so excited for training camp in July that he showed up to the first day wearing cleats.“It feels like being born,” Harbaugh said at the time. “It feels like coming out of the womb. You’re in ther...
Gossip as a Literary Genre August 15, 2024
THERE’S A PASSAGE in Rachel Cusk’s motherhood memoir A Life’s Work that angers me every time I read it. Unlike many critics who were furious upon the book’s publication in 2001, I’m not annoyed by its descriptions of motherhood. I admire Cusk’s hones...
A Restored and Rejuvenated Games August 14, 2024
At some point, did Tom Cruise decide he wasn’t satisfied with playing death-defying secret agent Ethan Hunt, and that he would attempt to live out the over-the-top adventures of Hunt? Last night in Paris, the actor rappelled down from the roof of the...
The Peculiar Joy of Watching Tom Cruise Jump From the Sky August 13, 2024
The most entertaining part of what we will call the Tom Cruise Movement of the Paris Olympics Closing Ceremony wasn’t so much the stunts. The live jump into the Stade de France was unremarkable for an event that had performers dropping from great hei...
JoAnna Novak’s Poems of Domestic Dread August 13, 2024
In her memoir Contradiction Days (2023), JoAnna Novak sets out to write about the late Minimalist painter Agnes Martin. Traveling from her Los Angeles home to Taos, New Mexico, for a residency, Novak orders Martin’s favorite dishes at her favorite re...
Goodbye to the A’s August 02, 2024
The familiar smells of street food, swamp water, and urine permeate the air as I cross the bridge that leads from the Coliseum BART station to the Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum a few minutes before the first pitch of a July 19 matchup between the O...
Literary Blockbuster August 02, 2024
The comedic set-up could be a movie. One day a beloved Hollywood megastar e-mails an eccentric British writer seeking to collaborate on a tie-in novel based on an ultraviolent comic book.The exuberant A-lister envelops the mild-mannered, high-minded ...
