Around Los Angeles, sometimes human geography is difficult to comprehend, but you still feel it, like the edges of a ghost.

“Any seed or insect or lizard or mammal that found itself in L.A. had to believe that there was a chance to thrive” (Walter Mosley, Blonde Faith).

The joy of everyone working together with the same goal in mind, sacrificing to that same goal—that’s not something we have in our society anymore. We’re very individualistic. It’s an American thing, it’s a modern thing.” Was it a Los Angeles thing? Spangle nodded. “For a lot of these guys, it was the first time they’d ever had a touch of that.”

To be moved is different from being manipulated.

Mandy Patinkin and I talked about it on the phone. “When you take someone like Jen Tullock,” he said, “who is incapable of not being alive, she has an immediate addictive quality to anybody she comes in contact with. Because she is so alive. It’s not just about being talented or brilliant or beautiful; it’s about being hungry and alive for the few

For the most part, floods were a distant memory. After devastating overflows in 1914 and 1916, the Los Angeles River was paved, reducing its danger.

Steve Pyne, author of Fire: A Brief History, suggested that the trend could deserve its own era in time. “So vast is the magnitude of these changes that we might rightly speak of a coming Fire Age equivalent in stature to the Ice Ages of the Pleistocene. Call it the Pyrocene.”

In On the Road, Jack Kerouac called Los Angeles “the loneliest and most brutal of American cities.”

in April 2019, “There’s something that is truly Californian about the wilderness and the wild and pioneering spirit.” And so, every taxpaying Californian was asked, realizing it or not, to finance the protection of homes built in places where fire was sure to burn.