“Los Angeles is profoundly more experimental than other cities,” Dana Cuff, the founding director of cityLAB at UCLA, told me. “That comes from being a city that isn’t codified by nineteenth-century formats. We look west, rather than east, for references. We look south. We’re not Eurocentric. Asia, the Americas, those are our axes and networks.”

“The Case for Letting Malibu Burn,” a chapter from Ecology of Fear, Davis argued that taxpayers shouldn’t keep forking out to rebuild a wealthy district that predictably burned to the ground every couple of decades. Davis

In Hollywood, when a producer summoned you to their office for “a general”—a get-to-know-you meeting—their assistant frequently would inform you ahead of time whether or not you would be “validated.” The word applied mostly to parking.

Los Angeles: was an exercise in horror vacui. Los Angeles: was algae from the future. Los Angeles: ate at the dream side of my mind.

(Los Angeles’s antipode, its geographical opposite on the planet, was a spot off Madagascar.)

For nearly everyone, travel through LAX was a trial. It was the realm, as Dante wrote, “of those who have rejected spiritual values by yielding to bestial appetites or violence, or by perverting their human intellect to fraud or malice against their fellowmen,”

The latest L.A. boom, known as “Peak TV”—in 2018, nearly five hundred shows, or “scripted originals,” were produced; in 2010 there had been about two hundred—might have increased the number of roles for actors, but that was like building another lane on the freeway; it just filled up with more cars.

Christopher Isherwood said it was “antiseptic, heartless, hateful, neon-mirage.” For Lynell George, “broken edges and patched-together lives.” Rarely simply itself, Los Angeles often would be summoned to express another: a midwestern suburb; a Pacific Rim metropole; a heteropolis—suggesting a land full of love for difference and all things weird: s

Conceptually, Los Angeles is unequaled. The most populous county in the most populous state, it is the United States’ seat of destitution and gated communities. Capital of incarceration and liberal policies.