Even the Stars Are Ill at Ease

"The more complicated answer is that these fires are an especially acute example of something climate scientists have been warning about for decades: compound climate disasters that, when they occur simultaneously, produce much more damage than they would individually. As the climate crisis escalates, the interdependent atmospheric, oceanic and ecological systems that constrain human civilization will lead to compounding and regime-shifting changes that are difficult to predict in advance. That idea formed a guiding theme of the Biden administration's 2023 national climate assessment."

Eric Holthaus at The Guardian writes that "[c]onditions for a January firestorm in Los Angeles have never existed in all of known history, until they now do."

Also at The Guardian, Oliver Wainwright argues that "[t]he city needs greater urban density, not more firebelt bungalows." (At CalMatters, Ben Christopher also questions how L.A. should or should not rebuild, as does Jerusalem Demsas at The Atlantic.)

And Adrian Daub looks to earlier L.A. writers like Mike Davis.

Dan Walters at the Ventura County Star considers the criticism of Gov. Gavin Newsom and Mayor Karen Bass.

And Mark Z. Barabak at the Los Angeles Times criticizes the critics.

"Wasn't Just Read, However. It Was Devoured"

"'When you judge the work of somebody, it's what the work itself did, the ways it makes us think differently,' said historian William Deverell, director of the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West. 'Equally important: How many ships did it launch? And "City of Quartz" launched so many ships—whether it's dissertations or conferences or articles.'"

Carolina A. Miranda at the Los Angeles Times writes an obituary for Mike Davis.

"LA's Radical Culture Was Powerful and Prevalent"

"It moves seamlessly between civil rights and Black Power, anti-war protests, gay liberation, women's liberation, alternative media, the Brown Berets and the Chicano Moratorium, student strikes, the free clinic movement, Asian American radicalism, and the citywide struggle against police brutality. All these movements shared a desire for freedom—freedom of movement and mobility; freedom to access public space; freedom to live and work anywhere; freedom to determine their own education, health, and sexuality; freedom to write, perform, and make art; and freedom from economic precarity and war—at home and abroad. And at times, Davis and Wiener show, LA's insurgent movements were winning, challenging the state’s legitimacy and thus driving it to rely on force to maintain control."

At Boston Review, Robin D.G. Kelley reviews Mike Davis and Jon Wiener's Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties.

"With Global Capitalism So Impotent in the Face of This Biological Crisis, Our Demands Must Be for Properly International Public-Health Infrastructure"

"It's not surprising that the first epicenter of community transmission in the United States was the Life Care Center, a nursing home in the Seattle suburb of Kirkland. I spoke to Jim Straub, an old friend who is a union organizer in Seattle-area nursing homes, and currently writing an article about them for the Nation. He characterized the facility as 'one of the worst staffed in the state' and the entire Washington nursing home system 'as the most underfunded in the country—an absurd oasis of austere suffering in a sea of tech money.'"

Mike Davis at Jacobin discusses the coronavirus pandemic.

"Probably the Most Hated Man in Ragtime America"

"More is at stake than parochial Los Angeles history. Otis’s revised biography provides important clues to the larger mystery of how the Radical Republicans, once courageous advocates of human equality and free labor, ultimately became geriatric strikebreakers and jailers of dissent. Long before he became the embittered commander-in-chief of L.A.’s elites, Harry Otis was Eliza’s sweetheart and an Abolitionist knight on horseback."

Mike Davis in the Los Angeles Review of Books begins a nine-part biography of Harrison Gray Otis.

"Pessimism of the Intellect, Optimism of the Will"

"The review was founded in 1960 out of a merger of two existing journals, Universities and Left Review and the New Reasoner, the former representing an upsurge of political and cultural radicalism in the late 1950s, especially strong in universities, that repudiated the reformism of the Labour party, while the latter provided a rallying ground for those communists and ex-communists who, post-1956, disowned orthodox Stalinism. New Left clubs were formed around the country, and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament provided a mobilising and unifying focus. For a brief period, the review was part of a wider movement. But after the 1962 changeover, it focused more exclusively on preparing the theoretical ground for 'revolution' (it can be hard now to remember what an everyday term 'revolution' was in the 1960s and 1970s)."

Stefan Collini in The Guardian marks the fiftieth anniversary of New Left Review.

And in NLR, Stuart Hall traces the journal's origins.

The Devil's Wind

In the Los Angeles Times, Bettina Boxall, Meghan Daum, and Christopher Hawthorne try to make sense of last week's destructive wildfires in Southern California.


"More recently, on the very eve of the new firestorms, county supervisors endorsed a so-called 'shelter in place' strategy that will permit developers to build in the rugged, high-fire-risk backcountry without having to provide the secondary roads needed to ensure safe evacuation. Instead residents would be encouraged to stay in their 'fire resistant' homes while fire-fighters defended the perimeter of their cul-de-sac. As scores of fire experts and survivors have pointed out in angry op-ed columns and blogs, this is a lunatic, if not homicidal, scheme that elevates developers' bottom-lines over human life. Those who have actually confronted 100-foot-high firestorms, driven by hurricane-velocity winds, know that the developer slogan--'It's not where you build, but how you build'--is a deadly deception.
"Meanwhile, the new fire cataclysm seems to be rewarding the very insiders most responsible for the uncontrolled building and underfunded fire protection that helped give the Santa Ana winds their real tinder. While conservative ideologues now celebrate San Diego's most recent tragedy as a 'triumph' of middle-class values and suburban solidarity, the business community openly gloats over the coming reconstruction boom and the revival of a building industry badly shaken by the mortgage crisis."

And Mike Davis at TomDispatch.com sums it all up.

The Great Exception

"During the 1920s McWilliams, like so many other unknown young writers in the West and South, had benefited from the editorial patronage and friendship of H.L. Mencken and his American Mercury; now he returned the favor, becoming the champion of such fresh talents as Ralph Nader, Dan Wakefield, Howard Zinn, Richard Cloward, Frances Piven and a broke and desperate soul named Hunter S. Thompson, to whom McWilliams fatefully pitched the idea of a report on California motorcycle gangs."

In The Nation, Mike Davis recalls the singularity of muckraker Carey McWilliams.