Site Archives

In 2013 I drove across Los Angeles to watch South African-Canadian director Neil Blomkamp’s Elysium at the Cinerama Dome. A devastated Earth! An impoverished population without health care or reliable…

If this sounds like a sentimental call to the barricades, an echo from the classrooms, streets, and studios of forty years ago, then so be it; on the basis of…

“(Social) space is a (social) product,” Marxist theorist Henri Lefebvre writes in The Production of Space, but this “fact” is “concealed” under global capitalism because space reduces the “real’…to a…

To the disappointment of my closest companions, I never tire of the opening lines of Mike Davis’s Planet of Slums. In fact, I try casting bardic inspiration on my students…

In my library, I have what I call ‘the premier bookshelf.’ There I keep the books that I credit for providing the inspiration to earn a Ph.D. in History and…

Angel’s Flight, the 1901 funicular that still graces Bunker Hill, serves as a visual touchstone for a certain version of Los Angeles, one characterized by both noir aesthetics and working-class…

My first encounters with Mike Davis occurred while scouring online forums and generously pirated PDFs for choice excerpts of his monographs as an adolescent socialist in the Catskill Mountains. My political…

As we face another summer of record-breaking wildfires, more floods and earthquakes, a never-ending plague, and presumed global financial collapse, it’s hard not to feel that we’re living out a…