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A Neighborhood’s Death Foretold

News about the fire arrived in fragments. First, that the blaze in Eaton Canyon was spreading rapidly, then that a few homes in the foothills were consumed, then whole neighborhoods, including my former one on the southern perimeter of the Angeles Crest National Forest. The house I owned on Jaxine Drive, designed in 1959 by Randell Makinson, burned to the ground. The loss to the current occupant is obviously much greater than mine. I hope that she finds solace in the love of family and friends, and that she may rebuild if she chooses. More

Situational Awareness 2025: A Dying Blaze of Splendor

As we move from the civil solemnity of Carter’s funeral to the portentous pomp of Trump’s second inauguration, do we now find ourselves at such a historic turning — an inflection point, as policy wonks like to say — a hinge moment after which our reigning assumptions about the world that seem so solid will “melt into air,” to use the phrase of a noted manifesto-writing nineteenth-century German philosopher?   What is history’s clock saying about this moment?  If an epoch is ending, what will be the motto of the era that might lie ahead – a restored Great America, a new Time of Troubles, a Dark Enlightenment, or something entirely different? More

Suicide by Rental Truck: Why the U.S. Gets Violent Wake-Up Calls From Vets

The final missions of Army Sergeants Mathew Livelsberger and Shamsud-Din Jabbar left millions of other Americans scratching their heads.  Why would two much-saluted young men—who served their country so honorably at home and abroad, for a combined total of 33 years—both rent trucks in two different locations, within the same week? And then turn them into instruments of mass and/or self-destruction? More

Roaming Charges: Cease Fires Walk With Me

I’m a natural born cynic, of course, but I can’t help but think that this ceasefire, this lull in the killing, is meant to erase, if not the memory of, at least the responsibility for, the killing that has come before. As Jean Baudrillard wrote: “Forgetting extermination is part of extermination.” More