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- Benedict Anderson and the Nation as Imagination
- Anthony D. Smith: The Student Who Kept the Question and Rejected the Answer
- Ernest Gellner
- Eric Kaufmann: The Man Who Made the Majority Visible
- Dominic Cummings: A Biography
- Steve Lopez: The Last City Columnist
- California Historian Kevin Starr
- Stephen Kotkin: A Life in Power
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- The Cross at Sinjar: Tom Holland’s Dominion
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- * The Enlightenment Wasn’t Enlightened (6-23-26)
* Mr. Burge Draws The Line (6-23-26)
* 'Improving on Democracy' (6-17-26)
* People Leak To People Who Are Fun (6-11-26)
* Why Does Australia Produce So Many Great Journalists? (6-11-26)
* Steve Wynn and the Press: Power, Litigation, and the Contest Over Las Vegas (6-3-26)
* Sheldon Adelson and the Journalists (6-3-26)
* The Vigilant Animal: Thinkers Who Reject the Myth of Human Gullibility (6-2-26)
* The Cost of Refusing the Misunderstanding Myth (6-2-26)
* Show Me How It Travels (6-2-26)
* The Norm Explainers (6-2-26)
* Centering Marginalized Voices (6-1-26)
* What would it look like if the Washington Post put its reader first? (6-1-26)
* What would it look like if the Financial Times put its reader first? (6-1-26)
* What It Would Mean for the Los Angeles Times to Put the Reader First? (6-1-26)
* What It Would Mean for The New York Times to Put the Reader First? (6-1-26)
* Why Wembanyama Lives on the Perimeter (5-31-26)
* The Emotional Palettes Of San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco & Sacramento (5-27-26)
* The Administrative Capital: Sacramento Legal Culture (5-27-26)
* San Diego - The Quiet Republic (5-27-26)
* The Quiet Bar: San Diego Legal Culture (5-27-26)
* SF v LA Legal Culture (5-27-26)
* Why Talent Travels Poorly Between San Francisco and Los Angeles (5-27-26)
* San Francisco and Los Angeles as Rival Models of Urban Access (5-27-26)
* Social Cliques in New York, 2026 (5-25-26)
* Social Cliques in San Francisco, 2026 (5-25-26)
* The Rival Courts of Washington (5-25-26)
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Category Archives: Hollywood
Anthony Lane: A Life
On the morning of January 30, 2024, a memo went out to the staff of The New Yorker. David Remnick (b. 1958), the editor, announced that Justin Chang, the film critic of the Los Angeles Times, would join the magazine … Continue reading
Posted in Hollywood, Journalism, Literature
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Nikki Finke: A Life in Deadline Hollywood
Nikki Finke (1953-2022) reshaped American entertainment journalism. She founded Deadline Hollywood, a digital publication that changed how studio executives, agents, producers, and reporters followed industry news. Combative and independent, she challenged the long dominance of the established trade papers, Variety … Continue reading
Posted in Hollywood, Journalism, Nikki Finke
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Liza by the Curb
I came to Los Angeles in March 1994. The job listings ran to acting and modeling, so I gave it a go. I lived out of my car. I took classes at night and worked as an extra by day. … Continue reading
Posted in Hollywood
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Mulholland Drive
David Lynch (1946–2025) turned sixty on January 20, 2006. The party sat in a restaurant near La Cienega and Melrose, the kind of room where the lighting flatters everyone and the valet knows which cars to bring around first. A … Continue reading
Posted in Hollywood
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Legends of the Fall (1994)
Tristan kneels in the mud of a forward trench in France and opens his brother with a knife. Samuel is dead, his face still soft with the surprise of it, and Tristan cuts the heart out of the chest and … Continue reading
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The Man at the Door
On Christmas Eve of 2006, Greg Whiteley (b. 1969) climbed the steps of a cabin in Park City, Utah, a camera in his hand, and knocked. He did not know whether the family inside would wave him in or send … Continue reading
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The Man on the Floor: Peter Berg and the Cinema of Competence
Peter Berg (b. 1964) works as a director, producer, writer, and actor. His films and television share a subject. He studies how organizations function under pressure, what happens when systems fail, and why some men keep doing their jobs while … Continue reading
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The City of Private Rooms
Los Angeles in 2026 holds a set of overlapping prestige worlds, each with its own gatekeepers, its own real estate, its own theory of why its members deserve the room. The most powerful figures sit in several of these worlds … Continue reading
Posted in Beverly Hills, Hollywood, Los Angeles
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Harry Knowles and the Birth of Networked Fandom
Harry Knowles (b. 1971) is an American film commentator, internet entrepreneur, and founder of the website Ain’t It Cool News. He stands at the transition from twentieth-century entertainment journalism to digitally networked fan culture. Through his site he showed that … Continue reading
David Poland and the Reinvention of Entertainment Journalism
David Poland (b. 1964) is a transitional figure in American entertainment journalism. He occupies the unsettled ground between the declining authority of the twentieth-century trade press and the rise of decentralized digital commentary. Across more than three decades he moved … Continue reading
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