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D.J. Waldie

D. J. Waldie (2017)

D. J. Waldie is the author of "Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir" and "Where We Are Now: Notes from Los Angeles," among other books about the social history of Southern California. He is a contributing editor for the Los Angeles Times.

D. J. Waldie (2017)
Communities
Front Porch Time Machine: Tomorrow's South Bay
I wonder how its residents are supposed to make good decisions about the future of the South Bay if their imaginative conception of it no longer reflects what the South Bay is becoming.
I've Got You Under My Skin: Smog and Modern Memory
Wednesday was a good day. I drank in the bright air of that afternoon and thought that it was a better day than I had known before. But not good enough.
Doris Rosenthal: Desire and Repose
If most southern Californians came here because of jobs and the climate, some did come because they were lured here by the desires manifested in images that were much like Doris Rosenthal's.
Jonathan Gold: What We Eat in L.A. We Become
For Gold, the "thereness" he seeks in a meal in Los Angeles answers the criticism that if you scratch beneath the phony tinsel of our anxious city you'll only find the real tinsel.
Neither Paradise Nor Hell: One Suburb's Story
As every history is, Lakewood's story is an "imposition" on the wrack of stuff that carelessness and forgetting have washed up on the shore of remembrance.
What We Gave Up to Become Suburban
We were housed in Lakewood in the 1950s. But we didn't have a home yet.
Still rural
Pictures at a Revolution: Images of a Post-War Suburb
Photographs from more than 60 years ago have their quota of nostalgia. But they also record the making of a place that satisfied a longing for home.
How Do Places Mean? It's All in Your Head.
Places mean - even the most ordinary places - because they become, however briefly, remarkable.
For Pro Football in Los Angeles, It's 'Groundhog Day' All Over Again
From 2011 through 2014, the prospects for an NFL team returning to Los Angeles after two decades brightened and dimmed with the regularity of the seasons. Expect another year of waiting as the NFL toys with the hopes of fans and politicians.
Tale of a Coat
While I'm spending some time with family and friends -- as I hope you will -- I've pulled a few of my favorite pieces from past years to repost.
Some Forgotten Angeleños, Remembered Briefly
The poor, the unknown, the forgotten, and the misplaced are given to the Los Angeles County Cemetery, their mass graves marked with a metal plaque denoting the year of their burial.
Yaroslavsky
Changing Up the Supes and Reshaping L.A.
Change has come to the Board of Supervisors. More changes are ahead. What that means for how the county does its many jobs is unclear. But whatever the changes are, they will affect the lives of ten million county residents.
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