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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)
This is the End of Building Planes in Long Beach
I grew up in a sort of company town where men and women with a mediocre education could get a job at Boeing and make a fit life for themselves and their families.
Drive-in Megachurch to Catholic Cathedral: Sacred Spaces in Transition
Turning the Crystal Cathedral into a Catholic church.
Ghosts and Shadows: An Unconventional Conversation at Rancho Los Alamitos
Southern California is being refigured by the imaginations of all of its interpreters.
Doomsday Architecture: Shelter for Your Deepest Fears
Shelter took on a new meaning under the threat of global thermonuclear war. Decades of uneasy peace have followed. "Shelterists" are sure that it won't last.
Breaking Good
The Remaking of Long Beach: How a Breakwater is Like a River
Remaking the Los Angeles landscape balances risks and benefits.
Wayfarer's Chapel, Saturday Afternoon
Stone and glass. Anchored and slipping away. Wayfaring and rest, on a Palos Verdes bluff.
September
The Septembers of Southern California
The click-click-click-click of a sprinkler counts the passages of September on the hottest morning of a summer that should have ended.
Just Stopped
Rolling Stop: A Short Meditation on the City's Momentum
I'm not - to myself - an authentic Angeleño. But my status as a tourist in the country of wheels does allow me to be dispassionate about those who are drivers.
What Lies Below: FBI Deepens Its Water District Probe
The investigation is widening to include grand jury testimony by several state legislators. More records of contractors have been subpoenaed. Behind the corruption probe are the ties between small time politicians and big city political operatives.
Powerless: We're Still Paying for the Energy Crisis of 2000-2001
The makers of California's disastrous electrical deregulation scheme were convinced that the market they constructed was infallible. That corrupting belief led them blindly into the hands of market manipulators.
The Door That Shuts Out 'Citizen Politicians' in Los Angeles
Termed-out state legislators fill city council seats that would have been filled in the past by crusaders, activists, and community organizers. Conflict is muted in a body that has begun to look like an adjunct to Sacramento. And that's not a good thing.
Landscape in the Language: The Shakespeare of Places
"All the world's a stage" was a cliché well before the glum Jacques, in "As You Like It," trots out his set speech on the Seven Ages of Man. For Shakespeare, however much "stage" and "world" were interchangeable, both were in a place he never entirely...
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