I decided to write about Los Angeles before I ever moved to Los Angeles. That I didn’t know this at the time makes me want to re-imagine my relationship with the city now as something latent, something protean. Unsurprisingly, it all began and ended with noir, a style of writing Los Angeles more or less invented, going back to Raymond Chandler and the woefully misremembered Paul Cain. I had become a deep reader of the genre in my 20s, and, as all writers are readers in emulation, I began to think about writing a hard-boiled fiction of my own. The appeal of that sort of book, then as now, felt palpable: an “axe for the frozen sea within us,” to borrow Franz Kafka’s term.
Mass plantations are not the environmental solution they’re purported to be, Crowther argued when he took the floor on December 9 for one of the summit’s “Nature Day” events. The potential of newly created forests to draw down carbon is often overstated. They can be harmful to biodiversity. Above all, they are really damaging when used, as they often are, as avoidance offsets— “as an excuse to avoid cutting emissions,” Crowther said.
Maybe the famous croissant and its ugly American stepsister, the doughnut, can coexist. If there’s one thing the French know, it is food, so I’m confident they’ve got this.
Now, onto more pressing matters. I wonder how you say “Chocolate Iced Custard-Filled” in French?
Voices in the Dark paints a vivid picture of rural life without shying away from its challenges – isolation, stretched resources, farm succession and the harsh environment.
Emily Cockayne’s “Penning Poison: A History of Anonymous Letters” is full of the very odd things that people do by means of unsigned mail. The anonymous letter, Cockayne points out, creates an asymmetrical relationship, an imbalance of information — I know who you are, but you don’t know who I am — that is unsettling and confers a kind of power on the sender.
The book’s central image—of a person stuffed inside a hidden compartment in the car—is less subtle but surprisingly effective: it gets us thinking about tech in a way that’s refreshingly visceral, the human driver producing a “queer feeling” to rival that once produced by their absence. And it’s not terribly far off from reality.