los angeles Archives

Tuesday

May 6, 2025

Can AI make Spencer Pratt mayor?

What to make of the new AI election ad created by the filmmaker Charles Curran on behalf of Spencer Pratt, a reality TV star who is running to be Mayor of Los Angeles? The radio host Buck Sexton has already hailed the video as the future of political communication, and Jeb Bush has called it “maybe the best political ad of the year.” The video, which Pratt did not commission, but did repost on social media, shows California worthies – incumbent Mayor Karen Bass, Gavin Newsom, and Kamala Harris – assembled for a sinister banquet. Victims are brought before them: a mother whose children are being harassed by the city’s homeless, and

Jeremy Hildreth

The Palisades, reimagined

You can see how wrecked the place is, and how temporarily low the de jure population – but the clean-up and rebuilding are well under way

Thursday

February 19, 2026

Blake Neff

The unfathomable depths of blue-state fraud

“The Somali pirates who ransacked Minnesota remind us that there are large parts of the world where bribery, corruption and lawlessness are the norm, not the exception,” said Donald Trump in his State of the Union address last night, as the Democrats booed and heckled him. Media commentators scoffed at Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric. But the President, who estimated that $19 billion had been lost to fraud in Minnesota alone, is if anything underplaying the scale of the problem. The extent of fraud across blue state (that is, Democrat-led) America is truly monstrous, and each week brings fresh revelations of swindling on a truly epic scale. Trump’s now-withdrawn ICE surge in

Wednesday

December 17, 2025

Julia Friedman

What monuments stand to teach Americans about themselves

Why do we raise monuments? Why do we tear them down? These questions hover over MONUMENTS, now on view at Los Angeles’s Museum of Contemporary Art and the Brick. The premise is straightforward enough: gather the remains of America’s shattered sculptural conscience – decommissioned Confederate statues and their graffiti-marred plinths – and display them alongside contemporary works on racial topics. This comparison is supposed to reveal something about America’s nature and history, and it certainly does: it shows us just how attached we are to grievance. Both the raising and the destruction of monuments nourishes convictions on either side, ensuring that the argument can never end. Readers will remember the

Monday

December 15, 2025

Cockburn

Has Donald Trump succumbed to Trump Derangement Syndrome?

What else explains his insensitive rant about the late Rob Reiner?

Saturday

December 13, 2025

Joan Collins

Christmas in Los Angeles and London

“Never again!” I sigh every January 6, as I pack away the abundance of Christmas decorations lovingly collected over the decades. “It’s too much!” I moan to Percy. “Let’s go to a hot island next year and get away from it all…” But I never do, because I just love Christmas. Every year in early November I eagerly unpack multiple boxes tenderly packed two years earlier because we like to spend Christmas in London one year and in LA the next, as we love both cities. I have quite a lot of extended family in each, so we know that celebrating in either one will be very “happy families.” But