Welcome to City of Angles

It's a fair bet not many of us came to L.A., or choose to stay, for the politics. But from City Hall to the City Council, from the County Board of Supervisors to the L.A. Unified School District, from elections to ballot measures to budgets to the economy to education to crime to streets to garbage collection to scandals, local political and civic affairs shape our lives in Los Angeles in ways that aren't always apparent, and that are often hard to keep up with week to week. This blog's role will be to help you understand and appreciate all the angles of L.A.'s always lively and often perplexing political scene.

I'm a Los Angeles guy (since 1994) and a politics guy (started working in 1994 for the only national politics and policy magazine based in Los Angeles, Reason magazine, where I am now a senior editor; the magazine is owned by the L.A.-based policy think tank the Reason Foundation). I spent my first decade here in Culver City (leaving, alas, right on the cusp of its current hotness), and now reside on the eastern edge of West Hollywood. I've been active in local bands and local art weirdness from the Cacophony Society to the Art of Bleeding.

I have published three books: This is Burning Man (about the experimental arts festival/community born up in San Francisco), Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement (three of whose founding influences have deep L.A. roots: novelist and screenwriter Ayn Rand, former Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce chief Leonard Read, and former SoCal Edison exec William Mullendore), and Gun Control on Trial (about last year's historic Second Amendment Supreme Court case D.C. v. Heller). While I'm not quite L.A. to have (yet) succumbed to the lure of screenplay writing, I am enough of an L.A. guy to spend a lot of my laptop writing and research time in local coffee shops, my favorite haunt being Abbot's Habit on Sunset.

Los Angeles politics and civic life are complicated and contentious; "City of Angles" will keep you up to date and connected with the city's most pressing civic maneuverings, victories, and crises, with multiple perspectives and historical context covering all the angles.

Photo by Floyd B. Bariscale, used under Creative Commons license.