Dear John*

Look, it’s not you. It’s me. Something’s just not clicking right now, and trying to get that spark back is so tiring and too much effort.

I thought spending a few months apart, earlier this year, putting some distance between us might give me a healthier perspective. dearjohnAbsence making the heart grow fonder and all that. Things wouldn’t look so dim and depressing with the long winter gone. Continue reading

Wine (Myth) Making

(A little change of pace today, for all you oenophiles out there who thought the California wine industry started with Ernest and Julio Gallo. From our Los Angeles correspondent, Ned Teitelbaum, Executive Director of Plant The Vine, an urban landscape history and public memory project intending to create a greater awareness of L.A.’s wine-making past through the establishment of small community vineyards. Viticulture?! Everybody knows L.A. has no culture.)

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I had been researching a public-history project about Los Angeles’ first truly dominant industry, that of winegrowing and winemaking, when I realized that I’d been running across quite a lot of what I can only describe as an open and obvious bias against Los Angeles terroir. Continue reading

How About A Selfless-Driving Car?

About 100 years ago, when interests in the new-fangled motor coaches began pushing for their proper place on the roads and streets of cities, one line of argument they used was the future, modernity. beholdthefutureYou can’t fight progress, you horse-and-buggy rubes. Get out of the way (literally), a new world is dawning! Only cavemen wouldn’t want to be behind the wheel of this shiny new mode of transport, the automobile!! Continue reading