United States of America
Julia Ingalls is primarily an essayist and book editor. Her work has appeared in The Los Angeles Times, Salon, Dwell, Guernica, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and on public radio, among other places. In 2018 her work was included the collection "Critically Acclaimed" published by Rare Bird Lit. She has written extensively about architecture, history, love, and Los Angeles.
LARB PRESENTS AN EXCERPT from Julia Ingalls's forthcoming book on the L.A. River revitalization, The 40 Year Artwork, featuring extensive conversations with Lewis MacAdams, who passed away on April 21. ¤ Lewis MacAdams waits until after the nurse has closed his door to snicker.
Although Americans fought mass murderers in World War Two, by the latter half of the 20th century the country was encountering a new breed of homegrown maniac: the serial killer. The media turned these criminals into instant celebrities. Unlike mass murderers like Pol Pot or Hitler or even the homegrown Timothy McVeigh, serial killers often don't have a political ideology.
Julia Ingalls On the porch that evening in August 2004, still wearing his plastic ID bracelet from the ER, my father laughed. The mental blowout, which doctors diagnosed as transient global amnesia, was his memorable way of retiring. I couldn't blame him. He'd clocked sixty years on earth, most of it spent dodging shrapnel of...
That the Petersen Automotive Museum is an architectural critical atrocity is not news; that the public will interpret it as being representative of Los Angeles' architecture and urbanity is. By now, many prominent architectural critics have eviscerated the tacked-on facade of the recently redesigned Petersen Museum, decrying its new, chrome fettuccine exterior by Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates as the kind of swoopy, thoughtless architecture-lite that makes developers smile and aesthetes weep.
By Julia Ingalls What's odd about death is that it makes you aware of the ways you are unknowingly part of another person, like waking up with sore muscles you never even knew you had. Sharing a life with someone comes down to how we sustain our memories.
L.A. Affairs is our weekly column about the current dating scene in and around Los Angeles -- and finding romance in a wired world. If you've got a story to tell, we want to hear it. We pay $300 per published column.
IN CONTEMPORARY NOIR, you are often your own worst enemy. This is stylishly illustrated in the 2012 movie , in which time travel has been outlawed but is still used as a handy black-market tool for assassins. To get their lifetime supply of gold for services rendered, the assassins must kill their future selves to retrieve the lucre off their own dead backs.
For many baby boomers, "retirement" is just a long way to spell "the end." This wasn't the case for Mike and Fiona Goodchild, a pair of retiring Scottish UCSB professors who wanted a home that would easily adapt to meet their changing needs while helping future generations meet theirs.
The United States used to be a country that talked about its dreams with a straight face. The idea that someone born into poverty could work his way up into a better class of life wasn't the setup to a joke; it was, in real terms, doable.
T.C. Boyle nonchalantly raps spoons against his blue jeans as he crosses his living room. His Frank Lloyd Wright designed home, built for George C. Stewart in 1909, is exquisite. An artificially low ceiling, which threatens to clip Boyle's nimbus of hair, abruptly opens up into a majestic rectangular receiving room, framed by an elegant staircase leading to his office upstairs.