Mike Davis

Mike Davis was one of the leading intellectuals of his era and a contributing editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books. His works include City of Quartz (1990), a seminal study of Los Angeles’s economic and racial fault lines, Planet of Slums (2005), In Praise of Barbarians (2007), and Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties (2020), co-written with Jon Wiener.

Articles

  • The Elderly: Unworthy of Life?

    The Elderly: Unworthy of Life?

    Probably the single most sinister term in the Nazi lexicon was lebensunwertes Leben, “life unworthy of life.” It was the label worn by the hundreds of thousands of little children and adults murdered by the SS because of some physical or ...

    • The Elderly: Unworthy of Life?

      The Elderly: Unworthy of Life?

      Probably the single most sinister term in the Nazi lexicon was lebensunwertes Leben, “life unworthy of life.” It was the label worn by the hundreds of thousands of little children and adults murdered by the SS because of some physical or ...

      • A Note from Mike Davis about the Second Amendment

        A Note from Mike Davis about the Second Amendment

        FIVE WEEKS BEFORE the final ratification of the Bill of Rights in December 1791, the regular Army of the United States of America, under the command of Revolutionary War hero Arthur St. Clair, was utterly destroyed at the ...

        • A Note from Mike Davis about the Second Amendment

          A Note from Mike Davis about the Second Amendment

          FIVE WEEKS BEFORE the final ratification of the Bill of Rights in December 1791, the regular Army of the United States of America, under the command of Revolutionary War hero Arthur St. Clair, was utterly destroyed at the ...

          • The Reds Under Romney’s Bed

            The Reds Under Romney’s Bed

            IN 1884 THE JOURNALIST Edward Bellamy, struggling with an idea for a utopian novel, visited the only actually-existing Communist society on earth: Utah.  More precisely, he spent a week in Brigham City, seat of Box Elder County, where Apostle Lorenzo ...

            • The Questionnaire: Mike Davis

              How do you get up in the morning? With regret.   Do you succumb to nostalgia?  No, I live nostalgia.    Do you write long and cut, or short and backfill? More like stone masonry, but you can never ...

              • No More Bubblegum

                No More Bubblegum

                Our sit-in 46 years ago was a guerrilla raid; this is Wall Street under siege by the Lilliputians....