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?
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 ...
Apr 26, 2020
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 ...
Mike DavisApr 26, 2020
Set the Night on Fire
LARB presents an excerpt from Mike Davis and Jon Wiener"s "Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties."...
Apr 14, 2020
- History
- Politics and Economics
A Week in the Death of Alfred Olongo
A chronicle from Mike Davis following the death of Alfred Olongo....
Oct 6, 2016
- Politics and Economics
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 ...
Jun 14, 2016
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 ...
Mike DavisJun 14, 2016
BILLIONAIRES AND SUPER-STORMS
The eye of the super-hurricane was reported to have come ashore at Cuixmala, where English robber baron Sir James Goldsmith built his Xanadu....
Oct 24, 2015
- Politics and Economics
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 ...
Oct 25, 2012
The Embers of April 1992
"Los Angeles became a carnival of repression."...
Apr 30, 2012
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 ...
Mar 29, 2012
No More Bubblegum
Our sit-in 46 years ago was a guerrilla raid; this is Wall Street under siege by the Lilliputians....
Oct 21, 2011
The Ghost of Wrath
Harrison Gray Otis: a biography in progress....
Jul 15, 2011