Libros Schmibros Founder David Kipen

L.A. Interlopers, Eating a Dodger Dog Is the Least You Can Do In Our Fair City

Native Angeleno David Kipen is a writer and the founder of Libros Schmibros, a nonprofit lending library and bookshop in Boyle Heights. He has been the San Francisco Chronicle book critic and director of literature for the National Endowment for the Arts in Washington, D.C. Before moderating a panel that demystified the Santa Ana Winds, he talked about American cheese, the art of the book recommendation, and the L.A. diary project he’s working on in the Zócalo green room.

September 16, 2013

L.A.’s Dread Winds of Autumn

The Santa Anas Keep Blowing Our Minds

by Sarah Rothbard | September 9, 2013

You know them when you feel them, or when you hear them blowing through the trees. They’ve cut out your power or even threatened your home. And you can quote …

Does L.A. History Include Humans?

The New “Becoming L.A.” Exhibit Shows How Much This City Lacks a Coherent Story About Itself

by Joe Mathews | August 6, 2013

We Angelenos were never supposed to be here.

In an 1868 essay considered so powerful it was taught to schoolchildren for a century, writer and economist Henry George predicted that California …

When Santa Monica Was Still Oshkosh By the Sea

In 1973, Real Estate and Business Interests Ran the City. My Fellow Activists and I Helped Change That.

by Ernie Powell | June 20, 2013

I can’t think of a song about an apartment. Nor can I recall a single poem or novel about one. (I do remember a great little movie many years ago …

The Angeleno Behind Proposition 13

Thirty-Five Years Ago, Howard Jarvis Changed the Golden State Forever

by James Lacy | June 6, 2013

In the mid-1970s, when I was a law student at Pepperdine and California state chairman of a conservative volunteer group, the Young Americans for Freedom, we began to get visits …

Privatized Leisure

L.A. as Ode to Perfect Climate, for Some

by Lawrence Culver | July 13, 2011

In the early twenty-first century, Americans are concerned about the prospect of global climate change. But climate itself is not a new national preoccupation. Americans have long focused on climate …

Los Angeles history