Pushing the boundaries of visual culture, science, technology, and society

White Sight

A new history of white supremacist ways of seeing—and a strategy for dismantling them. Mirzoeff connects Renaissance innovations with everexpanding surveillance technologies to expose how white sight creates an oppressively racializing world.

#You Know You’re Black in France When…

What does it mean to be racialized-asblack in France on a daily basis? Tricia Keaton offers a groundbreaking study about everyday antiblackness and its refusal in an officially raceblind France.

The Language of the Face

For thousands of years, artists, philosophers, and scientists have explored the question of what our outer appearance might reveal about our inner selves. This broad and riveting cultural history of physiognomy explores how the desire to divine deeper meaning from our looks has compelled humans for millennia.

Sol LeWitt’s Studio Drawings in the Vecchia Torre

A visual archive of Sol LeWitt’s masterpiece of conceptual art, this book situates the artist’s provisional, material, bodily, and highly personal drawings in their historical, biographical, and theoretical contexts.

Gallup

A poignant artistic collaboration, showing how history and mythology converge in the Navajo communities in and around Gallup, New Mexico in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

in that detritus on their way to work or school. But fire is also personified in stories of grifting, gambling, urban despair, political assassination, everything that goes up in smoke and, of course, love, dreams, and more deepfakes.

I don’t want to die in Los Angeles, but I want to drive right out to the edge of the Pacific Coast Highway with “Die in L.A.” at full volume, and I want to invite the world along for the ride. Another Angeleno friend and writer likes to say that the future happens here first. You can love it from afar or hate it up close or remain committed to your deep and productive ambivalence about it, but you should definitely read about it.

An undergraduate student at UCLA sent us her self-produced, pitch-perfect spoof of The New Yorker called The Angeleno. Samia Saad, who included no social media handle or email, made the glossy deepfake “to satirize the ridiculous monopoly the East Coast has on ‘high-end’ literature and journalism.” It was accepted into her undergrad art show, but its circulation stopped in a manila envelope delivered to my desk. She thanked us “for all the phenomenal work you do proving that there is a vastly talented community of writers and a readership in Los Angeles and up and down the Pacific coastline. I only gripe that your existence takes a bit of the punch from my satire by rendering part of it untrue and obsolete.”

The editors of the Los Angeles Review of Books would like to invite Samia Saad of The Angeleno to make fun of us, any time, on her way to becoming a senior editor at The New Yorker and to pitch us, too. We hope Samia Saad continues to mock everyone in her way, and we want to reach all the readers and writers who understand that the things that burn you up are also the things that keep you warm. Borrowing a metaphor from Sharon Kivland, from her French Revolutionary calendar diary in this issue, “Saltpeter is incendiary, Greek fire, but also preserving.”

Whatever you listen to on PCH, whatever dark romance you have with the places where you want to live and die, and however the elements inspire you, I hope you’ll spend time with the Los Angeles Review of Books and all of our programs, come hellfire or high water, this year.

Love,