Episode 28: Rosecrans Baldwin on Los Angles as City-State

Los Angeles is a hundred suburbs in search of a city, or so it’s been said. In his new book about Los Angeles, novelist and nonfiction writer Rosecrans Baldwin—a somewhat recent transplant to Los Angeles from the East Coast—tackles the famous quip and expands on it. His premise in Everything Now: Lessons from the City-State of Los Angeles (MCD/FSG, 2021) is spot-on: “Functionally, aesthetically, mythologically, even technologically, it is an independent territory, defined less by distinct borders than by an aura of autonomy and a sense of unfurling destiny—this is the city-state of Los Angeles,” as a concept. Baldwin spent years reporting on this book before finally finishing it during the pandemic last year. He looks at the city through so many prisms and angles, it’s impossible to finish reading Everything Now without acquiring a deep (or deeper) fondness for L.A. The book is an exploration of the city, its people, and its culture. And as stated on the sell copy of the book, in Los Angeles, “you have no better plan that exists to watch the United States’ past, and its possible futures play themselves out.” Like Thom Andersen’s magnum opus, the documentary film Los Angeles Plays Itself, Everything Now is a deeply researched, and well-argued street-level view of the city—the good, the bad, and the ugly. Baldwin and I caught up this past fall to discuss how his latest book came to be.