At Hollywood and Sunset: Instead of homes, the homeless get hand-washing stations in LA.
I gotta admit, it’s been hard for me to focus this past few…how long has it been since we’ve been on lockdown? One week? Two? Three? I honestly can’t tell anymore. There are too many things converging and melting down all at once at every level: a national and global medical disaster, a political crisis, a looming humanitarian catastrophe, an oligarchic power grab, and all sorts of imperial sadism — all triggered by a pathogen that was pumped into our lives by our own neoliberal globalized industrial economy. It all bleeds together. And all the while, people are dying and millions are losing their jobs and livelihoods and facing evictions. People are panicking, and it’s only gonna get worse. We’re seeing the rotten core of our society exposed in real time — and it feels like we’re entering some sort of political event horizon, but no one’s sure what kind.
This crisis stands at the intersection of a lot of the reporting that I’ve done over the last decade-plus. And as we sit all isolated from the world and from each other, I feel like the best thing I can do with my energy and my journalism right now is to try to cover this crisis as much as I can from my self-isolation here in LA. I’ve done that a bit already, but I’d like to do a lot more.
So I wanted to reach out and ask you: Is there anything in particular you’d want me to cover, to investigate, or write about in this crisis? Let’s start a discussion thread below.
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Take care of yourself and the people around you.
—Yasha Levine
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PS: For a bid morbid comic relief, I give you…
Hey Yasha, great piece. You're right: housing is a potent form of healthcare and it's despicable that the city isn't housing people safely, even with empty apartment buildings downtown. I have symptoms and am only recovering so quickly from them bc I have a place to quarantine. It's sick what they're doing, the shortages, willfully depriving us of healthcare.
I think the western fetishism of people from places the west doesn't like for basically no good reason is an interesting topic. I mean I exist because of that and the states' weaponization of immigrants in my own national origin story. So the piece you did on the dude who couldn't get enough culture and documented it while working to destroy it like the demented fkn sicko he was was great. Sadly elements of that piece kind of reminds me of some very close people in my family, but it's been so helpful for me to make sense of what the fuck has happened to us by way of being in the states for just a few generations. I'd be interested to read about other guys like him, but I'm not sure if it'd just be more of the same. They're basically creepy carbon copies of each other, so I dont know many new sites on the ground to cover on them.
Anyway, you do great work and I'm really inspired to write bc of it. Take care
I would love to see coverage of any and every strike of any kind being planned in SoCal.