What Makes L.A. Unlike Any Other City on Earth?

When Rosecrans Baldwin, one of this magazine’s favorite longtime contributors, first moved to Los Angeles, years ago, he was struck by the sense that something was different there. Or maybe that everything was different there. As he writes in his latest book, Everything Now: Lessons From the City-State of Los Angeles, the city provoked in him a feeling that “anything could happen at any second.” And so, Rosecrans, a novelist and screenwriter, burrowed in and paid careful attention to the specific frequencies and unique atmospheres that make the place so singular. The result of that enthusiastic and thoughtful study, Everything Now, is a genre-bending work of reportage and memoir that’s been lauded as one of the best and most inventive books of the summer. It’s a book that delights in the mysteries of the place. “Questions abound,” Rosecrans writes of the city. “Why do conversations in Los Angeles tend to feel more wide-open? Why is the mood often sublimely tense? Why does it feel like history is happening all at once?

The vast “nation-state” that Rosecrans describes in Everything Now is an L.A. that is beguiling and enchanting and frustrating and fascinating all at once. It’s the kind of place—and this is the kind of book—that leaves visitors and readers alike with more curiosity. So, Rosecrans gamely answered a few questions about the mysteries and magic of Los Angeles and how his fellow Angelenos have been reacting to his book.

GQ: You offer a kind organizing explanation for the book when you tell readers that the standard way of thinking about L.A. rests on a fundamental misunderstanding that L.A. is like a typical big American city. You show us that it’s not, at all. I wondered: How did you arrive at this realization that we get L.A. wrong?

Rosecrans Baldwin: Everything stems from my own ignorance. My wife Rachel and I moved to L.A. about six years ago. Right away, I was super confused. How Los Angeles is both a city and a county. How “L.A.” refers not just to Los Angeles, or Beverly Hills, or Compton—all of which are separate cities—but also, for a lot of people, to places as far spread as San Bernardino, Simi Valley, or Newport Beach.

Just L.A. county is 11 million people. Greater L.A., the five counties, is close to 20 million people. I say this in the book, but it was really one of my first feelings, that it could seem, at times, when I drove around L.A., like I was in the middle of everything, and also nowhere at all. The way there’s both vastness and density, diversity and segregation. The thought of L.A. being just another big city like New York or Miami or Houston—the way those places look and operate, how they feel when you live there, and also how they figure into the United States’ understanding of itself—didn’t make sense to me. It just didn’t agree with the facts on the ground.

As for Angelenos, they’re the last people to misunderstand their city; they know their city very well. But I’d also say, because plenty of Angelenos told me this when I was doing my interviews, that they recognize they may only really know their version of Los Angeles, their enclave, their places. Los Angeles has many, many versions.

When you set out, was there any risk of feeling intimidated by the subject? Writers could spend a lifetime immersing themselves in the ideas you’re exploring. Or was there something thrilling about being able to put fresh eyes on the place and make the kinds of connections and insights that a native might have been tempted to overlook?

Dude, super intimidated. And yes, it was also thrilling, if only because there are so many stories lying around. At the same time, Los Angeles doesn’t lack for literature. It doesn’t need any more people showing up from the East Coast, checking into the Chateau Marmont, going around telling Angelenos what their city is like. I felt an incredible amount of pressure. To do the research, drive the miles, read everything I could get my hands on. Carey McWilliams. Octavia E. Butler. Mike Davis. Lynell George. Héctor Tobar, Paul Beatty, Myriam Gurba. On and on and on.

I remember reading an interview once with David Cornwell, aka the great novelist John Le Carré, who said something like there are two times when it pays to write about a place you don’t know well: soon after you’ve arrived, when your impressions are fresh, or after you’ve lived there a long time, when you really know something about it. For my part, I started taking notes practically as soon as we arrived—not knowing I’d write the book, but for my own curiosity. And for research purposes I spent several years interviewing dozens of people who know L.A. really well. So I’m hoping I found a middle ground.

Now that I think about it, that interview might have been with Graham Greene, but whatever.

You’re hearing from readers and I wonder: What have Angelenos been telling you that you helped them realize or discover? What have they been surprised by?

Well, I’ve been surprised by how many people here agree with the city-state idea. To be clear, not everybody, and not every aspect of it, but definitely a majority of people I’ve talked to, both during all the research and reporting, and now that the book’s out, tell me they feel something similar. That it suits the city they know in certain ways.

Honestly, I never set out to explain Los Angeles, to wrap it up in a single story. I know the book is kinda marketed that way, to fire up buzz, but truthfully the idea of a city-state, the metaphor of it, was far more a way for me to grasp L.A. personally, to address my confusion as to how all of its parts and people fit together. I wasn’t looking to explain it; I was trying to understand it. If that makes sense.

You got to dip into a ton of very interesting worlds and subcultures in the course of your reporting. And you saw pretty amazing things. Were there moments when you looked around and thought “I can’t believe this exists…”

So many times. Certainly for the more out-there stuff – pagan church ceremonies; Topanga plant communication workshops; definitely the night I had beers and wings with Real Vampires (people who drink human blood, or enjoy their own blood being consumed). Truthfully, though, what’s hardest to accept is our homelessness problem, also known as our problem with drug addiction, mental illness, structural racism. It’s hard to believe it exists at such a scale. It’s hard to believe that scale is getting worse.

I love the little nuggets you dig up about modern LA. Like this one: There are more than 90 languages spoken in the public schools. Which facts blew you away?

How about the wilderness side? According to researchers at UCLA, Los Angeles is home to more than 4,000 species of animals and plants, including several dozen endangered species – which is more than any county outside of Hawaii. I know L.A. has a reputation for being a concrete kingdom – for plenty of good reasons – but it’s also an incredible place to live if you enjoy the outdoors.

Everybody in America has an idea about LA -- even if they’ve never been there -- is that helpful in creating a book like this? Or tricky, in that readers bring so many assumptions?

It makes it tricky because I wanted the book to work for people who know almost nothing about Los Angeles, and also for the L.A. heads who know it well. Same for people who love L.A. and people who hate it. (They’re often the same people, which includes me). For example, everyone’s heard of Hollywood, and plenty of people associate it with Los Angeles. And it is a huge part of our economy, our image. But very few people here work in TV or film; the great majority of Angelenos have no more connection to Hollywood than somebody in Spokane. So I needed to write about Hollywood, but ideally in ways that not everybody already understood or thought they understood.

Last fall, you wrote a piece about how Sean Penn had started what was probably the world’s largest COVID testing program—in the parking lot of Dodger Stadium. One of those things, like so many in the book, that was audacious and absurd and could only happen in L.A. You spent a big chunk of the pandemic volunteering there, and I wonder what that experience left you feeling.

It taught me about benevolence. Simple human kindness. All these people, most of them young people, who came together to build massive infrastructure on the fly. I mean, I think I talked about it in that story you and I did, but I haven’t made friends with this many young twentysomethings since I was… a young twentysomething.

Really, both on the parts of the volunteers and staff, and all of these Angelenos rolling through in their dirty cars – I just saw an enormous amount of kindness, mutual assistance, true empathy. We also had plenty of weirdos and jerks come through; white guys in luxury cars are truly the world’s worst citizens. But broadly it showed me that L.A. can be a very caring place. When it wants to be.

A lot of the early praise for the book mentions the kaleidoscopic structure in which you range far and wide, presenting vignettes and characters from a huge spectrum. What books or authors made you think this kind of approach could be successful?

There are a ton of books about L.A. that I’d mention — City of Quartz and Ecology of Fear by Mike Davis, principally — but two of my biggest inspirations were about other places: Istanbul by Orhan Pamuk and Maximum City by Suketu Mehta, about Mumbai. Both blend memoir, reporting, research, quirky profiles. When I was starting out, I went looking for books to learn from, even to emulate, that were both deep and shallow, hyper-focused and also broad, and I never really found any that were quite what I wanted to do. But those two did make me think I might be able to pull it off.

What’s your favorite place in LA?

So many places. Perhaps the beach? The big ones like Dockweiler or Zuma, or in Ventura or San Clemente. I love that the beaches are for everybody. They’re possibly the only single gathering place in L.A. where you actually see everybody.