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Los Angeles Review of Books •

Breaking Free of the Cult of Academia: An Interview With Amy Gentry

AMY GENTRY LIVES in Austin, Texas, and holds a PhD in English from the University of Chicago. She is the author of Good as Gone, a New York Times Notable Book, and Last Woman Standing.Her most recent novel, Bad Habits, is a literary psychological thriller about reckoning with the consequences of unchecked ambition, set in the cutthroat world of academia. Set in alternating timelines, one tracing Mac’s path to a mysterious, and deadly, grad school program, and the other set over the course of one
The Daily Beast •

Gimlets, Bukowski & Day Drinking: Missing L.A.’s Dive Bars

Los Angeles is a city built on contradictions. While it’s famous for its international stars, miles of beaches and devotion to over-the-top opulence, it also boasts an equally impressive network of gritty dive bars.

These are not the places where you’ll find the glitterati or the Insta-fluencers—the parade of people trying hard to look like they’ve never tried hard in their lives. No craft cocktails or sleek decor here; no scene, no dress code. These watering holes are practically as old as LA
Crimespree Magazine •

5 Femmes Fatale Who Inspired The Lady Upstairs

When I was writing my feminist noir debut novel, The Lady Upstairs, I turned to other noir novels (and films!) for inspiration on crafting a character that I wanted to be both a throwback to the genre I love and also, her own creation. In The Lady Upstairs, my main character, Jo, works as a literal femme fatale: blackmailing the bad men of Los Angeles in a honeypot sting arrangement. I found inspiration for Jo in the following strong women of noir–namely, the following five femmes fatale.
• The
CrimeReads •

How Today’s Authors Are Reinvigorating Noir’s Classic Tropes

Noir is alive and well and probably will never die (despite the fact that most people of my acquaintance don’t seem to know what it is when I share that I’ve written a feminist noir). When I’m asked to explain noir, too often I fall back on that old pornographic clarification: “I know it when I see it.” But the truth is, noir has traditionally rested heavily on the value of familiar tropes (as does any genre deeply entrenched and well known) and that familiar ground is what makes noir so immedia
CrimeReads •

The New Wave of Private Eye Fiction

There’s no disputing that crime fiction is a beloved genre, but trying to measure its appeal can be a difficult project. Perhaps we’re drawn to crime novels because they possess the ability to titillate the reader, with all that safely removed talk of murder that allows us to shock ourselves at a distance with the most violent and depraved urges of mankind. Or perhaps we like them because a crime novel, traditionally, must set the world to rights by the end of the book—the bad guy is locked up,
CrimeReads •

The Evolution of the Femme Fatale in Film Noir

You know her the moment she’s on screen: she’s got the best lines and the best wardrobe. She’s having more fun than anyone else around her—which usually means she’ll have to be punished by film’s end. The femme fatale isn’t a trope that originated with film noir—you can make strong arguments for shades of the femme fatale in biblical Eve, Ishtar, the Sirens, Medusa, and Circe. Anywhere a hero needs a test or a scapegoat, you’ll find her. But film noir is where she’s best embodied and remembered.
CrimeReads •

Tourism in Mansonland

Fifty years ago on August 9th, Sharon Tate, along with houseguests and her unborn child, were murdered on Cielo Drive in one of the hottest summers on record in Los Angeles. For the four months that the killers remained at large—following up the murder of Tate by the at-first-unconnected LaBianca murders in Silverlake—Angelenos kept their doors and windows shut tight against the unknown threat, bottling themselves and their anxieties up like a pressure cooker.

There have been other crime sprees
Make Change - Where Money and Mission Meet •

Hydroponic Farming Aims to Change the World

When “Mad Max: Fury Road” premiered in 2015, no one suspected it might actually be a documentary. OK, OK, maybe not a documentary—but the threat of civilization run amok by lack of water and resources is becoming a plausible reality.

The world is, undeniably, facing a water shortage crisis: Currently, 844 million people globally live without clean drinking water. In 2018, Cape Town, South Africa, was projected to be the first major city to completely run out of drinkable water. Severe water rat
Make Change - Where Money and Mission Meet •

7 Jobs Where a Woman’s Time and Experience Command Equal Pay

April 2 is Equal Pay Day—but don’t celebrate just yet. Equal Pay Day marks the day in the year women have to reach to make the same amount as men did during the course of the previous year. Measured by total earnings across 15 years, and accounting for time away from the workforce, women’s earnings were 49 percent of men’s earnings, on average. (And for women of color, the wage gap is much larger.) Theoretically, closing the pay gap by 2025 would lead to a 31 percent (or $28 trillion) increase i
Make Change - Where Money and Mission Meet •

Why You Should Spend Your Spring Break Preserving American Concentration Camps

Along the long, lonely highway to Mammoth, California, a popular winter sport destination, just north of the tiny town of Lone Pine and at the base of the beautiful snow-dusted Sierra Nevada, a small turn off leads to Manzanar, the most well-known of the American concentration camps for Japanese-Americans during World War II.

In March 2017, I joined the spring volunteer dig at Manzanar, with very little idea of what to expect. Volunteers were given a vague idea of what we’d be doing at signup a