What Makes Putin and the World’s Autocrats So Resilient? (WSJ / David Luhnow and Juan Forero)
New York State Built Elon Musk a $1 Billion Factory. ‘It Was a Bad Deal.’ “In terms of sheer direct cost to taxpayers, this may rank as the single biggest economic development boondoggle in American history." (WSJ / Julie Bykowicz and Ted Mann)
What 120 Degrees Looks Like in One of Mexico’s Hottest Cities. Residents of the northern city of Hermosillo struggled to breathe. (The New York Times / Photographs and Video by Cesar RodriguezWritten by Elda Cantú)
Los Angeles’s Bradbury Building is a gorgeous edifice built in 1893. You’ve seen the Bradbury if you’ve seen “Blade Runner;” the Bradbury was the setting for the Toymaker’s workshop. And the building has been featured in a million other movies and TV shows.
From the outside, the Bradbury just looks like a brick office building at the corner of 3rd and Broadway, downtown. It seems unremarkable, but the magic happens when you step inside.
The Bradbury is basically a tall, narrow courtyard, walled in with terra cotta, covered with a glass ceiling, and flanked with two iron, clanking hydraulic-powered elevators. Human conductors still operate them.
There’s a reason the Bradbury is in so many films. Aside from being beautiful, it’s also practical. The balconies allow the crew to shoot from many different angles and create a whole range of different moods for various genres. The Bradbury’s ceiling height can accommodate all the lights and the camera equipment. Also, the Bradbury is located near a parking lot (for all the vans and trailers), as well as places downtown where a film crew can go get lunch.
Lewis Bradbury, a gold-mining millionaire, commissioned the buillding in 1892, from notable architect Sumner Hunt.
As the story goes, Bradbury didn’t like any of the plans that Hunt showed him, and so, disappointed, was on his way out when, for some reason, one of Hunt’s young draftsmen caught his eye. George Wyman, the draftsman, had no professional training as an architect.
Bradbury pulled Wyman aside and asked him to build his very important half-million dollar office building.
Wyman consulted the spirit of his dead brother before deciding to take the offer.
The design of the Bradbury was directly inspired by a novel called Looking Backwards by Edward Bellamy. Written in 1887, the book takes place in the year 2000.
In other words, the design is a 19th Century vision of what a 21st Century skyscraper would look like. And the vision was fulfilled, because the Bradbury is still standing today.
As of the time this article was published, 2015, the Bradbury was being used as office space for the Los Angeles Police Department internal affairs division. And that’s why I called up this article to re-read it: I’m currently reading “Angel’s Flight,” a police procedural murder mystery by Michael Connelly, and some of the action takes place in the Bradbury. The novel was made into a season of the TV series “Bosch”—another place you can see the Bradbury on-screen
… movies don’t shoot in the Bradbury as frequently as they once did. Generally, filming is not as welcome downtown now that people live and work there. These days, film crews can’t blow up cars in the street or have 300 zombies stampede down Broadway in the middle of the workday.
A bad day for local journalism.
LA’s Richest Man Sells Union-Tribune to Feared ‘Chop Shop’ (Voice of San Diego / Will Huntsberry and Scott Lewis)
Update: I emailed Slate to cancel my sub, and they replied promptly and said they had done so. So, points to them for that. But there really needs to be a button on the site.
At the park this weekend I saw a bulldog wearing a pearl necklace. Big chunky pearls, like Barbara Bush used to wear.
The pearls probably weren’t real, but the dog probably was.
Slate Plus is raising its subscription rate from $59 to $119 annually. That’s a nope. I searched the website for 15 minutes to find out how to cancel my subscription and was unable to find a link. That’s sleazy, Slate.
Parakeet Panic. “When invasive parakeets began to spread in New York City in the 1970s, the government decided it needed to kill them all. Today: The offbeat panic about wild parrots, and a history of anxieties about population growth.” (The Last Archive)
An odd ChatGPT conversation
Wait, should I not be drinking airline coffee?. On the new Search Engine podcast, PJ Vogt investigates rumors that the water used on airlines is dirty and full of bacteria, and the flight crew won’t drink it, and won’t even use it to wash their hands.
“Harry Milas' sleight of hand skills are so good that he now helps to expose gambling rings. He explains the tricks of the trade and why he hates casinos.”
The Magician Who Catches Card Cheats in Casinos (The Guardian / Sian Cain)
In her new book “Nuts and Bolts Seven Small Inventions That Changed the World (in a Big Way),” structural engineer Roma Agrawal identifies and examines the seven of most basic building blocks of engineering that have shaped the modern world: the nail, the wheel, the spring, the lens, the magnet, the string, and the pump.
— Nuts and Bolts [99% Invisible]
Born into extreme poverty, [Cary] Grant was told as a child his mother had died. She had actually been placed in a psychiatric institution. It was the start of a life of repression and extraordinary reinvention.
— The Trauma of Cary Grant: How He Thrived After a Terrible Childhood - As Told by His Daughter. (The Guardian / Emma Brooks)
Grant was determined to give his only child, a daughter, born when he was 62, the good upbringing he never had. So he walked away from his film career to devote the rest of his life to raising her. That daughter, Emily Grant, is now an executive producer on a four-part TV series about her father’s life.
Want to read: This Bird Has Flown by Susanna Hoffs 📚Good interview with Hoffs, formerly of The Bangles, on Debbie Millman’s podcast. Hoffs is surprisingly smart. She’s written a novel and it sounds good.
Finished reading: Persian Fire by Tom Holland 📚 Fascinating story, a non-fiction history of the Persian-Greek war 2500 years ago. But a challenging read. The author uses ornate sentences that I had to read two or three times to get the gist of. I’ve read other Holland history books and enjoyed them, and did not find them quite so difficult.
Yesterday at the supermarket, I saw a man with a dog. The dog wasn’t wearing a service dog vest. It was just a dog, but inside the supermarket. It looked like a chocolate lab, but with a wiry tail.
I happened to be buying treats for Minnie at the dog treats shelf at the moment I saw the dog. The supermarket dog sniffed the shelves with great interest, then turned away.
Later, I saw a teen-age girl with an e-bike in the supermarket. She wasn’t riding it in the supermarket. She was just pushing it. Still, it was odd.
After that, I decided we were just bringing any dang thing we wanted into the supermarket, so I brought in the car and drove it up and down the aisles rather than walking, throwing my purchases from the shelves over my shoulder onto the back seat. I knocked a lot of things over, but it was otherwise very convenient.