In the Aftermath

The Eaton and Palisade fires that tore through Los Angeles last year laid waste to two distinct communities: the tonier Pacific Palisades, where average home prices soar past $3 million, and parts of Pasadena like Altadena that are mostly working- and middle-class areas. As a result, as Karrie Jacobs writes in Books & the Arts’s June section, “the question is not just how to rebuild housing” but how to do so in a more egalitarian fashion. Answering this question has been made only more complicated by the Trump administration, which has targeted FEMA and other agencies in its gutting of the federal government, but a series of architects are currently on the job—as Jacobs shows. Surveying the small-scale efforts “by local architects” and some of the bigger ones too, she considers the problems of not just rebuilding Los Angeles in the wake of the fires but also finding a way to restore its sense of community. Read “How Should Los Angeles Rebuild After the Fires?”

Shell Shock

Alex Garland and Ray Mendoza’s Warfare eschews the dramatic conventions of military movies about the War on Terror and instead sticks to a single incident, drawing from the memories of the US veterans, among them Mendoza, who were on the ground. Across its trim 95-minute running time, it follows a failed US Navy SEALs operation in Ramadi, Iraq, in 2006. What results, Beatrice Loayza writes in her review, is a war movie of painstaking and ambiguous realism that feels quite different from what we have come to expect of such films. Its “careful attention to the details changes our relationship to war movies.” Viewers “may not be enraptured by heroics,” she adds, but “the film’s meticulous rendering of combat, coolly stripped of operatics,” plays its own part in dodging some of the hard questions that its anthropological approach raises. By presenting everything as empirically as possible—or at least viewing its effort in these terms—it seems “to quell a troubled conscience with the assurance that this is real and we are learning.” Read “Can Alex Garland and Ray Mendoza Remake the War Movie?”