A request for those writing about L.A.

Put Joan Didion, Mike Davis, Nathanael West, and the rest of the broad-brush catastrophizers back on the shelf. As incisive as that writing was when it first appeared, its most familiar formulas long ago degenerated into hasty-take clichés, negative blurbs. Climate change has turned every place on earth into a laboratory of apocalypse; there is nothing exceptional about Los Angeles's drastic, distorted relationship with nature. In any case, it might be good to wait until the fires have stopped burning and all the bodies and ashes have been retrieved before hitting send on the feuilltonistic pontification. To those in the middle of things, it can look grotesque.