I was first exposed to the Glass House in a lecture hall in 2001. A few weeks earlier, the twin towers had collapsed, and along with it, the old frontier sense of impermeability. A black and white slide of the Glass House clicked into view, and I felt an overpowering sense of relief, as if everything we had collectively lost was somehow preserved by that structure: the gracefulness of transparency.

There’s nothing more ridiculous—and deadly serious—than television. Like a drunk uncle who has for years been taunted, mocked, despised, and yet never fully expunged from the larger family of entertainment, television keeps hanging in there, trying to produce something of value. On occasion it does. The recent rumpus over the hosting of the Tonight Show is an excellent illustration of one generation refusing to hand over the reins to the next generation.

If you spend enough time on Earth, you begin to think of religion as a clever way to charge for something that is inherently free. Spirituality is like photosynthesis for the soul, whereas religion is a kind of shuttered greenhouse, artificially controlling everyone’s growth rates.

Like the music industry or the neighborhood video store, the publishing industry is witnessing a transition of its own; a farewell, perhaps, to hardcopies as a way of life, and an emphasis on the transitory nature of the screen-read. In November of 2009, Amazon, the powerful online purveyor of books and music, flew out several of New York’s most prominent literary agents to Seattle to break down their business plan. This business plan featured drastic cost-cutting on the prices of new hard covers from $25 to $8.99, and an aggressive marketing focus on so-called ‘e-books,’ virtual copies of literature that can be read on mobile devices such as the Kindle.

Like a hologram, you have to approach Los Angeles from just the right angle, or it appears to be a flimsy nothingness. This is why housing prices here never really hit bottom; if real estate is all about location, and that location exists only in your mind, then Los Angeles is perpetually located in the hottest market. So where is here, in a city based on imagination? If you accidentally fall asleep and forget to project your own reality, does it all vanish overnight?