The Los Angeles Times Editorial Board

Our National Disgrace

The Los Angeles Times Editorial Board

Homelessness in Los Angeles has burst its traditional borders. These days, downtown's Skid Row is only the ugly epicenter of a staggering problem that radiates outward for more than one hundred miles. Homelessness has spread to gloomy underpasses and dark side streets, to parks, libraries, and subway platforms, so that there are now more than 50,000 people who lack a regular place to sleep in Los Angeles County. From Long Beach to Hollywood to Beverly Hills to Lancaster, no Angeleno can credibly claim to be unaware of the squalid tent cities, the sprawling encampments, or the despair and misery displayed there. In March 2018, the Editorial Board of the <i>Los Angeles Times</i> published a powerful six-part series describing the problem in this city&mdash;one that is mirrored to one degree or another up and down the West Coast, from Portland to San Francisco to San Diego. The editorials explain who LA's homeless people really are and how they got there, call for changes in policy toward the mentally ill, and urge weak-kneed politicians to be leaders in the struggle to provide housing for the homeless. All six editorials have now been bound together into a single vital and disturbing book.

Our Dishonest President

The Los Angeles Times Editorial Board

Even before Donald J. Trump reached his first hundred days in office, the <i>Los Angeles Times</i>'s Editorial Board published the first of six consecutive denunciations calling him &ldquo;Our Dishonest President.&rdquo; The paper's condemnation of Trump's lies, his authoritarian temperament, his war on journalism, and his obsession with conspiracies was as bold as it was unprecedented, as was its call to Californians to oppose the brazen acts of a man patently unfit to preside over the republic. It prompted a tremendous response: within days, the series garnered seven million page views.<p>Heyday is proud to present a paperback of the six editorials, brought up to date with an introduction by Davan Maharaj, <i>The Times</i>’s publisher and editor-in-chief, and by Nicholas Goldberg, the paper’s editor of the editorial pages. When read in sequence the arguments gain force and momentum, delivering a formidable and indispensable critique by one of America’s most important newspapers.