All right. We're back with Nancy Romulman, everybody. Welcome back to Walkins. Welcome.

I'm glad to be back here. Thank you for being here. I'm excited to talk to you about

40 bucks and a dream stories from Los Angeles. When did this come out exactly? So it came out

in September of 2024. It is a collection of writings from Los Angeles. I lived in L.A. for 18 years.

I wrote a lot for the L.A. Weekly. So some of the stories in here were, did appear in the weekly,

but some of them were new. And I tried to put it in, you know, obviously construction is everything

when you're writing. So I tried to give it, give the stories in a way that

would kind of build and inform you a bit about L.A. as it was, as it may be eternally, though,

of course, LA's changing. So anyway. You were just there, right? I was just there for Reason

magazine. So when the ice raids began, per usual, when there's these sort of demonstrations, protests, riots,

you know, we don't exactly know what to call them sometimes.

I always want to be there.

I always want to report on it sort of with clear eyes, if I can.

I've been able to do that for reason a lot.

So I banged out there and, you know, waded into the protest,

talked to other people around it, looked at other parts of the city, it was going on,

and banged out six stories in nine days, which was a lot for me. And hopefully gave people

a trustworthy view about what's happening on the ground. Because as you very well know,

depending on what your algorithm is showing you, it's either, you know, everything's on fire constantly at all times,

or there's nothing bad going on whatsoever. Right. Obviously, neither of these things are true.

So I think it's valuable to have people, you know, put their shoes on the ground and talk to a lot of people. And so I did that. Yeah, I did that. I got back a couple weeks ago. Did you go anywhere else in L.A. when you were there? Did you see like Altadena or the Palisades? I went. I didn't go. No. So I was not reporting at all on like any of the fires. I was just reporting on basically what's going on right now in terms of ice coming in and gathering people.

But what I did do, I did go around to different cities.

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