Beyond L.A.’s glamorous, famously sunny façade, the city has always had some pretty deep thoughts going on.
L.A. is home to a slate of Nobel Prize winners, top universities and some of the most oft-cited research reservoirs in the world (among them the California Institute of Technology and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory). We are the “creative capital of the world,” and people don’t call you that just for being pretty. The weirder aspects of our city’s history have a cerebral component to them as well: L.A.’s origins are more heavily steeped in the occult than any other place in the country and, frankly, learning those crafts requires reading some pretty heavy books. A June op-ed in Forbes praised Los Angeles as the Silicon Valley of social impact. And even The New York Times conceded, as far back as 1999, that there’s brains behind L.A.’s beauty.
https://www.laweekly.com/arts/berggruen-institute-casts-la-as-the-lab-to-reconceive-humanity-9714296