Hachette India

Boom Times for the End of the World

Scott Timberg

A rich banquet at the cutting edge of the arts, rooted in California's eclectic cultural gumbo, by one of America's most gifted critics

The late Scott Timberg championed artists earnestly and relentlessly, with empathy and persistence. An award-winning writer for the Los Angeles Times and many other publications, he was one of the first to sound the alarm on the escalating economic challenges that have faced creative workers in the twenty-first century. He ultimately became a victim of the "culture crash" he chronicled, but his own words form a valuable window onto the cultural shifts that have upended creative traditions and expectations.

Timberg had a knack, as Ted Gioia writes in his introduction, for "finding the best in the cultural scene on the dream coast." Drawn from across his career, the passionate and wide-ranging reflections in this book span West Coast jazz and Gustavo Dudamel's LA Philharmonic, the early films of Spike Jonze and Christopher Nolan, the comics of Los Bros Hernandez and Adrian Tomine, and many more musicians, writers, filmmakers, architects, and impresarios.

Scott Timberg

Scott Timberg, a former arts reporter for the LA Weekly and the Los Angeles Times, wrote on music and culture and was a contributor to Salon, the New York Times, and Vox. He was an award-winning journalist, a blogger on West Coast culture, and an adjunct writing professor. His previous book, Culture Crash: The Killing of the Creative Class, was published in 2015 by Yale University Press. Richard Brody of the New Yorker called Culture Crash “a quietly radical rethinking of the very nature of art in modern life,” and Ben Downing, writing in the Wall Street Journal, said, “Mr. Timberg succeeds in assembling a large, coherent, and troubling mosaic . . . weaving all manner of information and opinion into a fluent narrative of cultural decline.” Timberg died by suicide on 10 December 2019 in Los Angeles. He was fifty years old.