By Ella Taylor

Among the 75 more newsroom staffers let go at the L.A. Times on Monday were three writers who, by any definition, spiffed up the cultural conversation in our city. Film critic Carino Chocano’s best work was embodied in her all too infrequent essays connecting movies to social trends — I’m not the first to notice that her last one, on the kinds of movies we get in hard times, now seems eerily prophetic. The departure of Scott Timberg, whose elegant profiles and think-pieces on literary figures kept Calendar’s pages humming amid the drone of celebrity gossip, leaves only David Ulin and his depleted team holding the fort for books. And Lynell George wrote long-form pieces that took us not only into thriving African-American arts subcultures, but truly all over the L.A. Cultural map. How rotten for them to lose their livelihoods and their platforms; how much the poorer we are for the loss of their voices.

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