Lawrence Weschler, a graduate of Cowell College of the University of California, Santa Cruz, went on to a twenty-year stint at The New Yorker, followed by nearly fifteen years as director (now emeritus) of the New York Institute for the Humanities at New York University, though Southern California (where he was born in 1952 and then raised in the San Fernando Valley suburbs of LA) has remained his heart’s true home throughout. His more than twenty books include contrapuntal lives of both Robert Irwin (Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees) and David Hockney (True to Life); Mr Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder (on the Museum of Jurassic Technology); Vermeer in Bosnia (a wide-ranging collection which includes his celebrated New Yorker piece on The Light of LA); and more recently And How Are You, Doctor Sacks? a biographical memoir of his 35 year friendship with the late neurologist Oliver Sacks. For more, see www.lawrenceweschler.com