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At TorchedLA, journalist Alissa Walker reports that in an annual ranking of park systems in the largest 100 cities, L.A. has dropped to 90th, which she fairly called “a bad look for a city set to host the largest sporting events in the world.”

Joan Didion fell in love with movies as a girl but would sour on Hollywood after working there, Alissa Wilkinson writes in ‘We Tell Ourselves Stories.’

In her new book, “We Tell Ourselves Stories: Joan Didion and the American Dream Machine,” Alissa Wilkinson paints the famously reserved author as an unabashed fan of Hollywood, especially the foursquare genre pictures churned out by studios in the 1940s and 1950s.

By Alissa Wilkinson Liveright: 272 pages, $30 If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores.

An important step in the quest to lessen anxiety is to stop fighting it, said Alissa Jerud, a clinical assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania.