When Arthur's main brain, Jay Babcock, moved to Brooklyn, the magazine went with him (as LAObserved reported yesterday). Issue #30 -- on paper -- is coming very soon. And it will be available at Chango, so, movers and slackers, no need to worry about your reading material. It'll be available for download, too. All would be fine, except that Babcock shut down his Nature Trumps blog about the L.A. River. The last headline: "Nature Trumps is kaput." No need for flowery prose when you've already decamped. So Brooklyn's gain is our loss.

I emailed Babcock and asked why on Earth he had moved to Brooklyn (though, for the record, I LOVE Brooklyn). It took him about two minutes to respond to that and other questions with:

I lived in Atwater Village, beneath the police and tv helicopters, and amidst the almost-nightly gunfire and break-ins.

I graduated from UCLA in 1992 and have been in L.A. ever since.

It's devolving very fast now -- there are creeping crises (overdevelopment, journalism implosion, traffic, health care, schools, crime, bad police dept, general cultural dumbness and hostility to the Arts) that, short of catastrophe, are unsolvable given L.A.'s government structure -- and I finally figured a way out. I don't want to live anymore in the psychic death hole that is Carusoland. And I don't want to be there when the next earthquake hits, or when Griffith Park and the Hollywood Hills finally burn. Angelenos don't strike me as being particularly resilient. The city is terminal.

I have so many friends in L.A., but ... well, you have to spend too much time driving and finding parking to make visits and get-togethers as pleasant as they should be.

And so on.

Bright spots: Family. Cinefamily. McCabe's. FoLAR. Elf Cafe. The L.A. Record.

Psychic death hole. No one should live in a place they regard as a psychic death hole.