About

The Big One is named after the mythical mega-quake predicted to hit Southern California at any moment, creating a future constantly hung in the balance. We chronicle this fate from the regional perspective of Los Angeles, narrating a mutually-sensed impending doom through fiction, essay, poetry, and things in-between, loosely organized into themes local to the city. We celebrate these themes in issues we call “Magnitudes,” from the Richter magnitude scale used to record the seismic strength of an earthquake, developed by Charles Richter and Beno Gutenberg at the California Institute of Technology in 1935.

This regional condition of physical instability holds a mirror to a broader emotional condition stemming from the imminent collapse that pervades our times. The tension toward something larger than you could imagine being not-so-far in the future can induce both paranoia and a sweet sense of relief. However, the project is not nihilistic. There’s still new ideas to be heard and minds to be roused through art and words. We think that’s beautiful and all there really is to do.