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Here is a history of work in six words: from jobs to careers to callings.

Until quite recently, we had little concept of “progress” in our labor. Around the world, people hunted or harvested, just as their parents and grandparents had. They hammered nails. They assembled gears and sewed thread and patched homes. Their work was a matter of subsistence and necessity; it was not a race for status or an existential search for meaning. These were jobs. And for hundreds of millions of people everywhere, work is still work—grueling or boring or exploited or poorly paid, or all of the above.

In the 19th century, the railroads and the telegraph forced American companies to change the way they organized their labor. In 1800, traveling from Manhattan to Chicago took, on average, four weeks; in 1857, it took two days. With goods and information moving faster than ever, firms headquartered in major cities had to track prices from Los Angeles to Miami. To conduct this full orchestra of operations, they built a new system for organizing labor. They needed managers. “As late as 1840, there were no middle managers in the United States,” Alfred Chandler observed in The Visible Hand, his classic history of the rise of America’s managerial revolution.

Rail and telegraphs made new kinds of businesses possible, including department stores, mail-order houses, and the national oil and steel behemoths. Large companies required massive, multilevel bureaucracies. And within these laborious labyrinths, workers could ascend from grunt to manager to executive. These corporations invented the modern journey of a career, that narrative arc bending toward a set of precious initials: VP, SVP, CEO.

As the managerial revolution created a sense of professional progress, the decline of organized religion and social integration in the 20th century left many Americans bereft of any sense of spiritual progress. For some, work rose to fill the void. Many highly educated workers in the white-collar economy feel that their job cannot be “just a job” and that their career cannot be “just a career”: Their job must be their calling.

What’s wrong with that? Perhaps nothing. Some people simply love their job, and it would be ridiculous for me to tell them that actually, they are quietly suffering from some disease they cannot perceive. But many of them are also adherents to a cult of productivity and achievement, wherein anything short of finding one’s vocational soulmate amounts to a wasted life. These workers have founded a new kind of religion—one that valorizes work, career, and achievement above all else. And it’s making them a little bit crazy.

I call this new religion “workism.” Workism is not a simple evil or virtue; rather, it’s a complex phenomenon. It is rooted in the belief that work can provide everything we have historically expected from organized religion: community, meaning, self-actualization. And it is characterized by the irony that, in a time of declining trust in so many institutions, we expect more than ever from the companies that employ us—and that, in an age of declining community attachments, the workplace has, for many, become the last community standing. This might be why more companies today feel obligated to serve on the front lines in political debates and culture-war battles.

The credo that work should be the centerpiece of one’s identity quietly governs several stages of modern life. For many children and their parents, it has created an obsession with educational achievement that is igniting an anxiety crisis. For adults, it leads to overwork in the labor force and less time focused on family, friends, and personal pursuits.

In some cases, the worship of work squeezes out other values and relationships that are more conducive to a healthy life and community. In an era of diminishing attachments, career and work sometimes seem like the last truly universal virtues. In a 2019 Pew Research Center survey, roughly half of Americans said that the most important part of a fulfilling life is work that provides joy and meaning. Less than a third said the same about being in a committed relationship or having children. Well, one might say, that’s just one report. But this week, a widely circulated Wall Street Journal survey found that traditional values such as patriotism, marriage, and community seem to be falling out of favor. Although the headline and viral graphs almost certainly exaggerate the degree of decline, the underlying survey found that one virtue finished first, above tolerance, community, and even self-fulfillment: “hard work.”

I think we’re at the cusp of a fourth revolution in work. If I were to write the lede of a similar essay in 20 years, I would have to say, “Here is a history of work in eight words: from jobs to careers to callings to …” Except I’m not sure what the eighth word should be yet.

Today, work and workism are facing a double-barreled revolution—the remote-work phenomenon and the dawn of generative AI.

By snipping the tether between work and home, telecommuting is changing the way that millions of people work, the kinds of companies they start, and where they live. The immediate implications are already fascinating: Fewer commutes and empty offices have decimated public-transit revenue, buckled the commercial-real-estate industry, and triggered showdowns between in-office bosses and white-collar workers seeking flexibility in their schedule. But the second-order effects might be even more interesting. Remote work has encouraged many Americans to seek bigger homes to accommodate their home office, which has created a “donut effect” of plumped-up housing prices in the suburbs of many metro areas. This year, a new paper noted that female remote workers are more likely to intend to have a baby than their all-office counterparts, suggesting that Work From Home could increase fertility rates. Some data even suggest that WFH has encouraged men to pull back on working hours, possibly putting a dent in workism itself.

Imagining utopian scenarios is easy: Perhaps the flattening of the job market will make labor more equal around the country and around the world; perhaps the legacies of workplace sexism, ageism, ableism, and racism will come crumbling down with the demise of the office. But imagining dystopian scenarios is equally easy: Perhaps the disappearance of the workplace will increase modern anomie and loneliness. If community means “where you keep showing up,” then, for many people, the office is all that’s left. What happens when it goes the way of bowling leagues and weekly church attendance?

The other prong is AI. Over the past few years, news of fresh AI breakthroughs—in solving games, in predicting protein shapes, in mimicking human language—has come fast and furious. The release of ChatGPT and GPT-4, the latest large language model from OpenAI, has transformed the way millions of people think about the future of work. People once believed that although machines were talented at replicating human brawn, general intelligence and creativity were firmly in the “for humans only” category. But we may discover that the opposite is true: Text-to-image tools such as Midjourney give ordinary people with little artistic genius access to a superhuman savant of pastiche, allowing them to mix and match styles to create characters, design homes, and produce extraordinary images. ChatGPT, using GPT-4 technology, can write code, poetry, parodies, news articles, book summaries, idea outlines, literature reviews, bibliographies, and bespoke Wikipedia pages about obscure historical events. The implications of this kind of program for white-collar industries are both thrilling and terrifying.

Confidently predicting the future of any larval technology is a fool’s errand. I’ll give it a go anyway. In the 1994 paper “Household Appliances and the Use of Time,” the economists Sue Bowden and Avner Offer found that time-using technologies (such as TV) diffused faster throughout the consumer economy than time-saving technologies (such as vacuum cleaners and refrigerators). The reasons are complex; breadwinner husbands may have demanded TVs before vacuums because they didn’t clean the house. But Bowden and Offer conclude that time-using novelties might also spread faster because they delight people and confer status. By extension, one might expect that generative AI tools such as Midjourney and ChatGPT will be gangbusters consumer technologies before they are mainstream producer technologies. For the next few months, the most obvious AI use case for nonprogrammers will be making stuff to share on social media and group texts in the spirit of “lol these machines are still dumb” or “lol this is kind of amazing.” Generative AI will waste 1 billion hours of time before it saves 1 billion hours of time.

But eventually, I expect that the technological descendants of these tools really will prove revolutionary, bringing the modern workforce into its fourth age of work: from jobs to careers to callings to chimeras.

The chimerical age of work will have several components. First, as people become fluent in the language and faculties of their AI tools, work in almost every economic domain will represent a co-production between human and machine. (If you think of the internet as a kind of proto-AI that allows individuals to work with a database of collective intelligence, you could argue that we’re already in the initial stages of this chimera age.) It will be common for architects and illustrators to work with text-to-image AI, and for home buyers to use these tools to mock up their dream home and rooms. It will be de rigueur for consultants and writers to outline, research, and brainstorm with LLMs; steadfastly refusing to use these tools will, in time, seem as arbitrary as never using search engines. Software engineers will consider AI co-programmers to be as fundamental to their work as computer keyboards. “Was this done with AI?” will soon be as strange and redundant a question as “Was this done with an internet connection?” (Every technology incurs a backlash culture, and I also suspect that, just as the rise of streaming music coincided with the resurgence of vinyl records, the eerie ubiquity of AI-inflected work will create a niche market of bespoke, explicitly anti-AI products.)

The word chimera has two very different meanings. The first is a mythological creature composed of three different animals, and it is in that spirit that I’m predicting a future of human-machine co-productions. But a chimera is also an illusory dream—something profoundly hoped for that doesn’t come to pass.

The technologies that most empower humanity almost always produce a shadow ledger of pain. The steam engine unleashed the industrial revolution and brutally shortened life spans. Nuclear technology can power energy reactors or atomic bombs. The internet makes us productive and unproductive, delighted and miserable, informed and deluded. Like the future of everything else, the future of work will be, above all, messy.

This article has been excerpted from Derek Thompson’s forthcoming book, On Work.

Close your eyes and think about what rock and roll looks like. Do you see a gang of comrades wielding and/or destroying instruments onstage? Do you see Mick and Keef, or Buckingham and Nicks, or all of the Blink-182 boys acting simultaneously like friends, siblings, colleagues, and rivals? This image is, by some measures, old-fashioned—in rock and other genres, bands are no longer prime.

For example: If you scanned the highest reaches of Billboard’s Hot Rock & Alternative Songs chart last week, you’d find many solo artists going by their birth name (Steve Lacy, Zach Bryan) or TikTok-friendly alias (d4vd, dazy). Not until spot No. 10 would you see an actual band (one whose heyday was long ago: Linkin Park). This week’s cross-genre Hot 100 chart is even starker—the highest placement by a band is at No. 50 (for a song that’s actually by two bands, Fuerza Regida and Grupo Frontera). Exceptions exist in many vibrant scenes, such as K-pop and the jam-band circuit. Yet even in indie rock, much of the buzz now goes to individuals.

The singer-songwriters Julien Baker, Phoebe Bridgers, and Lucy Dacus have all been recipients of such buzz. Over the past few years, each woman’s highly specific take on emotionally vulnerable guitar music has achieved fervent acclaim (plus moderate fame in the case of Bridgers, a Taylor Swift tourmate and a tabloid fascination). Together, they’ve formed a supergroup called boygenius—whose mission is, in part, to make a last stand for bands.

The cover of boygenius’s 2018 EP featured the trio posing like Crosby, Stills & Nash did for its debut. Recently, a Rolling Stone cover featured boygenius outfitted in the same way that Nirvana was for the magazine’s cover in 1994. Boygenius’s first full album, The Record, is out on Friday. Although Baker, Bridgers, and Dacus are known for solemn, often hushed, solo work, the album features rollicking passages that seem perfect for long drives and festival gigs. I interviewed the group with a question in mind: By harkening back to the archetype of the world-uniting rock band (which is often associated with men), are these three queer, 20-something women being nostalgic—or making a novel case for the glory of collaboration?

Sitting together on the quilt of a Los Angeles Airbnb’s four-poster bed, the trio flaunted their personalities in a kind of rowdy harmony. Baker, a Carhartt-clad multi-instrumentalist raised on punk rock, gave stream-of-consciousness speeches about capitalism. The slyly charismatic Bridgers cracked wise from within her NASA hoodie. Dacus—whose music has a sweeping, essayistic quality—murmured considerately, often while lying down. Interaction between the three was nonstop. At one point, Dacus asked if she could rest her head on Bridgers’s knee. Bridgers assented with a warning: “It’ll be bony!”

Our conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Spencer Kornhaber: The rollout for this album is giving a self-conscious, next-big-thing, alt-rock-band-from-the-’90s vibe. Is that what you’re going for?

Phoebe Bridgers: That’s deeply what it is: acting like we’re already a legacy. These days, people try to make it seem like you made your record in your bedroom and you had some dark backstory and you were discovered by the label. Nobody shows up and trashes a dressing room. (Don’t trash your dressing room. The people who you want to suffer from that are not suffering from it.) Rock used to be, like, a sin. Now when you think rock, you think Coors or the Super Bowl.

Julien Baker: Before, when big rock bands were a huge deal, everything was about the album as a body of work, because the record store was the gatekeeper of taste. And now there’s infinite splintering of taste. So it’s nice to be like, We want to be a big rock band and not the cool, obscure thing. Put the foot-on-the-monitor guitar solo in there, put the fun Americana lyric in there, because it makes people happy.

Kornhaber: Part of what you’re talking about is the power of a band, right? You three got your start as solo artists, and there’s a sense that bands in rock are less popular these days. Why do you think that is?

Lucy Dacus: My theory is that labels don’t want to sign more than one person, because it’s a liability if the band breaks up and jeopardizes the product.

Baker: This has always been the aim of capitalism: to make everybody into an individual. In a band, the identity is more than the sum of the individuals. Robert Plant and John Bonham and Jimmy Page all have their superpowers, but there’s still a Justice League of Led Zeppelin. This is going to get pull-quoted as me being like, “Rock and roll ain’t what it used to be.”

Bridgers: It ain’t!

Dacus: It’s not that it was better. Things change. All art movements are in response to a previous thing. I’m a nostalgic person, and I get annoyed by the nostalgia for ’70s rock.

Baker: Because people are like, “Guitar music is dead.” No, the guitar sounds different now. You don’t like the guitar music that you’re hearing.

Kornhaber: Does being in this band allow you to be more like yourself?

Baker: I’m more of an extreme caricature of myself, in a way. When someone engages with your music as your first name, last name, then you’re like, Okay, everything I do has to communicate the fullness of my personhood. But I can be a freak in this band. I can be the freaky guitar player in boygenius.

Dacus: Exactly. Did you hesitate, Phoebe?

Bridgers: Oh, I was just thinking, we are characters. There’s only such a small amount of us that can be shown. But I don’t think I’m acting a part.

Dacus: I don’t want our fans to think that they know us that well.

Bridgers: Insert Fiona Apple’s “This world is bullshit” speech.

Kornhaber: You were talking about wanting to move away from indie, obscure music. How did that play out in making this album?

Dacus: We’ve talked a lot about Julien wanting more sick riffs. It was fun having that barometer to be like, “This really hits and will be awesome at a festival.”

Baker: I do feel the impulse, when I’m with you all, to just do something that feels good. When I’m making my own music, I feel a bit self-conscious. The drum needs to be a complex meter. I was just thinking about [the new boygenius song] “Anti-Curse.” It’s just [makes crushing sound] the most simple-ass drum beat you can imagine.

Bridgers: That recording really scratches my brain.

Baker: Because what you want to happen happens when you want it to. You’re like, And this would be the part where there’s a dropout and a big part! And then there is a dropout and a big part.

Dacus: You’re satisfied, and you can tune in to the meaning in the lyrics better.

Kornhaber: One thing that comes up in your lyrics a lot are places like gas stations, cowboy bars—places that are in between, and nonurban places. Why are you writing about those places so often?

Dacus: We all love liminality.

Bridgers: In a monoculture, the places you notice that are existing as their own ecosystem are the most interesting to me.

Dacus: Creatively, I get a lot from spaces like that, because nothing is expected of me. I don’t have to be a specific version of myself. It’s a non-place, or a place where nobody is stagnant. People are in and out, so there’s this refreshed energy, and that’s helpful for me in order to hear my own thoughts.

Kornhaber: What do you make of liminal spaces being fetishized online?

Dacus: We all love them.

Bridgers: It makes me sad, though. It’s post-nostalgia to me. The classic empty arcade or whatever—those places feel like they don’t exist anymore. I just can smell a lot of those pictures. A lot of them smell like an indoor pool.

Dacus: I never thought about the smell of them. I take it as a new ontological thought experiment that a lot of people are engaging with. It’s artful to notice the intangible details of something and put them together. It really does something for me.  

Kornhaber: That’s making me think about the album’s depiction of love. It always sounds like a telepathic thing: You know what another person’s thinking; you feel really known. Why do you all seem to agree on that portrayal of love in your songwriting?

Bridgers: I have this impulse to not look under the hood of why that is. There’s just this magical force that is our friendship.

Dacus: That’s the fourth boygenius. I’ve had people in my life who think that they can telepathically understand me, and it’s judgmental; they don’t take the time to actually find out from me who I am. So I do think that [telepathic love] exists, but a lot of people think they have it and are missing it.

Bridgers: And! We work on our relationship. We do therapy. It is hard work to have achieved the easy thing.

Baker: Luce, you were talking about how it’s messed up when people say, “No one knows you like I do.” It’s like, Yeah, because we have an individual relationship, no one will have our dynamic. Also, part of love is curiosity. When you love someone, you are signing up to learn how they change.

Kornhaber: You said you do therapy together. What does it mean to work on yourselves as friends?

Dacus: There’ve been a lot of conversations about identifying what’s worth protecting in our relationships and how to do it. Is it weird to talk about this? Is this a breach—?

Baker: No.

Bridgers: I would have raised my hand if that were true, but I’m not scared of this conversation.

Baker: Yeah, therapy is not a punishment. Therapy isn’t a last-ditch effort. Therapy can be a prophylactic exercise.

Bridgers: We’re going to be in a lot of challenging situations this year. We just want to know there’s a shorthand for our communication skills when things are hard. Personally, I have a really hard time with that, but it’s the easiest with y’all already. It’s fun to protect something that is not yet in jeopardy.

Dacus: We’ll be good at it.

Kornhaber: A lot of the lyrics on the album sound like they’re about romance. But I know that the song “Leonard Cohen” is about a car trip that you all had together. Is friendship love and romantic love as different as our culture makes it seem?

[In unison]: No!

Dacus: I have tons of romantic friendships that I treasure. I had a conversation recently with a friend who really disagrees with that and thinks that hierarchically, friendship is the highest form of love—and romance is a demotion.

Bridgers: Yeah. Like the sexual tension between two cis hetero guys who never talk about their feelings. The yearning in both of those people, it’s so—

Baker: You mean between me and my bro-ass lesbian friends at the gym being like, “Whaddup.”

Bridgers: I just mean there are less boundaries to those relationships [than people think].

Dacus: I agree. People should get in touch with their instincts.

Bridgers: And their intentions. Sometimes competitiveness is just love, if you work on it.

Baker: I’ve been trying to recontextualize when I find myself envious of a person. What is it that they’ve got that I want to be?

Bridgers: I love that feeling so much. When I meet somebody or see a show and I’m like, I should have had that, it makes me feel alive.

Dacus: There’s so much less competition in this world than people think. Every person is their whole universe and can’t be repeated. Competition’s been prescribed to us for market purposes.

Kornhaber: Another variety of love is familial love—the subject of the first song, “Without You Without Them,” in which you pay tribute to a friend or lover’s ancestors. Some of you have complicated relationships with your parents. How did that influence the decision to open this album on that note of familial gratitude?

Bridgers: I’ve been thinking about this a lot. Yes, I have a lot of sympathy for my inner child. But I wouldn’t trade my current life for anything I withstood. My ability to make chosen family, and the hard work that it took to be intimate with people, is now one of my greatest attributes.

Dacus: I have songs about how family doesn’t matter or, for instance, killing someone’s dad—that sort of thing. With “Without You Without Them,” I wanted to be super generous. Even if somebody really sucks, if they had to be there in order for you to be here, I have to love something about them. I have to be grateful, even if I hope they die.

Kornhaber: The last track on the album, “Letter to an Old Poet,” is a callback to what you’ve done before. Phoebe, you go from singing, “I want to be emaciated” on the 2018 song “Me & My Dog” to “I want to be happy” on this new song. Which was the harder thing to admit in lyrics?

Bridgers: Hard in a completely different way. I was having really disordered eating around the time I met y’all. The only way that I could write that “emaciated” lyric was by myself. And then this song, I could only write that with you guys. Lucy wrote it, but it’s true for me. You noticed it about me: I’m ready to be happy. So that is special.

Seven California Highway Patrol officers and a registered nurse were charged for the 2020 death of a man who was being restrained on the ground and repeatedly said he could not breathe, Los Angeles County District Attorney George Gascón announced in a news conference.

This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.

Last week, I asked readers for their thoughts on cities versus suburbs.

Lauren argues that cities remain sufficiently appealing to rural and suburban migrants. What’s needed are more affordable places to live within their borders:

I grew up in the 1970s and early 1980s in a classic middle-class suburb in the city of Calgary, Canada––big yards, quiet streets, pretty homogeneously middle-class and white. It was a five-minute walk to a bus stop, where a bus ran by every 30 minutes or so; a 10-minute walk to a 7-11; a 25-minute walk to a shopping mall; and later, a 30-minute walk to a new light-rail-transit station. That was it. There was nothing to do unless you drove.

As a result, although it was apparently safe, it encouraged teenage behaviors that were really risky. I used to go with a friend to the 7-11, hang around and wait for teenage guys with cars to show up, then hop in their vehicles to drive aimlessly and drink alcohol-infused Slurpees. Or meet guys in empty schoolyards to drink whatever alcohol we had.

I was not some teenage rebel; I was a straight-A student who played classical piano and worked part-time to pay for my planned university education. There was simply nothing else to do.

I hated the suburbs and their stultifying boredom and homogeneity with a passion. I got out as soon as I could and never went back. I now live in Toronto, which is large, diverse, and safe. My house is small by American standards—about 1,600 square feet—but I raised two kids in it comfortably and now it is bigger than I need. I can walk to a range of restaurants, retail, and services. I know my neighbors and the local shopkeepers. I am a five-minute walk away from a subway, and I use it all the time to go to restaurants, concerts, the theater, art galleries—you name it.

My kids had independence from an early age, because they could walk and subway everywhere, and they did. When they did summer camp at the museum, from age 10, I sent them on the subway. As teenagers, they went to board-game cafés, concerts, restaurants, and movies on their own. They could stay at school late for clubs and programs without asking me to come pick them up. They had way more fun than I did, and way more safely.

Cities will remain popular because they fulfill certain human needs that suburbs just don’t. There has certainly been a bump in social disorder in Toronto post-pandemic. I see it on the subway and in public places: more people with mental-health and addiction troubles, more homelessness, more suffering. But it remains an incredibly safe and functional city.

The big challenge is affordability, a challenge that shows no sign of abating. Young people will leave not because they prefer the suburbs but because the average monthly rent for a one-bedroom apartment is a shocking $2,375. A one-bedroom condo is over $600,000.

Both my kids want to make their lives in the city. I don’t know what that looks like, unless housing prices come down. Perhaps it will necessitate a move to a smaller and more affordable Canadian city, like Halifax or Ottawa. To a significant degree, Toronto is a victim of its own success.

This is the real challenge to my mind: not to make city life appealing, because a good city is incredibly appealing, but to make it accessible and affordable for everyone who wants a piece of it. This issue is on the radar of our municipal, provincial, and federal governments. I sure hope they can solve it.

Lori makes a pitch for “the unique charms of the ‘inner-ring suburb.’” She writes:

Here in Cleveland, our suburbs surround the city like rings in a tree trunk. Ours is about a 15- minute drive from downtown. We have bus and rapid-transit options. Lake Erie is a couple blocks from our house. Our town is pedestrian-oriented. Congestion is not too hectic. And anything I truly need is available within about five blocks.

My husband and I are urban-oriented people. We desire a variety of good restaurant options, cultural activities, and museums. But we also enjoy nature walks. So, it’s a good thing we have many parks in our area as well as the lakefront. We wanted some suburban amenities for our daughter, such as a backyard for playing, a stable school system that offered a quality curriculum, easy access to grocery stores, drug stores, her pediatrician … and also programs for kids such as day camps, music lessons, playgrounds, city pools, and a good library. And our inner-ring suburb has it all.

We have a small backyard with a garden. But we are located five miles from the heart of the city. Our neighbors are friendly and welcoming, and there are many citywide events planned throughout the year. You get all the privacy and diversity of a large city (our suburb is home to immigrants from at least 50 different countries) but do not sacrifice the conveniences of life in the suburbs. I think that inner-ring suburbs are the way to go.  

Bob suggests that the place he lives began as a suburb but is now something different:

In the 1950s and 1960s, Orange County was characterized as a “bedroom community” to Los Angeles. In Fullerton, 30 miles south of downtown L.A., you could buy a home on a half acre of land for, in today’s dollars, around $300,000. Current market value: $2 million.

Today I live in Irvine, California, where homes are crammed onto tiny lots 10 feet apart. Your private space is very small, but there is a lot of well-planned shared community space. You will not find the smallest of homes for anything close to $300,000. Throughout the county, multistory apartment and condominium buildings are rising in the “downtown” areas of various cities. I feel as if I am in one of the nicer and safer neighborhoods in a very large city.

Orange County, population 3-plus million, has most of the economic and cultural opportunities of nearby Los Angeles. It has smaller urban centers all over for entertainment, dining, and shopping. It also has many city governments. And it’s a lot easier to affect local government in a city of 150,000 than one the size of L.A. It seems more democratic. Orange County is probably not unique in America. Maybe we need a new term: city-burb.

Ryan disputes the stereotypes of suburbs:

The notion of the suburbs as homogenous (read: racist, dull, and shut down by 9 p.m.) is badly outdated. In my metro area, there are inner-ring and outer-ring suburbs, and three times as many people live in the suburbs than the city. These suburbs are not all the same; you can identify at least six distinct sociopolitical cultures in the suburbs overlapping with the area’s peculiar geography. The suburbs have diversified racially in the past 25 years and now have the majority of the metro area’s Hispanic and South Asian populations. And restaurateurs and cultural entrepreneurs are increasingly choosing the suburbs for their new ventures. COVID accelerated these trends, but I suspect it’ll be much longer until our culture drops the “boring sameness” connotation of suburbia.

Having tried the suburbs and the city, Lindsey chose neither:

I was raised in the wild of the Texas Hill Country, on a beautiful free-range cattle ranch where I hiked and biked the rocky landscape, ate wild pecans, and climbed my favorite live oak nearly every day of my childhood after school. While I loved that experience for myself, I always envisioned living in a built-in community, like the kids at school who grew up with default neighborhood friend groups.

When my husband and I decided to purchase our first home, we really fell for the slick marketing behind “custom” homes in new suburbs. We picked a location in the sprawling Austin metropolis, not far from where I grew up. The particular suburb we bought into had pitched us a map that showed not only the expected neighborhood amenities like sidewalks, playgrounds, and pools, but expansion plans that called for trail systems, fairgrounds, and even river access. We swallowed up the $600 annual HOA fees and waited for our “investment” to pay off.

The expansion plans disappeared, of course, and we learned a great lesson in managing expectations. The house itself was perfectly fine. Our attempts at built-in community turned into a barrage of MLM sales pitches and invitations to “like” every social-media page of a neighbor or their business. The HOA charged us exorbitant daily fees for atrocities like leaving a visible weed in the front flower beds or putting the trash out too soon on the night before trash day. We also couldn’t park in the street overnight, for reasons that were hotly debated in the Facebook group.

During our first year in the community, a tornado knocked down two homes under construction down the street from us. The second year, we had 100 days above 100 degrees. Once, a neighbor drove her car in front of me onto the sidewalk where I was walking my dog and pushing my infant in a stroller because she thought my Facebook comment was condescending. (She was probably right about that part.)

Vehicles were burglarized and vandalized occasionally. One neighbor’s dog was killed by a venomous snake in their backyard, which shared a fence with ours. They never found the snake so they don’t know for sure. I didn’t know what to do, so I baked her a cake.

We began dreaming about picking up our pretty new home and moving it to somewhere far, far away, with mountains and snow. So we cut our losses, sold the home for a bit less than we paid for it, and moved to a rural neighborhood near Spokane, Washington.

Today, I’ve seen a porcupine, deer, chipmunks, turkeys, and robins in my yard. I can hike in the pine forest any day I want. And we have lovely neighbors just up and down the street! We can see a couple of their roofs from here. We have no HOA restrictions or fees, although we aren’t allowed to cut down our share of the forest. We’re able to build an accessory dwelling unit (ADU) someday, if we ever wanted a small second home for family or to offer for rent.

I’ve quit social media. I like these neighbors too much to learn about their political views. When our own dog died, we buried her in the yard, where we’ll plant a flowering tree for her. In a lot of ways, we were nudged North and West by both climate change and politics. I was born in this part of America, so I feel like I’ve come full circle, geographically. I have learned that community is what you make of it. And you can’t change things where you live, but you can change where you live.

We also lived in the city—downtown Spokane—for a few months before finally moving into our current home just as the first pandemic restrictions were announced. In the city, parking was an expensive nightmare. Our vehicles were each hit with rocks. The front door to our building was broken into. Many passive-aggressive notes were left in the laundry room. The neighbor below us filed a noise complaint about my toddler’s footsteps. We couldn’t possibly imagine moving back.

So I know you said to opine about urban and suburban life, but rural life is my favorite. This summer, I’m going to grow strawberries and watch the mountain bluebirds make their nests. I’m going to raise my children to love the Earth and to take care of her, and I’m happily going to live closer to nature to make that easier to accomplish.

Zoe argues that the city is a good teacher:

I live in New York City, and it is the best choice for our two children, for two reasons. The first is exposure to all kinds of people. While my kids might be missing out on some nature education, I can make this up easily with a few trips to big parks every year, whereas the kind of daily interactions they get with people from all walks of life is not something I could foster in the suburbs. That is because of reason two: public transit and a walkable city! The isolation that the car-dependent suburbs create reduces the range of people one comes across, and that is not something I want for my children. Walking everywhere also means my toddler has a great sense of orientation, and is developing early independence.

Fabrice makes the case for commuting:

I’m writing this from the 15th floor of an office building on Third and Market in San Francisco, but I commute on rail to work each day from Fremont (recently voted the “happiest” suburb in the U.S., for whatever reason). After work today I’m going to walk across the street to a favorite local bar. It’s a place of interesting conversations that happen between random strangers talking about everything and nothing. After that, if I wanted, I could go stop by a Detroit-style pizza joint and grab a square, or grab a high-quality bowl of noodles, or head to the urban food court at the mall for some fairly high-quality mall-food options before heading home. What I can’t do is wander too far past that mall, because Hyde and Taylor is an open-air drug market and I’d be carrying my work laptop.

When I get back? There’s good Indian and Chinese food in Fremont, but nothing’s open past 9 p.m. besides fast food, and the late-night drinking options are few and very far between. All I can really do is go home, settle in, and go to bed for a quiet night’s sleep in a quiet and safe neighborhood without any nearby open-air drug dealing.

I get the feeling that strong advocates for urban life versus suburban life have specific positives and negatives in this narrative that they value more than others. All I’ll say is that living in the city wasn’t something I found particularly enjoyable after someone overdosed on the sidewalk outside my step, and working from home in the suburbs introduced me to the idea of quiet desperation. I chose my current day-to-day in the attempt to get the best of both worlds, and I think I’m relatively successful; pitting cities and suburbia against each other is a false choice.

Based on my own travels, I don’t think there’s a way to conjure all the desirable cultural qualities of a dense city without at least some of the attendant ills (or turning into Singapore), though S.F. in particular is doing a terrible job of mitigating those ills.

And Bernie counsels patience and faith in the future:

Cities are the best. But they are like the people who live within them. That is to say, they have their good years and their bad years. I showed up in Los Angeles in 1986 and saw the long, slow slide down to near-oblivion; there were riots, poverty, gang wars, strife.

In 1995, my wife and I bought a house in Hollywood and everybody we knew tried to talk us out of it. We borrowed $190,000 for a charming (albeit rundown) three-bedroom craftsman with a 48-inch solid-oak front door and an enormous yard. There were loud Harleys, police helicopters, and sex workers who would throw their used condoms out onto my front yard (I had to go out and pick them up every morning because my twin toddler daughters thought that they were “balloons”).

In 1999, we swapped that house out for a more family-friendly house in South Pasadena and rolled all of our fast-growing equity into our new place. Zillow says that our old Hollywood house is now worth a cool $1.7 million. Also, our “forever” house in South Pas (recently paid off :)) is worth nearly the same. We were young and we had faith in Los Angeles. We watched with awe and delight as things got better and better (and, to be fair, worse and worse; gentrification is a very tough nut to crack, although I cannot deny that it benefited me).

Now things are sliding again. Homelessness is the new gang problem. It seems intractable, but so did the gang problem in the early 1990s. Now that the sprawling tent cities have risen to the top of everybody’s “crisis” list, they will indeed be solved, slowly, year after year, brick by brick. But by the time that the homelessness crisis has become too small to notice, there will be a brand new crisis. Because: This is Los Angeles!

In that future time, people will hew and cry, “This time, it really is the end of the Southern California Dream!” But it won’t be. It will just be Los Angeles having a few bad years in a row. Again.

Meanwhile, I’ll be picking fresh oranges off of my tree and thanking my lucky stars that I get to call Southern California my home. L.A. will go on and on. One hundred generations from now, there will be a place called Los Angeles, and the citizens of that time will experience a crisis or two. And eventually, they will get through it, just like we did.

Taylor Swift fans headed to court in Los Angeles Monday to face off against Ticketmaster after the ticketing giant fumbled online sales to the mega-star's latest tour.

This story contains spoilers through the first episode of Succession Season 4.

Who is Logan Roy, really? What can we say definitively about him now, at the beginning of the fourth and final season of Succession, that we couldn’t have easily observed at the show’s start? He’s irascible. He hates his children. He “loves” his children. (“Love’s not love,” as a character observes in King Lear, “when it is mingled with regards that stand / Aloof from th’ entire point.”) After all this time, Logan still feels less like a person, with the complicated, humanizing qualities that even terrible people tend to have, than a manifestation of the id—the singular desire he has to win at the expense of others, including his own family. In their recent book, Unscripted, an extraordinary account of the final years of the media mogul Sumner Redstone, James B. Stewart and Rachel Abrams write that as Redstone’s speech began to fail, he programmed a laptop to say phrases on his behalf, including “Would you like some fruit salad?” and “Fuck you.” But with Logan, there is no fruit salad.

Since Succession’s debut in 2018, people have puzzled over whether the series is a comedy or a drama. The impulse to define its genre isn’t just about semantics, or wanting to arbitrarily fit it into one box or another. It’s also about what we can ultimately expect from a show that breaks so many of TV’s tried-and-true rules. Heading into the new season, I’m truly flummoxed trying to anticipate where things might be headed. Structurally and stylistically, Succession is a comedy: Things rarely happen; there are few real stakes and fewer real consequences; virtually every character speaks in the same cheerfully obscene, improbably clever voice. (Ask yourself whether Kendall, an adorable dodo princeling, would really use internecine in a sentence, or whether you’ve ever actually heard a person say that word out loud.)

[Read: The best show on TV is stuck]

Narratively, Succession is also as circular as a sitcom: It has a tendency to reset itself rather than shake things up in unexpected fashion. In Season 4, which takes place after Logan has wrested power away from his children in a familial betrayal, their temporary distance from him has apparently made their lives a little brighter. “Let a thousand sunflowers bloom, Romie,” Kendall said in Los Angeles, cheerfully crunching on sunflower seeds; a few minutes later, when Tom called Shiv, sunflowers were also visible in the restaurant behind him. But when the younger Roy siblings got offered the unexpected chance to best Logan by outbidding him for the media conglomerate Pierce, they couldn’t resist. He has, in so many ways, raised them for exactly this: to kill rather than grow.

The fourth season’s first episode, “The Munsters,” emphasized in other ways how little has changed since the first time we met the Roys. It directly restaged a number of events from the show’s pilot: Logan again reluctantly celebrated a birthday and weighed his mortality, taking a lonely walk in the park while flanked by his “best pal” and fixer, Colin. Kendall again overbid on a media property in order to prove his business acumen to himself and his father. Shiv again considered a job working for a politician diametrically opposed to Logan’s right-wing empire, though she has graduated from wearing exclusively beige to wearing exclusively taupe. (I’m being glib—her marriage is also apparently over, even if Shiv didn’t want to talk about it.)

Dramatically, though, the series has always had bigger ambitions. If the characters sometimes feel limited by dialogue that shows off more than it reveals, they’re enriched by Succession’s fascination with power as a corrupting influence. Dealmaking is the show’s narrative preoccupation and love language—in a family business, it emphasizes, every interaction is also a transaction. I can appreciate the layers of societal critique within this approach, the show’s clear indictment of how the outsized influence of a few emotionally stunted men can contaminate not just their own families but also the entire world.

Still, the most indelible scenes of Succession for me are the ones where business is temporarily abandoned to let the characters be vulnerable and recognizably human. In tonight’s episode, a scene that could have been a devastating autopsy of Shiv and Tom’s marriage was cut off at the head by Shiv’s refusal to participate. “Tom, I think we could talk things to death, but actually, we both just made some mistakes, and I think a whole lot of crying and bullshit is not gonna help that,” she said. Pragmatic and businesslike? Absolutely. The stuff of great drama? Not in the least; it’s too early in the season for that kind of thing.

[Read: The tragedy of Tom and Shiv]

This is not to be uncharitable about a show that’s consistently more watchable, more bleakly pleasurable than almost any of its peers. (All hail Greg’s date, “Bridget Randomfuck,” and her ludicrously capacious bag, her flat shoes for the subway, her lunch pail.) It’s to say that the promise of an ending is intriguing because it offers Succession an opportunity to do something different. For three seasons, Kendall, Shiv, Roman, and Connor have followed in their father’s footsteps like pieces on a monstrous, immersive Monopoly board, their luck and status fluctuating but their moves never changing. The script for the show’s Season 1 premiere, “Celebration,” at one point describes Logan’s entrance into a room as changing its “center of gravity.” He simply is the game—not just the nucleus but also the force by which every other character is defined.

A good few curveballs potentially still lie ahead. What of Logan’s friend-assistant-and-adviser Kerry’s fertility-enhancing maca-root smoothies? Is Nan Pierce, the neutrals-clad, left-leaning matriarch of Pierce, also the ghost of Shiv future? Is the protofascist presidential candidate Jeryd Mencken nudging America toward civil war? (If so, the chaos hadn’t yet reached Fifth Avenue.) My main takeaway from “The Munsters,” though, is that this peace surely can’t last. As lovely as it was to see Kendall, Roman, and Shiv united, Shiv kissing her younger brother with surprising tenderness when he greeted her with insults, Logan seemed too ominously bored, too enraged by a sense of his own palpable weakness, to not try to tear them apart one last time.

A Delta Air Lines passenger was arrested after opening one of the plane's doors and sliding down an emergency exit slide as the plane prepared for takeoff from Los Angeles to Seattle Saturday, officials said.

The Los Angeles school strike that kept about a half-million students out of classrooms for three days this past week has ended, but that happened even before the union announced a tentative labor contract late Friday. Still, the union's success is another sign of why short-term strikes like it are surging nationwide.

The Los Angeles Unified School District and Service Employees International Union Local 99 have reached a deal following a three-day strike, officials said in a news conference Friday evening.

At least one person was injured after a rare tornado hit southeast of Los Angeles, local officials said. The twister is the strongest tornado to hit the area since 1983.