In the puberty-addled cinematic universe of the teen sex comedy, no carnal-minded pursuit is too implausible. High schoolers steal alcohol from other people’s houses, lose their parents’ prized possessions, drive across the country, lie about their ages, fall for undercover vampires, and get wildly intimate with baked goods.

Bottoms, the latest entrant in this chaotic canon, puts a queer spin on these odysseys. The filmmaker Emma Seligman’s sophomore feature follows PJ (played by Rachel Sennott, who also co-wrote the screenplay) and Josie (Ayo Edebiri), two high-school girls infatuated with hot cheerleaders who barely register their existence. When a rumor spreads that the “untalented gay losers” spent the summer in a juvenile-detention center, they parlay their newfound street cred into forming a fight club. On paper, the new campus organization is dedicated to teaching other girls the self-defense tactics that they used to stay safe—but, like most of the horny knuckleheads in these sorts of films, PJ and Josie are really just hoping to get close to their crushes, and eventually have sex. To put it very mildly, hijinks ensue. Bottoms marries the boisterousness and misanthropy of its teen-comedy predecessors, and is often raucously funny. But its abundance of gestures to those past influences and uneven satirical swings sometimes threaten to overshadow the story’s emotional core.

Seligman’s 2020 debut, Shiva Baby, starred Sennott as a bisexual Jewish 20-something horrified to encounter both her sugar daddy and her ex-girlfriend at the titular mourning ritual. Like that film, Bottoms is an acerbic, self-aware coming-of-age story that contemplates the evolving social expectations placed on young queer women. This cerebral sensibility works in the film’s favor, anchoring the raunch-fest in raw, adolescent angst. Pithy lines such as “Do you wanna be the only girl virgin at Sarah Lawrence?!”—an accusation that Josie lobs at PJ during the film’s opening sequence—showcase Seligman and Sennott’s sharp, highly referential humor. Edebiri is particularly delightful as an inhaler-toting skeptic of the fight-club scheme, and the film draws some amusing visual irony by throwing the 27-year-old main actors in a high-school setting without attempting to age them down.

Edebiri’s comedic chemistry with Sennott’s more assertive braggart, honed in part through their prior experience co-leading a Comedy Central series, keeps Bottoms feeling propulsive even when the film takes on more weighty themes or inane subplots than it can meaningfully tackle. Unlike the awkward sapphic horndogs at its core, Bottoms can sometimes seem like it’s afraid of committing to a cohesive identity. On its face, the movie is a tale of friendship, fights, and pheromones, but it packs in a dizzying collage of genre experiments and allusions to other films. Bottoms is, somehow, part sex comedy, part high-school satire, part slasher, part unexpected Marshawn Lynch comedic vehicle. (Though he’s in a handful too many scenes, the former NFL player generally delights as Mr. G, the clueless adviser to the girls’ fight club.) There are bombs, broken noses, bell hooks references, and a big important football game. And without spoiling too much, the campy, violent twist toward the end seems parachuted in from a different film altogether.

[Read: More comedies with wild sex scenes, please]

Bottoms is filled with nods to contemporary queer youth culture: The score was co-composed by the pop star Charli XCX, a darling of the queer internet, and the girls wear baggy polos, corduroys, and shirts emblazoned with sayings such as SPIRITUAL PLAYBOY. These winking details are among the film’s most endearing fixtures, but they also make some of the movie’s other choices feel especially perplexing. Along with a slew of surprisingly off-target eating-disorder jokes, Bottoms takes a bizarrely blasé tone toward the high rates of sexual assault among teenage girls. In one scene, PJ and Josie request that club members take a break from throwing punches to learn a bit about one another’s motivations for learning self-defense. After being asked if they’ve been raped, most of the girls hesitate to raise their hand—a reluctance that vanishes once it’s clarified that “gray-area stuff counts too.” But the potent moment is undercut by how breezily the film moves on from the girls’ alarming confessions. One character, who’s portrayed as a hyperemotional huffing addict, constantly gets played for laughs even as she attempts to telegraph the deep reserve of pain caused by her stepfather’s severe abuse.

The “gray-area” sequence is meant to be a stiff joke, but it didn’t land for me the way that Seligman told my colleague Shirley Li it has for other viewers. Of course, the whole point of Bottoms is that its protagonists are a pair of teenage dirtbags looking to get laid without caring whom they hurt—just like all of the straight boys before them. But the film is savvy enough to mock how easily some people—girls and women very much included—weaponize the language of solidarity to selfish ends. In its more clear-eyed moments, the film directs trenchant critiques at fair-weather adult allies, while making clear how many of its teen characters are starved for authentic relationships. But given the opportunity to deepen the girls’ connections to one another, Bottoms takes the easy way out by prioritizing borderline-edgelord humor.

Bottoms really shines when it forgoes loyalty to its many pop-culture references, and gives these quieter storylines—like one about Hazel, a long-suffering child of divorce who does the legwork required to keep the club afloat—some room to breathe. That neither of the two leads has anything resembling an overwrought coming-out subplot is refreshing; even more revelatory is the nonchalance with which the film handles another teen girl’s attraction to her fellow fight-club member. There’s no fanfare about her being with a girl after leaving her boyfriend, no agonizing over anything but the specific circumstances of the new connection. For young people entering an uncertain era of their lives, watching that kind of judgment-free fluidity play out on-screen could easily feel as powerful as landing the perfect punch.

A 'superstar playmaker' who now has a balanced team around him, could the Chicago Bears quarterback be NFL's Most Valuable Player in 2023?

Retired NFL star accuses the Tuohys of tricking him into making them his conservators rather than his adoptive parents.

The hotel was soulless, like all conference hotels. I had arrived a few hours before check-in, hoping to drop off my bags before I met a friend for lunch. The employees were clearly frazzled, overwhelmed by the sudden influx of several hundred impatient academics. When I asked where I could put my luggage, the guy at the front desk simply pointed to a nearby hallway. “Wait over there with her; he’s coming back.”

Who “he” was remained unclear, but I saw the woman he was referring to. She was white and about my age. She had a conference badge and a large suitcase that she was rolling back and forth in obvious exasperation. “Been waiting long?” I asked, taking up a position on the other side of the narrow hallway. “Very,” she replied. For a while, we stood in silence, minding our phones. Eventually, we began chatting.

The conversation was wide-ranging: the papers we were presenting, the bad A/V at the hotel, our favorite things to do in the city. At some point, we began talking about our jobs. She told me that—like so many academics—she was juggling a temporary teaching gig while also looking for a tenure-track position.

“It’s hard,” she said, “too many classes, too many students, too many papers to grade. No time for your own work. Barely any time to apply to real jobs.”

When I nodded sympathetically, she asked about my job and whether it was tenure-track. I admitted, a little sheepishly, that it was.

“I’d love to teach at a small college like that,” she said. “I feel like none of my students wants to learn. It’s exhausting.”

Then, out of nowhere, she said something that caught me completely off guard: “But I shouldn’t be complaining to you about this. I know how hard BIPOC faculty have it. You’re the last person I should be whining to.”

I was taken aback, but I shouldn’t have been. It was the kind of awkward comment I’ve grown used to over the past few years, as “anti-racism” has become the reigning ideology of progressive political culture. Until recently, calling attention to a stranger’s race in such a way would have been considered a social faux pas. That she made the remark without thinking twice—a remark, it should be noted, that assumes being a Black tenure-track professor is worse than being a marginally employed white one—shows how profoundly interracial social etiquette has changed since 2020’s “summer of racial reckoning.” That’s when anti-racism—focused on combating “color-blindness” in both policy and personal conduct—grabbed ahold of the liberal mainstream.

[Wesley Lowery: Why there was no racial reckoning]

Though this “reckoning” brought increased public attention to the deep embeddedness of racism in supposedly color-blind American institutions, it also made instant celebrities of a number of race experts and “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) consultants who believe that being anti-racist means undergoing a “journey” of radical personal transformation. In their righteous crusade against the bad color-blindness of policies such as race-neutral college admissions, these contemporary anti-racists have also jettisoned the kind of good color-blindness that holds that we are more than our race, and that we should conduct our social life according to that idealized principle. Rather than balance a critique of color-blind law and policy with a continuing embrace of interpersonal color-blindness as a social etiquette, contemporary anti-racists throw the baby out with the bathwater. In place of the old color-blind ideal, they have foisted upon well-meaning white liberals a successor social etiquette predicated on the necessity of foregrounding racial difference rather than minimizing it.

As a Black guy who grew up in a politically purple area—where being a good person meant adhering to the kind of civil-rights-era color-blindness that is now passé—I find this emergent anti-racist culture jarring. Many of my liberal friends and acquaintances now seem to believe that being a good person means constantly reminding Black people that you are aware of their Blackness. Difference, no longer to be politely ignored, is insisted upon at all times under the guise of acknowledging “positionality.” Though I am rarely made to feel excessively aware of my race when hanging out with more conservative friends or visiting my hometown, in the more liberal social circles in which I typically travel, my race is constantly invoked—“acknowledged” and “centered”—by well-intentioned anti-racist “allies.”

This “acknowledgement” tends to take one of two forms. The first is the song and dance in which white people not-so-subtly let you know that they know that race and racism exist. This includes finding ways to interject discussion of some (bad) news item about race or racism into casual conversation, apologizing for having problems while white (“You’re the last person I should be whining to”), or inversely, offering “support” by attributing any normal human problem you have to racism.

The second way good white liberals often “center” racial difference in everyday interactions with minorities is by trying, always clumsily, to ensure that their “marginalized” friends and familiars are “culturally” comfortable. My favorite personal experiences of this include an acquaintance who invariably steers dinner or lunch meetups to Black-owned restaurants, and the time that a friend of a friend invited me over to go swimming in their pool before apologizing for assuming that I know how to swim (“I know that’s a culturally specific thing”). It is a peculiar quirk of the 2020s’ racial discourse that this kind of “acknowledgement” and “centering” is viewed as progress.

My point is not that conservatives have better racial politics—they do not—but rather that something about current progressive racial discourse has become warped and distorted. The anti-racist culture that is ascendant seems to me to have little to do with combatting structural racism or cultivating better relationships between white and Black Americans. And its rejection of color-blindness as a social ethos is not a new frontier of radical political action.

No, at the core of today’s anti-racism is little more than a vibe shift—a soft matrix of conciliatory gestures and hip phraseology that give adherents the feeling that there has been a cultural change, when in fact we have merely put carpet over the rotting floorboards. Although this push to center rather than sidestep racial difference in our interpersonal relationships comes from a good place, it tends to rest on a troubling, even racist subtext: that white and Black Americans are so radically different that interracial relationships require careful management, constant eggshell-walking, and even expert guidance from professional anti-racists. Rather than producing racial harmony, this new ethos frequently has the opposite effect, making white-Black interactions stressful, unpleasant, or, perhaps most often, simply weird.

Since the murder of George Floyd in May 2020, progressive anti-racism has centered on two concepts that helped Americans make sense of his senseless death: “structural racism” and “implicit bias.” The first of these is a sociopolitical concept that highlights how certain institutions—maternity wards, police barracks, lending companies, housing authorities, etc.—produce and replicate racial inequalities, such as the disproportionate killing of Black men by the cops. The second is a psychological concept that describes the way that all individuals—from bleeding-heart liberals to murderers such as Derek Chauvin—harbor varying degrees of subconscious racial prejudice.

Though “structural racism” and “implicit bias” target different scales of the social order—institutions on the one hand, individuals on the other—underlying both of these ideas is a critique of so-called color-blind ideology, or what the sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva calls “color-blind racism”: the idea that policies, interactions, and rhetoric can be explicitly race-neutral but implicitly racist. As concepts, both “structural racism” and “implicit bias” rest on the presupposition that racism is an enduring feature of institutional and social life, and that so-called race neutrality is a covertly racist myth that perpetuates inequality. Some anti-racist scholars such as Uma Mazyck Jayakumar and Ibram X. Kendi have put this even more bluntly: “‘Race neutral’ is the new “separate but equal.’” Yet, although anti-racist academics and activists are right to argue that race-neutral policies can’t solve racial inequities—that supposedly color-blind laws and policies are often anything but—over the past few years, this line of criticism has also been bizarrely extended to color-blindness as a personal ethos governing behavior at the individual level.

[Theodore R. Johnson: How conservatives turned the ‘color-blind constitution’ against racial progress]

The most famous proponent of dismantling color-blindness in everyday interactions is Robin DiAngelo, who has made an entire (very condescending) career out of asserting that if white people are not uncomfortable, anti-racism is not happening. “White comfort maintains the racial status quo, so discomfort is necessary and important,” the corporate anti-racist guru advises. Over the past three years, this kind of anti-color-blind, pro-discomfort rhetoric has become the norm in anti-racist discourse. On the final day of the 28-day challenge in Layla Saad’s viral Me and White Supremacy, budding anti-racists are tasked with taking “out-of-your-comfort-zone actions,” such as apologizing to people of color in their life and having “uncomfortable conversations.” Frederick Joseph’s best-selling book The Black Friend takes a similar tack. The problem with color-blindness, Joseph counsels, is it allows “white people to continue to be comfortable.” The NFL analyst Emmanuel Acho wrote an entire book, simply called Uncomfortable Conversations With a Black Man, that admonishes readers to “stop celebrating color-blindness.” And, of course, there are endless how-to guides for having these “uncomfortable conversations” with your Black friends.

Once the dominant progressive ideology, professing “I don’t see color” is now viewed as a kind of dog whistle that papers over implicit bias. Instead, current anti-racist wisdom holds that we must acknowledge racial difference in our interactions with others, rather than assume that race needn’t be at the center of every interracial conversation or encounter. Coming to grips with the transition we have undergone over the past decade—color-blind etiquette’s swing from de rigueur to racist—requires a longer view of an American cultural transition. Civil-rights-era color-blindness was replaced with an individualistic, corporatized anti-racism, one focused on the purification of white psyches through racial discomfort, guilt, and “doing the work” as a road to self-improvement.

Writing in 1959, the social critic Philip Rieff argued that postwar America was transforming from a religious and economic culture—one oriented around common institutions such as the church and the market—to a psychological culture, one oriented around the self and its emotional fulfillment. By the 1960s, Rieff had given this shift a name: “the triumph of the therapeutic,” which he defined as an emergent worldview according to which the “self, improved, is the ultimate concern of modern culture.” Yet, even as he diagnosed our culture with self-obsession, Rieff also noticed something peculiar and even paradoxical. Therapeutic culture demanded that we reflect our self-actualization outward. Sharing our innermost selves with the world—good, bad, and ugly—became a new social mandate under the guise that authenticity and open self-expression are necessary for social cohesion.

Recent anti-racist mantras like “White silence is violence” reflect this same sentiment: exhibitionist displays of “racist” guilt are viewed as a necessary precursor to racial healing and community building. In this way, today’s attacks on interpersonal color-blindness—and progressives’ growing fixation on implicit bias, public confession, and race-conscious social etiquette—are only the most recent manifestations of the cultural shift Rieff described. Indeed, the seeds of the current backlash against color-blindness began decades ago, with the application of a New Age, therapeutic outlook to race relations: so-called racial-sensitivity training, the forefather of today’s equally spurious DEI programming.

In her 2001 book, Race Experts, the historian Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn painstakingly details how racial-sensitivity training emerged from the 1960s’ human-potential movement and its infamous “encounter groups.” As she explains, what began as a more or less countercultural phenomenon was later corporatized in the form of the anemic, pointless workshops controversially lampooned on The Office. Not surprisingly, this shift reflected the ebb and flow of corporate interests: Whereas early workplace training emphasized compliance with the newly minted Civil Rights Act of 1964, later incarnations would focus on improving employee relations and, later still, leveraging diversity to secure better business outcomes.

If there is something distinctive about the anti-color-blind racial etiquette that has emerged since George Floyd’s death, it is that these sites of encounter have shifted from official institutional spaces to more intimate ones where white people and minorities interact as friends, neighbors, colleagues, and acquaintances. Racial-awareness raising is a dynamic no longer quarantined to formalized, compulsory settings like the boardroom or freshman orientation. Instead, every interracial interaction is a potential scene of (one-way) racial edification and supplication, encounters in which good white liberals are expected to be transparent about their “positionality,” confront their “whiteness,” and—if the situation calls for it—confess their “implicit bias.”

In a vacuum, many of the prescriptions advocated by the anti-color-blind crowd are reasonable: We should all think more about our privileges and our place in the world. An uncomfortable conversation or an honest look in the mirror can be precursors to personal growth. We all carry around harmful, implicit biases and we do need to examine the subconscious assumptions and prejudices that underlie the actions we take and the things we say. My objection is not to these ideas themselves, which are sensible enough. No, my objection is that anti-racism offers little more than a Marie Kondo–ism for the white soul, promising to declutter racial baggage and clear a way to white fulfillment without doing anything meaningful to combat structural racism. As Lasch-Quinn correctly foresaw, “Casting interracial problems as issues of etiquette [puts] a premium on superficial symbols of good intentions and good motivations as well as on style and appearance rather than on the substance of change.”

Yet the problem with the therapeutics of contemporary anti-racism is not just that they are politically sterile. When anti-color-blindness and its ideology of insistent “race consciousness” are translated into the sphere of private life—to the domain of friendships, block parties, and backyard barbecues—they assault the very idea of a multiracial society, producing new forms of racism in the process. The fact that our media environment is inundated with an endless stream of books, articles, and social-media tutorials that promise to teach white people how to simply interact with the Black people in their life is not a sign of anti-racist progress, but of profound regression.

[Conor Friedersdorf: The DEI industry needs to check its privilege]

The subtext that undergirds this new anti-racist discourse—that Black-white relationships are inherently fraught and must be navigated with the help of professionals and technical experts—testifies to the impoverishment of our interracial imagination, not to its enrichment. More gravely, anti-color-blind etiquette treats Black Americans as exotic others, permanent strangers whose racial difference is so chasmic that it must be continually managed, whose mode of humanness is so foreign that it requires white people to adopt a special set of manners and “race conscious” ritualistic practices to even have a simple conversation.

If we are going to find a way out of the racial discord that has defined American life post-Trump and post-Charlottesville and post-Floyd, we have to begin with a more sophisticated understanding of color-blindness, one that rejects the bad color-blindness on offer from the Republican Party and its partisans, as well as the anti-color-blindness of the anti-racist consultants. Instead, we should embrace the good color-blindness of not too long ago. At the heart of that color-blindness was a radical claim, one imperfectly realized but perfect as an ideal: that despite the weight of a racist past that isn’t even past, we can imagine a world, or at least an interaction between two people, where racial difference doesn’t make a difference.

The seven-time Super Bowl winner has "made everyone's day," Birmingham City fans say.

There’s no such thing as a smart sports bet, but the first one I ever made was, by any measure, particularly stupid. It was late January 2022, and mobile-gaming apps had become legal in New York only a few weeks earlier. I had successfully ignored all of them until I saw Joe Burrow, the quarterback for the Cincinnati Bengals, walk into Arrowhead Stadium in Kansas City for the AFC Championship game wearing a sherpa coat, black turtleneck, huge gold chain, and rimless sunglasses. That man is not losing a football game today, I thought to myself.

When I saw Burrow’s outfit, I knew what to do immediately, even though I’d never really contemplated betting on sports before. Signing up for a new DraftKings account got me a $100 free bet, and I put it on the Bengals moneyline. Advertisements for gaming apps had blanketed virtually every surface of the city as soon as their use had become legal. Much of the same is true in the dozens of other states that have legalized mobile sports betting, and gambling is even inescapable in the places where you can’t do it: Frank discussion of betting odds and point spreads has become a marquee feature of sports media, where the topic had long been forbidden.

The sports-betting boom shows few signs of slowing. Yesterday afternoon, ESPN made an announcement that was both unprecedented and expected. This fall, in a 10-year, $2 billion deal with the gaming company Penn Entertainment, the most powerful sports-media company in the United States by a wide margin will launch its own digital sportsbook, ESPN Bet. The partnership, which will lead ESPN and its talent to promote the sportsbook on its television networks, website, and smartphone apps, cements a transformation that would have seemed all but impossible even five years ago. Betting, once completely excluded from mainstream sports, is now inextricable from nearly every level of the business. Gaming companies sponsor television coverage, put their names on arenas, operate sportsbooks in stadiums, and partner with teams. The game is over. Betting won.

For much of the modern history of professional sports, even the vaguest acknowledgments that some viewers might be interested in games for reasons other than a pure-hearted love were largely verboten. For decades, the NFL forbade the networks airing its games from even discussing point spreads. The convention slowly began to erode as fantasy sports became popular in the 2000s, but the real turning point came in 2018, when a Supreme Court decision cleared the way for states to legalize sports gambling. Five years and one ferocious gaming-industry lobbying push later, 36 states and Washington, D.C., have joined Nevada in doing exactly that. Most disruptive of all have been those that now allow bets to be placed in mobile apps, moving the sportsbook into America’s pockets.

When done with even a modicum of skill, bookmaking is an extremely profitable venture; people are, by and large, very bad at gambling. Suddenly, millions of new bettors who might have never sought out casinos can make impromptu bets on their phone while at a sports bar or on their couch, including wagers on moment-to-moment minutiae in live games, such as the outcome of the next play or at-bat. Companies such as DraftKings and FanDuel, which already had robust apps and large pools of existing users playing fantasy sports, were the first to capitalize on the gaming gold rush, along with well-known casino operators such as Caesars and MGM. A 2022 Pew Research Center survey found that nearly one in five Americans had gambled on sports in the previous year—a huge proportion of the population, considering that some of the country’s most populous states, including California and Texas, have so far resisted legalization.

Betting has become inescapable for even casual fans with no interest in it—app commercials are ubiquitous during game broadcasts, gaming jargon is a standard part of the sportscaster lexicon, and players and coaches now regularly get in very high-profile trouble for their own gambling exploits. Some less traditional sports-media outlets were quick to partner with gaming companies once legalization began, funneling readers toward existing services or opening their own. Now even powerful broadcast networks have fewer incentives than ever to stick to their hard-line stance on the topic. They can argue that viewer demands have changed, and that failing to get into the betting business would actually be a disservice to their audience. ESPN chairman Jimmy Pitaro said as much about betting coverage and partnerships in an interview with The Athletic last year: “It’s something that our fans are expecting from us,” he said. “So it’s not a ‘nice to have,’ it’s pretty much at this point a must-have.”

Regardless of demand, all that gaming cash has caught broadcasters at an especially weak moment. Although ESPN in particular is still enormously profitable—to the tune of billions of dollars a year—the decline of cable has made continued growth look difficult, and growth is what shareholders want. No matter how creatively you do the math, streaming subscriptions are unlikely to make up the difference. Media executives go where the money is, and right now, the biggest piles of new money are available to those who encourage viewers to gamble. If even ESPN can’t hold out, and apparently has no desire to try, then no one can.

Those piles of money are not guaranteed to save the business, or even be around for very long. The lavish, years-long marketing and promotional campaigns that have filled sports media’s pockets are designed to onboard new bettors in new markets en masse, and their huge expense means that many of the mobile betting apps are not yet profitable. Pressure on sportsbooks to make money has begun to increase, and it’s already killed Fox Bet, the closest existing analog to what ESPN plans to launch this fall.

But in entering this market, ESPN has more advantages than any of its putative competitors—and more conflicts of interest. ESPN owns some or all of the broadcast rights to nearly every major sport in America, which means that it has enormous influence over how the entire business is conducted. It’s also the country’s biggest source of sports news, and how ESPN covers the industry already affects how unaffiliated sportsbooks set odds and how regular people make bets. Now ESPN will have its thumb on all three scales: influencing the leagues, informing the public, and setting the betting lines. (ESPN says that it will maintain a strict demarcation between its journalists and its betting operation.)

If you’re one of the (many, many) fans who find it irritating to now get much of your sports news filtered through the lens of what it means for bettors, the situation can only get worse as ESPN gets more centrally involved in gaming. Or maybe it’ll just turn you into a gambler against your better judgment, precisely as intended.

The month I moved to Los Angeles felt apocalyptic, even by the standards of a city forever being destroyed in film. It was the end of the summer of 2020; stores were closed, streets empty, and wildfires had enveloped the region in smoke, turning the sky orange. Yet after I parked the U-Haul, things got even bleaker.

Walking to my new apartment, I passed a car where a 20-something had passed out with the engine running. Folks, I noticed, were sleeping in nearly every car on the street—a mix, I would later learn, of UCLA students and construction workers.

I had never encountered vehicular homelessness before moving out West. Indeed, it hadn’t even registered to me as a possibility, as a thing one might do to avoid sleeping on the street. In New York City, most homeless people don’t own cars, and in any case, the city has a legal obligation to provide shelter. This is not true in California.

Nearly 20,000 Angelenos live in RVs, vans, or cars, a 55 percent increase over when the count first started, in 2016. As the housing shortage deepens, thousands more will likely be forced into this lifestyle. Many of these people do not have the mental-health or substance-abuse issues eagerly trotted out to dismiss the homelessness crisis. A significant minority have jobs—they’re people who stock shelves or install drywall but simply can’t afford a home.

Like most Angelenos, I was repulsed by the homelessness crisis, vehicular or otherwise. Early in the summer of 2021, I temporarily joined the 20,000. Amid COVID-19 lockdowns, I was paying half of my income for a bedroom in a shared student apartment furnished like a doctor's office waiting room. My lease was set to expire, and I had to travel for work, anyway. Moving into my Prius seemed like the best bad option.

Angelenos love their cars, the stereotype goes. Our city’s distinctive natural wonder is, after all, the tar pits: Los Angeles wants to be paved over. And many see a certain American romance in a stretch of living, free and unencumbered, on the road.

Search YouTube for living out of a Prius and the first thing you’ll find is a former Bachelor contestant and NFL cheerleader who has pulled in millions of views for her travels in a mint-green 2006 Prius. Hundreds of social-media accounts offer similar adventures. Their styles vary, but the pitch is consistent: Save money; see the country; live your best life.

Why the Prius in particular? Unlike vans or RVs, the Toyota hybrid offers escape at rock-bottom prices. A 10-year-old beat-up Prius can run as low as $7,500. The car enjoys minimal maintenance and high gas mileage, and thanks to the hybrid battery, you can leave it running overnight for heat or AC.

Online communities such as the r/priusdwellers Subreddit celebrate novel builds—lifted Priuses, Priuses with solar panels, Priuses with more storage than an IKEA showroom. But my build was basic: Drop the rear seats, stack a 28-quart container on a 54-quart container on the floor, and put a pillow on top to create a flat, six-foot-long clearing. Lay down a yoga mat, a mattress topper, and a sleeping pad, and you have a bed more comfortable than any hotel mattress. You can add rods for hanging curtains and clothes, a sunscreen and rain guards for privacy.

On my first day living out of my Prius, I whizzed up the Pacific Coast Highway before hopping over to the 101, which runs through the sleepy Salinas Valley of Steinbeck fame. As the sun started to set, I realized that I hadn’t planned out where I was going to camp for the night and was forced to make my first rookie mistake: sleeping at a highway rest area.

The parking lot was packed with people living out of vehicles—truckers in semis, middle-class retirees in RVs, Millennials in tricked-out vans, and quite a few people in cars poorly suited to vehicle living, with stacks of luggage filling passenger seats and shirts pinched into closed windows to serve as curtains.

As I lay in the back of my Prius, reading by headlamp, I looked over to see a family of four sleeping in an old Honda Accord. A man slept in a reclined driver’s seat. A child stretched across the back seat. In the front passenger seat, a woman cradled a sleeping toddler. I hoped it was only for the night—some mix-up or scheduling mistake—but I suspected otherwise.

At stops like this, I often talked with fellow travelers, quickly finding a surprising degree of camaraderie among vehicle dwellers. Of course, many just want to be left alone, but others share food, jump one another’s stalled-out vehicles, and—most important of all—swap notes on where it’s safe to park.

The next day, I drove through San Francisco up to southern Oregon. Using Free Campsites, a peer-to-peer platform for finding and reviewing camping locations, I picked a patch of Bureau of Land Management property just off I-5. For people living out of vehicles on the cheap, BLM land is the gold standard of campgrounds—parking is free for up to 14 days, and the sites are quiet, safe, and at least vaguely scenic.

After spending a few days with relatives in the Willamette Valley, I broke east toward Boise along Route 20, driving through a dust storm in the eastern Oregon Badlands. I stopped off in the foothills of the Boise National Forest, then beelined to a BLM campsite north of Yellowstone, where I spent a few days working off a mobile hotspot, free of distraction.

My experiment in vehicle dwelling was supposed to wrap up around this time. I had to get back to Los Angeles to help teach classes at UCLA. But the vacancy rate for apartments in the city was low, my Ph.D. stipend was paltry, and I was facing some unexpected debt. I realized I wouldn’t be moving out of the Prius anytime soon.

Sleeping in a car in the city is much grimmer than in remote areas. Many cities ban vehicle living entirely, though often a de facto ban is enforced through parking policies, such as permit requirements or limited hours.

Los Angeles deploys a zone system, dividing the city into a patchwork of areas where vehicle living isn’t and is tolerated. Places where it’s not tolerated tend to be nice and well lit—residential neighborhoods and parking lots. Streets where it is tolerated tend to be dark and isolated, the kinds of places where you risk being the victim of a break-in. Sleep on the wrong street at the wrong time, and you could be ticketed, towed, or woken by police officers knocking on the window in the middle of the night.  

When I didn’t need to be close to campus, I often slept in the Angeles National Forest, just northeast of La Cañada Flintridge. Forest rangers there turn a mercifully blind eye to the dozens of families who sleep each night in dirt pullouts along Angeles Crest Highway. When I did need to be close to school, I slept among other UCLA students and construction workers a few blocks from campus—the exact scene that had so repulsed me when I first moved to Los Angeles.

There are three categories of vehicle living in Los Angeles. And thanks to citywide counts, we know exactly where each group clusters. Slightly more than half of the people living out of vehicles are in RVs. Large and conspicuous, RVs are typically tolerated only in industrial areas, where they line many streets. Roughly one in six live in vans. Thanks to the popularity of “van life” culture, they tend to concentrate in hip, beachside neighborhoods like Venice.

And then there are cars. By the official count, they house nearly a quarter of people who live out of vehicles, but this is almost certainly an undercount, because cars and their residents blend in. Relative to other people struggling with homelessness, they are more likely to be white, women, parents, and only temporarily homeless.

Of course, vehicle living can pose sanitation and public-health concerns. But criminalizing it, as so many cities effectively do, does nothing to address the obvious underlying cause of vehicular homelessness—a lack of housing. It just makes people’s already hard lives harder.

The good news is that some cities are reforming these policies. Starting with Santa Barbara in 2004, many cities have implemented “safe parking” programs, setting aside parking lots where people who live out of cars can park overnight free of harassment. The facilities are often hosted by faith groups, and the best ones provide security, bathrooms and showers, and access to case workers who can connect residents with social services.

But by one estimate, Los Angeles provides fewer than 500 such parking spots. Even if the city converted all 11,400 public parking spaces into safe parking, it still wouldn’t be enough.

Here at UCLA, where one in 20 students will at some point struggle with homelessness, administrators have rejected student-led requests for on-campus safe parking—a campaign organized in part by one of my former students who spent a few months living out of his car on the same Westwood street where I would occasionally sleep. Perhaps it would be embarrassing for the university to admit that many students live out of vehicles. But is the alternative any less embarrassing?

If the student-homelessness crisis has a silver lining, it’s that it seems to have created a generation of activists committed to reform. You can throw a rock at pro-housing YIMBY (“Yes in My Backyard”) gatherings and hit someone who has been forced to live out of a car. That includes Muhammad Alameldin, a researcher at the Terner Center for Housing Innovation. He was a student at Berkley when a snafu with roommates and a brutal Bay Area housing shortage pushed him into his Prius for three months.

Like Alameldin, I moved back into an apartment after three months of living in my Prius, a period made manageable by the occasional stay in a cheap hotel or with friends and family.

Ask anyone living out of a car how they fell into this life, and they will likely say: “I wanted to live free”; “I wanted to see the country”; “I wanted to go on an adventure.” But let the conversation carry on for more than a few minutes, and you will inevitably bump into a sadder origin story: a layoff, a divorce, a death, a foreclosure, an eviction.

The urge to roam is human. But roaming is a lot more romantic when it isn’t done out of desperation.