This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present and surface delightful treasures. Sign up here.

The first time I watched an opera on a screen was in the Dallas Cowboys football stadium. My mom and I picked our way to the front over sparsely filled plastic seats—the bleachers had a hollowed-out, cheerless feel—and settled in for the show, where a simulcast of Turandot played across a 1.2-million-pound jumbotron more familiar with instant replays and fan-cam footage. It was a spectacularly underwhelming experience.

Most opera fans aren’t exactly awed by the beauty of the broadcast version, but the practice is still worthwhile, particularly as a way to increase accessibility to the art form (and, frankly, to keep it alive). Televising opera was first proved possible on the small screen in the 1940s—before that, it was broadcast to loyal audiences over the radio—and continues today through the Metropolitan Opera’s Live in HD and Live at Home programs, which stream performances to movie theaters and living rooms, respectively. The New York opera house has approximately 650,000 yearly visitors, but Live in HD opera streams reached nearly 1 million people last season. These programs hope to reach you even if you’re “on assignment in Antarctica.” It’s hard to argue with that.

But as persistent as the desire to televise opera is the debate over whether—and how—to do it. In 1983, the critic Lloyd Schwartz opined about “Opera on Television” for The Atlantic, calling it “virtually a self-contradiction: the most grandiose, elaborate form of entertainment this side of the Ringling Brothers (not always this side, either) diminished by the most intimate, reductive medium of transmission.”

The Met telecast its first complete performance in 1948, collaborating with ABC to bring Giuseppe Verdi’s Otello to more than 1 million viewers. They brought the works: long-range shots, close-up shots (those front-row seats didn’t stand a chance!), and even the rare backstage moment. It was a success in many ways, but not enough to stop the critic John Crosby from noting that “the Metropolitan’s great roster contains some of the worst actors, and actresses on earth,” and that “by Hollywood standards,” the Met’s female performers “are not likely to drive Betty Grable out of the pin-up business.”

Crosby understood that live audiences were willing to “overlook these failings,” and he predicted that television audiences might do the same. But imperfections may be harder for modern TV audiences, with their expectations of cleanly edited, smoothly run perfection, to ignore. Live audiences, however, understand that the most important component of an opera is not the acting or the visual charm of the soloists—Maria Callas comes around only once a century—but the singing. The composer David Schiff mused in The Atlantic in 1999 about what keeps opera magical in the age of movies:

Opera combines storytelling and spectacle in ways that rarely achieve the state of fusion we take for granted at the movies. Only die-hard film fans go to a bad movie to catch a great cameo performance, but opera-lovers do the equivalent all the time, knowing that a few moments of vocal bliss are more important than an evening of credible acting or striking “production values.”

Seeing the seams is part of live performance’s charm—it asks the audience to actively participate in the suspension of reality, as opposed to having it ready-made for them. Broadcast opera retains some of that immediacy, but without the magic of a live performance, it’s harder to forgive its failings.

Watching the machinations of the orchestra down in the pit or waiting for the curtains to go up all serve to remind us that “we’re ‘at the opera,’” Schwartz wrote, “watching not only the work but an event, a document of a particular performance.” Knowing that you can experience a moment only once—and being unable to relive it—is a rarity in today’s world. Live opera reminds us that capturing also entails destroying, and that sometimes the ephemeral is meant to be just that.

A former friend said the hip-hop star opened fire at him during a dispute on a Hollywood street in 2021.

January's wildfires have exacerbated the decline of Hollywood's once booming film and television industry.

The US president's increasingly belligerent statements about the Danish territory have met with apprehension, outrage, and now, humour.

We've got Super Bowl 59 predictions from our BBC Sport team along with TV analysts, current NFL players and even Hollywood stars.

The video claiming that USAID paid Hollywood celebrities millions of dollars to visit Ukraine is not real and has hallmarks of a Russian disinformation operation that the BBC has previously investigated.

The rapper could face up to 24 years in prison if convicted in the Hollywood shooting case.

In the years since it began a committed effort to diversify and expand its membership, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has weathered strikes, the pandemic shutdown of theaters, and constant hand-wringing about declining TV ratings and potential cultural irrelevance. But one trend has remained consistent for the Academy Awards, the voting body’s annual big event: The Academy has been getting more and more international. This year’s nominations, announced today (six days later than planned, after a delay in recognition of the horrific Los Angeles fires), confirmed the extent to which Oscar voters’ tastes have shifted. The French-produced, Spanish-language musical Emilia Pérez received the most nominations of the day, accompanied by several other movies that premiered—and were big hits—at European film festivals.

The Academy nominated 10 films for Best Picture, leaving room for some of the biggest blockbusters of last year. The musical Wicked (10 nominations) and the sci-fi sequel Dune: Part Two (five nominations) were two of 2024’s highest-grossing films, racking up hundreds of millions more in box-office grosses than most of the other Oscar contenders. But if you want to gauge the true awards favorites, looking at the Best Director category, where only five hopefuls get picked, is usually more useful. Each of this year’s directors is a first-time nominee in the category, and four worked on features that mainstream moviegoers might consider unorthodox: Alongside the filmmaker Jacques Audiard’s Emilia Pérez, there’s the indie darling Sean Baker’s Anora, a raunchy dramedy about a sex worker; the actor turned filmmaker Brady Corbet’s 215-minute historical drama, The Brutalist; and the relative newcomer Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance, one of the few horror films in the Academy Awards’ history to resonate with voters. The writer-director James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown—a musical biopic that’s seen as conventionally attractive Oscar fare—stands out as the anomaly of the group. That Mangold’s film was also the only one to skip the international-festival circuit further suggests a turning tide for the Academy’s preferences.

[Read: A film impossible to have mild feelings about]

But Emilia Peréz, which debuted at the Cannes Film Festival last year, is a unique case among those five front-runners—it’s a Netflix-branded movie. The streamer has spent years striving for the Best Picture title, only to narrowly miss out again and again. Netflix made what seemed to be likely bets over the past half decade with Roma, The Irishman, Mank, The Power of the Dog, All Quiet on the Western Front, and Maestro, and over and over again, Netflix’s most prestigious work has gotten a ton of nominations but walked away without the biggest trophy. (In the cases of Roma and The Power of the Dog, the company at least left with the consolation of Best Director.) That track record is partly because of Netflix’s tendency toward backing fairly artsy, auteur-driven movies; the hope apparently has been that a director such as Martin Scorsese and David Fincher would be enough to draw viewers and votes. But the paltry Oscar showing thus far is likely also because, as a streaming-first studio that remains fairly hostile to cinematic releases, Netflix has a more polarizing status in Hollywood than most of its peers.

Could Emilia Pérez be the contender to break that streak? If so, it’ll be a slightly confounding win that could spark another thousand think pieces about the Academy’s continued drift from popular opinion. It’s a non-Hollywood film with very little English dialogue, a gonzo musical about a Mexican cartel leader (played by Karla Sofía Gascón) who fakes her death, transitions into a woman, and then tries to build a more authentic life. Emilia Pérez won major accolades at Cannes, but its post-festival reception has been more muted; it has weathered waves of backlash from multiple sides since its November debut on Netflix. The company has pushed all of its resources into the movie anyway, clearly seeing the potential for nabbing the big prize in a diffuse field; it’s already triumphed at the Golden Globes. But Netflix has come close and missed before, so it’s perhaps too early to be bullish on Emilia Pérez’s chances.

Netflix’s biggest challenger appears to be the distributor A24. The independent company acquired The Brutalist after its successful debut at the Venice Film Festival. The movie is a large-scale American epic made for a comparatively small budget, a supersize film (with an intermission) about topics that have resonated with Oscar voters for decades: tortured male geniuses, the long shadow of World War II and the Holocaust, the struggle of art against commerce. It’s an excellent film, as well as the kind of big movie that has won Best Picture many times. A24 mounted a slow Christmas rollout as a way to build buzz with not just critics but audiences too, including putting the movie on IMAX screens. The plan has worked thus far, and the breadth of awards-season attention, including Oscar nominations for all three main cast members—Adrien Brody, Felicity Jones, and Guy Pearce—might be enough to take the movie all the way. But simmering backlash to The Brutalist’s knottier second act—and, to a lesser extent, some scuttlebutt regarding the use of AI—could do it in; that the feature peaks about halfway through has become something of a prevailing opinion.

[Read: Watch—and rewatch—this 215-minute film]

The other big favorites will probably have to settle for slightly less notable trophies. Anora won the Cannes equivalent of Best Picture and has received a slew of other awards nominations, but after getting passed over at the Golden Globes, it somehow feels like an outside shot in every category (except maybe Original Screenplay for Baker). Wicked was an audience sensation that got warm reviews (if not outright raves), but it seems competitive only for the design trophies. Conclave, a robust grown-up drama about the Vatican choosing a new pope, missed a predicted slot in Best Director, suggesting a broad sense of “liked but didn’t love” among voters. Dune: Part Two will be treated as its predecessor was: a technical achievement, first and foremost.

Two smaller-scale nominees that snuck into Best Picture, I’m Still Here and Nickel Boys, benefited from passionate reviews and well-run campaigns by their respective distributors, Sony Pictures Classics and Amazon MGM Studios. Another competitor, The Substance, sustained its festival buzz with a solid box-office run; pundits’ worries that its lurid material might be too polarizing for staid awards voters have now been swept away, and the lead actor, Demi Moore—who won a Golden Globe for her performance earlier this month—looks like the top candidate for the Best Actress trophy. Meanwhile, two films that debuted and played well at North American film festivals—and which critics assumed were in Best Picture contention—ended up just missing out: A Real Pain, which was still nominated for Best Supporting Actor (the recent Golden Globe winner Kieran Culkin is a favorite) and Original Screenplay, and Sing Sing (which got three other nominations, including Best Actor for its star, Colman Domingo).

[Read: The 10 best movies of 2024]

The one movie that defies many of the trends among this year’s Oscar crop—particularly its lean toward a more international, film-festival-friendly lineup of nominees—is A Complete Unknown, as old-fashioned an Oscar picture as they come. It’s an American-produced biopic from a reliable, well-liked filmmaker (James Mangold) featuring a major star (Timothée Chalamet) playing a national icon (Bob Dylan); it’s largely traditional but with a slightly arty twist. Critics and theatergoers alike have praised the movie, and Chalamet in particular has enjoyed a great year: Between a buzzy press tour and his starring turn in fellow Best Picture nom Dune: Part Two, he appears to be well positioned to earn Best Actor. But in the end, Chalamet might be too “normie” for the big trophy. That reading stands in stark contrast to the Oscars of even 10 or so years ago, when the Academy favored movies such as Argo and Spotlight, mature Hollywood dramas that told well-known true stories in effective ways. This year’s ceremony, to be hosted by Conan O’Brien on March 2, will demonstrate just how much that consensus has shifted.

*Lead image credit: Illustration by Allison Zaucha / The Atlantic. Sources: Sony Pictures Classics; A24; Page 114 / Why Not Productions / Pathé Films / France 2 Cinéma; Bettmann / Getty.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

The aged president of the United States and the young midwestern senator he’d chosen as his second-term running mate were having a private, late-night discussion. The commander in chief wanted to share his plan to make America greater than it’s ever been. He flung an arm toward one end of the room as he explained the most audacious idea in the history of the republic.

“Canada! Canada!”

The senator, a veteran of America’s most recent war, was dumbfounded. “A union with Canada?” he asked.

“Right. A union with Canada. … Canada is the wealthiest nation on earth … Canada will be the seat of power in the next century and, properly exploited and conserved, her riches can go on for a thousand years.”

Not only did the president want to annex Canada, but he then declared the need to bring Scandinavia—with populations ostensibly blessed by genetics—into a new Atlantic union. “Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Finland, to be specific. They will bring us the character and the discipline we so sadly lack. I know these people … I’m of German extraction, but many generations ago my people were Swedes who emigrated to Germany.”

Other NATO members would be frozen out, especially Great Britain, France, and Germany, nations the president believed had faded as world powers. He assured his running mate that eventually they would become part of the new union one way or another—even if that meant using force against former American allies to compel their submission to his plans for greatness. “Force?” the incredulous young senator asked. “You mean military force, Mr. President?”

“Yes, force,” the president said. “Only if necessary, and I doubt it ever would be. There are other kinds of pressure,” the president continued, “trade duties and barriers, financial measures, economic sanctions if you will.” In the short term, however, the president’s first move would be to meet with the Russians—and to propose a nuclear alliance against China.

These exchanges are—believe it or not—the plot of a 1965 political thriller, a book titled Night of Camp David.

The author Fletcher Knebel (who also co-wrote the more widely known Seven Days in May) came up with these plans as evidence that a fictional president named Mark Hollenbach has gone insane. In the story, a crisis unfolds as the young senator, Jim MacVeagh, realizes that Hollenbach has told no one else of his scheme. He races to alert other members of the government to the president’s madness before the potentially disastrous summit with the Kremlin.

Such ideas—including a messianic president talking about attacking other NATO members—were in 1965 perhaps too unnerving for Hollywood. Unlike Seven Days in May, a book about a military coup in the United States that was made into a well-regarded film starring Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas, Night of Camp David was never made into a movie despite decent reviews and more than four months on the New York Times best-seller list. In fairness, the market was glutted with such thrillers in the mid-’60s, but perhaps the idea was too disturbing even for Cold War America.

And now, 60 years later, Donald Trump—an elderly president with a young midwesterner as his vice president—is saying things that make him sound much like Mark Hollenbach. He, too, has proposed annexing Canada; he, too, has suggested that he would use coercion against U.S. friends and allies, including Panama and Denmark. He, too, seems to believe that some groups bring better genes to America than others. Like Hollenbach, he dreams of a giant Atlantic empire and seeks the kind of accommodation with Russia that would facilitate an exit from our traditional alliances, especially NATO.

One of the most important differences between the novel and real life is that until the titular night at Camp David, Hollenbach is a highly intelligent and decent man, a president respected by both parties after a successful first term. His new plans (which, in another moment of life imitating art, also include unleashing the FBI on America’s domestic “enemies”) are wildly out of character for him, and in the end, MacVeagh finally manages to convince the Cabinet that the president is suffering from a sudden illness, perhaps dementia, a nervous breakdown, or the onset of paranoia.

Trump, however, has always talked like this. He is regularly caught up in narcissistic and childlike flights of grandeur; he routinely lapses into fits of self-pitying grievance; he thinks himself besieged by enemies; and he talks about international affairs as if he is playing a giant game of Risk. (In the novel, MacVeagh at one point muses that the president’s “once brilliant mind now was obsessed with fancied tormentors and played like a child’s with the toy blocks of destiny.”) Whatever one thinks of the 47th president, he is today who he has always been.

I am not a doctor, and I am not diagnosing Trump. I’m also not the first one to notice the similarities between the fictional Hollenbach and Trump: The book was name-checked by Bob Woodward, Michael Beschloss, and Rachel Maddow during Trump’s first term, and then reissued in 2018 because of a resurgence of interest in its plot. Rumors that the United 93 director, Paul Greengrass, wanted to make a movie version circulated briefly in 2021, but the project is now likely languishing in development hell.

In any event, rereading Night of Camp David today raises fewer disturbing questions about Trump than it does about America. How did the United States, as a nation, travel the distance from 1965—when the things Trump says would have been considered signs of a mental or emotional disorder—to 2025, where Americans and their elected officials merely shrug at a babbling chief executive who talks repeatedly and openly about annexing Canada? Where is the Jim MacVeagh who would risk everything in his life to oppose such things? (I’ve read the book, and let me tell you, Vice President J. D. Vance is no Jim MacVeagh.)

The saddest part of revisiting the book now is how quaint it feels to read about the rest of the American government trying hard to do the right thing. When others in Congress and the Cabinet finally realize that Hollenbach is ill, they put their careers on the line to avert disaster. At the book’s conclusion, Hollenbach, aware that something’s wrong with him, agrees to give up the presidency. He resigns after agreeing to a cover story about having a serious heart condition, and the whole matter is hushed up.

Perhaps such happy endings are why some thrillers are comforting to read: Fear ends up giving way to reassurance. Unfortunately, in the real world, the GOP is not responding to Trump’s bizarre foreign-policy rants by rallying to the defense of America’s alliances and its national values as the leader of the free world. Instead, Republican members of the United States Senate are seeing how fast they can ram through the nomination of an unqualified talk-show host as secretary of defense.

In 2018, Knebel’s son was asked what his father would have thought about the renewed interest in the book. The younger Knebel answered: “He’d say, yeah, this is just what I was afraid of.” But at least Mark Hollenbach only dared whisper such ideas in the dark. Donald Trump says them, over and over, in broad daylight.

Related:

Emperor Trump’s new map The political logic of Trump’s international threats

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

MAGA is starting to crack. Turns out signing the Hunter Biden letter was a bad idea, Graeme Wood writes. Capitulation is contagious.

Today’s News

A federal judge temporarily blocked Donald Trump’s executive order ending birthright citizenship, calling it “blatantly unconstitutional.” Trump told the countries attending the World Economic Forum that if they don’t make their products in America, they will face a tariff. The Senate voted to confirm John Ratcliffe as the new director of the CIA.

Dispatches

Time-Travel Thursdays: Stephanie Bai spoke with Russell Berman about the last president to lose, then win, a reelection bid.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

America Is Divided. It Makes for Tremendous Content.

By Spencer Kornhaber

Amid the madness and tension of the most recent presidential-election campaign, a wild form of clickbait video started flying around the political internet. The titles described debates with preposterous numerical twists, such as “Can 1 Woke Teen Survive 20 Trump Supporters?” and “60 Republicans vs Democrats Debate the 2024 Election.” Fiery tidbits went viral: a trans man yelling at the conservative pundit Ben Shapiro for a full four minutes; Pete Buttigieg trying to calm an undecided voter seething with rage at the Democrats. These weren’t typical TV-news shouting matches, with commentators in suits mugging to cameras. People were staring into each other’s eyes, speaking spontaneously, litigating national divisions in a manner that looked like a support group and felt like The Jerry Springer Show.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

Bishop Budde delivered a truly Christian message, Elizabeth Bruenig writes. Radio Atlantic: Even some J6ers don’t agree with Trump’s blanket pardon. Trump’s first shot in his war on the “deep state” OpenAI goes full MAGA. The animal story that RFK Jr. should know A possible substitute for mifepristone is already on pharmacy shelves.

Culture Break

Illustration by Jan Buchczik

Read. Will Bahr writes on growing up three doors down from the late director David Lynch. “David drove me to school a handful of times … Though he was more dad than director to us, David did carry a certain air.”

Contemplate. Here’s how philosophy can save your life, according to the happiness expert Arthur C. Brooks.

Play our daily crossword.

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

When David Lynch died last week, it was almost hard to know whom exactly to mourn. He was a Renaissance man: musician, painter, meditation instructor, YouTube personality. Most, of course, mourn him as a filmmaker, the medium in which he left his most indelible mark. But I mourn him as a neighbor.

I grew up down the street from David. Three doors down, to be precise. My parents owned a big blue wooden house in the Hollywood Hills, a stark contrast to David’s pink, brutalist box just up the lane. The neighborhood offered me a relatively normal childhood. There were kids to play with right around the corner. I learned to ride my bike in the street; I trick-or-treated. But I was also raised in a place organized by celebrity: by palatial homes, by immense creative success, by privacy as a hallowed virtue. After two decades in the big blue house, there were still neighbors within eyesight of my bedroom window whom I’d never met.

David wasn’t one of them. Though he ranked among the bigger names on the block, and his hermitry was legendary, he let us in. Our lives overlapped a good bit: His son Riley was in my sister Anna’s elementary-school class (they were good friends), his granddaughter Syd in mine (sworn nemeses, though we grew out of it). We went to David’s for the occasional pool party, where we kids were warned to steer clear of his workshop: the so-called Gray House, where the mad scientist conducted his experiments. He introduced my parents to transcendental meditation, a practice they maintain to this day. We attended his Christmas parties annually; he came to ours a grand total of once (in his defense, we required caroling). I knew David like I knew others in L.A.’s upper crust, as separate from his work—though, granted, I’m unsure how you introduce a child to his résumé in good conscience. To the extent that I knew him, I knew him as a neighbor.

It being Los Angeles, I mostly knew him in the car. David drove me to school a handful of times, along with Riley and Anna. Though he was more dad than director to us, David did carry a certain air—he was a tallish guy with a weird voice and weird hair and a weird house, and we were certainly quieter when he was on carpool duty. He once commented as much, pulling up to school after we had spent the ride in a cramped, adolescent silence: “You kids are so quiet, I can barely think.” For all his idiosyncrasy behind the camera, David could be disarmingly plain in conversation. Another morning, he quizzed us on the rules of the road with utter sincerity: “So … if I’m putting on my right turn signal … which way do you think I’m turning?” (Anna, in perfect deadpan: “Right.”)

Once, David appeared at my family’s front door after hours, excited to share a new toy: a Scion xB, a truly hideous vehicle of which he was particularly, oddly proud. He whisked me and my parents through the neighborhood, showing off the wheeled toaster oven as though it was a Model T. Every time we hit a dead end—and there were many in our neighborhood—David would throw the thing into reverse and exclaim with delight: “Scion backing up! Scion backing up!”

As the years passed and we children learned to drive ourselves, I saw less of my neighborhood and far, far less of David. Only after leaving his orbit did I get to know his work. I didn’t become a die-hard fan, but certain creations seized my heart with a pitbull’s grip. I’ll never forget my petrifying first viewing of Mulholland Drive, during which, in a truly Lynchian turn, my friend’s little brother sleepwalked into the room and started speaking to me. My dad, also a filmmaker, was thrilled to screen Eraserhead for me one night, cackling through the baby scenes.

And then there was Twin Peaks. During my last few months living at home, my whole family gathered weekly for a profoundly un-family-friendly viewing of the third season revival, dubbed The Return. I was so infuriated after the final episode that I stalked up the hill in the dead of night and urinated on David’s retaining wall. Though I have warmed to it since, at the time I raged that The Return often felt more like a raised middle finger than a story. But part of my reaction may have also been a childish denial of the point David delivered so effectively in that finale, as Dale Cooper knocks on the door of what he’s sure must be the Palmer residence: Try though you might, you can’t go home again.

[Read: How Twin Peaks invented modern television]

A few years ago, my parents sold the big blue house. They had their reasons: Without kids to fill it, the space was too big; after 30 years in Los Angeles, they wanted to finally live by the beach. But beneath this was a much more practical motivation. Climate change had become undeniable, and they couldn’t shake visions of our neighborhood in flames.

It was a prescient move. Mulholland Drive—the actual street—abuts the back of David’s property and threads through the hills that bisect Los Angeles. It snakes past the entrance to Runyon Canyon, which recently caught fire about a mile away from my old house and David’s. The blaze was contained relatively quickly, thanks in part to the oasis of the Hollywood Reservoir. David evacuated, though neither his house nor the big blue one burned. Not this time, anyway.

Months before the rest of the city sealed its windows and fought to catch its breath, David was doing the same. Last year, he publicly disclosed his emphysema diagnosis. I had hoped to interview him: I reached out to Riley, asking whether David might be up for a chat on the record, neighbor to neighbor. It wasn’t to be. David’s weakened lungs made even crossing the room exhausting and COVID a grave risk, further isolating him from the outside world. I can’t remember the last time I saw David—it would have been many years ago now—but before my parents sold their place, I would visit home and picture him above me somewhere on that dark hill, shuffling through the Gray House, still tinkering.

I have always struggled with Los Angeles. Every time I go back, I confront a cocktail of familiar feelings: nostalgia, frustration at the city’s bad reputation, a sense that Hollywood’s long-dangled, covetous promise of “making it” is alive and well in me. In a lifelong attempt to make peace with one’s home, who better to turn to than a neighbor? Perhaps more than any other director, David rendered Los Angeles fairly: the glittering sprawl of the flats and the freeways, the canyons’ serpentine darkness. He understood the city’s hellish side. His films may have never depicted the place in flames, exactly, but more than one framed Hollywood as a surreal and monstrous syndicate.

Yet his love for L.A. still shone through. In Mulholland Drive’s most arresting scene, the protagonists find themselves at an otherworldly club in the middle of the night. As haunting music emanates from behind a red curtain, an emcee emerges and announces that all the sounds are prerecorded; the entire show is an illusion. But then an entrancing singer takes the stage, lip-syncing so convincingly that the audience’s disbelief is suspended all over again. It’s a tribute to my hometown as critical and unsparing as only true love can be. The whole city, this vast, thirsty project sprouting from the desert, is contrived—and no less beautiful for it.

Like all neighborhoods, mine used to be a lot wilder. When David and my parents first bought their property, about a decade apart, there were still vacant lots in the canyon, and the streets were a patchwork of homes and chaparral scrub where deer and coyotes roamed free. (One of my parents’ favorite stories from my childhood, for whatever reason, involves me nearly getting trampled by a wild buck tearing through our yard.) Years later, my dad found himself catching up with David at a graduation party for Riley and Anna’s class. One of the neighborhood’s last wild tracts had just sold, a fact Dad was bemoaning.

David was unsentimental. He was far more impressed with the element of human craftsmanship than conservation, marveling that anything, with enough ingenuity, could be sculpted from the sandstone. “Oh, yeah,” he replied with his signature squawk and an unmistakable pride, “it doesn’t matter how steep it is. They’ll figure out a way to build on it.”