Ugh, this day. Is there anything that can save it? Maybe an amusing video with butts in it? Let’s give it a shot. It’s from John Grant — be sure to read this recent Guardian profile — features Tracey Thorn on backing vocals and includes the aforementioned butts, so if you work in a place where seeing butts is a problem quit you job and get another one where you can watch this video without worry. Anyway, enjoy. Tomorrow is bound to be better, and coming from someone as dubious about the possibility of improvement in any arena as I am, that is definitely saying something about how terrible today is.

Great. The NYT-hates-Israel billboard right outside my window has been replaced with a 9/11 truther billboard. pic.twitter.com/OAiF389RB3

— John Schwartz (@jswatz) September 9, 2015

Here’s the old billboard, for reference.

The only question now: What’s next?? My money’s on Gamergate.

by Safy-Hallan Farah

Geniuses is a series in which we interview geniuses from all walks of life. For the fourth installment of Geniuses, we’re talking to writer @AlanaMassey.

Do you consider yourself a genius?

Because I’m making a sincere and concerted effort to take more cues from Kanye West, I want to say, “Yes. Absolutely.” In reality, I go back and forth between thinking, “You are a goddamn fucking genius, Alana” and “You are ordinary in every way, destined to die alone and be buried in a potter’s field, Alana.” There is no middle ground.

Can you elaborate a little on why you’re taking cues from Kanye?

I’ve always passively loved Kanye’s music but last year, I went through a really rough patch personally and professionally where I just wanted to give up on everything. One of my best friends who is this amazing 21-year-old Kanye disciple made me go out and I was kind of sulky and she launched into this earth-shattering monologue where she was like, “Kanye wouldn’t give up when people said he couldn’t do something! Kanye would go home and make FAT. BEATS.” I honestly wish I had the whole thing on video. She was so fired up, it was like watching Edward Norton in the mirror in The 25th Hour or Bill Paxton on the back of a truck in Independence Day. You know, CLASSICS.

So I ended up doing a deep dive into the archive of his media appearances and he’s not only always had this unflinching confidence but he’s had this sort of eerie ability to predict his own success for the future too. He also works insanely hard, which makes it possible for him to produce so much incredible work that actually qualifies him for the genius label. So many people are busy quietly believing in their own genius and waiting for others to say the word, Kanye was like “Fuck the middle man, I’m a genius,” and he works hard all the time to keep it true. I admire that a lot.

Have you ever predicted your own successes?

No, because I always predict catastrophic failure on the micro level in order to prevent disappointment. So I am always like, “Don’t get your hopes up, dummy” about individual pieces or projects. It makes it a very pleasant surprise when something is a success but I’m always prepped for a personal apocalypse. But in my macro view of the entire future, I can imagine nothing short of my wildest dreams coming true. That part of my imagination is wired so that I always get absolutely everything I want.

What are your goals professionally, personally and otherwise?

So I was a walking cliche of disastrous 20-something in New York: I treated mental illness with alcohol and drugs and bad sex with much older men. I had a series of bad assistant and PR jobs and would fall back on stripping and fetish work when I inevitably quit my jobs or couldn’t cover expenses. I enrolled in Yale Divinity when I was 25 in the hopes that if I just got a good helping of Jesus, I’d be cured of my debauchery and sadness. While I was there, I halfway cleaned up my act in terms of my health and my priorities and realized that I had been embarrassed by all of the wrong things. So when I returned to New York and my relationship ended, I decided not to ashamed of my creative ambitions or of the fact that I worked in the sex industry. I was told that the best thing about surviving being a chaotic fuck-up in your 20s is turning it into something worthwhile in your 30s, which is what I am trying to do personally and creatively now. Empire out of suffering, etc.

Tell me about your book.

All the Lives I Want is an essay collection about me and several of my imaginary friends, all of whom happen to be famous women from the last 60 years of popular culture. I worship a lot of celebrities so it covers everyone from Sylvia Plath to Lil’ Kim. As far as “issues” go, it gets into the fate of occupying a human body, making a living off of the labors of your body, inadequacy and incompleteness, illness, and ultimately coping with the sneaking suspicion that you live in a world that wasn’t made for you. Because it wasn’t.

Celeb worship?

Have you ever seen To Die For with Nicole Kidman? She plays this fame-seeking psychopath that ruins a bunch of lives. Kidman has this perfectly delivered mini-monologue where she says, “You’re not anybody in America unless you’re on TV. On TV is where we learn about who we really are. Because what’s the point of doing anything worthwhile if nobody’s watching? And if people are watching, it makes you a better person.” I realize now that it is supposed to be a cautionary tale about a deranged narcissist but when I saw it in middle school, I was like, “Girl, I know.” I have a hard time finding anything I do worthwhile if it does not have public approval. I’ve always low-key desired the visibility of celebrity but was too scared or self-conscious to seek it. I hope that I’ve developed a more nuanced relationship to celebrity than when I was a scared adolescent who simultaneously wanted to die quietly in a burlap sack and be a movie star but the ideas of perfection and hyper-visibility remain both alluring and repulsive to me.

When was the earliest time you sought public approval in the creative sense?

When I was super small, I had two imaginary friends named Anky and Chancy. Anky wore a bone in her hair like Pebbles from The Flintstones and Chancy was kind of a third-wheel. Adults found the stories about them absolutely riveting and I realized that I could just make up all sorts of shit that we had done together to keep that attention coming. Mostly we just chilled out and played Barbies but I was like, “Oh yeah, we’re fucking time travelers and met this archaeologist from Tampa” or whatever. Even when I stopped believing in them, I kept them around as a conversation starter to get people to talk to me and think I was precious.

Did you ever tell lies (as a creative outlet or way to get attention) long after having imaginary friends?

Oh man, all the time. I would make up really elaborate family background stories as a kid and part of the fun was challenging myself to keep up the lies. At one point, I was claiming to be the youngest of 12 children and I had to keep their names and birth order straight. My fake ID in college was Israeli and we had to concoct a big back story for why I didn’t speak Hebrew and my birth place on the idea was Hosea, Russia so I had a good time keeping that story straight to make sure I didn’t get kicked out of bars. Another favorite is lying to men in bars when they’re hitting on me. So often if you tell a man you’re a writer, he interrogates your reading and writing habits in this way that is meant to make himself seem smart but really just comes off as challenging my own authority in my field and I find it really tiresome. My go-to lie is that I’m a marine cartographer because most people have absolutely no fucking idea what goes into making maps of the ocean and when they try to challenge you on any of it, I shut them down with completely made up shit about the ocean floor and the leading theories in the field.

If New York is a city built on Pretend then the biggest lie we tell ourselves is that summer ends the second we get back from Labor Day, even if the weather won’t play along with the charade. While summer technically lasts another two weeks, and you will still be sweltering well into October — no one remembers this now because of all the horrors of winter, but for the last two years a few of the days leading up to Christmas were routinely in the low ‘60s — we’re all complicit in the lie that it’s already autumn and we need to focus on our very important jobs so we can make money to see the groundbreaking cultural performances and eat at the exciting new restaurants and buy the dazzling “new” phones and generally throw ourselves into all of the other activities we embrace to help us forget our lives are largely meaningless and no matter what we attain or accomplish in the end death waits for all of us and laughs at our paltry pursuits. Anyway, it’s Wednesday. Presumably you have now addressed your end-of-summer inbox and are feverishly attempting to fool yourself into believing that it’s fall, the best season that we have here in New York, notwithstanding the fact that it’s built on lies. (Why not? Everything else is.) As skeptical as I am of almost all human endeavors, on this occasion I cannot bring myself to mock your deluded desire to invest what you do with significance. Once winter descends all hope you have will be extinguished for many months at a minimum and, even if you make it through, the other side you come out on will see you scarred, sadder and less likely than ever to find the strength to convince yourself that any of it is worthwhile. So go ahead, pretend that things are important. It won’t make a difference but there is only a little while left to you to imagine that it will. Chromatics will allegedly have a new album out at some point and maybe that will offer a brief bright spot but in the end nothing will save you so you might as well enjoy while you still can. So enjoy. Good luck with that “fall” thing.

★★★ Room by room, different decisions were being made about the windows and the air conditioning, till the frying bacon forced the issue to be settled in the windows’ favor. The shadows outside were still coolish but the sun was sharpening. There was dappled shade on the pitcher’s mound on the concrete playground diamond — at least, on the effective spot for pitching kiddie wiffleball — but any contact beyond a simple nubber led into a blazing, blinding wasteland. Still it was time to wring the last opportunity out of summer: scooter and bicycle and skateboard traffic looped erratically around the hardtop; soccer and basketballs rolled free; the wiffleball lineup expanded and contracted, but mostly expanded, as new players wandered in and out. More parents showed up to play defense. The cleanup hitter blasted a pitch high into the brightness and the grownup pitcher turned to take step in pursuit and stumbled over a kiddie bike cutting behind. There were dry leaves on the ground. The shade deepened and extended further across the infield. Outside the gates, children were operating a lemonade stand. The pitcher had skipped sunscreen on the legs and spent early afternoon warily checking the calves for any sign of a flush. Afternoon was even more thoroughly sun-blasted, so that every increment of the sun’s movement registered. The narrow, merciful band of shade under the scaffold on the way down to the market had been pushed aside on the walk back. The shadow behind the glass tower at Amsterdam had widened, but was quickly interrupted by the reflection off the other glass tower, down and across the avenue, casting trembling line segments of light through the locust leaves. Sweat stung the newly shaven upper lip. After dinner and sunset, outdoors still presented a wall of heat. The three-year-old had insisted on flip-flops, and went sprinting up the block in them. At bedtime, the first splash of water down the face carried the taste of the day’s accumulated salt.

by Noah Davis

Over the course of the last three months, I have interviewed more than twenty writers, editors, media people, and journalism professors about the state of being a freelance writer in 2015. The general consensus is that it’s the best time since the very early days of the web to make money by writing online, and a marked improvement from even two years ago. The influx of cash starts at the top, with the proliferation of well-capitalized sites like Vice, BuzzFeed, and Vox Media, which have all raised hundreds of millions of dollars — large chunks of it during the time I spent reporting this piece. The money comes from venture capitalists and other sources, with many traditional media companies desperate to buy their way into new digital forms that they ignored for too long and failed to create themselves. And some small percentage of it has been used by editors to entice writers.

In my own work, I’ve seen my average rate for my writing, which includes print and digital combined, jump from thirty-seven cents per word during the first half of 2013 to fifty cents per word in the first six months of 2014, and fifty-three cents per word so far this year. While that increase is partially due to my slowly rising standing in the freelance writing ecosystem, a lot of it stems directly from writing for flush sites. In general, each new digital outlet I write for pays better than the previous ones; there’s money out there if you know where to look.

Many newer outlets offer fifty cents per word or more — sites like The Verge might pay a dollar per word — as do established publications, including New York’s blog network and The Guardian. “You can expect that two hundred and fifty dollars is an ultimate baseline for anything that you do,” Kyle Chayka, a New York-based freelancer, told me. “No one is paying less than that. My own perception is that fifty cents per word is a fair going rate for an experienced freelance writer who’s writing something primarily for the web that’s been reported.” But still: Figure twelve hundred or fifteen hundred words per piece, and you’re talking closer to twenty cents per word. “That’s depressing math when you’re doing your budget,” Erik Malinowski, a freelancer writer, said.

This is true. And yet, it’s also true that two hundred or three hundred dollars per piece is more than a lot of outlets paid a couple years ago — and certainly more than they paid six or seven years ago. The increase is due in part to stores of cash, to developing business models like native advertising, and to the changing nature of outlets’ goals. “Web publications that have ambitions to compete with the big glossies know that they need to pay the best people in order to do that,” Eva Holland, a Canadian-based freelancer who writes frequently for sites like SBNation Longform, Grantland, and Pacific Standard, said. “You see editors framing it that way. They will say that our pay is comparable to a national magazine and that’s part of their pitch.” It’s not there yet, but it’s getting closer. Long pieces at SBNation, BuzzFeed, or other well-capitalized outlets are frequently well-edited, smart, tight, and sometimes influential. Their rates, between two thousand and three thousand dollars per piece — or even up to (and beyond) a dollar per word at outlets like Medium or The Huffington Post’s High Line, depending on the story (and your ability to negotiate) — will take a chunk out of your Brooklyn rent.

Sometimes, though, you write on the cheap in an effort to get noticed and move up in the world. “My friends who aren’t writers don’t know places like McSweeney’s or the Awl but those are highly influential places for the kinds of people who would hire you to do other stuff because of the quality and the pedigree of the work,” Vinson Cunningham said, adding that work for New York and the New York Times Magazine came directly out of a piece he wrote for The Awl.

Sites are slowly embracing new forms of online journalism as well. Susie Cagle combines writing and illustration in her work and says that interest in this form has increased dramatically in the last eighteen months or so. She routinely makes three to five thousand dollars for a multi-thousand-word reported feature with a number of illustrations. “This venture capital has infused all this money into freelance journalism but it has also created a little bit of an arms race between the sites,” she said. “If I do an illustrated piece for one site, I get editors approaching me in a way that I never did before, saying they want to try to something like that.” Still, most of the outlets Cagle writes for “didn’t exist two years ago” and “I don’t think this will last,” she said — although she’s more optimistic now than she was a couple of years ago that she’ll be able to find work with the combination of writing and illustration that she does.

There’s also a new group of digital outlets taking on more ambitious work. Sites like Epic and the Atavist — winner of one National Magazine Award, and an eight-time nominee* — publish long features, the type of fifteen-thousand-word-plus pieces that don’t fit into a traditional print magazine. (Well, almost never.) These stories can reach the level of an excellent magazine piece. They don’t pay as much upfront — think in the five-thousand-dollar range — but revenue-share deals and other ways to make money can increase the payout.

Josh Dean, a frequent contributor to outlets like GQ and Bloomberg Businessweek, wrote “The Life and Times of the Stopwatch Gang” for the Atavist Magazine because it would have been “gutted” at eight thousand words, the maximum length he would have gotten at a print magazine. The piece, which ran at eighteen thousand words, was one he felt might get optioned by a movie studio, and the freedom the Atavist provided allowed Dean to expand the tale and its characters. While the initial fee he received was smaller than what he would get if it ran in a traditional men’s magazine, it did get optioned, which bumped the payout considerably. (Relevant disclosures: I’m renting a desk at Atavist’s office this summer. I have also worked in a professional capacity with many people quoted in this piece.)

There are also even more non-traditional outlets — companies that didn’t have writing in their initial mission, but saw an opportunity to draw attention to themselves by funding prestige work. Amazon’s Kindle Singles are a prime example, a parallel experiment to something like Amazon Studios’ Transparent or Netflix’s Orange Is the New Black. Some writers are trying to take advantage of these new opportunities. “I’m starting to look at what places have the infrastructure to provide money to fund big projects and, increasingly, they are not publications,” Jamie Lauren Keiles, a former Rookie magazine staff writer who started freelancing full time in April, said.

A print feature will still command between a dollar-fifty and two dollars per word, sometimes more. By that metric, print pays better. But the supply of print work is limited by its nature–a magazine is only as long as its ads will allow it to be — and is growing smaller by the year as the number of advertising pages continues to fall, so much so that the Magazine Publishers of America eliminated them from their monthly reports. Print newspapers are losing advertising at a similar rate. Many print stories also require a slightly different skill set than the one possessed by a generation raised on, and used to writing for, the internet. “That person who relies on their voice and who can write a great web article in fifteen minutes isn’t necessarily a great magazine writer,” Keenan Mayo, an editor at Men’s Fitness, said. The web (traditionally) rewards writers who use their unique tone to stand out, while print (traditionally) offers more opportunity for reported pieces, especially at the length of a three-thousand-word-and-up feature. Mayo and other editors I spoke with, like ESPN The Magazine’s Megan Greenwell, do find writers they like online and recruit them for tryouts. “A big part of my job has been to get a diverse cast of writers, and we’ve been pretty successful at that,” Greenwell said.

If you put it all together, at the very least, freelance online work can be a significant part of a viable freelancer success story, the connective tissue in a career supplemented by occasional print work. Break your writing down on an hourly wage rather than a per-word basis, which is math that any smart freelancer does, and you learn that the five-hundred-dollar opinion piece you write for a website that took three hours makes more financial sense than the six-thousand-dollar piece you spent sixty hours reporting, writing, and re-writing over the course of a month for a national magazine. “The notion that you get paid more to do something that’s deeply reported for print and you get paid less for opinion on the web [isn’t entirely true],” freelancer, podcaster, and newsletter creator extraordinaire Ann Friedman said. “It all bleeds together for me. Those categories that people use to describe different types of content is not how I see my work breaking down.”

The question is, how long will the relative good times of getting paid to write on the web last? Even venture dollars are exhaustible. While a few sites will probably survive, the existing (and future) business models can’t support all the ones that are currently vying for writers and eyeballs. “The people who make money off the internet are Facebook, Google, and Twitter and their billionaire executives,” David Samuels, a contributing editor at Harper’s and frequent contributor to the New Yorker, said. “They are fantastically rich because they ate this whole world. Everybody in this world of internet publications is essentially providing content for them one way or another for free. If that’s your job, you’re very very nervous every day about the one little misstep that’s completely meaningless to Facebook, Google, or Twitter but might be the difference between life and death for you and for your publication. Does that encourage writers to take risks in language, subject matter, or approach? Does it encourage editors to edit those stories or to edit those things out? Does it encourage anybody to take financial or aesthetic risks? Does it impress anybody outside this world with the power, independence, and influence of any of these publications? No.”

We’re already in the early stages of a reckoning for internet publishers. Sports on Earth, a sports journalism-focused collaboration between USA Today and MLB Advanced Media, is a fraction of its old self. Circa didn’t work. SayMedia burned through a hundred million dollars. Mic pivoted. The Dissolve disappeared. Grantland is in flux. The Huffington Post could get sold for spare parts. The survival of Yahoo’s editorial is perpetually in doubt, and so on. (A good summary here.) “I have skepticism of the business models of certain places that I write for,” Friedman said. “Maybe I don’t want to sign a year-long contract with that place or with that editor, for whatever reason.” Holland agrees: “That’s a big question, if the places that have worked out well for you will continue to exist in six months or a year.”

And then there is a whole class of indie sites, outlets like this one, The Toast, and other media-world darlings that are struggling in a different way. A site needs a least twenty million unique visitors a month before most major advertising agencies will consider adding it as part of its media buy. It’s possible to make some money through agreements with smaller agencies and native advertising partnerships; direct deals with mid-market and local companies; and revenue-sharing deals via companies like Vice and Federated Media, but that cash flow is unpredictable by nature. While it can constitute a significant portion of a small- to medium-sized site’s revenue over the course of a year or two, the month-to-month reality relies largely on a patchwork ad networks for consistency. Those networks continue to see falling CPM rates. The indie outfits, many of which have helped launch the careers of young writers, won’t be able to raise their rates if they want to survive.

Even a site with the best intentions can struggle to find solid financial footing. When I emailed the Awl co-editor Matt Buchanan about potentially writing this piece, part of his response was that “one thing that would be the same is the pay lol.” Lol indeed. I asked for three hundred and fifty dollars, arguing that it had a chance to find a massive audience. Because this piece is about what writers are paid, in the interest of doing something unusual and putting some skin in the game, as a one-time, one-off experiment, the Awl ultimately counter-proposed a base rate of two hundred dollars plus an additional dollar per thousand pageviews, which I accepted. (The piece will be updated with the results in a month.) You have to bet on yourself. No one else will.

Besides, it’s not like the traditional outlets are in good shape. The New York Times said goodbye to roughly a hundred editorial staffers, with a similar number gone from the Wall Street Journal. Conde Nast might be shuttering Details and Self and will possibly unleash a bloodbath in the fall. Time Inc., Meredith Corporation, and Prometheus Global Media — owner of the Hollywood Reporter, Billboard — and other outlets have all recently cut costs. “Magazine layoffs” is not a pretty Google search term. But neither is “content bubble.”

In addition to creating a lack of outlets for writers, the hollowing out of the editor pool at most publications alters the details. Huge amounts of institutional knowledge and experience has been laid off or moved into new professions. The result is a world where what matters is that something exists, not that it’s good. How much can you learn by writing slideshows for ten dollars a slide? Or from a thousand-word think piece that is accepted and published without any pushback on the thoughts it contains? How much will you learn putting together a three-thousand-word feature that only gets a light edit and doesn’t pay enough to justify spending the days or weeks you’d need to really report and write it right? “I can only imagine how punishing it is to be a young writer these days,” Mary H.K. Choi, a writer for GQ, New York, and others, said. “I’m legit bummed that some really incredible voices and brains aren’t getting the handholding they need or the money they deserve because I know it happens. We talk about it over drinks and I usually pay.” A writer can improve, but it’s on them to do so.

That’s a real concern. So is this: “What I’d say is that the lower and middle-end of this economy look fine, in the sense that I think there are a bunch of places for people to do work and get paid,” Samuels said. “Plenty of those people are bright and really want to do good work. But I’d say that the top end of this market looks even worse today than it did two years ago.”

In 2015, the amount spent on native advertising — which is written and designed to look and feel like editorial, rather than an ad — will top 4.3 billion dollars, and is projected to double in the next three years. That’s a lot of brands that need content, and a lot of content that needs writers. If you’re a freelancer, you can go hungry riding on your emaciated high horse, or you can devote some portion of your time to doing this work. The demand is nearly limitless, and growing, and, at least to me, it’s an acceptable evil as long as it’s more in the copywriting vein and less getting bribed to include links in a blog. (I get these offers two or three times a month.)

There is also a proliferation of pop-up blogs that exist for a month or two, providing steady work for a couple writers during that time. New York is at the forefront of this trend, scoring brands like Chloe, Dolce, and Chanel to be the sole sponsor of a single-serving site about an event like Fashion Week or an idea like the art world. The content is editorially independent but the branding on the site is obvious in the display ads. Getting a gig like this is something most, if not all, freelance writers would accept, a reflection of the economic realities and changing perceptions of the relationship between advertiser and publication. These sites, and others like them, are an evolution. The reality is that almost all editorial is paid for by advertisers at some level.“I wonder if we are starting to eschew sponsored content a tiny bit less,”Jazmine Hughes, an editor at the New York Times Magazine, said. “These things are happening because big luxury brands are handing over a huge chunk of money to have an elevated editorial ad. Maybe we are getting to a point where sponsored content is getting less uncool.”

I make roughly a quarter of my income from this type of writing. One is for an international corporation that pays a large media company to produce a monthly newsletter. The other is some light editing and website production for another major corporation. I also take occasional one-offs: a flowchart, a six-hundred-word story built around an interview or two of experts provided to me by the client, a consumer-focused piece about a new product that a company runs on its website. I keep my name off the end product and I don’t take assignments that fall into categories I usually write about for consumer publications. Spending five percent of my time on branded whatnot for roughly twenty-five percent of my revenue frees up hours I can spend reporting or pursuing more ambitious stories that won’t be worth it financially but might pay off in other ways; getting paid twelve-fifty an hour for twenty hours is a lot easier to stomach when you’re also making a hundred dollars an hour for ten.

Virtually everyone I talk to has some side source of income. The ways you make money have changed, but the fact that you do it hasn’t. “I wrote thirty-nine Matt Christopher sports biographies for kids,” Glenn Stout, editor of SB Nation’s Longform, said. “Clearly, that wasn’t exactly what I wanted to do, but it allowed me to do other things.” Other people I spoke with do occasional copywriting, screenplay rewrites, or other lucrative un-bylined work.

Aileen Gallagher, a former editor at New York and current professor at Syracuse University’s Newhouse School, sees her students interested in pursuing options beyond the typical Devil Wears Prada dream of moving to New York and working for a glossy magazine (or even a shiny, well-funded website). Many are saddled with huge loans debts and looking for steady paychecks quickly. “I tell them how much I’ve made on freelance pieces and they get really sad,” Gallagher said. “I had a guest speaker who does branded content for Time Inc. and the students were full of questions for her. They wanted to know how they could take this thing they learned how to do, which is write, and not starve.”

Mary H.K. Choi has a suggestion: “Nobody become a writer unless your side hustle is finance or your parents are rich.”

Photo by Shutterstock

*We originally misstated the number of ASMEs won by The Atavist Magazine. Sorry!

A small reminder, in example and in song, that, should you ever do something great, or notable, or merely relevant, it’s not enough to let it sit. You have to do it again and again and again for the rest of your life.

The city of Los Angeles is going to add some bike and bus-only lanes to its roads. This will, by necessity, take those lanes away from cars, which might make traffic problems worse, initially. But ideally, over time, it will alleviate congestion because it will encourage people to use forms of transit that do not involve getting into a car and becoming part of the problem, like the subway, a bus, a bicycle or their own two feet. This proposition, to not automatically use a car to go anywhere, no matter how close the destination or how convenient it might be to public transit, is causing residents of Los Angeles to experience a profound form of cosmic terror:

“What they’re trying to do is make congestion so bad, you’ll have to get out of your car,” said James O’Sullivan, a founder of Fix the City, a group that is planning a lawsuit to stop the plan. “But what are you going to do, take two hours on a bus? They haven’t given us other options.”

…

Bruce Feldman, who has lived in Southern California for more than six decades, worried that under the transportation plan, residents could end up fenced into their own neighborhoods by traffic. The number of intersections where traffic crawls most slowly, according to city estimates, will double by 2035 under the plan.

“There are so many things going on in L.A., but if you can’t get to them, what’s the point of living here?” said Mr. Feldman, 67, who runs a luxury gift business and lives in Santa Monica, which already has its own network of bike lanes — and gridlock problems. “I’m not opposed to bikes, but you’re going to be dead before you see the city these people envision, so what do we do until then?”

…

After moving west from New York, Gabrielle deBarros initially commuted to work on public transit. But she often found that walking two miles was faster than waiting for the bus. Now that she has a car, the addition of bus-only lanes will not change her habits, she said.

“L.A. desperately needs some improvement in mass transit,” said Ms. deBarros, who now stays at home to raise her daughter. “But I don’t think most people out here are going to say, ‘I’m going to take the bus,’ unless getting in the car would just be madness.”

The city’s other initiative to encourage people to use public transit — importing New Yorkers en masse — appears to be proceeding as planned.

Photo by Mike Linksvayer

by Awl Sponsors

Traveling from Norway to the Italian Alps, then to Morocco and back again, “Dream Road” (which debuted at the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance) is a breathtaking virtual reality ride in the Infiniti Q60 Concept car. Covering close to 3,500 miles in the next gen coupe, the route in the film is impossible to recreate in a day, but the team behind the concept have made it an experience in which we can all partake. The film puts you in the driver’s seat, speeding between cliffs and through stunning valleys — thanks to 360° video playback on YouTube — you can even adjust your point of view to see the road reflected in your rear-view mirror or real time updates to the satnav. For those lucky enough to be at Pebble Beach this year, the experience is even more real through a state-of-the-art virtual reality demonstration at the Infiniti pavilion. Because Infiniti is more interested in the driver than the car, the film (which blends real world and CG elements to build an immersive VR experience) was truly created for potential drivers to feel and see what it’s going to be like to be behind the wheel of these concept vehicles.

★ Now the boys were feuding over the air conditioning and would keep the feud alive through the day, the skinny older one asking to have the cold shut off and the sturdy younger one climbing up on the couch to turn it back on. Again the foulness was more telling than the heat. The new exhaust from idling traffic blended with the general filth of the atmosphere. A thick canopy of trumpet vine, surging south, shaded a bench on the Broadway median. The children survived a detour to the grocery store without wilting or even whining. The late-day air was still thick, but not as saturated as real high summer — heavy, rather than sweaty. Unfamiliar kids drifted into and out of and back into the playground wiffleball session, fusing for a spell with someone else’s netless volleyball lesson in short left field. The wiffleball was one adult against two or four or three children, each baserunner circling the bases without stopping till chased all the way around to home plate. It took four cans of seltzer to rehydrate the pitcher afterward, in the darkness of late dinnertime. Out in the night, partygoers milled in the lights by the grills on the new luxury building’s roof, fading into a shapeless mass of bodies where the light gave out — more bodies, surely, than yet had moved into the stacked glass-fronted boxes below. Now and then whooping and other sounds of enjoyment carried across the avenue.