The New America, Los Angeles, California

The street where we live is not far from the bubbling-black Ice Age swamp called the La Brea Tar Pits, where layers of entombed sloth and saber-toothed tiger bones rest. Forty thousand years younger and a few blocks south, our house sits on a short street down near the city itself, in the middle of the vast map grid; on clear days we can see the Hollywood sign. But if you are observant, I think, you find something even bigger here: the America of the Twenty-second Century. For the moral values crowd, it may as well be called Hell Street.