1/22 Got up at four in New York and flew out to Tuscon where I picked up my Jeep at one. Much of my nervousness about the recent recall and software update is relieved, it behaves and drives just fine.

America is like a collection of rooms, or stages, and what’s stunning is the ease with which you can move between them, like switching scenes in a movie.

Tucson come across like a big smalltown. On my way from the airport we passed through vast stretches of flat, low-quality housing. Enclaves of elevated standards, carefully guarded. A stretch of gentrified bars and restaurants near the university. And yet, trying to find some easy calories I stumbled into the worst McDonald’s I have ever seen. A slum of a McDonald’s, one that reeked of piss inside and where teenage parents let their children play on the rubber-plastic-net cube structure that must be a world for these kids, innocent and wide open as ever, and everywhere.