Imagine a city. "If I close my eyes and picture L.A., all I can see is one big varicose vein." When Marilyn Monroe uttered that wonderfully unpleasant line to Truman Capote, she captured the grotesque beauty of one of the world's strangest cities: clogged, expanding, and straining at its physical limits.

When we close our eyes and picture anything, all we can see is L.A. It's a place of borrowed nostalgia for thousands of fictional sunsets; a stand-in for far-flung coastlines and fantastical worlds; a land of competition, contradiction, and (often maligned) creativity. And as much as any city in the world, it's a product of the 20th century, from its infrastructure to its industries to its insistence on doing everything it does with the help of a car. The challenges facing L.A. are the same as those facing any city in the developed world—just more so.

In this edition of good, we study critical issues facing global cities by looking through the lens of Los Angeles. Can we turn this swollen beast into a healthy, 21st-century city? If we can do it here, we can do it anywhere.

← Cover art: Photography by Jon Sager; collage by Keith Scharwath.