Likelihood of Success

Caitlin Macy writes good, in Slate:

It’s a truism that when New Yorkers go to Los Angeles, they drive around confusedly looking for some recognizable heart of the city—a Midtown or Central Park—only to find that there is no there there. At the beginning, in sprawling, idiosyncratically laid-out London, I did miss the numbered streets of the Manhattan grid system. But what I foundered on was the lack of system itself—of readable rules and transparent protocol, of posted procedures that one could internalize and conquer. There is, you might say, no “how” here. No policy, no process—denied the comforting ease of functioning within either, I have often been left, as I was when my daughter started nursery school, with the curiously humbling experience of being treated as a person.