I've been back in Los Angeles for ten days. I left seven years ago and moved to Medellín, Colombia. That's a long time to be gone from anywhere, but it's an especially long time to be gone from a place that changes as fast as LA does… and as slowly.

Here's the first thing that happened. I'm standing in line at the grocery store and someone gets too close and I say perdón. In Spanish. Without thinking. The person looks at me the way people in LA look at anyone who does something unexpected in a line, which is to say with a very particular blend of alarm and studied indifference.

That's the whole story right there. I've been gone long enough that my instincts are now Colombian.

The groceries themselves were instructive. Chicken, vegetables, coffee, a watermelon. A little ground turkey because ground turkey is one of those things Medellín doesn't really do. Nothing fancy. No wine, no specialty items. In Medellín this runs me about fifty dollars. At Ralphs. and I want to be specific: the regular Ralphs, not the fancy one, not Gelsons, the Ralphs where The Dude abides, I spent a hundred and eighty-one dollars.

I stood at the register and did the math three times. The math was right each time.

At a coffee shop later, The Oaks, an old haunt that survived Covid, I tried to pay in cash. This is not done anymore, apparently. Good thing I never canceled the credit card.

I've developed a habit in Medellín of greeting everyone. Doormen, strangers on the street, people waiting for the same elevator. In Colombia this is just basic human acknowledgment. In LA it reads as either a threat or a proposition. I said buenos días to a man walking his dog on the trail above my house and he looked at me like I'd proposed something illegal.

The signs. God, the signs. LA explains itself to itself constantly, in signage, on private property behind gates and walls and in some cases what appeared to be ornamental spikes. No trespassing. No soliciting. Dog waste damages landscaping. There is a neighborhood in the Hollywood Hills where I counted, on a single block, eleven signs telling me not to do things I had no intention of doing. I finally understood why the signs were breaking that Canadian’s mind.

I have lived in Colombia, a country Americans are told to approach with some caution, and I have never felt as warned-at as I do walking through Beachwood Canyon.

The tipping situation has evolved past parody. Fifteen percent is now the floor option on a screen that rotates toward you after you order a drip coffee. No longer a dollar a drink. as it was when I was bartending. The screen waits. The screen has all the time in the world. A barista's eyes drift toward the middle distance while you decide what kind of person you are.

The fashion remains LA's greatest achievement. On a single afternoon walk I saw a man in a full tuxedo, two women in matching tutus, a group of teenagers apparently dressed as different eras of David Bowie, and a child in what I can only describe as business casual. Nobody looked at any of them. In Medellín people dress with a kind of intentionality that I've come to love. In LA, intentionality and complete abandon produce the same result, which is that nobody looks at you twice, and that's its own kind of freedom.

And then there's the thing I forgot I missed. You cannot walk three blocks in this city without overhearing a conversation about a project. A pilot. A record deal. An album that's almost done. A director attached. Here, creative ambition is ambient. It's in the air, it comes through the walls of the coffee shop, it follows you up the hiking trail. I spent years in this industry and I absorbed more just by being here than I ever did from a book or a class.

That hasn't changed. That might be the one thing that hasn't changed.

I'm writing this from a 1926 Tudor in the Hollywood Hills. Technically, though I live in Colombia and have for seven years. I'll be back in Medellín by the time this reaches you.

The lemon I bought cost two dollars and forty-nine cents. In Medellín it would have cost eleven cents. But there is no word for lemon in Spanish, there are only yellow limes.

I'm not telling you where to live. I'm telling you what a lemon costs.

🇪🇸 Spain - Golden Visa: Gone Closed permanently. If Spain was your Golden Visa plan, time to make a new one.

🇬🇷 Greece - Golden Visa Expanding. Added a new pathway via startup investment (~$259K). No longer real estate only. American applications up 49% year over year.

🇮🇹 Italy - Golden Visa Rising Zero-day stay requirement, Schengen access, path to citizenship at 10 years. Quietly becoming the top pick for American retirees who want a European foothold without moving full-time.

🇯🇵 Japan - Digital Nomad Visa: High Bar Exists now, which it didn't two years ago. Requires ~$66K annual income and $10K monthly bank deposits. Bucket list, not a base.

🇹🇭 Thailand - Digital Nomad Visa: Tighter New rule: 500,000 baht (~$14,200) in the bank for three months before you apply. More hoops, still one of the best long-term options in Southeast Asia.

Check your target country’s official immigration page for exact income thresholds and application windows. They move quickly.

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It's refreshing to read a story where the hero, or in this case, the antihero, would sooner drown a cat than save it. Natalie Heller Mills is unlikeable, wrong about almost everything, and an unreliable narrator of her own life. The book is all the better for it.

Natalie is a tradwife social media influencer who wakes up one day transported back to the 19th century, where she must learn to live without modern society. In Hollywood they'd call this high concept. It is. But Burke doesn't use the premise as a parlor trick. She uses it as a scalpel.

To her followers, Natalie's life appears perfect: married to the handsome son of a wealthy senator, she spends her days posting content of herself churning butter, baking, and posing with her ever-expanding brood against the picturesque barn and rolling fields of Yesteryear Ranch. What the followers don't see is that nannies and modern conveniences run the actual operation. Then the modern conveniences disappear. The kitchen appliances vanish, her husband treats her with barely contained violence, and the food tastes awful. Turns out the past she was selling was a product. The real thing is something else entirely.

The deeper argument, what separates it from satire-as-snark, is about the children. When you force your kids to live inside your ideology, inside your nostalgia, inside a version of the world you've decided is correct, you aren't protecting them. You are conscripting them into your past and calling it love. They are the future. That's not a small thing to take from someone.

Anne Hathaway is set to star and produce, cited in the acknowledgements as instrumental in bringing Natalie to life. She's, as a casting director would say, purrrfect!

A word on the writing itself: Burke doesn't flourish. There is no reaching for effect, no decorative language, no sentence that exists to show you how clever the author is. Every word is placed where it needs to be and does what it needs to do. That kind of restraint is harder than it looks and rarer than it should be.

It's been on the New York Times bestseller list since its debut. Read it before the movie comes out and you still have opinions of your own

If something in here stayed with you, pass it on. The right essay finds the right person. Help it along.

See you next week. Don’t Escape. Design.

Ask Birdbrain GPT (Powered by Yours Truly, Rio)

Rio is a hummingbird who's been everywhere and trusts almost nothing he reads online. Ask him about visas, nomad life, or whatever the travel blogs are getting wrong this week.