In Hollywood movies and dystopian critiques, Los Angeles is two cities: one wealthy, white, and gated, the other impoverished, dark, and carceral. This depiction verges on caricature, eliding the diversity and maneuvers of the region's middle class. Drawing upon ethnographies of middle class families (black, white, Latino, Asian) in affluent areas of West Los Angeles and the Valley and in the low‐income areas that are located south and east of downtown Los Angeles, I explore how and why, and at what costs, parents engage in daily maneuvers to place their children in beneficial settings across the region's vast sprawl. I describe these maneuvers that resemble a game of “musical chairs” as selective flight. In contrast to middle class flight to the suburbs, selective flight involves diurnal rather than residential shifts. Enabling middle‐class families who reside amidst the crumbling infrastructure of the urban core to chase cultural capital and physical safety in ever‐receding advantaged areas, the post‐Civil Rights State expands spatial mobility yet does not close racial distances. The pursuit of ever‐receding spaces of advantage is particularly paradoxical and burdensome for black middle‐class parents.

Growth elites use cultural workers (artists, clergy, intellectuals) to rebrand old industrial cities as ecological delights that bring the market, society, and nature into harmony. Cultural workers’ vision of transforming the industrial city into a green commons has deep historical roots and enduring appeal. The market appropriation of this utopian vision is at once a revalorization technique and a conflict suppression maneuver. Merging theorization of practice, black urban politics, and the sustainability fix, this study frames the volatile relation of growth elites and cultural workers in Detroit as sustainability was made to mean resource enclosures. Cultural workers used their ties across cities and countries to fight the fix. There is a conflict between economic and cultural capital to control the spirit of capitalism and its relations with society and nature.

Recent studies of public space in US central cities tend to focus either on (1) market-driven placemaking (privatized parks, hipster shops)

At the turn of the twentieth century, ethnic enclaves helped immigrants to find jobs and to adjust to their surroundings. In the twenty‐first century, transnational professionals also have other spaces of support: the ‘virtual’ enclaves made possible by new communication tools. Based on interviews with high‐tech professionals over the course of an industry boom and downturn, in this article I trace the institutions that affected structures of online help with work. For some engineers from India and Taiwan, alumni ties, maintained by email lists, were important; these transnational workers had an allegiance to their ‘batch’ (university cohort) that the US‐born workers lacked. Their far‐flung, multi‐tiered alumni lists combined the benefits of strong and weak ties: deep commitments and unique information. This study makes a contribution to theorization of immigrant adjustment, social capital and work technologies.

the Bush Administration, the American Psychological Association, and antiwar organizations prescribed ways for U.S. parents to manage the emotions of themselves and their children. Through the use of ethnographic and archival data, the author develops a conceptual frame for explaining the ways in which therapeutic interventions targeted at families during war structure political subjectivities. This study extends research on the rise of therapeutic discourses to manage the emotions of civilians during war, and it bridges the theorization of governmentality and emotion management.