VAGES RISING

No place in America is more prone to reinvention-and Las Vegas is new all over again. New food, new art, new sports, new heat, and, yes, new Sphere. We sent BRETT MARTIN to take stock of the great American city of the future-and find out whether this Vegas is the best version yet.

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ON HOT, cloudy nights, the artist and writer Brent Holmes will sometimes stand in the backyard of his house, near Las Vegas's Chinatown, and look to the east. Behind a screen of clouds, he'll see flashes of light and the desert dweller in him will feel instinctive relief: A thunderstorm is on its way, something to cool off the intense, lingering heat of the day. Holmes will take a deep inhale but then frown. No smell of an impending storm.

And then it will hit him:

"Oh. No. It's the fucking Sphere."

We were standing in the parking lot of a strip mall in Chinatown, contemplating a third dinner of dim sum, after previously eating at a Japanese izakaya and a nearby fusion restaurant. It was 10 p.m. and 102 degrees. The day had already taken us from the Rat Pack casinos and urbanist experiments of Downtown, through the traditionally Black neighborhood of the Historic Westside, to taco trucks and catfish-plate lunches, through the galleries and hidden museums of Las Vegas's art scene and beyond. But inevitably, we came around to the one thing you need to talk about if you want to talk about Las Vegas as we approach the quarter mark of the 21st century.

You spot Sphere (not, sadly, The Sphere, just Sphere) out of the window on approach to Harry Reid International Airport. You glimpse Sphere between the glimmering towers of casinos as you navigate the Strip. Sometimes, you turn a corner and Sphere is actually looking at you. With eyes. At night, on the other side of your blackout curtains, you can feel it pulsing, flashing its loop of screen savers, concert promos, and UPS ads.