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Wednesday night’s deadly airplane crash was tragic—and, to many experts, not altogether surprising. The collision between a commercial airplane and a military helicopter in Washington, D.C., has led many people to take a closer look at the complex systems that commercial flying relies on, and the strain that some of those systems are under. I spoke with my colleague Ian Bogost, who writes often about the airline industry, about the factors that shape our perceptions of flying.

Lora Kelley: This incident is not an aberration, but rather something experts seem to have seen coming. What were some of the warning signs?

Ian Bogost: Aviation experts had been fearing that something like this would happen not just at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, but all across the country. Near misses have been on the rise, as have “runway incursions”—planes accidentally sharing the same space with other planes. I won’t pretend to understand all of the reasons for that—and that’s part of the problem. The issues here aren’t as simple as something like screws falling off. Rather, near misses and accidents have to do with the whole system of aviation management: pilot experience; air-traffic-control staffing; the number of planes in the air; the complex airspace around Washington, D.C., in this case. More Americans are flying too, and growing demand puts new pressure on all of these systems in invisible ways.

Lora: How should people think about flying at this moment?

Ian: Commercial airlines want you to feel comfortable flying, because their business depends on it. The evolution of commercial air travel, especially in America, has made it so you don’t even have to look at or smell or hear the equipment to the same extent that passengers once did. You’re protected from many things that remind you that you’re in a machine hurtling through the air at 500 miles per hour.

Commercial air travel really is quite safe. When I say commercial air travel, I mean when you fly a major carrier on a scheduled flight that’s regulated. Safety in the cabin has also improved. Flight attendants worked very hard over many decades to establish themselves as safety professionals and not just service staff. The flight crew is trained to act in case of an emergency, and they’re highly prepared to do so. But because travel is so safe, you never get to see them perform that expertise—God forbid you see them perform that expertise.

Lora: Airlines are quite consolidated, and the system of flight relies on a range of factors beyond just individual companies. How does consolidation factor into safety?

Ian: We have fewer choices in flight than we used to—fewer airlines, fewer routes, fewer airport hubs. That does have an impact on safety. One way this plays out is, if you have fewer options for direct flights, you might have to opt for a layover. Takeoffs and landings are the most dangerous part of air travel. So if you can reduce takeoffs and landings—for example, by taking one flight instead of two—you’re safer, at least statistically. This is all still safer than driving somewhere in a car.

It’s really difficult for consumers to make rational decisions about safety today. Especially because we don’t really know what happened yet with this incident, we don’t know how great the risk is of it happening again. I’ve heard people start to consider making changes to their habits, although I don’t think we’re going to see many folks change their plans in the long run. After a door plug blew off during an Alaska Airlines flight last year, I started to see people saying they would try to avoid the aircraft in question, a Boeing 737-9 MAX. Are those people actually safer? Who knows.

Lora: Why do people often pin their safety fears on airplanes themselves, rather than focusing on the people or systems that operate them?

Ian: In the case of flying, people tend to target their concern toward the concrete, visceral problems they can see and touch: Is there a screw loose? Is my seat broken? We mostly don’t consider the more systemic, intangible ones, such as staffing issues and maintenance routines and airspace-traffic patterns.

When an accident like this week’s happens, however, we get a brief insight into just how complex modern life is. For all of us, it’s certainly much easier not to have to think about that complexity.

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Fear of flying is different now. The near misses at airports have been telling us something.

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The Benefit of Doing Things You’re Bad At

By Arthur C. Brooks

Between my university lectures and outside speeches about the science of happiness, I do a lot of public speaking, and am always looking for ways to do so with more clarity and fluency. To that end, I regularly give talks in two languages that are not my own—not random languages, of course, but rather those I learned as an adult: Spanish and Catalan …

This is a specific example of what turns out to be a broader truth: Doing something you’re bad at can make you better at what you’re good at, as well as potentially making you good at something new.

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After Donald Trump visited the Los Angeles area late last month to observe the damage from recent fires, he made a nakedly political demand: As a condition of releasing federal aid to stricken areas, he wants California to make voters show ID at the polls. Trump is reportedly convinced that he would have won the state if it had such a law, but that has nothing to do with fire safety.

If Trump wants California to mend its ways before receiving federal disaster relief, he could make some reasonable requests: The state should stop encouraging suburban sprawl in fire-prone areas, for example, and start pushing property owners to take more precautions. To the exasperation of emergency-management experts and budget hawks alike, California fires are like many other disasters all around the country. They lead to massive insurance settlements and outflows of government aid, which in many cases pay for rebuilding the same physical environment that left people and their homes vulnerable in the first place.

[M. Nolan Gray: How well-intentioned policies fueled L.A.’s fires]

State governments typically manage the aftermath of natural disasters; when they are overwhelmed, they appeal to Washington for additional money. For years, people in my field have been urging Congress to put strings on that relief. Unfortunately, Trump’s voter-ID demand—along with his insistence that the state should also change its water policies, which he did not appear to fully understand—triggered a righteous response among prominent California Democrats. “Conditioning aid for American citizens is wrong,” Governor Gavin Newsom declared in a statement. No, it isn’t, but Trump is setting back the cause of reform.

The present federal disaster-relief system, built over decades, involves multiple pots of money from a variety of agencies: the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Small Business Administration, the Department of Housing and Urban Development. The 1988 Stafford Act, which governs the distribution of many of these funds, is built on the presumptions that major disasters are random, rare acts of God, and that communities hit by them need to be made whole again. But as climate change repeatedly exposes certain regions to the same disasters—fires in California, hurricanes along the Gulf Coast, tornadoes in the Great Plains—rebuilding the status quo looks less and less defensible. “Okay, that was a 40-year-old building; let’s rebuild a 40-year-old building,” one recovery official in Louisiana memorably said in a 2009 PBS report, capturing widespread frustration with federal rules governing New Orleans’s long recovery after Hurricane Katrina.

Some local jurisdictions have responded to disasters by taking steps to avoid a repeat. In 2018, the Camp Fire destroyed most of the buildings in Paradise, California, and killed 85 people. To build there now, homeowners must abide by local regulations, known as defensible-space requirements, that require them to remove vegetation that would otherwise help a fire move more quickly. In 2013, a tornado in Moore, Oklahoma, killed 24 people, including seven children in an elementary school. The community responded in part by imposing stringent new residential building codes.

When I visited Moore last year, after a devastating tornado season in Oklahoma, a builder named Marvin Haworth walked me through a home that requires sheathing, nail shanks, and hurricane straps under the new regulations. He was originally concerned about the changes, but the added cost to home purchasers is minimal, and the matter is settled now. “It is not a part of the discussion anymore,” he told me. “It’s the code. This is the way we are building and are going to build.”

[Nancy Walecki: The place where I grew up is gone]

Moore and Paradise both had the foresight to acknowledge the risks they face and take it upon themselves to change. States generally do not require such steps. Sweeping policy changes are difficult to enact immediately after a disaster. People are hurt and in need; political considerations demand that immediate distribution of money. That’s why FEMA administrators under presidents of both parties have proposed some version of conditional relief funding. Project 2025, the blueprint for Trump’s policies, calls on states to pay a “disaster deductible” before securing federal aid—a requirement that might motivate governors and legislators to demand better preparation for disasters. As The New York Times reported, that idea originally came from Craig Fugate, President Barack Obama’s FEMA chief, who insisted that Washington needed a mechanism to force states to do better advance planning. But states want money unconditionally, and substantive reform proposals such as Fugate’s have not survived political pushback.

Nevertheless, a lot of little changes—stronger nails, cleared yards—can add up to a more resilient society. Trump’s focus on political payback is unfortunate, because the current system needs an overhaul. Disasters are no longer random or rare. When disaster strikes, we should rebuild accordingly.

Looking quite a bit like a wizard casting a curse, Chappell Roan accepted her first ever Grammy by criticizing the music industry. Upon being named Best New Artist at last night’s ceremony, the 26-year-old singer took to the stage in a pointy cap (which promptly fell to the floor) and a robe that was scrunched into pearlescent folds. Reading from a notebook, she recalled being dropped from her first record deal in 2020 and feeling “betrayed by the system.” She urged labels to stop exploiting artists, by paying a living wage and providing health care.

These were striking words to hear from someone who, by all appearances, is thriving in “the system.” A theatrical vocal talent whose songs are barbed with sass and spite, Roan is pop’s greatest success story of the past year. She received nominations in all of the Grammys’ “big four” categories, and she put on an opulent, eye-popping performance featuring a troupe of rodeo clowns. Critical though it was, her speech fit well with a ceremony that felt like a generational changing-of-the-guard, ushering in a new class of willful, distinct talents.

Grammys ceremonies tend to be quickly forgotten, but this one stands to be remembered for a few reasons. One is that Beyoncé won her first ever Album of the Year, for her country-inflected album Cowboy Carter. Another is that the Los Angeles fires reshaped the night: host Trevor Noah repeatedly urged viewers to donate to relief efforts, ad space was given to local businesses that had burned down, and a group of firefighters presented the evening’s final award. The politics of Donald Trump’s second term loomed large as well: Noah joked that his deportation might be imminent; Lady Gaga spoke up for transgender visibility; Alicia Keys said, “DEI is not a threat; it’s a gift.”

But the real shake-up of these Grammys was simply the fact that the telecast felt primarily like a showcase for new music—and not for the nostalgic reunions and tributes of past ceremonies. The tone was set early on when the 25-year-old Sabrina Carpenter put on a medley of her hits “Espresso” and “Please Please Please.” The performance played up Carpenter’s signature attribute, her humor, by having her feign mistakes and miscues and then regain her composure. In a pretaped segment, she cracked, “I’m just being myself—with maybe bigger hair.”

[Read: The Grammys are built on a delusion]

Carpenter, like Roan, was nominated for Best New Artist, and many of the category’s nominees provided instantly viral moments. Benson Boone, a 22-year-old glam rocker, got his tux torn off and then executed flips in a glistening bodysuit; Raye, a 27-year-old hip-hop–soul fusionist from the U.K., crooned and scatted with remarkable finesse in front of an old-timey bandstand. Most impressively, the 26-year-old rapper Doechii blazed through an eclectic array of vocal techniques and physical postures alongside a legion of dancers in matching suits. Her outré presentation recalled the pioneering rapper Missy Elliott, but she also smoldered with a rare, know-it-when-you-see it quality: potential.

This being the Grammys, music history was still a big part of the telecast—but even this year’s definition of “legacy” felt a bit updated. After so many years in which the great rockers of the 20th century seemed to run the show, it now appears that the Millennials are becoming eligible for luminary treatment. (The Rolling Stones and the Beatles, centerpieces of many prior Grammy ceremonies, won their awards off camera.) Lady Gaga and Bruno Mars, acting like respected statespeople, performed a haunting rendition of the Mamas & the Papas’s “California Dreamin’” in response to the fires. A well-conceived tribute to Quincy Jones spanned the age spectrum: Herbie Hancock and Stevie Wonder shared memories from behind the piano, but crucial contributions also came from Janelle Monae (doing a physical Michael Jackson impression) and Wicked star Cynthia Erivo (dreamily interpreting Frank Sinatra).

The final awards of the night also called to mind generational change. Kendrick Lamar’s “Not Like Us” was named Song of the Year and Record of the Year—which is only the second time a rap track has been honored in either of those categories. Those wins, along with Beyoncé’s, will be celebrated as deserved but overdue, given the much-publicized difficulty that Black artists have had in the Grammys’ major categories over the years. The Academy may well have made significant progress in reforming itself to be more inclusive; several presenters took care to note the 13,000 voting members who chose the winners (and The Weeknd broke his years-long boycott of the Grammys to perform this time). Another simple factor to keep in mind: Beyoncé, 43, and Lamar, 37, have built bodies of work whose significance gets, with each passing year, harder and harder to deny.

Beneath all of the evolution these Grammys represented was a technological and social one: streaming. In the past few years, established stars and savvy newcomers seem to have figured out that the key to success in an era of content overabundance isn’t to try to be as broadly appealing as possible—it’s to play up one’s own personality, ambition, and even weirdness. Cowboy Carter, a genre-blending opus that caused consternation in the country-music world, is one example of that approach. Dressing like Merlin and demanding more of the industry that’s celebrating you is, quite delightfully, another.

The show is dedicated to those affected by the wildfires, with Billie Eilish and others performing.

A collection of some of the best looks from Sunday's ceremony in Los Angeles.