A curious social-media ritual repeats every time a major fire explodes in Southern California, and this month’s catastrophe was no exception. Between dispatches about evacuations and the hot takes and conspiracy posts that followed, the armchair urbanists got busy citing literature. First came the Joan Didion quotes about the fire-stoking Santa Ana winds (“I recall being told, when I first moved to Los Angeles and was living on an isolated beach, that the Indians would throw themselves into the sea when the bad wind blew”). Arriving shortly thereafter were the links to “The Case for Letting Malibu Burn,” by Mike Davis, a 1995 essay that methodically lays out the history of Southern California’s troubled, delusional relationship to fire. For the past few weeks, that relationship has been tested in ways that even Didion and Davis couldn’t have fathomed when they wrote the words that now proliferate on social-media platforms.

Davis, who died in 2022, was best known for his sprawling 1990 best seller, City of Quartz, a withering analysis of Los Angeles’s development. His Malibu essay is a clear-eyed explanation of how areas such as Malibu have evolved to burn amid natural cycles of regeneration, and how, prior to the arrival of Europeans, Indigenous people practiced controlled burns in these areas to keep the landscape in balance. Total fire suppression, he writes, “the official policy in the Southern California mountains since 1919, has been a tragic error because it creates enormous stockpiles of fuel.” Davis also assails the unsustainable “firebelt suburbs,” whose presence compounded calamity while policy decisions were “camouflaged in a neutral discourse about natural hazards and public safety.” Malibu, he concludes, didn’t simply have a tendency to burn—it needed to burn. After this article, first published in 1995, reached wide audiences when it was included in his 1998 collection, Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster, many local homeowners were not pleased.

As ash rained down on my home in East Los Angeles from the Eaton Fire, so did the online invocations of Didion and Davis on wind and flame. In a catastrophe, people are tempted to search for a theory that will explain everything. But as I prepped a go bag in the event of an evacuation, I wondered whether these writings were what we should be reaching for in 2025.

I won’t be the first to declare that it’s time to give Didion’s Santa Ana melodramas a rest; some of her stories are more noir mythology than incontrovertible fact. Almost two decades ago, in fact, Davis himself poked fun at “lazy journalists” who use these disasters as an opportunity to trot out lines by Didion and other writers about how “the Santa Anas drive the natives to homicide and apocalyptic fever.” (If you must pontificate about the winds, quote Bad Religion’s 2004 song “Los Angeles Is Burning,” whose dark refrain succinctly references “the murder wind.”) On Davis, my verdict is split: His essay remains crucial to understanding the events that led to this moment, but after 30 years, it can’t account for the constellation of issues we now confront.

“The Case for Letting Malibu Burn” is uncannily prescient. Davis pored over decades of historical and scientific research and then proceeded to smartly (and colorfully) synthesize the history of fires in the Southern California ecology and the policies that made them worse. He dug into the psychology around fire—both the human urge to “fix” it technologically and the tendency to spin conspiracy theories around its untamability. And he aimed his most pointed barbs at the new subdivisions springing up on fire-prone hillsides—what he terms “sloping suburbia” but what news stories commonly call the “wildland-urban interface.”

[Read: How well-intended policies fueled L.A.’s fires]

A lot has changed since 1995. Among the biggest fires described in Davis’s essay is Malibu’s 1970 Wright Fire, which claimed 403 homes, 10 lives, and 31,000 acres of land, primarily brush. Compare that with the Woolsey Fire, which in 2018 roared through roughly the same terrain, incinerating 97,000 acres and destroying 1,600 structures. As I write this, greater Los Angeles faces not just one gargantuan fire but two. Together, the Eaton Fire, on the fringes of the Angeles National Forest, and the Palisades Fire, in the Santa Monica Mountains, have burned through almost 38,000 acres, damaged or destroyed more than 17,000 structures, and killed 27 people (that toll is likely to rise). Davis was once described as L.A.’s “dark prophet” for his bleak view of the forces that shaped the city. But the 2025 fires have demonstrated that perhaps he wasn’t bleak enough.

Although Davis did, over the course of his career, write about climate change—and he added a postscript on the topic when “The Case for Letting Malibu Burn” was excerpted online by Longreads in 2018—his original essay does not contend with how the climate would set the stage for ever bigger blazes, fires with different causes, effects, and solutions than the cyclical events of the past. “This is a story about drought and lack of precipitation this winter,” Lenya Quinn-Davidson, the director of a statewide fire program for UC Agriculture and Natural Resources, told me. “The extreme dryness combined with an exceptional wind event—to have those things concurrent is a recipe for disaster. Even if you had fuel breaks around those communities, even if you had prescribed burns”—a solution that Davis highlighted—”it might not have had any effect.”

Nor is Davis’s wildland-urban interface what it once was. The Eaton Fire (which likely began as a wildland fire in Eaton Canyon) quickly spread to urban areas of Altadena, razing commercial thoroughfares and ravaging homes that had been around for more than a century. The Palisades Fire likewise reached deep into residential developments, igniting homes and schools that sit just half a mile—and a few wind-whipped embers—from the border of densely populated Santa Monica. “In the ’90s … there were much fewer incidences of fires burning into communities,” Quinn-Davidson said. That has changed over the past 10 years; wildfires are no longer staying wild.   

Class and wealth also provided an important frame for Davis’s essay. He documented a tremendous gap between the hefty resources deployed toward fighting fire in well-to-do exurbs and the meager funds allocated to quash fires in L.A.’s poorer urban core (most of these caused by a lack of regulation in old tenement buildings). Today, the class disparities remain, but the particulars have changed. The real-estate magnate Rick Caruso hired private firefighters to watch over his Brentwood home as other homeowners faced down the flames with garden hoses. And as wildfires penetrate farther into the city, it’s not just wealthy sloping suburbia that’s getting scorched. The Palisades Fire wiped out a mobile-home park; the Eaton Fire destroyed a multigenerational Black middle-class enclave in Altadena. For everyone but billionaires, fire has become a threat at every level of class and wealth.

Some positive change has occurred since Davis first published his essay; more of the controlled burns he advocated for have become a tool of forest management, preventing the accumulation of dried brush that can turn into kindling with the tiniest spark. Indigenous people, including the Tongva and Chumash, practiced managed burning for millennia prior to colonization. Although some controlled burns were allowed on federal land starting in the 1960s, residential areas long resisted the remedy, thinking them risky or visually unappealing. (In his essay, Davis describes a Topanga Canyon homeowner fearful of what such a burn could do to their property values.) In more recent decades, however, the practice has spread. In California’s north, regular burns are led by Yurok and Karuk practitioners. Near San Diego, in the south, the La Jolla Band of Luiseño Indians has a “burn boss” in the ranks of the reservation’s fire department. In 2021, Governor Gavin Newsom signed legislation to promote the practice.

[Read: The unfightable fire]

But the hopeful idea that small fires might save us from big ones is hard to reckon with in the era of climate change. In 2019 and 2020, wildfires in Australia resulted in the loss of nearly 25 million acres of vegetation, 34 human lives, and more than 3 billion terrestrial vertebrates. In 2023, drought and unusually high temperatures led to the immolation of 37 million acres of Canadian land. That same year, another deadly fire destroyed the Maui community of Lahaina. Late last year, New York City’s drought-wracked Prospect Park burst into flames. In attempting to understand fire at this scale, it might be time to set aside Davis and turn to the work of Stephen J. Pyne, a fire historian whom Davis not only cited in “The Case for Letting Malibu Burn” but also counted as a friend.

In his 2021 book, The Pyrocene: How We Created an Age of Fire, and What Happens Next, Pyne provides a compelling (if rather jargon-filled) geologic and cultural history of fire, describing the types of burns that have shaped our planet. There is fire in the wild (such as a wildfire generated by lightning), fire set and monitored by humans (a cooking fire, say, or the controlled burn of a field), and the perpetual flame that consumes fossil fuels: the ignition of a car’s engine, the flare stacks at a power plant, the electricity that powers the smartphone on which we share essays about fire. This third type of fire is what makes it feasible for people to commute to sloping suburbias and fuels the helicopters that fight the fires that encircle them. It is the fire that has remapped the surface of the Earth, even in places that rarely see literal flames. “Not every place has to burn to be influenced by fire’s reach,” Pyne writes. “It’s enough for combustion’s consequences, in this case on climate, to shape biogeography.”

In “The Case for Letting Malibu Burn,” Davis asks Californians to reexamine the way that they live on the land. Pyne does the same at the scale of our planet. The Pyrocene sharply critiques our reliance on fossil fuels and endless sprawl, as well as our inability to live with fire in the way that nature intended. “We don’t need new science or more science,” he writes. “We already know what needs to happen (in truth, we used to know much of it before we got greedy and forgot).” Pyne updates and expands on Davis, but their goals are similar: not to tell us what to do but to remind us why it matters, even when (or where) the world isn’t in flames. In Southern California, we are currently feeling the burn, but the fire is everywhere.

The cruel reality of living through a moment of catastrophic change is that the knowledge of how many other people are also living through it offers no comfort. It is happening to you: Your house is gone. Your father’s paintings are gone. Your hundreds of hours of footage, meant to be your film, gone. Your family’s efforts, across a whole generation, to establish financial stability, literally up in smoke. That this is also happening to other people is awful. As is knowing that it will almost certainly happen again.

Los Angeles is still smoldering. The winds have died down, but the Palisades Fire is just 39 percent contained, and the Eaton Fire is 65 percent. Many residents are under instructions not to drink their tap water, which ash and melted pipes may have contaminated. Tens of thousands of people under evacuation orders are still waiting to return, perhaps to a burned-out lot, or perhaps to a house still standing but coated in the toxic remains of everything around it.

The fires were, at their worst, unfightable. But destruction at this scale was not inevitable. The question now is what measures anyone will take to limit the damage next time.

Because there will be a next fire. The vegetation—fire fuel—will grow back, fire season will keep lengthening into wind season, and the combination of drought and wind will nurse an errant spark. Fire is part of the ecology in California; a century of suppressing it has only set up modern blazes to be more intense.

The way places such as California prepare for these fires has to change, or more neighborhoods will end up in ruins. Insurance is meant to insulate people from bearing the costs of extraordinary events, but those are becoming ordinary enough that private insurers have been leaving California. The state’s FAIR Plan, a pooled insurance plan of last resort, is oversubscribed, and may not be able to cover the claims from these fires alone. If it exercises its power to demand that private insurers help cover the difference, that could send even more fleeing. These are all signs that the state’s magical thinking about fire risk has exhausted itself.

[Read: Are you sure your house is worth that much?]

“California is like a driver that’s had five car accidents,” Michael Wara, a former member of California’s wildfire commission who now heads a climate-and-energy-policy program at Stanford University, told me. The state is at proven risk of catastrophic loss. But because California has spent years trying to keep insurance rates somewhat reasonable, those (still high) rates don’t reflect the real risk homeowners face. This creates a problem further up the insurance food chain: Insurers rely on reinsurers—insurance companies for insurance companies—who, Wara said, “are supposed to lose one in 100 times … They’re not supposed to lose, like, four times out of 10, which is kind of where we’re on track for in California.”

If a few of those companies stop insuring the insurers, there aren’t necessarily others to step in. The state is trying to stave off a reinsurance crisis by allowing insurers to incorporate more risk probability and reinsurance prices into their rates, as of last year. But California could still turn into Florida, where all but the most local insurers are leaving the state, or going belly-up, and insurance in places can cost tens of thousands of dollars a year. Because coverage is generally required for anyone seeking a mortgage, soaring rates in California could drive home values down, threatening yet another crisis, this one in real estate. And if existing homeowners can’t get insurance, they’ll be left bearing the cost of catastrophes all on their own, like many in the burn area around Los Angeles are now.

If nothing changes, more people will get sucked into this doom spiral, because California cannot avoid some level of catastrophe. Wind-driven fires like the ones in L.A. throw embers far ahead of themselves, leading to conflagrations that firefighters can’t stop, and the fastest fires are growing faster now. Transferring those risks to insurance will become less and less affordable as the climate warms and more people live in the zone where cities meet wildlands, because the catastrophic risk to homes is high and getting higher. As Nancy Watkins, an actuary at Milliman who specializes in catastrophic property risk, told me, “That actually is not an insurance problem. It’s a risk problem.”

To bring down risk, she wants to see neighborhoods embark on ambitious missions to “harden” homes and the landscape around them, and then see insurance companies account for those efforts. If each homeowner has removed vegetation from the first five feet around their house, if the neighborhood has kept its roads clear and made firebreaks where fire would be likeliest to enter, a place has much less of a chance of burning down, even in major fires. Plenty of communities, even the most fire-prone ones, still don’t do this. Watkins imagines a future database in which each parcel of land is inspected for fire-readiness, so that each neighborhood can be profiled for fire safety and insurers can price rates accordingly. Creating this system would take major effort, she knows, but it would motivate collective action: If it meant the difference between your whole neighborhood getting insurance and being uninsured, you would probably clean up your yard and screen your vents.

Watkins herself lives in the Moraga-Orinda Fire District, a highly flammable area outside San Francisco, which Wara’s research has identified as one of the top three places where the worst overnight losses could occur, from an insurance perspective. (Another was Pacific Palisades.) She was one of many in her area who got a nonrenewal notice from her insurer last year. Now she’s making her plot as fire-proof as possible, in hopes of coaxing an insurer back. It’s like staging a property for sale, she said: “We’re staging our home for insurability right now.” She cut down a 10-year-old manzanita tree and pulled out her mint garden, but so far she’s kept the Japanese maple that came with the house and turns a brilliant red in the fall. Once she has fire-proofed the rest of the property, she plans to invite a fire-chief friend over for dinner and ask, How bad is the maple? “And then do what they say,” she told me.

But unless her neighbors make similar efforts, Watkins’s risk will still be elevated. And taking these measures can be politically unpopular. Dave Winnacker, who was the fire chief of the Moraga-Orinda Fire District until his retirement last month, told me about trying to pass an ordinance that would require homeowners to keep a five-foot perimeter around their house free of flammable material; the public comments were overwhelmingly in opposition, even though these borders are proved to cut a house’s risk of burning down, he said. Residents called it a draconian overreach that would make their home unsightly and bring down property values. He chose that moment to retire. He didn’t want to be held accountable for their failure to act the next time fire arrived.

When communities do act, it can save them. Crystal Kolden, a pyrogeographer at UC Merced, studied what happened to Montecito, California—the town of Harry and Meghan, and Oprah—after it decided in the 1990s to take fire prevention seriously. From 1999 to 2017, the town spent $1.6 million total clearing brush, maintaining evacuation paths, building fuelbreaks, and working with homeowners to make sure they’d cleared vegetation around their houses. When the Thomas Fire came through in 2017—a worst-case-scenario fire for the region, with wind speeds around 75 miles an hour—Montecito could have lost 450 to 500 homes, Kolden’s research showed. Instead it lost just seven. Yards in Montecito do look a little different from others in California. But “there’s a lot of really gorgeous landscaping that does not burn,” Kolden told me. Succulents and other fire-resistant plants—think giant agaves—can be close to houses; rock gardens can be beautiful. Palm trees are fine if they’re well-manicured enough that they wouldn’t throw off flaming fronds, as some in L.A. did this week.

For a wealthy community such as Montecito, less than $2 million across almost 20 years is by no means prohibitively expensive. And according to Wara’s research, the state could help fund projects like these at relatively low cost. By spending about $3 billion a year—less than Cal Fire’s total fire-suppression budget in 2020, by his calculation—the state could harden about 100,000 homes a year, starting in the most fire-prone areas, and build fuelbreaks in every highly threatened community. That would also cover preventive burns on every acre that needs them, to prevent larger fires later.

Of course, landscaping and building better-sealed homes won’t change the fact that the biggest California fires are getting more intense. Climate change is creating more suitable conditions for the worst conflagrations to arise, and they will, again and again, with greater frequency now. Slowing that trajectory is a matter of global action. But yet here Angelenos are, living at the scale of their homes, their parcels of the Earth. Fires in California are like hurricanes in Florida. They’re going to happen, and people will live in their path. Stopping them from happening is impossible. But minimizing the damage they wreak is not.

When my family returned to our home in Santa Monica last Sunday night, we breathed a sigh of relief. Our house was fine, and the air quality was in the “good” category. Schools would reopen the next day. But as we unpacked, I noticed what looked like salt-and-pepper snow delicately dancing over the street. Ash from the Palisades Fire, burning just five miles north of us, was descending all around, coating the car we had left behind. In the backyard, it gathered over the small patch of turf we played on and in small clusters all across the garden, where my kids had recently planted carrots.

The next morning, we walked to school, talking about the blue sky. My 8-year-old pointed out the piles of windblown ash by the curb. That day, the kids would stay inside so the school could clean the debris from the playground equipment and yard.

As I walked the four blocks back home, a city-owned street sweeper buzzed past. When the truck’s bristles hit the pockets of ash, they kicked up car-size clouds of dust, sending all the debris back into the air. I clutched my N95 mask tighter against my face, pulled down my sunglasses, and jogged away. I closed the door tightly behind me.

That night, a local bookstore and mediation space held a ceremony to “call in the rain for a land devastated by fire.” Rain would help keep more fires from starting, and it would also help wash the ash away. For now, we’re left to deal with it on our own, swabbing surfaces, clearing streets, wondering what we’re breathing in and what it will do to the waterways that absorb it.

On Tuesday, the debris was continuing to fall, so the school held a “walking-only” recess. When I saw gardeners arriving armed with leaf blowers, my heart sank. (Los Angeles County has temporarily banned their use because they throw up so much dust.) But no one knew exactly the right way to clean up the mess. One neighbor was vacuuming their steps with a Shop-Vac.

With smoke, the hazards are clear: You can see it and smell it, and get out of the way. Our phones have been vibrating with air-quality indexes, which measure pollution in the air, but not ash. With ash circling like toxic feathers, it’s hard to know what is safe. The residue from house fires contains far more toxins than that of brush fires. The PVC pipes, lithium-ion car batteries, plastic siding, flooring, and everything else that evaporated in the blazes launched a soup of chemicals—nickel, chromium, arsenic, mercury—into the air. Older homes can contain lead and asbestos. Until Wednesday, the day after walking-only recess, L.A. County had an ash advisory in place, which recommended staying inside and wearing a mask and goggles when leaving the house.

But our lives in Los Angeles are largely outside: This is a city that dines outdoors all year long, where winter temperatures hover in the 60s and surfers are in the water in January. With no rain in the forecast, how long will our lives be coated in a fine layer of toxic dust? Maybe a very long time: A webinar put on by California Communities Against Toxics warned that the amount of ash that the fires had generated would take years to excavate, and created public-health risks.

The prospect of continued exposure to airborne chemicals sounds ominous, but Thomas Borch, a professor of environmental and agricultural chemistry at Colorado State University, was more sanguine. After the 2021 Marshall Fire tore through towns in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, Borch studied contaminants in the soil at houses near the fire. Some of the properties had elevated levels of heavy metals, but most were still below levels of concern. And although living among clouds of fine debris might feel apocalyptic, Borch told me that the wind could be helping to dilute the contamination in my neighborhood. “A lot of these ashes spread out over a much bigger area,” he said, which helps mitigate their health impacts.

Once ash and soot creep inside homes—through doors and windows, on shoes and clothes—“it’s a lot harder to actually get rid of,” he added. Cleaning can reinvigorate pollution inside the home, so it has to be done carefully. Borch advised that we vacuum with a HEPA filter and wet-mop surfaces to keep pollution from building up inside the house.

But the real questions regarding human health and ash are still open. Researchers have only recently started to investigate how the ash from structural fires differs from that of wildfires. In Los Angeles, Borch’s colleagues have set up 10 coffee-bag-size samplers around the fires (as close as they were allowed to go). They also plan to collect ash from within the burn areas and from windblown dust to compare the different toxins in smoke and ash, as well as their concentrations in the weeks and months following the fires.

If rain does arrive, it will wash out much of the debris, and the city will feel clear again. But that rain could also carry contaminants into streams, reservoirs used for drinking water, or the Pacific Ocean. Perhaps by then the wind will have blown most of the ash away, or in places, such as my neighborhood, outside of the fire’s direct path—we will have cleared the ash on our own. (Clearing ash in fire zones is a regulated process.) My family is still waiting to pull up the vegetables in our yard, but I’m no longer worried about bouncing balls and biking. We’ve been slowly wetting down our stone patio and stairs and trying to gently sweep up the ash, while making sure we’re protected by gloves, goggles, and masks. Half of the neighbors are wearing masks outside. We’re still swirling around like ash from the crisis, waiting for the rains to put everything back in place.

When my family woke up last Thursday, we learned that our friend Arthur Simoneau was missing.

The day before, when the Palisades Fire was heading toward the neighborhood where I grew up and where he still lived, my mom had texted his ex-wife, Jill, to ask if she knew where he was—he’d stayed behind to defend our road from fire before. Jill thought he was out of town, at a hot spring. But the next morning, she called to tell us that he’d raced back to his house, and no one had heard from him since. She asked if my father and I could head out from our place nearby to look for him.

Author and her father driving through the canyons to their old house. The driveway entrance to author’s childhood home, where a sign her father made, “Bilberry Ln.” used to be. (Photograph by Brian Van Lau for The Atlantic) Author’s father with the lamp he once installed, next to what used to be their garage (Photograph by Brian Van Lau for The Atlantic)

My old neighborhood began because my Dad and Arthur, separately, looked at the hills above Malibu and thought, I should build a house up there. They each bought land in a stretch of Topanga Canyon so sparsely populated that the path from the main road to their parcels was unpaved, running through a hillside of sumac, sagebrush, and toyon that produced red berries in the winter. Each lot had a panoramic view of the ocean and coastline. City water and power did not quite reach our road, so throughout the late ’80s and early ’90s, Arthur and Dad made the spot habitable, jerry-rigging a well, generators, solar panels, and an unofficial connection to a neighbor’s utilities.

Arthur building his home (Courtesy of Jill Ajioka) Arthur’s house, with Andre’s Door to Nowhere on the right side of the second floor (Courtesy of Jill Ajioka)

Fires might have been more of a worry up in the hills, but settling there didn’t seem much riskier than building a house in earthquake-prone Southern California to begin with. Fire was a part of life, and they upheld the codes, putting in driveways large enough for a firetruck and regularly clearing the brush around their lots. In Topanga Canyon, a clique formed around Arson Watch, a volunteer organization whose members cruise around in logoed jackets, looking for signs of emerging fires.

When we went to search for Arthur last week, Dad took his Arson Watch jacket with him. We were both hoping this 25-year-old piece of nylon could get us through closed roads and into our old neighborhood. But the officers we met weren’t buying that my 78-year-old father, with his faded jacket, needed to pass by barricades to a still-smoldering area. We returned home hours later, worried and exhausted, and then an evacuation warning for our area came through on our phones. As we packed the car, Jill called again, to tell us that Arthur was dead.

Arthur’s trees after the fire (Photograph by Brian Van Lau for The Atlantic)

My first memory is of Arthur, and in it, he looks the same as he did when I saw him last month. We’re standing on my lawn at my third-birthday party, next to the rosebush that Mom was always trying to make happen but that the deer always ate. He asks me how old I am, and when I tell him, he staggers.“No way, dude!” he says, feigning disbelief. “You’re so old!” He’s in a T-shirt, a ponytail, and (as he always was, no matter how formal the occasion) flip-flops. Backpacking at 9,000 feet of elevation, chasing a bear away while camping—flip-flops, because they were easy to slip off and didn’t collect burs as easily as sneakers.

He and Jill spent years constructing their three-story brick rectangle, painted olive green, with fragrant pepper trees along the front walkway. Arthur wanted to build a house with his own two hands, as his grandfather had done. (A bonus: He could design the garage door to fit his car with his prized hang-gliding gear strapped to the roof.) A football field away, across a small canyon, Dad and a construction crew built what he’d thought would be his bachelor pad. After he met my mom, she went with him to Mexico to buy the tiles that she laid in the floors and walls.

Back then, the only other dwelling on our road was a geodesic dome about a half a mile away, occupied by a gay couple who drove a DeLorean and held a support group for gay Filipino men with custody issues. Later on, a germophobic epidemiologist took over the Dome House, as we called it, figuring its remote location would help him avoid contagion. Peculiarity was a neighborhood prerequisite. When Jill and Arthur saw people touring properties who they thought would make annoying neighbors, they would walk around outside naked to scare them off.

Scrapbook photographs of Arthur and Jill building their home, and the trailer they lived in during the years they were building (Courtesy of Jill Ajioka)

A fire came through the canyon in 1993, and Dad and Arthur stayed behind with utility hoses and nearly 20,000 gallons of water to extinguish spot fires that erupted around their newly finished houses. Somehow, everybody and their homes stayed intact, minus a few warped windows.

My parents had kids first, then Arthur and Jill had Andre, who became my first and best childhood friend. Eventually our road got paved, more families moved close by, and we had a neighborhood. We called it simply “the hill” to differentiate it from “town”—Malibu. Our parents would trade off taking us to school, past an abandoned fire truck incinerated in the ’93 fire. My parents helped raise Andre; Andre’s parents helped raise my brother and me. I only just learned that Dad and Arthur had cleared a path between our two homes so that Arthur could run a phone line from his house to ours. I’d always thought it was so Andre and I could get to each other’s houses faster.

Members of the neighborhood, gathered in Arthur’s backyard for Andre’s second birthday part. Jill is on the far left beside Andre (held by a neighbor); the author and her mother are on the far right. (Courtesy of Family of Arthur Simoneau)

Arthur was our neighborhood’s unofficial scoutmaster. We were free to be as weird as we wished, but he would nip any selfishness or malice in the bud with a stern “Not cool, dude.” He’d help us wriggle under the chain-link fence next to a No Trespassing sign so we could soak in hot springs in Ojai, and strap pillows around our behinds with duct tape to teach us to rollerblade. He turned a wild garter snake, then another, into pets, Snakey and Snakey 2, who would roam freely in the living room; he’d lecture us extensively on gun safety before showing us how to shoot .22s and stash our guns in the brush if we saw any sheriff’s helicopters. He let us believe we were running wild, keeping us safe the entire time. When I woke up the morning after my dad had a heart attack, having slept through the ambulance lights that brought Arthur to our house, I wondered not about what might be wrong, but about what adventure he would take us on that day.

Our houses never really got finished. My brother’s bedroom was intended to be a walk-in closet, mine a breakfast nook, and neither had doors. Andre’s bedroom, meanwhile, had a surplus: a Door to Nowhere overlooking the driveway. Arthur had always meant to build a staircase there. The land, too, would allow us only so much normalcy. When my parents got us a trampoline, the Santa Ana winds blew it down the hillside, where it landed at a 45-degree angle against a tree and began its second life as our slide. We went through fires, blackouts, mudslides, rockslides, and windstorms. But we had the sense that tolerating these dangers made this life possible—one where you could see the Pacific Ocean from the kitchen and, from your bedroom at night, watch coyotes trot across the yard, backlit by the glow of Los Angeles. My family moved away when I started high school, only because we had to downsize, and other families left too. Eventually, Arthur was the only person from those years who still lived on the road.

Arthur looking out his window at the clouds above the Pacific Ocean. He could be found in this spot frequently, reading. (Courtesy of Jill Ajioka)

Before my father and I tried to reach the old road, we called the man who had bought our house on the hill. He told us what we didn’t want to hear: It had burned down. He thanked my father for building such a lovely home. Dad immediately thought of the nautilus fossil he’d placed in the center of the fireplace, made of rocks he’d collected along the canyon to the house. He wondered out loud if it had survived. On Monday, we finally did make it through the charred canyon, past deflated cacti, and up to the hills. We’d point to the piles of debris: I can’t tell if that used to be so-and-so’s house. When we saw the hills with nothing on them, I tried to superimpose what I knew of the land on what I saw, and I couldn’t. The sumac, sagebrush, and toyon were pulverized. We were on a new, blackened planet that happened to have the same topography as the place where I was raised.

Arthur’s home (foreground) and the rest of the neighborhood, burned. The rubble of the author’s house can be seen, flattened, on the far left. (Photograph by Brian Van Lau for The Atlantic)

Standing in what I think used to be our living room, I could not tell if a crumbling piece of metal was a washing machine or the 1920s Roper stove that we’d sold with the house. But I did find the nautilus, resting on top of some of the rocks Dad had collected. I thought about Arthur: He would have known how long it would take for the sumac to grow back.

So many people here are staring down losses like these. At least 10 of my friends’ childhood homes burned. If I drive down the coast right now, I can see hundreds of flattened houses where people I’ve never met were raised. All around Los Angeles, histories are vanishing. When we first found out that Arthur was missing, the fires’ official death count included just a few people; it has since risen to 25.

Dad and I drove away, and as we turned on a road where Arthur would lead us on bicycle rides, Dad gently mentioned that we’d found only one nautilus. He had actually placed two in the fireplace, and the one he loved the most was still missing. I couldn’t believe I’d forgotten. Yes, there were two.

Photographs by Daniel Dorsa

One of the worst-kept secrets in Los Angeles is a 130-acre swath of chaparral. On perfect weekend afternoons, I have walked my dog among the crowds at Runyon Canyon Park, a piece of rolling scrub nestled in the Hollywood Hills. I’d go more often if finding parking on Mulholland Drive wasn’t nearly impossible. In a city that loves the outdoors, Runyon is the premier Sunday-afternoon trail: a dusty-chic destination for after-brunch hikers, families, couples on first dates, and everyone else from around the city to get in steps, spot movie stars, or both. What makes the area so popular is that it’s a mountain hike in the middle of the city—across the freeway from Universal Studios and over the hill from the Hollywood Bowl. Rugged paths lead downhill to meet Hollywood Boulevard, close to the Walk of Fame.

As colossal wildfires have raged across L.A.—the most destructive in the city’s history—Runyon Canyon has not been spared. Last week, a blaze erupted in the heart of the park, forcing some nearby Hollywood residents to flee. Mercifully, firefighters halted the march of the flames before they turned into another major fire. But the blaze still left a 43-acre scar across the expanse. Treasured trails are charred.

Photographs by Daniel Dorsa

Compared with all that has been lost here in L.A., the devastation of Runyon Canyon and other hiking trails is trivial. Colleagues of mine have lost their homes. Entire neighborhoods have been wiped out, and winds threaten to keep fanning the flames. At least 25 people have died. Against the grim scale of this disaster, those ruined trails are a quieter kind of loss that the city will have to reckon with. Core to L.A.’s identity is easy access to nature—wild trails and canyons and vistas—along with perfect weather for visiting them almost any day of the year. Even the Hollywood sign is at the end of a hike. Just like that, many of the signature places to get outdoors have been wiped out.

The city burns because the city is wild. Multiple mountain ranges that demarcate the disparate communities of Los Angeles County create picturesque settings for homes—in dangerous proximity to scrub that is prone to catching fire. Those same areas house an ample supply of easily accessible trailheads that make these peaks and canyons our backyard. On the trails, dadcore REI hikers like me intermingle with athleisure-clad Angelenos who look like they started walking uphill from an Erewhon and wandered into mountain-lion territory. We cross paths with flocks of students carrying Bluetooth speakers, 5 a.m. trail runners, and tourists who underestimated the ascent to Griffith Observatory.

Any given morning in the secluded heights of Pacific Palisades, you would have found hikers on the hunt for a precious legal parking spot between the driveways. From there, well-worn paths lead through Temescal and Topanga Canyons, up to lookout points where hikers could watch the city meet the sea. It now appears this beloved area is destroyed. The horrific Palisades Fire may have started at a spot near the popular Temescal Ridge trail. Despite heroic, lifesaving firefighting, the fire continues to burn deeper into Topanga State Park. Gorgeous hiking country above Pacific Palisades may be closed off to the public for years as the area recovers.

Photograph by Daniel Dorsa

The Eaton Fire, the other major blaze, has also claimed some of the most beautiful spots around L.A. The fire’s namesake, Eaton Canyon, is home to a waterfall so photogenic that you once had to make a reservation to hike its trail. The blaze has burned up that walk, along with so many more in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains: trails that take you to Echo Mountain, Millard Falls, or toward the historic Mount Wilson Observatory that overlooks the city.

These bits of the outdoors have defined my life here, as they have for so many others. Those San Gabriel hikes are where my wife and I spent much of our time during the pandemic. The month after we got our dog, Watson, in 2020, the world shut down. There was nothing to do but hike. We drove to the trailheads that dot the Angeles Crest Highway, where hikers’ dirty Subarus dodge the gearheads who test their modified racers on the mountain curves. We parked in now-devastated parts of Altadena to get lost in the stunning foothills. We walked among the yucca all spring until Southern California’s unrelenting summer sun forced us indoors.

Much of L.A.’s nature still remains intact, of course. But even before the current fires, the sprawling Angeles National Forest that houses those peaks and trails of the San Gabriel Mountains has had it tough. In the autumn of 2020, the Bobcat Fire burned all the way across the range from north to south, torching 100,000-plus acres. This past fall, the Bridge Fire burned new patches of the mountains, with flames creeping toward the mountain town of Wrightwood and the ski slopes. Some of the areas my wife and I would traverse during the pandemic were decimated during these previous fires, and they are still recovering.

Photographs by Daniel Dorsa

Los Angeles County was ready to burn. The wet winters of the past two years helped keep the big blazes at bay. The current mix of drought and ferocious winds have proved to be prime conditions for a major fire. These conditions will inevitably return, and they will bring more flames that scorch L.A.’s trails. Yet the growing incidence of wildfire, and its threat to our most loved natural spaces, is far more than a California story. Forest fires are getting worse all around the globe; nearly a third of Americans live somewhere threatened by wildfire. National parks, forests, and other irreplaceable places for communing with nature are under threat. Last month, a 500-acre fire sparked by a downed power line burned up a big chunk of a national forest in North Carolina. In November, a brush fire broke out in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park.

Here in L.A., the city has only started to contend with the toll of these wildfires. On top of the lives, homes, and businesses, the legacy of the destruction will include natural areas. Los Angeles is hiking to Skull Rock just as much as it’s rolling down Imperial Highway. It is the studio lot and the Santa Monica Mountains. The open spaces all around us invite Angelenos to ditch the concrete grid for the wandering switchbacks. With so many trails that are damaged and closed, the mountains aren’t calling quite as loudly as they used to.

Photograph by Daniel Dorsa

Photographs by Alex Welsh

Michael Gollner studies fire and how it behaves at UC Berkeley’s Fire Research Lab. His research is focused on fires that spread from wildlands to urban areas––work that gives him insights into the fires ravaging Pacific Palisades, Altadena, and other areas near Los Angeles. On Friday, I interviewed him about the fires and how to rebuild the communities they’ve destroyed in a way that makes them more resilient. What follows is an edited version of our conversation.

Conor Friedersdorf: How relevant is the debate about how to manage forests––whether to thin them out, for example––to fires like the ones in greater Los Angeles that began in dry sagebrush and chaparral?

Michael Gollner: When extreme wind events occur, one variable is how much fuel is around to burn. Southern California had a lot of rain in the past couple of years, which caused a lot of plant growth, but no rain so far this winter, so that fuel was dry. We’re not talking about big trees burning in a forest. This was mostly little leaves and twigs, things less than a quarter-inch thick, so they get dry pretty quick. I’m not a fire ecologist, but in my observation of fire ecology, I think there’s still some debate on the best way to handle prescribed-burning regimes and fuel management in chaparral ecosystems. What I like to emphasize is: What happens when that fire gets to a community?

To improve protection, we’re not talking about clearing whole forests or bulldozing hills. We’re talking about just hundreds of feet out from the community. We’re talking about giving space between the fire and the community and then making it so that the only thing that can get through is embers.

Embers are little burning particles that are smoldering almost like charcoal when it is not making a flame but is red and glowing. They can loft up in the air and get carried by the wind—some firefighters reported seeing those embers lighting fires two to three miles ahead of the main flame front. You want to harden the community so that those embers are unlikely to light new fires.

[Read: The particular horror of the Los Angeles wildfires]

Friedersdorf: Even knowing that embers start new fires, a part of me can’t comprehend it: I think of struggling to light a campfire even while holding a constant open flame against firewood.

Where is my intuition going astray?

Gollner: It’s partly a matter of scale and probabilities. Any individual ember is unlikely to start a new fire. But a wildfire produces millions of embers. You can see them flying everywhere. One that catches is enough.

And you don’t see an ember land on a big flat surface, like a piece of plywood, and set it on fire. It rolls away. But where? In wind, embers tend to pile up together in one place, like between the boards of a deck, or in crevices at the base of a wall, in front of siding. They can get in nooks and crannies on the roof and pile up there, or if you have a vent, they can fly in through it and land on flammable material. A mulch pile can be a perfect cavity, where an ember or embers settle in a little one-inch area that is protected from the wind enough to smolder and ignite. That’s not something you can model at scale, but you can re-create it in a laboratory.

Alex Welsh for The Atlantic

Friedersdorf: What should homeowners understand about the science of how best to protect their homes?

Gollner: There’s never going to be 100 percent protection. But a shift in preparation can make a big difference, especially a community-wide shift. Firefighters can then have the upper hand and catch those fires that slip through the cracks. I’ve watched the videos of Pacific Palisades and elsewhere. In many places, vegetation management was not taking place. It’s hard to assign fault, because it’s a mix of private, city, county, and state property. But there was lots of brush, trees over structures, people who put juniper bushes next to their house, all in areas we’ve long known to be high-hazard. It’s devastating that it occurred in this way. We never expected it all to come together at once on any particular day. But we knew something like this could happen.

Think of having a defensible space around the home. You don’t want any material there that can catch fire and spread to your house, especially in the five feet around the base of the structure.

And then you want to harden the house against embers. Shake roofs are the absolute worst. The 1991 Tunnel Fire in Oakland Hills raced through wooden cedar-shake roofs, but those aren’t so common anymore. Now it’s flammable siding, flammable decks, open vents without mesh to protect against embers.

[Read: When the flames come for you]

And it’s tempting to think, I did my roof, I did my siding, and I did my vents. But I really love that juniper outside of my window. Well, if that juniper catches on fire, it is going to produce 15-foot-tall flames. It does not matter how strong your windows are; that’s going to shatter them and spread inside.

There is a story from a former fire chief about a house that was built mostly of glass and steel. It was super well defended against embers. Except it had an opening to an interior courtyard where they could land. An ember probably lit a planter on fire, which then probably shattered the glass and moved inside. Otherwise it would have been safe. But they had an opening that kind of let it in. You can build a whole concrete structure and then leave your window open, and it’s lost. So I don’t think the solution is to rebuild everything out of steel or concrete or mud, but rather to thoughtfully build and make sure you have the thought process of sealing the outside of your house from embers and keeping space around it free of flammable materials.

Left to right: Paint bubbles on the exterior of a home, palm trees singed by the Palisades Fire, and the remnants of a burned home in Pacific Palisades (Alex Welsh for The Atlantic)

Friedersdorf: And hope that your neighbors do the same?

Gollner: Yes. You can completely protect your house from embers, and then if you’re close to your neighbor who hasn’t done anything, and their house catches fire, those flames will be so huge, there’s just nothing you can do. You need the whole community to start making changes. If everyone’s making a lot of changes, even short of perfection, you start to see bigger impacts. Still, even if you’re the only one hardening your house, there can be benefits, depending on the fire. For example, over time, more firefighters arrive at the scene of a fire in a given area. When deciding where to focus, firefighters will probably pick houses that seem most defensible, which gives you a better chance. You want to be the house that they feel safe defending, not the house down a long drive surrounded by juniper trees where they feel unsafe.

If you and all your neighbors harden your homes, it’s harder for embers to start and spread fires, and the fire department can put out the isolated fires and save the community. But yes, once embers get into a community and set one house on fire, that fire can jump to the house of the neighbors. Fire spreads fast through vegetation, and slows down when it gets to houses. But houses burn really intensely and for a very long time. The fire dynamics completely change. You see just how much water firefighters are trying to use on house fires. Burning at that intensity, water doesn’t have much impact. So you want some space between your house and your neighbor: 30 feet is an estimate that we’re trying to refine with current experiments.

[Read: The unfightable fire]

Friedersdorf: So in Pacific Palisades, where the entire community burned, it’s unlikely that one home, having been diligently hardened, would have survived, whereas if the whole neighborhood had been hardened against fire, there might have been a different outcome?

Gollner: Right.

Friedersdorf: In communities that have largely or totally burned to the ground, and so have the opportunity to make changes at scale when rebuilding, what changes pass the cost-benefit test?

Gollner: There’s some discussion of trying to move around the footprint of where we build different things. And often that’s near-impossible because people own that land and they’re going to rebuild.

California does have fairly good fire-prevention measures and requirements in its building codes. One of the most important things is to make sure that those are enforced in rebuilding. Make sure that structures are up to code and hard to ignite, and that yards have defensible space and aren’t going to become infernos.

One hopes that if you do that at scale, you can discount some of the design aspects of building resilience into properties and landscaping, so that it’s cheaper for everyone. We’ve seen things like wooden fences spread fire. And so in the five feet next to the house, use metal or a nonflammable material or change the entire fence. There’s a lot of ways that you can make changes. And because of the wealth in Pacific Palisades, I could imagine it becoming a model for rebuilding resiliently. Hopefully this can become an area where, in a future wildfire, people evacuate and no houses burn down, or one house burns without spreading.

Alex Welsh for The Atlantic

[Read: Altadena after the fire]

Friedersdorf: I notice that whereas the public seems focused on city officials better responding to house fires once they start, you’re mostly focused on better preempting house fires from starting.

Gollner: We are never going to stop wildfires driven by extreme winds. But we can prevent large-scale disasters if we understand that almost everything you can do to avoid the worst outcomes must take place long before that first spark. It’s about the way we design our communities, the vegetation around them, the buildings and the way you prepare for the first response, so that you can very quickly identify a fire when it’s so small that a water drop from a plane can put it out, especially if the weather is favorable. Once the fire is large, it’s almost impossible to do anything.

Of course you want to answer questions, like Did the water pressure fail in Los Angeles? and Was the fire department appropriately funded? Investigations may reveal mistakes or a need for reforms.

But when assigning blame, remember, Pacific Palisades was designed 50 to 100 years ago, in a really high-fire-risk area where people built homes without consideration of wildfires. There were mistakes made, mistakes like the difficulty of evacuating, long before we fully recognized that they were going to be mistakes. We’ve allowed them to stand and failed to make commonsense changes. And everyone involved in many decades of decisions is partially responsible.

[Read: How well-intentioned policies fueled L.A.’s fires]

Friedersdorf: How do you study something as chaotic and variable as wildfires spreading into communities?

Gollner: One thing we do is modeling. There’s been a big development there: We took models of how wildfires spread through vegetation and expanded them to include how those fires spread into urban areas: how embers get into communities, how different structures burn, how fires hopscotch between homes and vegetation.

We also do experiments. We go to the Missoula Fire Lab a lot to better understand wildfires. And we go to the Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety, where they burn tiny houses, or ADUs, in a six-story-tall wind tunnel. We measure heat fluxes. We study how far structures need to be spaced from one another. We collect the smoke to understand what’s in it. We ask questions: How do embers ignite different materials, like mulch or siding or wood? There are still a lot of aspects of how fire spreads that we could understand much better.

Updated at 8:35 p.m. ET on January 10, 2025

In my neighborhood—a mobile-home park on the western side of Malibu—the power and gas have been out for days, and cell service is intermittent at best. If I drive to the right vantage points, I can see the Palisades Fire and Kenneth Fire—two of the five major fires blazing across Los Angeles—but they are still far away. My home is not in a mandatory evacuation zone or even a warning zone. It is, or is supposed to be, safe. Yet my family’s phones keep blaring with evacuation notices, as they move in and out of service.

As far as I can tell, these notices have all been in error. Earlier today, Kevin McGowan, the director of Los Angeles County’s emergency-management office, acknowledged at a press conference that officials knew alerts like these had gone out, acknowledged some of them were wrong, and still had no idea why, or how to keep it from happening again. The office did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but shortly after this article was published, the office released a statement offering a preliminary assessment that the false alerts were sent “due to issues with telecommunications systems, likely due to the fires’ impacts on cellular towers” and announcing that the county’s emergency notifications would switch to being managed through California’s state alert system.

The first alert jolted my phone yesterday afternoon. My family had already loaded the essentials in the car earlier this week, but we started packing in whatever else would fit, thinking that this might be the last chance we had to save anything we valued. Dad and I heaved my mother’s old rodeo saddle through the living room as she took a call from a woman worried about a friend of ours whom no one had heard from since the night before. Mom had the phone crooked under her ear, moving back and forth through the house. She gathered a photograph of her father and the tablecloth crocheted by my great-great-great-grandmother—a Californian, like me. But every time she went to a new part of the house to get some other keepsake, the call would cut out, and she wouldn’t be able to hear what her friend was saying.

“Just stop moving,” I told her.

“I know,” she said, “but what else am I supposed to do?” The tablecloth was in our kitchen; the photograph of her dad was in the living room; she still wanted to see if we could find the old Super 8 tapes we’d been meaning to digitize. We had to get ready to leave.

We learned that the first notification had been sent out in error. Mom’s employer, Pepperdine University, sent an email clarifying that, according to multiple sources, officials had accidentally sent the warnings countywide, rather than to only the people who actually needed to evacuate.

The second notice came as we drove through a canyon, on our way to the woman who had called earlier. We got the third when we pulled into her driveway. For all I know, these could have been the same alerts, pinging my phone again from different cell towers as we drove through L.A. County.

Mom checked the Watch Duty app before we went into our friend’s house. The platform sends her alerts about fire perimeters, evacuations, and any new blazes cropping up. This app has been the only way we’ve had any sense of the gray area of danger between the fire is far away and leave now. Looking at Watch Duty, we judged that we were in the clear—that these notifications were inaccurate. But we kept our phones close.

The third and fourth evacuation warnings came through on the way home. Again, we had no idea whether to trust them. From what we could tell of the fire’s movements, from the radio and from Watch Duty, the perimeter was still very far away from us. The wind had gone quiet. Mom and I fell asleep at about 4 a.m.

The fifth, sixth, and seventh evacuation warnings came through at around 6 a.m.—on my phone. My parent’s phones were silent, and they were still asleep. I woke Mom up to check Watch Duty. From what we could tell, these notices were also false. At least now we were awake in case they turned out to be real.

If we had to leave, we weren’t entirely sure where we would go. Most of our local friends have already had to evacuate; we have yet to find a hotel with a vacancy. Mom and I keep talking over our options—whether we should drive to Santa Cruz, San Francisco, or Las Vegas, where we have friends waiting for us.

The eighth notification came at about 8 a.m today. The ninth, around 9 a.m. The tenth, around 11:30 a.m. The 11th, as I finished writing this dispatch.

My family might be outliers in the sheer number of false alarms we keep receiving. Two of our friends in other neighborhoods received only that first false alarm yesterday and haven’t received anything since. (Some people received a correction notice from L.A. County.) But our next-door neighbor told us this morning that several evacuees staying with her got evacuation alerts last night too.

Even one false evacuation alert is, of course, a problem. Everyone around me is desperate for any bit of information that might tell us what’s happening and what we need to do next. It’s alarming when my phone—my one portal to fire updates and messages from friends—keeps screeching that I may need to get up and go, with seemingly no relation to the reality I see out my window.

Between the probably-false-but-maybe-not evacuation notifications, my loved ones are texting to ask if my family is okay. I am grateful they are asking, and at the same time, I truly do not know what to tell them. Not being able to trust the alerts that are supposed to tell us when we are safe or not has rattled us. We keep talking with our neighbors, trying to figure out where the fires are.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

Welcome back to The Daily’s Sunday culture edition.

Few things are more satisfying than watching a show pull off a clever and high-octane episode. For those looking to revisit some greats, our writers and editors answer the question: What do you think is a perfect episode of TV?

The following contains spoilers for the episodes mentioned.

“The Panic in Central Park,” Girls (streaming on Max)

Maybe this is the former theater critic in me coming out, but the thing I love most is when a television series tells a complete story in miniature—a stand-alone short that puts a particular dynamic or relationship or cast member front and center. Girls, which revolves around four friends in New York City, has always been brilliant at this, and never more so than with “The Panic in Central Park,” a Marnie-centered episode that deals with the particular moment in young adulthood when fantasy becomes untenable.

“The Panic in Central Park,” like the best Girls episodes, is written by Lena Dunham and directed by Richard Shepard. It begins with Desi mournfully reproaching his “cruel” new wife, Marnie, for declining to go get a scone, ends with her asking for a divorce, and riffs on film history, romance, and codependency in between. The high-strung Marnie, out on a walk to clear her head, encounters her ex, Charlie, who’s almost unrecognizable. He whisks her away on a whirlwind New York City adventure involving a consigned red cocktail dress (Millennial Williamsburg’s answer to Pretty Woman), a fake identity, Italian food, a rowboat in Central Park, a robbery, and—finally—the revelation that Charlie is addicted to heroin. A sadder, wiser Marnie walks home barefoot, having accepted the idea that no one is going to save her. The episode is beautiful and incisive about the allure of the stories we wrap ourselves in and the power of shaking them off.

— Sophie Gilbert, staff writer

***

“If It Smells Like a Rat, Give It Cheese,” Survivor: Micronesia (streaming on Hulu and Paramount+)

If I could erase my brain in order to watch anything for the first time again, I would do it for the penultimate episode of Survivor: Micronesia. The 16th season of the reality game show is famously one of the best, and this episode is why. Watching it is like witnessing Alex Honnold climb El Capitan without ropes—except instead of sheer athleticism in the face of seemingly impossible odds, you’re seeing how master manipulators exploit social dynamics to get what they want. It’s the Olympics for those who prefer politics or gossip to sports.

People who haven’t watched Survivor often assume that it’s about “surviving” the wilderness, but it’s always primarily been about surviving human nature. Driven by power and social capital, the show has more in common with Game of Thrones than Naked and Afraid. Explaining exactly what happens in this episode would be like explaining an inside joke; you need to watch the whole season to get why it hits. Just know that it features Red Wedding–level of gameplay, setting the bar high for how far people will go to get ahead.

— Serena Dai, senior editor

***

“C**tgate,” Veep (streaming on Max)

Unlike a perfect movie, a perfect episode of television does not need to surprise you or make you cry. It just needs to move your beloved or loathed characters through the formula in an especially excellent way. But the element of surprise may be why I remember “C**tgate” so many years later. In this episode of Veep, Selina Meyer (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) orchestrates two tasks that are both impossibly monumental and petty. She has to decide if she is going to bail out a bank owned by her current boyfriend, and she must find out who on her staff called her a “cunt” so loudly in public that it was overheard by a reporter.

These interweaving plots alone would make a perfectly satisfying episode. What makes it golden are two of the funniest, most unexpected subplots in Veep’s run. One involves a focus group for the bumbling White House liaison Jonah Ryan, now running for Congress in New Hampshire, who is workshopping an ad. The second is a surprise announcement by Selina’s daughter, a recurring sad sack who can never get her mother’s attention. Guess who she’s dating?

— Hanna Rosin, senior editor

***

“Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose,” The X-Files (streaming on Hulu)

If you’re seeking out a perfect episode of TV, the richest cache to search is the “case of the week” entries of The X-Files. The show wove an elaborate arc about aliens on Earth but saved most of its best material for the smaller stuff. “Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose,” written by Darin Morgan, is a gothic short story, following FBI agents Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) as they investigate a murder with the help of a tetchy local psychic named Clyde Bruckman (Peter Boyle).

This being The X-Files, Mulder is immediately taken with Bruckman’s clairvoyance, while Scully is skeptical—but Morgan’s script resolves each of Bruckman’s predictions about the future in clever, tragicomic ways, reinforcing Mulder’s belief while also finding ways to affirm Scully’s cynicism. It’s funny, dark, and beautifully acted—particularly between Anderson and Boyle—with an elliptical plot structure that feels wonderfully complex even by today’s TV standards.

— David Sims, staff writer

***

“It’s the End of the World” and “As We Know It,” Grey’s Anatomy (streaming on Netflix and Hulu)

I’ve previously written that after more than 20 seasons, it’s time for Grey’s Anatomy to come to an end. But in its early days, the series was responsible for some of the most memorable episodes of television: The second season’s two-part storyline, “It’s the End of the World” and “As We Know It,” demonstrated the show’s mix of humor and drama at its best.

Colloquially known as the “bomb in the body cavity” episodes, they tell the story of a patient who comes in with live ammunition in his chest. At the same time, the show’s powerhouse resident Dr. Miranda Bailey goes into labor, and two other characters perform surgery on her husband, who crashed his car on his way in. In the midst of some very suspenseful plotlines, the dialogue explores the relationships among, and vulnerabilities of, the characters in a beautifully human way. On a show that’s known for putting people in harm’s way, this pair of episodes focuses as much on the emotions as on the drama: the fear of losing someone you care about, and what it really means to be in love.

— Kate Guarino, supervisory senior associate editor

***

Season 2, Episode 10, The Mole (streaming on Netflix)

The Season 2 finale of Netflix’s reboot of The Mole is made perfect if you first watch all of the other episodes. The show’s formula is simple: 12 people collaborate on Indiana Jones–style missions to earn money for a prize pot, but one of them is a “mole” hired by the producers to sabotage the other contestants. Elimination isn’t based on your performance in missions. It’s about how accurately you identify the mole, according to your answers on a quiz given each round.

What results is sumptuous chaos, set among abandoned buildings and real explosives that make you wonder what the release form for this show must look like. Everyone is pretending to be the mole (to mislead others) while testing their fellow players (to figure out who the mole is) and still, somehow, trying to collect money for the prize pot. Oh, and did I mention that Ari Shapiro of All Things Considered fame is this season’s host?

I won’t spoil the finale, but it involves minefields and three equally mole-like characters. There’s not a single weak link in this episode, and if you correctly guess who the mole is, you’ll have bested much of the internet.

— Katherine Hu, assistant editor

***

“Chocolate With Nuts,” SpongeBob SquarePants (streaming on Paramount+)

At about 11 minutes per segment, SpongeBob SquarePants doesn’t have much room to play around with. But its best episodes use that brevity to their advantage, stuffing in visual gags, one-liners, callbacks, goofy voice acting, and witty repartee. “Chocolate With Nuts,” from the third season, is the greatest example of the show’s “run out the clock” ethos: SpongeBob and his best friend, Patrick, become chocolate-bar salesmen to achieve “fancy living.” Their ensuing door-to-door journey introduces them to a cavalcade of bizarre Bikini Bottom dwellers, including a seemingly immortal, shriveled-up fish and a man who feigns “glass bones” syndrome in one of many efforts to dupe the boys into buying chocolate from him instead.

More than most episodes of this kids’ cartoon, “Chocolate With Nuts” threads the needle between the juvenile hijinks and some more adult themes: the empty promise of the good life, the uphill battle of entrepreneurship, the fallacy of “trust thy neighbor.” That headiness is all conveyed through SpongeBob’s elastic face and Patrick’s gobsmacking vacuousness—the best way to explore any nuanced concept, in my view.

But the primary reason I have been rewatching this episode for more than 22 years now is its unassuming density. SpongeBob is wonderfully breezy, but its hidden strength is how layered each joke is: I laugh at different things every time—a certain line delivery, a certain facial expression—and impulsively repeat its most memorable quotes. “Chocolate,” says the pruned old-lady fish, wistfully. “Sweet, sweet chocolate. I always hated it!”

— Allegra Frank, senior editor

Here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:

The anti-social century The army of God comes out of the shadows. The agony of texting with men

The Week Ahead

September 5, a drama film detailing an ABC Sports crew’s efforts to cover the massacre at the 1972 Olympics in Munich (in theaters nationwide Friday) Season 2 of Severance, a sci-fi series about a corporate employee who agrees to surgically “sever” his personal life from his work life (streaming on Apple TV+ on Friday) The JFK Conspiracy, a book by Josh Mensch and Brad Meltzer about the first assassination attempt on John F. Kennedy (out Tuesday)

Essay

Illustration by Jackson Gibbs

Parents Are Gaming Their Kids’ Credit Scores

By Michael Waters

Several years ago, Hannah Case decided to examine her personal credit history. Case, who was then a researcher at the Federal Reserve, hadn’t gotten her first credit card until she was 22. But as she discovered when she saw her file, she’d apparently been spending responsibly since 14.

Read the full article.

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A man watches as flames from the Palisades Fire close in on his property in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles. (Ethan Swope / AP)

The Palisades Fire grew quickly in California, burning many structures and sending thick plumes of smoke into the air. These photos show parts of Los Angeles scorched by the wildfire.

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In an ember storm, every opening in a house is a portal to hell. A vent without a screen, a crack in the siding, a missing roof tile—each is an opportunity for a spark to smolder. A gutter full of dry leaves is a cradle for an inferno. Think of a rosebush against a bedroom window: fire food. The roses burn first, melting the vinyl seal around the window. The glass pane falls. A shoal of embers enter the house like a school of glowing fish. Then the house is lost.

As the Palisades Fire, just 8 percent contained this morning, and the Eaton Fire, still uncontained, devour Los Angeles neighborhoods, one thing is clear: Urban fire in the U.S. is coming back. For generations, American cities would burn in era-defining conflagrations: the Great Chicago Fire in 1871, the San Francisco fires of 1906. Then came fire-prevention building codes, which made large city burns a memory of a more naive time. Generations of western firefighters turned, instead, toward wildland burns, the big forest devastations. An urban conflagration was the worst-case scenario, the one they hoped they’d never see. And for a long time, they mostly didn’t.

Now more people live at the flammable edges of wildlands, making places that are primed to burn into de facto suburbs. That, combined with the water whiplash that climate change has visited on parts of California—extraordinarily wet years followed by extraordinarily dry ones—means the region is at risk for urban fire once again. And our ability to fight the most extreme fire conditions has reached its limit. The Palisades Fire alone has already destroyed more than 5,300 structures and the Eaton Fire more than 4,000, making both among the most destructive fires in California’s history. When the worst factors align, the fires are beyond what firefighting can meaningfully battle. With climate change, this type of fire will only grow more frequent.

The start of the Palisades and Eaton Fires was a case of terrible timing: A drought had turned abundant vegetation into crisp fire fuel, and the winter rains were absent. A strong bout of Santa Ana winds made what was already probable fire weather into all but a guarantee. Something—it remains to be seen what—ignited these blazes, and once they started, there was nothing anyone could do to stop them. The winds, speeding up to 100 miles an hour at times, sent showers of embers far across the landscape to ignite spot fires. The high winds meant that traditional firefighting was, at least in the beginning, all but impossible, David Acuna, a battalion chief for Cal Fire, told me: He saw videos of firefighters pointing their hoses toward flames, and the wind blowing the water in the other direction. And for a while, fire planes couldn’t fly. Even if they had, it wouldn’t have mattered, Acuna said. The fire retardant or water they would have dropped would have blown away, like the hose water. “It’s just physics,” he said.

California, and Southern California in particular, has some of the most well-equipped firefighting forces in the world, which have had to think more about fire than perhaps any other in the United States. On his YouTube livestream discussing the fires, the climate scientist Daniel Swain compared the combined fleet of vehicles, aircraft, and personnel to the army of a small nation. If these firefighters couldn’t quickly get this fire contained, likely no one could. This week’s series of fires is testing the upper limits of the profession’s capacity to fight wind-driven fires under dry conditions, Swain said, and rather than call these firefighters incompetent, it’s better to wonder how “all of this has unfolded despite that.”  

The reality is that in conditions like these, once a few houses caught fire in the Pacific Palisades, even the best firefighting could likely do little to keep the blaze from spreading, Michael Wara, a former member of California’s wildfire commission who now directs a climate-and-energy-policy program at Stanford, told me. “Firefighting is not going to be effective in the context we saw a few days ago,” when winds were highest, he said. “You could put a fire truck in every driveway and it would not matter.” He recounted that he was once offered a job at UCLA, but when the university took him to look at potential places to live in the Pacific Palisades, he immediately saw hazards. “It had terrible evacuation routes, but also the street layout was aligned with the Santa Ana winds so that the houses would burn down like dominoes,” he said. “The houses themselves were built very, very close together, so that the radiant heat from one house would ignite the house next door.”

In California, the shift toward ungovernable fires in populated places has been under way for several years. For the former Cal Fire chief deputy director Christopher Anthony, who retired in 2023, the turning point was 2017, when wildfires in populated places in Northern California’s wine country killed 44 people and burned nearly a quarter million acres. The firefighting profession, he told me, started to recognize then that fortifying communities before these more ferocious blazes start would be the only meaningful way to change their outcome. The Camp Fire, which decimated the town of Paradise in 2018, “was the moment that we realized that this wasn’t, you know, an anomaly,” he said. The new fire regime was here. This new kind of fire, once begun, would “very quickly overwhelm the operational capabilities of all of the fire agencies to be able to effectively respond,” he said.

As Wara put it, in fires like these, houses survive, or don’t, on their own. Sealed against ember incursion with screened vents, built using fire-resistant materials, separated from anything flammable—fencing, firewood, but especially vegetation—by at least five feet, a house has a chance. In 2020, California passed a law (yet to be enforced) requiring such borders around houses where fire hazard is highest. It’s a hard sell, having five feet of stone and concrete lining the perimeter of one’s house, instead of California’s many floral delights. Making that the norm would require a serious social shift. But it could meaningfully cut losses, Kate Dargan, a former California state fire marshal, told me.

Still, eliminating the risk of this type of wind-driven fire is now impossible. Dargan started out in wildland firefighting in the 1970s, but now she and other firefighters see the work they did, of putting out all possible blazes, as “somewhat misguided.” Fire is a natural and necessary part of California’s ecosystem, and suppressing it entirely only stokes bigger blazes later. She wants to see the state further embrace preventative fires, to restore it to its natural cycles. But the fires in Southern California this week are a different story, unlikely to have been prevented by prescribed burns alone. When the humidity drops low and the land is in the middle of a drought and the winds are blowing at 100 miles an hour, “we’re not going to prevent losses completely,” Dargan said. “And with climate change, those conditions are likely to occur more frequently.” Avoiding all loss would mean leaving L.A. altogether.

Rebuilding means choosing a different kind of future. Dargan hopes that the Pacific Palisades rebuilds with fire safety in mind; if it does, it will have a better chance of not going through this kind of experience again. Some may still want to grow a rosebush outside their window. After this is over, the bargaining with nature will begin. “Every community gets to pick how safe they want to be,” Dargan said.

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President Joe Biden still imagines that he could have won. Asked by USA Today’s Susan Page whether he could have beaten Donald Trump if he had stayed in the race, Biden responded: “It’s presumptuous to say that, but I think yes.”

Reality thinks not.

Of course, we’ll never know for sure, but the evidence (including polling) suggests that he would have been crushed by an even larger margin than Kamala Harris was. Biden’s answer is a reminder that his legacy will be tarnished by his fundamental misreading of the moment and his own role in it.

To be sure, Biden can point to some impressive successes. He leaves behind a healthy and growing economy, a record of legislative accomplishment, and more than 230 judicial appointments, including a Supreme Court justice. And then there were the failures: the chaotic exit from Afghanistan; a massive surge of migrants at the border in 2023. Although Biden was not solely to blame for inflation—factors included the Federal Reserve’s low-interest-rate policy and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine—his spending policies contributed to the problem. And even though he rallied Europe to the defense of Ukraine, critics suggest that he also misread that moment—Phillips Payson O’Brien argued in The Atlantic in November that the Biden administration “treated the conflict like a crisis to be managed, not a war to be won.” Ukraine’s uncertain fate is now left to Biden’s successor.

A charismatic and energetic president might have been able to overcome these failures and win a run for reelection. Some presidents seize the public’s imagination; Biden barely even got its attention. He presumed that he could return to a Before Times style of politics, where the president was a backroom bipartisan dealmaker. Whereas Trump dominated the news, Biden seemed to fade into the background almost from the beginning, seldom using his bully pulpit to rally public support or explain his vision for the country. Trump was always in our faces, but it often felt like Biden was … elsewhere.

Biden also misread the trajectory of Trumpism. Like so many others, he thought that the problem of Trump had taken care of itself and that his election meant a return to normalcy. So he chose as his attorney general Merrick Garland, who seems to have seen his role as restoring the Department of Justice rather than pursuing accountability for the man who’d tried to overturn the election. Eventually, Garland turned the cases over to Special Counsel Jack Smith, who brought indictments. But it was too late. With time running out and a Supreme Court ruling in favor of broad presidential immunity, Trump emerged unscathed. And then came the sad final chapter of Biden’s presidency, which may well overshadow everything else.

When he ran for president in 2020, Biden described himself as a “transition candidate” and a “bridge” to a new generation of leaders. But instead of stepping aside for those younger leaders, Biden chose to seek another term, despite the growing evidence of his decline. With the future of democracy at stake, Biden’s inner circle appeared to shield the octogenarian president. His team didn’t just insist that voters ignore what was in front of their eyes; it also maintained that the aging president could serve out another four-year term. Some Democrats clung to denial—and shouted down internal critics—until Biden’s disastrous debate performance put an end to the charade.

Even then, Biden stubbornly tried to hang on, before intense pressure from his own party forced him to drop out of the race in July. Now he is shuffling to the end of his presidency, already shunted aside by his successor and still in denial.

As the passing of Jimmy Carter reminds us, presidential legacies are complicated matters, and it is difficult to predict the verdict of history. But as Biden leaves office, he is less a transformational figure than a historical parenthesis. He failed to grasp both the political moment and the essential mission of his presidency.

Other presidents have misunderstood their mandate. But in Biden’s case, the consequences were existential: By his own logic, the Prime Directive of his presidency was to preserve democracy by preventing Donald Trump’s return to power. His failure to do so will likely be the lasting legacy of his four years in office.

Related:

Biden’s unpardonable hypocrisy How Biden made a mess of Ukraine

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

The army of God comes out of the shadows. “The Palisades Fire is destroying places that I’ve loved.” Why “late regime” presidencies fail

Today’s News

Former President Jimmy Carter’s state funeral took place in Washington, D.C. Carter’s casket was flown to Georgia after; he will be buried in his hometown of Plains. At least five people are dead in the wildfires that have spread across parts of the Los Angeles area. More than 2,000 structures have been damaged or destroyed. New York’s highest court denied Donald Trump’s request to halt the sentencing hearing in his criminal hush-money case.

Dispatches

Time-Travel Thursdays: Early-career poetry often poses a tantalizing question: How did this poet start off so terrible—and end up so good? But a writer’s final works are compelling for a different reason, Walt Hunter writes.

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Evening Read

Illustration by Jan Buchczik

You’re Going to Die. That’s a Good Thing.

By Arthur C. Brooks

Death is inevitable, of course; the most ordinary aspect of life is that it ends. And yet, the prospect of that ending feels so foreign and frightening to us. The American anthropologist Ernest Becker explored this strangeness in his 1973 book, The Denial of Death, which led to the development by other scholars of “terror management theory.” This theory argues that we fill our lives with pastimes and distractions precisely to avoid dealing with death …

If we could resolve this dissonance and accept reality, wouldn’t life be better? The answer is most definitely yes.

Read the full article.

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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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