Americans are now spending more time alone than ever. It’s changing our personalities, our politics, and even our relationship to reality.
I've been posting a lot of longform articles this week. Here's another, which, like most, you can listen to if you prefer: The Anti-Social Century by Derek Thompson.
In the past two days, fires in and around LA County have destroyed 27,000 acres and counting — sometimes as fast as three football fields every minute. It's an astonishing amount of land to go in such a short time. More than 130,000 lives uprooted. People left with nothing.
My thoughts are with friends in Pacific Palisades, Woodland Hills, Santa Monica, Studio City, Beachwood Canyon, and Lake Hollywood, which are currently on fire or bordering neighborhoods that are burning.
I haven't been to California since 2019, but I've lived in all of those places, sometimes for weeks, sometimes for months. I lived in Santa Monica for almost a year... spread over a decade. I know a lot of good people who call those cities and neighborhoods home.
In 2017, I lived on the Beverly Glen-Bel Air border when the Skirball Fire decimated Bel Air, burning 422 acres. It was a terrifying and clarifying place to be.
The next year, I was talking with my friend, Artur, who was bartending at the Fairmont Miramar in Santa Monica, when a Malibu resident just displaced by the Woolsey Fire sat next to me. He wore cut-off jeans, flip flops, and a ratty t-shirt, his face and hair grey with soot. "I just ran," he said. His house was gone, his car. He asked to borrow my phone and then just stared at it, realizing he didn't know anyone's number. "Do you have your wallet?" I asked. He nodded and realized why I was asking. He asked Artur about vacancies. So many people were fleeing, it was possible every room was taken — if you looked north over the hotel pool, you could see the smoke above Malibu, which lies just beyond Pacific Palisades. It was that close. Artur picked up the bar phone and within a few seconds was giving the man a thumb's up. The man looked at my drink and asked what it was. "A Two-Legged Dog," I said and motioned for Artur to fix him one, but the man signalled for him to stop. "Just water," he said. "Lots of water."
A few days earlier, I'd accepted an invitation to stay at a friend's loft in DTLA. I wished the stranger luck, said goodbye to Artur, and headed to the Expo. I was at the loft in a little over an hour. My friend had completely forgotten about the invitation and was packed to head north for a few days, along with a mutual friend, documentarian Nirvan Mullick. They were going to document the Camp Fire in Paradise and asked if I'd help. I knew in my bones I couldn't again be close to that kind of devastation. I declined.
Be safe, California friends.
A few bonus reads:
I Saw the Beginning of Hell by Lucy Sheriff (Intelligencer, January 8, 2025)
A Running List of Resources to Help Artists Impacted by LA Fires
Los Angeles Fire Season Is Beginning Again. And It Will Never End by David Wallace-Wells (Intelligencer, May, 2019)
The Case for Letting Malibu Burn by Mike Davis, from his book, Ecology of Fear, 1998. Davis was also the author of City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles and other fantastic books.
Who knew that you could tour Alcatraz on Google Maps Streetview. Not I.
I Have That On Vinyl is "a place for people to share their passion for vinyl records, music, and have discussions about both." Pretty self explanatory.
Caught my eye because of Poetry, Lyricism, and David Berman: a Mourner's Chronicle.
Does what it says on the tin: Italy is the only country with lifeguard dogs.
I somehow missed that Hania Rani did a Tiny Desk Concert in 2024.
I've posted about Rani previously.
This Longform story, Eat What You Kill, is astonishing and well worth your time. At the heart of it is a doctor growing rich by misdiagnosing patients, including one who died after receiving chemo for 11 years for stage 4 cancer despite never having cancer:
Hailed as a savior upon his arrival in Helena, Dr. Thomas C. Weiner became a favorite of patients and his hospital’s highest earner. As the myth surrounding the high-profile oncologist grew, so did the trail of patient harm and suspicious deaths.
You can read the full investigation on ProPublica: Eat What You Kill by J. David McSwane.
I'll point out that ProPublica is the best place for thorough journalism that I'm aware of. When I cancelled my subscriptions to The Guardian (due to anti-Trans bias) and The Atlantic (too expensive), I funnelled that money into a monthly donation to PP.
Another banger piece they published just this week was The Militia And the Mole by Joshua Kaplan:
A wilderness survival trainer spent years undercover, climbing the ranks of right-wing militias. He didn’t tell police or the FBI. He didn’t tell his family or friends.
He only told Joshua Kaplan at ProPublica.
Speaking of Longreads (see the post below), Longreads.com has released their best of 2024, which is broken into numerous categories. They always compile the best best-of list of the year:
Longreads
I hate linking to Bloomberg, but I do appreciate their annual Jealousy list, wherein their reporters list the articles published at other outlets that they themselves wish they'd written.
Here's the 2024 Jealousy List. Previous years have archive links on the page.
This is an extraordinary page about The Moon. Anything and everything you ever wanted to know about the moon in one place.
The page has been making the rounds for a few weeks and I'd played with it a bit but only did the deep dive today and therefore, I'm now ready to share. I give you The Moon.
