From the Front Lines of a California Wildfire

In today’s newsletter, our puzzles and games editor, Liz Maynes-Aminzade, introduces Laugh Lines, a new weekly game that challenges your knowledge of New Yorker cartoons. But, first, M. R. O’Connor reports on what it’s like to fight a wildfire. Plus:

Inside the Fight Against a Los Angeles Inferno

A reporter embeds with wildland firefighters during one of the deadliest blazes in California history.

The rain has come to Los Angeles, and the city can finally exhale—the showers providing some much needed moisture to the bone-dry landscape. Firefighters are also getting a break, after spending weeks desperately battling the half-dozen or so major wildfires in the area.

The deadliest of those fires, the Eaton, which killed seventeen people, is now ninety-eight per cent contained. For a piece in this week’s issue, M. R. O’Connor, a reporter with wildland firefighting training, embedded with crews working the blaze, helping to fight the fire herself. For days, she hiked to watch the fire’s progress, talking with the crews and sleeping in a chilly tent in the Rose Bowl parking lot, which had become a makeshift “fire camp” for first responders. O’Connor and her fellow-firefighters walked through the partially burnt-out suburbs, using the backs of their hands to check for warm spots among the ashes.

Wrangling a blaze of this size isn’t just about spraying water on active flames. It requires days—if not weeks, months—of painstaking, and surprisingly manual, work. “Every inch has to be checked by a person in order for an area to be declared fully contained,” O’Connor explains. “The perimeter of a wildfire is typically walked over three or four times, and sometimes more.” One firefighter compared fire to an animal: “If you take away the air, it dies. You can feed it by giving it more fuel. It can sleep,” he says. “It’s an entity that you have to respect.” This is a knowledge that we are coming around to; as O’Connor writes, “an entire city, maybe an entire country, was starting to appreciate the reality that wildland firefighters inhabit.” Read the story »

The First Days of Trump 2.0

Donald Trump onstage at the Libertarian National Convention, in May, 2024.Photograph by Francis Chung / POLITICO / AP

• A pardon for a dark-Web folk hero: Ross Ulbricht, the founder of the online black market Silk Road, was pardoned by the President last week, for crimes related to drug trafficking, money laundering, and computer hacking. Ulbricht has become a mythic figure in the crypto community, largely because the transactions on his site were made in bitcoin. Trump’s decision to free him is just one example of the ascendancy of the crypto lobby in the new Administration. Charles Bethea reports.

• MAHA moves in: Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the nominee for secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, will appear before the Senate on Wednesday and Thursday this week. If confirmed, Kennedy would oversee the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and fifteen other agencies. Clare Malone profiled R.F.K., Jr., last year, and explored the origin of some of his unorthodox and potentially dangerous ideas.

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