we can't keep doing this 😭

On the fires in Los Angeles and on the growing desire to fight back.

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Death toll in LA wildfires rises to 10
Likely to Be Costliest Blaze in U.S. History
Eames House, other cultural gems threatened
Trump seizes on Los Angeles infernos
This is…one of the bigger modern disasters? Absolutely devastating, made more bitter by news that 2024 was the hottest year ever. We’ll talk about this in a moment but, if you’re looking to or for help, here are a resources that I’ve caught from feeds and friends, to help out and or help yourself if in need.

• Emergency Resource Guide

• MALAN Fire & Wind Storm Resources

• LA Fire Mutual Aid Resource Hub

• Displaced Black Families GoFundMe Directory

• Support The Music Community

• Help Victims of the Los Angeles Wildfires

• How To Give, Volunteer, And Help

• “Where Physical Donations Are Being Accepted”

• IN PERSON Volunteer Opps

Why does Trump want Greenland?
Republicans pave way for Trump to acquire Canal
Trump says he plans to change Gulf of Mexico
Mexico's President offers sarcastic response to Trump
A preview of the insanity (Or, um, imperialism.) which is definitely a distraction. Meanwhile, all Greenland wants to be is independent. Do you smell the friction?

"It's time to get back to our roots"
Behind Meta’s Makeover Ahead of Trump
“ending it’s third party partnership”
Infuriating and, well, nothing many will do about it since we “depend” on such stupid platforms like his. Don’t think it’s bad? Leaked docs and internal strife say otherwise. Anyway, Europe is fending off Musk’s influence. Who says there aren’t global kings?

The true cost of Brexit, five years on
Germany joins EU’s ‘ultra-low’ fertility club
Canada's Justin Trudeau resigns
Other concerns from here and there.

New York first US city with congestion charge
Some good news this week, despite chodes outing themselves as ignorant scaredy cat babies who should maybe move back home. Cue the scared of cities meme!

Doctors worry that iodine deficiency
Add this to the “Just like old times!” disasters list.

Bald eagle found felled by bird flu
The metaphors…they’re becoming even more obvious.

I always told my parents that, unless the Hollywood sign is on fire, I would be okay. This was because a fire in Chatsworth would affect the air, yes, but wasn’t going to “get me.” The same with fires in Agoura Hills, Santa Barbara, San Francisco: those were “close” but not at all. It’s hard to conceptualize a place like Los Angeles unless you’ve lived there, as it’s both everywhere and nowhere, which outsiders see as a constant coast adjacent to only Hollywood and only Beverly Hills, only celebrities and only movie makers.

The fires this week in Los Angeles are different: the scale, yes, but it's the proximity to real people and real lives that make it different and so damaging, an unfathomable nightmare that literally every friend I’ve spoken to described as “apocalyptic.” Yes, sure, we can compare the site to two Manhattans and 200 golf courses or place the scale upon other cities — but this is the sort of disaster that this “isn’t about”: like Maui and Hurricane Helene, the destruction and size may be comparable but, unlike those other disasters, the concentration of people and the diversity of lives is different as it’s the 22nd most populated city in the world. Imagine not Central Park burning but instead tens and tens of blocks from the upper east side and entire neighborhoods within Queens disappearing. Imagine blocks and blocks of row houses in Georgetown gone along with neighborhoods in Chevy Chase: that’s the sort of cultural damage we’re talking about. This is why people who have lived there have been dumbfounded, why this will have an impact akin to Hurricane Katrina: so many parts of the city were under attack because it wasn’t “some forest in Malibu” but apartment buildings and schools and nice houses and not-nice-at-all houses. Yes, celebrities lost homes in the Palisades — but all the working class people and new families in Altadena? In the Valley? What about them? Like any place, Los Angeles is real people, doctors and teachers, fine artists and working artists, people in Hollywood and people way outside of that industry. No matter where you were in the city, you felt the fire in your eyes and lungs, whether you could escape it or not. That is the reality of such a situation, no matter how one stereotypes the politics or economics of the city. As I chatted with a friend, LA is a city that is constantly rebuilding — and it will survive this. It’s a city of happy, resilient people always at the edge of disaster, hence the Didion quotes, hence the burned pages. Like a broken bone, it will heal (even if something is lost in the process).

There are fingers to point, of course. Yes, the fires are being fought with slave prison labor (which the state just voted to continue). Yes, it was bad that the mayor was in Ghana, which was only made worse by rumors of the fire department budget having been cut — which was a right wing allusion to what they will do, emphasized by LA billionaire mayoral candidate Rick Caruso and eaten up by a consistently unchecked media landscape that emphasizes right-wing righteousness. But the biggest thing of all is that these fires are one of the many blood diamonds on an ever lengthening chain of climate disasters: the area was underwater months ago and recently swung toward drought, a common patter of our all too commonplace climate chaotic now. “The Green Dream, or whatever they call it,” the left said. “It’ll start getting cooler…I don’t think science knows,” the right said. All this, as the temperature rises, as people like Trump cut things like early pandemic detection, as places just south of me cut services that would prevent flooding.

Twelve days into 2025 and our dystopic now continues. An explosion at the feet of the incoming president, the greatest city in America burns as some wait for Amazon deliveries, as some wonder about (and use) private fire fighters. “Will the lifeboats be seated according to class?” The rich crusade to cut social services like fire fighting. The rich want to arrest people instead of help them. “Capitalism! Capitalism! Capitalism!”: sure — but maybe we shouldn’t let one billionaire couple own all of California’s water supply? Maybe we shouldn’t continue to give our water to AI instead of ourselves? Maybe we should be more mad the spaces we care about are being removed? “The entire Pacific Palisades looks like, you know, unfortunately Gaza or one of these war-torn countries,” Jamie Lee Curtis said, firmly leaning back in her chair, as if awaiting to be bathed in applause. “CLASS WAR” someone sprays on a wall Downtown. CLASS WAR.

If we think about our lifetime, about the enabled disparities, are situations like these not battles within a larger conflict? We talk and talk about our plight and shared injustices — but has the world been weaponized against those who have no means to protect themselves? One billionaire bows to another, another moves from one major continent to another to steal control before becoming shadow president of the world — and what can we do about it? Track their planes? Attempt to tan by the flames, posting online about how much capitalism sucks as we Instacart? Unlike world wars where countries battled over ideologies resulting in death, this century is more about those with money feuding for more and more cash as they adjust their footing upon growing piles of the dead that accumulate at a quickening glacial pace. Genocides happened and continue to happen but, now, thanks to the computers in our pockets that they gave us and mercury’s nudging upward, mass death is a weekly occurrence that you have to glut yourself on as you overwork to death while posting about it on the panoptic digital playgrounds. We’re in constant states of grief for a future that doesn’t exist — and yet we hope and hope for change. Someone will save us, right? Is this not the moment when we choose between fighting back or indulging magical thinking?

“This is a story about cooperation. It's about actually locking arms,” Alissa Walker wrote of the disaster. “It's the same story I write over and over about how the lack of regional goals is hampering LA's ability to get it together for its megaevent era.“ It’s a fitting summation of a moment, of a week, of a decade, of a century.

John Waters Is Still Filthy
An upper. We needed it this week!!

“Screenshotting an Article Is Just Plagiarism”
"This app runs off the work of journalists"
This critique isn’t new but this is true for…most of social media. And this is why writers, media, etc. are disappearing! But also why journalists, writers, etc. had to “become creators” because the art of citing has been lost to, say, the contentification of society and illiteracy. (But not in this newsletter! We citing the fuck out of shit.)

‘Root’ writers pressed to ‘offset’ colleague’s death
Hulu+ Live TV service and Fubo to merge
“It’s on Tubu”
"Nikki Glaser just interrupted her own musical"
"there’s a studio leaderboard"
Some other indications of the state of media. (Interestingly, the early Wicked home release paid off.)

Apple's automatic AI photo analysis
Apple automatically put an AI feature into Photos. You can undo it though!

Americans Need to Party More
"guilt your friends"
RE: last week’s “The kids have quit drinking!” story. That said, to the point of starting a family newsletter, Bobby and I did that because we couldn’t have our annual holiday party during Covid. The party hasn’t returned — yet. I’m taking it upon myself to start partying again, I guess! (This reminds: I keep hearing about the death of craft breweries, which means the 2010s are finally ending…in the mid-2020s.)

"teeth are so back"
" i think veneers are gonna be gauche"
“radicalized my fyp”
“full bush in a bikini”
“full bush in a bikini”
Between the normal teeth coming back and the bush talk on TikTok, you’d think being “natural” was coming back. Lest I remind you of the Ozempic fascism thing, although this bushiness is a gift to the 4B world.

furry robot ‘mirumi’ clips on bags
“We all need a little joy”
This thing would heal me. I’ve been fixated on it all week, even though no one actually needs it. But it’s bashful little face!

The Gen X anti-corporate streak too easily co-opted by corporations, turned into family entertainment about boys usurping adults, cf. Home Alone, Dennis the Menace, Problem Child. Which around 9/11 got mashed and extruded into profane nihilism (early VICE, indie sleaze, American Psycho, Family Guy) and twee escapism (Wes Anderson, Joanna Newsom, McSweeney’s, Pixar), or what I called Shock-and-Aww. Plus that smelly mélange of gaming and filesharing forums, and the lad-and-dad sites, your Farks and Chives. This was the primordial cumbath the modern troll, edgelord, groyper etc. slithered from, as did I.

This is perhaps the most accurate summation of the times, no? This comes during the never-ending ending of Tony Tulathimutte’s Rejection, which may be remembered as one of the most necessary — and searing — analyses of liberalism in these times. The characters are modern loser stereotypes, rejects from the straight white male sect to the queer POC world whose patheticism is based in progressivism, thus invoking every reader as both viewer and actor in our stupid on-and-offline dramas of today. You leave every story in the book knowing that you, like them, have no idea how to stand up for yourself as that was not what the structures of contemporary liberal culture were made for.

It’s easy to parody modern liberalism and its patheticism, as best manifested by the annual versions of the “liberal January 6” meme which, in 2025, included brat, polycules, and land acknowledgements. The joke is always funny because it holds up a mirror in the same way Tulathimutte does: we protest, yes — but fight? No, because “we go high,” which seems to have enabled a near decade of using logic and reason and courts and systems and “holding space” and general pleasantries to do necessary work versus putting a fist through someone’s teeth when they treat you like shit. The monstering of antifa outdid the actual action of antifa.

Violence is bad, obviously, but we’re experiencing a restless shift away from 2010s twee politics and into a desire for left-wing aggressivism in the months after defeat, a spinefulness suggesting everyman action instead of perma-rationality only allowed (and respected by) the college educated and general smug liberal elite. The ProPublica story on the gay man who infiltrated right wing militias stormed the internet precisely because it offered a rubric for this, a suggestion for how to fight. “The only way to stop fascist rhetoric from spreading in this country, with where everything’s at and where the stakes are, is to meet that rhetoric with the threat of violence,” leftist TikToker @420blazed69 said, while defining a niche of leftists who throw hands for a cause. “Shows like Will & Grace could only exist because there were decades of gay liberation movements because people had been making straight people so uncomfortable for so long,” lesbian bookseller bookendsinflorence explained. Extreme times call for extreme measures — direct action, for example — that require getting uncomfortable and putting yourself aside for the greater good. People are tired of behaving. The world is burning, rich people continue to squeeze us, and the rights that some fought with their lives for are being peeled away as we rot: we’ve run out of time to be pleasant. Contemporary strategic pacifism has failed us: blow up the pipelines.

This may sound extreme but rejecting too gentle semantics like “unhoused,” using mental health to excuse the mistreatment of others, clinging to ideas of respectability, bean souping and invoking capitalist enabled laziness, and generally spending too much time online due to insecurities allows us to get walked all over as we cannibalize our intelligence, our literacy. These are spineless, follower behaviors based on too many years of internet poisoning, of a blue screen reality instead of a lived reality. Look at the modern history of a word like “latinx” for proof. Are we content to be the punching bag? Or to actually punch back?

Yes, we of the progressive opinion can and should disagree without being disrespectful — but it’s this sort of infighting and demands of respectability that disable advancement, that our own mania in this moment pushes so-called “normal” people toward strongmen, away from our weak asses and weak movement. If we need to fight for the planet and win a class war, we actually have to do something and our being divorced from reality and each other is a rotten way to start. “You can’t even stop yourself from shopping online and you think you’re going to seamlessly transition to a classless society?” cntrtnr said on TikTok. “We’re not going to get anywhere unless some of you people embrace the notion of personal sacrifice and take moral agency in your life. You can’t fight climate change by doing TikToks and taking exotic trips.” Nothing will change until our anger gets powerful enough.

"The Silver Swan"
I have been thinking about this automaton all week. She’s called The Silver Swan and I would…sob if I saw her, in real life. (Speaking of, listen to Amy and David Sedaris talk about grief.)

"thread of the worst music on Reels"
Another big item this week was TikTok is more or less dunzo. So, I’m preparing for having to skip to Reels and Shorts and…it fucking sucks. We’re about to enter a culture void that I don’t think we’re prepared for. Things are rough enough already!

“a Tina Perry production”
The Beyoncé propaganda to biracial eugenics to multiple beefs pipeline resulted in this, which is just great. The finale of TikTok: The Musical!

"Tomorrow’s World was broadcast in 1995"
I love what the past thought about the future.

“My husband keeps calling”
I think all babies born this year should have this name.

“white people be like”
Sadly, to the point of the essay above, they do be like that and that’s why we all will continue to lose.

“saw this at 7/11”
“his lifeless eyes”
What are we doing to stop Mr. Beast from being seen in public again? Speaking of freaks, here’s a blast from the past: David Dobrik returned and is now buff. It’s kind of like that one tabloid Hercules kid from the nineties, which is to say: freakish.

“fucked up in the crib”
“On the computer”
Balataro hive…where we at??

“ireland school of motoring logo”
And what about a logo having a penis? They can have penises too!

“had a great day”
I would be hollering at that job rejection too. I’m obsessed with her. “I’m sowwee.”

And, finally, one of the items on my 2025 vision board.

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