The Week That Changed Los Angeles

Writer Emily Witt (“Health and Safety: A Breakdown” https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/718547/health-and-safety-by-emily-witt/) has spent the past two weeks on the ground covering the Los Angeles wildfires for The New Yorker. Her latest story centers around the Benns (5:39), a multigenerational Black family with deep ties to Altadena (8:35), where they’ve raised children in homes they’ve owned dating back to the late 1950s (16:13). We discuss how they’re managing as the Eaton fire continues to rage (17:00), the value of community in crisis (18:40), and the measures the city was urged to take to mitigate this disaster (23:28). On the back half, Witt reflects on her 2023 interview with Mayor Karen Bass (32:40), the prophetic work of Altadena author Octavia Butler (39:28), how on-the-ground reporting offers a chance to “write a first draft of history” (46:30), and where Los Angeles goes from here (56:10). To help support the Benn family, visit their GoFundMe https://www.gofundme.com/f/aid-the-benn-family-rebuild-after-devastating-wildfire or text “Talk” to 858-358-5881. And special thanks to Weyes Blood. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:20Sam Fragoso?

  This is Talk Easy. I'm Sam Fragoso. Welcome to the show.

• 0:27Sam Fragoso?

  Today, author and journalist Emily Witt. She recently published an excellent new book called Health and Safety and is a staff writer at The New Yorker, where she covers politics, culture, and climate. In recent years, that's included coverage of the landslides in Big Sur, the wildlife in Griffith Park, the increasing consequences posed by oil drilling, and the debate over electric vehicles. Witt, who is currently a resident of Los Angeles, has spent the past couple of weeks on the ground covering the wildfires, which to date have claimed the lives of at least 27 people, displacing tens of thousands more.

• 1:09Sam Fragoso?

  The LA Times reports that upwards of 12,000 structures across the city have been reduced to ash. That includes the home of Emily's brother, Stephen, whose Altadena residence was lost in the Eaton Fire, which, at the time of recording, has not yet been fully contained. We start today by discussing Emily's latest piece for The New Yorker, which focuses on the black families of Altadena displaced by these fires. Specifically, the Bens, who first bought a home in the historic LA suburb back in 1959, and have spent the intervening 60 years creating community and amassing generational wealth.

• 1:52Sam Fragoso?

  Overnight, the Ben family, living across four different homes within minutes of each other, lost everything: furniture, clothes, vehicles, personal belongings, all the instruments they acquired as a family of lifelong musicians. All that remains are the few pieces of clothing they evacuated with.

• 2:14Sam Fragoso?

  Well, that and an overwhelming sense of uncertainty about what's to come. And so today, while telling just a fraction of the Ben family story by way of Emily's reporting, I want to also help their transition back to Altadena as they begin to slowly rebuild and repair all that's been lost. If you're able to make a donation to the Ben family, we've included a link to their GoFundMe in the show notes of this episode. You can also text the word TALK, T-A-L-K, to 858-358-5881. Just text TALK, like TALK EASY,

• 2:55Sam Fragoso?

  to 858-358-5881. And from there, you'll get a direct link to the Ben family fundraiser. They're about 80% of the way to their $60,000 goal, and I think it would just be amazing if the TALK EASY community at large could help get them over the top. Again, you can follow the link that's on your phone, or just text TALK to 858-358-5881. We haven't really done anything like this in fundraising form, at least not this involved. And it's something we want to continue doing moving forward, as I think these crises, in one

• 3:37Sam Fragoso?

  way or another, are bound to continue. With that, here is my conversation with writer Emily Witt.

• 4:01Sam Fragoso?

  Hi, Emily.

• 4:02Speaker 01

  Hey, Sam.

• 4:03Sam Fragoso?

  Thank you for, for being here. This feels like an especially loaded question, but in this moment, how are you doing?

• 4:11Speaker 01

  It's been a really long week. It would be a long work week even if my brother's house hadn't burnt down. You know, it was kind of like maxed out on all levels. But we had some good news yesterday, actually, which was that when my brother evacuated, we thought his cat was outside and he didn't bring his cat. And so all week we've been like, oh, you know, I've been up to where it was a few times and it was so intensely burnt out that I was just like, you're deluded, Emily. There's no way the cat survived. And then yesterday a firefighter up there found the cat up a tree. And so we're kind of like elated because of that.

• 4:56Sam Fragoso?

  What's the cat's name?

• 4:57Speaker 01

  Carrot Cake.

• 4:59Sam Fragoso?

  Wow, I'm so glad I asked.

• 5:03Sam Fragoso?

  We were just gonna let that go.

• 5:06Sam Fragoso?

  Okay, so Carrot Cake is alive, which I'm happy for for your brother. But his home is gone and your brother's home was in Altadena, which is where you've spent the past couple of weeks on the ground, reporting in Los Angeles, where the fires have have just continued to engulf the city. Even at the time of recording, they're not entirely contained. Some of them are not even at 50% containment. Being in Altadena, you you wrote in your latest dispatch for The New Yorker about a family affected by the Eaton fire, which has completely upended this historically black suburb. So walk me through this.

• 5:49Sam Fragoso?

  Did this story find you because of your brother or did you find it?

• 5:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I had spent a lot of time in Altadena. And after the fire, the first place my thoughts went to was Altadena just has tons of families who Are kind of working class but house rich because their ancestors, maybe their parents or their grandparents bought a house in the 1970s or late 1960s when you could buy a house for less than $20,000 or $50,000. And, you know, a working class family could pool together a $5,000 down payment and buy a really cute house. And the presence of those families, you really felt it. You know, they weren't just black families.

• 6:37Speaker 01

  There were Latino families. There were Japanese American families. Altadena was just a place that had a lot of different kinds of people in it. It was kind of this like utopia. So when I knew I wanted to write something, I was kind of hoping to find a family who had that story because I don't think it was well known if you didn't know the city already. And it was just luck, really luck, that I was standing outside a National Guard checkpoint and the first guy I started talking to came from, from a family like that.

• 7:12Sam Fragoso?

  So this family, the Ben family, the eldest daughter told you, when you think of certain families in the city, there's names attached to it. You know, the Milton family, you know, the Johnson family, and you know, the Ben family. You had not known them until that day you met them next to the National Guard. But like, what was that first conversation you had as the fires are raging on?

• 7:36Speaker 01

  Yeah. So the first person I met was a cousin of theirs, of the Ben families. He's descended from the Bens on his mother's side. So just to kind of tell the stories, there were 16 siblings from Georgia. Most of them moved to California in the 50s and 60s.

• 7:55Sam Fragoso?

  And they were leaving the Jim Crow South to come to California?

• 7:58Speaker 01

  That's right. At a time when, you know, the eldest brother was a Korean War veteran and was transferred by the army to California and bought the first house and brought a lot of his siblings with him over time. And there were so many families like that. And, you know, I think that's generally referred to as a second great migration. You know, the first one was kind of in the 20s and then this one was in the 50s. A lot of black communities in Los Angeles established themselves in those years.

• 8:29Sam Fragoso?

  So this is a robust, multi-generational musical family that's lived and raised kids in Altadena since the late 1950s. What was it about Altadena that appealed to them back then?

• 8:45Speaker 01

  Well, you know, Pasadena is kind of like notoriously racist city with a racist history. It was a sundown town. I believe it was one of the last cities to desegregate at schools. And Altadena, I think because it was kind of off up in the hills, it attracted some more free-thinking people in general. And then the passage of two fair housing acts, there was Californian's in 1963, and then more impactful was the federal one in 1968 that ended redlining, which denied mortgages to black communities.

• 9:25Sam Fragoso?

  And made housing discrimination illegal, at least the law set as much, although plenty of it was practiced.

• 9:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's right. And yeah, I think in Altadena, the land was affordable. The city went from being something like 95% white in 1950 to 43% black in 1980. So there was some white flight, but also it was kind of a time when they were building the 210 freeway and schools were integrating. All this stuff was happening. So it really affected how people moved around.

• 10:02Sam Fragoso?

  So in the last two weeks, when you're on the ground talking to this family, and they're telling you their story, how much of that exchange between you and them is about the past and how much of it is about the present?

• 10:17Speaker 01

  You know, The loss of their material possessions is secondary to the loss of their social world.

• 10:26Sam Fragoso?

  What do you mean by that?

• 10:27Speaker 01

  They were, you know, their family's roots in this neighborhood went so deep that they had cousins kind of everywhere. Their cousin was the pharmacist, their cousin owned a small business. You know, they described going to high school at Blair High School in Pasadena and meeting members of their family that they hadn't even met before. And they had, just geographically, the family I spoke with, there was a kind of eighty-five year old matriarch who had owned her house since the late nineteen sixties. And maybe, you know, a five minute drive from her was another house with some of her children.

• 11:03Sam Fragoso?

  This is a woman named Marie. She's eighty-five and now a widow.

• 11:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, and within their, their family, Marie's house was kind of, Lauren Benn told me that it was the place a lot of the members of their family begin and end. Like, when a woman in their family has a baby, she'll leave her normal house, go up there to get postnatal care and, and to, it was kind of also where elder members of the family would go if they were sick or needed hospice care, end of life care. In their family, they wouldn't go to a nursing home. It was kind of different siblings and different cousins would rotate through to take shifts, kind of caring for the member of the family that needed help. And it was very, this protean, you know, like really seamless, people staying over

• 11:50Speaker 01

  at people's houses, kind of moving around all the time. And, you know, this real deep sense of belonging. They all worked pretty much locally. It was just this really close knit world, their church, which had also been there for fifty years. And so the loss of their house, obviously, is really devastating in their material possessions, but it's this community and this sense of belonging that if the family is scattered, you know, can't really be recreated.

• 12:23Sam Fragoso?

  And that last point is, to me especially,

• 12:27Sam Fragoso?

  Poignant and pointed because so much of the reporting and so much of what you see on social media is about the material loss, which is, at this current moment, incalculable. But it often overlooks, I think, the interconnectedness of these communities. Like this woman, Marie, her and her husband bought their first home in West Altadena back in 1959. Five of their seven children were born in that house before they had to move, I think, 10 minutes north because of a freeway expansion, which in and of itself would cause a lot of distress to most families. But they did that.

• 13:09Sam Fragoso?

  They did that and they built a new home on Los Flores Drive, which up until these last 10, 11 days was where she lived for 60 years.

• 13:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, and there, you know, one thing that this has revealed is in Los Angeles is just the different cultural responses. So, you know, I think their faith tradition, I went to their church on Sunday, is one where you, you kind of don't wallow in self pity. You try to look forward and, and stay strong and stay positive. And that was definitely their attitude. They, they weren't succumbing to pessimism.

• 13:50Sam Fragoso?

  Were you?

• 13:51Speaker 01

  I just don't know how, it's so, the scale of this is so overwhelming. Los Angeles was already a place that it was so impossible to find a place to live. And so many people in the city, kind of, the way that they could live there was they had this kind of generational in. And this is even true in the Palisades, right? Like, there's probably a lot of boomers there that bought their houses a long time ago and got to live in this community that got extremely wealthy. And, and, you know, we know people like this all over LA. This is kind of how people are able to stay here in a time when a house costs a million dollars.

• 14:36Speaker 01

  And so to have that rug pull, I'm not trying to be pessimistic, but it's, you know, I'm thinking of other situations where this happened, like Hurricane Katrina. And I think, I think those neighborhoods were irretrievably lost. And certainly what they had is not going to come back. It's, it's, it's, you know, I hope they're able to stay together. And that's their main objective right now is to stay together and not have to split up into different houses. I mean, they're, they're out there looking for a five bedroom house, which is, you know, it's hard to find. It is just so sad. You know, what, what one of the cousins told me was that Altadena had been spared.

• 15:20Speaker 01

  What happened to so many black communities where you had a highway built through it, or you had, or burnt down in the late sixties, or it, it didn't have that. It was able to have this continuity and this, this generate, this passing down of, of inheritance. And honestly, even for my brother, you know, my, my niece is eight. She went to school up there and a lot of her friends, they lost their houses too. And, and so your little routine, your little kind of, the way you triangulate your day is just completely upended and you have to kind of come up with a new psychogeography.

• 16:01Speaker 01

  But when, when, when the roots go back this deep, it's just a huge loss.

• 16:06Sam Fragoso?

  What Marie and others created is just so remarkable. Like you referred to those stats earlier, but in 1960, Altadena was 95% white. By 1980, it was 43% black. And as the children of this family grew up and had kids of their own, these houses were either sold or passed down to younger families or just shared among them. And Altadena in turn became a sanctuary, not just for the Bens, but for many black residents. And about 80% of that community owned their homes, which is close to double the national rate. And so as you've spent this time with them in this community, whether it's on the street

• 16:51Sam Fragoso?

  or at church or in cars.

• 16:55Sam Fragoso?

  How have you seen this family grapple with this unimaginable loss?

• 17:01Speaker 01

  You know, I think they haven't even had time to mourn. And so their eldest daughter is in Boston. She teaches at Berklee College of Music. So the minute this happened, she's kind of like the family manager. She kind of, it's just clear, everybody defers to her authority. And she's a very organized and really on top of it, really poised person. The night of the fire, she booked everybody hotel rooms, thinking that they just needed to get out because Oscar Ben recently had the flu and is on oxygen. The air was bad.

• 17:38Speaker 01

  You know, and so I don't think they thought their house was going to burn down, but they left. And as soon as they lost the houses, she flew back and she's been kind of managing everything. And what she told me was that she wants them to get to a place where they can actually cry and they can actually feel devastation because right now it's just triage. It's just every day, it's like getting the baby clothes, getting the diapers, you know, applying, applying all the stuff you have to apply for, canceling all your power bills. They had to pay the mortgage. I think one of the houses still had a mortgage, so they had to pay it before they could even apply for the insurance.

• 18:21Speaker 01

  And then the major, major task for everybody from these fires right now is finding a place to live in a really tight housing market. So when I went to that service, the pastor at that church, his name is Bishop Dorsey, he told me 13 households in the congregation had lost their houses and 27 were displaced for the time being. And while we were sitting there, the different families were filing in and it was kind of, you know, casual. People would come in for a minute, sing a few songs and leave. And I guess, you know, what really struck me at the church, and obviously this is part

• 19:01Speaker 01

  of being Christian, I guess, but, but was just how not self pitying it was. And just that the message that was repeated over and over in the music and the preaching was God has a plan. God tests you. You have to just have faith that you, this test is here for some reason and that you'll, you'll prevail on the other side. And it did feel really uplifting to be in that room and to kind of have that shared sense of commitment

• 19:40Speaker 01

  to a future. You could feel the solace that that, just being in a room with other people who had seen and experienced the same things and were just as scared as you, I found it pretty powerful. And the Ben family, they're very, very musical. In the article, I compared them to the Von Trapps because they, they all grew up singing and there's four sisters and they would just practice four-part harmony with each other when they were children. And so at the, at the church service I went to, they, they only came for a little while, like they weren't there even for the whole thing, but they were invited up to sing. And they sang this four-part a cappella of, medley of songs. And it was just, it was just a

• 20:22Speaker 01

  really powerful thing to see in this moment of so much devastation.

• 20:30Sam Fragoso?

  After the break, more from writer Emily Witt.

• 20:40Sam Fragoso?

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• 22:10Sam Fragoso?

  You know, the story you've been telling here and the story you, of course, wrote in The New Yorker, the contrast between that and what I've seen online is just so stark. And across the internet, we've seen good things like the GoFundMe for the Ben family and their church, which we're trying to raise money for doing this episode. But we've also seen, on the other side, large swaths of people, many of whom don't seem to actually live in Los Angeles or California, trying to find the culprit for this historic disaster. The suspects range from climate change to aging infrastructure, water shortages,

• 22:54Sam Fragoso?

  proposed budget cuts to the fire department, Mayor Karen Bass, who left LA for Ghana on January 4th, a day after the National Weather Service issued a fire warning watch to the city. Speaking to the Ben family and really to the community in Altadena, have you had a sense of who or what they blame these fires on? Is that something they're even contemplating in this moment?

• 23:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, honestly, it didn't even come up, you know? They didn't express anger and maybe they will later. You know, on the very first day of the fires, before I had met them, The New Yorker sent me out to just go find whatever I could. And I was driving all around town. And I'm looking online and I just... The self-important hot take was already not aging well and becoming like increasingly insufferable, but something about really being on the ground here, and this is apolitical on the left and on the right. It was just like, can all of you people just shut up for five minutes? Just shut up. Like, it's just, it's just.

• 24:02Sam Fragoso?

  You understood the hot takes as what?

• 24:04Speaker 01

  People want to be a part of things and there's an event that everybody in the country is apparently looking at, right? So everybody feels the need to weigh in and give it a spin. It was like a literal whirlwind of embers and it's just, like, so many of the immediate takes on it, it's just the smoke literally had not cleared. Like, it just wasn't. Then it became really clear that the right was gonna blame this on, you know, the takes on diversity, equity, inclusion. And it's like, you're in Los Angeles. Like, what are you talking about? Like, you're in Los Angeles. There are really important discussions to have about infrastructure, but all of this

• 24:49Speaker 01

  just to score political points or to make yourself kind of look like interesting and I don't know, it's just.

• 24:58Sam Fragoso?

  This has been happening more and more since the advent of Twitter and has, I think, been accelerated by the pandemic and Trump's first term and soon to be second term. There is this tendency, when things are going really, really wrong, for people to want to be right. And being right doesn't really have a lot to do with the Ben family. It doesn't really have a lot to do with any number of these communities in Los Angeles. Whose lives are irrevocably changed by the past two weeks.

• 25:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, and you know, Wednesday morning, probably around or shortly after my brother's house burned down, and I had no idea, I met like the the city press conference with all the first responders giving really basic summaries of what was going on and what they were doing. And then to go from that and to just open up social media, it's just like, you know, there are there are really earnest, hardworking people out there, working really, really hard, and they are good at their jobs. I'm sorry, like the firefighters and utility people, I think a lot of them, I'm sure we're gonna find some really serious flaws, but

• 26:19Speaker 01

  people I saw were just really dedicated to their jobs in that moment, in very difficult circumstances where there just were not enough firefighters. And the fire chief of LA County's Anthony Maroney, he was like, there were just not enough of us. We were prepared for one brush fire, and there were four. And so then to go and like, go on social media, and there's a clip of a homeowner being like, and they're angry because there weren't firemen there. It's just like, there were, you know, at least seven, 10,000 houses burning, like, takes three fire trucks to put a house fire. The winds are blowing 70 miles an hour, there's

• 27:02Speaker 01

  embers flying everywhere, like this. I think it's just hard to picture the extremity of the circumstances. And people think it was like a line of fire encroaching on the city slowly. It was like, not that at all.

• 27:17Sam Fragoso?

  On one of the local news stations I was watching, they talked to one fire boss who said, at 10 miles per hour, I'm a firefighter. Anything over 30 miles, I'm an observer. If it hits 45 miles per hour, we can no longer offer aerial support, which is how these firefighters fight fires in very steep topography. The fires exceeded well beyond 45 miles per hour. And at that point, there is no amount of firefighters, no amount of fire trucks, no amount of technology that can solve that. One fire chief said, it's like stopping a typhoon. It's not possible. And so if you have people in your life, to anyone listening,

• 28:03Sam Fragoso?

  Maybe said something around the dinner table, who's maybe tweeted something, please send them this tape. And we will send you the sources that I'm getting this from that, by the way, go left, right and center, that will tell you the exact same thing. And so that's been one part of this story that I think has been overblown and not properly reported. But there is something you mentioned that is true, which is staffing. And a month ago, on December 17th, the City of Los Angeles Fire Commission held a meeting where several members of the LAFD, including the President of the United Firefighters, outlined some of the problems they are facing heading into 2025.

• 28:48Sam Fragoso?

  And I thought we could play a clip from that meeting with the fire union chief and a 35-year veteran of the LA Fire Department, Freddie Escobar. Here he is.

• 29:02Speaker 02

  We know the city is headed into tough financial times, but when it's your home that is on fire, or when it's your loved one who's suffering a heart attack, you know we can't wait. We need to work towards a solution now. In 2000, voters passed Proposition F to build new fire stations and training centers to upgrade additional facilities. It's time to be again exploring that, a bond measure, excuse me, and the standard of cover is the first step. I want to thank Chief Crowley, Captain Kingsling, Chief Roberts, and everyone involved with this process. We look forward to working with everyone in the future to get this right. And I'm going to make a bold statement. I'm not scared. I'm going to say what people can't say.

• 29:45Speaker 02

  If we cut one position, if we close one station, if we close one resource, the residents of Los Angeles are going to pay the ultimate sacrifice and someone will die. And we want to work with you guys to prevent that from happening. And we have the facts to back it up. Thank you very much.

• 30:06Sam Fragoso?

  December 17th, 2024, just about a month ago. I think when he said that, I don't think he thought it was gonna happen this soon. But hearing that is haunting.

• 30:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, very much so. This is gonna remake the city in so many ways. And clearly, it's so interesting because the big one was always supposed to be an earthquake, right?

• 30:31Sam Fragoso?

  Mm-hmm.

• 30:32Speaker 01

  And I think LA, we were used to fire being up in the hills somewhere. Like Malibu, you kind of expect it. You expect Malibu to catch fire on a regular basis. And the people that live there kind of know it, too.

• 30:48Sam Fragoso?

  Hmm.

• 30:49Speaker 01

  But this just went so much closer to the city than Los Angeles has been used to. And I mean, from that hearing, it just seems like nobody imagined that it would be like this, you know?

• 31:03Sam Fragoso?

  You could hear Eskimo in that clip trying desperately to make the case and sound the alarm, to reach the city. And Mayor Bass, who I think has been the recipient of more criticism than just about anyone over the past couple of weeks. And back in 2022, during her inauguration, you reported on that day and then subsequently sat with her for a long interview in The New Yorker. But I just want to read from a part of her inaugural speech where she talks about housing. I just see where it lands with you.

• 31:43Sam Fragoso?

  She said, "This is my call to you, Los Angeles, to welcome housing in every neighborhood. The struggle to pay the bills, the stress of not knowing how you will fix the car if it breaks down, this is what causes anxiety and despair for so many. And it pushes too many of us into crisis, degrading mental and physical health, driving us toward addiction and self-harm. When a parent is hospitalized, when a job is lost, when the rent can no longer be paid, this is how so many Angelenos lose their homes."

• 32:18Sam Fragoso?

  Returning to that speech this week and what I believe to be her good intentions for this city, I was struck by how she offered a short list of sources that can lead to being unhoused or displaced. And yet, there is no single mention of climate, no mention of the major fire disasters that this state has dealt with in 2018 and 2019 and 2020, no mention that we live in a volatile city that's always on the precipice of ruin. And I guess I wonder, like, why do you think what we've experienced in the past

• 33:00Sam Fragoso?

  two weeks with these fires, as someone who was there that day and then later spoke to her, why do you think that couldn't make it into the speech?

• 33:10Speaker 01

  I feel like in my memory, I mean, it's a long time ago that I spoke with her, but I do feel like she did bring it up in some way. But yeah, and that's particular list. I mean, I think even when you look at her rival in that in that mayor election, Rick Caruso, he's out there right now blaming the empty hydrants and in the Palisades, the hydrants ran dry on Tuesday or Wednesday, really early in the morning because the firefighting water is the same as the municipal water and people were running their hoses and everything else. You know, he's not out there mentioning climate change either. He's blaming her incompetence.

• 33:50Sam Fragoso?

  Right. But that's, but that's why she was elected. A former Republican turned moderate Democrat in Rick Caruso, lost to Mayor Bass, in part because we believed in her capacity to talk about these things.

• 34:04Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, I think the lesson from this is it might not be that politically attractive to talk about climate change in every instance. But if you're in this city, you have to talk about it all the time. The insurance crisis that's happening, the actuaries are taking it seriously. Finance is taking it seriously. Banks are taking it seriously. The politicians have to, you know, speak in a way that reflects this reality. I think you're right. I think it's negligence and kind of. You know, but all of so much of LA is in this willful ignorance. The dream of this place is so strong and so powerful that people are willing to put up with these like really, really big threats, you know?

• 34:48Speaker 01

  And even on Wednesday morning, I was out in Malibu on the PCH, standing in front of a mansion that was burning, you know, had burned to the ground. It was just kind of smoldering and talking to some like Malibu old timers out there, two of whom had already lost their houses in the Woolsey fire. I'm like, God, this, this city is not even just Karen Bass. It goes so deep, the kind of desire to pretend like you could, you could have all this, you know? And I think that, that dream has been so resistant to empirical reality for so many years and now, but now it's just like, this is gonna happen a lot.

• 35:32Speaker 01

  This could happen every six months, something like this now. The city has always wanted to believe that it can handle all this. And I, I don't know. I mean, it's, it's just a question how, how it's gonna kind of maintain this. You can think of so many other American cities that are equally ticking time bombs. Any city in Florida, you know, there's gonna be a big hurricane. Phoenix, there's gonna be some huge water shortage, you know? Who would have thought that Asheville, North Carolina was gonna get hit by a hurricane? And that wasn't even, that was not that long ago. And these major things that used to happen once in a while, Hurricane Andrew or a big

• 36:14Speaker 01

  earthquake, it's like, it feels like now it happens every six months. I wonder how people in Florida are thinking right now. I was spending some time in Palm Beach this summer for a story, which is-

• 36:27Sam Fragoso?

  And Florida is where you started your journalism career?

• 36:29Speaker 01

  That's right. Yeah, I worked at the Miami New Times and All Weekly in Miami for a couple of years. And, and you get the same, you know, you get the same, oh, well, we get hurricanes all the time. It's kind of like what you get in Malibu, like, oh, we're used to wildfires. And someday it's gonna be a different one, just like this was a different fire. I, I think, I don't know where that kind of willful, I don't want to call it optimism. It's kind of like a stubborn refusal that, you know, is really strong politically. And I, I, maybe Karen Bass just didn't want to be a downer, you know what I mean? But when I talked to her back then, I was like, God, like, she is set up to fail in so

• 37:09Speaker 01

  many ways. Like, being the mayor of the city of Los Angeles is a really hopeless task in a lot of ways. Between, yeah, the housing crisis is really at the heart of all of this.

• 37:21Sam Fragoso?

  In John Mulaney's Everybody's in L.A. special, he pulls down a map of the city. And he's like, Los Angeles. If you were to drive around Los Angeles, you would think, no mayor, right?

• 37:35Sam Fragoso?

  And by the way, like, for no mayor, this is going pretty well. And for people who don't live here, it's almost unfathomable to understand how large and expansive and sprawling and disparate it is. And for one person to run that is a challenge. But when you did sit with her at the end of 2023, do you remember the last question you asked her?

• 37:57Speaker 01

  No.

• 38:00Sam Fragoso?

  It was a question about dystopia. I think since then, dystopia has been on a lot of people's minds. It's something ahead of Trump's inauguration that keeps coming up in conversation, especially within my communities in Los Angeles, where the work of Octavia Butler has been endlessly quoted and excavated this past week. Butler, of course, was a writer who lived and worked and, I believe, was buried in Altadena. And she published a book in 1993 called The Parable of the Sower, which, for those unfamiliar, was a sci-fi novel, and this is absolutely true, it's not something I'm making up,

• 38:46Sam Fragoso?

  about California burning in 2024, following a presidential election of a candidate named Donner, whose slogan is "Make America Great Again." As a writer,

• 39:01Sam Fragoso?

  How do you interpret her work in this moment?

• 39:05Speaker 01

  Obviously, the cliches of Didion and Mike Davis, they got brought out every time something like this happens. And I think Octavia Butler was a new one in the pantheon that I hadn't, you know, yeah. And what was she channeling? What knowledge was she channeling that allowed her to see this from where she was? You know, on Tuesday, before this all got so bad, and they were predicting the winds, I was like, oh, like, you know, the weather's Didion-esque, the maid is sulking. I don't know if you know that line from her piece about the Santa Anas? She's like, oh, the baby frets and the maid is sulking. I was kind of joking about it with my friends because these tropes become, you know, whenever

• 39:50Speaker 01

  I get a migraine and I'm in LA, I'm like, oh, I have a Didion-esque migraine, you know.

• 39:55Sam Fragoso?

  Does that happen often for you in Los Angeles?

• 39:57Speaker 01

  Somehow it happens more here. I don't know why. It's like the dryness. I don't, who knows? Something about the city just lends itself to these literary, we need them, you know? I mean, the literary reference I kept bringing up when I was up in Altadena was the road. Like, that's ashes, the Valley of Ashes up there. Now, that's, I guess that's Gatsby. But, you know, it's apocalypse and it's, you know, there's a lot of scenes up there that are Hollywood, that are, or I was kind of thinking, I mean, this Civil War was such a vacuous movie, but it was that feeling of being a journalist, going through a checkpoint, you know, the burnt out shells of cars, like scattered around,

• 40:39Speaker 01

  the sort of shells of washing machines and burnt trash cans. And, you know, the devastation when you see it in a photograph versus when you smell it and just the scale of it, just block after block after block of just total incineration. A lot of that had only been articulated to people through Hollywood before, I think, that vision.

• 41:08Sam Fragoso?

  After one last break, more from my conversation with Emily Witt.

• 41:35Sam Fragoso?

  I'm curious, when it comes to you and your work, in the pandemic, you reported on the protests in the summer of 2020. And in your book, Health and Safety, you describe yourself in a way that I just wanted to hold firm on. And this is around the illusion of journalistic objectivity about, quote, "having a job that transforms political uprisings into spectacle." He did not understand, this was your former boyfriend, that this was the only way I knew how to participate in the world. I could not be otherwise. Were you grappling with that over the past couple of weeks?

• 42:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, it's just, as soon as something interesting happens around me, I go into note-taking mode, for sure. The funny thing is, I was so burnt out after the election, because I was covering the Kamala Harris campaign. And the strain of just getting strangers to talk to me about politics was really wearing. And I was feeling really burnt out. And reporting this story surprisingly made me feel way more re-engaged, I guess, because meeting the Bens in particular, in this time of utter childishness and selfishness, and

• 42:57Speaker 01

  just people we see dominating the news every day, and their just total lack of decorum, you know, whatever. It just was really meaningful to talk to people that, I don't know, were so rooted in their community and their values were so rooted in history and tradition and family, and not in this performative trad way or something, but that had kind of real commitment to generosity and helping others. I mean, the Bens, they were kind of collecting a lot of donated goods, and then people were coming to the... They were almost like a mini distribution center, because so many people just know them.

• 43:41Speaker 01

  They were able to kind of channel information and goods to other people.

• 43:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, and meanwhile, seeing this kind of contrasting dialogue online. So it kind of revived something in me about just wanting to counteract the just venal discourse that's raining right now.

• 44:06Sam Fragoso?

  I want to talk about what it's revived in you because Butler, in interviews, would often describe herself as a "histo-futurist," where her work was focused on exposing, quote, "problematic patterns of the past while creating stories that could inspire future progress." And I think after safety, the question of purpose for those that have called Los Angeles home, as I have for almost nine years, is top of mind, how to be useful, what to do with our time in the aftermath of this disaster. And in your job interview for The New Yorker, when you were applying for a position to

• 44:49Sam Fragoso?

  write for the website, I heard that you said, quote, "This job is a chance to write a first draft of history." Is that how you saw the job in Altadena and is it how you see the job moving forward?

• 45:03Speaker 01

  You know, I wrote two little stories last week. So the first was just kind of Tuesday into Wednesday, you know, the story of the fires as I experienced them. And so when it's like really breaking news situation like that, I do think because everything, people are getting the information in so many fragments now, The New Yorker can offer something genuinely useful, even if it seems really simple, in just describing what happened chronologically in like a descriptive way that the newspaper can't quite do. And that's what I kind of consider like the first draft of history part is when I have to like kind of just tell people what it looked like and in what order it happened.

• 45:46Speaker 01

  Because I actually think that's kind of in short supply right now and that's what a magazine can do. And then, you know, for the second story, they wanted something specific and I really was hoping to find it. A really rooted family. Um, and you know, what's interesting is that there's so many families like that in Altadena that come from different backgrounds, like the photographer that took the photos for that story. Um, her name is Thalia Goches. Her grandmother was an immigrant from South El Salvador, a housekeeper who put together a $5,000 deposit for her house with some uncles, you know, whatever, like in the late seventies, I think.

• 46:28Speaker 01

  Her grandmother died, but the house was now with an aunt and uncle. But, you know, again, was just like a family house where everybody like left their motorcycle and like, you know, every, every kind of holiday happened there. And, and so these stories aren't specific to any one cultural community. That was very much the story of Altadena, I think.

• 46:52Sam Fragoso?

  To close, I, I want to go back to the Ben family. When they get past the triage point of the next few months, do they have a desire to rebuild what was lost? Do they want to go back to Altadena?

• 47:09Speaker 01

  I believe they do. Their cousin who didn't lose his house, who's also in the story, Anton Anderson, when he and Lauren Ben met up after the fire, he was like, I'm making you guys rebuild. And actually, I think they have to. I don't think they can walk away. And I think actually tons of people in Altadena just can't walk away, actually. Like so much of their life savings is tied into these homes that they have to kind of, they have to rebuild unless they want to start over from zero. Cause it's interesting when you, you mentioned dystopia, like the other thing that I've

• 47:51Speaker 01

  been feeling just in the air since the Trump victory is this real like accelerationist, technological optimism that we're gonna build nuclear power plants and AI is gonna, you know, do all this stuff. So if you wanted to take that view instead of the dystopian one, you can start trying to envision some fireproof city with cool architectural and landscape changes that make the city resilient. All of these conversations will, will happen, but.

• 48:27Speaker 01

  I don't know much about insurance and stuff, but I don't, I think a lot of people really don't have a choice.

• 48:33Sam Fragoso?

  Toward the end of the piece, you quote Anton Anderson, who's a cousin of the Ben family. I think he said part of the quote earlier in the episode, but I just wanted to read it in full because he said, "The houses that were inherited, that's a deep well. That's the kind of thing that people don't have, certainly not in Black and Brown communities. Part of why I'm just heartbroken for our family is this was one of our few places in the country where people could still do that. They didn't get burned out like Tulsa. They didn't get burned out like places in the South are paved over. I'm not getting all Malcolm X about it, but Altadena is where all those bad things didn't happen."

• 49:18Sam Fragoso?

  And, you know, these are folks I haven't met, but reading your story and hearing and then trying to tell part of it here today, I just, I just don't know what to do with that. Like, the multi-generational family that built homes and passed them down for decades, I don't know how that can be reconstituted. And that part is devastating. And on the other hand, like you said, the Ben family and the rest of the community going to that church and not leaning into self pity, but trying to find a way together in community

• 49:59Sam Fragoso?

  to keep going. I guess that is the question. How do we go about doing that? And how do we go about helping people we may never meet? How do we continue being useful when so many of our elected politicians feel just useless?

• 50:16Speaker 01

  You know, it's funny, when you're saying that, I'm just reminded of this story I did up in Alaska about an Inupiat community in the Arctic Circle that is losing the land they live on because of. Sea level rise and worsening storms and stuff like that. And you know, the feeling there, it was, it's similar because you know, there you're talking about a culture that for a thousand years, thousands of years, survived in the most hostile of human environments. It's so beyond a house or building. It's a similar story because what you're talking about being lost is not the material stuff. There's no insurance policy for your culture that you can buy.

• 51:01Speaker 01

  Culture is rooted in place. And again, this is like true for the Palisades. The people in the Palisades are feeling this too. There's no insurance policy for that feeling of knowing your neighbors and everybody grew up going to the same school. And, and the survivors of Hurricane Katrina were maybe the kind of first people to really speak to that experience of just what was wiped out wasn't just your house. And it was a whole world, a whole, a whole world with history and tradition and family and social networks. And that's, I think, what this story really got to for sure. And it's something to bear in mind as this keeps happening.

• 51:43Sam Fragoso?

  When your brother called you, what did he say?

• 51:47Speaker 01

  I was driving around the west side trying to report this story. And, um, you know, they, they'd evacuated the night before. And when they evacuated, it looked like they were being really cautious because they weren't in like the red evacuation zone. It was only a couple of blocks from them, but they were still not in the mandatory zone when they left on the night before. And when I went to bed on Tuesday night, it looked like the fire was kind of going east or south into Pasadena a little bit even, not west where they lived. And so then my family, my parents and my brother, they were staying downtown at a hotel and they just kind of drove up to try to get a sense of things. So they all called me from the car on the Bluetooth.

• 52:32Speaker 01

  And yeah, my brother was just like, there's no way my house is there. There's like, everything's on fire up here.

• 52:41Speaker 01

  And I still didn't quite believe it, right? And then I don't know how he got confirmation from the neighbors that it was gone. And it was kind of like the pandemic when you, when you left the office and then didn't go back for a year and a half and your sweater was there or something. It's like, I got home, my niece and my dad had made like a loaf of bread and given me a few pieces of the bread, you know? I'm like, wow, I'm eating this toast and the, the rest of the bread is gone, you know? Or you're just picturing this kitchen that's gone. And then I was just kind of obsessively thinking about the cat.

• 53:17Sam Fragoso?

  Carrot cake?

• 53:18Speaker 01

  Carrot cake, yeah. Carrot cake. And, and all week I was going up there. So you couldn't get behind the National Guard, but I, with my press pass, I could. And I was going up there and reporting and stuff. And so I did, midweek, I, I just put out like a big bowl of water and a big bowl of food. But it's hard to describe how toxic this place was. I mean, just, it's like asbestos charred. So I was like, oh, I shouldn't even put this out. I don't want any animal to like be tempted to go in there. And as I walked away, just like 10 crows, like just a flock of crows descended on the bowls of food and water. And I was like, okay, I gotta get out of here.

• 54:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, so it was just totally shocking yesterday to hear that he was alive. I mean, if you had seen what he survived, it just doesn't seem possible. It was like, I think we're all just reeling that the cat survived. It's like this thing that you can kind of cling to.

• 54:20Sam Fragoso?

  There are small miracles in all of this. I mean, some people's homes, including the musician who is supplying all the music for today's episode, an Altadena resident. Her name's Natalie Mearing and she goes by Wise Blood. Her home has been saved and her neighbors are gone. And it's just unfathomable, the, the good luck and the bad luck of it all. And how there's really no rhyme or reason. Not dissimilar to the pandemic in a lot of ways, like you said. And that moment where everything changed in March of 2020,

• 55:02Sam Fragoso?

  where you left the sweater at the office and you didn't know that was going to be irretrievable. There's a section in your book, Health and Safety, that I thought you could read from before we go that feels especially fitting for anyone in Los Angeles right now.

• 55:21Speaker 01

  Okay. When I think about late January of 2020, it's as if I'm looking at a miniature diorama of a life inside a glass ball. I'm looking back at an intact self who doesn't know something is on the verge of ending. A city as one knew it, a relationship, a social world that showed no signs of faltering, a pattern that gave no indication it would not keep repeating itself. I understood that the people you love could get sick and die, that relationships could end, that a person could lose a job. But I didn't understand yet that a whole life can fall apart and not reconstitute itself again. I didn't know what that meant or how it might be possible.

• 56:05Sam Fragoso?

  Where does that land with you, reading that?

• 56:07Speaker 01

  It's just like when you think about people that lived through the 20th century, people that lived through the 19th century, these kind of apocalyptic events happened all the time. So I think there's something more just overwhelming that it isn't a war. I mean, there is a human protagonist of this, but if it's climate, it's so much bigger than a historic act or something like. And yeah, it feels like we're just on the verge of something that's really just beginning and just feels different than what's come before. And sometimes you feel melodramatic saying that. And sometimes you feel like you're not being. Dramatic enough, you know? I think that's where LA is right now in this tension of people squabbling over

• 56:51Speaker 01

  fire hydrants and stuff. It must be some kind of solace for people to think that it was a failure of municipal governance. And I'm sure there were some failures, but it's just this denial goes so deep, I think, because the alternative still just feels too unreal. You know, I think Los Angeles, like, as much as for all this kind of obsession with the apocalypse and dystopia, like, the people in Malibu just love their houses, you know? Like, I keep going back to that. It's just, the dream is really hard to kill off here.

• 57:24Sam Fragoso?

  Well, my last question for you, I guess, then, is the thing that was reawakened in you over the past couple of weeks that was previously burned out or dimmed because of this past election. Where do you see your place in it, in that uncertainty? Do you feel that your job still is to make these intangible things at least more, if not tangible, legible?

• 57:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that's still what drives me. I don't know if it'll take the form of a journalistic article, but...

• 57:54Sam Fragoso?

  Are you announcing your retirement here?

• 57:56Speaker 01

  No.

• 57:58Speaker 01

  I mean, yeah, I think the part of me that likes to tell that story, it's almost compulsive, I can't. When I think of even just the amount of kind of historical events that I've gotten to witness through doing this job in the past 10 years, I've really gotten to be close up to a lot of things. And I, I think that continues to motivate me and always will, as long as I get to be there and seeing things and that I can try to kind of summarize it in a slightly zoomed out way, I'm really compelled to do it, in part because a lot of my favorite writing does that. And I think Octavia Butler is a good example of that. It's like, you can't totally understand the moment that you're in, but if you, if

• 58:40Speaker 01

  you write it down and with enough specificity and detail from a kind of open, honest place, it'll be there for people later who can understand what you couldn't understand at the time. And I like the idea of laying down that layer of evidence.

• 58:58Sam Fragoso?

  Well, I appreciate you doing that, both on the page and throughout this talk together. You can read her story about the Ben family in The New Yorker. If you're able to help the Ben family, you can do so on their GoFundMe page. And Emily, thanks again for the time, especially in what has been a historic and historically painful couple of weeks in Los Angeles.

• 59:25Speaker 01

  Thank you, Sam.

• 59:27Sam Fragoso?

  That was Emily Witt. She's a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of the new book, Health and Safety. I want to give a special thanks this week to Josh Bierman, GoFundMe, and Blue Raincoat Music. If you can manage to make a donation to the Ben family in Altadena, find the link in our show notes at talkeasypod.com. You can also just text TALK to 858-358-5881. Again, text TALK to 858-358-5881. From there, you'll get a direct link to their fundraiser. This episode was produced by Caroline Reebok

• 1:00:08Sam Fragoso?

  and executive produced by Janix Bravo. It was edited by Adam Jamal and mixed by Andrew Vastola. Our engineering comes from Tim Moore out of York Recording. You may have noticed some additional music this week. It comes from Altadena resident Natalie Merring, otherwise known as Wise Blood. Much love to her. Our illustrations are by Krisha Shanoy. Research assistant, Callie Conley. This episode was made in partnership with Lemonada Media, and I'm Sam Fragoso. Thank you for listening to Talk Easy. I'll see you back here next week with another episode. Until then, I'll let Natalie play us out. Stay safe and so long.

• 1:00:56Speaker 03

  You see the reflection And you want it more than the truth

• 1:01:06Speaker 03

  You yearn to be that dream You could never get to Cause the person on the other side Has always just been you Oh God, turn me into a flower

• 1:02:41Speaker 04

  Good morning. It's January 19 And it's gonna be cloudy for a while, but When you're eating lunch, if you look out the window You might start seeing beautiful blue skies And golden sunshine all along the way.

• 1:03:04Speaker 04

  Everyone, have a great day.

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  I mean, how many rats would you guess were back there?

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  Find out what it's like to be a long haul trucker, a couples therapist, or an FBI agent, all on the podcast What It's Like to Be.