Nancy Walecki | The Atlantic

The Guitar Sounds New Again

2026-04-14T14:59:15-04:00

Every now and then, music gets a guitar hero—a player who makes the instrument sound like something other than itself. Jeff Beck transformed it into something like the human voice singing; Jimi Hendrix, a psychedelic swirl. Fans are always looking for the next player who will make the same six-string instrument sound new again. And now Mk.gee has hit the scene.

A 29-year-old from New Jersey whose real name is Michael Gordon, Mk.gee released his debut album, Two Star & the Dream Police, in 2024. On it, his guitar sounds at various points like an orchestra, a snarling animal, a wildfire, a person shouting, and a radio playing at the bottom of the ocean. Critics declared Mk.gee a guitar hero; he played on a Bon Iver album and worked on two Justin Bieber records. This past weekend, he performed with Bieber at Coachella. Listen long enough, and you’ll realize that Mk.gee’s grungy extraterrestrial sound is everywhere.

The quest to achieve the “Mk.gee tone” spawned a series of “How Does He Make His Guitar Sound Like That?” YouTube videos; musicians compared notes on Discord servers and Reddit threads. They also did what they’ve always done—gone to concerts and looked at the stage floor to see what gear the other guy’s got—and eventually, someone posted a photo of Mk.gee’s stage setup. There on the ground, surrounded by cables, was a large black box adorned with knobs and sliders and, in a cheesy futuristic font straight out of a ’90s bowling alley, the name: VG-8.

That Reddit post was probably the most fame the Roland VG-8 (short for virtual guitar) had gotten since the ’90s. Released in 1995, the VG-8 was designed to be a toolbox filled with essentially every existing guitar sound, Chris Bristol, the former chair and CEO of Roland U.S., told me. Players could make their guitar sound like a different model, and electronically switch amplifiers, microphones, and even the acoustic environment. Push some buttons, and the guitar might sound like an Eric Clapton–style Fender Stratocaster played in a small club; push some others, and get a Jimi Hendrix–esque fuzz distortion in a stadium. The VG-8 also comes with dozens of synthy sounds and guitar effects—which, if Reddit and my ears are correct, are a big part of Mk.gee’s tone.

They were for Joni Mitchell’s too. My father, Fred Walecki, owned a musical-instrument shop, Westwood Music, where Mitchell was a customer, and he procured a VG-8 for her in 1995, when she told him that she was going to quit music. Her songbook uses more than 50 tunings, and she was tired of constantly retuning dozens of guitars on tour. Dad got her a VG-8 because with it, she could keep her guitar in standard tuning and let the device produce her more unusual ones. Because of the device, she kept touring, and the sounds of the VG-8 itself brought to her music “a freshness and distinctiveness that’s almost orchestral, it’s so rich,” she told a Billboard reporter at the time. “I wanted to blow chords up in size the way Georgia O’Keeffe blew up the flowers in her paintings, and now that’s possible.”

[Read: My father, guitar guru to the rock gods]

Other musicians followed: Reeves Gabrels used the VG-8 extensively in his work with David Bowie; Sting wrote most of his 1998 album, Brand New Day, on it. He told Revolver magazine that the device “gave me a shot in the arm about being creative on guitar.” But the VG-8 retailed for about $3,000, and “because of the price, it was a very elitist, expensive technological product,” Paul Youngblood, the former president of Roland’s U.S. BOSS division who helped develop the VG-8, told me. It also came with a 118-page document closer to a textbook than a user manual. A few influential musicians loved it for a while; then, for about 30 years, VG-8s collected dust.

Now they’re making a comeback. VG-8s were selling only occasionally, and for $200 or so, before Mk.gee released Two Star & the Dream Police, according to data provided to me by the music-gear marketplace Reverb. In the months following his debut, demand for the VG-8 rose—and so did its prices, reaching $1,200 in early 2025. Kevin Murrell, a musician who performs under the name kevm, has seen them for $2,000 and sometimes $3,000. (Accounting for inflation, that’s still roughly half the price it was in 1995.) The competition for VG-8s is steep enough that Murrell set up alerts on his phone for new listings—“Pray for me yall,” he wrote on the VG-8 channel of a Mk.gee Discord server. A caption on a Mk.gee-fan Instagram account reads, “Men want one thing and it’s a vg8.”

The VG-8’s appeal is as much about what it can’t do as what it can. Music technology in 1995 “wasn’t anywhere near what it is today,” Youngblood said. Play too hard or too loud, and the VG-8 will spit out something choppy and explosive; even though the device was advanced for the time, it still “had a lo-fi kind of sound to it.” The noise that the VG-8 makes, simply because it’s old, has become a genre in itself thanks to Mk.gee. The guitar track on Lorde’s 2025 song “Shapeshifter” sounds more like a gritty string quartet than it does a guitar—that’s Mk.gee’s touring band member Andrew Aged on the VG-8. (Mk.gee declined to comment for this article.)

Mk.gee himself plays a Fender Jaguar, which had a similar resurgence in the ’90s among players in the grunge scene, because “you could find one at a pawn shop for dirt cheap,” Cyril Nigg, the senior director of analytics at Reverb, told me. Gear revivals are part of the life cycle of music: A soon-to-be-famous player comes across forgotten equipment “and picks it up because it’s cool and inexpensive, and it ends up having a huge influence on their sound and then the culture at large,” Nigg said. In one way, though, the VG-8’s current popularity is a slightly newer phenomenon. Vintage-gear crazes are usually around analog devices, as a kind of rebellion against digitization and technology, Steve Waksman, a rock musicologist at the University of Huddersfield, told me. But the VG-8’s recent rise represents “nostalgia for a time when digital was still new.” Music sounds so digitized now that even just an earlier digital device feels like it has more character.

Roland recently came out with the VG-800, a modernized version of the VG-8. Marcus Hidalgo, a guitar player in Nashville who performs under the name toast, told me he’ll take it on tour because it’s more portable. The newer model, though, is a little too clean, a little too digital. When he saw a VG-8 for sale on Facebook Marketplace in Tampa, Florida, he texted his friend in Orlando, “Dude, I will give you all the gas money, I will give you lunch, whatever you need, if you just drive to Tampa for me and pick up this random old 90s unit from this random guy.” He prefers the VG-8 and the “weird noises” it makes. “I feel like I just started to learn how to play the guitar again,” he said. Like any tool, the VG-8 is only as good as the musician using it, but it holds the promise that there are still new sounds out there to find—even if they’re in a device from 1995.

It’s Not Gambling, It’s ‘Girl Math’

2026-04-01T12:59:00-04:00

“Come get ready with me for the day,” a young blond woman says over footage of herself making her bed, arranging her pillows, and weighing her clothing choices. The video is just like any other lifestyle content that influencers post to Instagram and TikTok—right up until she whips out her phone and scrolls through the Kalshi app. “I use it to check the weather to help me pick out an outfit for the day,” she says, modeling a black spandex romper for the camera. “Go ahead and check out the app link below.”

Recently, my Instagram feed has been haunted by women explaining how much they enjoy betting on elections, the pop-music charts, and Dancing With the Stars. They are advertising prediction markets such as Kalshi and Polymarket, which let users wager on virtually anything. “The boys can do their parlays and use words I’ve never heard of. But the girls can use their pop culture and educated guesses to make decisions and trade on Kalshi,” a woman says in a TikTok on one of the company’s accounts. Her caption assures me: “Kalshi is for the girls!!!!”

So far though, it is not. Prediction markets have a dude problem. Though these sites offer all sorts of wagers—where will Taylor Swift get married? Who will win Survivor?—they have largely become yet another place for men to bet on football and March Madness. In the past six months, 88 percent of trades on Kalshi have been about sports, according to the investment firm Paradigm. The second-largest category, at about 6 percent, is crypto (which is arguably even more bro-ey).

[Read: You’ve never seen Super Bowl betting like this before]

In an apparent attempt to bridge the gap, both Polymarket and Kalshi are running social-media campaigns that parrot the language of female empowerment and girlish memes. “Girl math says if I make $10 predicting real-life stuff, that coffee was technically free,” a girl in thick-framed glasses says in an ad that Kalshi ran on Facebook and Instagram. “If I’m already scrolling news or pop culture anyway, might as well turn my hot takes into some free iced coffees.” She adds, “It’s kind of addicting, but in a fun way.” (The video has since been removed for not having a necessary ad disclosure.) Some posts, like this one, are advertisements from the companies themselves; some are paid influencer partnerships; and some are either undisclosed partnerships or made by women who are just super excited to post a suspicious amount of links to Polymarket.

Prediction markets should be an easier sell for women than traditional sports betting. Though women are less likely to gamble than men, prediction markets offer the veneer of being more than places to bet. Both Kalshi and Polymarket claim that they are financial markets, not casinos; users make trades about any given event, which in turn generate odds that supposedly predict the outcome. (They are called “prediction markets” for a reason.)

When prediction markets try to entice women, they especially tend to lean into the idea that all of this is investing, not gambling. On Kalshi’s dedicated Instagram for women, @KalshiGirls, one meme reads, “When someone says prediction markets are ‘just betting,’” over a photograph of Cher from Clueless saying, “Ugh, as if.” Meanwhile, the ads for men tend to emphasize the fun of gambling and the possibly big payouts: “Dude,” reads an ad Kalshi ran in the lead-up to the 2024 presidential election, “I am going to bet my Cybertruck on Trump, probably gonna make enough for a house if he wins.”

Kalshi in particular has been ramping up its efforts with women. (Polymarket’s main site, where people bet using crypto, is accessible in the United States only through digital work-arounds.) The reason for appealing to women is simple, Elisabeth Diana, Kalshi’s head of communications, told me: “They’re 50 percent of the population.” She noted that 26 percent of Kalshi-account holders are female—up from 13 percent just 10 months ago. Diana claimed that much of that increase is because of organic interest, but the company seems intent on pulling in more women. Before ABC canceled Season 22 of The Bachelorette a couple of weeks ago, Kalshi had been planning a watch party.

Sure enough, when I looked up all the ads that Kalshi has run on Instagram and Facebook, I spotted a fair number that were obviously geared toward women. In the clips, influencers tended to make small wagers with a clear goal in mind—usually caffeinated beverages. Polymarket taps into the same dynamic on its X account for female traders, @PolyBaddies. (I do not suggest you Google that phrase.) One post includes a photo of a Starbucks cup with the caption, “Matcha and markets kinda day 😌.” (Polymarket did not respond to requests for comment.)

Many of these marketing efforts are ridiculous. I would bet—sorry—that most women will not be compelled to spend their time on prediction markets to maybe win $5 for their morning matcha. But some ads are less “girl math” and more actual math. Priya Kamdar, Maya Shah, and Anika Mirza—the 20-something hosts of Get the Check, a technology-and-business podcast—reached out to Kalshi directly to obtain a partnership deal because they were already using the site, the three hosts told me. Mirza has a Kalshi wager on the race to succeed Nancy Pelosi in Congress; Shah bet on how long the government shutdown was going to last; Kamdar put money on the Rotten Tomatoes score that each movie in the Wicked franchise would receive (she was right about the first film and wrong about the second).

[Read: America is slow-walking into a Polymarket disaster]

The more women who are betting on prediction markets, the closer these sites get to their stated goal of forecasting the future. If they want to predict the Fed’s next interest rate, the winner of The Bachelor, or whether or not it will rain tomorrow in Poughkeepsie, a market made up only of male sports fans won’t cut it. But Kalshi and Polymarket also have other incentives to show they are for women. Sports have an outsize popularity on prediction markets because these sites allow people to effectively wager even in states where sports betting is illegal. This is becoming a major problem for the companies. Kalshi is facing lawsuits from several states for allegedly operating as an unregistered sports-betting site. Arizona recently became the first state to press criminal charges against Kalshi, and Nevada has temporarily blocked Kalshi and Polymarket from operating in the state. The companies, which maintain that they are financial markets and thus not subject to sports-betting restrictions, have a vested interest in getting users betting on topics besides sports. “It does future-proof them,” Dustin Gouker, a gambling-industry consultant who writes a daily newsletter, told me.

Perhaps the biggest concern with these ads is that they make it easy to forget that you can actually lose money on prediction markets. Shah, the podcast host, told me that if someone trades on topics they’re deeply knowledgeable about, prediction markets can be a useful “financial tool.” But they’re inherently risky. At one point, I was served an ad of a woman anxiously checking a Kalshi bet with her friends, with the caption, “I was about to be unable to pay my rent, but I got two years of rent through Kalshi’s predictions. It’s amazing! 🥰🥰” When I searched for it again, the ad had been taken down; the next time I saw it was as an exhibit in a class-action lawsuit against Kalshi that alleges, in part, that the site is not adequately disclosing risks to consumers. (Kalshi has denied the allegations.)

To hear the companies tell it, prediction markets are just another way to be a #girlboss. “Listen up, girlie pops! This platform is normally considered, like, for the finance bros, but I’m gonna show you why it’s so for us,” one woman says in a post seemingly sponsored by Polymarket. (The video includes no disclosures.) Kalshi and Polymarket become just another part of the day—platforms that women can use to check the odds even if they don’t place bets.

A year ago, I probably could not have told you what a prediction market was. By January, Polymarket odds were displayed during the Golden Globes, and CNN pundits were citing Kalshi’s markets on air. In February, Los Angeles’s Sunset Boulevard—a legendary street in my hometown, known for its clubs and neon signs—had a billboard displaying live Kalshi odds. These platforms are already ubiquitous. If women really do start using them en masse, prediction markets will burrow into American life even more deeply. Until then, the companies will keep reminding them to do some “girl math.”

The Skin-Care Industry Is Coming for Toddlers

2026-02-25T10:55:01-05:00

Kids love to imitate their parents, and in Shay Mitchell’s home, that meant her daughters wanted to copy her face-mask routine. Mitchell, an actor best known for her role in Pretty Little Liars, would wear one while she read her 3- and 6-year-old girls a story, and inevitably, they’d look at her sheet mask and ask, “Can I have it?” Cutting eyeholes into cleansing wipes didn’t cut it, she told the Today show late last year. They wanted a “real” one.

So Mitchell co-founded the child-skin-care company Rini and launched an Everyday Facial Sheet Mask for toddlers. That (vegan, 100 percent pure cotton, mushroom-serum-based) mask quickly became an object of scorn online. In news coverage and on social media, people asked some version of Why would we ever want kids to get into skin care so young? Mitchell made her Today show appearance in an attempt to defend the company; Rini quietly raised the minimum age on its masks from 3 to 4.

If Rini represents some kind of “late-stage capitalist hell,” as one commentator put it, it’s far from the only company in this particular circle of the inferno, in which 7-year-olds make “get ready with me” videos on TikTok. A handful of companies are now pitching regimens for children who are elementary-school age and even younger; some spas have begun to feature child-oriented menus. Tubby Todd Bath Co., which sells a basic lineup including bath wash, lotion, and diaper paste, asks customers if they’re shopping for “baby’s first skincare routine.” A TikTok from the company Evereden depicts a bathroom cabinet filling up with the brand’s products—a child-size skin-care headband, lip oil, fragrance, face mist—with the superimposed text “pov: your 3-year-old is interested in skincare.” (The company also launched a pink-packaged multivitamin face wash and moisturizer called the Barbie Kids Happy Face Duo, which comes with rhinestone stickers to bedazzle the bottles.) The tween-skin-care brand Pipa tells customers to “start young”—in this case, at 8, the average age that children in Generation Alpha who are using these kinds of products begin experimenting.

Dermatologically speaking, most kids don’t need a skin-care routine; soap, lotion, and sunscreen suffice. If the actual benefits of many skin-care products for adults are questionable, for kids, anything that goes beyond the basics is unnecessary. But Megan Moore, an elementary-school teacher in the wealthy suburb of Oakwood, Ohio, told me that by fifth or sixth grade, most of her female students have a mini-fridge at home specifically for skin care. Her 9-year-old daughter, Charlotte, later told me she’s hoping for her own skin-care fridge, too—once her mom lets her get products other than the ones she picks up as party favors. She walked me through a typical slumber-party routine, much of which I recognized from my own, early-aughts childhood: paint your nails, spritz perfume, braid one another’s hair, take your braid out in the morning to reveal “whatever funny-looking curl” it gave you. But some of the routine was new to me: get out your goodie bag, put on your skin-care headband, and don a sheet mask made for kids. (A brand called Yes Day, run by a 13-year-old CEO, offers a Sleepover Set for exactly this type of ritual.)

By the time they’re old enough to be Sephora Kids, at least some tweens are raiding skin-care aisles and buying adult brands such as Drunk Elephant—known for its bright packaging and premium price point. Those products can contain strong anti-aging ingredients, such as retinol, that can irritate a young person’s face. The parents I spoke with said they were willing to buy their kids skin care to help them adopt a good routine early or at least have a chance to try it out—as long as the products were safe. “Millennials created the wellness economy,” Kimberley Ho, a co-founder of Evereden, told me: Is it any wonder their kids are interested too? Companies like hers, she said, saw an opening for products formulated for children’s skin.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, adult-beauty retailers are welcoming these Gen Alpha–focused brands. Sephora began its expansion into the Gen Alpha skin-care category recently; Ho told me that Evereden will launch in Sephora stores nationwide next month. Sephora’s first Gen Alpha partner, Sincerely Yours, was co-founded by the then-15-year-old YouTuber Salish Matter to provide “skincare created with teens, for teens.” But when Matter held a rollout event at the American Dream mall, in New Jersey, she drew a roughly 80,000-person crowd that included many kids who were almost certainly middle-school age or younger. Presumably some of them persuaded their parents to buy Sincerely Yours’s four-step bundle: cleanser, sunscreen, moisturizer, and a serum mist. (Julia Straus, the company’s CEO and one of its co-founders, told me in an email that its customers’ average age is solidly in the teens, but that “we know younger audiences may show interest, especially at community events, and some of our products like sunscreen are a must for all ages.”)

The lines between hygiene, wellness, and beauty are blurry, and some of the companies sell products that fall under all three categories. The brands like to portray skin care as a normal part of childhood play. “For Gen Alpha, I feel like skin care is closer to slime-making or nail art or exploring different hairstyles” than an actual beauty routine, Ho told me. Rini’s next batch of products, released today, does feature more explicitly play-oriented “face and body crayons.” Charlotte told me that she and her friends like to use skin care because it’s fun, it feels good, and it “makes us feel more mature because we’re doing skin care and we’re 9-year-olds.” I’m sure that I would have begged my mother for Evereden’s five-piece set with the pink travel case, too.

But selling skin-care products that very young kids are meant to use daily is distinct from, say, letting a curious child re-create a parent’s nighttime routine with a dollop of yogurt. Mimicking adults is an important part of childhood play, but if actual skin care becomes the norm at a young age, it could deprive kids of the imagination that emulation normally affords, Katie Hurley, a child and adolescent psychotherapist, told me. A toddler using a prepackaged sheet mask is not doing as much learning or thinking as one who’s making their own version. Beauty products for kids also chip away at what psychologists call “middle childhood”—the years when kids are more independent but are not yet distracted by the self-consciousness of puberty, Susan Linn, a psychologist and the author of Consuming Kids, told me. Children want to feel older than they are, and skin care gives them that. But Linn and other researchers worry it gives them the insecurities of adolescence too.

Child-skin-care companies do, for the most part, market their products as tools for self-care, rather than correction. When I reached out to the companies mentioned in this article, Pipa, Evereden, Sincerely Yours, and Tubby Todd Bath Co. all said that they offered age-appropriate products, meant to promote skin health, and focused on cleansers, moisturizers, and sunscreens formulated for younger skin. “The goal isn’t to introduce adult beauty concepts early, but to normalize simplicity: sun protection, gentle cleansing, and barrier support,” Ho said. (Rini declined to comment.)

Charlotte seemed to think of skin care mostly as a game or as a way to express herself. But she was vaguely aware—as my friends and I were when we’d do “makeovers” using Lip Smackers gloss—that the products were part of a self-improvement project. “When you put on face masks, the ending result is a lot brighter than what you had before you put it on,” she told me. “I like my first look, but I like the second look a little better.”

If skin-care companies do make a meaningful push into the toddler market, they’re bound to hit adult opposition, Rebecca Watters, the wellness-insights director at the market-research firm Mintel, told me. Even parents who go for other child-self-care offerings—which these days include meditation apps for children, yoga for children, and superfood powders for children—might not buy into the idea that a 3-year-old needs aesthetically branded skin care. But the strongest skepticism I heard about toddler sheet masks came from Charlotte, with all the wisdom of her 9 years. “That’s really weird. I mean, who’s gonna put a face mask on a 3-year-old?” she told me. She couldn’t imagine her own toddler sister sitting still for the five to 15 minutes that the Rini mask recommends, or that such a young child would need a skin regimen in the first place: “If they get chocolate or mud on their face, you could just get a paper towel and wipe it off and they would be fine.” Rini has a new product for that, too—Bamboo Face Wipes that “soothe and hydrate with every swipe” at whatever mess a kid has made.

Winter Ice Could Humble the United States

2026-01-23T18:18:12-05:00

Open up the government’s national weather-alert map, and pretty much the entire eastern half of the country is painted one color or another. A thick pink band stretches from New Mexico, across Texas, then through Pennsylvania, New York, and Vermont—a winter-storm warning. To the north, a dark-blue splotch around the Great Lakes—extreme-cold warning. And then a narrower, deep-purple band through the Southeast, from East Texas up through the Carolinas—ice-storm warning.

By Sunday, when the storm peaks, more than half of the people in the lower 48 will be experiencing some combination of snow, sleet, and freezing rain. Sixteen states and Washington, D.C., have declared states of emergency. Colder-than-usual air from Canada will drift across the eastern United States and meet up with an atmospheric river from the Pacific. The U.S. “didn’t have any hurricanes last year, but this is definitely the equivalent of a hurricane, from Texas to the Northeast,” in terms of its potential for power outages and wind damage, Ryan Maue, a meteorologist and the former chief scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, told me. Those in the band with an ice-storm warning, he said, should think of “preparing for a hurricane—except it’s ice.” Many of these regions aren’t used to getting this kind of winter weather. And as one man in North Carolina posted on X, “Ice will humble you fast.”

“Two or three inches of snow, we can handle that,” Maribel Martinez-Mejia, the director of emergency preparedness for the North Central Texas Council of Governments, told me. But, she said, more than a quarter inch of ice is a challenge; her region could see about half an inch or more. That amount can add as much as 500 pounds of weight to a power line and cause an outage. “The power grid is vulnerable to ice,” Jason Shafer, a meteorologist and the chief innovation officer at PowerOutage.us, told me. “It’s hard to winterize the system,” in part because doing so is expensive. Many places don’t have the money to spend on that project, especially if ice is a rare threat. So lines snap, and trees do too—onto the lines, sometimes. One way to avoid that is to put the lines underground, but, Shafer said, “we built everything overhead in this country.”

Even if a power line doesn’t break, ice can make it so cold that it doesn’t send out enough power, Autumn McMahon, a vice president at Oklahoma Electric Cooperative, told me—“so linemen would have to go out and literally break the ice off of the power lines.” (Much of her state is expected to experience “considerable disruptions to daily life,” according to the National Weather Service.)

But before they can fix a line, workers have to be able to get to it. Ice makes that more difficult, Tony Robinson, a former administrator of FEMA Region 6 who now works for National Emergency Management and Response, told me. Utility companies are good at restoring power relatively quickly during a storm, but “if the ice is too bad and they’re not able to get their equipment to the site”—well, that slows things down. And delayed power restoration “is obviously concerning,” the Oklahoma-based meteorologist Alan Gerard told me, “especially since many homes in this part of the country are not insulated or prepped for cold weather.” Pipes can freeze or burst, and people could be without water.

This is the type of storm that can tighten the aperture of people’s lives for a time. Thousands of flights have already been canceled. The safest way to drive on an ice-slicked road is not to drive at all. In a power outage, keeping warm can mean hunkering down in one room of the house, blanketing the windows and doors overnight, and staying put.

Then there’s the snow. Snow poses far less of a risk of power outages than ice does, but it is a hazard on roads, especially in areas that may not have snow plows. But even then, ice is a sneaky villain: States are aggressively pretreating their roads for snow and sleet, “but with freezing rain, it just washes that away, and then you’re left with an ice rink,” Rachel Riley, the director of the Southern Climate Impacts Planning Program, told me. Maue is particularly concerned about areas that get ice then snow, which can create a crust on surfaces that’s then difficult to shovel.

Whatever version of frozen water hits the ground this weekend will linger. Much of the country will remain cold into next week or even into early February. Icy piles of snow will line icy sidewalks that line plowed and salted roads. Maue has been saying that the country will be “entombed” in ice.

But some areas are just going to be quite cold, with a fresh layer of snow—a relative rarity in some of those places. That can bring unfamiliar challenges but also unfamiliar delights. Kids may have “their first real snow,” North Carolina Governor Josh Stein said at a press briefing yesterday. But much of the state, he said, will see not snow, but ice. Today, he took a more urgent tone, telling residents to be prepared to be stuck at home for a few days. “This is a serious storm,” he said. “We are taking it seriously, and so should you.”

The View From the Palisades

2026-01-07T13:12:16-05:00

This weekend, I stood on a bluff in the Palisades where houses used to be. Los Angeles rose to my left, and the sky had the dramatic clouds we get in the winter when it rains, as it has for a few weeks. The hillsides have turned to Irish green, but the burn scar, below, is still black. Twice, when my family drove past during the holidays, our phones blared with evacuation alerts for possible mudslides and flooding. Since last January, whenever the rain has been heavy, people living near the burn areas have had to sandbag their homes and field evacuation warnings.

Where the Pacific Coast Highway runs through the burn area, the speed limit slows to 25 miles an hour, and building equipment is scattered along the shoulder. What used to be the Malibu Feed Bin—a red barn where one could find both horse feed and a gigantic metal sculpture of a giraffe—is now a collection of temporary offices for the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power’s utilities-rebuilding projects. Inside the Palisades, most of the old landmarks are gone. The Building Block—a 1920s Spanish Colonial building known for being light pink, like the inside of a conch shell—has a piece of its facade still standing.

In the year since the fire, the Army Corps of Engineers has hauled away millions of tons of debris, in what the governor’s office has called the fastest major-disaster cleanup in American history. Most lots are empty now; the city of L.A., which oversees most of the Palisades, has approved rebuilding plans for about 14 percent of the homes destroyed, according to the Los Angeles Times. Paradise moved more slowly toward rebuilding after the 2018 Camp Fire, and Santa Rosa, after the 2017 Tubbs Fire, went much more quickly. Almost 80 percent of the homes lost in the Tubbs have been rebuilt; in Paradise, about a quarter of homes have come back.

Each disaster is different, Kathryn McConnell, who studies wildfire rebuilding at the University of British Columbia, told me: Population size, socioeconomics, and land value all can influence the rate at which a community recovers. But no matter what, a year—even though it can feel like many more when you’re waiting to return home—is not very long in the timeline of disaster recovery.

I saw very few people in the Palisades this past weekend, but the community had left messages on the houses and businesses. A banner on a garden gate: Thank you to all our wonderful neighbors! We can rebuild this beautiful town together. On an elementary school: Returning in January 2028. The CVS, which was spared by the fire, still had signs up from its grand reopening in August. (Across the street, a notice from the L.A. Department of Water and Power read DO NOT DRINK THE TAP WATER.) One of the more frequent lawn signs I saw on empty lots was THEY LET US BURN, a call to come to a protest against city and state agencies that’s happening this morning. There were many FOR SALE signs, and then, over and over again, ones that read instead, This home will rise again.

Paul Horvitz, a lifelong friend of my father whose ranch home of 45 years burned in the fire, was among the first homeowners in the Palisades to get a rebuilding permit. It helped that he’s a mortgage lender and knows more about the real-estate system than many people: Once the rain ends, he will be ready to start construction on his house, which will no longer be surrounded by bougainvillea but will be made entirely of fire-resistant materials. Other Palisades Fire survivors are entering the permitting tedium that survivors of the 2018 Woolsey Fire, in Malibu, have been navigating for years—finding out, for instance, that the plans they used in the ’70s are no longer up to code, or that they’ll need to raise their coastal home higher off the sand to comply with upgraded flood-elevation guidelines. Even a wealthy place like Malibu might rebuild slowly, in part because its geography is so complicated. About 600 homes burned there last year, and about one-third of the owners have put in permit applications. As of New Year’s Eve, only 22 homes have been approved to rebuild.

But rebuilding is only one way to measure recovery. In Malibu, my childhood friends and I realized that all of the restaurants where we’d normally gather at the holidays had burned. In Altadena, a chef whose restaurant survived the Eaton Fire told CBS that when he goes to work, he thinks, This was a neighborhood restaurant. It always has been. And now there’s no neighborhood. Jennifer Champion and her family lost their house but have moved into a condo in one of the Palisades’ more intact neighborhoods; still, she says not a day goes by that she doesn’t think about how much the fire took. Families of the 12 people killed in the Palisades Fire will gather for a ceremony today.

[Read: The place where I grew up is gone]

Everyone wants to make the next fire less brutal. Michael Rohde, an emergency-management consultant and a retired battalion chief with the Orange County Fire Authority, grew up just south of L.A., where he could see a fuel break the width of eight bulldozers on Mount Wilson. These types of clearings are meant to slow fires down by limiting the material they have to burn, but a large, indiscriminately placed fuel break like that probably won’t do much good when winds can carry embers for miles, Rohde told me. In Southern California in particular, clearing away strips of flammable brush could actually make the problem worse by inviting invasive grasses, Max Moritz, a wildfire specialist with the University of California Cooperative Extension, told me. He and other researchers have been beating this drum for decades. Already, the too-frequent fires in L.A. create an opening for these species to grow back instead of the native chaparral, Alexandra Syphard, an ecologist for the Conservation Biology Institute, told me. These are the grasses making the hills green right now, but by the summer, they dry into brown fuels that ignite more easily than the native plants.

Fuel breaks can still help during a fire, researchers and firefighters both told me, when placed along roadways and directly around housing developments where firefighters can access them. But the breaks need to be used more sparingly than they might be in forested land, and placed more deliberately. As part of the area’s recent fire-resiliency projects, public-land organizations have now been working on smaller, strategically placed breaks. Michael O’Connell, the president of Irvine Ranch Conservancy, told me that the IRC and its partners are developing some fuel breaks that replace nonnative grass with heavier, less flammable shrubs and cacti. Still, only recently has the state begun to manage Southern California fires as their own distinct problem. What works in the forests of Northern California, where fires are fueled by the forest itself, might not do as much in Southern California, where the most destructive fires are propelled by strong winds.

Those winds will return here; some of the people, homes, businesses, and routines will too. But many will not. Horvitz told me that some of his neighbors are still deciding whether they’ll come back. One who already moved away worried the place would just burn again; another had lived there for decades and took the fire as a sign it was time to go. Along one stretch of the Pacific Coast Highway, the Reel Inn (a restaurant with surfboards in its rafters, and good fish tacos), Wylie’s Bait and Tackle (a shack opened by Bill Wylie in the ’40s, now owned by his granddaughter), and the Topanga Ranch Motel (bungalows from 1929, where Malibu kids would wait for the school bus) all burned and are now behind a chain-link fence. California State Parks, which owns the land, told at least the Reel Inn that it would not be renewing the business’s lease; then, after a local uproar, it told the restaurant it wanted to figure out a path forward. For the moment, when I drive on PCH at night, silhouettes of bare bluffs and hills, just barely darker than the sky behind them, line one side of the road. On the other side used to be homes. Now I can see the ocean.

ChatGPT Needs More Cowbell

2025-12-24T07:00:00-05:00

You’d be forgiven if you can’t hum the 18th-century Cumbrian folk song “Do Ye Ken John Peel.” But in 1942, a version of that tune, reworked with lyrics about Pepsi-Cola, was the most recognized melody in America.

Three years earlier, two men walked into the office of Pepsi-Cola’s president, carrying a phonograph. They played a demo of what would become one of America’s earliest advertising jingles. To the tune of “Do Ye Ken John Peel,” it went: Pepsi-Cola hits the spot / Twelve full ounces, that’s a lot / Twice as much for a nickel, too. Pepsi-Cola is the drink for you. The jingle became a hit. People played it on jukeboxes around the country; it was translated into 55 languages. Electronic chimes atop a Pepsi-Cola plant in New York rang the first seven notes on the half hour. Other companies recognized the power of hummable commercials, and there were soon so many on the radio that listeners complained. Eventually, The New York Times’ radio station banned these “singing commercials,” but companies could get around the ban by launching instrumental versions instead.

America has had a love-hate relationship with jingles since, but they’ve continued to provide paychecks for musicians. Most of the music industry is made up of people in the gray area between “rock star” and “hobbyist,” like the session musicians and composers who make not just albums, but commercial soundtracks and jingles. When a report surfaced in October that OpenAI was developing a music-generation tool similar to products like Suno and Google’s Lyria, I wasn’t worried about the rock stars. These artists at least have their celebrity to trade on. But advertising musicians’ work is usually anonymous, and you don’t need to be Stravinsky to compose the 800-588-2300-EMPIRE tune. Are the jinglers going to be okay, or will advertising melodies be yet another livelihood cut down by new technology?

Jingle writing has become less of an art and more of a science over the past several decades. There are conventions now that did not exist in the “Do Ye Ken John Peel” era, and conventions could make it easier for the work to be automated.

For starters, jingles have gotten shorter and shorter over the years, morphing from 30-second songs to what are sometimes called “mnemonics,” or short sonic tags like the Netflix tudum and Liberty Mutual’s “Liberty, Liberty, Liiiberty, Liiiberty.” (Liberty Mutual’s CMO, Jenna Lebel, told me that they originally tested a version of the song that repeated liberty six times, but they felt that was a bit much and cut it down to four, which went over well.) Sonically, jingles—I just can’t get myself to call them mnemonics—are simple. Timothy D. Taylor, an ethnomusicologist at UCLA who wrote a history of advertising music, used to keep a database of every jingle he came across, labeled by genre. “Many of them were written like they were a song for children,” he said. “The very simplicity of them was part of the reason they stick in your head.”

[Read: AI is democratizing music. Unfortunately.]

With all of these limitations, jingle writers focus on measurable, proven qualities. “In many ways products like Suno think about music the same way that advertising agencies do—through words about mood and genre, and through references to existing artists,” Ravi Krishnaswami, a musicologist who studies AI music at Brown and a commercial-music composer himself, wrote to me in an email. Agencies might give composers a brief asking for a song that feels “curious,” “playful,” “witty,” and “quirky,” for instance—the types of descriptors you might see on a Spotify playlist—and then gauge which jingles best evoke these emotions in listeners. In theory, AI could be programmed to create a ditty with these qualities—perhaps producing something as catchy as “Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there” or “I am stuck on Band-Aid” (both of which were composed by Barry Manilow, by the way).

But good commercial music needs to target people’s emotions, and AI music is bad at doing that, at least for now. In one analysis by Stephen Arnold Music and SoundOut, a music-testing company, AI generally was not able to deliver tracks that matched the emotions requested by the prompters. Krishnaswami told me that, although AI can produce good jingles right now, “I’m not sure about ‘great’ yet.”

I could see what he meant. When I played around with one generator, it gave me nice-enough music for B-roll in a cat-food commercial. But could AI give me something as delightfully weird as the Meow Mix song? No. I asked for a jingle I could use for a coffee company, hoping it could give me something like the Folgers theme. Instead, it gave me “Brewed Bliss,” in which a store-brand Jason Mraz sang of “coffee magic in your soul.”

Maybe lyrics aren’t its thing, I thought. (We can’t all be Barry Manilow.) So I asked the generator for a series of five notes a coffee company could use as its sonic tag. It then gave me a 2-minute-27-second song called “Coffee Chime.” A soprano with Broadway-caliber diction narrated the song as it played, actually singing aloud the words “A five-note sequence that feels warm and inviting,” and “a rising pitch on a xylophone, ending with a soft chime that lingers, evoking the sound of a spoon stirring in a cup.” I tried to make it clear that I wanted something under five seconds that did not include self-narrating lyrics. But I just got another long song, more “sound of a spoon.”

[Read: Nobody cares if music is real anymore]

Many of these jingles were ridiculous; many were deeply average. But the real problem was that I couldn’t remember any of them. A good jingle needs to stick with you—Liberty Mutual chose its melody because people could sing it back after hearing it only once, Lebel told me. Repetition is the main way a song can become an earworm, but it also needs to be the right amount of familiar and unusual, Bradley Vines, the director of neuroscience for the consumer-intelligence company NielsenIQ, told me. Memorable songs have a common melodic shape—think of how many pop songs’ melodies rise and fall in pitch, forming an arch (so does the tune of McDonald’s “I’m Lovin’ It”). But earworms usually have a surprising change in pitch, like that satisfying jump in the “Like a good neighbor” melody. “Given that a driver for earworms is the unexpected, an AI system trained on existing earworms may not be able to create a new one” by following what has worked before, Vines said.

The music I generated may have been forgettable because it was either too weird (no common melodic shape) or too bland (no surprising interval or rhythm changes). But research also indicates that people just don’t remember AI-generated content as well as the kind made by humans. Vines told me that when NielsenIQ showed people AI- and human-created advertisements, they couldn’t reliably distinguish between the two. However, when they looked at AI commercials, the memory systems in their brains were less active. “There was something that wasn’t as familiar and relatable in those ads,” he said. “There is something at the level of the nonconscious that still distinguishes” between human-created and AI-generated media.

Which isn’t to say that advertisers aren’t using the technology—they do, but mostly for demos, not the finished product. A composer who is not much of a singer might send a sample track with AI vocals on it. Or someone testing out whether to go with a band or a string quartet for a commercial track could easily try out both, before hiring people for the real advertisement. Part of this is pragmatic: Companies may be afraid of a lawsuit if, say, their prompt for “an upbeat 1960s British rock song with a 12-string Rickenbacker” produces a jingle that sounds too much like the Beatles. “I don’t see anybody going, Hey, AI, write me the next Coca-Cola jingle,” Jonathan Wolfert, the president of JAM Creative Productions, told me. (Ironically, Coca-Cola’s current holiday campaign features AI-generated visuals—but even so, the company has emphasized that the music in the ads was performed by humans.)

Whenever music generation gets good enough, companies will be ready. Liberty Mutual uses AI for voice, music, and sound effects in the early-stage commercials it shows focus groups. Then, it uses humans for the final versions. For now, people generally feel like AI-generated ads are inauthentic, but Lebel told me that Liberty Mutual has been testing them “with the hopes to someday incorporate that in market.”

Many people I spoke with said that a great jingle, or any great music, needs a “human touch.” When I’d ask them to define it, though, the consensus seemed to be, “I know it when I hear it.” But maybe it’s simple: AI is not a human. It does not exist in the sensory world, and it’s not exposed to the inspiration that daily life provides. Joni Mitchell wrote “Nathan La Franeer” about a real New York City cab driver who took her to the airport. Paul McCartney got the image for Eleanor Rigby’s “face that she keeps in a jar” from his mother’s cold cream. And the name Rigby, he saw on a sign while visiting Bristol.

Jingles are not Song to a Seagull or Revolver, but the best ones come from those same incalculable leaps of the creative mind. I thought of David Lucas. Now 88, Lucas was a prolific jingle writer from the ’60s through the ’90s, but by night, he was a rock musician. He was a producer on Blue Öyster Cult’s hit “(Don’t Fear) the Reaper,” and was the one who suggested the song needed a cowbell. (He thought nothing of it until decades later, when SNL did an entire sketch about it, and needs more cowbell entered the cultural lexicon.)

Lucas was once in a meeting about Fanta. He told me about passing bottles of it around with the other advertising guys, laughing, having a good time. As he got into a cab to head back to his studio, he thought, Well, that was fun. And then he got the lyric “It’s fun to be thirsty.” It’s a weird line—who likes to be thirsty? Not me. But after weeks of listening to jingles generated by AI, none of them stuck in my brain like Lucas’s Fanta jingle, which I had heard only a single time. And I doubt that AI—or most humans, for that matter—would have thought that “(Don’t Fear) the Reaper” needed more cowbell.

The Rarest of All Diseases Are Becoming Treatable

2025-12-08T08:00:00-05:00

Updated at 11:35 a.m. ET on December 8, 2025

For a decade after its discovery, CRISPR gene editing was stuck on the cusp of transforming medicine. Then, in 2023, scientists started using it on sickle-cell disease, and Victoria Gray, a patient who lived with constant pain—like lightning inside her body, she has said—got the first-ever FDA-approved CRISPR gene-editing treatment. Her symptoms vanished; so did virtually everyone else’s in the clinical trial she was a part of.

This year, the technology has started to press beyond its next barrier. Most of the 8 million people globally who have sickle-cell disease share the same genetic mutation; treating rare disorders will require dealing with many different mutations, even within the same disease. And although rare diseases affect 30 million Americans in total, relatively few people are diagnosed with each one. Fyodor Urnov, a scientific director of UC Berkeley’s Innovative Genomics Institute (IGI), showed me a list of rare diseases and pointed to one carried by only 50 people. “Who’s going to work on a disease with 50 patients?” he asked. And even within one disorder, each person might need their own customized CRISPR treatment. Drug developers have little financial incentive to spend years and millions of dollars designing therapies that may need to be tailored to literally one person.

The technology is ready to treat at least some of these diseases, though. “There’s a whole toolbox now that can target arguably any part of the genome pretty precisely,” Krishanu Saha, a gene-editing researcher at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, told me. If researchers could build one CRISPR platform for a single disease, or even several similar ones, and tweak that template to suit each patient, they could target extremely rare disorders more quickly and economically. Maybe the first patient’s treatment for a disease takes $2 million and a year of development; by the third patient, the cost should be down to, say, $100,000 and a month of development, Urnov said, because you’ve already proved that the reused components are safe.

“We have been moving in the direction of thinking about CRISPR as a platform for some years,” Jennifer Doudna, the IGI’s founder, who shares the Nobel Prize for discovering CRISPR gene editing, told me. But, in her mind, 2025 was the first time many people understood its potential. A baby named KJ Muldoon is a big reason why.

In February, Muldoon became the first child to receive one of these customized CRISPR gene-editing treatments, tailored to fix his specific mutation. People born with his rare genetic disease, a type of urea-cycle disorder, have about a 50 percent chance of living past infancy. If they do, they live with extreme developmental delays and usually require a liver transplant. But when he was six months old, Muldoon got his bespoke treatment, and now he’s a healthy 1-year-old. His therapy was proof that custom gene-editing treatments can work and that they can be spun up relatively quickly, yet safely.

His treatment also gives scientists a chance to try the platform approach. The next child treated for a urea-cycle disorder should now be able to receive a CRISPR treatment from Muldoon’s template, tweaked to their unique DNA. CRISPR technology uses guide RNA, a molecular GPS of sorts, to send an editor protein to a particular address in someone’s DNA. Targeting a different mutation just means changing the address. Muldoon’s case put more momentum, too, behind personalized gene editing in general. The federal government recently announced two major programs that offer funding to scientists working on personalized treatments for rare diseases. The focus now, Doudna said, is figuring out how to make customized CRISPR “available to anyone who needs it.”

For years, one of the main roadblocks has been the U.S. drug-regulatory system. Its approval processes were designed for traditional drugs that help many people, not a bespoke treatment that helps one child in Philadelphia. The FDA has considered each treatment, even for the same disease, as a different drug. Biochemically, two therapies might be the equivalent of a pizza with pepperoni and another with artichokes. But under the FDA approval process, “you go back to square one. You recertify the oven. You recertify the person who throws the disk of dough. You confirm the cheese is still safe to eat,” Urnov, who was also part of the team that designed Muldoon’s treatment, said. The FDA has been trying to change that process over the past few years, and last month, two of its top officials, Marty Makary and Vinay Prasad, announced a new drug pathway that could speed up approvals for personalized rare-disease treatments. The framework was inspired in large part by the success of Muldoon’s therapy. (The FDA did not respond to a request for comment.)

The new pathway opens the door to the platform approach that scientists have hoped to take. If researchers could prove they’d successfully treated a small number of patients for one rare genetic disease, they could continue customizing treatments for other mutations, and potentially also for similar conditions. That streamlined process could finally attract for-profit players—the best shot at actually getting these customized therapies to patients en masse, Doudna said. “If we’re able to bundle trials together so that we’re able to treat multiple related diseases without starting from scratch, that could completely change the economics of treating rare disease,” she said.

The first clinical trials in this model will begin soon. Urnov and his colleagues plan to investigate a platform for rare immune disorders; Rebecca Ahrens-Nicklas and Kiran Musunuru, the geneticists who treated Muldoon at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, told me they are planning to start one this winter for children with various types of urea-cycle disorder. If all goes according to plan, another child should receive a treatment based on Muldoon’s in the near future.

Working this way does put more responsibility on scientists to test their therapies thoroughly, Ahrens-Nicklas said. Gene editing can go wrong: A treatment may accidentally alter the wrong part of a patient’s DNA, or the delivery mechanism could trigger a deadly immune reaction in their body. “If you have to treat fewer subjects in order to get that approval, you want to make sure that you’re really robustly measuring the safety on those few subjects” and communicating any risks to the wider gene-editing community, she said. But done well, these trials are a major step toward getting more custom treatments out to more people.

All of the researchers I spoke with emphasized that these are early days. Because of how the current gene-editing delivery mechanisms work, scientists are mostly limited to treating disorders in the blood and liver. And researchers are focused on single diseases, or groups of similar ones, for now. Their dream would be to have a CRISPR platform that could address many disparate disorders, but the current reality is that many, many families will still go without bespoke therapies. Muldoon’s treatment “took a team of people at both nonprofits and for-profit companies in multiple countries working at a scale I have never seen before,” Doudna said. And they changed his life. His parents weren’t sure if he’d ever be able to sit upright on his own, but recently, Muldoon took his first steps. The press has dubbed him a “miracle baby.” Now miracles like his need to become commonplace.

This article originally misstated the full name of the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

A Funny Book About Faith

2025-11-09T07:00:00-05:00

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, in which one Atlantic writer or editor reveals what’s keeping them entertained. Today’s special guest is Nancy Walecki, an associate editor who has written about her father, a guitar guru to the rock gods; the Palisades Fire that ravaged Los Angeles earlier this year; and her quest to find the East Wing rubble.

Nancy is an avid reader of Anne Lamott, whose writing blends faith and humor. She also enjoys listening to Erroll Garner’s songs, debating the merits of the latest Taylor Swift album, and revisiting John Singer Sargent’s paintings.

— Stephanie Bai, associate editor

The last thing that made me snort with laughter: Traveling Mercies, by Anne Lamott. It tells the story of her journey to faith: She grew up in an atheist intellectual Bay Area family, became addicted to alcohol and drugs, lost her father to cancer, and eventually found her way to Christianity.

Some of the funniest bits are about her raising her son. When she’s ashamed of yelling at him: “It’s like bitch-slapping E.T.” When another mother in her son’s class makes a passive-aggressive comment: “I thought such awful thoughts that I cannot even say them out loud because they would make Jesus want to drink gin straight out of the cat dish.”

The last thing that made me cry: Also from Traveling Mercies, in which Lamott describes God as a kind of adoptive parent who will take in even the most difficult children. “The mystery of God’s love as I understand it is that God loves the man who was being mean to his dog just as much as he loves babies; God loves Susan Smith, who drowned her two sons, as much as he loves Desmond Tutu,” she writes. “So of course he loves old ordinary me, even or especially at my most scared and petty and mean and obsessive. Loves me; chooses me.”

A favorite story I’ve read in The Atlantic: I had to wipe away tears of laughter while reading Gary Shteyngart’s “Crying Myself to Sleep on the Biggest Cruise Ship Ever.”

An actor I would watch in anything: Anthony Hopkins.

An author I will read anything by: Ann Patchett.

A quiet song that I love, and a loud song that I love: One of my favorite quiet songs is “Misty,” as performed by its composer, the pianist Erroll Garner. Listening to it makes even just a walk around the block dreamy. (Bonus: If you explore more of Garner’s work, you’ll notice he hums and vocalizes along while he plays!) For a loud one, I’ve been replaying “Nobody’s Son,” by Sabrina Carpenter. Every sonic variable is perfectly calibrated to yield the ideal amount of bubblegum pop.

A culture debate I recently had: A friend and I debated whether the new Taylor Swift album, The Life of a Showgirl, is good. I’m a longtime Swift fan, but even I thought it sounded like ChatGPT’s version of a Taylor Swift album. And yet, “The Fate of Ophelia” remains stuck in my head. I don’t even like the song! Maybe this is what Swift meant when she said the album would contain “melodies that were so infectious that you’re almost angry at it.” [Related: Taylor Swift’s fairy tale is over.]

Something I recently revisited: I recently wrapped up a magazine feature about my father’s musical-instrument shop, which was a hub of the 1960s and ’70s music scene in Los Angeles. Once the story went to press, I rewatched This Is Spinal Tap, because nothing (lovingly) parodies rock music better.

The last museum or gallery show that I loved: In general, I’m less affected by visual art than I am by music. The exception may be the “Sargent and Paris” exhibit at the Met earlier this year, which I saw four times. I especially love a painting of two young women on a rooftop in Italy; one appears to be dancing the tarantella, and the other is playing the tambourine. You can hear the music; you can feel the cool Capri air. Looking at the scene fills me with an emotion I haven’t yet been able to identify, so I keep coming back.

My favorite way of wasting time on my phone: I was actually wasting so much time on my phone (mostly on Instagram) that I had to remove every single fun app from it. But one of my favorite ways to waste time on my computer is Pinterest. It is, in my experience, a universally positive part of the internet. I use it as a tool to dream with—usually about the southwestern-style home I hope to one day own, where I will have lizards and coyotes for neighbors. [Related: What is Pinterest? A database of intentions.]

A good recommendation I recently received: The novel Piranesi, by Susanna Clarke. I’ll describe it to you the way my friend did to me: It is a strange, beautiful little book unlike anything I’ve ever read, and it’s best to know as little about it as possible before you start.

Here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:

The Week Ahead

The Running Man, a dystopian action thriller based on Stephen King’s novel about contestants surviving a deadly game show for a $1 billion prize (out Friday in theaters)
The American Revolution: An Intimate History, by Ken Burns and Geoffrey C. Ward, who reframe the war as both a broader global battle and a civil conflict that shaped a divided new nation (out Tuesday)
My Nightmare Stalker, a documentary about Eva LaRue and her daughter’s 12-year ordeal of surviving a stalker (out Thursday on Paramount+)

Essay

Illustration by Jonelle Afurong / The Atlantic. Sources: Giovanni Giannoni / WWD / Getty; Gotham / GC Images / Getty; Jason Kempin / Getty; Lyvans Boolaky / WireImage / Getty; Victor Virgile / Gamma-Rapho / Getty.

The Pantsless Trend Reaches Its Logical Conclusion

By Julie Beck

Celebrities seem to have developed a pants allergy. Bella Hadid and Julia Fox have been running errands in their underpants. Bodysuits, oversize blazers worn as dresses, and sheer fabrics that reveal the lingerie underneath are all common sights. This widespread pantsless trend has given rise to a new sort of garment, more micro than micro-shorts, bulkier than lingerie: I call it the “fashion diaper.”

Read the full article.

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My Quest to Find the East Wing Rubble

2025-10-25T11:11:28-04:00

When the president of the United States decides to demolish the East Wing of the White House to construct a ballroom, all that stucco and molding and wood had to go somewhere. So I tried to find it.

I’d heard that the dirt from the East Wing demolition was being deposited three miles away, on a tree-lined island next to the Jefferson Memorial called East Potomac Park. So yesterday I drove around until I saw trucks and men in construction gear. They were congregating at an entrance to the public East Potomac Golf Links, where rounds of golf carried on as usual, except every few minutes, dump trucks entered the green.

The trucks would cut across the course to a cordoned-off site in the middle, where the grass had been torn away and replaced with piles of dirt. It did not look like much, but several employees at the site confirmed: This was not just any dirt. This was White House dirt. The precursor to the East Wing was constructed during Theodore Roosevelt’s administration in 1902 and updated during Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration in the ’40s. Maybe this was not just White House dirt but Roosevelt-era dirt. I gazed upon the golfers going about their games. Do they know, I wondered, that they are in the presence of such particularly American soil?

I asked one employee what the plan was for all this dirt. “Oh, they’re gonna turn it into another hole,” he said. Other reporters have heard the same. But when I asked a different employee about it, he demurred; his boss drove by and said, “No comment” before my colleague Grace Buono had even asked him a question. Donald Trump has reportedly been considering rebranding East Potomac Golf Links as the Washington National Golf Course and giving it a makeover. He even mocked up a new golden logo for it that’s nearly identical to those of the courses he owns. I suppose the East Wing demolition is an excellent source of soil. (The White House did not respond to my request for comment. It told CBS News that wood and plants from the site could end up being recycled for garden nurseries.)

To test if this really was a White House operation, Grace and I followed one of the trucks out of the golf course, past the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, to a path that normally leads to the White House but was blockaded. Suspicious! The guard let in the truck but not Grace and me, even though we tried to look important. So we went inside the nearby Milken Center for Advancing the American Dream, which has a second-story window that looked out over the barricades. We enjoyed the center’s exhibit on the “American Dream Experience,” which includes tape of a vintage Oprah Winfrey interview, while we watched four dump trucks stand in a line on Pennsylvania Avenue, presumably getting ready to haul some more debris from the demolished East Wing.

So far, though, we’d only seen dirt. The East Wing had housed the Office of the First Lady. It had a movie theater. It had an emergency bunker. The president might have been able to knock down part of one of the most cherished buildings in the United States in a matter of days, but he couldn’t make its remnants poof into nothing. There had to be some concrete, some wood, some rebar, somewhere. I wanted to find the debris.

Generally, what happens to the White House’s trash is secret—at least as of 2018, which was apparently the last time the federal government released any information on where Oval Office garbage goes. The General Services Administration, which oversees the White House’s day-to-day operations, said back then that it does take out trash and recycling, but it did not reveal which company provides the service or where the refuse goes. But the interest in the East Wing demolition had been acute enough that a local-news outlet had identified one of the East Wing dump sites—an industrial park in Hyattsville, Maryland. We headed there.

This particular road in Hyattsville is the place to go if you need your car repaired or your roof redone. We stopped in at a roofing-supply company next to the dump site, where the man behind the counter simply said it was very sad that this part of the White House had been demolished. He asked that, if we found any debris, we bring him back a piece of rebar.

We had walked about 30 yards into the dump—mostly mounds of dirt and gravel—when a man in an American-flag T-shirt emerged from the guard house and asked why we were there. I guess two 20-something women in office wear stood out at a hard-hat-only industrial-waste site. When we told him, he said the site definitely was not housing White House debris. Not at all! Everyone else we tried to talk with at the site—a guy in a utility vehicle, two guys unloading the back of a pickup, two driving away—either ignored us or said they’d been told not to speak to the press.

We did not find rebar for the man at the roofing-supply company. We checked at another nearby dump, which someone at a neighboring business told us might be the sort of place that would receive White House debris, but we found nothing there, either. Somewhere in the greater D.C. area, the remains of the East Wing are being processed. However much the White House, sometimes called the People’s House, means to Americans, it can still be crumbled into rubble and trucked away. At least the East Potomac Golf Links might get a new hole, which presumably anyone will be able to use, for $42 plus the cart rental.

Additional reporting by Grace Buono.

The Pitfalls of Sleepmaxxing

2025-10-25T10:09:51-04:00

Eight Sleep—often called Silicon Valley’s favorite bed—is like a full-body Fitbit. It is a $3,050 mattress cover filled with sensors to monitor heart rate and body temperature. For people who pay $199 to $399 for an annual subscription, the cover will automatically heat and cool itself throughout the night to keep the owner at a sleep-optimal temperature. The add-on base (about $2,000) raises the angle of the bed to make reading more comfortable or to help stop snoring. Eight Sleep gently vibrates its users awake; it lulls them to sleep with “deep rest” meditations narrated by the wellness-science podcaster Andrew Huberman. To buy the Eight Sleep is to buy fully, with your whole body, into the idea that the future of sleep is technological.

On Monday, the future glitched. Eight Sleep’s features run on the AWS Cloud, so when one of Amazon Web Services’ data centers went offline at about 3 a.m. ET, the sleep system went haywire. Eight Sleep generally warms when the user is drifting off, then gets cooler as they enter deeper sleep. Santiago Lisa, a software engineer in Pittsburgh, told me he woke up because his bed was stuck in deep-sleep frigidity. He tried to warm it up using the Eight Sleep app, but no dice—the app was down. Then he tried the system’s manual buttons. No dice there, either—they also require the Cloud to function. Jordan Arnold, who works in the video-game industry in Washington State, told me that his girlfriend couldn’t sleep because her side of the bed was stuck at its highest temperature, 110 degrees Fahrenheit. She slept on the couch. Other poor souls, who had put their bed in a sitting position to read and were now stuck there, spent the night in the world’s most high-tech Barcalounger. A Jetsons vision of the 21st century did not include Mrs. Jetson stuck in an upright and locked position because her bed could not connect to a data center in Northern Virginia.

The disruption was short-lived: Eight Sleep’s products were up and running once AWS was. (The company is working to diversify its cloud setup, a spokesperson told me, and on Wednesday, it launched a backup mode that uses Bluetooth.) But that this fiasco happened at all is a sign of how much Americans’ desire to optimize their rest has grown—along with the market to sate that desire. We are being offered more and more ways to become, essentially, sleep cyborgs who depend on technology to enhance what should be a basic aspect of being alive. Those interested in “sleepmaxxing,” along with people who want to sleep better but don’t have a Silicon Valley–style term for it, have made sleep tech a $29.3 billion industry, by one measure. The value of the industry is expected to more than quadruple, to $135 billion, by 2034.

Shalini Paruthi, a physician who’s on the American Academy of Sleep Medicine committee for emerging technology, told me that she mostly sees her patients using sleep tech through meditation and bedtime-story platforms. Those with the Calm app can fall asleep to Harry Styles narrating a story called “Dream With Me,” Matthew McConaughey pontificating on “the mysteries of the universe,” or Travis Kelce’s mom talking about football. Devices have permeated all aspects of sleep, Paruthi said. Wearables such as the Oura Ring and Apple Watch track the wearer’s vitals. Red-light lamps aim to help people feel sleepier, noise machines play soundscapes as they drift off, and alarm clocks mimic sunlight to wake them up. I thought I was a little high-maintenance for using a fabric eye mask, but for north of $100, I could acquire a “smart” one that not only blocks light but also vibrates in sync with my heartbeat. For help falling asleep faster, people can buy a $350 “neurotech headband.” And those who aren’t ready to spend $3,000 on a sensor-filled mattress cover could instead opt for a $1,400 “dual zone climate control bed-making system”—a duvet connected to air hoses that pair with Alexa voice command. Notably, the Eight Sleep has aggregated much of the most popular consumer sleep equipment available into a single piece of technology.

Whether or not these gadgets actually help with sleep is an open question. Sleep-tracking devices do a “pretty good job of figuring out when a person fell asleep and when they woke up, based on their movement and heart rates,” Paruthi said. (So does looking at your clock.) But they don’t “always do the best job in between.” Patients will come to her because their wearable says they got no REM sleep, which, she said, “quite frankly, would be impossible.” At the very least, these devices can encourage better sleep hygiene: One too many bad “sleep scores,” and a person might just start going to bed earlier and leaving their phone in another room.

For those with actual sleep disorders, cyborg sleep can be a very good thing. People who have extreme nightmares from PTSD can use NightWare, a prescription-only system that comes with a preprogrammed Apple Watch and detects if the wearer is having a nightmare. It will vibrate enough to stop the bad dream but not enough to wake the user. And for those with restless legs syndrome, there is Nidra, a cuff worn around the calves that helps alleviate RLS symptoms. Even Eight Sleep can be FSA/HSA-eligible with a doctor’s note explaining why it might help a preexisting health condition.

But in general, the more technology in a sleep routine, the more possible points of failure. Our bed might not connect to the cloud and remain stuck at an incline. We might open our phone to summon the soothing voice of Matthew McConaughey and instead be spirited away by Instagram. Technology, one of the main reasons we can’t sleep, has entered the last part of our life that is usually free from it. Before Eight Sleep announced its new offline mode, some Reddit users discussed “jailbreaking” their bed so that it could function without the AWS Cloud. A simpler hack might be to let our bodies do what they’re already primed to do. Even when his Eight Sleep malfunctioned on Monday and remained at frigid temperatures, Lisa told me, “I ended up sleeping. It was just cold.”

A Surreal New Revelation About the L.A. Fires

2025-10-09T17:54:29-04:00

Updated at 10:53 a.m. ET on October 10, 2025

The origin story of L.A.’s Palisades Fire, according to a criminal complaint announced yesterday, reads like a scene from an art-house film. Shortly before midnight on New Year’s Eve, a son of missionaries visits a scenic overlook near the Los Angeles coast. The clearing is known for the Buddha statues hikers leave behind in the hollowed-out stump of a power pole. The man listens to a French rap song about the malaise of modern life. Then, according to investigators, he starts a fire with an open flame, a combustible material, and malicious intent.

He dials 911 to report the fire, but his first few calls do not connect (presumably because this is coastal Los Angeles, and our cell service is terrible). He then begins screen-recording on his cellphone while he continues to dial 911. He asks ChatGPT if he might be criminally liable for starting a fire with cigarettes, possibly to cover up what he’s done. Then, the man films the flames on his iPhone as firefighters arrive.

By January 2, they determine that the fire is out. But it has in fact gone underground, smoldering in the root system of the hillside’s brush. Days later, strong winds travel from the desert to that same hillside and revive the blaze, which becomes the Palisades Fire. It levels more than 6,800 structures and kills 12 people. (Those structures included my childhood home, and those deaths included Arthur, a man who’d lived next door to that old house and whom I’d known and loved since I was born.)

The suspect is a 29-year-old Florida man named Jonathan Rinderknecht, and the case against him is one that could be made only in an era of AI. To help establish intent, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives turned to Rinderknecht’s conversations with ChatGPT—not just his cigarette question, but also an exchange from months earlier in which he asked ChatGPT to generate an image of a “burning forest” next to a crowd of people “running away from the fire.” OpenAI declined to specify whether the company had handed Rinderknecht’s chat logs over to the investigators; a spokesperson for OpenAI told The Atlantic only that “following the Palisades fire tragedy, we responded to standard law enforcement requests related to this individual.” It was standard in the sense that tech companies comply with requests relating to criminal investigations all the time. But for an investigation to rely to this degree on a conversation with a large language model is new. The allure of a chatbot is that it’s a machine that will process your most private thoughts without judgment. Now it seems that those conversations can appear before a judge and jury. (A public defender for Florida’s Middle District told the Associated Press that the evidence against Rinderknecht is circumstantial; the public defender’s office did not immediately return my request for comment.)

If the revelation about the fire’s alleged beginning is meant to be the art-house film’s dramatic conclusion, the Angelenos I’ve talked with haven’t exactly found it satisfying. “I don’t know a single person that’s like, ‘Did you hear the news? This is amazing,’” Jennifer Champion, who lost her home, her children’s schools, and part of her husband’s business in the fire, told me. Much of this story had already been told, albeit without such certainty: Since its early aftermath, residents suspected that the Palisades Fire was born out of the one on New Year’s, which they also suspected was human-caused. (In L.A., rumor had it that some teens started it by launching fireworks.) The issue for locals was never really about how the fire started—it was about whether Los Angeles and state agencies should have done more to make it less destructive.

The response to the Palisades Fire—and the five others burning around Los Angeles County in early January—was far from optimal. The Palisades’ Santa Ynez Reservoir, which was specifically built for firefighting use, was empty. Many hydrants failed to dispense water. The emergency-alert system repeatedly failed. I was with my family in L.A. at the time, and received 11 evacuation alerts that, as far as I can tell, were all sent in error; in Altadena, some people did not receive a warning before the fire reached their neighborhood. Now residents are wondering why the fire department reportedly didn’t station any engines in the Palisades on January 7, when the New Year’s burn site was still relatively fresh and forecasters had predicted catastrophic, fire-fueling winds. Many Angelenos feel that they went without resources that should be standard during a wildfire. (The Los Angeles mayor’s office directed me to the city attorney’s office, which said it could not comment due to pending litigation, and to the L.A. Department of Water and Power. After this article was published, a spokesperson for LADWP pointed me to previous statements the department had made, indicating that the reservoir was empty because it was being repaired and that hydrants might have lost pressure due to “extraordinary demands.”)

[Read: It’s time to evacuate. Wait, never mind.]

A federal arson charge likely will not save state and city agencies from the civil lawsuits they are facing for negligence and mismanagement, because they generally concern government entities’ fire preparation and response, not the Palisades Fire’s acute origins. One suit, filed on behalf of more than 3,300 people affected by the Palisades Fire, alleges that the city and state didn’t adequately clear public lands of brush, were slow to shut off power the day the Palisades Fire broke out, and allowed the reservoir to go dry. (The L.A. Department of Water and Power, which is named in the case, has previously denied any role in worsening the crisis. A spokesperson for the California Department of Parks and Recreation, which is listed as a defendant, said the office does not comment on pending litigation.) An arson conviction won’t change those complaints, a lawyer representing residents in that case told reporters yesterday.

The acting U.S. attorney for California’s central district, Bill Essayli, said at a press conference yesterday that he hopes the arrest “will provide a measure of justice to all those who are impacted.” But most people I talked with met the news with just a resigned shrug—not because they aren’t grateful to law enforcement, but because it does little to change the experience of living in the aftermath of the fire. People have already lost what they lost. Champion still thinks about the letters from her late father that burned; my family still misses Arthur. Yesterday, after the press conference, I expected to feel some kind of justice for the man who helped raise me, or at least some kind of closure. Instead, I’ve been combing through photographs of how his house used to look, how green his pepper trees were before they burned.

Matteo Wong contributed reporting.

My Father, Guitar Guru to the Rock Gods

2025-08-07T09:00:00-04:00

Photographs by Peyton Fulford

In August 2000, when I was 2 years old, my mother put me in a maroon velvet dress and stuck foam earplugs in my ears. She carried me through the backstage corridors of the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium—the same venue where, in 1964, James Brown gave one of the most ecstatic performances of his career. It’s where, in 1972, George Carlin first listed the “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television.”

My mother remembers the night in flashes. David Crosby—walrus mustache, smiling eyes—telling jokes. Bonnie Raitt’s aura of red hair. In the distance, the sound of Linda Ronstadt warming up. Sitting in a dressing room with Michael McKean and Christopher Guest, already in costume as Spinal Tap’s front men.

That night, the auditorium was hosting the Friends of Fred Walecki benefit concert. These friends included Crosby, Raitt, and Ronstadt. Also Jackson Browne, Graham Nash, Emmylou Harris, and Warren Zevon. Three of the four original Eagles, who in this room in 1973 had performed their new album, Desperado, were there too.

One of the Eagles, Bernie Leadon, had helped put the event together. He had known Fred Walecki, my father, since they were teenagers, when Leadon started coming into Westwood Music, Dad’s musical-instrument shop in Los Angeles.

Dad had recently been diagnosed with Stage 4 throat cancer and had undergone a complete laryngectomy. Surgeons removed his vocal cords and created a hole in his throat that he used to breathe; to speak, he pressed an electronic buzzer against the side of his neck. If people gawked at him, he’d joke that everyone on his home planet sounded like this.

When Leadon had learned that my father was sick, he called Glyn Johns, another of Dad’s close friends and a groomsman at my parents’ wedding. Johns is the English sound engineer and producer who worked with pretty much every major rock band of the ’60s and ’70s—the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Who, the Eagles. He and Leadon suspected that my family was struggling to pay Dad’s medical bills, so they contacted his other friends and asked if they’d play a benefit concert for him. Everyone said yes. Dad’s classmate from Emerson Junior High School, Jeff Bridges, who’d recently starred as “The Dude” in The Big Lebowski, would be the evening’s emcee.

I wish I had been old enough to remember this night of thank-yous to my father. He was 51 when I was born; I’ve only known Dad with gray hair, and I have no memory of his original voice. But Browne remembers my father’s impeccable Jimmy Stewart impersonations; he remembers Dad as the guy who turned him on to Gibson guitars. At the concert, he performed “My Opening Farewell” on a guitar that had been assembled at Westwood Music. Dad had spent hours polishing it to give it the rich hue Browne wanted.

Crosby thought of my dad as his “guitar guru,” and like many of the performers that night, he praised my father for his friendship. “Fred’s helped a lot of people when they really needed it. Really needed it,” he said. He and Nash then played their song “Déjà Vu.”

[Nancy Walecki: The house where 28,000 records burned]

Before the night could get too sentimental, Spinal Tap—who claimed that Dad had been the first person in the music business to ask them, Do you have to play so goddamn loud?—took the stage and gave an enthusiastic rendition of “Big Bottom.” I’m told I fell asleep sometime before the Byrds reunited.

After the concert, Rolling Stone declared that Fred Walecki had been “responsible for a night of music history,” even though his name “might not mean much, if anything at all, to music fans.” But my father has been there since the 1960s—doing his work so that some of America’s greatest artists can do theirs.

I. The Store

Dad never wanted to go into the family business, and his father, Hermann, didn’t want him to either. Hermann opened Westwood Music, a classical-instrument shop, in 1947, the year after Dad was born. But even as he taught my father to apply thin layers of shellac to wooden instruments until they were as reflective as still water, he’d say, This life is too small for you.

Maybe because no Walecki before him had lived a small life. Dad’s grandfather had been a cabinetmaker by day and a socialist revolutionary by night. His opera-singer aunt was the buxom blonde on The Three Stooges, and his sister, Christine—known as the Goddess of the Cello—was the first American musician to hold a concert in Castro’s Cuba. Dad’s brother, the only family member who wasn’t in the music industry, was one of the engineers behind the fastest jet-propelled aircraft in the world. Then there was Hermann, who spoke five languages, had a photographic memory, and was a world-renowned expert on and dealer of rare classical string instruments. As a young man, he’d trained to be a priest before getting recruited to play hockey for the Chicago Blackhawks.

Hermann Walecki, who founded Westwood Music, circa 1934 (Courtesy of Nancy Walecki)

But as I would half a century later, Dad grew up in Westwood Music. He loved it as I would; he memorized its smell of old wood and lacquer. When customers came in to have their violin bows rehaired, they’d sit beside Hermann and confess their problems while he worked. Hermann, still a devout Catholic who prayed on his knees every night, would listen, nod, and occasionally offer spiritual advice. The Walecki tract home nearby was decorated with harps and baroque instruments, and served as an artist’s salon of sorts: For a summer, the harpist Marcel Grandjany gave master classes in the living room and slept in the extra twin bed in Dad’s room. When my father was born, his parents received a year-long diaper service as a gift from their friend Harpo—whom Hermann knew more as a harp player than a Marx Brother.

Dad started working on Westwood Music’s sales floor in grade school. Once, he bragged to his father that he’d persuaded a man to buy more expensive strings than his cheap guitar required. Hermann made Dad chase the guy to his bus stop with his change and the strings he actually needed and could afford. When Dad was 12, he ran the shop while his parents traveled to Europe to find rare instruments. Sold $123 worth today, he reported in a letter to his parents, and added that he’d previously sold a piano, nine flutes, and a $350 drum set, and talked a guitar student into buying a banjo and learning that, too. As a teenager, he started a guitar-polish business, mixing his concoction in the garage with an eggbeater and a coffee percolator from Goodwill.

Westwood Music back then was a blend of old-world craftsman’s studio and museum. By the front door: a grandfather clock built by Hermann’s woodworker father. On the sales floor: trumpets displayed in antique jewelry cases, fine violins in velvet-lined cubbies. On the wall: violas da gamba (baroque cousin of the cello), violas d’amore (baroque cousin of the violin), an oil painting of Christine playing the cello as a child, a rare oud constructed when Istanbul was still Constantinople. And in a frame above the sales counter was one of Hermann’s favorite quotes, attributed to Goethe:

A man should hear a little music, read a little poetry, and see a fine picture every day of his life, in order that worldly cares may not obliterate the sense of the beautiful which God has implanted in the human soul.

The store was the complete opposite of Ledbetter’s, the folk club that opened next door in the 1960s. Its idea of decor was putting a vintage Dodge truck on the roof. On its stage, against a brick wall, the then-unknown Steve Martin did his banjo-and-comedy routine and Henry John Deutschendorf Jr. gave one of his first performances in L.A. It was the owner of Ledbetter’s who suggested that Deutschendorf needed a stage name, which is how he became John Denver.

Chris Hillman, later of the Byrds, bought mandolin strings from Hermann when he was playing in what he described to me as a “horrible faux bluegrass band” for $100 a week at Ledbetter’s. Sixteen-year-old Bernie Leadon was in town to see Hillman rehearse when he spotted a National Tricone guitar in the window of Westwood Music. (These guitars, which have bodies made of metal, look like they belong to very hip aliens, but are a favorite of blues musicians.) My dad, also a teenager, was behind the counter, and Leadon thought he looked like a total prep: oxford shirt buttoned at the cuffs, dress slacks, penny loafers, brown hair neatly coifed. Leadon didn’t buy the guitar (he couldn’t afford it), but Westwood Music had made an impression.

Dad wanted to welcome the Ledbetter’s crowd drifting in and told Hermann that folk and rock were going to be big. But Hermann was hesitant about adding “that element,” as he called it, to the store while still accommodating violin buyers with white hair and season tickets to the symphony. He allowed Dad the National Tricone and some acoustic and electric guitars if he mostly tucked them away in a little-used music-lesson room. Dad paid Hermann rent for the space and furnished his mini guitar salon with an antique clock and table so that, he told me, “it looked kind of groovy.”

[From the May 2025 issue: Ringo Starr still believes in peace and love]

Dad ran Westwood Music alongside his father, with no designs to take it over. But then Hermann got lung cancer. Soon, suppliers were calling, asking why Westwood Music was so late on payment. Eighteen-year-old Dad told them that Hermann was on an extended trip to Europe. He ran the shop solo, and at night, he repaired instruments for extra money. He’d take cash straight out of the register to pay his father’s home nurses. The cancer spread to Hermann’s brain, and he died in 1967, when Dad was 20. Westwood Music was now his to run alone.

When he’d open the shop in the morning, Dad had no trouble with the lock at the top of the door. But when he’d bend down to undo the latch at the bottom, he’d get hit with a wave of nausea. The neon sign above the door still said Westwood Musical Instruments—Hermann Walecki, but the decal on the window now read Hermann Walecki & Son. He asked himself, How do you take your father’s place?

One day, a tour bus pulled up in front of the store and out walked the country singer Merle Haggard. He was a real-life outlaw who’d done time in San Quentin and a leader of the “Bakersfield Sound,” gritty country-western music that sounded nothing like the overproduced schmaltz Nashville was selling in the ’60s. “I’m here to get a really good violin,” he said. Dad took him to Hermann’s safe and brought out a centuries-old Carlo Antonio Testore. “Can you put steel strings on that?” Haggard asked. Hermann would have thought the request blasphemous, but Dad obliged. The violin went for $16,000; this one sale would cover much of the family’s remaining medical debt. Haggard was fiddling on the new strings when Marian, Dad’s mother, who’d taken over as the store’s bookkeeper, walked by.

“It sounds like that violin has steel strings on it,” she said. An accomplished classical violinist and wool-skirt woman of the old school, she was scandalized. But then Dad told her that Haggard was going to buy it. “It sounds marvelous,” she said.

Every time he sold one of his father’s violins, Dad would reinvest in new inventory—handmade guitars by the Spanish luthier José Ramírez; Traynor amps imported from Canada; and, for musicians who wanted their own sound system, Lamb Laboratories mixing boards from England (because Dad found that if he adjusted the board’s settings just right, it could “get you a really good Rolling Stones sound live”). Martin guitars, a favorite of folk musicians, had only a handful of authorized retailers in Los Angeles; Dad was one of them. As musicians started traveling more and more by plane, he found a man named Mark Leaf, who built fiberglass guitar cases on his kitchen table in Virginia. Dad told Leadon that a guitar in that case could fall onto an airplane tarmac without a scratch. (Leadon later learned this to be true.)

Dad would stock anything that delighted him—folk, rock, or otherwise. Dolmetsch, a company in England, made “the ultimate baroque recorders,” in his opinion, so he carried a full line of them. “If another music store sold it, then forget it, you know? But if it was the best and the coolest, then I would get it,” he said. He remembers a young guy dressed in jeans and a suit jacket coming into the shop one day and trying out the recorders. He’d take one out of the display case, play it, then slip it in his suit-jacket pocket before returning it. Again and again: out of the case, in the pocket, back in the case.

“Hey, man,” Dad said, and asked what the guy was doing.

“I wanted to see how comfortable it is, because I want to use it as a little traveling instrument,” Jackson Browne replied.

I met Browne at his recording studio in Los Angeles last summer. One of the first things he said to me was “You’re tall!” The last time we’d seen each other, I was 3 feet and still struggling to pronounce my r’s. He showed me his studio of vintage recording equipment and the ailing sunflower seedlings he was trying to grow on the windowsill for his grandson. “You are going to come back,” he told the slouching shoots. “Sorry I let this happen again.” We sat at a table in the studio’s kitchen while he made us a pot of coffee.

Browne has no idea what his younger self wanted to do with that recorder. “That was pretty harebrained,” he said. “I didn’t really learn to play recorder at all.” But back then, music was “the coin of the realm. The songs you could play or what you could do on a guitar was a kind of introduction to people and friends.” At little clubs like Ledbetter’s, musicians could listen to one another and ask, How do you do that?

All of them were so young. Browne was only 18 when he wrote “A Child in These Hills.” Linda Ronstadt was the same age when she moved from Tucson, Arizona, to Los Angeles. Crosby and Hillman were in their early 20s when, in 1965, the Byrds essentially launched the folk-rock genre with their cover of “Mr. Tambourine Man.” By 1970, Hillman and Leadon had fused country and rock together in the Flying Burrito Brothers. (Their pedal-steel player used Jimi Hendrix–esque fuzz distortion and was also an animator for The Gumby Show. His name was Sneaky Pete.)

Dad’s store had become part of a scene that was reshaping American popular music. But Dad was still trying to run a shop suitable for his father’s remaining violin clientele. Leadon took him aside. “Fred, you don’t need to dress like that, wearing a tie and white shirt and slacks,” he said. “These people that you’re dressing for are not the ones that are bringing in money. We are.” So Dad kept his father’s old instruments on the wall, his grandfather’s clock by the door, and the Goethe quote above the sales counter, but he placed his Martin guitars on stadium bleachers in the front window and started wearing Levi’s like the rest of them.

II. The Tools

In one of my favorite photographs of my father, he stands behind the counter of Westwood Music. A lute, a violin, and about a dozen guitars hang on the wall behind him, and the counter and cabinets overflow with papers. In his Levi’s and Waylon Jennings T-shirt, he is now the king of cool. And then there is his smile—the one I inherited—which takes up half his face. He looks at whoever is on the other side of the counter as though they are the center of his world.

Dad, in Levi’s and a Waylon Jennings T-shirt, behind the counter of Westwood Music (Courtesy of Nancy Walecki)

“People would come in and it was boom, that floodgate of stories would open,” Christopher Guest told me. Maybe Dad would launch into the one where he found himself in a Las Vegas greenroom with Elvis and women he took for “ladies of the night,” as he put it; or the time he dropped off a 12-string guitar at a recording session for Crosby, along with some regifted weed from a member of Ricky Nelson’s road crew, who’d cautioned that it was “one-hit dope.” The recording engineer called the next day to say they’d all ignored the warning, and when he drove home afterward, he couldn’t believe how long it was taking to get to his house, a few neighborhoods over. Then he saw the sign: Welcome to San Diego. Dad would follow customers to their car, just to finish a story.

My father was a competent musician, though never thought about doing it professionally. He learned some songs, including Browne’s “My Opening Farewell,” so he could show customers different aspects of a guitar’s tone. “He always really liked to show me that he could play it, which I felt very honored by, you know?” Browne said. “And that goes right along with him pulling out a guitar and saying, ‘I have to show you something. Check this out.’ And he would show you what invariably would be a phenomenal guitar.”

Check this out : the three-word portal into the Fred Walecki Experience. Check this out, and he’d hand John Entwistle his first-ever Alembic bass, a brand he would go on to use for many years with the Who. Check this out, and he’d pull out a guitar by Mark Whitebook or David Russell Young, luthiers he’d discovered in the mountains of Topanga Canyon, and whose instruments he sold to James Taylor and Gram Parsons. Glyn Johns bought a David Russell Young so he’d have a good acoustic guitar for the rock bands he worked with. (Johns showed me that guitar when I visited him at home last fall; he apologized for all the scratch marks. “Everybody’s played this,” he said. “Eric has played it; Jeff Beck’s played it; Jimmy Page has played it.”)

Guest does an imitation of my father rummaging around in his shop for the item he needs you to see. Wait, what’s this thing? he’ll say, as he unearths some treasure. My dad has been doing this for as long as I can remember. It was just over here [Dad lifts up a touring case, printed with B.D., from a Bob Dylan tour]. Maybe it’s under [peers behind a platinum record the Eagles gave him for One of These Nights]. I think it’s just [moves aside a priceless Spanish guitar by the 19th-century luthier Antonio de Torres Jurado]. Oh, here! The joy for my father is in watching other people check this out. This is why when he looks at me with pure excitement and asks me to try the soup he has made from three different types of Progresso, I accept the spoon from him.

I’ve tried to get my father to wax poetic about the music that his customers were making in the ’60s and ’70s. He was there for the birth of what is sometimes called the California Sound, a blend of country, bluegrass, folk, and rock that is utterly distinctive and nearly impossible to categorize. How to contain the Beach Boys and the Byrds, the Doors and the Mamas & the Papas, Bonnie Raitt and Joni Mitchell? Gram Parsons called his own sound Cosmic American Music, and maybe that’s a better term for the entire Los Angeles scene. The music, he said, would unite “longhairs, shorthairs, people with overalls, people with their velvet gear on.” Cosmic American Music, at least, captures the movement’s spiritual aspirations, while gesturing to the distance between its stars.

The Eagles. Don Felder is in the Westwood Music T-shirt. (Published in the Sydney Morning Herald)

Whatever you call it, this music defined an era, and it has stuck around since. On road trips, my friends and I, all under the age of 30, still roll down the windows and blast the Eagles. We act like Joni Mitchell wrote Blue just for us. I’ve asked my father to explain it to me, to offer a theory for why there, why then. How did so much good music come out of one place?

But he just shrugs. “I’m more of a jazz guy,” he says. This is true. My entire childhood, our car radio was under the tyranny of KJAZZ 88.1. His heroes are Bola Sete, Kenny Burrell, Johnny Smith, and Baden Powell. If I want to talk about the California Sound, he tells me, I should ask his friends who actually made it. So I brought the question to Browne, the bard of ’70s Los Angeles. What do you think did it?

“It was the guitars,” he said. “Anybody will tell you it’s the instruments.” He smiled and we both laughed. But then Browne stopped himself, considered. “I’m joking when I say it’s the guitars. But I’m also serious.”

Each instrument contains unwritten melodies and lyrics, he said. “They have personalities, and they will speak to you with those personalities.” (Dad likes to say that instruments have their own little souls.) Browne said, “Especially for a writer, you’ll get to play stuff that will unlock a way of playing, or a song that’s in that guitar that you might not write on another.”

Chris Hillman described Westwood Music to me as “the hardware store” of the L.A. music scene. Guest had a more romantic metaphor: Dad, he said, “was like a matchmaker,” a conduit between the human soul and the instrumental one. Where other salesmen might just tell you the price of a guitar, with my father, “it was about going so much further than that and thinking, I’m listening to you play, and it sounds like this might be a good guitar for you.”

When Joe Walsh brought in his Gibson J-200 to sell, Dad called up Emmylou Harris right away. “You need to have this guitar,” she remembers him telling her. It had that warm country sound he knew she’d like. “You play an A chord and it’s just like, pwah! ” Harris told me, miming fireworks. J-200s have been her signature guitar ever since. She added, “I sort of became the unofficial Gibson Girl.”

Early in her career, Bonnie Raitt was playing in little clubs and “wasn’t even expecting to do this for a living. It was kind of a hobby for me,” she told me. But Dad, she says, “showed me around and showed me the whole world of things that I could have.” He explained how different amplifiers could change her sound, and he took her to a trade show where he introduced her to the genteel, rather ancient chairman of Martin Guitar, C. F. Martin III.

Raitt has a mischievous, bawdy sense of humor. (As a kid, I understood I was never to repeat a Bonnie Raitt joke.) Dad told C. F. Martin that Raitt was a rising star and may be in need of a custom-made guitar. “What I really need is a custom-made IUD,” she said. Martin had no idea what she was talking about, so Dad jumped in: “Uh, it’s a lot like a Martin D-35.”

None of this could happen now. Today’s musicians don’t need Fred Walecki to call them up about a J-200 or broker a deal for a bespoke Martin. Like professional athletes, they have sponsorship deals and can get their equipment for free. But Dad “made it his business to know the latest on every single improvement of every keyboard, every amp, and every guitar,” Raitt said. “It’s not something I take for granted. We were all incredibly lucky to have someone on our side that had so much integrity.”

Dad never forgot having to chase down the man he’d upsold on fancy guitar strings; once the store was his, he kept prices reasonable—if anything, he charged too little. Warren Zevon once saw an antique harmonium in Westwood Music and asked Dad how much he wanted for it. “Fifty bucks,” he said. “Or nothing! Take your pick!” Zevon used to call them “Freddie’s Zen Prices.”

My father became an angel investor of sorts. When the future Eagle Don Felder first came to L.A., he needed to learn mandolin for an audition, so Dad loaned him one. As Felder writes in his memoir, my father told him to take it “if you have a chance for a job,” and wished him luck. He got the gig. The Eagles landed their first tour before they had the money to buy all the necessary equipment. Dad gave them a charge account.

III. The Scene

As usual, I’m staying in the Blue Room, named for its cerulean rug and robin’s-egg walls. And as usual, when I come down the staircase, Linda Ronstadt is in her favorite armchair.

Her San Francisco living room feels like the inside of an Impressionist painting: pastel-hued, soft at the edges. It smells of cut flowers and the black tea she prefers to coffee. An icon of Our Lady of Guadalupe keeps watch from the mantel; a painting of her cat wearing a crown overlooks her shelves and shelves of books. Outside in the garden, fog cradles the roses she brought with her from one of her grandfather’s ranches in the San Gabriel Valley.

She has known me since I was born, when my parents were still trying to make my double name, Nancy Kathryn, catch on. When I began singing as a child, Linda introduced me to Brian Wilson’s harmonies and Maria Callas’s vocal placement, and, unbeknownst to me, paid for my lessons. Every time I visit, we talk about books (most recently, Anna Karenina) and boys (I talk, she listens). We watch TV and go to bed early. I’m just Nancy now to most people, but to Linda, I’m still Nancy Kathryn.

She has known my father since the 1960s, when she started coming to his shop as the lead singer in the somewhat bumbling folk-rock group the Stone Poneys. In a feeble attempt to sound like a rock band, they bought electric pickups for their acoustic guitars. Dad, she recalled, “gave us the same attention he gave to the Byrds.”

The two became friends, and whether she was looking for a new guitar or just some company, “he always showed up when he was needed. And he was always needed.” In the late ’70s, a powerful storm hit Malibu, washing away the glass-enclosed tearoom attached to Linda’s house. Dad arrived with sandbags, quick-dry cement, and a stockpile of Mexican food from Lucy’s El Adobe. Years later, he was the one who drove her home to Tucson after her breakup with George Lucas.

When Linda pictures Westwood Music, she thinks of an old line she loves: “Music is a conspiracy to commit beauty.” Someone was always fingerpicking, an electric guitar was always humming—musicians were always conspiring.

Jackson Browne, Glyn Johns, and Dad outside the store (Courtesy of Nancy Walecki)

People didn’t necessarily come to buy something. Westwood Music was a daytime clubhouse of the L.A. scene, Bernie Leadon said. Emmylou Harris called it “the watering hole.”

It “was a place where people saw people, made friendships, made connections, and it was all through your dad,” Harris told me. “He just put out that vibe—that sense of it was always about music, the musicians.”

This was an analog world, a world in which serendipity was still possible. “Sometimes you’d go in and you’d see Jackson or Ry Cooder and all these different people that were hanging out there, and suddenly it would turn into half a day, and you’d go in the back room and you could just sort of sit and jam together,” Leland Sklar, a bass player who has backed artists including Linda, Browne, and James Taylor, told me. Artists would catch up, talk about what they were working on, and then head off to their respective recording sessions, maybe at the Complex or Village Recorders nearby. Cooder, a slide-guitar virtuoso, would bring a six-pack and jam. Joni Mitchell popped by for pizza. Even Neil Young, known as something of a hermit, stopped in.

The store came with a bemused den mother, Marian, known to all as “Mrs. Walecki.” She’d do the store’s payroll while musicians in the adjacent guitar room tried out new instruments by playing “Stairway to Heaven.” (It was always “Stairway to Heaven.”) One time, Mick Taylor, the bony, long-haired guitarist for the Rolling Stones, asked Marian where the loo was. That depends, she said, with total sincerity. “Are you a boy or girl?”

Mark Bookin, the store’s senior salesman for decades, described Dad as the “master of ceremonies” at each day’s gathering. But Dad says he thought of himself more as the store’s maître-d’hôtel. Let me sit so-and-so here, near the producer from Asylum Records, he’d think. Or: These two guitar players might sound good together; let me introduce them. He connected Linda and Johns because he thought they might make a good record, and shortly after, they did—We Ran. “Music-store owners don’t do that,” Johns told me.

My father and his store, Guest said, “accelerated everything. It made everything better, because it provided a second home and a place where people could feel appreciated, and that’s a big thing.” When I asked Dad what time Westwood Music would close at night, he shook his head. It closed when its crowd wandered elsewhere—usually to the Troubadour, a West Hollywood club and the scene’s nighttime nexus. Dad remembers leaning against the bar and running through his celebrity impersonations: Jimmy Stewart, John Wayne, Kirk Douglas. “You know, really funny shit,” Browne said. Dad had to get up early the next morning to run a business, while the rest of them slept in. But Ned Doheny, a singer-songwriter and Browne’s former musical partner, said, “He was as much a part of that scene as anybody who ever made a record during that period of time.”

By the mid-’70s, “it was all happening,” Dad says. The Eagles and Jackson Browne were playing arenas around the world. Linda would rush home from one string of concerts, dump out the contents of her suitcase, pack for an entirely different climate, and head out on the road again. Dad sold her a portable, battery-powered Pignose amplifier, about the size of a lunch box, that she and her band could use for jamming between gigs. He sent the Beach Boys cases of Ricola cough drops to preserve their voices on tour.

[Read: Brian Wilson’s world of sound]

As his friends’ music moved deeper and deeper into rock, Dad phased out his remaining pure-folk inventory—ceding the folkies to a music store he’d been competing with nearby. Not long after, a roadie for the Rolling Stones called and asked Dad if he could come to a Warner Bros. soundstage, where they were recording. Keith Richards wanted a guitar with a B-string bender—a device that musicians put inside their guitars to emulate the sound of a pedal steel. Dad’s car was in the shop, so he hopped in his mother’s station wagon. When he got there, he mentioned that he was going to see the blues duo Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee at the Ash Grove, and asked if the Stones wanted to come. They piled into Marian’s station wagon. When they walked into the club, Dad saw that the other music store had set up a kiosk inside. “And here I come with the Rolling Stones,” Dad says, with that smile that takes up half his face.

IV. The Confidant

How do I describe my father, a man who, if he could, would crawl out of these pages and meet you himself? In my head, he comes with his own theme music—a rollicking kazoo melody with a boogie-woogie bass line. If he finds himself around someone he feels is taking themselves too seriously, he will hover his finger about one inch from their face and singsong, I’m not touching you! until they are disarmed into being nothing but themselves. When faced with adversity, he will say, God’s not on a coffee break. And if presenting a plan, work-around, or detour that will inspire the fear of death in his companion but ultimately be a lot of fun: Let me show you a cheatsy way to do that.

Dad was never one to say no to an adventure. Over the years, he went skiing with the band Poco and tuna-fishing with the Doors. Wix Wickens, the keyboardist for Paul McCartney, refused to join my father on his frequent trips to Mexico, because, “it being your dad, jaunts would turn into escapades would turn into incidents.”

It was on one such trip that he met my mother, who was sitting at the next table at a seafood restaurant. She was a Stanford grad and a celebrated Western-style horseback rider who had grown up on a Nevada cattle ranch about 100 miles from the nearest gas station. He was a very loud man wearing a hat that resembled a marlin. It had a fin.

Fred Walecki “incidents” were not necessarily fueled by drugs or debauchery. (Dad told me he smoked weed only between 1977 and 1979. He got it for free from Crosby’s dealer.) Instead, his adventures were inspired by what Wickens described as my father’s “benign chaos.” Dad’s policy: “If it seemed to me that a nice person wouldn’t hold it against me, I would do it.”

Jimmy Buffett once called and said he’d been offered a last-minute stadium gig. He asked if Dad could replicate his band’s entire stage setup—including the congas—in record time. Buffett’s box truck couldn’t fit all the equipment, so they loaded up Dad’s station wagon with gear and strapped the congas to the roof. They paused long enough to paint Freddy and the Fishsticks World Tour ’81 on the side.

People turn to folklore to describe my father: He’s the Pied Piper, the maven, or, as Ned Doheny calls him, the trickster—a mischievous entity who “tracks pollen all over the place, and all kinds of things happen.”

A publicity photo for Linda Ronstadt’s album Simple Dreams. Sunburn courtesy of Dad. (Alamy)

One day in 1977, he showed up at Linda’s house in Malibu with some fresh fruit and some excellent marijuana. Lulled by the strong weed, the sun, and my father, Linda stayed outside too long and got horribly sunburned. The next day, she had to take publicity photos for her album Simple Dreams. In the iconic shot of Linda (her ex George Lucas’s favorite, she says), she looks over her left shoulder, lips parted, a white flower in her hair—but whenever she looks at the photo, she sees the sunburn she got with Dad. My father and his pollen.

But then there is my father, quiet, beamed back down to Earth. When I was 18, I got a bad concussion that took me out of college for my first semester. My doctor didn’t want me to fly home for a while, so I called Dad one night from the other side of the country, panicked that my brain would never return to normal. “What are you looking at right now?” he asked. Pine trees, I said. Some shrubs. I’m sitting on a bench outside. “What’s the temperature like where you are?” It’s nice. Cool but not cold. It was early fall in the Northeast, a new sensation for a Californian. “What does the air smell like?” Wood chips. “I know it’s hard, but your only job right now is to stay in this moment and not future-trip. In this moment right now, the one God is giving you, the air smells nice, the temperature is good, you’re somewhere beautiful.” We kept talking and he slowly untangled problems that, before I called, had felt insurmountable. He signed off that night, as he usually does, by saying not I love you, but I’m loving you—love, active.

I know now that he had dozens of conversations like this, with dozens of musicians, decades before he became a father.

Anyone “can feel like the stowaway in the trunk of a great enterprise,” Browne told me. But an artist, maybe especially, needs someone who makes them believe that they’re worthy, that it’s all going to be okay, Mac McAnally, a singer-songwriter and longtime member of Jimmy Buffett’s band, told me. “Fred can make you believe it’s going to be okay.”

Freddy and the Fishsticks on the road, 1981 (Courtesy of Nancy Walecki)

Joni Mitchell stopped touring in the 1980s, and in the ’90s told Dad she was going to do her last-ever public performance, at the 1995 New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival. Her songbook incorporates about 50 different tunings. “I’d tune to the numbers in a date, I’d tune to a piece of music that I liked on the radio, I’d tune to birdsongs and the landscape I was sitting in,” she said in a 1996 interview. “I’d work out these wonderful fresh harmonic movements, only it was a pain in the butt to perform and I felt like I was always out of tune.” She didn’t want to do it anymore.

But Dad told her he might have just the right tool: Roland’s new VG-8, which could electronically alter a guitar’s sonic output and, crucially, memorize tunings. Mitchell could keep her guitar in standard tuning, then push a button for “Big Yellow Taxi,” say, and the VG-8 would convert the sound of each string to match that tuning. Dad knew Mitchell had had polio as a child and still suffered from muscle weakness, so he built her a guitar from lightweight spruce (commonly used in violin making) and placed the VG-8 inside. He painted the guitar his favorite color, British racing green. She named it “Green Peace.”

What she thought would be her swan song “turned into the first performance in a whole new period,” she said in that 1996 interview. She used the VG-8 to make the guitar sounds on Taming the Tiger, giving her “access to all kinds of possibilities in keeping with the way I hear guitar, which is like a full orchestra, with the treble like a brass section and the lower strings like the viola, cello, and bass.” To another reporter, she said, “This instrument is going to be my savior.” She used my father’s name in one of the album’s lyrics—she calls him “Freddie”—and, in the liner notes, thanked him for “rekindling my desire to make music.”

[From the November 2017 issue: The unknowable Joni Mitchell]

Dad has always been “genuinely interested in people,” Linda told me in her living room. “And when they came in, he’d talk to them, and they confided in him.”

I leaned in, ready for a flood of rock secrets. “What would they confide in him about?”

“Well, I don’t know! He kept it secret.” She smiled. “He kept my stuff secret. But he always knew the undercurrents that were going on and band dynamics and stuff like that.”

And if necessary, “he’d tell them when they were full of shit. He had no reservations about that,” Bookin, the store’s longtime salesman, said. Once, at a recording session, Crosby played Dad a vocal track he’d just cut and was clearly proud of. “Your voice is great, but were you reading it?” Dad asked. Unmemorized lyrics are the height of laziness, in my father’s eyes.

“Oh fuck you,” Crosby said. (The two remained good friends until Crosby’s death.)

My father has a low tolerance for what he perceives as stupidity, and over time, drug use in the L.A. music scene got stupider and stupider. To hear my father and his friends talk about it, the era can be divided into B.C. and A.C.: Before Cocaine and After Cocaine. When Weed Guy showed up at the party, that could be fun. Mushroom Guy, too. Even Acid Guy. But when Cocaine Guy started coming to parties, Dad said, he drained the scene of its remaining innocence. The music got self-indulgent. People would talk over one another and think they were having a conversation.

Doing a line with someone “was like having a cup of coffee” with them, Mickey Raphael, Willie Nelson’s harmonica player, told me. It took everyone a while to notice the scene darkening. In June 1979, Dad’s friend Lowell George, of the band Little Feat, died of an overdose. Dad was an Eagle Scout by the scene’s standards, but he realized that “we couldn’t keep going at this pace” and got sober that August. “He was one of the first people I knew to really get sober and just draw the line,” Browne said. “The rest of us, it was years before anybody decided that was the problem.”

Dad still went to all the parties; he just brought IBC root beer to drink. Once, at a gathering at Crosby’s house, he was being so loud, so boisterous, cracking such awful jokes, that another party guest, Neil Young’s producer and recording engineer Niko Bolas, assumed he was high on some new drug they all needed to try. Raphael said that Dad’s particular brand of abstinence “turned a little light on with all of us, saying, Hmm, if Fred can do it, then maybe I can.” You could be clean and “still able to hang with the musos.” Dad would help heroin addicts detox at the little country home he and his father built together in the 1950s, and started a weekly gathering of the alcoholics he mentored, who nicknamed it “The Gol Darn Dingy Deal,” after my father’s catchphrase when facing a setback. (“What’s the gol darn dingy deal?” he will ask when, say, the car doesn’t start.)

In 1986, when Crosby was out of prison on drug charges and newly sober, Dad joined him on a white-water-rafting trip. That vacation, Crosby’s wife, Jan Dance Crosby, told me, was “really the first time we actually did something for fun after working so hard to get sober.” Dad was proof that life didn’t end—indeed, could become more joyful—after sobriety. “He wasn’t shy about sharing that joy, and he also wasn’t preachy,” she said. “All he was was a friend.”

A photo I took at the Newport Folk Festival in 2022, right before Joni Mitchell took the stage. Dad is holding Green Peace, the guitar he made for her. (Courtesy of Nancy Walecki)

Dad became a Christian around that time. This, too, started in the shop. When Larry Myers, a musician and pastor, came to Los Angeles, someone told him that if he wanted to meet people, he had to go to Westwood Music and meet my father. The two became friendly, and Myers invited Dad to hear his band at the Vineyard Church. Today Vineyard is an international body of churches, but at the time one of its only chapters met in Dad’s old junior high school. Members of Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue made up the worship band; Myers had helped bring Dylan himself to Christ. As Dad listened to the band play that Sunday, “I realized I had tears in my eyes,” he recalled. “I realized that I really always—I always loved God, and it was time to make friends” with him.

When my parents met, in 1990, Dad bragged that he was building an off-the-grid home in Topanga Canyon, in the mountains outside L.A. My mom, Kathy, made it clear, in her quiet way, that she knew a lot more about off-the-grid living than he did. Together, they finished the home where I was raised, surrounded by sage and overlooking the Pacific. When the solar power inevitably went out, Mom would put on a headlamp and start the generator; when our water pressure dropped, she’d go outside and bang on the pipe with a rock; when rattlesnakes came into the house, she’d take care of it. She created the conditions for Dad to continue doing his work. He bought a 1970s GMC motor home on eBay (shag carpets, corduroy seats), which became a guest room for family, friends, wandering souls, and the addicts he mentored. Mom organized a family trip to Ohio to drive it home. At one point, she held the broken door closed with a piece of rope so it wouldn’t fly open on the highway.

Throughout my childhood, and to this day, Dad regularly reads his favorite book, The Greatest Thing in the World, a pocket-size theological meditation on love as defined in First Corinthians. It was his father’s favorite too. And now it is mine. The section about a love that “thinketh no evil” reminds me of my father:

Love “thinketh no evil,” imputes no motive, sees the bright side, puts the best construction on every action. What a delightful state of mind to live in! What a stimulus and benediction even to meet with for a day! To be trusted is to be saved. And if we try to influence or elevate others, we shall soon see that success is in proportion to their belief of our belief in them. For the respect of another is the first restoration of the self-respect a man has lost; our ideal of what he is becomes to him the hope and pattern of what he may become.

Dad does not describe the people in his life as musicians, mathematicians, or zoologists; they are the drummer “who understands how to swing on a metaphysical level,” “the mathematician who practically ran the Aerospace Corporation,” and the “only person Dennis Wilson trusted” to care for the Asian small-clawed otters he kept in his swimming pool.

My father sees us as the people we wish to be, and he will tolerate us being nothing less. In 2022, Dad was one of Mitchell’s guitar techs at her surprise Newport Folk Festival comeback, and he let me tag along. At a rehearsal, Marcus Mumford was sitting a few feet away from us, behind the congas, and I whispered to my father how much I loved his music. “Go talk to him,” Dad said. “He’s Marcus Mumford, Dad,” I said. He grinned. “And you’re Nancy Walecki.”

V. When It Was Ours

Westwood Music was always a family enterprise. Dad told customers to check this out on the sales floor while my brother and I ostensibly helped take inventory, but mostly built forts in a loft above the amp room. We’d read Tales From the Crypt surrounded by touring cases, cross-legged on the British-racing-green carpet. Upstairs, in her bookkeeping office next to the repair shop, my mom kept the Fred Walecki Experience running.

Musicians would sit on the store’s leather couches, playing guitars and drinking the coffee we made in our Mr. Coffee machine. I saw how much the electrolarynx frustrated my father, but he continued to be the voice of the shop. He once came up behind Browne while he tried a guitar; got real close, up to his ear; then buzzed: “Can you believe that tone?”

By the 1990s, the store was struggling, as professional musicians got more and more free equipment through sponsorship deals. A Guitar Center opened down the street—a black hole sucking up our business, to hear my parents describe it. “Gui-Target,” Dad called it. Later, people started buying instruments online, but Dad wasn’t interested in building a web presence. If an instrument has its own little soul, how could you buy it without spending time with it in person?

Dad in his Malibu studio. Westwood Music has closed, but he still repairs instruments for clients such as Christopher Guest, Robby Krieger of the Doors, and the Edge. (Peyton Fulford for The Atlantic)

Dad sold Westwood Music in 2010, and the new owners closed it during the pandemic and never reopened it. Dad and I went back to the store last year, to clear out the last of his belongings: the leather couch my brother and I had carved our initials into with a paper clip; the scoreboard-size photograph of Dad, sitting backwards on a chair, talking to Lyle Lovett; the neon Westwood Musical Instruments—Hermann Walecki sign. I thought of something Christopher Guest had said. Someone should put a plaque outside the building: Westwood Music was here. 1947–2021.

I told Dad I was sorry that my brother and I hadn’t carried on the family business. It felt like we’d failed him and the generations before him. Dad shook his head and reminded me that his father hadn’t wanted him to take over the store. Besides, being here didn’t even make him that sad, he said, because the new owner’s iteration was so different. “But when it was ours,” he told me, “we did it well.”

Dad is 78 now, and still repairs instruments for customers like Guest, Sklar, Robby Krieger of the Doors, the Edge, and anyone else resourceful enough to find his new shop, unlisted on Google Maps and located inside a converted greenhouse at a succulent nursery in Malibu. Dad brings lettuce from home to feed the rabbits that run beneath the pallets of cacti; the other tenants include a glassblower, a clothing designer, a painter, and a sculptor. When he leaves home in the morning, he will say, “I’m off to do my father’s work”—referring to both Hermann and his heavenly father.

His repair shop still smells of Westwood Music’s old wood and lacquer, along with the ocean and the faded paper in his boxes of ephemera. (My favorite piece is a photograph of Crosby, Stills, and Nash’s recreational baseball team, the Hoovers—a cocaine joke, Dad had to explain to me.) He keeps his father’s Goethe quote above his workbench, where he recently repaired a cello from 1876. “You know what’s interesting? I realized that’s what I like to do,” he told me. If he didn’t love guitar players so much, he’d work only on cellos. Repairing them reminds him of his father.

This past winter, I stopped by with some lunch for us to share. He was chatting with a customer while he lowered the strings on the man’s guitar closer to the fretboard so it would be easier to play. Dad told a joke and offered the man some advice on a problem he’d been having with his wife, then the two of them discussed Romans 8. When it was time for the man to go, my father told him a story all the way to his car.

Dad and I ate our sandwiches, and I mentioned how much I missed singing. He said that I should hang around more jazz clubs, because “parties don’t happen by themselves,” and that I should join a sailing club, because he suspected that I missed the ocean. (I have never expressed an interest in sailing, but maybe now I’ll learn.) We searched for a guitar pick he wanted to show somebody, from the set he’d custom-made for the Beach Boys. When we locked up the shop for the day, he looked tired but pleased. He’d be back again tomorrow.

This article appears in the September 2025 print edition with the headline “My Father’s Work.”

My Snail Mucin Is Caught in a Trade War

2025-04-05T11:42:00-04:00

When Korean skin care arrived in the United States several years ago, it became the stuff of legend among beauty enthusiasts. They raved about the sunscreen from the Korean brand Beauty of Joseon, which used advanced UV filters and left no white film behind; currently, it costs $18—its closest American counterpart would be about $40 and gloopier. Korean snail mucin promised to hydrate skin and improve fine lines, and prompted a buying frenzy, during which I did drop my own American dollars on a facial “essence” made from the secretions of snails. It has made my skin softer and only grossed me out twice.

Now my snail mucin is caught in a trade war. On Wednesday, President Donald Trump’s announcement of nearly global tariffs included a 25 percent hike on goods imported to the U.S. from South Korea; his administration has also repealed a customs loophole used by certain K-beauty exporters based in Hong Kong. Some skin-care enthusiasts had been preparing for possible trade disruptions—“spent my paycheck on korean skincare because those tariffs are about to go crazy,” one person posted in December. But now, they’re springing into action. “If you love your glow, get it now,” one skin-care influencer said on TikTok. “This is your last chance before it becomes unaffordable.”

Americans’ love affair with K-beauty was fostered by many years of free trade with South Korea, when our mucin came free of additional fees. The new tariffs will be “a good test to see how powerful the K brand is” in America, Andrew Yeo, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who studies U.S.–South Korea relations, told me—how much “soft power” Korea has accumulated here. If people have been buying K-beauty products because they love K-beauty (or K-pop or K-dramas), a price hike might not matter. But if they decide Korean products haven’t done that much for their skin, maybe they’ll switch to Neutrogena.

Beauty enthusiasts have, at times, gone to great lengths to import Korean serums, face masks, moisturizers, sunscreens, and the like from exporters usually based in Korea or Hong Kong. When Joshua Dupaya, a beauty influencer, first got into Korean products in 2016, for instance, he sourced them mostly from “trusted eBay sellers,” he told me. Cosmetics have become a fairly significant part of Korea’s exports—$10 billion globally last year, nearly $2 billion of which went to the United States. And certain K-beauty brands are more beloved here than in their home country. A co-founder of Beauty of Joseon said on a podcast in December, “We’re not really popular in Korea, I have to admit.” (Their Korean brand name means “beautiful woman in Joseon,” referring to the former, long-reigning Korean Joseon dynasty. She said Koreans think the name is “so tacky.”)

Part of K-beauty’s appeal is its price point—$15 for a high-quality moisturizing cream compares favorably with a $20 bottle of CeraVe, and extremely favorably with the $390 La Mer “crème” touted by the upper echelon of skin-care influencers and celebrities. Korean beauty products also contain ingredients that are uncommon in U.S. skin care, but that some American consumers swear by—Centella asiatica (Asiatic pennywort), rice water, ginseng extract, and of course, snail mucin. Their sunscreen is also just objectively better. The FDA is notoriously slow to approve new UV filters, which has meant that sunscreen in America is generally worse than it is in Europe and Asia. Formulations here feel chalkier and oilier, and they can leave white residue behind, because American chemists have a smaller palette of UV technology to draw from. For $12, someone could buy American sunscreen in uninspiring packaging that makes them look like a ghost. For the same $12, they could buy a K-beauty sunscreen in expensive-looking packaging that will not make them look like a ghost. When my friend returned from South Korea with an entire carry-on full of Korean skin care, we applied gobs of sunscreen, feeling like royalty with our advanced UV protection. For skin-care aficionados, K-beauty was an ideal trifecta: a product that feels luxurious, seems effective, and is relatively affordable.

[Read: You’re not allowed to have the best sunscreens in the world]

The tariffs will test whether a higher price outweighs those other benefits. Yesterday, the founder of the Korean company KraveBeauty announced on TikTok that the tariff will hit their next shipment to the U.S. and will have to be passed on to customers. “We’re still calculating what the implications of this new trade policy would be to our business, but this will change pretty much everything,” she said—for her company and others. She said the tariffs could upend her brand’s long-standing policy of keeping all their products under $28; those responding in the comments already spoke of K-beauty in the past tense; many included crying-face emoji.

Trump’s tariffs, of course, apply only to imported K-beauty. In the past several years, a handful of major K-beauty manufacturers have opened factories in the United States and will be able to avoid the tariffs, Yeo told me. But he expects that other Korea-based companies will wait about a year to see if these tariffs last and how U.S. consumers respond to the price hike before they consider relocating to America. “I don’t know if Koreans want to invest that much,” he said. “It depends how bullish you think the U.S. market is.” American demand for K-beauty has grown a lot, but brands will have to decide if they think it’ll keep growing. The U.S. isn’t their only market, and companies may choose to focus on countries such as China instead.

But if the tariff succeeds and more K-beauty is soon made in America, the industry could lose its major selling point: it is not made in America. These non-U.S. formulations are the “whole allure of using Korean beauty,” Dupaya told me. Beauty of Joseon recently began making versions of its beloved sunscreen specifically for the U.S. market, which meant it could use only UV technology approved by the FDA. Fairly or not, American users seem to think they have the same problems as U.S. sunblock. “Garbage,” a skin-care influencer said about one of the American formulations. “Absolute garbage.”

Who Wants to Live in the Palisades Now?

2025-03-18T08:00:00-04:00

The Palisades Fire burned its way through Jennifer Champion’s life. It started in the hills where her family liked to hike and moved along the roads she took with her daughters to Elysse’s high school (burned), Annabelle’s middle school (partially burned), and Charlise’s day care (too damaged to use). Nearby, her husband owned three sober-living facilities (one burned; the other two are now uninhabitable, surrounded by rubble). The roof and front wall collapsed at the grocery store where Charlise would get free sprinkle cookies; the one down the street is a pile of warped steel. Champion’s family had lived in the Palisades for about 16 years and, two years ago, leased a house they’d hoped to stay in long-term. That home burned. So did most of the other ones on their street.

Now they are living about 45 minutes away, in Manhattan Beach, where some other Palisades friends relocated too. “Is it convenient for all of us? None of us,” Champion told me, but they wanted to stay together. Elysse transferred to a high school in Santa Monica, about an hour away in traffic, with Palisades friends; Annabelle’s school found a temporary location there too. Champion’s job at Pepperdine University can be nearly two hours away. But she isn’t sure she will be able to keep it anyway, especially now that they don’t have child care for Charlise.

They are past the first days of the fire—evacuating, securing temporary housing—and the first few weeks—finding a long-term rental, furnishing it with donations from a friend, buying pillows and cutlery. But “none of us know what to do next,” Champion said. Her Palisades friends talk: Do they stay where they are and make Manhattan Beach their home? Rebuilding the Palisades will take years. But right now, they all want to go back if they can.

In January, I drove through Altadena, the other neighborhood destroyed by that month’s fires, with Frank Bigelow, Cal Fire’s deputy director of wildfire preparedness. At lot after lot after lot, the only bit of house still standing was the chimney. The air was acrid and quiet. To Bigelow, the scene recalled an image from a 1961 fire that razed Bel Air, about five miles from the Palisades. (Local legend in Malibu holds that the town’s flock of colorful parrots is descended from pets that escaped Bel Air’s burning homes.)

The L.A. Fire Department produced a documentary postmortem a year later about all the ways the city had built itself flammable. That old film, he told me, “speaks to every one of the issues we saw” in January—a brush fire that quickly became an urban one; clogged evacuation routes; hydrants running dry; houses built on steep hillsides, where flames travel fastest. Bigelow rewatches it every few years. At the end, over black-and-white footage of a rubble neighborhood, the narrator intones: “Now fireplaces stand as tombstones over row upon row of dead homes on dead streets.” As we drove, Bigelow pointed to the chimneys. “Tombstones,” he said.

After the 1961 fire, people kept building in Bel Air and into the hills. My father grew up one neighborhood over and, in the 1970s, bought a plot of land in the mountains of Topanga Canyon, overlooking Malibu, where I grew up. And all of the ignition points that humans brought in—power lines, heavy equipment, cars, cigarette butts—started more fires than the land was adapted to handle. Southern California’s chaparral needs fire to regenerate, but historically, it burned only every 30 to 100 years, Alexandra Syphard, a senior research scientist at the Conservation Biology Institute, told me. More frequent fires meant it no longer had enough time to recover between burns, so non-native grasses—far more flammable—filled the gaps. Over time, the landscape has become more and more fit to burn. When a wildfire came through my neighborhood in 1993, it traced a similar path to a fire from 1970, and traveled through burn scars from seven other fires. That 1993 conflagration lapped at the windows of my childhood home; the Palisades Fire finally burned it down.

[Read: The place where I grew up is gone]

California has tried to build for the inevitable. After the Bel Air fire, Los Angeles updated its building codes, outlawing wood-shingled roofs and mandating that homeowners clear the brush around their house. Since 2008, the state has required that new homes in extremely fire-prone areas—such as my childhood neighborhood and much of the Palisades—have fire-resistant siding, tempered glass, and ember-resistant eaves and vents. Many homes in the Palisades were constructed long before 2008 and, when they’re rebuilt, will be brought up to those standards. Fire can consume even the most defensible house, but if everyone designs less flammably, the whole neighborhood is less likely to go, Emily Schlickman, a fire-resiliency researcher at UC Davis, told me. In her ideal world, high-risk communities would have a ring of cleared land around them as a firebreak, robbing the flames of fuel. The local government in Paradise, California, which was destroyed by the 2018 Camp Fire, is trying to buy up land around the community to do precisely that. But many vulnerable places forgo such measures because they could do everything right and burn anyway.

Los Angeles is still trying to decide how to remake its destroyed neighborhoods. A commission of volunteer experts will give the county recommendations on reconstructing (and retrofitting) the area for future disasters. Steve Soboroff, the real-estate developer whom Mayor Karen Bass appointed chief recovery officer, has promised that the Palisades will be rebuilt resiliently (and, also, somehow have their Fourth of July parade this year). And the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power recently pledged to put all of the Palisades’ power lines underground. In the days after the fire, some Angelenos and experts also advocated for dramatically remaking the Palisades—to be denser, for instance, with firebreaks around the community—but those notions may already be more or less moot. Many residents simply want to get home as quickly as possible, and the city and state have waived certain permitting requirements for those who want to rebuild essentially their same house on the same lot.

Every time these fires wreak this level of damage, people look at the melted cars, curled stucco, and thousands of displaced residents and ask: Should human beings return to these places at all? “When most of us build or buy a home, we carefully appraise the neighborhood. In Malibu the neighborhood is fire. Fire that revisits the coastal mountains several times a decade,” Mike Davis wrote in his famous essay “The Case for Letting Malibu Burn.” (You can tell what he thought of our whole shrubland coastal-living experiment.) Taxpayer dollars helped rebuild these areas, many occupied by rich people, again and again and again. Why not just accept that this coastline is kindling and move on?

But abandoning these landscapes altogether just isn’t realistic, researchers told me. Almost a third of all housing in the continental U.S. is already in places where settlements and wilderness intermix. All those people can’t just move. And abandonment isn’t always the best way to manage fires, either. Move everyone out of these half-wild places, and you may have taken away the people who were clearing brush and otherwise reducing the fire risk for the city nearby, Miriam Greenberg, a disaster researcher at UC Santa Cruz who studies the wildland-urban interface, told me. Leaving these areas untouched, Greenberg said, means “the potential for future disasters increases significantly for those adjacent urban areas, which is most of California.”

People have chosen to live here, with fire, for generations. My classmate and her father attended the same middle school; my friends’ parents and grandparents have been in Malibu for decades. A friend recently walked me through his home, which was severely smoke-damaged in the Palisades Fire and which, he told me, was a rebuild: The house had burned down in the 1993 fire. I asked if he’d ever leave, and he laughed: “When I die, I guess.”

Most displaced residents I spoke with want to come home. Ginny Wylie, now in her 80s, grew up in her grandfather’s store, a wooden shack called Wylie’s Bait and Tackle, and took it over decades later. She used to live behind the shop, in what had once been a cottage-style motel for the construction workers who built the Pacific Coast Highway. When the state bought the bungalows to preserve as a historic site, Wylie moved into an apartment in the Pacific Palisades. The fire leveled Wylie’s Bait, the bungalows, and her apartment; she lived in her car for a month and then in a temporary Airbnb. She told me she hopes to rebuild: “I’m going to stay with the store as long as I can.”

Insurance helps. But in my community, the difference between “good” and “okay” coverage is already determining people’s futures. Lisa Machenberg and her husband are going to rent nearby while building a home with enough room for future grandchildren; the Amirani family, whose daughter I used to play softball with, hope to live in a trailer on their burned lot, if they can afford to rebuild. Their private insurer dropped them a few years ago—one of the many companies that stopped writing policies in California—and the Amiranis estimate that their coverage will foot only about half the cost of construction.

Renters like Jennifer Champion and her family have no guarantee that they can return to the neighborhood. The Champions asked their landlord if they could purchase his burned lot, but he doesn’t plan to sell. Jennifer’s eldest daughter reminds her that, by the time the Palisades take form again, she will be away at college. Still, the Champions have added themselves to a directory, Protect Pali, that matches people looking to live in the Palisades with residents who want to sell their land.

[Read: How to rebuild from the ashes]

Because not everyone wants to come back. Jane Warden refuses to rebuild. In 2018, when the Woolsey Fire came through the western half of Malibu (spared by the Palisades Fire this year), it burned down the home where she’d raised her children and spent 10 years growing a garden of eucalyptus, palm trees, and pine trees—highly flammable plants that are everywhere in this part of California. Nick Tinoco, a sociologist at UCLA, followed people in Woolsey’s aftermath and told me that most people he’d spoken with had initially planned to rebuild. But only about 40 percent of the homes lost in that fire have been. The reality, Tinoco found, “was two-plus years of them trying to rebuild and then reaching a point where it was either better for them financially or psychically to let go and move on,” even if only to the next town over. (Trees in the canyons are still black from Woolsey; my prom date’s house is now an overgrown lot of mustard and jimson weed.) People tend to think climate migration is driven by the desire to flee a hazardous place, Tinoco said, but really, it is a by-product of “the long process of trying to stay.”

Warden had originally planned to rebuild too, but she got so fed up with permitting that she sold her lot; the buyer quickly built a giant house, and sold it for four times what Warden had paid for the original, she told me. She moved to a neighborhood on the other side of Malibu so her kids could stay in the same school. She started a new garden of less flammable native plants and made a five-foot hardscape perimeter of sand and gravel around her home. The Palisades Fire burned down her house again anyway, and most of her neighborhood.

Her HOA is talking about using factory-built homes when their community rebuilds. “It makes sense, right? Because then you can replace your house easily, if we start thinking of housing as more semipermanent,” she told me. But she personally plans never to live in Malibu again. Losing a house to fire “twice is okay, but three times starts to feel like carelessness,” she said. She will replace her Christmas ornaments for the second time, but she has given up on keeping a personal library and has been leaving books wherever she finishes them. She and her husband are considering moving to the East Coast or to nearby Santa Monica, where the fire risk is generally lower (although portions of it were evacuated in January).

Fire is a brutal sorting mechanism, deciding who can actually afford to live in a place and who can’t. More money generally enters an area after a fire, because they tend to happen in coveted landscapes, Kathryn McConnell, a disaster sociologist at the University of British Columbia, told me. Five years after Northern California’s Camp Fire, home prices in Paradise have gone up, and so has the number of houses sold that were built on spec, according to a study published last month. Only about five of the area’s 30 mobile-home parks have been rebuilt. The Palisades and Malibu are already extraordinarily expensive places to live; the fires will likely make them more so. The median home price in the Palisades is north of $4 million, and the median income is a little less than $200,000. Some people have been living in the homes their grandparents bought years ago or, like my parents, in mobile-home parks (two of which burned in the Palisades). But after a fire, rebuilding an old house can be financially impossible, especially if it was underinsured, and mobile-home parks might never reopen if the owners decide to sell and move on.

So far, investors have been the earliest buyers of the burnt lots that people have put on the market. The first one sold in the Palisades belonged to an art teacher, who asked for $999,000 and got about $1.2 million. Richard Schulman, the real-estate agent who brokered the deal, told me that the buyer is a real-estate investor who plans to either build a spec home to sell or just sit on the land for a few years until more people move back and the property values rise.

Schulman is bullish on the Palisades. “This is very valuable land to be on,” he said—secluded yet convenient, with ocean views and a sea breeze. Last month, I stood with him in a leveled townhouse complex along the road where, during the fire, evacuating residents abandoned their vehicles and ran. A mudslide had since closed the lower half of it. “I’m 99 percent sure this is the unit here,” Schulman said, indicating some undulating stucco indistinguishable from the other undulating stucco. He told me that this particular pile was a condo he’d recently listed—a great buy, he said, for a highly speculative investor.

A small patch of grass on the burnt hillside was still alive. Schulman pointed at the unburnt bit: “If you look at it the right way, it’s like, This is beautiful. There’s trees; there’s green.” The air smelled of eucalyptus and dead fish, which were lying on the walkway beside us. They had survived the fire, only for the recent rains to wash them out of the community pond. Schulman made a picture frame out of his thumbs and forefingers and held it toward the hill. “If you ignore the burnt hillside back there,” he said, “this is a great place to live.”

*Lead image credit: Illustration by Tarini Sharma. Sources: David Rumsey Map Center; Stanford Libraries; Agustin Paullier / AFP / Getty; Robyn Beck / AFP / Getty.

The House Where 28,000 Records Burned

2025-02-13T12:54:47-05:00

Before it burned, Charlie Springer’s house contained 18,000 vinyl LPs, 12,000 CDs, 10,000 45s, 4,000 cassettes, 600 78s, 150 8-tracks, hundreds of signed musical posters, and about 100 gold records. The albums alone occupied an entire wall of shelves in the family room, and another in the garage. On his desk were a set of drumsticks from Nirvana and an old RCA microphone that Prince had given to him at a recording session for Prince. A neon Beach Boys sign—as far as he knows, one of only eight remaining in the world—hung above the dining table. In his laundry room was a Gibson guitar signed by the Everly Brothers; near his fireplace, a white Stratocaster signed to him by Eric Clapton.

Last month, the night the Eaton Fire broke out, Charlie evacuated to his girlfriend’s house. And when he came back, the remnants of his home had been bleached by the fire. The spot in the family room where the record collection had been was dark ash.

I’ve known Charlie for as long as I can remember. He and my father met because of records. In the late 1980s, Charlie was at a crowded party in the Hollywood Hills when he heard someone greet my father by his full name. Charlie whipped around: “You’re Fred Walecki? I’ve been seeing your name on records.” Dad owned a rock-and-roll-instrument shop, and musicians thanked him on their albums for the gear (and emotional support) he provided during recording sessions. Charlie was a national sales manager at Warner Bros. Records and could rattle off the B-side of any record, so of course he’d clocked Walecki appearing over and over again. Growing up, I thought every song I’d ever heard could also be found on Charlie’s shelves; his friend Jim Wagner, who once ran sales, merchandising, and advertising for Warner Bros. Records, called it the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame West.

Charlie’s collection started when he was 6. He had asked his mother to get him the record “about the dog,” and she’d brought back Patti Page’s “(How Much Is) That Doggie in the Window?” No, not that one—he wanted a 45 of Elvis’s recently released single, “Hound Dog.” He’d cart it around with him for the next seven decades, across several states, before placing it on his shelf in Altadena. At age 8, he mowed lawns and shoveled snow in his hometown outside Chicago to afford “Sweet Little Sixteen,” by Chuck Berry, and “Tequila,” by the Champs; when he was 9, he got Ray Charles’s “What’d I Say.” And when he was 10, he walked into his local record shop and found its owner, Lenny, frazzled, sitting on the floor, surrounded by piles of records. Every week, Lenny had to rearrange the records on his wall to reflect the order of the Top 40 chart made by the local radio station WLS. Charlie offered to help.

“What will it cost me?” Lenny asked.

“Two singles a week.” Charlie held on to all of those singles, and the paper surveys from WLS, too.

When he was 12, he bought his first full albums: Surfin’ Safari, by the Beach Boys; Bob Dylan’s eponymous debut; and Green Onions, by Booker T. and the M.G.s. He entered a Wisconsin seminary two years later, hoping to become a priest. There, he and his friends found a list of addresses for members of Milwaukee’s Knights of Columbus chapter, and sent out letters asking for donations—a hi-fi stereo console, a jukebox—to the poor seminarians, who went without so much. Radios were contraband, but Charlie taped one underneath the chair next to his bed, and at night, while 75 other students slept around him, he would use an earbud to listen to WLS. “And I would hear records, and I would go, Oh my God, I gotta get this record. I have to. ” Seminarians could go into town only if it was strictly necessary, so he’d break his glasses, and run between the optometrist and the five-and-dime. That’s how he got a couple of other Beach Boys records, the Kinks’ “Tired of Waiting for You,” and the Lovin’ Spoonful’s “Daydream.”

Charlie dropped out of seminary in 1967, at the end of his junior year. All of those five-and-dime records had been in his prefect’s room, but when he left, the prefect was nowhere to be found. So, Charlie got a ladder, wriggled through a transom, and got his collection, stored in two crates which had previously contained oranges. (“Orange crates held albums perfectly,” he told me.) Then he hitchhiked to San Francisco and grew his hair out just in time for the Summer of Love. He moved into a commune of sorts, a 16-unit apartment building with the walls between apartments broken down, and got a job hanging posters for the Fillmore on telephone poles around the Bay Area. He’d staple up psychedelic artwork advertising Jefferson Airplane, Sons of Champlin, the Grateful Dead, or Sly and the Family Stone. (He still had about 75 of those posters.) He worked at Tower Records on the side but would hand his paycheck back to his boss: The money all went to records. Anytime one of his favorites—Morrison, Mitchell, Dylan, the Beach Boys—released a new album, he’d host a listening party for friends. When he moved back to Chicago, his music collection took up most of the car. The record store he managed there, Hear Here, would receive about 20 new albums every day to play over the loudspeakers. When Charlie heard Bruce Springsteen’s first album (two before Born to Run), he thought it was such a hit, he locked the shop door. “Until I sell five of these records,” he announced, “nobody is getting out of this store.”

Next, Charlie worked his way up at a music-distribution company, starting from a gig in the warehouse (picker No. 9). Later, at Warner Bros. Records, he’d work with stores and radio stations to help artists sell enough music to get, and then sustain, their big break. To sell Takin’ It to the Streets, he drove with the Doobie Brothers so they could sign albums at a Kansas City record shop; to help Dire Straits get their start, he lobbied radio stations to play their first single for about a year until it caught on. He was also on the shortlist of people who would listen to test pressings of a new album for any pops or crackles, before the company shipped the final version. Charlie held on to about 1,000 of those rare pressings, including Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours and Prince’s Purple Rain.

He moved to Los Angeles in the ’80s to be Warner’s national sales manager, and in 1991, he bought his home on Skylane Drive, in Altadena. Nestled in the foothills, the area smelled of the hay for his neighbors’ horses. Along the fence was bougainvillea, and in his yard, a magnificent native oak that our families would sit beneath together. He started placing thousands of his albums on those shelves in the family room, overlooking that tree.

In Charlie’s house, a record was always playing. He had recently papered the walls and ceiling of his bathroom with the WLS surveys he started collecting as a child, in his first record-store job. Every record he pulled off the shelf came with a memory, he told me. And if he kept an album or a memento in his house, “it was a good story.”

A gold record from U2, on the wall next to the staircase: “All bands, when they first start off, they’re new bands, and nobody knows who they are, okay? … I went up with U2, on their first album, from Chicago to Madison, and they played a gig for about 15 people, and then we went to eat at an Italian restaurant. I went back to the restaurant a couple years later, and the same waitress waited on me, and I said, ‘Wow, I remember I was in here with U2.’ And she goes, ‘Those guys were U2?’ I was like, ‘They were U2 then and they’re U2 now.’”

In the kitchen, a poster of Jimi Hendrix striking a power chord at the Monterey Pop Festival: “Seal puts his first record out, and I have just become a vice president at Warner Bros. And I go to my very first VP lunch, and I announce, ‘Hey, this new Seal record is going to go gold.’ The senior VP of finance says, ‘You shouldn’t say that. Why would you make that kind of expectation?’ And I’m like, ‘Because I know with every corpuscle in my body it’s gonna go gold’ … So we make a $1 gentlemen’s bet. About six weeks later, it’s gold.” At the next lunch, he asked the finance executive to sign his dollar bill. Just then, Mo Ostin, the head of the label, walked in and heard about their wager. “Mo said, ‘So Charlie, is there something around the building that you always liked?’ I was like, ‘Well, that Jim Marshall poster of Hendrix.’ And he goes, ‘It’s yours.’”

*Illustration sources: RCA / Michael Ochs Archive / Getty; Stoughton Printing / Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times / Getty; Warner Brothers / Alamy; Sun Records / Alamy

The Place Where I Grew Up Is Gone

2025-01-16T14:07:27-05:00

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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.

The author and her father driving through the canyons to their old house. The driveway entrance to author’s childhood home, where the “Bilberry Ln.” sign her father made used to be. (Photograph by Brian Van Lau for The Atlantic)

The 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 fire truck 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 burrs 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 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 party. Jill is on the far left beside Andre (held by a neighbor); the author and her mother are on the far right. (Courtesy of the 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, flattened, is 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.

It’s Time to Evacuate. Wait, Never Mind.

2025-01-10T19:07:01-05:00

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.

‘I’ve Never Seen Anything Like This’

2025-01-08T20:47:00-05:00

We knew to expect winds. When they came on Tuesday morning, sounding like a tsunami crashing over my family’s home in western Malibu, the utility company shut off our power. We knew the chance of fire was high.

I had arrived home for the holidays in early December, and had already been greeted by the Franklin Fire, which had burned the hills black. Now, when my dad and I went in search of electricity, a great plume of smoke was rising above those burned hills. It cast out over the Pacific, just as it had during the Woolsey Fire that tore through Malibu in 2018. The way the wind was blowing—rattling our car, scattering palm fronds and tumbleweeds across the road—we knew this new fire would probably hit Topanga Canyon, the mountain community where I grew up. Dad decided we needed to get up there and help our former neighbors. People who have lived in this area for decades, as my family has, can get so used to evacuation warnings that they don’t always follow them.

Yesterday, the fires burning around Los Angeles were frightening; overnight they became a terror. A fire this strong, at this time of year, is unusual, an outlier. But it is also familiar, one in a series of fires that, as a seventh-generation Californian, I’ve lived through, or my family has. It has destroyed places that I’ve loved since childhood; it’s not the first fire that’s done so. To some of our friends and neighbors, this fire seemed manageable—until it didn’t. Today, it is, as one friend said, a hell fire.

On the way to Topanga Canyon, Dad and I stopped to watch the fire burn. The flames were coming into a neighborhood where two of my childhood friends grew up, just beyond the Pacific Palisades, where the blaze had started. The way the fire was burning, I couldn’t imagine that the Palisades was still standing. The main road was closed—these winds can dislodge rocks and rain them down on cars—so we took back streets. “You can tell people are emotional from the way they’re driving,” Dad said, after someone whipped around a blind turn. We made it to the house of a friend, another old-timer who, like Dad, had lived through the 1993 fire, the one that got so close, it warped the double-pane glass in my childhood home. He told us he’d be fine, based on the way the wind was blowing, and offered to make us a pot of coffee while he still had power—he’d heard they’d be shutting it off in the next hour. Dad said it looked like the flames had reached the mouth of Topanga Canyon, and our friend promised he’d get ready to evacuate. “But nothing will ever be as bad as ’93,” he said.

When Dad and I got home, our power was still out. The city had issued evacuation warnings in a nearby neighborhood. Should we get ready? A month before, we’d packed up the family photos and the birth certificates for the Franklin Fire, and our house had been fine. Our Malibu neighbor, who stayed behind during the Woolsey Fire, tends not to worry. But the winds were so strong, she thought this one could be worse than all the others.

That night, Dad and I decided to get back in the car, to see how close the fire was. When we managed to open the front door against the wind, we were coated in a fine layer of dust. The houses around us were dark, all their power out. Driving on the highway this time, instead of smoke, we saw flames.

The friend we’d visited that afternoon called us. “I’m on the freeway now,” he said. “I got the hell out of there. We’re toast. I’ve never seen anything like this.”

From a radio broadcast, cutting in and out, we could hear the gist of the damage so far. “Malibu Feed Bin”—where my family would buy dog food and pet the rabbits—gone. “Topanga Ranch Motel”—the bungalows where I’d wait for the school bus—gone. “Reel Inn”—a seafood restaurant where employees would handwrite ocean puns beneath its neon sign—gone. “Cholada Thai”—a high-school standard where my friends and I still gathered—gone. “Wiley’s Bait & Tackle”—a wooden shack opened in 1946, where my brother and I would gross each other out looking at lugworms—gone.

My ancestors came to California before it was even a state; we have lived through decades of Santa Ana winds coming in off the desert and shaking our houses so powerfully, we lose sleep. But my brother and I also used to stand outside our childhood home, our backs to the wind, and toss stones into a nearby canyon, laughing as the Santa Anas carried them farther than we could ever throw. The winds are part of life here, and one that I’ve always, probably foolishly, loved.

Last night, my parents and I kept our phones on in case any emergency notifications came through. This morning, our power was still out. We have loaded the family photos and the birth certificates in the car and are ready to leave if the evacuation notice comes. Even as the fires are still burning, my parents are already talking about how they will handle this all better “next time.” We will get a larger coffee press so that, next time, we can each have two servings when the power goes out. We will get a camp stove so that, next time, when the gas shuts off, we won’t have to boil water on the barbecue.

Mom just told me that one of her friends sent her some new photographs: My childhood home, which she and my Dad built together in Topanga Canyon, may be gone. For now, the fire is still on the other side of Malibu. The wind is still blowing.

The Hurricanes That Caught America Off Guard

2024-10-10T16:35:00-04:00

This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present and surface delightful treasures. Sign up here.

Hurricane Milton’s wind and rain lashed Florida overnight—flooding streets, spawning tornadoes, and sending sheets of a fiberglass stadium roof billowing like tissue paper. As they did just weeks before, people in the Southeast have cycled through another round of evacuations, storm surges, and waking up to survey the damage. In the wake of Hurricane Helene, houses that were once up the street are now downriver, and entire communities have been “wiped off the map.” One survivor told CNN that “the smell of decay, and the smell of loss of life … will probably stick with me the rest of my life.” Many are living in a world not so much upside down as erased.

Less than a century ago, New England was in a similar position. As in North Carolina before Helene, rainstorms saturated the Northeast’s soil and overwhelmed its rivers. Then, a Category 3 hurricane traced a fishhook path across the Atlantic and slammed the New England coastline on September 21, 1938. Later nicknamed the “Long Island Express” and the “Yankee Clipper,” after the areas it damaged the most, the storm took almost everybody by surprise; no one had expected it to travel that far north—meteorologists included. According to Atlantic writer Frances Woodward’s report, a gust of wind had toppled a crate of tomatoes in front of a New England grocery store early that day. An onlooker speculated a hurricane might be brewing. Another scoffed: “Whad’ye think this is, Palm Beach?”

When the storm hit, people were caught “alone and unprepared,” according to the editors’ note on Woodward’s story. Residents watched as the physical world gave way around them: Streets were engulfed by “the sea itself,” inundated with a “bulk of green water which was not a wave, was nothing there was a name for,” Woodward observed. Long Island Railroad tracks were damaged, Montauk temporarily became an island, and more than 600 people died. “Curious to see the houses you knew so well, the roofs under which you had lived, tilt, and curtsy gravely—hesitate, and bow—and cease to exist,” Woodward wrote.

After the flooding receded, people gathered to assess the damage. Their towns didn’t feel like home anymore, Woodward recalled: “It was just some place out of a cold-sweated dream … the sour smell on the air. And the alien face of the harbors, blue and placid, with shore lines no one could recognize.” As the sun set, fires burned along the waterfront. “It was a sort of nightmare background to the wet and the cold and the feeling of being still as confused as you had been in the wind.”

The year 1938 had already been a difficult one. The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Edward A. Weeks, could have been describing 2024 when he wrote in the aftermath of the New England hurricane: “We have all had too much worry, too much recession, too much politics, too much hurricane, too much fear of war.” Survivors asked then, as they are now, How do you begin again?

I’d hoped there might be an answer in The Atlantic’s archives. But what I found instead was a story that repeats itself after every natural disaster: People sift through the rubble, searching for missing loved ones. They take stock of what they have left, and figure out a way to rebuild. “You got used to it, in a way, if you kept going,” Woodward wrote.

Maybe there’s a comfort in knowing that our predecessors weren’t sure how to handle this moment either. One of the earliest mentions of a hurricane in The Atlantic comes from a poem by Celia Thaxter, published in April 1868. After a hurricane causes a shipwreck, a lighthouse keeper laments how unfair it is that the ocean can still look beautiful, when so many sailors have died in it. He asks God how He could have allowed so much suffering; in response, a voice tells him to “take / Life’s rapture and life’s ill, / And wait. At last all shall be clear.”

Sighing, the man climbs the lighthouse steps.

And while the day died, sweet and fair,
I lit the lamps again.

The Doctor Will Ask About Your Gun Now

2024-04-01T13:25:57-04:00

Updated at 3:23 p.m. ET on April 3, 2024

A man comes to Northwell Health’s hospital on Staten Island with a sprained ankle. Any allergies? the doctor asks. How many alcoholic drinks do you have each week? Do you have access to firearms inside or outside the home? When the patient answers yes to that last question, someone from his care team explains that locking up the firearm can make his home safer. She offers him a gun lock and a pamphlet with information on secure storage and firearm-safety classes. And all of this happens during the visit about his ankle.

Northwell Health is part of a growing movement of health-care providers that want to talk with patients about guns like they would diet, exercise, or sex—treating firearm injury as a public-health issue. In the past few years, the White House has declared firearm injury an epidemic, and the CDC and National Institutes of Health have begun offering grants for prevention research. Meanwhile, dozens of medical societies agree that gun injury is a public-health crisis and that health-care providers have to help stop it.

Asking patients about access to firearms and counseling them toward responsible storage could be one part of that. “It’s the same way that we encourage people to wear seat belts and not drive while intoxicated, to exercise,” Emmy Betz, an emergency-medicine physician and the director of the University of Colorado’s Firearm Injury Prevention Initiative, told me. An unsecured gun could be accessible to a child, someone with dementia, or a person with violent intent—and may increase the chance of suicide or accidental injury in the home. Securely storing a gun is fundamental to the National Rifle Association’s safety rules, but as of 2016, only about half of firearm owners reported doing so for all of their guns.

Some evidence shows that when health-care workers counsel patients and give them a locking device, it leads to safer storage habits. Doctors are now trying to figure out the best way to broach the conversation. Physicians talk about sex, drugs, and even (if your earbuds are too loud) rock and roll. But to many firearm owners, guns are different.

Not so long ago, powerful physicians argued that if guns were causing so much harm, people should just quit them. In the 1990s, the director of the CDC’s injury center said that a public-health approach to firearm injury would mean rebranding guns as a dangerous vice, like cigarettes. “It used to be that smoking was a glamor symbol—cool, sexy, macho,” he told The New York Times in 1994. “Now it is dirty, deadly—and banned.” In the 2010s, the American Academy of Pediatrics’ advice was to “NEVER” have a gun in the home, because the presence of one increased a child’s risk of suicide or injury so greatly. (“Do not purchase a gun,” the group warned bluntly.) And when asked in 2016 whom they would go to for safe-storage advice, firearm owners ranked physicians second to last, above only celebrities.

In the past couple of decades, some states have toyed with laws that curtail doctors’ ability to talk with patients about firearms and the information they can collect, to assuage gun owners’ privacy concerns. Only in Florida did the most restrictive version—what physicians call a “gag law”—pass, in 2011; six years later, a federal court struck it down. But “I think the gag orders, even though they’re not in effect now, really scared people,” Amy Barnhorst, an emergency psychiatrist and firearm-injury-prevention researcher at UC Davis, told me. A smattering of studies have found that doctors—particularly pediatricians—generally think talking with their patients about firearm safety is important, but most of the time, they’re not doing it. As of 2019, only 8 percent of firearm owners said their doctor had ever brought it up.

That year, in California, Barnhorst launched the state-funded BulletPoints Project, a free curriculum that teaches health-care workers how and when to talk about firearms with their patients. The program instructs them to keep politics and personal opinions out of the conversation, and to ask only those patients who have particular reasons for extra caution—including people with children, those experiencing domestic violence, or those living with someone with a cognitive impairment. It also suggests more realistic advice than “Do not purchase a gun.” Maybe a patient has a firearm for self-defense (the most common reason to have one), so they’d balk at the idea of storing a gun unloaded and locked, with the ammunition separate. A health-care worker might recommend a quick-access lockbox instead.

Researchers are now testing whether these firearm conversations have the best outcome if doctors broach them only when there’s a clear reason or if they do it with every patient. Johns Hopkins is trialing a targeted approach, talking about firearms and offering gun locks in cases where pediatric patients have traumatic injuries. Meanwhile, Northwell Health, which is New York State’s largest health system, asks everyone who comes into select ERs about gun access and offers locks to those who might need them. Both of these efforts are federally funded studies testing whether doctors feel confident enough to actually talk with patients about this, and whether those conversations lead people to store their firearms more securely.

For doctors, universal screening means “there’s no decision point of who you’re going to ask or when you’re going to ask,” Sandeep Kapoor, an assistant professor of emergency medicine who is helping implement the program at Northwell Health, told me. So far, Northwell’s trial has screened about 45,000 patients, which signals that the approach can be scaled up. Kapoor told me that with this strategy, gun-safety conversations could eventually become as routine for patients as having their blood pressure taken. When she was in primary pediatrics, Katherine Hoops, a core faculty member at Johns Hopkins’s Center for Gun Violence Solutions, worked firearm safety into every checkup, as she would bike helmets and seat belts. (The American Academy of Pediatrics still maintains that the safest home for a child is one without a gun, but the organization now recommends that pediatricians talk about secure storage with every family, and offers a curriculum on how to have this conversation.) Universal screening can also find people whom a targeted approach might miss: The team at Northwell recently learned through screening questions that a 13-year-old who came in with appendicitis had been threatened with guns by bullies, and brought in his parents, a team of social workers, and the school to help.

But a patient in the ER for a sprained ankle may understandably wonder why a doctor is asking about firearms. “There’s no context,” says Chris Barsotti, an emergency-medicine physician and a co-founder of AFFIRM at the Aspen Institute, which aims to reduce firearm injuries through health-focused interventions. The firearm community, he said, remembers when “the CDC wanted to stigmatize gun ownership,” so any movement for health care workers to raise these questions needs nuance. To his mind, these should be tailored conversations. Betz, of the University of Colorado, raises the question only when a patient is at risk, and believes that firearm safety can otherwise be in the background of a practice—for example, in a waiting room where secure-storage brochures are displayed alongside pamphlets on safe sex and posters on diabetes prevention.

About half of firearm-owning patients agree that it’s sometimes appropriate for a doctor to talk with them about firearms, according to a 2016 study by Betz and her colleagues. They’re even more okay with it if they have a child at home. The physicians I asked said that the majority of the time, these conversations go smoothly. But Betz’s study also found that 45 percent of firearm-owning patients thought doctors should never bring up guns. Paul Hsieh, a radiologist and a co-founder of the group Freedom and Individual Rights in Medicine, wrote in an email that gun owners he’s spoken with “find the question about firearms ownership intrusive in a different way than questions about substance use or sexual partners.”

Chethan Sathya, a pediatric trauma surgeon and the director of Northwell Health’s Center for Gun Violence Prevention, pointed out that those topics used to be contentious for physicians to talk about. To treat guns as a public-health issue, “we can’t be uncomfortable having conversations,” he told me. But doctors have more power in this situation than they do in others. They might tell someone with diabetes to stop having soda three times a day, but they can’t literally take soda away from a patient. With guns, they might be able to. In states with extreme-risk laws, if a health-care provider believes that their patient poses an immediate threat to themselves or others, they can work with law enforcement to petition the court to temporarily remove someone’s firearms; a handful of states allow medical professionals to file these petitions directly. There are many people “across America right now who own guns and won’t come to counseling, because they don’t want their rights taken away for real or imagined reasons,” Jake Wiskerchen, a mental-health counselor in Nevada who advocates for such patients, told me. They worry that if their doctor includes gun-ownership status in their medical record, they could be added to a hypothetical national registry of firearm owners. And if questions about guns were to become truly routine in a doctor’s office—such as on an intake form—he said owners might just lie or decide they “don’t want to go to the doctor anymore.”

Physicians accordingly choose their words carefully. They talk about preventing firearm injury instead of gun violence—both because the majority of gun deaths are suicides, not homicides, and because it’s a less loaded term. Telling a diabetic patient to cut back on soda might work, but people “are not just going to throw their guns in the trash,” Barnhorst, of UC Davis, told me. “There’s a lot more psychological meaning behind firearms for people than there is for sodas.”

Barsotti says a public-health approach to firearm safety requires more engagement with the upwards of 30 percent of American adults who own a firearm. Owners of shooting ranges and gun shops are already “practicing public health without the benefit of medical or public-health expertise,” he told me. They’re running their own storage programs for community members who don’t want their guns around for whatever reason; they’re bringing their friends for mental-health treatment when they might be at risk. Betz’s team collaborated with gun shops, shooting ranges, and law-enforcement agencies in Colorado to create a firearms-storage map of sites willing to hold guns temporarily, and she counsels gun clubs on suicide prevention, as a co-founder of the Colorado Firearm Safety Coalition. Exam-room conversations can be lifesaving, but in curbing gun injury, Betz told me, health-care workers “have one role to play. We’re not the solution.”

Hurricanes Are Too Fast for Category 5

2024-02-05T15:35:28-05:00

At 149 miles an hour, the world’s fastest roller coaster, Formula Rossa in Abu Dhabi, is so quick that riders must don goggles to protect their eyes from the wind. But even the formidable Formula Rossa is no match for the 157-mile-an-hour-plus winds of a Category 5 hurricane, which can collapse a home’s walls and cave in its roof. And yet, according to a new paper, Category 5 may itself be no match for several recent hurricanes.

Right now, every hurricane with maximum sustained wind speeds above 156 miles an hour is considered a Category 5 on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale—whether it’s blowing 160 mph, like Hurricane Ian, or roughly 215 mph, like Hurricane Patricia, which struck Mexico in 2015. To distinguish between extreme storms and, well, extremely extreme storms, James Kossin, a distinguished science adviser at the climate nonprofit First Street Foundation, and Michael Wehner, a senior scientist studying extreme weather events at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, explored adding a hypothetical sixth step to the scale. Category 6 hurricanes, they write, would encompass winds above 192 miles an hour. By their definition, five hurricanes—all of which occurred in about the previous decade—would have been classified as Category 6.

When Kossin and Wehner ran climate models into the future, they found that if global temperatures rise 2 degrees Celsius, the risk of Category 6 storms would double in the Gulf of Mexico and increase by 50 percent near the Philippines. “Adding a category better describes these rather unprecedented storms,” Wehner told me. Actually changing the Saffir-Simpson scale would require research into how a revised system would communicate disaster risk, the authors noted in the paper; still, “we really should consider the idea of scrapping the whole thing,” Kossin told me. And he’s not the only one who thinks so. “I’m not sure that it was ever a really good scale,” Kerry Emanuel, a leading atmospheric scientist at MIT and the editor of the paper, told me. “I think that maybe it was a mistake from the beginning.”

The Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Scale hit the meteorological scene in the 1970s, when a civil engineer (Herbert Saffir) and the head of the National Hurricane Center (Robert Simpson), teamed up to design a simple one-through-five rating for a hurricane’s potential to cause damage by relating wind speed, central pressure, and potential storm-surge heights. For a few decades, things went smoothly. But by the mid aughts, it was clear that the scale’s categories didn’t always reflect the damage on the ground. Hurricane Charley, in 2004, weighed in at Category 4, but caused relatively little destruction. Hurricane Ike, by contrast, made landfall near Galveston, Texas in 2008 at only Category 2, but killed 21 people directly and caused an estimated $29.5 billion in damages across Texas, Louisiana, and Arkansas.

The difference was water. Charley, despite its high winds, was a relatively dry storm; Ike caused a 20-foot storm surge. Sandy wasn’t even a hurricane when it flooded 51 square miles of New York City, casting the ocean into the streets, overtopping boardwalks and bulkheads. About 90 percent of hurricane deaths in the U.S. come from storm surge and inland flooding, Jamie Rhome, the deputy director of the NHC, told me in a statement. In 2010, the NHC tweaked the scale’s name to the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale, removing storm surge and central pressure to clarify that it couldn’t measure a hurricane’s overall potential destruction.

But Saffir-Simpson is deeply embedded in the public psyche. Like the Richter scale’s nine or the DEFCON system’s one, people tend to think of Saffir-Simpson’s five as a definitive ranking of danger. “The simplicity of the scale is both a flaw and an advantage,” Brian McNoldy, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School of Marine, Atmospheric & Earth Science, told me. Category 5 is visceral in a way that inches of rain and projected feet of storm surge perhaps are not. But Saffir-Simpson is so misunderstood that during presentations, McNoldy likes to tell people: “There’s more to the story than the category.”

The NHC, which forecasts and communicates hurricane risk to the public, has tried to expand the public’s focus from the particular Saffir-Simpson designation. Instead, the center has emphasized hurricanes’ many additional hazards, such as rainfall, tornadoes, and rip currents. Rebecca Morss, who founded the Weather Risks and Decisions in Society program at the National Science Foundation’s National Center for Atmospheric Research, told me that adding a Category 6 could turn the focus away from those many other dangers.

For its part, the NHC seems unenthusiastic about adding a Category 6. “Category 5 on the Saffir-Simpson scale already captures ‘catastrophic damage’ from wind, so it’s not clear there would be a need for another category even if storms were to get stronger,” Rhome, the NHC deputy, said. A sixth category wouldn’t necessarily change FEMA’s preparations before a storm makes landfall, either, because the agency anticipates that any Category 4 or 5 storms will have significant impacts, a spokesperson for the agency wrote in an email, stressing that emergency managers should consider overall risks from a hurricane’s hazards.

Atmospheric scientists and meteorologists have tried to create better systems, based on surface pressure to better predict storm surge, or integrated kinetic energy to better estimate storm size. But even with a system that incorporates wind speed, storm surge, rain, and other factors—eventually, “you’ll encounter a storm that breaks the rules,” Emanuel told me. An ideal hurricane alert, Morss said, would tell people about the risks they may face in their specific location and how they can protect themselves. It would also point them toward reliable sources of accurate, timely information as the storm approaches. “It’s difficult to do that with a single hurricane-risk rating,” she told me.

Emanuel and others believe that the United States could stand to learn from the United Kingdom’s system, which categorizes severe weather as either yellow, amber, or red—where red means citizens are in imminent danger. That color alert is accompanied by a “crisp narrative,” he said, summarizing what people can expect to see—for instance, a few feet of flooding, a storm surge, heavy rain, high winds. This kind of people-centered hurricane system would require input not just from scientists but also from communications experts, sociologists, psychologists, and people who have lived through hurricanes. Creating a system with that degree of nuance would take a while, and in the meantime, Saffir-Simpson is the best we’ve got. “We want to stick with what people know until we have something better,” Kim Wood, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Arizona, told me.

Long before there was Saffir-Simpson, there was Simpson, a 6-year-old watching the water rise outside his family’s home in Corpus Christi, Texas. His father hoisted him on his back and they swam three blocks to safety in the town courthouse. But even Simpson couldn’t have imagined the kind of storms we face today, Emanuel said. In fact, it’s remarkable that he and Saffir gave us a succinct way to describe something as complex as potential hurricane damage. Kossin told me he has nothing but admiration for the work of Saffir and Simpson, whom he met back in the 1990s. But today, armed with more decades of data, maybe we can build something even better.

Spotify Doesn’t Know Who You Are

2023-11-30T13:33:21-05:00

Updated at 4:40 p.m. ET on November 30, 2023

When I think of last year, I hear “Northeast Texas Women,” by Willis Alan Ramsey. I’ve carried it with me since my father played it in the car in January 2022, him drumming the steering wheel and me the dashboard. Our windows were open to the desert outside, the air all sagebrush and sunburnt dirt. I was nostalgic for the moment even as I lived it, five minutes and 51 seconds of country music in the Mojave.

But to Spotify, my favored music-streaming app, this was nothing more than a single “play,” just one data point among countless others. When the company released its annual “Wrapped” feature—an interactive slideshow that analyzes a user’s listening habits throughout the year and packages them into cheeky graphics that are meant to be shared on social media—Willis Alan Ramsey was nowhere to be seen. The platform had crunched my numbers, aggregating thousands of minutes spent streaming on the subway, at the gym, and in the office, to arrive at its assessment of my character. It produced a withering phrase: “Pumpkin Spice.”

Having my musical taste compared to a mass-market fall flavoring didn’t sit right. I’ve since learned that I’m not alone in being unsettled by what Spotify Wrapped—the latest version of which was released yesterday—seemed to say about my character. There are lengthy Reddit threads of people worrying about their results and trying to guess how they’re calculated in the first place. Articles deliver tips on how to expunge “cringe” music from the roundup. One college newspaper reported that listeners could create an impressive playlist and loop it silently while they sleep. A friend of mine recently suggested, in earnest, that I could get ahead of things by requesting my personal listening data from Spotify. I would have to wait up to a month for the company to email them to me in a spreadsheet file; then I could put that into ChatGPT and ask the chatbot questions about my music habits. What were my top five artists? What genres were most listened to? What are some words that describe the musical aesthetic of the dataset (DO NOT SAY “PUMPKIN SPICE”)? I didn’t, but I was tempted.

[Read: How Starbucks perfected autumn]

All of these ideas amount to algorithmic “folk theories,” as researchers call them—stories we tell ourselves about the technology that collects our data and presents some kind of compelling, inscrutable output in response. Users might assume that commenting on a TikTok prompts the algorithm to serve them similar content; I might speculate that looping Steely Dan will keep the soundtrack to High School Musical: The Musical: The Series off my Wrapped slideshow. But I’ll never really know if I’m right.

As Robyn Caplan, an assistant professor of technology policy at Duke University, told me, “The gap between what we believe about algorithms and how they actually work will always remain.” Companies keep their algorithmic secret sauce under lock and key, and its precise recipe changes constantly anyway, as developers tweak and morph it for whatever mysterious reasons. But folk theories help us feel like we’re narrowing the gap between ourselves and the technology that shapes our online experience; they offer us a sense of control. And maybe when it comes to a platform like Spotify, which tries to capture something as personal as taste, people feel compelled to close another gap—between how the algorithm sees them and how they see themselves.

The central premise uniting these theories is that we can’t really tell an algorithm who we are; we have to show it. Platforms used to offer recommendations based on clear user inputs (consider that Netflix used to ask you to rate a movie out of five stars); now things have gotten murkier as our behavior is tracked and collated in complex, opaque ways. Consumers have learned to adjust their actions to get the content they want, according to Nick Seaver, an anthropology professor at Tufts University and the author of Computing Taste: Algorithms and the Makers of Music Recommendation. “You were much more in control of how you represented yourself under those [earlier] systems,” Seaver told me. Now our behavior—even the embarrassing kind—generates our unique media world.

[Read: What will happen to my music library when Spotify dies?]

Just as the machine tailors itself to us, we try to tailor ourselves to it. This could mean deliberately streaming an album so that Spotify “knows” we like that artist or listening to some “tasteful” music to remind it that our preferences extend beyond guilty pleasures. It’s not just Spotify: People do this kind of thing on TikTok all the time, lingering on a BookTok video if they want more literary content, and so on.

This preoccupation with tweaking the algorithm reflects a belief that it’s saying something meaningful about who we are. Jeff Hancock, a communications professor at Stanford University, told me he calls it the “algorithmic mirror”—the assumption that whatever the technology spits back at us tells us something true about ourselves. A user might get served an ad for knitting needles, something they’d never used before, and think, I actually would like to knit!

Research has shown that people can be so swayed by an algorithm’s read of their personality that they will justify complete mischaracterizations. Motahhare Eslami, a computer-science professor at Carnegie Mellon University, conducted a study in 2018 on how we process algorithmic communication. She explained to me that one person she spoke with kept receiving ads that were tailored toward living in New York City, even though the participant did not. Rather than assume that the program was making a mistake, the individual contrived an explanation: The algorithm thought she was interested in New York because she’d been watching a lot of Friends.

Spotify Wrapped leans into this mystique. It’s not just a calculation of the songs you’ve played—it’s the “real, the realer, and the realest listening moments” from your year, according to the 2023 marketing campaign. Of course, that’s not really true. The realest moments aren’t the ones when Spotify and its algorithmically curated playlists are just filling dead air or getting me through my commute. Maybe I’m pumpkin spice in the in-between moments of my life that I dot with John Mayer (apologies to my fellow women) and Olivia Rodrigo. But when I look away from the algorithmic mirror, I see my dad in the driver’s seat and hear Willis Alan Ramsey coming through the speakers. And I feel like myself again.

This article previously misstated Robyn Caplan’s professional affiliation.

Tiny Climate Crises Are Adding Up to One Big Disaster

2023-11-01T14:30:39-04:00

The Louisiana wildfire that upended Katie Henderson’s life was barely a blip on this year’s string of catastrophes. On August 24, just after she’d brought her 7-year-old son home from school, she spotted a red band of flames speeding across the treetops, crackling like static on the world’s largest television. She had time only to hand off her son to a neighbor and herd the family’s four dogs into a horse trailer hooked to their pickup. (Their cat, Windy, she plopped into an unzipped backpack.) As she and her neighbor caravanned out through the backwoods, fire filled her rearview mirror. Her house was so badly damaged that day that her family hasn’t yet been able to move back.

On the scale of disasters, this one was small—Henderson’s house was one of the few affected, and the overall damages will likely be orders of magnitude less than those of the billion-dollar disasters the country racked up this year. Go just a mile down the dirt road to the highway that leads into Evans, a town of a few hundred people, and everything looks fine, Henderson told me. But this localized wildfire is part of a category of catastrophe, sometimes called “low-intensity disasters,” that experts are becoming more concerned about. Although major disasters tend to be the most studied and understood, low-intensity disasters, collectively, may be just as essential to track in the long term.

These events are small enough to escape widespread notice, but they happen frequently, accumulating damages that rival, and in some cases surpass, a major one-off disaster. Periodic flooding on a highway, for instance, might start as a commerce-reducing nuisance, but over time it can shape livelihoods and landscapes. “You’re reducing the foundations of support very gradually, from one event to the next,” Roger Pulwarty, a senior scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration who also conducts research with the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR), told me. “It’s death by a thousand cuts.”

The way these smaller disasters add together challenges the traditional ways of defining and measuring catastrophes. Insurance companies, for instance, have long divided catastrophes into primary and secondary, or peak and nonpeak perils. Nonpeak perils—events such as floods, thunderstorms, and wildfires—are considered more localized, more frequent, and less costly than peak perils—sudden disasters such as hurricanes and earthquakes. Recently though, even compared with hurricanes, “we’re seeing more flood damage from just extreme-rainfall events that overwhelm local infrastructure,” as well as other localized disasters, Carolyn Kousky, a climate-risk researcher with the Environmental Defense Fund, told me. In fact, globally, nonpeak perils have been the biggest drivers of insured disaster losses every year since 2013 (except 2017—a particularly catastrophic year marked by Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria), according to a 2021 report from Howden, an international insurance broker that tracks disaster damage. Nonpeak perils are also becoming more frequent and severe, according to Ernst Rauch, the chief climatologist for Munich RE, a reinsurance company that collects data on global disaster costs. As of the first half of this year—marked by about 24 separate billion-dollar disasters in the United States, according to NOAA, and earthquakes in Turkey, Syria, and Morocco—nonpeak perils still formed the bulk of losses worldwide, Rauch told me.

[Read: What your insurer is trying to tell you about climate change]

Taken together, frequent, low-intensity disasters can surpass the damage of acute, intense ones. Loretta Hieber Girardet, the chief of risk knowledge, monitoring, and capacity development for UNDRR, thinks of Colombia in 2010 and 2011, when the country experienced a strong La Niña event: The ensuing floods, landslides, mudslides, and torrential rain affected 93 percent of the country’s municipalities and caused more than $6 billion in direct economic losses. “It wasn’t one single disaster but thousands of smaller-scale events” that eroded communities over time, she told me.

At UNDRR, Hieber Girardet’s team has defined a small disaster as one that involves fewer than 30 deaths or fewer than 5,000 houses destroyed, and has found that from 1990 to 2013, 99.7 percent of all global disasters met those criteria. In the U.S., NOAA is responsible for measuring big, billion-dollar disasters; now “we’re starting to consider looking at sub-billion-dollar events, even in the present year,” says Adam Smith, the lead researcher on NOAA’s billion-dollar-disaster reports. Pulwarty, who works for both organizations, said that, in general, looking at the number of people affected and houses damaged, and even traffic wait times and internet-connectivity losses, could better clarify these events and their accumulating damages; tracking them on a national level could illuminate what is an almost “invisible issue.” And given the damage of low-intensity disasters, a sticker price would help justify the investment in managing and preventing them.

Right now, low-intensity disasters fall into a gray area for assistance: They’re too destructive for a community to handle easily on its own, but not destructive enough to warrant the aid that comes from federal disaster declarations. Because tracking systems are set up to monitor large disasters, national governments might not realize the extent of smaller events’ damage, and even if a community can manage a low-intensity disaster in the near term, it may not have the resources in place to build back more resiliently. “It’s a big gap,” Hieber Girardet said, “and that’s something we’re seeing around the world.”

Falling into that gap can feel like “you’re forgotten about,” Heidi Rochlin, the district superintendent in charge of Antietam Middle Senior High School, told me. In July, heavy rains in Berks County, Pennsylvania, bloated a nearby stream, which ran through the school for days, flooding the basement, knocking out the school’s water and electrical supply, and depositing thick mud and dead fish in the first-floor hallways. The students are spread for the rest of the school year among a local church, a community college, and the district’s two other buildings. Rochlin estimates that the school’s damages total $21.8 million—before adding anything new to guard against future floods—but the Berks County disaster wasn’t large or severe enough for the school to be eligible for federal relief. (The county has applied for and received funds through other means, including low-interest loans made by the U.S. Small Business Administration in coordination with FEMA, but the process can be long and piecemeal.)

Experts are also concerned about damage from changes that happen in slow motion. Ongoing climate stresses—“whether that’s sea-level rise, broad changes in temperature, an extreme rainfall event, or drought—these longer-term things can be equally economically disruptive” as a major climate disaster, Kousky, the EDF researcher, told me. When Grant Ervin, Pittsburgh’s former chief resilience officer, and his team surveyed residents, they found that people’s concerns were about changes gradual enough to have escaped widespread notice: Their basement had started flooding every time it rained; 10 years ago, their backyard was 100 yards long, but storm erosion had shrunk it closer to 50. These problems might not be a huge problem in any immediate time frame, Ervin told me, but over time can have a “catastrophic impact.”

[Read: A recipe for climate disaster]

Think about the flooding just from the higher tides that sea-level rise creates. Maybe the floods begin as a minor annoyance for a coastal community; one day a month, you can’t leave your house because the water is too high, Kousky said. But even one day a month of not getting to work or taking a child to school adds up. Bigger disasters can change where people live overnight, but quieter stresses like these, she said, could reshape how and where we reside just as much.

All of this has convinced Hieber Girardet and the other experts I spoke with that these slower-onset events must be tracked and measured. Her UNDRR team will convene scientists this month in Germany to determine how they can actually do so. “Maybe we can start small with a few phenomena, like sea-level rise,” she said, and from there, generate global methods of tracking their effects.

Still, as important as quantifying these events will be, Pulwarty told me, “we don’t have to know these numbers precisely in order to act.” These low-intensity disasters are, in essence, the most manageable, if societies invest in risk reduction. Fine-tuned data will add detail to our picture of the future, but we can already start building for the one that scientists are seeing now.

The Mississippi Is Losing Its Fight With the Ocean

2023-10-11T10:53:38-04:00

The mouth of the Mississippi River is the arena for a kind of wrestling match. In one corner of the ring is the salt water of the Gulf of Mexico, and in the other, the river’s fresh water. The two shove against each other, and usually, the Mississippi flows with enough force to keep the salt water out. But this year’s drought, currently affecting 40 percent of the continental United States, sapped the Mississippi of water pressure, and a wedge of salt water began muscling its way upstream along the riverbed this summer. It’s already corrupted the drinking water in several towns in southeast Louisiana, and could reach New Orleans around late November. The ocean is winning.

Whatever the climate brings in a year, the Mississippi River keeps the score. This year’s saltwater intrusion “is the integration of all these environmental events that have happened throughout the Great Plains, throughout the Ohio Valley, throughout parts of the Mountain West,” Matthew Hiatt, a hydrologist at Louisiana State University, told me. Landside drought lowers the river’s water levels, and rising sea levels on the ocean side pushes salt water in. Those who study the Mississippi agree that this year’s saltwater intrusion is a particularly dramatic example of what may become a more frequent feature of the dry season. “This is not a one-off or once-in-100-years thing,” William McAnally, hydraulic-engineering professor emeritus at Mississippi State University, told me. “It’s something we’re going to be seeing rather often.”

[Read: Why doesn’t New Orleans look more like Amsterdam?]

This isn’t the first time it’s happened. During the Dust Bowl, New Orleans’ drinking water had a salt concentration 55 percent above current federal guidelines. And in 1988—a year so hot and dry that about 30 percent of the nation’s corn crop failed and wildfires raged in Yellowstone for months—a wedge of seawater stopped just short of the water-intake plant for the eastern bank of Orleans Parish. In the past few decades, salt water has traveled far enough upriver that the United States Army Corps of Engineers built semi-temporary underwater earthen dams, or sills, four different times to stop it—in 1988, 1999, 2012, and last year. This year and 2022 mark the first consecutive times the Army has had to do so.

Human activity is also directly clearing the path for salt water. Throughout the Mississippi’s history, engineers have lowered its southernmost riverbed to accommodate the ships that fuel the region’s economy. The Army Corps of Engineers last lowered the channel in 1987, to 45 feet below the water line, and has begun deepening it to 50. Any drop “essentially provides more space for salt water to move in when the water levels are low,” Hiatt told me.

These compounding factors—lowering the river’s navigational depth, sea-level rise, and changing rainfall patterns—are a formula for more frequent saltwater intrusion, he said. In general, you can think of the Mississippi “like a stock portfolio,” John Sabo, the director of Tulane University’s ByWater research institute, told me. Rain in Ohio can cancel out drought in Minnesota, for instance, but when everywhere is withering, the river dips and peters. The Mississippi’s flow patterns are also becoming more volatile, McAnally, the MSU professor, told me. A statistically predictable pattern of rainfall runoff and river discharge, used to design infrastructure for 100-year floods, for instance, “has become a statistically unpredictable pattern of dry spells and wet spells,” he said.

This type of saltwater wedge is, in some sense, an affliction particular to the Mississippi River. Even Mobile Bay Estuary, 150 miles east, doesn’t experience this degree of intrusion, McAnally told me. Tides can make the difference. In many estuaries, tidal fluctuations churn salt water and fresh water like syrup and ice in a slushie machine, discouraging the separation that a wedge requires. The Mississippi estuary, comparatively, is calm enough that the denser salt water can settle and move upriver.

[Read: Mark Twain remembers his riverboat-pilot training]

The underwater dams that the Army Corps builds work by halting the saltwater flow on the river bottom, said McAnally, who evaluated the efficacy of the 1988 sill as the chief of the Corps’ estuary division. The Corps also built a sill when the intrusion began this summer, but in late September, the seawater overtopped it. “At some point, the ocean gets high enough that sills don’t work anymore,” Sabo said. “And we might be there.”

As the salt moves up the river, communities who get their drinking water from the river have to drink bottled water, pipe fresh water in from elsewhere, or run desalination systems. Keith Hinkley, the president of Plaquemines Parish (where the salt water has been since June), told reporters he hopes to install permanent desalination systems in the region—an energy-intensive and expensive proposition, but a longer-lasting fix. Tyler Antrup, a visiting professor of urban planning at Tulane, says it might make sense to build a water-treatment plant further upriver, large enough to accommodate multiple towns. Over time, saltwater intrusion could affect communities outside the river’s immediate vicinity. If salt water flows into the Mississippi more regularly and stays for longer stretches, eventually it leaches into the groundwater. Right now this type of knock-on effect of sea-level rise is a greater worry in places such as Florida and Texas, but in Louisiana, too, “that could be something we deal with in the future,” Sabo told me.

And water does not move alone. “If anything settles into that salt wedge, it’s going to move upstream until the currents are too weak to propel it,” McAnally said, leaving deposits of sediment. This could create problems in the spring when the Mississippi runs high and moves that dirt into the navigation channel and interrupts shipping. “That would take what is normally a large dredging burden and turn it into impossible,” he told me.

If the salt water keeps returning, too, the lower Mississippi could begin to fundamentally change. “There’s ramifications on coastal fisheries. There’s ramifications on transportation. There’s ramifications for how we build infrastructure,” Sabo said, because salt water can corrode pipes and send heavy metals into the water supply. The southern part of the Mississippi is a balancing act of interests: shipping, farming, fishing, tourism, and the infrastructure to protect it all from hurricanes and salt water. “When we deal with one, we affect the other,” McAnally said. “So what we need is to take a systems view of the whole thing.” If the salt water returns often enough, far enough up the river, it could change the most basic way a city perceives itself, too. “If we’re focusing on where fresh water meets salt water, it means in New Orleans and maybe beyond—we become a truly marine coastal city,” Sabo told me.

This year, at least, Hiatt believes that the salt water will likely be gone by spring, when snow melts in the upper Midwest and sends a pulse of fresh water all the way to Louisiana. The state has long been at the center of the Mississippi’s fight with the Gulf, catching blows from hurricanes, flood, and salt water and habitable because of the engineering solutions that mitigate those dangers. But for this year’s particular saltwater problem, “the only thing that is going to fix this is rain,” Hiatt said. “And lots of it.”

New York City Is Not Built for This

2023-09-29T15:24:53-04:00

New York City’s sewer system is built for the rain of the past—when a notable storm might have meant 1.75 inches of water an hour. It wasn’t built to handle the rainfall from Hurricane Irene, Hurricane Sandy, or, more recently, Hurricane Ida—which dumped 3.15 inches an hour on Central Park. And it wasn’t built to handle the kind of extreme rainfall that is becoming routine: The city flooded last December, last April, and last July—an unusual seasonal span. “We now have in New York something much more like a tropical-rainfall pattern,” Rohit Aggarwala, New York City’s environmental-protection commissioner, said yesterday at The Atlantic Festival. “And it happens over and over again.”

It happened today. Less than 24 hours after Aggarwala’s statements, rain arrived in New York City—the kind that sends waterfalls through Brooklyn subway ceilings, dangerously floods basements, and floats cars on the road like rubber ducks. Mayor Eric Adams said earlier today that the city could receive up to eight inches of rain today; parts of Brooklyn saw a month’s worth of rain in just three hours. New York State Governor Kathy Hochul has declared a state of emergency, and New York City residents received emergency alerts cautioning them to avoid travel (unless, ominously, they were evacuating), seek high ground, and avoid driving.

“You always build to the record” when designing infrastructure, Aggarwala said yesterday. The problem comes when the changing climate creates conditions that blow through those records. He also said the 1.75-inches-an-hour standard isn’t met across the board. “That’s our target—not everywhere in the city is up to that standard.” And since Hurricane Ida hit two years ago, there have been at least half a dozen instances in which certain neighborhoods have received two inches or more of rainfall an hour, he said. “That’s not a pattern New York City is accustomed to. That’s a pattern that Miami might be accustomed to, maybe Singapore.”

[Read: Will it ever stop raining?]

Already, today’s rainfall, as measured in Central Park, is the worst the city has seen since Ida, Zachary Iscol, the New York City emergency-management commissioner, confirmed at a press conference today. (Ultimately, Ida dropped 7.2 inches of rain on Central Park and nearly six inches on Prospect Park.) The city’s sewers simply can’t process water that quickly. “The sad reality is that our climate is changing faster than our infrastructure can respond,” Aggarwala said at the same conference.

Extreme rainfall isn’t just a New York City problem. A recent analysis found that one in nine residents in the contiguous United States is at significant risk of storms that will bring at least 50 percent more water than their local infrastructure can handle—overwhelming the pipes, channels, and culverts that might have met the rainfall records of the past. Any place trying to fix this mismatch might not have the basic information it needs, either: The periodic update of national rainfall from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, for instance, won’t arrive for another three to four years, which could keep climate-resilience efforts lagging behind the speed at which the climate is changing.

As acute and random as these events can feel, Aggarwala warned yesterday against myopia. “We can’t say, ‘Well, this is a one-off and maybe it won’t happen again,’” he said. “This is our new reality.”