California Wildfires

In a Los Angeles suburb, multigenerational families like the Benns found affordable housing and a deep sense of connection. After the devastating fires, many wonder whether they’ll be able to rebuild what they’ve lost.

In the age of social media, every politician who has to stand in front of a camera after a tragedy turns into just another battle site in an endless culture war.

“Nobody’s defending Gavin Newsom,” the staff writer Jay Caspian Kang says. “I think he’s probably in a lot of trouble. And I do think that this might have tanked his Presidential ambitions.”

The Los Angeles fires hark to the nineteenth-century blazes that ravaged our cities—and point toward an even more flammable future.

A climate scientist discusses how to think about and weigh the variables that led to the current disaster.

For years, experts have warned that homeowner insurance in the state could easily collapse.

The images of a burning Los Angeles won’t last, simply because our ways of seeing are inadequate to our predicament.

In my rural corner of Sonoma County, there is no longer a question of whether fire will come to us; it’s only a matter of when.

Life as a Californian during the 2020 fire season.

The disaster encapsulates a moment in which both science and the everyday rhythms of American life seem to be under assault.

Faced with historic wildfires on the West Coast and in Siberia, it’s tempting to simply give up. But giving up is generational aggression: it consigns the planet’s young people to an ever-grimmer planet.

In Northern California, everyone knew that it was only a matter of time before another fire tried to outdo the awful accomplishments of the Camp Fire, from 2018.

We get a sense of what a warming globe feels like—each second, trapping the heat equivalent of four Hiroshima-sized bombs exploding—when we have a week like the one we just came through.

The virus is indoors; the fires are outdoors. There are few places left to go.

Throughout the twentieth century, federal policy focussed on putting out fires as quickly as possible, but preventing megafires requires a different approach.

Against an infernal backdrop of widespread wildfires, the Administration announced its plan to roll back rules limiting greenhouse-gas emissions from power plants.