Tag: wildfire

2025 Year In Review: La La Land

Posted on by Elise
All podcasts are video now.

I began writing this after a relentless 24 hours of miserable news. Another mass shooting on a college campus, a massacre of Australian Jews on the first night of Hanukkah, the stabbing deaths of legendary Hollywood director Rob Reiner and his wife, Michelle, in their home, by their adult son. The barrage of bad news in a concentrated period is not unlike the rest of this year, which started with my home of Los Angeles ablaze on the West side and the East side, in the mountains and along the coast. Elon Musk dismantled global food and medical aid like he was just dusting off dirt from his shoulder, and hundreds of thousands of children are dying as a result. And by summer, we were the first of many cities to face brutal ICE raids and effectively, kidnappings, and occupied by National Guard troops, sent by a president who views more than half this country and its millions of immigrants as his enemies.

In the midst of all this misery we still have jobs to do and bills to pay and children to raise. Compared to last year’s recap, this one feels decidedly more dreary. We’re in this time of both frequent natural disaster and self-inflicted national crisis (how is there still no meaningful gun control, it’s a known public health epidemic)!

One of my responses this year has been to create more art and try and make an impact and better connects people or deepens understanding. In the pursuit of generative work, I’ve enjoyed a very “LA” year, both spending more time living here and not traveling as much, and engaging in its entertainment industry. I went to the Oscars for the first time, finished writing the screenplay version of FLAWLESS (though it later died in development, and have spent more than 30 days on location, co-directing a documentary. It features four kids who either lost their homes or were displaced by January’s fires. They range in age from 12 to 17, and I’ve essentially taken on four other kids this year to text with and check up on, in order to embed with their families for mundanities and milestones. By this time next year, I hope we will have a finished film — WINDSWEPT. We need help funding it, so pitch in if you can.

Directing WINDSWEPT on Christmas Tree Lane, Altadena

And without further yapping, herewith a recap of my 2025.

Favorite Creator of the Year: Luke Holloway, the guy who turns awkward Tinder conversations into smash hit songs, none of which were bigger than “I have one daughter,” (no shade to K-Pop Demon Hunters)

Favorite Interview of the Year: Pooh Bear, the prolific music producer known for hits with Justin Bieber, among many many others. While we were on stage, he took a concept from the crowd and straight up wrote a hook and post-hook for it within three minutes, then challenged the AI tool Suno to do the same, “in the style of Poo Bear.” And right there on stage we all felt the ineffable quality of humanness in the actual human’s song, showing that at least for now, AI is still pretty mid. CLOSE SECOND: Stacey Abrams, who revealed how much she loves the Amazon TV show, Reacher.

New Places: The Narrows in Zion National Park, Jacksonville, Deadwood, SD, the Angeles National Forest

Favorite Films: Sinners, Rental Family, Splitsville

Firsts: Attending the Oscars, speaking at the Met, TED Talk launch, hosting a podcast for the BBC, pitching networks on my documentary, finishing a screenplay and getting paid for it, a Luchador show in Mexico City, inducing dog vomiting, finding a dead bird in my bed that the cat brought in.

Nerdiest Accomplishment: I won $10 in a category of my tennis pool. We bet on the four majors by picking players seeded 1-10, 11-20 and an unseeded player and see how they fare.

Live Show of the Year: Labiahead, the all-woman Radiohead tribute band featuring Lena TKTK and Charlene Kaye, who is also…

New Friend of the Year: Charlene Kaye. She’s a comedian and musician … a musical comedian. We met through my book, Flawless. She read it and reached out over Instagram, we became Instagram-friendly for a couple years, and this year I pitched her for a TED Talk and in November, she absolutely brought the house down as she closed out TEDNext with her performance-slash-talk that I cannot wait to share once it’s released. CLOSE SECOND: Jena Friedman, another uproariously funny comedian whose hourlong special, MotherF*cker, is a must-see if you can get a ticket.

Most Thrilling Sport Match/Game of the Year: It’s a tie between Game Seven of the World Series and the Men’s Final of the French Open, a grueling five-hour slugfest in which Carlos Alcaraz clawed his way back from two (or was it three) Championship points to best his rival Jannik Sinner,

And in no particular order, this year I:

Joined a hip new coworking space
Started filling in on KCRW’s Press Play
Became the mom of a teen
Covered the costliest natural disaster in global history
Fostered a cat fire survivor
Started filming a documentary
Joined the board of the Birthday Party Project
Hosted a medical podcast
Began hosting a weekly parenting podcast
Twice endured a live mouse in my house that the cat dragged in
Sat in the very front row of the Hollywood Bowl, something all should experience
Saw so much live music: Nelly, Ja Rule, Eve, KC of KC and Jojo, Keith “Babyface” Edmonds, Labiahead, Samora Pinderhughes and the Healing Project Choir, Joshua Bell and the Chamber Orchestra of America
Went to Mexico City with friends for my birthday, got violently ill, then had to endure a full body massage while having the chills and on the precipice of explosive diarrhea at any moment
Got my book and my podcast shouted out (on separate occassions) in the NY Times
Saw the Japanese edition of my book hit shelves
Got sharked by Mark Cuban for a speaking engagement
Decided to shut down our small business started with my girlfriends
Moved in with my man, well, actually, he moved in with us
Won a $35,000 grant for our documentary
Spent a countless number of hours in volleyball gyms and on soccer sidelines, as two out of three of my girls are on travel teams
Ran 149 miles, still way down from my COVID-era highs, but played a lot of tennis
Read 33 books
Wrote 25 newsletter dispatches
Flew 38,097 miles to 25 cities, three countries and spent 66 days away from home

PREVIOUS YEARS IN REVIEW

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I Heart LA

Posted on by Elise

The skies are clear today, making the contrast between the giant plumes of smoke out my window so striking against blue skies.

My home is in on LA’s Westside near the coast, but not in a canyon or the hills, which are the two types of places most threatened by the multiple fires that broke out this week. The cause of these fires is under investigation, but we know they are fueled by those unpredictable Santa Ana winds. Of those winds, I’m reminded of Joan Didion’s writing, in Slouching Towards Bethlehem:

“It is hard for people who have not lived in Los Angeles to realize how radically the Santa Ana figures in the local imagination. The city burning is Los Angeles’s deepest image of itself. Nathaniel West perceived that, in The Day of the Locust, and at the time of the 1965 Watts riots what struck the imagination most indelibly were the fires. For days one could drive the Harbor Freeway and see the city on fire, just as we had always known it would be in the end. Los Angeles weather is the weather of catastrophe, of apocalypse, and, just as the reliably long and bitter winters of New England determine the way life is lived there, so the violence and the unpredictability of the Santa Ana affect the entire quality of life in Los Angeles, accentuate its impermanence, its unreliability. The winds shows us how close to the edge we are.”

On Monday, my friend Morgan and I were eating lunch out on a patio, soaking in the beautiful weather and feeling guilty that we had it so good in LA, while so much of the rest of the country was buried under snow and sleet. (Morgan is now out on fire lines reporting for NBC News.)

By Tuesday, winds had shifted and picked up so fast that the speed of spreading wildfires was measured in miles per hour. On that day, the largest of the many fires in LA county, the Palisades Fire, burned to ashes the neighborhood where my partner Rob and his family grew up. The humans are safe, but so much property is wiped out. The post office where his sister mailed her college applications. Where they bought their Thanksgiving turkey every year. Where they rode their bikes. (Rob’s sister Joanna wrote heart-wrenchingly of this, for The New York Times.)

Below is video of the Palisades Village part of Pacific Palisades, on Tuesday night at sunset.

On Wednesday morning, I awoke to a message asking whether I could be on Morning Edition in 20 minutes. Before I went to sleep the night before, I had reached out to my old colleagues at NPR on the national desk, which is the desk that springs into action in a disaster. By the time I woke up, the editors of this metastasizing story were hungry for more coverage and I frankly felt relieved to be able to pitch in to contribute. So far, between a near constant stream of spot news dispatched, I’ve reported on folks who lost their homes in Pasadena and the Palisades, and the extraordinary volunteer effort to aid during this disaster.

Thursday the girls were all home from school, as their classes were canceled. We held a morning meeting as a family to discuss how to help. Eva suggested fostering kitties, because she is a cat person. Luna suggested making sandwiches for those in need, which is something we do for displaced people at other times during the year. Our most anxious child, Isa said, “WHAT ABOUT US?! What if WE need to evacuate and our house burns down?” By evening, we had made the sack lunches for Covenant House, a shelter for displaced young people, and I delivered them to K-town since I was reporting in that neighborhood anyway. Seeing the outpouring of donations and community come together in this crisis moved me deeply; I love Los Angeles, I love all its shapes and sizes and colors and the faith folks have in this place and each other.

Volunteers at the Koreatown YMCA on Thursday

And folks on Instagram got us in touch with a woman in the Palisades who lost her home and needed to find shelter for their eight cats. Now we have Minx, a fire victim and evacuee, at our house.

Palisades Fire evacuee temporarily at the Hu house.

Friday, thanks to enduring relationships with NPR producers, Janet W. Lee, who happened to be in town, mixed our K-town piece while I tried to keep the kids occupied, as schools remain closed. By evening, Rob’s mom, who thought she was okay to head back to her Brentwood house, had to heed the warnings to stay out of the mandatory evacuation zone, for the officials had instituted a dusk to dawn curfew, which remains in effect.

What a year this week has been. There is no one in this county of 10 million that doesn’t know someone who lost everything. The scale of this disaster will change this special place forever. We count ourselves among the fortunate ones. Still cozy, in our own homes, with our creatures, and with all the food and water and power we need. Please consider giving to these aid organizations, which my friend and fellow Angeleno Chris Duffy shared this morning:

A Town That Fire Burned Down

Posted on by Elise
This was part of the First Assembly of God church. The burned chairs were still in stacks.

Today I went to Paradise, California, where search and rescue teams are accompanied by cadaver dogs, sifting through what’s left of homes and businesses. Wildfires, like tornadoes, act capriciously. Two houses on one side of a street look untouched, while across the street there’s nothing left but mangled metal and ash. Overall Paradise is just one giant scene of devastation, though. Up close you can see what remains of a lot of kitchens, because the ovens are still kind of around, and occasionally items survived, like couple of ceramic mugs. I spotted a yellow bumble bee mug because it was the only shock of color among so much white and gray.

Every survivor you talk to tells a harrowing story. A lot of them seem sanguine when they say to me, “Home’s gone. All gone.” They note the tunnel of fire, or a ring of fire that they drove through to escape down. They tell me about cars exploding behind them. The traffic as they tried to get out. The lone evacuees on the side of the street with their dogs that they encouraged to jump onto the beds of their pickups. Their neighbors running — running — from the heat and flames. To imagine that night is to imagine hell. And somehow so many people actually made it out alive.

Last week, in the first days of the fire, I was in Boston hosting Here and Now, our national program that originates from WBUR. I was in the comfort of a studio, talking with people from Butte County over a phone connection. We could all hear the weariness in their voices. The reporter in me thought, what am I doing in a studio? I have to be there.

I eventually made it here 10 days after the flames first raged. It took me awhile because I had fill-in hosting duty for a podcast, too. Last night the camaraderie and connection was clear for the three of us who were here for NPR: We are all former foreign correspondents who had been in the muck and wanted to be here. For Kelly and Leila, who both lived so long in the Middle East — they’d seen so many towns felled by armies and saw the parallels. “Parts of Paradise look like Fallujah,” Leila said to me. This is the kind of story that had it happened overseas, we’d probably be there for weeks.

This is California’s most destructive and deadly fire yet, but this is also part of a much larger story about climate change and its refugees. It’s a migration story. And it’ll continue.

A former Sears is now a disaster recovery center for victims who need federal and state assistance in putting their lives back together.