From the Front Lines of a California Wildfire
The DailyYou’re reading The New Yorker’s daily newsletter, a guide to our top stories, featuring exclusive insights from our writers and editors. Sign up to receive it in your in-box.In today’s newsletter, our puzzles and games editor, Liz Maynes-Aminzade, introduces Laugh Lines, a new weekly game that challenges your knowledge of New Yorker cartoons. But, first, M. R. O’Connor reports on what it’s like to fight a wildfire. Plus:Why Trump pardoned the Silk Road founderCelia Paul and the power of lookingPartying with a Paper magazine legendAn image of a burned-down building in Los Angeles.Photograph by Bryan Anselm / ReduxInside the Fight Against a Los Angeles InfernoA reporter embeds with wildland firefighters during one of the deadliest blazes in California history.The rain has come to Los Angeles, and the city can finally exhale—the showers providing some much needed moisture to the bone-dry landscape. Firefighters are also getting a break, after spending weeks desperately battling the half-dozen or so major wildfires in the area.The deadliest of those fires, the Eaton, which killed seventeen people, is now ninety-eight per cent contained. For a piece in this week’s issue, M. R. O’Connor, a reporter with wildland firefighting training, embedded with crews working the blaze, helping to fight the fire herself. For days, she hiked to watch the fire’s progress, talking with the crews and sleeping in a chilly tent in the Rose Bowl parking lot, which had become a makeshift “fire camp” for first responders. O’Connor and her fellow-firefighters walked through the partially burnt-out suburbs, using the backs of their hands to check for warm spots among the ashes.Wrangling a blaze of this size isn’t just about spraying water on active flames. It requires days—if not weeks, months—of painstaking, and surprisingly manual, work. “Every inch has to be checked by a person in order for an area to be declared fully contained,” O’Connor explains. “The perimeter of a wildfire is typically walked over three or four times, and sometimes more.” One firefighter compared fire to an animal: “If you take away the air, it dies. You can feed it by giving it more fuel. It can sleep,” he says. “It’s an entity that you have to respect.” This is a knowledge that we are coming around to; as O’Connor writes, “an entire city, maybe an entire country, was starting to appreciate the reality that wildland firefighters inhabit.” Read the story »The First Days of Trump 2.0Donald Trump onstage at the Libertarian National Convention, in May, 2024.Photograph by Francis Chung / POLITICO / APA pardon for a dark-Web folk hero: Ross Ulbricht, the founder of the online black market Silk Road, was pardoned by the President last week, for crimes related to drug trafficking, money laundering, and computer hacking. Ulbricht has become a mythic figure in the crypto community, largely because the transactions on his site were made in bitcoin. Trump’s decision to free him is just one example of the ascendancy of the crypto lobby in the new Administration. Charles Bethea reports.MAHA moves in: Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the nominee for secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, will appear before the Senate on Wednesday and Thursday this week. If confirmed, Kennedy would oversee the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and fifteen other agencies. Clare Malone profiled R.F.K., Jr., last year, and explored the origin of some of his unorthodox and potentially dangerous ideas.In the NewsRevelations about A.I. are rattling the U.S. stock market today. The dominance of companies such as Nvidia, which makes super chips that power chatbots, may be undermined by DeepSeek, a Chinese A.I. company that has developed an open-source reasoning model that it claims uses significantly less energy and raw materials than its peers. In 2023, Stephen Witt met with Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s C.E.O., at the Denny’s in San Jose, California, where the company was started. At the time, Nvidia had recently become one of the most valuable corporations in the world, “worth more than Walmart and ExxonMobil combined.”More Top StoriesThe World-Changing Gaze of Celia PaulKim Hastreiter, the Queen of StuffFun & Games Dept.Liz Maynes-AminzadePuzzles and games editorIn celebration of the New Yorker’s centenary, we bring you Laugh Lines, a weekly game that challenges you to guess when cartoons from our archive were originally published. To do this successfully, you’ll need to search for context clues in images and captions: the way people dress and speak, the technologies they use, the pop-culture icons and world events that preoccupy them.If you’re intrigued, learn more about how to play—and don’t miss the video tutorial starring Jesse Eisenberg, the New Yorker’s official (according to him) joke historian.Daily CartoonCartoon by Jorge PennéCopy link to cartoonCopy link to cartoonLink copiedShopShopMo
In today’s newsletter, our puzzles and games editor, Liz Maynes-Aminzade, introduces Laugh Lines, a new weekly game that challenges your knowledge of New Yorker cartoons. But, first, M. R. O’Connor reports on what it’s like to fight a wildfire. Plus:
- Why Trump pardoned the Silk Road founder
- Celia Paul and the power of looking
- Partying with a Paper magazine legend
Inside the Fight Against a Los Angeles Inferno
A reporter embeds with wildland firefighters during one of the deadliest blazes in California history.
The rain has come to Los Angeles, and the city can finally exhale—the showers providing some much needed moisture to the bone-dry landscape. Firefighters are also getting a break, after spending weeks desperately battling the half-dozen or so major wildfires in the area.
The deadliest of those fires, the Eaton, which killed seventeen people, is now ninety-eight per cent contained. For a piece in this week’s issue, M. R. O’Connor, a reporter with wildland firefighting training, embedded with crews working the blaze, helping to fight the fire herself. For days, she hiked to watch the fire’s progress, talking with the crews and sleeping in a chilly tent in the Rose Bowl parking lot, which had become a makeshift “fire camp” for first responders. O’Connor and her fellow-firefighters walked through the partially burnt-out suburbs, using the backs of their hands to check for warm spots among the ashes.
Wrangling a blaze of this size isn’t just about spraying water on active flames. It requires days—if not weeks, months—of painstaking, and surprisingly manual, work. “Every inch has to be checked by a person in order for an area to be declared fully contained,” O’Connor explains. “The perimeter of a wildfire is typically walked over three or four times, and sometimes more.” One firefighter compared fire to an animal: “If you take away the air, it dies. You can feed it by giving it more fuel. It can sleep,” he says. “It’s an entity that you have to respect.” This is a knowledge that we are coming around to; as O’Connor writes, “an entire city, maybe an entire country, was starting to appreciate the reality that wildland firefighters inhabit.” Read the story »
The First Days of Trump 2.0
A pardon for a dark-Web folk hero: Ross Ulbricht, the founder of the online black market Silk Road, was pardoned by the President last week, for crimes related to drug trafficking, money laundering, and computer hacking. Ulbricht has become a mythic figure in the crypto community, largely because the transactions on his site were made in bitcoin. Trump’s decision to free him is just one example of the ascendancy of the crypto lobby in the new Administration. Charles Bethea reports.
MAHA moves in: Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the nominee for secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, will appear before the Senate on Wednesday and Thursday this week. If confirmed, Kennedy would oversee the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and fifteen other agencies. Clare Malone profiled R.F.K., Jr., last year, and explored the origin of some of his unorthodox and potentially dangerous ideas.
In the News
Revelations about A.I. are rattling the U.S. stock market today. The dominance of companies such as Nvidia, which makes super chips that power chatbots, may be undermined by DeepSeek, a Chinese A.I. company that has developed an open-source reasoning model that it claims uses significantly less energy and raw materials than its peers. In 2023, Stephen Witt met with Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s C.E.O., at the Denny’s in San Jose, California, where the company was started. At the time, Nvidia had recently become one of the most valuable corporations in the world, “worth more than Walmart and ExxonMobil combined.”
Fun & Games Dept.
Liz Maynes-Aminzade
Puzzles and games editor
In celebration of the New Yorker’s centenary, we bring you Laugh Lines, a weekly game that challenges you to guess when cartoons from our archive were originally published. To do this successfully, you’ll need to search for context clues in images and captions: the way people dress and speak, the technologies they use, the pop-culture icons and world events that preoccupy them.
If you’re intrigued, learn more about how to play—and don’t miss the video tutorial starring Jesse Eisenberg, the New Yorker’s official (according to him) joke historian.Daily Cartoon
- Play today’s challenging puzzle. A clue: 2024 U.S. Open winner Jannik. Six letters.
- Shouts & Murmurs: Production Notes on Amazon’s Melania Trump Documentary
P.S. A magnitude-3.8 earthquake startled the Gulf of Maine this morning. For more surprising weather phenomena in the state, read Ann Beattie’s short story “Save a Horse Ride a Cowgirl,” from 2015, in which a hailstorm hits in August. “Miller Ryall had come out on his front lawn during the storm, wearing Jockey shorts, not even bathing trunks, raised his hands to heaven, and laughed and danced like some deranged freak on ‘Twin Peaks,’ whooping and pirouetting.”
Hannah Jocelyn contributed to today’s edition.
