After the Burn [#156]
The Palisades and Eaton Fires are finally 100 percent contained. And it's my birthday month and I need your help...
Happy Lunar New Year,
Two tables of friends got together at a lazy susan style Chinese restaurant for a new year banquet, in which the servers were so swamped that when one of us asked for water, the guy just goes, “No.” So, that’s how the Year of the Snake started.
In LA, the fires finally, finally stopped burning. I’ve loved on LA previously, but one more reflection, real quick. I am in my seventh year in LA now. It is the only place I have lived for longer than five consecutive years since I was 13, when the Hu family moved away from St. Louis.1 I don’t want to leave this home, for many reasons. The shortest reason is because I love it here. The striking beauty. The pluralism and diversity. The arid climate. The possibility. And the people. I feel as Sean Bonner describes it:
“Hope and optimism could be felt everywhere. People were trying to do things. On top of that, there was this feeling that everyone you met was a potential collaborator rather than what I was used to, which was competition at every turn.2 It was intoxicating, I’d never felt anything like it and immediately knew I needed to live there.” —Sean Bonner
While I feel so privileged to have landed here, a place that’s way more than a city, the danger of a climate shock is very much with us, all the time. We got The Big One. We just always thought it was going to be an earthquake. The ruins and displacement are still evident everywhere. Keep sparing a thought for Los Angeles, even though the rest of the world seems on fire, metaphorically, and it is hard to even bear the headlines.
Reading
Come for the headline, stay for the column. This is the clearest-eyed look at the past 48 hours I’ve read. Musk’s former friend Sam Harris wrote 1,700 words on how Elon’s lost grip with reality and “something is seriously wrong” with his moral compass. We’re getting the social media crisis wrong, but the piece points to an answer. The world’s best athletes tell her everything. An explainer on how Hollywood’s PR wars have turned so nasty. What your favorite 90s band says about the kind of suburban mom you are today. Dead butt syndrome is really in the zeitgeist lately, so here’s another story about it.3 Oh, and drug eating rats invaded the Houston police headquarters. (h/t
)Werk Werk Werk
My production company, Reasonable Volume, has been working with LAist on The Other Moonshot, the untold story of black aerospace engineers who helped put a man on the moon, for years and it finally released this week!
My TED Talk also came out last week, which was very cool. Meanwhile, ilustrator Hallie Bateman stopped by Forever35 to chat with us about collaborating with her mom, and what to do when you get dumped. On inauguration day, law prof and Strict Scrutiny co-host Leah Litman talked us through how to stay politically engaged. I’m also in the field trying to make a documentary, and wrapping up writing the Flawless screenplay adaptation, so I’m just a content-making-factory right now.
Watch and/or Listen
Conclave is the perfect bitchy high school gossip movie of people cutting each other from the back, only it’s Catholic cardinals choosing the next pope. Also, some of the shots looked like Dutch masters paintings, that’s how beautifully they were composed.
The Doechii Tiny Desk Concert. This helped curb my despair.
Help
This month is my birthday and y’all know I love a good birthday party. For my 30th a bunch of us partied in Costa Rica for a week, for my 40th I threw a throwback 1994-themed party and the costumes were incredible. The next year, the theme was Black Tie and/or Pajamas and folks also understood the assignment!
This year I’m forgoing a big bash. Instead I’m sharing my birthday with The Birthday Party Project, whose mission is simple: throwing birthday parties for kids experiencing homelessness. So instead of sending me a Starbucks gift card, or buying me a $35 cocktail in LA, please give to my Birthday Project fundraiser this year and support kids who are displaced and/or currently homeless. If there’s ever a time to support displaced kids, it’s this year, when so many thousands more are housing insecure after the catastrophic wildfires.
Check those email settings,
E
I’ve still lived more cumulative years of my life in St. Louis (1982-1996) and Texas (1996 to 2000, then nine months in 2003, then my last stint from 2006 to 2011). But I am quickly considering myself a Californian.
That “competition at every turn” is very DC, a place where it seems like everyone was their high school class president or at least in the top ten percent of their graduating class. So much angling. So much measuring yourself by proximity to power. (Someone once observed that DC is the only place where you might say something like, “I was seated next to Donald Rumsfeld last night…”) In fact, the reason I wound up in Seoul having never stepped foot there is because I needed to get out of DC.
The other day I apologized for a butt dial and Rob writes back, “You couldn’t feel it, could you.”
Please tell me Flawless is going to be a campy drama-comedy series!!
Off topic but it is so comforting to hear your calm smooth voice on the TED Talks Daily intros and outros.
Thank you for this small bit of sanity.