IN THE NEWS

“We had a fire today,” reads a diary entry in Octavia Butler’s 1993 science fiction novel, The Parable of the Sower. The in-book date of that entry was Feb. 1, 2025 — what would have constituted the far-flung future for the book’s IRL readers when it dropped — and that fire foreshadowed the larger, more destructive infernos to come in the story. The book’s main character is trying to stay alive in a 21st century Los Angeles facing ecological and economic apocalypse. Elsewhere in the novel, Butler writes: “People have changed the climate of the world. Now they’re waiting for the old days to come back.”

A student once asked Butler whether she believed the calamities she described in her books would take place. “I didn’t make up the problems,” she responded. “All I did was look around at the problems we’re neglecting now and give them about 30 years to grow into full-fledged disasters.”

When she died, Butler was buried in a cemetery in Altadena, California, a small, unincorporated community a little to the northeast of Los Angeles proper. (Also buried in Altadena: Eldridge Cleaver, the Black Panther Party spokesman, and Owen Brown, the son of the radical abolitionist John Brown, who moved to the area after the famous raid on Harpers Ferry.) Altadena had a reputation as a kind of local secret: a quaint, middle-class suburb that had long been a haven for Black, Latino, and Asian Angelenos — owing to the fact that during the Civil Rights era, it was one of the few places in Los Angeles County that wasn’t redlined, making it one of the few places where families of color, especially Black families, could build generational wealth through home ownership. Jackie Robinson lived in Altadena; Rodney King grew up there. Much of the history of Black Los Angeles streams through the town.

Zoe Meyers/Getty Images

It might seem a little on the nose then, that the cemetery where Butler rests was damaged by the fast-moving Eaton fire, which wiped out some 7,000 buildings – homes and businesses – in Altadena last week. At the time I’m writing this, that conflagration was one of the four still raging fires that were spreading across L.A. County, which has a larger population than 40 states. It’s too soon to know what these burned-out communities would look like if and when they are rebuilt, or who might return, but Altadena had long been considered relatively safe from the kind of fire that has now destroyed much of the town. As the world keeps getting hotter and hotter, though, so many of us who live in places that are considered “low risk” are likely to find that the storms, floods, droughts, blizzards, and fires that used to be called once-in-a-century catastrophes now seem to be happening a lot more often.

Siwatu Moore, one of my good friends, moved to Altadena a few years ago during the pandemic, in part because of its history. Like many others in the town, his family’s home was vaporized by the fires last week, with nothing left standing but a chimney. “Today will be the most difficult day of my life and at my age, I have had more than a few,” he wrote in an update on Facebook. “Today we will tell our two children that we have lost our home. We will tell them that other than the things currently with us in this hotel room some forty miles from our property, all our possessions are lost.” It’s a conversation ever-more American families will be having in the years to come, as we blow past projections about the pace of climate change and a new administration hostile to even modest environmental regulations takes over in Washington.

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ON THE POD

Fujio Emura

Youngmi Mayer, Korean comedian and writer, rose to social media fame for mocking casual racism white people seem to get away with in everyday life. But she also dishes out brutal critiques of Korean culture, too – the perks of being biracial. In her new memoir, I'm Laughing Because I'm Crying, Mayer writes about humor as a tool of survival for the generations of Korean women in her family, from her grandmother to her present self.

For producer Schuyler Swenson, Mayer's comedy stood out as deeply clarifying and immediately relatable to her as a Korean adoptee. They spoke about the Korean comedic tradition, inappropriate humor and why the saddest stuff is what makes them laugh the hardest.

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