In the end, President Trump’s ominous visit to California’s new ghost towns was an anticlimax, his tarmac photo op with Gov. Gavin Newsom and the rambling news conference that followed just two more beats in the familiar pattern of post-disaster normalization — partisan finger-pointing, wonks crunching the insurance numbers, the immediate arguments about how to rebuild. As eagerly as Americans crane their necks to behold disasters, we also like to quickly zoom past them. And for many days, as Californians distracted themselves with related arguments, the air was still thick and acrid and full of foreboding, looking like both a heavy cloud of unprocessed trauma and a toxic health menace that put many masked Angelenos in mind of East Palestine, Ohio.
“Everything we burn, we breathe,” I wrote a few years ago, in a long essay on the catastrophic health effects of air pollution, mostly the industrial kind, which causes perhaps 10 million deaths a year. Wildfire smoke can be even worse for you, especially because it can briefly smother whole communities with blankets of toxic particulate matter. But the return of the urban firestorm augurs not just a new age for fire but also a new one for air. It’s one thing to worry about breathing in smoke, however thick, produced when the wood of wildland forest burns through. It’s another to consider that you are inhaling an aerosolized city.
The phrase “urban firestorm” has terrified me since I first heard it, from the climate scientist Daniel Swain, who was spooling out for me a bleak recent history — Fort McMurray, Santa Rosa, Paradise, Boulder — that’s been extended in the years since: to Lahaina and now, even more spectacularly, to the Palisades and Altadena.
But that terror was also circumscribed, in a way: a nightmare of direct attack, with fire rampaging through gridded blocks, threatening modern homes built long distances from flammable forest and destroying much of what I’d come to take for granted about the impenetrable safety of life in the cities of the Anthropocene. I didn’t realize, at first, that incinerating an entirely different kind of kindling would also produce a very different kind of airborne toxic event. “If you’re ever wondering why wildfire smoke is so bad for you,” one observer put it memorably on BlueSky, “it’s because it contains things like ‘an entire bicycle.’”
At least for a time, the air above Los Angeles also contained the detritus of more than 10,000 homes. Somewhere in there, in the air being breathed into human lungs, was everything else that had been vaporized by flames: furniture, clothing, electronics and automobiles, cribs and bibs and whole nurseries full of toys, record collections and libraries, stoves and refrigerators and microwaves, computers, tennis rackets, video game systems, sneakers and loafers and pumps, cosmetics and toiletries and razors and tampons, watches and jewelry and remote control cars, lamps and lampshades and rugs and yoga mats, Pelotons and treadmills, sports bras and free weights, gardening equipment and spare tires, the ashes of loved ones and whole shelves full of photo albums, Legos and ladders and whole washers and dryers, full bottles of detergent and dish soap and Pine-Sol and paint, pantries full of dry foods, blankets and mattresses, heating pads and stuffed animals, street signs and power lines, weather vanes and mailboxes, garbage cans of various sizes and shapes, not to mention everything held inside them.
When we are forced to itemize tragic horrors like these, we tend to focus on all that has been lost — the lives, above all, but also the homes themselves, the memories they sustained, the sense of belonging and the illusion of permanence. But before everything is lost it first becomes fuel. An awful lot of it gets breathed.
The deadliest fire in California history was the Camp fire, which burned through more than 153,000 acres in Butte County, destroying more than 18,000 homes and structures and killing 85 in 2018. But wildfire smoke that year might have killed 12,000 Californians — more than a hundred indirect deaths for every direct one, an understanding that residents of wildfire zones now carry with them into every new encounter with flames. “The air here has many flavors this week,” Audrey Gray and Andrew Robinson wrote in a dispatch from Los Angeles’s fires for Inside Climate News, “none of them reassuring.”
Sometimes it seems the word “fallout” would be more appropriate than “smoke.” As my colleagues Hiroko Tabuchi and Mira Rojanasakul documented last week, the fires in and around Los Angeles produced atmospheric concentrations of lead 100 times average levels, even long distances from the fires themselves. Chlorine, also toxic, was 40 times the average. The scientist Mike Brown tested the Eaton fire ash that had fallen in his driveway and found, in addition, titanium and heavy metals. “Treat that ash like it’s toxic, folks,” he wrote, “(because it is).” Sarah Rees, a director at the South Coast Air Quality Management District, struck a similar note: “assume the worst,” she told Inside Climate News.
And it is necessary to assume — not just out of caution, but because it is impossible to actually know. Over the past few years, as fear of wildfire smoke has grown alongside fear of flames, many more Americans have acquainted themselves with the air quality index, or A.Q.I. — the standard measure of breathability, the one that pops up on your smartphone anytime you’re checking the weather. But the A.Q.I. doesn’t tell you exactly what is in the air, only how much of it there is. Some things it doesn’t even measure at all, as the Coalition for Clean Air emphasized in an alarm-raising presentation about smoke risks on Jan. 16, shared nervously in the weeks since. (“DO NOT BREATHE THE AIR IN L.A.,” the filmmaker Eddie Huang headlined his summary of the webinar.) The presentation included a horrifying electron-microscope image of airborne compounds taken in the aftermath of Sept. 11, a tangle of toxic materials as thick as cobwebs, though invisible to the eye. In situations like these, you may want to consult localized air-quality measures like purpleair, clarity and fire.airnow.gov — these don’t capture everything either but give a more granular, up-to-date picture. You also can’t entirely count on an N95 mask, since those only filter particulate matter, not the “volatile organic compounds” that can linger in homes for months. Instead, as Zoë Schlanger reported recently in The Atlantic, you genuinely need a gas mask.
Some of our best measures of air toxicity now appear to have returned to normal levels, but the story of what burns, and how an urban community can be aerosolized, is also a story of how it burns, which is, often, much more ferociously. “Very few fixtures of the modern home are entirely free of plastic,” Schlanger writes, and for decades now fire specialists have been raising the alarm about what that means when they burn. I first read about demonstrations of this risk in John Vaillant’s “Fire Weather,” in which he describes a harrowing 2005 experiment comparing the burn patterns of “legacy” homes, full of natural materials and surfaces, with “modern” ones, full of synthetic furnishings and an awful lot of plastic. “Today, it is common to find oneself sitting or sleeping on furniture composed almost entirely of petroleum products,” Vaillant writes. “As bizarre as it sounds, many people prepare for their day by dressing themselves from head to toe in highly flammable petroleum-based materials.”
Recently, I watched footage of a more recent test, conducted by the Fire Safety Research Institute in 2020. I suggest you do the same; it will take only a few minutes, because that is as long as it takes for a modern living room to be completely consumed by fire and smoke produced initially by the dropping of a single lit candle.
The fire catches more quickly in the legacy room, but then burns steadily, without really growing or producing much smoke; three or four minutes later, you could still casually extinguish the flames with a towel or pitcher of water. By that point, by contrast, the modern living room has exploded in raging-hot flames and billowing smoke, utterly destroyed within five minutes. When people ask how it is that modern urban communities like Palisades and Altadena could be so thoroughly and quickly aerosolized, this is part of the answer — from the inside out. And when that happens, there’s a good chance that someone, somewhere, will breathe it all in.
Has America Wasted Hundreds of Millions of Dollars on A.I.?
I wrote earlier this week, for the Times Opinion blog, about the release of a Chinese A.I. model that poses a serious challenge to the entire premise of the domestic A.I. push:
Last week, something potentially enormous happened for artificial intelligence: The Chinese company DeepSeek released an open-source, free-to-use reasoning model that is — by crude measures, at least — on par with the best American equivalents. In its announcement DeepSeek offered one cost estimate: Its new r1 model was built for one-thirtieth the cost of OpenAI’s flagship product.
Presumably, in the weeks ahead, geek specialists will be chewing over the claims that r1 was so cheap to produce and that it performs roughly as well as the best-in-class models. But already r1 looks like an earthquake, generating a storm of debate over the weekend, rattling the whole stock market this morning and suggesting two truly seismic possibilities about the technological future on which so much of the American economy has recently been wagered.
Read the whole thing here.
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