Inferno & A Lost Archive

Featured Articles

Inside the Fight Against a Los Angeles Inferno

The New Yorker • 25 Jan 2025 • ~4400 words

A reporter embeds with wildland firefighters during one of the deadliest blazes in California history.

An entire city, maybe an entire country, was starting to appreciate the reality that wildland firefighters inhabit. Dirty work is often assumed to be unenlightened work, but wildland firefighters have a unique empirical understanding of natural forces. This includes troubling facts, such as the distance that floating embers can travel (miles) and the speed with which a wind-driven fire can move (about ten per cent of prevailing wind speeds). Firefighters also have access to a ground truth that is out of reach for the general public, and even for many scientists, about how our world is changing. In the past ten years, they have witnessed new and dramatic kinds of weather, unfamiliar fire behavior, and blazes that grow to an unprecedented size and intensity. Firefighters told me again and again how much they loved their job: the physical labor, the adrenaline, and the freedom of working outdoors. But they expressed how frustrated they were that, as a society, we are not doing routine work—creating defensible space around communities, managing landscapes, igniting prescribed fires—to help prevent such devastation.

Nazi Persecution Scattered My Family. A Lost Archive Brought Us Together

The Walrus • 27 Jan 2025 • ~6500 words

How 10,000 pages of documents sent me on a journey through Germany’s dark past.

I leaf through the images, noting how expressions migrate with the year of the photo. Felix in a family picture from 1934 is beaming. By the time of his Reisepass, he looks grimly determined. Two years into exile, posing in a rumpled white linen suit with colleagues, next to a locomotive in the trainyards where he worked in Quito, I can see the deep fatigue, his face darkened and haunted. Pictures of my mother show the same progression. The kid posing with her rucksack on the first day of school is the girl who wanted to be a doctor like her famous grandfather Rudolf. A decade later, she’s sixteen and looks utterly battered, her face that of the young woman exposed at school for being half-Jewish, attacked, humiliated, cast out, gone into hiding, lucky to be alive. Her bruised expression carries the weight of every day she’s spent alone. But it’s also the face of the woman she would become as a result, who would meet my father in Guayaquil, have five kids and raise them in Venezuela, emigrate to Canada, to Vancouver, where she’d break down sobbing in the family Volvo at the sight of searchlights over the Pacific National Exhibition, as we drove down Hastings Street, all of us kids watching wide eyed from the back seat as my father tried to comfort her.

Recommended Articles

How the Capybara Won My Heart—and Almost Everyone Else’s

The New Yorker • 27 Jan 2025 • ~6400 words

It’s not hard to understand why capys have a cultlike following on Instagram and TikTok. I fell for the giant rodent decades ago.

The unreality of the capybara is partly responsible for its cultlike following. The past years have seen the rise of capybara TikTok and Instagram. If you have been following the beast on your socials, you might know that capybaras get hiccups; that they carry large oranges and yuzu on their heads; that they allow birds to eat the schmutz out of their fur, which brings them almost orgiastic levels of delight; that they try to help injured corgis escape from their protective cones; that they cuddle with monkeys and lick baby kangaroos; that a group of them adopted a cat named Oyen into their social group at a Japanese zoo.

The end of neoliberalism?

Aeon • 27 Jan 2025 • ~5000 words

The case of Mexico shows that, despite a proliferating discourse that it is over, neoliberalism is as relentless as ever.

In fact, conflict, war, violence, pain, pessimism, frustration and illiberalism abounded in the past four decades, but the reigning rhetoric is otherwise. For scholars and natives of Latin America, the narrow, triumphalist if mournful viewpoint of Anglo-American elites avoids the discomfort of addressing the Latin American experience of, and abundant scholarship on, neoliberalism. We should not be surprised. Including Latin America in these nominally global histories would make it impossible to suggest that neoliberalism is tantamount to consensus; that it was peacefully developed, not violently imposed; that it is defined by a sense of optimism; that it is not imperial. Without Latin America, we forget about the intimidating rise of Third World power before the 1980s, epitomised by movements for a New International Economic Order. We forget about the weaponisation of the Volcker Shock and the destruction wrought by its ensuing debt crises. We forget the reassertion of First World domination through enforced ‘structural adjustment’. More importantly, we are able to ignore that neoliberalism is structurally ongoing.

‘The nice version of her was manufactured for YouTube’: my mum, the family vlogger who became a child abuser

The Guardian • 25 Jan 2025 • ~5100 words

Ruby Franke was a social media star who made viral videos about her six children and perfect-seeming life – until she was jailed for child abuse. Now her eldest daughter Shari is telling her side of the story.

When Shari was in eighth grade, aged 14, she took a course in mental health. It was only then that she understood she was suffering from severe depression. She was overwhelmed by a sense of self-loathing and hopelessness. Sometimes she felt so bad, she wanted to end it all. She told Kevin, who was sympathetic and suggested to Ruby that Shari would benefit from therapy. Ruby scoffed and said she just needed to sleep longer, eat better and exercise more.

The warlord, the oligarch and the unravelling of Russia’s Amazon.com

The Economist • 24 Jan 2025 • ~4450 words • Archive Link

Before the Ukraine war, Wildberries was a giant of e-commerce. Now it’s caught up in a medieval blood feud.

When a business in Russia reaches a certain size, its owners often consider it prudent to seek a *krysha* – a protector*.* The concept of a *krysha*, which literally means “roof”, became widespread during the 1990s when predatory gangs would demand that nascent capitalist enterprises pay them protection money. As time passed the gangs realised it was in their interests for these businesses to flourish, and they became more like patrons, helping their clients manage state bureaucracy and out-manoeuvre rivals. After Putin took control of the country the idea of a *krysha* changed slightly, to refer more to someone with close ties to the Kremlin. Nowadays big companies will typically call in a *krysha* if they’re facing trouble with regulators or looking for help repelling a hostile takeover.

Did a Private Equity Fire Truck Roll-Up Worsen the L.A. Fires?

BIG • 25 Jan 2025 • ~3250 words

During the LA fires, dozens of fire trucks sat in the boneyard, waiting for repairs the city couldn't afford. Why? A private equity roll-up made replacing and repairing those trucks much pricier.

… the increasing price is a result of a private equity firm, American Industrial Partners, consolidating the fire truck industry and forcing up prices across the board. For decades before the 2010s, the fire apparatus industry was characterized by relatively stable (inflation-adjusted) prices and ample production capacity.

My Last Trial

The Atlantic • 24 Jan 2025 • ~3950 words

Amanda Knox shares her journey through an 18-year legal battle in Italy that began with a wrongful murder conviction.

When the police interrogate you, the first thing they do is isolate you. Isolation is not just about the room you’re in (one with no windows and no clocks). It’s about making you feel that the police themselves are your only support system. This was easy for the Perugia police; I was in a foreign country thousands of miles from my family, and I often didn’t understand what was being asked of me. I assumed that the police’s unwillingness to believe me was the fault of my own inadequate Italian. The police had also tapped my phone, and knew that my mother was flying to Italy to help me, and that soon I’d no longer be alone. And so, hours before her arrival, they broke me in that final interrogation.

Speaking in Small Tongues

The Fence • 23 Jan 2025 • ~3750 words

An oil trader and an Old Etonian with a genius for PR, was Justin Welby the worst Archbishop of Canterbury since Thomas Arundel?

You could argue that Welby, having endured all that, surviving probably the worst pain someone can experience, was well equipped for a life of spiritual contemplation. You could also argue that such experiences would emotionally rupture almost anyone, changing them for good. We can’t say exactly how the events we have described affected Welby but the Archbishop has gone public with his depression, his ‘self-hatred, self-contempt, real, vicious sense of dislike of oneself.’

In Sprawl We Trust

Current Affairs • 27 Jan 2025 • ~7150 words

How did the US become filled with sprawl? Simplistic debates about "centralized planning" versus "the free market" belie the truth: that a strong coalition of private and public interests helped create the sprawl that dominates our landscape.

Those who attribute America’s sprawling road infrastructure to either government planning or free markets aren’t exactly wrong. But it’s more accurate to say that highway building programs constituted a capitalist support system for a broad coalition of automobile interests. As urban historian and Building Suburbia author Dolores Hayden told me*,* “the federal government intervened very effectively on behalf of business from the 1920s on” and was “very pro-money making” for these groups, which were “doing precious little on behalf of citizens.” At best, this arrangement might be called quasi-centralized planning, but Hayden’s term for it—“stealth planning”—is more apt.