Returning to a Home Consumed by the Wildfires

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

News, David, Books, Arts, Storytelling, Wnyc, New, Remnick, News Commentary, Yorker, Politics

4.2 • 5.5K Ratings

🗓️ 28 January 2025

⏱️ 12 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The longtime staff writer Dana Goodyear talks about the devastation of the wildfires that devastated her house and thousands of other buildings in the Los Angeles area.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Listener supported, WNYC Studios.
0:12.5	This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.
0:16.3	Staff writer Dana Goodyear has reported on California, the entertainment industry, a deadly crime spree in Malibu,
0:24.0	Kamala Harris's rise in politics, and the ever more fragile environment in the state.
0:28.9	Dana has lived for a long time in Los Angeles in the neighborhood of the Pacific Palisades,
0:34.0	and recently she and her family found their lives very much at the center of the story.
0:40.2	About a week after the house burned down, I drove up Pacific Coast Highway and I stopped at a command
0:50.5	post basically right underneath my neighborhood at the beach. If you drive up about
0:55.8	1,200 feet, you're in the Palisades. I knew that I wanted to go back up there and they weren't
1:03.3	letting residents in. They had no problem with me going in as a journalist.
1:11.7	So you have a trespass and you're trying to get up there?
1:14.6	I guess my question to you is what's your ultimate goal today?
1:18.6	I have combined goals.
1:20.8	So I write for the New Yorker magazine.
1:23.7	It's long-form non-fiction journalism.
1:25.8	Okay.
1:26.3	And I need to be seeing things that all the heroic emergency operations people are doing.
1:33.1	And I also need to figure out what the hell is going on at my house
1:36.9	because we haven't been able to see it.
1:39.2	Okay.
1:39.6	And I know it's gone, but more than that.
1:42.1	Yeah, I'm sorry for that.
	...

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