In the latest issue of New York Magazine, deputy editor David Wallace-Wells writes a bulletin from our climate future, looking at Los Angeles’s fires and how Angelenos are normalizing their suffering as quickly as climate change produces it. “In 2018, then-Governor Jerry Brown called the fires ‘the new normal,’ then adjusted to ‘the new abnormal,’” writes Wallace-Wells. “A better phrase would be ‘the end of normal,’ since climate change promises to cascade away from us as long as we continue to burn fossil fuels. Among those living in fire-prone areas, apocalyptic talk often unfolded alongside quotidian concerns and a kind of personal utopianism.”
The cover photograph, taken on day two of the Woolsey fire in Malibu last year, features “a guy right out of central casting,” in the words of New York’s photography director Jody Quon. While the fires are raging in the background, he’s on his phone, covering his mouth with what is maybe his t-shirt. “It epitomized what it feels like to be living with fire. It humanized the whole thing,” says Quon. “It felt more surprising than a look into a house that was on fire to see someone actually zooming through it.”