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Column: Black spatulas and mystery drones: Your guide to the unfounded panics of the season
The “silly season” of news coverage used to refer to the dog days of summer, when there was so little of importance happening that newspapers and cable channels filled the vacuum with fluff.
Not this year.
Starting in October and gaining intensity through the season, Americans have found themselves awash in panicky health and safety warnings about previously unappreciated threats.
Most people don’t look at the sky. They don’t know what airplanes look like up there, particularly at night, and they don’t know what the stars and planets look like.
— Scientist Cheryl Rofer explains the drone panic
It started with warnings about your black plastic spatulas and other such implements. Spurred by a study and press release issued Oct. 1 by the Seattle nonprofit Toxic-Free Future, news organizations from coast to coast — including The Times — posted articles advising consumers to ditch their black food utensils and children’s toys with black plastic pieces.
The black spatula panic was soon outrun by the drone panic, which has Americans scanning the skies for menacing aircraft.
As is typically the case, both of these panics springs from a nugget of truth. It’s true, for example, that chemicals that could theoretically harm people’s health at high exposure levels can be found in some household products — chiefly chemical flame retardants in black plastic electronic devices that have been banned from new uses but have been getting recycled into the consumer stream.
It’s also true that drones, ranging in size from the lightweight models deployed by hobbyists to large commercial models, are becoming a pain in the neck, with the largest craft posing a real danger to commercial aircraft.
But the distance between those nuggets of reality and the level of public hysteria is so great that the latter can be explained mostly by two factors: the desire for clicks on news sites and to fill newspaper columns, and the impulse of preening politicians to show they’re attentive to constituents’ concerns, no matter how dubious.
Let’s take these panics in order, starting with the black utensils. For a time, press advisories that people ditch their black spatulas were impossible to ignore. The most alarmist was probably an offering from The Atlantic, which was headlined: “Throw Out Your Black Plastic Spatula/It’s probably leaching chemicals into your cooking oil.”
The piece ran under an illustration of a black spatula dripping sinister goblets of melting plastic, against a background of bilious green. It gave prominent space to the Toxic-Free Future study, as well as to research papers by the British scientist Andrew Turner, who has been studying the contamination of household goods by those electronic flame retardants for years.
A few points about the Toxic-Free Future paper, which spurred all that news coverage. First, it’s based in part on a massive mathematical error. The paper calculates that users of “contaminated kitchen utensils” would have a median intake of BDE-209, one of the common flame retardants, of 34,700 nanograms per day. (A nanogram is a billionth of a gram.)
The paper states that this daily exposure “would approach” the reference dose set by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency of 7,000 nanograms per kilogram of body weight per day, which the the paper says pencils out at 42,000 nanograms per day for a 60-kilogram adult. Pretty good ground for concern, since the EPA uses the reference dose to measure the level of health risk from exposure to a toxin.
Except: 7,000 times 60 isn’t 42,000; it’s 420,000. The median intake for a 60-kilogram adult, in other words, isn’t anywhere close to the EPA’s reference dose.
Toxic-Free Future has issued a correction to its paper, acknowledging that the daily intake it calculated doesn’t “approach” the EPA reference dose but is one-tenth of the reference dose. (The Times has followed up with an article about the correction; several other publications that went to town on the black utensil threat have also done so.) But it also says “the calculation error does not affect the overall conclusion of the paper.”
Megan Liu, the paper’s lead author, told me that it wasn’t really designed as a risk assessment, but chiefly as a study of how much of these contaminants has entered the consumer economy through kitchen utensils, children’s toys and other products. “Flame retardants shouldn’t even be in these products at all,” she says, which is true.
Yet the issue for the average consumer is how dangerous are these products, really? The answer is, not very.
In a study cited by Liu’s paper, researchers found that some chemicals leached from a black spatula into cooking oil.
The Atlantic’s take on this was that the paper “found that flame retardants in black kitchen utensils readily migrate into hot cooking oil.” Not so readily, however: The researchers cut a black spatula into small pieces and basted them in 320-degree cooking oil for 15 minutes. Who does that? As epidemiologist Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz points out, “most people don’t leave their spatulas in the fryer and walk away for a quarter of an hour.”
More issues are related to this paper. One is that 60 kilograms, or about 132 pounds, isn’t the average weight of American adults. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Preventgion places the average weight for an adult male at about 200 pounds, and for a female about 171.
Using those weights would have shown that the potential for health effects is even more remote than the overheated news coverage of the paper suggests. In any case, the evidence for long-term human health effects from the normal exposure to these chemicals is scanty. It comes almost entirely from experiments on lab mice and rats subjected to doses unlikely to occur in the real world, and to an experiment on human cells also in the laboratory.
Of course, if you’re inclined to eliminate all artifacts of modern commerce from your life, no one is stopping you. Liu and her colleagues observe that kitchen implements made from wood or stainless steel are widely available. They’ve also properly noted that among the real problems with the recycling of plastics in consumer goods is that we don’t know anything about how much goes into which products and where they’ve come from.
Some legislatures have moved toward requiring more disclosure, which is to the good. But if you spent the last few weeks or months doing a hard target search for black implements in your house, you probably didn’t have to.
Now on to the drones. When I first heard of New Jersey residents expressing panic over mysterious lights overhead, I flashed on the Firesign Theatre line, “Big light in sky slated to appear in East.” Except that the Firesign Theatre was a satire troupe of the 1960s and ‘70s, the line originated in their parody of a post-apocalyptic news broadcast, and the game was given away by the title of their best album, “Don’t Crush that Dwarf, Hand Me the Pliers.” The current panic appears to be for real.
All the worrying got me thinking about the interview I conducted in September with Sean M. Kirkpatrick, who had recently retired as the Pentagon’s chief investigator of UFO reports. As he had written in a Scientific American op-ed, he and his team had been overwhelmed by a “whirlwind of tall tales, fabrication and secondhand or thirdhand retellings of the same,” producing “a social media frenzy and a significant amount of congressional and executive time and energy spent on investigating these so-called claims.”
Sound familiar?
The claims of an invasion of the Eastern seaboard by swarms of drones has every marker of a groundless social media frenzy. This started with some truly baroque partisan speculation; on Dec. 11, Rep. Jeff Van Drew (R-N.J.) cadged himself some airtime on Fox News by claiming that his home state was under attack from Iran.
“I’m going to tell you the real deal,” he said. “Iran launched a mother ship that contains these drones. It’s off the East Coast of the United States of America. They’ve launched drones.”
Three days later, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, declared “this has gone too far,” grousing that mystery drones had closed down a metropolitan New York airport. The bare-bones reporting on this event might have made people think that JFK or LaGuardia had been attacked by mystery drones. In fact, the airport was Stewart Airport, which is 60 miles from Manhattan, is served mostly by the ultra-low-cost Allegiant Airlines with routes to Florida, and was closed for one hour.
My favorite performance was that of former Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, a Republican, who reported via X that on Dec. 12 he “personally witnessed (and videoed) what appeared to be dozens of large drones in the sky above my residence … (25 miles from our nation’s capital). I observed the activity for approximately 45 minutes.”
It didn’t take long for Hogan to be inundated with responses from astronomers and meteorologists that what he had videotaped weren’t drones flying over his house, but the constellation Orion, which as meteorologist Matthew Cappucci informed him crisply, is “made up of stars between 244 and 1,344 light years away.”
Since then, neighborhood groups in New Jersey have organized “sky watches” to track the invading swarms and traded reports via their Ring doorbells. Donald Trump advised people to shoot the drones down, which is a good way to make things worse.
Some people conjecture that the drone hysteria is the product of the public’s mistrust of government. That doesn’t explain much, since a large share of the hysteria has been promoted by elected officials themselves. Politicians are naturally averse to calling their constituents idiots, so they have been responding by demanding more transparency from government officials at the Pentagon and other agencies. It’s always safe for politicians to assure voters that they’ll hold bureaucrats’ feet to the fire.
The problem here is that government agencies have been very clear about what’s happening overhead. The “drone” sightings, they say, are of commercial or U.S. military aircraft, helicopters, and perhaps drone flights by hobbyists wanting to get in on the fun. Most of it is surely the product of ignorance. How much more do we need federal agencies to explain?
“Most people don’t look at the sky,” notes Cheryl Rofer, a retired nuclear scientist. “They don’t know what airplanes look like up there, particularly at night, and they don’t know what the stars and planets look like. They can’t estimate distance — which is tricky in the sky — and they aren’t aware of how things can seem to move. They aren’t aware of how to check if those objects in fact are moving.”
There may be one other explanation for why there are so many purported drone sightings in New Jersey. As the blogger Kevin Drum writes, there are a lot of drones in New Jersey, in part because a state law “indemnifies drone fliers against lawsuits from New Jersey landowners for use of their property for drone overflights.”
So, sure. New Jersey loves drones, which nobody noticed until a local congressman decided to blame Iran.
That should cover the hysterias of the moment. Black spatulas won’t kill you, and the lights in the sky aren’t alien spaceships or Iranian bombers. Any questions?
Google took internet searches to the next level. Could it do the same for mosquito control?
The Silicon Valley-based tech giant is seeking to release up to 64 million sterilized male mosquitoes in California and Florida over two years, according to a notice in the Federal Register. It’s part of an ambitious effort to curb the diseases the insects spread.
Google says it can harness technology to optimize a concept that’s been around for decades, but hasn’t been successfully scaled with mosquitoes to rein in disease.
For example, the process often involves separating the insects by sex to isolate the males. Currently, that’s done manually and can be time consuming. Google says it’s “developing new technologies that combine sensors, algorithms and novel engineering to take advantage of unique aspects of mosquito biology to quickly and accurately sort males from females.”
The company also says it’s building software and monitoring tools to guide releases of sterile males, and its scientists and engineers are creating sensors, traps and software to decide which areas need to be treated and treated again.
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Called Debug, the project targets Aedes aegypti mosquitoes, which are native to Africa but have infiltrated nearly half of California’s counties since first being detected in the state in 2013. Not only do they drive residents nuts with itchy bites, but they can carry a number of potentially serious diseases, including dengue, Zika, chikungunya and yellow fever.
The plan is to infect males — which don’t bite — with a bacteria called Wolbachia, which effectively renders them sterile. They are then released to seek out wild females and mate. Females will lay eggs but these won’t hatch, which experts say drives down the population over time.
There are other methods to sterilize male mosquitoes. Vector control districts serving Los Angeles, Orange and San Bernardino counties have irradiated males and released them in recent years.
Early results are promising. Two neighborhoods treated by the Greater Los Angeles Vector Control District saw a more than 80% reduction in the female Aedes aegypti population in 2024 and 2025.
But as the Greater L.A. district seeks to expand its operations, cost poses a problem. Last year, business owners signaled they weren’t willing to shell out more every year to make it happen. District officials are still hoping to sway them.
If Google moves forward, it wouldn’t be the first time it has been involved in such an effort. In 2018, the company conducted a large-scale trial in Fresno County, releasing 14.4 million Wolbachia-infected males in three neighborhoods.
“At peak mosquito season, the number of female mosquitoes was 95.5% lower in release areas compared to non-release areas, with the most geographically isolated neighborhood reaching a 99% reduction,” a 2020 paper reported.
Google has applied for a permit from the Environmental Protection Agency to carry out the releases in California and Florida, for which the federal agency is currently seeking comments before deciding whether to grant approval.
The company aims to release up to 16 million Wolbachia-infected males in California, and the same in Florida, per year for two years, the Federal Register announcement said, for a total of 64 million.
Urgency to tamp down the invasive mosquito population in California has increased since 2023, when the state logged its first locally acquired dengue cases — meaning people were infected in their communities, not while traveling. The following year, the number of locally acquired cases ballooned to 18, with 14 of them in Los Angeles County.
A study published last week in “The Lancet Regional Health — Americas” found that approximately 18.2 million Californians — primarily in the Central Valley, L.A. and San Diego areas — live in regions where conditions are probably suitable for local dengue transmission.
“Under moderate scenarios of climate warming and urban expansion, an additional 4.1 million residents may be at risk by mid-century,” according to the study led by UC Berkeley’s Lisa Couper. Researchers note the current and future risk of transmission remains low except during summer in the Central Valley and Southern California.
“I’m pretty much in favor of whichever [sterile insect technique] approach gets us the disease prevention and nuisance control we need and at the lowest price,” Susanne Kluh, general manager of the Greater L.A. County Vector Control District, said in an email.
She said her district went with radiation because it was the only approved technique when they wanted to launch their pilot, and that it’s “also the only one where some company does not make a profit in the middle.” However, she wouldn’t rule out using Wolbachia if it turned out to be the most affordable option.
Residents of Monterey Park voted overwhelmingly to ban data centers on election day, making the San Gabriel Valley city the first in the nation to do so by public vote.
As of Wednesday, 86% of votes were in favor of Measure NDC, the city ban, according to the Los Angeles County registrar-recorder/county clerk.
Other cities and towns have passed moratoriums on data centers, as a wave of opposition sweeps the country. But the Monterey Park vote can only be overturned by another ballot measure, making it the most permanent data center ban in a jurisdiction.
Monterey Park’s City Council had already banned data centers by ordinance, after a proposed 247,000-square-foot data center met an outpouring of public anger and concern. The developer withdrew that plan.
That facility would have been less than 500 feet away from the nearest home, and would have used three times the electricity of the entire 60,000-person city. Residents said it would have caused noise and air pollution and driven up electricity rates.
“This ensures long-lasting protections for current and future generations,” Amy Wong, co-founder of the group San Gabriel Valley Progressive Action, said of the vote. “It means that future city councils cannot overturn a data center ban, even if data center developers wanted to spend money to fund pro-data center candidates.”
The measure had no formal opposition. The developer of the proposed facility, investment firm HMC StratCap, said it wouldn’t engage in the ballot fight when it withdrew in March.
The Data Center Coalition, an industry trade group, expressed disappointment in the vote.
“It sends a signal that the area is closed for business, both for data centers and for other significant economic development projects,” state policy director Khara Boender said.
“It deprives local residents of the opportunity to compete for jobs and investment, while also causing the area to relinquish substantial long-term economic investment, high-wage jobs, and critical tax revenue to neighboring areas or other states.”
SGV Progressive Action worked with hyperlocal groups including No Data Center Monterey Park to rally support for the measure.
The group is now focused on stopping data center proposals in the City of Industry and fighting a move by City of Industry, Santa Fe Springs, Vernon and City of Commerce to welcome data centers and other industry with fast-tracked permitting and tax incentives.
City of Industry, in the San Gabriel Valley, and Vernon, south of downtown L.A., are primarily industrial areas, each with around 300 permanent residents. They are employment centers, and tens of thousands of workers commute in daily.
There has been little vocal opposition to data centers among the few residents of these cities. Wong said the protest is primarily coming from the surrounding neighborhoods.
“If a data center gets built in City of Industry, residents across the region would bear the brunt of pollution and increased utility costs,” Wong said, noting that it is surrounded by 16 other cities and unincorporated communities.
Data center proposals have been limited in California compared to Virginia, Texas, Georgia, Illinois and Arizona, which sit at the center of a recent boom in hyperscaler facilities to power artificial intelligence.
California has the third-most data centers in the country, with 300, but high electricity rates, expensive land and regulatory hurdles mean that fewer, and smaller, facilities are currently planned than in other hotspots.
That doesn’t mean opposition hasn’t been fierce. In Coachella and Imperial County, residents are showing up in droves to protest local proposals.
In the San Gabriel Valley, Montebello, El Monte and Baldwin Park have all enacted temporary moratoriums, and Alhambra recently banned data centers as part of a zoning code update.
Wong said she hoped the ballot measure vote would galvanize the opposition. “The vote is a testament to the people power of our region,” she said. “Our region is worth protecting, and we won’t let data centers determine our future.”
A rule intended to prevent rent gouging in the wake of the Eaton and Palisades fires has lapsed in Los Angeles County, possibly exposing some renters to hikes.
The executive order that blocked rent increases was issued by Gov. Gavin Newsom amid the devastating wildfires last year. Under the order, landlords couldn’t increase rents by more than 10% above their prefire levels.
The rule, which was supposed to be temporary and was repeatedly extended, ended Friday after a vote to extend it again failed to garner enough votes. Supervisor Lindsey Horvath, whose district includes Pacific Palisades, sounded the alarm in a motion to extend price protections that failed to pass at the Board of Supervisors’ May 19 meeting.
“These price gouging protections continue to be necessary as construction and rebuilding continue, and as thousands of people remain displaced,” the motion said. “Families which signed short-term leases could face drastic price increases of 50% or more without further price gouging protection.”
Los Angeles County is home to more than 1 million rental properties, though not all of them needed protection from the new rule. There are already stricter rent increase caps for many residences, depending on the location, type and age of the building. Despite the rent control in the region, the people of Los Angeles pay among the highest rents in the country.
It is uncertain whether renters will face rapidly rising rents now that the protection has lapsed. But some real estate experts and policymakers said there was no need for the temporary rule that was part of the governor’s state of emergency.
Supervisors Kathryn Barger, Janice Hahn and Holly Mitchell abstained from voting on the motion to extend the protection, while Supervisors Hilda Solis and Horvath supported it.
“I abstained because I did not see sufficient evidence to justify extending this emergency ordinance, nor did I see evidence to eliminate it entirely,” Hahn said.
Barger’s office said she supported allowing the protections to sunset while waiting to see whether new information emerged.
“Market data already shows countywide rents are only about 2% above pre-emergency levels and rental inventory has grown,” Barger representative Helen E. Chavez Garcia said. “The Supervisor is also mindful of the burden these ongoing protections place on small property owners throughout the county.”
Mitchell did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
There haven’t been steep rent hikes in neighborhoods within three miles of the Palisades fire, according to a Times analysis of data from Zillow, the property listing company.
In ZIP Codes within three miles of the Palisades fire, rent increased 4.8% from December 2024 to April 2025. In areas around the Eaton fire, which destroyed swaths of Altadena, rent jumped 5.2% in the same period.
In L.A. County, ZIP Codes farther from the fires saw only about a 2% increase.
A landlords representative, Jesus Rojas of the Apartment Owners Assn. of Greater Los Angeles, told the supervisors during public comment at the meeting that the county’s rent-gouging rules have “long outlived the emergency they were intended to address” and are now being “wrongfully used to harm thousands of rental housing providers throughout the county.”
“There is no proof that multifamily rental housing providers are hugely increasing rents for impacted homeowners,” Rojas said.
Indeed, there are strong signs that the property market in the Los Angeles area has at last begun to cool.
L.A. metro-area rent prices recently fell to a four-year low, with the median rent slipping to $2,167 in December.
Meanwhile, condominium sales had their slowest start of the year in decades. Condo sales in Los Angeles have plummeted to a 20-year low, with fewer than 2,000 units sold in January and February — the worst start to the year since 2005.
Newsom defended the price-gouging protections shortly after they went into effect.
“In the days following the Los Angeles firestorms, we worked quickly to protect Los Angeles survivors from any form of exploitation,” he said in February 2025. “The state has the tools in place to not only block price gouging during this emergency, but also to prosecute bad actors.”
The Los Angeles County Department of Consumer and Business Affairs said it received more than 2,000 complaints after the fires, alleging that retailers and landlords were taking advantage of people put in hardship by their losses, and sent out more than 2,000 cease-and-desist letters to businesses and landlords for alleged price gouging, said Morine Merritt, who oversees department investigations into consumer and real estate fraud.
“Close to 90% of the complaints that we received involved allegations of rent increases,” Merritt said in an interview. Now that the fire-related protections have expired, existing laws and “regular market conditions determine price increases for goods and services, including rents,” she said.
Crackdowns on fire-related rent gouging have been rare, said Chelsea Kirk of the activist organization the Rent Brigade, which analyzed L.A. County’s rental market in the year after the fires. It reported 18,360 potential examples of price gouging in listings but said that few lawsuits had been filed by authorities so far.
Last week, Rent Brigade announced what it said was the first private civil lawsuit brought by a family that claimed to be rent-gouged in the aftermath of the wildfires. Plaintiffs Randall and Candy Renick, whose Altadena home was damaged, said they were charged nearly three times the maximum permitted rate for nearly 10 months. They seek restitution of $96,000 plus civil penalties and attorneys’ fees.
The rental market has probably stabilized since the fires, Kirk said, but other families may still be “locked into illegal rents” that they agreed to pay when they were in a rush to find housing after they were displaced.
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