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Commentary: Need a balm for these troubled times? I recommend the works of P.G. Wodehouse
Seeking succor when the world seems to be closing in on you is a quintessentially human habit. Some people do it by gorging on comfort food like macaroni and cheese, others choose drink, or drugs, or gardening, or the warmth of a puppy.
I always know when I’m feeling blue, because I feel the gravitational pull of my long shelf of P.G. Wodehouse books.
If you’ve never read Wodehouse, I envy you the pleasure of discovering him for the first time. I’m well past that point; some of his stories and novels I’ve read dozens, even hundreds of times, and they can still make me convulse in laughter. More so when the outside world provides little to laugh about.
Evelyn Waugh, who admitted to learning a hell of a lot from Wodehouse, may have put it best: “Mr. Wodehouse’s idyllic world can never stale,” he wrote in a 1961 essay designed in part to defend Wodehouse over the one blot on his life story (more on that in a bit). “He will continue to release future generations from captivity that may be more irksome than our own. He has made a world for us to live in and delight in.”
And what is that world? It’s timeless, and yet dated. Orwell narrowed it down to the Edwardian era — 1901 to 1919 — long before the irruptions of two world wars and the Great Depression. Its inhabitants are those of “there will always be an England” England: stern vicars, timid curates, lords and earls, penniless titled wastrels living on allowances from their uncles, imperious aunts, upper-crust twits.
They’re all presented on the page by an inspired farceur whose exquisitely penned prose seems effortless, but belies the painstaking craftsmanship needed to make his split-second timing come off.
Some Wodehouse lines are like time bombs, detonating with a momentary delay. My favorite comes in an exchange with the soupy Madeline Bassett in “The Code of the Woosters,” when Bertie comes up with a quote he heard from Jeeves, actually the title of a poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley, to describe his friend Gussie Fink-Nottle as “a sensitive plant.”
“Exactly,” Madeline replies. “You know your Shelley, Bertie.”
“Oh, am I?”
Where to start with Wodehouse? He used several framing devices for his novels and short stories. The golf stories are narrated by the “oldest member” of an upper-class golf club who buttonholes unwary younger members to regale them with his memories of golfers he has known.
The peak of this series, to me, is “Farewell to Legs,” featuring a playboy who takes a house in a placid golfing community and discomposes its dour Scottish golfers with his high jinks: “Angus became aware with a sinking heart that here, as he had already begun to suspect, was a life-and-soul-of-the-party man, a perfect scream, and an absolutely priceless fellow who simply makes you die with the things he says.”
Then there are the fish stories told by Mr. Mulliner at his local pub the Angler’s Rest, involving his inexhaustible circle of relatives. To me, the glory of the Mulliner stories are a sequence of three stories — “Mulliner’s Buck-U-Uppo,” “The Bishop’s Move” and “Gala Night,” all related to his brother Wilfred’s invention of a tonic meant to “provide Indian Rajahs with a specific which would encourage their elephants to face a tiger of the jungle with a jaunty sang-froid,” and what happens when unsuspecting users swallow a tumblerful of something that should be taken by the teaspoon.
Some are set in New York and Hollywood, where Wodehouse spent some time writing lyrics for musicals with Jerome Kern and others. (His best-known song is probably “Bill,” from “Show Boat.”)
But at the summit of Wodehouse’s genius are the stories of Bertie Wooster and his “gentleman’s personal gentleman,” or valet, Jeeves. Of the short stories, all narrated by Bertie, to my mind the greatest are a trilogy beginning with “The Great Sermon Handicap,” continuing with “The Purity of the Turf,” and concluding with what may be the single funniest short story ever penned in English, “The Metropolitan Touch.”
Bertie and Jeeves, as the British essayist Alexander Cockburn once asserted, are a pairing as momentous in literary history as Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, or Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. Wodehouse never exhausted the counterpoint between Bertie’s slangy gibbering and half-remembered literary allusions with Jeeves’ carefully modulated responses: “Very well, Jeeves, you agree with me that the situation is a lulu?” “Certainly a somewhat sharp crisis in your affairs would appear to have been precipitated, sir.”
Bertie is both a classic unreliable narrator and a stock comic character given life. Having inherited a fortune from parents who are almost never mentioned, he’s rich enough for financial difficulties to never be a plot obstruction, though he’s always willing to tide over a pal brought low by “unfortunate speculations” at the racecourse. Jeeves is a deus ex machina; we learn almost nothing about him, except for imperturbability and skill at solving the crises that Bertie falls into through his pure cloth-headedness.
Bertie’s romantic relations are entirely sexless, 20th-century echoes of courtly love, though throughout the oeuvre he gets engaged to at least six women by my count. Among them towers the frighteningly domineering Honoria Glossop. (“Honoria, you see, is one of those robust, dynamic girls with the muscles of a welter-weight and a laugh like a squadron of cavalry charging over a tin bridge.”)
Jeeves extricates Bertie from every one of these entanglements, and thankfully so, because every fiancée begins their relationship with the determination to toss Jeeves out on his ear.
Wodehouse aficionados wage a never-ending debate over which Jeeves and Wooster book is his masterpiece, with “The Code of the Woosters” (1938) and “Joy in the Morning” (1946) typically trading the top two spots.
I’m partial to the former, in part because it features the only overtly political character Wodehouse ever devised. He’s Roderick Spode, a would-be British dictator plainly based on the real-life British fascist and Hitler partisan Oswald Mosley.
Spode is the leader of a gang of fascist toughs known as the Black Shorts. “You mean ‘shorts,’ don’t you?” Bertie says when he first hears about Spode. “No,” he’s told, “by the time Spode formed his association, there were no shirts left. He and his adherents wear black shorts.” “Footer bags, you mean?” Bertie asks, a Britishism for football shorts. “How perfectly foul.”
Spode throws his weight around Brinkley Court, the country estate where the story takes place, harrying Bertie endlessly for reasons we don’t need to go into, until Jeeves provides Bertie with a magic word guaranteed to turn dictator Spode into a shrinking mouse. At the climax, Bertie presses his advantage, informing his nemesis:
“The trouble with you, Spode, is that just because you have succeeded in inducing a handful of half-wits to disfigure the London scene by going about in black shorts, you think you’re someone. You hear them shouting ‘Heil, Spode,’ and you imagine it is the Voice of the People. That is where you make your bloomer. What the Voice of the People is saying is: ‘Look at that frightful ass Spode swanking about in footer bags. Did you ever in your puff see such a perfect perisher?’”
It’s no spoiler to tell you that the magic word Jeeves provides to Bertie is “Eulalie.” As for who or what Eulalie is, and why it reduces Spode to jelly, you’ll have to read the book.
That brings us to that one blot on Wodehouse’s life. When World War II broke out, he was living peaceably in the French resort of Le Touquet. When the Nazis came through in 1940 they interned Wodehouse and transported him to Berlin, from which the Germans persuaded him to make a handful of “nonpolitical” radio broadcasts for his British compatriots.
There was an uproar at home. Newspaper columnists condemned Wodehouse as a “Quisling,” libraries took his books off their shelves, there were condemnatory speeches in Parliament.
The truth is that the broadcasts were indeed nonpolitical; if the Germans thought they had scored a propaganda victory it was instantly evident that they were wrong, and they halted the broadcasts after only five. Wodehouse had displayed nothing worse than the stupidity of the innocent. He knew nothing of the political context, much less that his broadcasts came at a moment when the very future of Britain was in question.
But that fit precisely with Wodehouse’s literary landscape. Farce, of course, depends on its characters’ failure to recognize what is near at hand; Wodehouse in his splendid isolation in France and in a bygone fictional Eden was incapable of recognizing the crisis in Britain was so near at hand that his broadcasts would strike hard at his countrymen’s diminishing morale.
Orwell’s opinion of Wodehouse’s attackers was withering. “It was excusable to be angry at what Wodehouse did,” he wrote in 1946, “but to go on denouncing him three or four years later — and more, to let an impression remain that he acted with conscious treachery — is not excusable. Few things in this war have been more morally disgusting than the present hunt after traitors and Quislings. At best it is largely the punishment of the guilty by the guilty. … In England the fiercest tirades against Quislings are uttered by Conservatives who were practicing appeasement in 1938 and Communists who were advocating it in 1940.”
One could go on. The pleasures of Wodehouse are inexhaustible, so I’ll stop here. With some news about Trump’s tariffs threatening to disturb my peace today, and having just finished a rereading of “The Code of the Woosters,” I will share the next few hours with G. Darcy (“Stilton”) Cheesewright, Zenobia Hopwood, Edwin the Boy Scout, Boko Fittleworth and Percy, Lord Worplesdon, and their horseplay in and around Steeple Bumpleigh, Hampshire.
Looking back on the affair and its satisfying resolution, Bertie tells Jeeves, “There’s an expression on the tip of my tongue which seems to me to sum the whole thing up. … Something about Joy doing something.”
“Joy cometh in the morning, sir?”
“That’s the baby. Not one of your things, is it?”
“No, sir.”
“Well, it’s dashed good.”
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.
Dear Mr. Pelley:
I meant what I said in my letter last week to the 60 Minutes team: joining 60 Minutes is the honor of my career and I am grateful to be working alongside the people who have contributed to the most important television journalism brand this country has ever produced. While I’m new to 60 Minutes, I’ve devoted my career to investigative journalism and storytelling. I started this job excited to collaborate and to benefit from the wisdom and experience of the 60 Minutes veterans, with you among them. For that reason, one of the first things I did in my new role was call you to talk and invite you to dinner. It is a profound disappointment that you rejected that overture and chose ambush instead. Yesterday, you hijacked my first meeting with staff to disparage me, my qualifications, and my intentions with remarkable incivility and contempt. I welcome a diversity of viewpoints and respectful debate among the team, but this was nothing of the sort. Yesterday’s performative display of hostility enacted in front of the staff instead of in a civil, private conversation-demonstrated that you have no interest in contributing to the future success of the show, or approaching my new tenure with a mind open to collaboration and progress. I am here to deliver first-in-class news programming, not to make headlines about newsroom drama. I am eager to work alongside those who share this goal.
Despite yesterday’s misconduct, I had hoped that in sitting down with you today we could find a path forward together. You made clear that you are not interested in such a path.
Your antipathy to the future of the show has come through loud and clear. And I have heard you. I therefore write on behalf of CBS News, Inc. (“CBS”) to inform you that your employment with CBS is terminated for cause effective immediately. Enclosed is your formal termination letter.
Sincerely,
Nick Bilton
Executive Producer, 60 Minutes
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