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The Southern California fires have us on the edge of our seat. When can we finally relax?

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The Southern California fires have us on the edge of our seat. When can we finally relax?

When our city went up in flames last week, everyone I know in Los Angeles was in emergency mode. Now, as a new week begins, it’s hard to know how to feel.

For those of us living in neighborhoods not decimated by fire, the acute threat seems to have passed, at least for the moment. The skies are blueish and a light breeze is blowing as I write this. There’s ash on the ground, but less of it in the air. Most LAUSD schools have thankfully reopened. Friends and neighbors who left town are trickling back home.

And yet the National Weather Service warned of a “particularly dangerous situation” with wind gusts up to 45 to 70 mph from 4 a.m. Tuesday through 12 p.m. Wednesday for swaths of Los Angeles and Ventura counties. Additional powerful wind events are also expected throughout the week.

“We are not in the clear yet and we must not let our guard down,” Los Angeles Fire Chief Kristin Crowley said at a news conference Monday.

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And so, in my house at least, the evacuation bags are still packed and waiting by the door and my phone remains in easy reach at all times. But how much longer do we have to live like this, allowing Watch Duty alerts to interrupt our sleep, poised for flight? When will we stop feeling the threat of fire hanging over our heads? Or has the threat always been there and we’re only now just seeing it?

“The reality check is there will always be events that nature throws at us that, no matter how great our technology, we can’t fight,” said Costas Synolakis, professor of civil and environmental engineering at USC. “We don’t have to live in fear, but this should give us pause about how vulnerable we are.”

A season of high risk

Fire experts say it was the deadly combination of extremely high Santa Ana winds of up to 99 mph and a city that hadn’t seen significant rain in eight months that set the stage for the two most destructive fires in L.A. history: the Palisades fire and the Eaton fire. Collectively they have burned more than 37,000 acres and killed at least 24 people.

“How a fire starts, grows and spreads has a lot to do with wind and rainfall,” said Amanda Stasiewicz, assistant professor of fire policy and management at the University of Oregon. “We had this duality of high risk from drought making things very pro-fire growth and pro-fire proliferation plus fast-moving winds that are going to carry it quickly, make it harder to suppress and challenge firefighter safety.”

The winds may have died down for now, but the dry conditions remain unchanged, making it easy for new fires to break out from a long list of sources. If the underbelly of an overheated car comes in contact with bone-dry vegetation, that can start a fire. If someone accidentally drags a chain behind their truck, unknowingly sending sparks into the air, that too can set our hills ablaze.

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“As long as these drought conditions endure, having that go bag packed is not a bad idea,” Stasiewicz said. “If you have a wind event, the opportunity is there to have a fire get bigger, quicker — and larger fires are harder to contain.”

Her advice? Keep an eye on the weather forecast, paying special attention to wind advisories. “It’s a bit of keeping yourself on your toes,” she said.

This ends with rain

Despite the terrifying imagery and intense warnings, keep in mind that the high wind gusts predicted for the coming week are still significantly lower than the howling “Wizard of Oz”-like winds that blew through the city the night our two deadly fires began.

“To be clear, it looks very unlikely that we’ll see strong north winds of anywhere near the magnitude that we did in the beginning of [last] week,” said Daniel Swain, a UCLA climate scientist on a YouTube livestream on Friday.

However, he does not think L.A. is out of the woods yet when it comes to fire risk.

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“Relatively strong Santa Ana winds have a cumulative effect on intense drying,” he said. “I call them atmospheric blow-dryer-like winds. The longer they blow, the dryer and more flammable the vegetation becomes.”

According to Swain, the city of L.A. will not truly be able to breathe a collective sigh of relief until we see rain.

“What we really need is an inch or two of rain to truly and finally end fire season in L.A.,” he said. “Until then, any time there are dry windy conditions, we are going to see an additional risk.”

Unfortunately, there is only a slim chance of scattered showers in the forecast for the next two weeks.

“There is a chance we may continue to see fire risk into February or even March,” Swain said.

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Facing a new reality

Even with no rain in the forecast, Synolakis, who has studied people’s response to natural disasters like tsunamis, hurricanes and fires across the world, thinks it’s likely that most of us will relax our hyper-vigilant state fairly soon.

“Last week the feeling in my community in Venice was eerily similar to the first few days after 9/11 when people didn’t know if there were going to be more attacks elsewhere in the United States,” he told me. “Hearing helicopters, and seeing these giant plumes of fire increased our uncertainty. People didn’t know if the fire was going to spread all the way down here.”

But as long as the fire plumes continue to clear and evacuation orders continue to be downgraded to warnings or less, he expects people who have not been directly affected by the fires to return to a semblance of normalcy.

“If there is no new flare-up, I think by the weekend people in surrounding communities will take a deep sigh of relief,” he said.

Whether that relief is warranted, however, is worth considering. The feeling of acute threat may have passed, but climate scientists have been warning us for decades that a warming world will be accompanied by more intense weather and more intense fire.

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“These fires are entirely unexpected, but this is what I keep telling people about climate change,” Synolakis said. “You are going to have more events that are unexpected, and you are not going to be able to deal with them.”

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Comedian Ronny Chieng is thankful he never got a job out of law school

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Comedian Ronny Chieng is thankful he never got a job out of law school

A note from Wild Card host Rachel Martin: When you’ve watched Ronny Chieng’s comedy, it becomes pretty clear he’s a guy who takes none of his success for granted. He knows life could have turned out differently. What were the odds that a twenty-something Chinese Malaysian guy trying to launch a comedy career after law school in Australia would make it big in America? Whatever the odds were, Ronny Chieng beat them to become one of the biggest names in comedy.

He’s been a regular correspondent on The Daily Show since 2015 and is now a rotating host. He absolutely crushes his role as Jimmy O. Yang’s best friend in the Hulu show Interior Chinatown. And he’s got his third Netflix comedy special out now called Ronny Chieng: Love to Hate It, which made me laugh so hard I started recommending it to anyone within earshot.

The comedy in his specials is rooted in personal experience and observation, but this one is especially so. From stories about the challenges and absurdity of IVF to his dad’s death, he weaves in and out of these intimate places in the most hilarious way possible.

Throw in some razor-sharp observations about masculinity and YouTube in the Trump era, and boom! You got yourself an epic comedic journey well worth the ride.

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The trailer for “Ronny Chieng: Speakeasy.”

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This Wild Card interview has been edited for length and clarity. Host Rachel Martin asks guests randomly selected questions from a deck of cards. Tap play above to listen to the full podcast, or read an excerpt below.

Question 1: How do you consciously try to emulate your parents?

Ronny Chieng: I don’t think anything is that impressive. [laughs]

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That’s how I mimic them because they’re not easily impressed by much — but in a good way. So, I think in that way I try to see reality the way they see it, where they’re like, “Oh yeah, this is not that big of a deal. This is not that big of an achievement.” [laughs]

Rachel Martin: I think that would be helpful in your line of work, actually, because there is the risk that things spiral and all of a sudden, you think you’re really awesome.

Chieng: Yeah, yeah. It keeps you working to pursue perfection, right? You never think you’ve achieved it, so it’s good.

Martin: Did that ever cut the other way for you growing up? Like, if you did a thing and you wanted them to be proud of you and they were like, “Hmm?”

Chieng: I don’t know. I don’t think I was that impressive a kid. I didn’t have that many great achievements anyway, so I don’t feel like they wronged me by not being impressed. So, no, I don’t. I was like, “Yeah.” I was like, “You’re right. It’s not that impressive.” [laughs]

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Martin: And do you find that people in your line of work are constantly seeking that kind of affirmation? Do you find yourself falling into that trap?

Chieng: You know, my line of work being stand-up comedy — undoubtedly, we seek affirmation through a crowd response to our jokes, right?

We are looking for a good reaction to a joke, specifically laughter. So, in that way our integrity is compromised.

But we don’t believe in our own marketing. Someone told me, “The best comics think that their material is bad.” And there’s something to that, I think. I don’t know any great comic who’s like, “Oh, my material is the best in the world,” you know?

You’re always looking at other comics and going, “Man, that guy’s really funny. I need to write a better bit,” you know? You never feel like you have the greatest joke in the world. You’re always impressed by someone else’s joke. That’s how I feel, anyway.

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Jimmy O. Yang (left) and Ronny Chieng (R) at the premiere of Hulu's "Interior Chinatown."

Jimmy O. Yang (left) and Ronny Chieng (R) at the premiere of Hulu’s “Interior Chinatown.”

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Question 2: What was a disappointing experience that now feels like a blessing?

Chieng: I couldn’t get a job coming out of law school. My grades were too bad, and I couldn’t get hired. And everyone around me was getting jobs because I went to a very good law school, so everyone around me was these very hyper-competitive type-A people who were getting really good jobs at these big law firms. And I felt a little left out at the time.

But in hindsight, I’m like, “Oh man, I’m so glad I never got hired,” because I think it would have been more difficult for me to quit a job and do comedy. As it was, I just — I didn’t have anything to lose, so I could just do comedy. It wasn’t like I had to pick between comedy and a corporate job. I was just not smart enough like my wife. I went to law school with my wife and she’s like a genius. Her grades are amazing. She got all these job offers. But I couldn’t get a single one.

Martin: So, were your parents disappointed that that didn’t pan out for you?

Chieng: No, they weren’t because I never told them.

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Martin: What do you mean?

Chieng: I didn’t tell them I was doing comedy. They thought I was studying for the bar exam, which I was in fairness. But at that time, I was just doing comedy. And by the time they found out, it was almost too late.

Martin: Wait, that’s awesome. So you just led this separate life — assuming you were in a good enough place that when they found out, they weren’t traumatized. You’re like, “I’m a comedian — and I can pay my rent. So it’s okay?”

Chieng: Yeah. They only found out honestly when I got hired on The Daily Show.

Martin: Wow. Did they know what The Daily Show was?

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Chieng: No, they didn’t know what it was, but after I told them I got hired, they googled it, they found out all about it, they were like, “Oh, you know, this is an important show, this is a very famous show,” and I’m like, “Yeah, I know, I know.”

They kind of trained me to be like, you know, it’s just an opportunity. It doesn’t mean you’re good. [laughs] It just means you have a chance to do something cool, right? Like that’s what it was, so that’s what I took it for. And that’s really what the strength of being on The Daily Show is. Like, more so than fame or whatever, it’s like this opportunity to work with extremely talented people and really become better yourself. Because everyone at that show is so good at their jobs that you don’t want to be the weakest link. And so you lift your game. So, that’s why it’s the best job in comedy. It makes you a better writer, performer, comedian, satirist, you know? That show is — it’s like the Harvard Business School of comedy.

Ronny Chieng on “The Daily Show.”

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Question 3: How have your feelings about death changed over time?

Chieng: Oh, yeah. It’s become more real. It used to be this kind of conceptual abstract, right? And then it’s become very real the last couple of years, seeing it up close. It becoming more real was kind of frightening. I was studying Buddhism recently, and there was this very interesting concept that I’m going to butcher because I’m going to give you the Cliff Notes of it in, like, five seconds. But the idea was something like: we are a different person in every moment, anyway. Our thoughts are different. Our cellular makeup is different in every second, every moment. Meaning — we are different people in every second of every moment anyway. So, the concept of “me” doesn’t really exist because I’m constantly changing anyway.

And so when I die, it doesn’t matter because I never really existed. So that is kind of like the Buddhist answer — one of the Buddhist answers — to that.

Martin: I like that idea. Does that mean that when a person dies, you think that it’s just another transition, or are they gone?

Chieng: I think that, unfortunately, as a person observing someone dying, that person is gone. I’m just talking about me, personally — for me to come to terms with my own mortality. That’s how I view it anyway — that I never really existed. I’m different every moment, so if I go, that’s just another change, right? Dealing with other people, that’s tough. I think that requires a different concept.

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Jets Part Ways With Aaron Rodgers, Moving in 'Different Direction' at Quarterback

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Jets Part Ways With Aaron Rodgers, Moving in 'Different Direction' at Quarterback

Aaron Rodgers
Over And Out In Big Apple
… Jets Part Ways

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New board elects President Trump chair of Kennedy Center

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New board elects President Trump chair of Kennedy Center

Education Artist-In-Residence Mo Willems supervised a 2019 rehearsal at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC.

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images North America

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President Trump is the new chair of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, following through on a promise the president made last week. He posted the following on the social media platform Truth Social on Wednesday afternoon.

“President Donald J. Trump was just unanimously elected Chairman of the Board of the prestigious Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. The President stated, “It is a Great Honor to be Chairman of The Kennedy Center, especially with this amazing Board of Trustees. We will make The Kennedy Center a very special and exciting place!”

Trump was elected by a board that excluded the 18 Democratic appointees purged by the president last week. New board members, according to a statement from the Kennedy Center, include the Vice President’s wife, Usha Vance as well as Susie Wiles, Dan Scavino, Allison Lutnick, Lynda Lomangino, Mindy Levine, Pamela Gross, John Falconetti, Cheri Summerall, Sergio Gor, Emilia May Fanjul, Patricia Duggan and Dana Blumberg.

In a statement sent to NPR marking her departure, former Kennedy Center president Deborah Rutter said, in part:

“The goal of the Kennedy Center has been to live up to our namesake, serving as a beacon for the world and ensuring our work reflects America. I depart my position proud of all we accomplished to meet that ambition. From the art on our stages to the students we have impacted in classrooms across America, everything we have done at the Kennedy Center has been about uplifting the human spirit in service of strengthening the culture of our great nation.

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“I have been motivated my whole life by the fundamental values of America – freedom, equality, and a deep belief in the American dream. Core to our American experience is also artistic expression. Artists showcase the range of life’s emotions – the loftiest heights of joy and the depths of grievous despair. They hold a mirror up to the world – reflecting who we are and echoing our stories. The work of artists doesn’t always make us feel comfortable, but it sheds light on the truth.

“Much like our democracy itself, artistic expression must be nurtured, fostered, prioritized, and protected. It is not a passive endeavor; indeed, there is no clearer sign of American democracy at work than our artists, the work they produce, and audiences’ unalienable right to actively participate.”

Trump has boasted about never attending a performance at the country’s national cultural center. He skipped the Kennedy Center Honors in 2018, traditionally attended by sitting presidents. A few of that year’s honorees had vocally criticized his leadership and politics, including the singer Cher and theater artist Lin-Manuel Miranda.

On Monday, a longtime ally, Richard Grenell, was named interim executive director. 

For more than a decade, the Kennedy Center’s board was led by philanthropist David M. Rubenstein, who had deferred retirement until next year and told the New York Times that he believed he was on friendly terms with the president. Until recently, the 36-member board was notably bipartisan, with members split equally between Republicans and Democrats. Several had been appointed by President Biden shortly before he stepped down; they included former White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre and his longtime aide and advisor, Mike Donilon.

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Board members are appointed to six-year terms, and typically, those terms are fulfilled. The Kennedy Center’s leadership addressed the legality of Trump’s actions in a statement on Friday.

“Per the Center’s governance established by Congress in 1958, the chair of the board of trustees is appointed by the center’s board members,” it said. “There is nothing in the center’s statute that would prevent a new administration from replacing board members; however, this would be the first time such action has been taken with the Kennedy Center’s board.”

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