THOMAS LARSON

(Written January, 2025)

The day after the Eaton fire destroyed much of Altadena, California, one of its residents, the L.A.-centric essayist and podcaster Meghan Daum, recorded a phone talk that begins with a somber recitation of facts and becomes a tragic surrender to fate. The previous evening, warned by neighbors to get out, she packed a few clothes, her computer, her phone, and her dog into her car and fled. The morning after, she says, she learned that “my house and every other house on the street had burned to the ground. The wind was so strong and the water was so scarce that emergency crews and firefighters were virtually helpless.”

Soon, Daum is excoriating social media, a living entity, for calling the Palisades and the Altadena conflagration “rich people fires.” Yes, there are pricey homes but their working-class residents, like her, never stop hustling to earn a living. As with Katrina, the compounded loss towers over the individual—no school, no library, no CVS, no park, no local job, and no infrastructure (the wires above are gone) means you can’t just rebuild your home. You pray the feds, the state, and the insurers (Hah!) will lay the groundwork.

Daum’s 12-minute “dispatch” is the most fully informed testimonial I’ve heard in the weeks after the L.A. fires, indeed, the most trenchant, largely because she poses what has happened to her against anyone arguing from a political or moral perspective about the “cause” of the catastrophe knows precisely “zero percent of what they’re talking about.” We news consumers should keep that in mind. And with that, she says, she’s releasing this announcement to everyone, not “just paying subscribers.”

That was January 9; on January 15 she posts an update. Daum is reflective, revisiting her hazy decisions about what she did and didn’t take, and why, the night of her evacuation, which has less of the weight of the first tale. She discovers how things bought and delivered from Amazon—the disposable, the clutter—went unnoticed during packing and post-flight is unmissed. That crap feels tawdry compared to the one-of-a-kind losses: personal gifts, original paintings, a cherished oboe, even the half-uneaten Poke Bowl in the fridge she would have got to.

Meghan Daum is and should be better known for her podcast, The Unspeakable, seeded by her provocative essay collection of 2014. On air and video, she’s built a substantive crib, mostly women discussing heterodox takes on current issues. In the wake of losing her home and footing, her program has been quiet. These brief phone-recorded chats alert her followers who value her regular presence like readers of a weekly magazine and now as listeners are committed to her voice. The same day, deluged, she says, with people’s concern, she tweets, “Lots of people asking how they can help. The best thing is to become a paying subscriber. #LosAngelesFire dispatches are not paywalled but the podcast will resume its regular schedule very soon and premium subs get lots of perks, including stuff I write!”

Some might note that this ad crosses the line between shameful self-promotion and a life-affirming confession, platformed from the churchly dais of social media. But I don’t fault her. Indeed, for me she is using the fire (it could have been anything: mudslide, earthquake, arrest) to ask for what artists, especially freelance authors, have been asking for since the Internet severely crippled our income—attention to + compensation for our work.

Here’s an essayist-book-author-producer-podcaster, an indefatigable transliterate do-it-yourselfer, adopting one of her many voices, which is, when necessary, writerly. She is saying, in effect, I know I talk a lot with a lot of people, mostly women about the vicissitudes of the culture, but I haven’t, and won’t, in my gainful employment given up writing. It’s like a backup job I keep if podcasting doesn’t sustain itself. (I’d also offer that because she was a writer first, like the podcaster and former book author Sam Harris, her ability to improvise cogently and with flair is evident. I’m not sure what mere celebrity pod talkers have to call on in an emergency.)

It’s a mere observation to note that her podcast must continue to bring in the revenue she needs to restock her toolkit: studio, microphone, crew, space to organize, a sense of where she is and from which she can broadcast. Because to broadcast is to be: That is this alien new age where patient writer must turn social-media speaker. Daum’s loss of home legitimizes paying subscribers not only to support but also to identify the lone self-publisher and sub-stacker who has no choice in how the broligarchs keep rearranging our communication structure. My sense is that we who are trying to keep up must be just as relentless as they are, at plugging our products, essentially, pitching you my brand, me. Such is where we authors find ourselves in dinghies, floating out to sea, in the mid-2020s, with feelings of resentment that any plea for help occasions.

I can’t tell you how many, nearly all of my lifelong friends, think that whatever I write should be free to them, their email response, “just send me a copy,” let someone else pay. In the new transliterate mediaverse, which rewards those who are most crossover savvy, we shill or die. Thanks for your service in supporting whatever platform this codependent dispatch ends up on.