Getting your takes on California from publications with "New York" in their name may not be the smartest play

The following comment is from David Wallace-Wells. It is part of a conversation he had with Jared Diamond in 2019 published in New York magazine. If anything is more relevant now than it was then.

I’m a native New Yorker and lived my whole life in this environment on the East Coast. And when I see images of those wildfires and when I hear stories of people I know or people I meet, and the fact that they’ve evacuated, the fact that no matter where you are in Southern California, also in parts of Central California and Northern California, you have an evacuation plan in mind. I just don’t understand how you guys can live like that. It must begin to impose some kind of psychic cost.

Diamond does a reasonably good job parrying the silliness, pointing out that it was the psychic costs of dealing with New England blizzards that convinced him to move to Southern California, but he is far too polite to come out and say just how wrong Wallace-Wells gets this.

Though the situation is very different when it comes to earthquakes, the majority of Angelenos do not have and do not need any kind of wildfire evacuation plan. There are obviously exceptions. If you live somewhere like Topanga or have a house in the Hollywood Hills, you very much do need to know in advance what your options are for getting out of harm's way. If you live in or near the foothills, it's a good idea. But most of us do not live in or even adjacent to wildland-urban interfaces. We do need to have plans in place for how to deal with the possibility of heavy smoke or power outages, and when we travel in the state, it's a good idea to check on fire conditions, particularly in the national forests. This is a huge problem and no one in the state or in any mountainous regions of the West can entirely avoid its impact, but most of us are under no real danger of losing our house to a wildfire.

Too much of the national narrative about LA and California in general either originates with or is interpreted by people with no real knowledge of the place. This is always a bad way to approach reporting about an area, but when you're talking about something as big, varied, and complex as this, rampant misinformation is as inevitable as forest fires.

This isn't the first time we've had an issue with Wallace-Wells' reporting.