While much of Los Angeles was processing the devastation in Altadena and the Pacific Palisades in January of 2025, Jacob Soboroff, national correspondent for MS Now (MSNBC’s new moniker), was busy writing a book about it: Firestorm: The Great Los Angeles Fires and America’s New Age of Disaster.
Recently, Soboroff returned the Palisades — where he grew up — ahead of his book’s release, and THR joined for the tour. He began at the Palisades Recreation Center, where his family had been just a few days before the fires. He pointed to an empty patch of dirt surrounded by a chainlink fence: “we called that the Snack Shack. It was a little tennis shop, but really we would go in there and just buy junk food.”
A few blocks over in the Huntington Palisades, Soboroff visited the remains of his childhood home, which he returned to for the first time on camera, and FaceTime’d his mother to see the rubble.
“I write in the prologue to the book that it was a time machine — I had come back, and I’m standing here, and all my past is around me, but nobody’s left,” said Soboroff. “In a way, it’s like a time machine of the past and into the future to see what my children will inhabit.”
And it wasn’t just seeing his childhood home that gave Soboroff flashbacks. September 11th occurred during his freshman year of college at NYU. “It was like a total blue sky date and it was very windy and seeing all the people, the crush of humanity on Sunset and the bulldozer pushing the cars out of the way and people walk with their suitcases, it was, like, very much a 9/11 callback to me,” he said. And just like then, the air was toxic. Is Soboroff worried about everything he’s breathed in both during the fires and after September 11th? “Yes,” he said. “But what can I do?”
As Soboroff continued to report from the Palisades in those early days during and after the fires, he was inundated by friends, family, and loose acquaintances all asking him to check if their home was still standing.
“The morning of January 8th, one of the people who called me was my brother and said, ‘Can you go run up to the house and check on it?’” recalls Soboroff. The house had miraculously survived, although many around it had burned. A year later, the house remains unoccupied over concerns about air quality and toxicity, says Soboroff. “Even their doctor was like, ‘with a little kid, I don’t know if it’s the best idea for you to come back into the neighborhood.”
The strangest request of all, Soboroff admits, may have been from Katie Miller — wife of Trump’s Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller — who asked if Soboroff could check on Stephen Miller’s parents’ house.
“I was shocked to see that she was calling me, but, just like for everybody else, I was like, yeah, sure, I’ll go over there,” says Soboroff. “I guess I had hoped that in the moment the sort of awful, toxic nature of our politics could be set aside.”
www.hollywoodreporter.com
#Jacob #Soboroff #Book #Palisades #Fire
