TGIF: Hellfire

Firefighters fight the Eaton fire on Wednesday, January 8, 2025, in Altadena, California. (Jason Armonds via Getty Images)

The policies that broke California. Meta’s fact-checkers head to Texas. David Muir cinches his waist. Jimmy Carter’s cliquey funeral. And much, much more.

By Nellie Bowles

01.10.25 — TGIF

Nellie Bowles is a co-founder for The Free Press and its head of strategy. She was previously a reporter at The New York Times, where she won the Gerald Loeb Award for investigative journalism and the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award. She started her career at her hometown paper, the San Francisco Chronicle.

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Hello and welcome back to TGIF, where I wander through piles of ash and figure out which one of you is to blame (it was not me, nor my tiny decorative brushfire).

→ California down: Los Angeles is currently battling the most destructive wildfire in Los Angeles County history. The Palisades are gone—all those beautiful homes with those beautiful views jus…