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Welcome to the Quillette podcast, hosted on alternate weeks by me, Jonathan Kay, and by Iona Italia.

Quillette is where Freethought lives. We are an independent grassroots platform for

heterodox ideas and fearless commentary. You are about to hear a free preview of this

week's episode. To hear the full episode, and to get access to all our podcasts and articles,

visit us at quillette.com and click the subscribe button. And this week I'm in Los Angeles,

which is why I sound like this. I'm using my travel microphone. And no, this trip wasn't

supposed to be a fact-finding journalistic project to learn about

the wildfires raging around the Los Angeles area.

I'd actually planned this trip months ago so I could attend a science conference at the

University of Southern California.

And in coming weeks, you'll be hearing a lot about that conference.

But now that I'm here, I decided to use the opportunity to educate myself and

Quillette listeners about the fires, which you can smell from the USC campus and pretty

much everywhere else in this city. To date, the fires have claimed at least 10 lives and

destroyed tens of billions of dollars worth of property. To find out what caused the fires

and what Californians can do

to prevent them from recurring,

I paid a visit to an expert here on the USC campus.

Professor William Deverell,

a historian with a focus on the history of the American West,

...