The fast-rising Chinese AI lab DeepSeek is sparking national security concerns in the U.S., over fears that its AI models could be used by the Chinese government to spy on American civilians, learn proprietary secrets, and wage influence campaigns. In her first press briefing, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said that the National Security Council was “looking into” the potential security implications of DeepSeek. This comes amid news that the U.S. Navy has banned use of DeepSeek among its ranks due to “potential security and ethical concerns.”
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]DeepSeek, which currently tops the Apple App Store in the U.S., marks a major inflection point in the AI arms race between the U.S. and China. For the last couple years, many leading technologists and political leaders have argued that whichever country developed AI the fastest will have a huge economic and military advantage over its rivals. DeepSeek shows that China’s AI has developed much faster than many had believed, despite efforts from American policymakers to slow its progress.
However, other privacy experts argue that DeepSeek’s data collection policies are no worse than those of its American competitors—and worry that the company’s rise will be used as an excuse by those firms to call for deregulation. In this way, the rhetorical battle over the dangers of DeepSeek is playing out on similar lines as the in-limbo TikTok ban, which has deeply divided the American public.
“There are completely valid privacy and data security concerns with DeepSeek,” says Calli Schroeder, the AI and Human Rights lead at the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC). “But all of those are present in U.S. AI products, too.”
Read More: What to Know About DeepSeek
DeepSeek’s AI models operate similarly to ChatGPT, answering user questions thanks to a vast amount of data and cutting-edge processing capabilities. But its models are much cheaper to run: the company says that it trained its R1 model on just $6 million, which is a “good deal less” than the cost of comparable U.S. models, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei wrote in an essay..
DeepSeek has built many open-source resources, including the LLM v3, which rivals the abilities of OpenAI’s closed-source GPT-4o. Some people worry that by making such a powerful technology open and replicable, it presents an opportunity for people to use it more freely in malicious ways: to create bioweapons, launch large-scale phishing campaigns, or fill the internet with AI slop. However, there is another contingent of builders, including Meta’s VP and chief AI scientist Yann LeCun, who believe open-source development is a more beneficial path forward for AI.
Another major concern centers upon data. Some privacy experts, like Schroeder, argue that most LLMs, including DeepSeek, are built upon sensitive or faulty databases: information from data leaks of stolen biometrics, for example. David Sacks, President Donald Trump’s AI and crypto czar, accused DeepSeek of leaning on the output of OpenAI’s models to help develop its own technology.
There are even more concerns about how users’ data could be used by DeepSeek. The company’s privacy policy states that it automatically collects a slew of input data from its users, including IP and keystroke patterns, and may use that to train their models. Users’ personal information is stored in “secure servers located in the People’s Republic of China,” the policy reads.
For some Americans, this is especially worrying because generative AI tools are often used in personal or high-stakes tasks: to help with their company strategies, manage finances, or seek health advice. That kind of data may now be stored in a country with few data rights laws and little transparency with regard to how that data might be viewed or used. “It could be that when the servers are physically located within the country, it is much easier for the government to access them,” Schroeder says.
One of the main reasons that TikTok was initially banned in the U.S. was due to concerns over how much data the app’s Chinese parent company, ByteDance, was collecting from Americans. If Americans start using DeepSeek to manage their lives, the privacy risks will be akin to “TikTok on steroids,” says Douglas Schmidt, the dean of the School of Computing, Data Sciences and Physics at William & Mary. “I think TikTok was collecting information, but it was largely benign or generic data. But large language model owners get a much deeper insight into the personalities and interests and hopes and dreams of the users.”
DeepSeek is also alarming those who view AI development as an existential arms race between the U.S. and China. Some leaders argued that DeepSeek shows China is now much closer to developing AGI—an AI that can reason at a human level or higher—than previously believed. American AI labs like Anthropic have safety researchers working to mitigate the harms of these increasingly formidable systems. But it’s unclear what kind of safety research team Deepseek employs. The cybersecurity of Deepseek’s models has also been called into question. On Monday, the company limited new sign-ups after saying the app had been targeted with a “large-scale malicious attack.”
Well before AGI is achieved, a powerful, widely-used AI model could influence the thought and ideology of its users around the world. Most AI models apply censorship in certain key ways, or display biases based on the data they are trained upon. Users have found that DeepSeek’s R1 refuses to answer questions about the 1989 massacre at Tiananmen Square, and asserts that Taiwan is a part of China. This has sparked concern from some American leaders about DeepSeek being used to promote Chinese values and political aims—or wielded as a tool for espionage or cyberattacks.
Read More: Artificial Intelligence Has a Problem With Gender and Racial Bias.
“This technology, if unchecked, has the potential to feed disinformation campaigns, erode public trust, and entrench authoritarian narratives within our democracies,” Ross Burley, co-founder of the nonprofit Centre for Information Resilience, wrote in a statement emailed to TIME.
AI industry leaders, and some Republican politicians, have responded by calling for massive investment into the American AI sector. President Trump said on Monday that DeepSeek “should be a wake-up call for our industries that we need to be laser-focused on competing to win.” Sacks posted on X that “DeepSeek R1 shows that the AI race will be very competitive and that President Trump was right to rescind the Biden EO,” referring to Biden’s AI Executive Order which, among other things, drew attention to the potential short-term harms of developing AI too fast.
These fears could lead to the U.S. imposing stronger sanctions against Chinese tech companies, or perhaps even trying to ban DeepSeek itself. On Monday, the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party called for stronger export controls on technologies underpinning DeepSeek’s AI infrastructure.
But AI ethicists are pushing back, arguing that the rise of DeepSeek actually reveals the acute need for industry safeguards. “This has the echoes of the TikTok ban: there are legitimate privacy and security risks with the way these companies are operating. But the U.S. firms who have been leading a lot of the development of these technologies are similarly abusing people’s data. Just because they’re doing it in America doesn’t make it better,” says Ben Winters, the director of AI and data privacy at the Consumer Federation of America. “And DeepSeek gives those companies another weapon in their chamber to say, ‘We really cannot be regulated right now.’”
As ideological battle lines emerge, Schroeder, at EPIC, cautions users to be careful when using DeepSeek or other LLMs. “If you have concerns about the origin of a company,” she says, “Be very, very careful about what you reveal about yourself and others in these systems.”
In an increasingly digital world, connectivity is a necessity. Yet, nearly a third of the global population remains offline, unable to access the services vital to participating in our global digital economy and society. The Edison Alliance at the World Economic Forum has worked to change that by delivering digital connectivity and access to financial, healthcare, and education services to those who need them most. Our partnerships with governments, industries, and non-governmental organizations drive lasting systemic change.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]The World Economic Forum played a pivotal role in launching and guiding the Alliance’s work, providing a platform for stakeholders to come together and commit to a vision with actionable ideas and plans. CEOs, ministers, and heads of international organizations harnessed the power of public-private partnerships and gathered to discuss the barriers to connectivity and identify scalable solutions.
The 1 Billion Lives Challenge, achieved by the Edison Alliance in 2024, one year ahead of schedule, exemplifies what can be achieved when diverse stakeholders work toward a common goal. Through partnerships with telecom providers, financial institutions, technology companies, and policymakers, the Alliance delivers impactful programs worldwide. In India, we are using digital tools to connect rural communities to vital health services. In Africa and the U.S., mobile banking solutions empower millions of unbanked individuals with access to financial services. In Latin America, digital literacy initiatives opened new educational opportunities for often underrepresented populations.
Each of our efforts underscore the profound impact of digital connectivity. For the rural farmer in Kenya, it means access to real-time market information that can increase yield and revenue. For the student in a remote village in Peru, it means access to online learning platforms and global educational resources. For the small business owner in Indonesia, it means the ability to reach new markets and grow. Connectivity, quite simply, is the key to unlocking potential and reducing inequality.
Achieving the 1 Billion Lives Challenge is not just a milestone, as every life touched is a life improved and a call to further action. It demonstrates that global challenges—no matter how complex—can be addressed when we come together with purpose and determination. But our work is far from over. While one billion people have better and more comprehensive access to our digital world, billions more still lack access to these critical digital tools. And, the adoption of AI and Generative AI tools threatens to further widen that gap. The digital divide remains one of the most pressing issues of our time, and the Alliance is committed to continuing its efforts to close it.
The World Economic Forum will remain a critical organization for advancing our work. It is a place where leaders are not only inspired to think big but are also held accountable for delivering on their commitments. The Forum’s unique structure, which emphasizes multi-stakeholder collaboration, ensures that progress is not just discussed but achieved. It is in this spirit that the EDISON Alliance was born, and this is the spirit that will launch further efforts to expand access to vital resources and opportunities. Our work will continue through new initiatives like the World Economic Forum’s AI for Prosperity and Growth in Africa, launched at this year’s Annual Meeting.
Looking ahead, we see a world where connectivity is available to all who want it. This vision requires sustained effort, innovation, and investment. It requires us to address the structural barriers that perpetuate the digital divide, from affordability and infrastructure to digital literacy and policy frameworks. It requires us to keep asking tough questions and pooling our resources to push the boundaries of what is possible. We call on the public and private sectors to increase their collaboration so we can meet these bold ambitions. Together, we will build a world where no one is left behind in the digital age.
When President Donald Trump delivered his second inaugural address on Monday, January 20, he preserved a tradition of national mythmaking that has only served Americans poorly. Beyond the expected theatrics, Trump declared the U.S. to be “history’s greatest civilization,” despite its fixture as the most unequal nation with the lowest life expectancy, even just among Western democracies of today. And, despite his record-thin margin of victory in November’s election, the President claimed that “the entire nation is rapidly unifying behind our agenda.”
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]What’s actually noteworthy about this moment, however, is that there is a rare current of agreement among Americans today. The consensus comes in the form of a deep pessimism about our most cherished national story. One recent poll of American voters conducted by WSJ/ NORC found that only 36% still believe in an American Dream broadly defined by the idea that hard work begets success and upward mobility. This finding represents a big tumble downward from 2012 when, even in the shadow of the Great Recession that cleaned millions of families out, 52% of Americans still held fast to the story of the dream.
The far-reaching senses of despair and disenchantment in the U.S. aren’t solely the results of bad trade deals or corporate concentration or the American retreat from social and civic engagement. They can’t be described strictly through the failure of the government to protect citizens and consumers from the exploding cost of necessities like housing, healthcare, education, and childcare. The national gloom stems from something deeper, specifically the torment of a supposedly cohering national story about opportunity that is encoded in culture, policy, and civic life.
Read More: Why a ‘Third Life’ Is the Answer to America’s Loneliness Epidemic
Historically, to be American (for some at least) meant the chance to live free of the titles, class static, and feudal baggage of the Old World. Even before the term was coined, an American Dream of being socially mobile by means of hard work dusted industriousness with a special merit-driven magic that has seduced and frustrated millions. From the Pilgrims and founding fathers through the frontier and all the way to today’s hustle culture, gig economy, and ragged-by-design safety net, the essential American folk tale has plaited hard work with destiny, self-reliance with self-actualization, and success with moral worth.
The trouble with that story is that it makes struggle feel shameful. Take the nation’s kludgy public assistance programs, which are purposefully gummed up with red tape. A 2020 audit by the Government Accountability Office, for example, found that roughly 8,000 Americans file for bankruptcy and another ten thousand people die every year while waiting for a disability benefit decision (or an appeal) to be decided by the Social Security Administration. “The administrative burdens themselves are, in some sense, a deliberate test of deservingness,” Dr. Heather Hahn, an associate vice president at the nonpartisan think tank Urban Institute, explained of America’s social insurance programs. “It’s this assumption that only someone truly, desperately needy, who really has no other options, is going to put up with all that is required. That adds to this deservingness.”
Meanwhile, in public retellings, the Americans who don’t make ends meet while providing care work for loved ones or battling at terrible jobs are just people without sufficient ambition. “I don’t think hard-working Americans should be paying for all the social services for people who could make a broader contribution and instead are couch potatoes,” former Florida representative Matt Gaetz once argued in 2023 while lobbying against anti-poverty programs.
Similarly, an individual drowning in student debt is never someone who took out loans to go to nursing school or dropped out of an engineering program to care for a sick parent. It’s always some loafer or wastrel who, in the words of Senator Ted Cruz, “studied queer pet literature” or a “slacker barista who wasted seven years in college” and can’t “get off the bong for a minute.” On the other hand, those who make it are upheld as virtuous and enlightened. Calling up the 2016 electoral map, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton argued that, “All that red in the middle, where Trump won, what the map doesn’t show you is that I won the places that represent two-thirds of America’s gross domestic product. So I won the places that are optimistic, diverse, dynamic, moving forward.”
While the narrative around opportunity has largely remained fixed, the American experience has degraded from one of bootstrapping to one of white-knuckling. Over the past 45 years, the U.S. economy has doubled in size and American workers have grown 81% more productive while their wages have only grown 29%, according to the Economic Policy Institute . (Workers of color and workers without college degrees have seen their real wages decline.) Today, medical debt is the biggest cause of bankruptcy in America and baby formula is one of the most shoplifted items. According to a Brookings Institution study, 44 % of Americans work jobs that qualify as low-wage.
“I did everything I was supposed to do,” Nakitta Long, a single mother of two with a Master’s degree in North Carolina, told me about the impossibility of finding a job that might sustain her family. “Why is this not simple?”
These are some of the mad-making, faith-shredding headwinds that made arguments about preserving democracy fall flat for people already failed by a democracy where hard work doesn’t pay off.
They are the same winds that have rustled President-elect Donald Trump back into power. And we’re learning again, from Capitol rotunda to the displaced communities of Southern California, winds can very easily carry fires.
Adapted excerpt from 99% PERSPIRATION by Adam Chandler. Reprinted by permission of Pantheon Books, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright (c) 2025 by Adam Chandler.
Economic fears have metastasized into grievance—this is the core finding of the 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer. We observe a profound shift in popular sentiment, a move beyond political polarization to aggressive advocacy for self-interest. Throughout the elections of the past year, citizens have raised their voices against business, government, and the wealthy across the globe. Incumbent parties have been ousted in Western democracies, including the U.S., U.K., France, Germany, and Canada. Business has been pushed back on for its involvement in societal issues, from DEI to sustainability.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]Such grievances stem from a conviction that the system is unfair, business and government make things worse, and the rich keep getting richer. A growing sense of alienation is so profound that nearly two-thirds of respondents now fear being discriminated against, up 10 percentage points from the previous year. Even high-earners are increasingly worried about being made a victim—up 11 points to 62%. Three quarters of respondents worry about their pay not keeping up with inflation. And there is deep concern about job loss due to the impact of innovations like automation, which 58% of employees worry about, and of globalization—62% of workers worry about international trade conflicts affecting their livelihoods.
Four preconditions, which have been building for the past decade, have exacerbated these grievances. First is a pervasive lack of belief in a better future. Only one-third of respondents believe that the next generation will be better off. In every Western democracy 30% or fewer believe so. In Germany, just 14% of people believe that the next generation will be better off. And in France, just 9% believe so.
There has also been a widening divide in trust among top and bottom income brackets. Low-income respondents have profoundly less trust in institutions than the top quartile. For instance, 48% of low-income respondents trust institutions, averaged across business, government, media, and NGOs—compared to 61%, on average, among high income respondents. Business sees the greatest divergence of any institution, with a 16-point trust gap between high- and low-income groups.
Institutional leaders themselves may have also dropped the ball. Globally, two-thirds of respondents worry about journalists, government officials, and CEOs intentionally lying to them.
And there are fewer and fewer agreed-upon facts. Nearly two-thirds of respondents find it difficult to differentiate between news from a reliable source and disinformation. The decision by social media networks to move away from fact-checking will further complicate an already messy media context.
Our collective grievances are broad-based, extending from economic to electoral to societal. Most people hold a sense of grievance against elites and institutions. Sixty one percent of respondents have a moderate (41%) or high (20%) sense of grievance, defined as feeling business and government make their lives harder and serve narrow interests, and the system benefits the wealthy while regular people struggle. Such a belief is more prevalent among those on the Left than the Right (69% on the Left compared to 57% on the Right) and among older people than younger people (66% among those aged 55 and up compared to 58% among those between the ages of 18 and 34). The majority of high-grievance people adopt a zero-sum mindset: If something gives you a win politically, it comes at a cost to me.
The wealthy are seen as playing a malign role in society. Two-thirds of respondents believe the wealthy fail to pay appropriate taxes and laws that serve the wealthy come at the detriment of “people like me.” Add all of these grievances up, and many think that capitalism has failed. Over half of respondents believe that capitalism does more harm than good—53% among the general population, including 55% of 18 to 34-year-olds.
Many also feel that the prevailing political systems are broken. Only one-third of respondents believe that those with different political views “play by the rules” and fewer than half (44%) trust those with different political beliefs. Government is distrusted in 17 of the 28 countries we measured. And to many, violence may be necessary. Over half of young people approve of one or more of the following methods of hostile activism to bring about change: attacking people online, intentionally spreading disinformation, or threatening or committing violence to persons or property.
Low-trust nations reflect aggravated levels of grievance and repairing that trust enables belief in a brighter future. In Germany, 41% of people, on average, trust institutions in society and 69% of respondents feel a moderate or higher sense of grievance. In Singapore, 65% are trusting of institutions and just 39% hold grievances. This illustrates a powerful inverse relationship: The greater trust that people have in their institutions, the less grievance a society has.
Business has emerged as the default solution on societal issues given that many people believe businesses are more competent (+48 points) and more ethical (+29 points) than their government. But businesses lack the authority to lead alone because views of business ethics plunge as people become more aggrieved. Business has the potential, and much of the publics’ permission, to address societal issues.
The other three major institutions also have the potential to address grievances in society. This is NGOs’ moment as the ethical leader, the only institution seen as a unifying force among those with a high sense of grievance and the institution with the highest trust among that group. Government needs to prove its competence again, to deliver results that benefit the individual citizen. And media outlets must successfully provide quality information that enables people to make proper decisions.
We need to move back from the precipice of a grievance-based society where violence is seen as a viable option. All four of the major institutions must play a role. Businesses will have an opportunity in the coming months to work with the new governments in major democracies on important issues such as trade, energy supply, and reskilling.
All of this will be debated in the more chaotic, free-wheeling media, putting a premium on speed and facts. Our goal must be to give people a sense of control over their destiny, and to drive change that is positive instead of threatening to society.
My only son, Hersh, was kidnapped from a music festival on Oct. 7, 2023, after having his dominant forearm and hand blown off. He was held captive, tortured, starved and then, after 328 days, shot in the hand (his only one), shoulder, neck and twice in the head in a dark and airless tunnel in Gaza on Aug. 29, 2024.
Hersh’s name had been on the list, in July, who would be released in a deal between Hamas and Israel. But that deal did not happen, because decision makers did not want it to happen. And Hersh, along with five other beautiful young people, with whom he was being held hostage, are now all dead.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]My husband Jon and I, after having suffered more than 300 days of every parent’s nightmare of utter and indescribable torment, continued advocating and pushing for the release of the remaining hostages in Gaza. We did not want anyone else to go through what we are and will continue grappling with for the rest of our lives. At this time there are 98 hostages still in Gaza. The live hostages must come home to be physically and psychologically rehabilitated, and the deceased must return to have proper and respectful burials.
Finally, on Wednesday, the news came that a deal was reached and will begin to be implemented imminently.
Over 200 messages flooded my phone. People seemed confused that Jon and I are relieved and happy that so many of our hostage community, with whom we feel like family, will finally be reunited with their loved ones. This does not mean we are not in agonizing mourning and oozing with grief for our beloved Hersh, who we buried 135 days ago. It means we can hold two truths; we can even hold more.
Humans are fascinating creatures. We can experience a multitude of diverse feelings simultaneously. So we can experience suffering while still having the capacity to laugh, we can be longing for someone and capable of celebration, we can be weeping and resilient, we can be yearning and hopeful.
What is essential to us at this moment is that we make sure this phase of the deal is the beginning of the end, and not the end. Getting out 33 cherished human beings is critical. BUT, there are still going to be 65 hostages left in captivity. This remains a microcosm of failure of all of humanity.
The remaining hostages represent 23 different nations. They are Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists. The youngest is Kfir Bibas, who will turn two years old on Saturday, Jan. 18. And the oldest is Shlomo Mansur, who is 86 years old. They are both slated for being released in this first phase of the deal. Yet back in November 2023, they were also supposed to be released (as was my son Hersh), but the deal broke down and now Hersh is dead. I pray Kfir and Shlomo come home as planned, alive and able to recover.
In addition, the innocent Gazans who have suffered terribly since the Hamas attack on Oct. 7, 2023 also severely and critically need relief and recovery immediately. So this deal must happen, to the very end, with everyone in the region finally able to quench our common desperate need for solace.
While I remain ever optimistic and cautiously sanguine, a deal is not a deal until it is successfully completed.
Godspeed to us all.
U.S. regulators on Wednesday banned the dye called Red 3 from the nation’s food supply, nearly 35 years after it was barred from cosmetics because of potential cancer risk.
Food and Drug Administration officials granted a 2022 petition filed by two dozen food safety and health advocates, who urged the agency to revoke authorization for the substance that gives some candies, snack cakes and maraschino cherries a bright red hue.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]The agency said it was taking the action as a “matter of law” because some studies have found that the dye caused cancer in lab rats. Officials cited a statute known as the Delaney Clause, which requires FDA to ban any additive found to cause cancer in people or animals.
The dye is known as erythrosine, FD&C Red No. 3 or Red 3. The ban removes it from the list of approved color additives in foods, dietary supplements and oral medicines, such as cough syrups. More than three decades ago, the FDA declined to authorize use of Red 3 in cosmetics and externally applied drugs because a study showed it caused cancer when eaten by rats.
“The FDA is taking action that will remove the authorization for the use of FD&C Red No. 3 in food and ingested drugs,” said Jim Jones, the FDA’s deputy commissioner for human foods. “Evidence shows cancer in laboratory male rats exposed to high levels of FD&C Red No.3. Importantly, the way that FD&C Red No. 3 causes cancer in male rats does not occur in humans.”
Food manufacturers will have until January 2027 to remove the dye from their products, while makers of ingested drugs have until January 2028 to do the same. Other countries still allow for certain uses of the dye, but imported foods must meet the new U.S. requirement.
Consumer advocates praised the decision.
“This is a welcome, but long overdue, action from the FDA: removing the unsustainable double standard in which Red 3 was banned from lipstick but permitted in candy,” said Dr. Peter Lurie, director of the group Center for Science in the Public Interest, which led the petition effort.
It’s not clear whether the ban will face legal challenges from food manufacturers because evidence hasn’t determined that the dye causes cancer when consumed by humans. At a hearing in December, FDA Commissioner Dr. Robert Califf suggested that’s a risk.
“When we do ban something, it will go to court,” he told members of Congress on Dec. 5. “And if we don’t have the scientific evidence, we will lose in court.”
When the FDA declined to allow Red 3 in cosmetics and topical drugs in 1990, the color additive was already permitted in foods and ingested drugs. Because research showed then that the way the dye causes cancer in rats does not apply to humans, “the FDA did not take action to revoke the authorization of Red No. 3 in food,” the agency has said on its website.
Health advocates for years have asked the FDA to reconsider that decision, including the 2022 petition led by CSPI. In November, nearly two dozen members of Congress sent a letter demanding that FDA officials ban Red 3.
Lawmakers cited the Delaney Clause and said the action was especially important to protect children, who consume more of the dye on a bodyweight basis than adults, the lawmakers said.
“The FDA should act quickly to protect the nation’s youth from this harmful dye, used simply to give food and drinks a bright red color,” the letter said. “No aesthetic reason could justify the use of a carcinogen in our food supply.”
Red 3 is banned for food use in Europe, Australia and New Zealand except in certain kinds of cherries. The dye will be banned in California starting in January 2027.
The International Association of Color Manufacturers defends the dye, saying that it is safe in levels typically consumed by humans. The group points to research by scientific committees operated by the United Nations and the World Health Organization, including a 2018 review that reaffirmed the safety of Red 3 in food.
Some food manufacturers have already reformulated products to remove Red 3. In its place they use beet juice; carmine, a dye made from insects; and pigments from foods such as purple sweet potato, radish and red cabbage, according to Sensient Food Colors, a St. Louis-based supplier of food colors and flavorings.
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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
Severance is a complex tale of corporate conspiracy, scary scientific advancements, and the sheer boredom of working a desk job. In the show, an ominous company named Lumon experiments with a technology that splits employees’ memories between their work lives and home lives.
The two sides of a severed person’s personality are colloquially referred to as their “innie” and “outie.” The outie clocks into work at Lumon each morning, at which point the innie takes over. The outie doesn’t remember anything about what transpires during the work day. The innie, by contrast, is never able to leave the windowless “severed floor” of Lumon or see the light of day.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]The practice obviously raises several ethical questions: Are innies separate people with their own desires and rights? What happens to a severed person’s “innie” when they leave Lumon for good? Does the innie die?
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And though the first season of Severance takes place mostly inside Lumon’s walls, the few glimpses we get of outie life suggest that the company is preying on vulnerable people. The main character Mark, played by Adam Scott, agreed to the process of severance after his wife died in a car crash. He suffers from depression and uses severance as a means of escape.
Throughout the first season’s nine episodes, it becomes clear that there is something special about Mark: Lumon keeps an extra close eye on him. And Mark, in turn, begins to suspect that something shady is happening at Lumon. Season 1 took many twists and turns, culminating in one of the most shocking finales in recent television history. The delayed second season will finally arrive on Jan. 17, nearly three years after the first premiered. Here’s everything you need to remember about the sci-fi story.
At the beginning of the series, Mark, a worker bee at Lumon, finds out that his best friend in the office, Petey, has suddenly quit, which means Mark will never see him again. Petey’s replacement is a firebrand named Helly (Britt Lower) who does not respond well to the innie initiation experience.
Lumon keeps its employees in line with silly perks like a dour party in which everyone can nibble on some balled honeydew and cantaloupe, all of which are coveted by Mark’s coworker Dylan (Zach Cherry). The company also tries to instill the creepy mythos of Lumon and its founder Kier Egan into its employees, turning some of them into something like corporate-religious zealots. Mark’s other coworker Irving (John Turturro) is one of these Lumon devotees.
Mark, Helly, Dylan, and Irving work in a department called Macrodata Refinement and spend their days sorting a screen of random numbers based on the feelings the numbers inspire in them. They’re overseen by Mrs. Cobel (Patricia Arquette) and Mr. Milchick (Tramell Tillman) who do not reveal the purpose of this data refinement.
Petey (Yul Vazquez), it turns out, has gone through the process of “reintegration” to unite his innie and outie thoughts. The surgery is performed by a former Lumon scientist named Regabhi (Karen Aldridge) who has broken from the company and is working to stop severance. Petey hunts down outie Mark to tell him that Lumon is up to no good. Outie Mark does not want to get involved in the corporate conspiracy. But Petey claims Lumon is trying to kill him so Mark allows Petey to hide in his basement.
When Mark goes home we learn that his boss Mrs. Cobel is also his next-door neighbor, who goes by the name of Mrs. Selvig. She quite literally worships at the altar of Kier Egan kept in her closet and is keeping tabs on Mark for unknown reasons. Shortly after contacting Mark, Petey dies of an alleged brain aneurism related to reintegration.
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Helly tries to escape multiple times. She threatens bodily harm until she is allowed to record a video for her outie in which she pleads to be released. The outie sends a video back telling Helly she does not get to make decisions about her life because she is “not a real person.” Helly then attempts to hang herself in the elevator that transforms innies to outies so that her outie wakes up choking to death.
Management prevents Helly from killing her outie and asks the wellness director, Ms. Casey (Dichen Lachman), to monitor the rebellious worker. Mark is also disturbed by Helly’s outie’s behavior and begins to take a personal interest in Helly. Together, they decide to investigate what is going on at Lumon. They also begin an office romance that eventually culminates in a kiss.
Mark’s brother-in-law Ricken (Michael Chernus) leaves Mark a copy of the silly self-help book he wrote. It is full of corny lines like, “Your so-called boss may own the clock that taunts you from the wall, but, my friends, the hour is yours” and “Machines are made of metal, but man is made of skin.”
Mark brings it to the office, and though management initially confiscates the book, the innies manage to find it. They have never read anything besides the Lumon handbook, and Ricken’s pretentious platitudes seem profound to them and help to incite their rebellion against Lumon.
Macrodata refinement runs into another department, Optics and Design, which is responsible for hanging up paintings of Lumon’s cultish ceremonies and printing seemingly random 3D objects. Among the Optics and Design staff is Burt (Christopher Walken). Burt and Irving bond over their shared love of art and religiosity. They begin an office flirtation.
Dylan warns Irving that there’s a rumor Optics and Design once attacked and slaughtered Macrodata Refinement, and Burt admits that he once heard that Macrodata once attacked Optics and Design. The who conflicting stories prove management is trying to sow discord among the departments.
The Macrodata Refinement team tries to team up with Optics and Design to figure out what is going on at Lumon, but Mrs. Cobel revokes the workers’ privileges to walk the hallways and forces Burt into retirement, abruptly ending the Burt-Irving romance.
There are also hints that severance is being used in other capacities. At one point Mark’s pregnant sister Devon (Jen Tullock) goes to a birthing retreat where she meets the wife of a pro-severance senator who has severed herself so that she won’t have to experience the pains of childbirth. That means this woman’s innie has only ever experienced the pains of birth and having her baby immediately taken from her.
Also, at one point, Mark and Helly wander down the labyrinth of brightly-lit, indistinguishable hallways on their floor, open a door, and find a guy feeding milk to baby goats. It’s unclear what, if anything, these baby goats have to do with severance. But one begins to wonder what exactly Lumon’s business model is.
Dylan’s innie runs across a pile of cards that show cartoons dressed in office garb practicing self-defense. The purpose of these cards is unclear, but Dylan grabs one at random, which sends management into a panic. Mr. Milchick wakes up Dylan in his outie life through a process called “overtime contingency” to demand he give the card back because it contains sensitive information. During his brief look at the outside world, innie Dylan sees that he has a son, which radically changes his perspective on life.
Back inside the Lumon office, Helly earns a “Dance Party Experience” for meeting a quota. The foursome begins to boogey down with Mr. Milchick until Dylan snaps. He attacks Mr. Milchick who quickly ends the party. Dylan tells his fellow coworkers about the overtime contingency. They decide to stage a jailbreak so they can each learn more about their outies. Innie Mark discovers that he has a keycard that will help them accomplish this. (The doctor who performed Petey’s reintegration and tracked down Mark gave him the card and told Mark his innie would know what to do with it.)
Dylan, having hit a quota, gets to stay after work to enjoy a waffle party and watch a weird Eyes Wide Shut-esque orgy. He sneaks away and activates the overtime contingency, waking up innie Mark, innie Helly, and innie Irving to the outside world.
Irving discovers that his outie has been compulsively painting the same dark hallway in Lumon over and over again, one that ends with an elevator that goes down further into Lumon’s depths rather than up to the surface. We’ve already seen Ms. Casey take this elevator. Irving also learns that his outie has been researching severance and tracking down Lumon employees at their homes, including Burt. Irving rushes to Burt’s house only to discover Burt is happily married. Irving decides to bang on the door anyway.
Helly learns she’s Helena Egan, heir to the Lumon fortune, and that her decision to undergo severance was propaganda to help bolster support for the controversial procedure. Helly meets her father, an extremely creepy dude. Helly takes the stage as a keynote speaker at a black tie event celebrating severance and reveals that she is in fact Helena’s innie. She tells the audience that her experience has been hellish.
Mark finds himself at a book party for his brother-in-law. Also in attendance is Mrs. Selvig/Mrs. Cobel: She has been taking care of Devon and Ricken’s baby (scary!). Mark doesn’t realize that this woman goes by the name Mrs. Selvig outside of Lumon and accidentally calls her Mrs. Cobel, tipping her off to the fact that his innie is wandering free in the outie world.
Mrs. Cobel flees and the baby goes missing (even more scary!). Mrs. Cobel had, in fact, been fired by Lumon earlier that day for failing to get Mark and his coworkers under control, but she tries to get her job back by stopping the innie rebellion and shutting down the overtime contingency.
Before Mr. Milchick can turn off the overtime contingency, Mark reveals everything he knows to his sister Devon and pressures her to find out what’s happening at Lumon. While hunting for the baby (the baby is fine, don’t worry!), Mark finds a framed picture from his wedding. He discovers that his supposedly dead wife is, in fact, Ms. Casey, whom he has seen alive and well inside Lumon—though he never recognized her. Mark yells, “She’s alive!” just as Milchick tackles Dylan, ending the overtime contingency. And Season 1 ends.
After living in the Pacific Palisades for three generations, Chad Comey’s family was not scared of fire.
“I’d always imagined that the earthquake would do us in,” says Comey, who lives with and cares for his disabled parents. “There was a fire in 2019 in the Palisades. My parents did not evacuate for that fire. There was a fire in 1978 that came within an eighth of a mile of our property. My parents lived through that one.”
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]On the morning of Jan. 7, when Comey, 31, looked through a pair of binoculars and saw the Palisades Fire, which had already torn through 200 acres, leaping across the hillside toward his parents home, he wasn’t panicking yet. “We’ve had worse,” he thought to himself.
By that night, their home was gone.
“You just spend your whole life accumulating certain things that mean something to you, and in 12 hours, it’s all gone,” he says.
A number of factors have made the wildfires spreading through Los Angeles among the most destructive in the state’s history. California’s wildfire season has stretched on later than usual, and dry vegetation and strong Santa Ana winds have caused the fire to spread rapidly. As of Jan. 14, the Palisades Fire which so far burned through nearly 24,000 acres, was 17% contained, while the Eaton Fire, which has torn through 14,000 acres, was 35% contained, according to CAL FIRE. Over 12,000 structures have been destroyed, and thousands of people have been displaced, forced to evacuate with little warning. The fires have killed at least 24 people—16 related to the Eaton Fire —making it one of the deadliest in California’s history.
Heather McAlpine, a volunteer with Altadena Mountain Rescue, saw the devastation first-hand on the evening of Jan. 7 when the Eaton Fire broke out. She began aiding with evacuations, knocking on doors until 2 a.m. and helping those who might need assistance leaving. She has helped with evacuations in the past, but she says she’s never seen anything like this: “It was just completely overwhelming.”
McAlpine recalls knocking on doors that night near Eaton Canyon, where the Eaton Fire began. “I remember seeing the entire Canyon lit up and feeling very sad for the wildlands and people in the vicinity,” she says. “I just didn’t think that it was going to affect me.”
Later in the evening, McAlpine, who lives in Altadena, was called to do a wellness check near her home. She could see the fire getting closer, but an evacuation order had not yet been called. She decided to go home and pick up her cat, along with a few essentials.
The next day, she went back to confirm what she already knew. The entire block was gone.
“It was such a special place, and I’m so sad for the community,”
McAlpline was living in a cottage, and while she had renters insurance, she’s unsure just how much it will do.
For many victims, fire insurance is not only unaffordable—it’s unavailable. Just months before the fires, insurers dropped nearly 70% of policyholders in Pacific Palisades, deeming them too much of a fire risk to insure. Now, many are left without coverage in what is expected to be one of the most costly wildfires in U.S. history. While government agencies have yet to provide preliminary damage estimates, analysts at Accuweather estimate losses could reach $52 to $57 billion.
Comey says that fire insurance was too expensive to even consider. “There’s no money in the budget to cover insurance,” he says. “There’s barely enough money for them to get groceries.”
After evacuating from the Palisades on Jan. 7, another pair of residents, Alex Hill and her mother Kristen Van Vlack, didn’t know where to go. “Everyone that we know lived in the Palisades,” says Hill.
The two drove to Santa Monica and sat in a park until Van Vlack found an Airbnb there for the night. But once they settled in, it became clear they couldn’t stay. “We heard lots of sirens going by, and one fire truck was just driving really slowly near where we were,” says Hill. “And just looking in the sky, like it was glowing red.”
The winds were picking up, and they were worried they’d need to evacuate again, so they packed up again and drove a few miles south to Marina Del Rey, where they parked their car in a Ralph’s grocery store parking lot and tried to sleep. When they woke, another fire had broken out, and the sky was red in every direction.
Ashley Pomeroy, who also lives in the Palisades, had driven six hours north to Mammoth Mountain with her dad on Jan. 7 when her mom called to tell them they had less than three minutes to evacuate their home.
“We were on the freeway driving home, speeding, trying to see if we could get back home before the fire hit it,” she says. “But on the way there, we heard all our alarms go off and our sprinklers go off. We knew that it was over.”
Pomeroy, a student at Colorado University in Boulder, is mourning the Palisades community she grew up in and wondering what it might now become. “My friends and I talk about it all the time, like we can’t imagine growing up somewhere else. It was just picture perfect,” she says. Her family expects to rebuild, she says, though the process could take years.
For now, in the areas razed by fires, little is left. On Thursday, Hill went with a friend to her grandparents’ old home, which the family had just sold in December. She grabbed a few bricks from the driveway, took a photo of the 200 year-old eucalyptus tree the late actor Will Rogers had planted, still standing.
They drove to the Palisades Village, a shopping center at the heart of the town. The windows were still intact, and music was still playing. Rick Caruso, a billionaire and unsuccessful Los Angeles mayoral candidate who developed the center, hired private firefighters—a practice that some have criticized—to protect the property as emergency responders have been overwhelmed.
It was a shock for Hill, who had worked at a restaurant in the Village, but quit after the fire. “My job is still there when they open,” she says. “I’d have a job, but not a home.”
Though they lost all of their possessions, Hill’s mother Van Vlack says they were luckier than most. For years Van Vlack had been thinking of leaving Los Angeles, and at the end of 2024, she ended up visiting a friend in Meridian, Idaho, and closed on a house there on December 30, eight days before the fire came. Van Vlack and Hill drove there over the weekend and are there now, in an empty home with their two dogs.
Still, Van Vlack can’t help but mourn the things that cannot be replaced: hundred year-old Dutch doors that were once on the commercial property her grandparents owned, Mother’s Day cards collected over the years.
Hill is waiting to return to the Palisades, where she thinks their condo’s storage unit, located below ground, might still be intact. It doesn’t contain much—mostly holiday decor in big plastic tubs, she says—but it’s the only thing left from their home.
“I want to go back,” Hill says. “It might be silly decorations, but it’s from our home, and it has memories for us.”
If you would like to donate to the victims of the California wildfires, donate here.
In late 2022, Erin, a 43-year-old from Pennsylvania, agreed to spend six weeks in a psychiatric ward, getting intensive treatment for an illness she knew she didn’t have.
That decision was a last resort for Erin, who asked to be identified only by her first name for privacy. Her health had deteriorated after she caught COVID-19 nearly a year earlier; the virus left her with pain, fatigue, rapid weight loss, digestive problems, and vertigo. After another bout with a virus months later, Erin only got sicker, developing heart palpitations, muscle spasms, hoarseness, and pain in her neck, throat, and chest.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]Erin was no stranger to chronic illness, having coped with a connective-tissue disorder her whole life. This was different. She became unable to work and rarely left her home. Her usual doctors were stumped; others said her litany of symptoms could be manifestations of anxiety.
When it became too painful to eat and swallow, Erin grew severely malnourished and was hospitalized at a large academic medical center. “I felt at the time like this was my last hope,” says Erin, who has since been diagnosed with Long COVID. “If I didn’t get any answers there, I didn’t know where to go afterward.”
Once again, however, she was disappointed. The only physical diagnosis her doctors landed on was vocal-cord dysfunction, which Erin felt did not explain her wide range of symptoms. When her doctors began to discuss discharging her, Erin panicked and said she could not manage her excruciating symptoms at home—a sentiment that she says contributed to concerns of self-harm among her doctors and kicked off conversations about a stay in the psychiatric ward. Eventually, seeing no other way forward, Erin agreed to go. “I just got increasingly defeated over time,” she says. “I didn’t know what to do.”
She was admitted for a six-week stay and given diagnoses she knew were wrong: an eating disorder and anxiety.
Read More: Long COVID Doesn’t Always Look Like You Think It Does
The vast majority of Long COVID patients will not land in psychiatric wards, but Erin is far from the only one who has. “Emergency rooms are dangerous places for people with Long COVID,” says David Putrino, who studies and treats the condition as director of rehabilitation innovation for the Mount Sinai Health System in New York.
Numerous patients, he says, are told that inpatient mental-health care is their best or only option. He has worked with at least five patients who were ultimately admitted—and says some of his patients’ stories sound a lot like Erin’s. “Imagine you go to an emergency department, you wait 13 or 14 hours, your condition actually deteriorates, and then you’re told, ‘Hey, good news, everything is normal and we’re sending you home,’” Putrino says. “Going home doesn’t sound like a survivable outcome. So at that point you might break down…and often that gets reinterpreted as ‘Let’s put this person on a psych hold.’”
Such experiences fit into a long, troubling tradition in medicine. Because there often aren’t conclusive tests for these types of complex chronic conditions, and because many patients do not outwardly appear unwell, they’re frequently told that they aren’t physically sick at all—that symptoms are all in their heads. “Mainstream medicine really isn’t geared toward treating conditions and diseases that it cannot see under a microscope,” says Larry Au, an assistant professor of sociology at the City College of New York who has studied one of the consequences of that disconnect: medical gaslighting of Long COVID patients.
The chronic illnesses that make doctors doubt their patients often start after what “should” be a short-lived sickness. And it’s not just COVID-19; many diseases, from Lyme to mono to the flu, can lead to mysterious, lingering symptoms that are often ruinous but difficult to explain.
Myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS), for example, can follow a variety of viral or bacterial infections, leading to cognitive problems and extreme fatigue made worse by physical or mental exertion. (There is so much overlap between the symptoms of Long COVID and ME/CFS that many people now meet diagnostic criteria for both.) Today, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) calls ME/CFS a “serious, debilitating” biological illness—but for decades, it was written off as psychosomatic. A 1988 paper by researchers from the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) suggested that it could be related to “unachievable ambition” and “poor coping skills.” And in 1996, a CDC researcher told a journalist that the condition has no viral cause, results in no immune abnormalities, and could be summed up as “hysteria.”
Because the disease was for so long dismissed as psychological, many clinicians to this day try treatments like cognitive behavioral therapy that, at best, do nothing to address the condition’s physical symptoms—and, at worst, exacerbate them. Elizabeth Knights, who is 40 and lives in Massachusetts, went through even more intensive mental-health treatment. She spent several weeks in a psychiatric ward in 2006 before finally being diagnosed with ME/CFS and finding care that dramatically improved her health.
During her senior year of high school, Knights caught a mono-like illness that never fully went away. Once at the top of her academic class and an avid skier and rock climber, Knights eventually had to withdraw from college and move in with her parents because she couldn’t function under the strain of persistent fatigue, flulike symptoms, and cognitive dysfunction—all of which her doctors chalked up to depression.
“I kept insisting, ‘There’s something else going on here,’” Knights remembers. But she didn’t know about ME/CFS at that time, and her doctors were adamant that her problems were psychological. So when physicians recommended she try inpatient psychiatric care, she went along with it. “That was the only path that was presented to me,” Knights remembers, and she took it.
Read More: The Relentless Cost of Chronic Diseases
The experience made things worse. She was given numerous medications to which she had bad reactions and went through electroconvulsive therapy, which she says damaged her memory to the point that she had to relearn how to talk and navigate her hometown. “Nobody was listening to me, and people were not informed enough to make a correct diagnosis,” she says. “I was being misdiagnosed and treated for something that I didn’t have.”
Rivka Solomon, a longtime ME/CFS patient advocate, says she hears this story a couple times a year: a patient, like Knights, has been wrongly admitted to or threatened with inpatient psychiatric care. And those are just the instances she learns about. “I worry about who is, right now, lying in a bed in a psych ward, too sick to function, left with no one to properly care for them, left with no one to advocate for them,” she says.
The problem is larger than individual doctors, says Mount Sinai’s Putrino. People with conditions like Long COVID and ME/CFS may benefit from inpatient rehabilitative care, for example—but if they don’t meet admission criteria set by hospitals, state regulatory boards, or insurance plans, even well-meaning clinicians may be stuck. Sometimes, “there’s no administrative way to admit these people,” Putrino says. A psychiatric diagnosis is, in some cases, the simplest way to get a patient in.
Another complicating factor: there is no validated medical test for detecting Long COVID, ME/CFS, or similar conditions like chronic Lyme disease, another post-infection illness that remains controversial. Although studies have identified biological signs of these illnesses, researchers have not yet found clear biomarkers that lead to definitive diagnoses. “The medical profession loves cold, hard diagnostic tools and evidence-based medicine. They want randomized controlled trials and an easy test that tells you yes or no,” says Dr. Monica Verduzco-Gutierrez, who runs a Long COVID clinic and is chair of physical medicine and rehabilitation at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio. When those tools aren’t available, clinicians sometimes deem patients’ symptoms psychological.
Ruth, a 32-year-old who asked to use only her first name for privacy, recently had that experience, even though she is a mental-health professional herself and already knew she had Long COVID. One morning in 2024, she woke up in pain, struggling to breathe and unable to control her bladder. When she visited an emergency room, hoping for medication that might help, she says she was told by a doctor that she was experiencing anxiety. “I was like, ‘I am fading away here. I am slowly dying. I need help,’” she says. But despite her repeated requests for care and her own psychological training, she says she was turned away.
These dismissals can also be damaging, Solomon says. “The extreme examples of patients being admitted to psych hospitals are just the tragic tip of the iceberg,” she says. Patients who aren’t believed may struggle to get any medical care at all, or get pushed toward therapies that don’t work. They may also face an uphill battle when trying to secure insurance coverage for treatments, disability benefits, or workplace accommodations.
Read More: Long Waits, Short Appointments, Huge Bills: U.S. Health Care Is Causing Patient Burnout
Without the backing of a doctor or diagnosis, patients often find that other people in their lives don’t believe them, either. Doug Gross, chair of the department of physical therapy at the University of Alberta, has studied how hard it is for Long COVID patients to find medical care. He says patients often talk about “disbelief from not only the health care system…but more broadly in their social sphere: family members, employers, supervisors at work.”
Psychiatric care is not always inappropriate for patients with Long COVID or similar conditions, Verduzco-Gutierrez says. Some do develop depression, anxiety, and other mental-health symptoms, potentially including severe neuropsychiatric complications related to inflammation in their brains or other physiological issues, Putrino says. “Some folks can really benefit from skilled psychological care, even if it’s not their primary or underlying, driving cause of their illness,” he says.
Some clinicians, however, fail to differentiate between side effects and root causes, or use screening techniques that aren’t well suited for people with chronic conditions, Verduzco-Gutierrez says. For example, asking someone whether they struggle to get out of bed in the morning—a common question when screening for depression—isn’t all that useful if the clinician doesn’t differentiate between physical and mental exhaustion. “The only way to solve this is more education,” Putrino says, “so the next generation of clinicians are not looking at these patients and saying, ‘A couple of antidepressants and a day off will fix you.’”
Katiana Mekka, a 26-year-old Long COVID patient from Greece, says education is especially needed outside the U.S. Last fall, she says, she was involuntarily committed to a psychiatric ward and held for three days, until she passed a thorough screening test for mental-health disorders. The ordeal worsened her already severe illness, leaving her virtually unable to eat, move, or talk for days after.
“These illnesses are so mistreated and misdiagnosed,” Mekka says, adding that so few doctors in Greece know about Long COVID that she has been forced to seek virtual support from specialists in other countries. “The patients that I know, we all have so much will to live and so many dreams. This is not a mental issue. We have severe symptoms.”
Read More: 11 Ways to Respond When Someone Insults a Loved One’s Disability
There are signs that the medical community might be getting better at treating people with Long COVID and diseases like it. The sheer volume of Long COVID patients who have emerged in the wake of the pandemic—nearly 20% of U.S. adults have experienced symptoms at some point—has forced a reckoning with the medical system’s history and sparked new research interest in these conditions. The federal government now has an office dedicated to Long COVID research, and the NIH earmarked an estimated $110 million for Long COVID research in 2024. (Federal research funding for ME/CFS is still paltry in comparison: an estimated $13 million in 2024.) Solomon says more research on not just Long COVID but all infection-associated illnesses is critical, so scientists can develop reliable tests and effective treatments.
There’s a long way to go. Putrino says he’s been advocating for systemic changes that would make it easier for hospitals to admit patients with complex conditions and for patients to secure reimbursement for in-home care, but progress is slow. Stigma and denial also still persist. And to this day, most U.S. medical schools do not teach trainee doctors about conditions like ME/CFS.
Despite all she’s been through, Erin, the Long COVID patient who spent time in a U.S. mental hospital, considers herself lucky. She found a silver lining to her stay: in the psychiatric ward, she met a clinician—a speech pathologist she saw because of her vocal dysfunction—who knew about Long COVID and referred her to a specialist. She met with that specialist after leaving inpatient care and in 2023 was diagnosed with both Long COVID and ME/CFS. Under proper care, and after plenty of rest, she’s been able to manage her symptoms well enough to return to work and a mostly normal life.
“That took me a long time, but I was lucky and found someone who actually helped,” Erin says. “Some people never figure it out.”
In the wake of reports that a lack of water supply may have negatively impacted the work of firefighters battling the multiple blazes in Los Angeles, California Governor Gavin Newsom called for an investigation on Friday, Jan. 10.
“The ongoing reports of the loss of water pressure to some local fire hydrants during the fires and the reported unavailability of water supplies from the Santa Ynez Reservoir are deeply troubling to me and to the community,” Newsom wrote in the letter addressed to Janisse Quiñones, CEO of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, and L.A. County Public Works Director Mark Pestrella.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]“While water supplies from local fire hydrants are not designed to extinguish fires over large areas, losing supplies from fire hydrants likely impaired the effort to protect some homes and evacuation corridors.”
Newsom posted the letter on X (formerly Twitter), telling his followers: “We need answers to ensure this does not happen again and we have every resource available to fight these catastrophic fires.”
Read More: L.A. Fires Show the Reality of Living in a World with 1.5°C of Warming
Currently, the Los Angeles Fire Department and CAL FIRE are fighting multiple blazes, the most dominant being the Palisades Fire. As of Jan. 12, at least 16 people are thought to have died, according to the Los Angeles Medical Examiner’s Office, thousands of homes have been destroyed, and over 40,000 acres have been decimated.
Soon after the first fire sparked on Jan. 7, reports and concerns began to emerge that the fire hydrants were running dry, after being overstressed without aircraft support.
On Jan. 8, Los Angeles Fire Department Public Information Officer Erik Scott, addressed the “multiple questions” he was receiving about firefighters experiencing challenges with water pressure when fighting the Palisades Fire. He posted on X about how water supply and dry conditions had negatively affected firefighting efforts, despite the fact that the L.A. Department of Water and Power filled all available water tanks in the area.
“[W]ater availability was impacted at higher elevations, which affected some fire hydrants due to limited replenishment of water tanks in those areas,” he wrote. “The extreme demand caused a slower refill rate for these tanks which created a challenge for our firefighting effort.”
In a news conference on Wednesday morning, both Quiñones and Pestrella discussed the struggles with water supply. “We pushed the system to the extreme,” Quiñones said. “We’re fighting a wildfire with an urban water system. And that is really challenging.”
On Friday, the Los Angeles Times reported that the Santa Ynez Reservoir, which helps supply water in Pacific Palisades, was offline for maintenance when the Palisades fire ignited on Tuesday. The 117-million-gallon-water storage is a fundamental tool in sustaining the water system for the residential area.
In a memo posted by the LADWP attempting to combat misinformation regarding water supply, they clarified that “LADWP was required to take the Santa Ynez Reservoir out of service to meet safe drinking water regulations,” but stated that “water supply remained strong to the area.”
They also said that they are “initiating [their] own investigation about water resiliency.”
Read More: How to Help Victims of the Los Angeles Wildfires
Some experts have told the media that “no water system in the world” would have been able to handle the sheer magnitude of fires that have blazed over the course of the week, especially with the strong Santa Ana winds often grounding air support.
According to Newsom, many of Southern California’s largest reservoirs are “currently at or above their historic average storage levels for this time of year.” And while he has ordered for an investigation “into the loss of water pressure to local fire hydrants and the reported unavailability of water supplies from the Santa Ynez Reservoir,” he states on his new California fire facts website—launched on Jan. 11 with the intention of combating misinformation about the fires—that “reservoirs are full and water is available.”
He also reminds readers that “urban water systems are built for structure fires and fire suppression, not hurricane-force firestorms” and that the water supply was “exhausted because of the extraordinary nature of this hurricane-force firestorm.”
Newsom addressed his call for an independent investigation in an interview on NBC’s Meet the Press, which aired on Jan. 12. He was asked what questions he’s hoping to get answered. “The same ones you’re asking…What the hell happened? What happened to the water system…Was it just overwhelmed?” Newsom said. “Did it contribute in any way to our inability to fight the fire? Or were 99 mile-an-hour winds determinative and there was really no firefight that could’ve been more meaningful? So I want—all of us want to know those answers, and I just don’t want to wait because people are asking me. I want to know those facts. I want them objectively determined, and let the chips fall where they may. This is not about finger pointing.”
Throughout the week, there has also been much discussion as to whether budget cuts to the fire department have affected LAFD’s ability to fight the destructive wildfires. Patrick Soon-Shiong, owner of the Los Angeles Times posted on X, criticizing Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass.
“Fires in LA are sadly no surprise, yet the Mayor cut LA Fire Department’s budget by $23M,” he claimed. “And reports of empty fire hydrants raise serious questions.”
L.A. Fire Chief Kristin Crowley has also criticized the city and Bass, stating on Fox 11 that the budget “was cut, and it did impact our ability to provide service.” She said: “We are still under-staffed, we are still under-resourced, and we’re still under-funded,” and added that she was not aware that the reservoir had been closed before Tuesday. “That is something to discuss, and we’re going to look into that in regard to how we can ensure there’s going to be water when we need it,” Crowley said in the Jan. 10 interview.
Newsom has denied that there were cuts to the firefighting budget. “CA did NOT cut our firefighting budget. We have nearly doubled the size of our firefighting army and built the world’s largest aerial firefighting fleet,” Newsom wrote in a social media post announcing his new California fire facts website.
Read More: Understanding How Massive the L.A. Fires Are
Meanwhile, in a memo Crowley sent to Bass in Dec. 2024, she stated that the elimination of civilian positions and overtime within the department was causing “unprecedented operational challenges” and “severely limited the department’s capacity to prepare for, train for, and respond to large-scale emergencies, including wildfires.”
Bass, who was criticized for being out of the country when the fires broke out, has repeatedly defended her support of the fire department throughout the week, stating in a news conference on Jan. 9 that “the impact of our budget really did not impact what we’ve been going through over the last few days.”
TIME has reached out to the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power and Department of Public Works for comment.
