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Today’s top stories

Firefighters were able to slow the spread of wildfires in Los Angeles yesterday after the Santa Ana winds eased, allowing crews to drop water from above. Red flag warnings, which indicate that a combination of warm temperatures, low humidity and strong winds is expected to heighten the fire risk, have been extended through today. At least 10 people have died and thousands of structures have been destroyed in Pacific Palisades and other affected communities.

• 🎧 NPR’s Greg Allen tells Up First he spent yesterday in the Altadena community of Los Angeles, where he talked to Teandra Pitts, whose house caught fire. She returned to salvage what she could and was shocked to find her door was kicked down and the place ransacked. Looters took her family’s things, including her son’s sneaker collection. The Los Angeles sheriff has promised to crack down on looting, and communities are imposing a curfew. President Biden says California Gov. Gavin Newsom has assured him that generators are being deployed to supply power to water pumping stations.
• ➡️ Jinghuan Liu Tervalon packed a few keepsakes and clothes before evacuating her Altadena home, thinking her family would return the next day. Now, the house is gone.
• ➡️ See before and after satellite images showing the California wildfires’ destructive force.

President-elect Donald Trump will take a quick pause today from his transition to power to attend his criminal sentencing in Manhattan. He was convicted last year on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records to conceal a payment to an adult film star. With a narrow majority, Supreme Court justices declined to give Trump a last-minute reprieve. The former and future president is unlikely to face punishment, but he will have a criminal record, which he can attempt to appeal.

• 🎧 NPR’s Ximena Bustillo says it’s key to note that Trump was one Supreme Court justice away in the vote from not having to be sentenced today. He has tapped several of his personal lawyers on the case to join his next administration, including John Sauer, who appealed the case to the Supreme Court. Trump has vowed to appeal the case, but some ethical questions remain over his lawyers’ ability to do so if they are confirmed to serve in the executive branch.

Today, the Supreme Court will hear arguments over whether TikTok should be banned in the U.S. Lawyers from the China-based viral video app’s legal team and the Justice Department will make their respective cases. The oral arguments come in light of a law passed by Congress and signed by President Biden that set a Jan. 19 deadline for the app to sell off its U.S. operation or be banned over national security concerns.

• 🎧 TikTok argues that shutting down the media platform violates the free speech of the U.S. operation and the millions of Americans who use it daily, says NPR’s Bobby Allyn. The app’s lawyers are expected to argue that it has worked to distance itself from its parent company ByteDance. Meanwhile, the Justice Department’s response is expected to be that anything less than a complete separation isn’t enough. A ruling isn’t expected today, but the court could delay the law’s start date. Allyn says the Supreme Court is trying to ensure Americans are not silenced but also safeguard against possible covert influence from China.
• ➡️ Here’s how TikTok creators are preparing for the possible shutdown of the app in the U.S.

25 goals for 2025

Can’t decide on a resolution for 2025? NPR’s Life Kit has expert guides to make any goal a reality. We’ll share a few of them every week this month. View all 25 guides here.

Constantly aiming to make other people happy can come at a high price. When one of your top priorities is to be liked, you may find you aren’t in touch with what you need. People pleasing isn’t reserved for pushovers; perfectionists tend to do it too. But this is a changeable habit. Here are some tips:

• 💖 Take note of how often you say yes, no or maybe to a request. How did each request make you feel? This can reveal the kinds of requests that might cause you anxiety.
• 💖 Try documenting your energy level and your calendar. Assess your time before taking on new responsibilities.
• 💖 Start to learn when requests align with your values or make you feel good versus when they feel like obligations.

Life Kit has several more guides to help you navigate relationships in 2025. Check out some of them here:

Weekend picks

Ben Whitehead as Wallace in Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl.

Netflix

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Netflix

Check out what NPR is watching, reading and listening to this weekend:

🍿 Movies: Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl is the latest film in the stop-motion animation series. Inventor Wallace and his pooch Gromit are dealing with a robotic garden gnome, Wallace’s latest invention. The adventure includes having to face down an army of evil robots.

📺 TV: Medical dramas, Westerns, cop shows and documentaries are just some of the offerings for the beginning of the year. Here’s a list of returning and new series to add to your watch list.

📚 Books: From fiction to nonfiction, here are 10 books hitting the shelves soon that you might want to add to your to-be-read list.

🎵 Music: With the Grammys looming, Billboard‘s charts see another big week for the usual suspects: Kendrick Lamar, Sabrina Carpenter, Taylor Swift and Billie Eilish. But, here are some of the fresh faces gaining momentum on the charts.

❓ Quiz: The quiz is back and I started the year off right with a perfect score. Do you think you can keep up with that momentum? Give it your best shot.

3 things to know before you go

A yellow northern cardinal, likely born with a genetic mutation that impacts one in a million birds, according to the National Audubon Society.

Taka Yanagimoto

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Taka Yanagimoto

1. A cardinal with a rare mutation has been photographed in St. Louis by Taka Yanagimoto, the director of photography for the St. Louis Cardinals. This male specimen displays yellow feathers instead of the typical red. (via St. Louis Public Radio)
2. Today, after 17 years, co-anchor and Hoda & Jenna co-host Hoda Kotb will make her final appearance on NBC’s Today show.
3. Lebanon’s parliament appointed Joseph Aoun, the head of the armed forces, as the country’s next president. The position has been vacant since October 2022.

This newsletter was edited by Suzanne Nuyen.

Los Angeles County is experiencing a once-in-a-generation wildfire event, spurred on by a once-in-a-decade windstorm. A true catalog of the destruction is almost impossible to assemble at this date, since any figures are quickly rendered obsolete by the ongoing infernos.

What is possible is to trace the natural factors that conspired to produce such an apocalyptic result, and explain how these factors will likely continue to cause devastation across the country in the coming days.

The first ingredient in this deadly cocktail was the recent drought. Despite intense rainfall in the northern part of the state, Southern California has been bone dry, with only 0.03 inches of rain falling at LAX in the last three months of 2024. This is a negligible amount compared with the more than 3.5 inches that fall during that period in an average year. As a result, vegetation that would typically be full of water by midwinter instead remained parched. Dry fuel is much easier and quicker to ignite than wet fuel, since the fire needs to expend less energy on evaporation.

The next ingredient was a high-pressure weather system perched over southern Idaho. In the Northern Hemisphere, high-pressure systems create winds that rotate in a clockwise direction around their center.

Since Southern California was located somewhere near 6:30 on this imaginary clock face, the result was winds traveling from east to west — the opposite of their normal direction. When these winds descended from the higher altitudes of the Mojave Desert toward the Pacific coast, the air warmed due to compression — the same effect that makes a bicycle pump hot when it is used to inflate a tire — and accelerated as it traveled through narrow mountain passes. These hot, dry, east-to-west winds caused by a high-pressure system are typical of the Santa Ana winds, which can afflict Southern California more than a dozen times per year.

So what made these Santa Anas so exceptional? The final ingredient, which elevated the winds and wildfires from risky to ruinous, was a low-pressure system spinning up over the Gulf of California. Winds rotate in the opposite direction around low-pressure systems, and since Los Angeles was located smack in between the zones of high and low pressure, the result was like a baseball stuck into a pitching machine.

With the combined force of both systems, wind gusts reached 100 miles per hour in the San Gabriel Mountains. High winds increase fire danger immensely by feeding oxygen to the blaze, carrying embers, and even bending the flames forward to ignite material in the fire’s path. These hurricane-force winds, combined with the unusually dry conditions, led to the unprecedented explosion of wildfires across L.A. County as even the tiniest spark was rapidly fanned into an inferno. Moreover, the treacherous weather conditions also hampered efforts to fight the fires, as air crews were unable to operate due to strong gusts.

And the destructive effects of this low-pressure system will not be over once it leaves Southern California behind. It is predicted to become a winter storm somewhere in East Texas before continuing through a string of Southern states, depositing ice and snow in a volume unusual for the region. This wintry mix can lead to dangerous travel conditions and significant power outages.

The fact that these two dangers share a single cause is not just a curiosity — “fire and ice,” “hot and cold” — but rather an illustration that many different forms of extreme weather are controlled by one phenomenon: the jet stream.

The jet stream is a band of strong winds that travel from west to east across the globe. Normally, the jet stream resembles a real stream, slicing directly across the country with perhaps a few small meanders. But if the jet stream starts to twist and turn like a winding river, it produces powerful high- and low-pressure systems that are responsible for heat waves, snowstorms, floods and strong winds.

Worryingly, some scientists believe that climate change could produce a more “curvy” jet stream, which would lead to more instances of back-to-back disasters like the U.S. is experiencing now and like the world experienced during the summer of 2021, when heat waves and floods seemed to ricochet across the globe. So far, this effect has largely been observed in climate model projections rather than observations, but if it does emerge in the real world, it is expected that it will be most significant in the winter, when the jet stream has the most energy.

Whether this theory is correct or not, climate change has been intensifying a variety of extreme weather events, including droughts. In the case of the disaster that is now unfolding, the unusually dry conditions played a crucial role in setting the stage for extreme wildfires; a similarly powerful windstorm in Pasadena in December 2011 was preceded by a damp November, helping to prevent any significant fires.

While we can never attribute a given event to climate change with 100% certainty, it is impossible to ignore that the main source of change over the intervening decade is the ever-increasing amount of carbon dioxide entering Earth’s atmosphere.

If this trend is not rapidly reversed, we can expect that these extraordinary wildfires will become horribly more ordinary.

Ned Kleiner is a scientist and catastrophe modeler at Verisk. He has a doctorate in atmospheric science from Harvard.