  Burnt: Inside California's Worst Wildfire Season on Record Eight miles to the southwest, a plume of smoke stretched into the clean western sky, rising like bread. It looked like a cloud creating itself. A calm settled in among the Truckee Hotshots as we watched from a hilltop at the northern edge of the North Complex Fire. This was my first season and seventh fire on a U. S. Forest Service hotshot crew, a unit trained to fight the hottest and most remote parts of wildfires. We thought we were witnessing a typical blowout, when a fire crosses containment lines. "Well," one of my crewmates said, "tomorrow's going to suck."
That day, dry winds blew across California and beyond, wrenching fires loose and sending them ripping across the forest. The entire West seemed to be going up in flames at once, from the August Complex in the Mendocino National Forest, where thirty-seven fires were coalescing into the largest fire in state history, to the catastrophic fires in Oregon and Washington.
Two hundred miles northeast of San Francisco, the North Complex started tearing through the Sierra Nevada at devastating speeds, launching flaming bits of pine cones and needles like scouts, igniting spot fires up to four miles ahead of the fire's advance. In less than a day, the North Complex crossed twenty-five miles of the Plumas National Forest to the outskirts of Oroville, a town of nineteen thousand, baffling experts with its rate of spread. The communities of Berry Creek, Brush Creek, and Feather Falls were overrun. Unable to evacuate, fifteen people died in the flames, mostly in Berry Creek. If it weren't for the other simultaneous 2020 record holders, the North Complex would be the second-largest fire on record in California; instead, it's the sixth.
On September 8, the day the North Complex intensified, a finite number of crews, including the Truckee Hotshots, were there to take it on, with no backup on the way. One air-attack firefighter flying overhead, who from his vantage could see for dozens of miles in all directions, radioed that what he was observing looked like "multiple intergalactic plumes across California." Instantly, intergalactic, a word possibly never before spoken over the apoetic lanes of air-traffic radio, became the catchphrase all over the fire.   The 51 Most Romantic Gifts Money Can Buy Giving a romantic gift is all about knowing your partner. If you've been married for 30 years, you know them pretty damn well, but you might be stumped on how to surprise them. If you've been dating for three months, you probably have a lot left to learn, including what kind of gift will strike the right chord without being overly cheesy. Finesse is required, whether your relationship is brand spanking new or in its golden years. Should you want to give your holiday gift-giving a dash of romance or get your ducks in row a little early for the sappiness-fest that is Valentine's Day, allow us to help you crush romantic gift-giving with the following 51 ideas.
 25 Pairs of Very Good Sweatpants. Because, Damn, Is It Ever Time for Sweatpants. Wearing the right pair of sweatpants—in high-tech fabrics or good ol' fleece—is still the easiest way to dress down any outfit. Throw on the comfiest pair you own and some camp socks when lounging around the apartment or treat yourself to a luxe take on the style in a super premium material with a sweater layered on top and a pair of slip-ons for a WFH fit that still feels office-ready. From tried-and-true classics to updated takes on the style from some of the coolest labels around, there have never been more options—or a better time to be in the market for a pair of today's breed of subtly tweaked, expertly cut sweats. Here, we rounded up more than 20 of the best styles available now, and thank us later.  The 40 Best Food-Related Gifts to Impress Any Self-Proclaimed 'Foodie' We're all "foodies" in some sense of the word, since we all eat food to get from one day to the next. But if you're the type who eats to live, and the person on your holiday shopping list is the type who lives to eat, it might be hard to find them the right gift. What if you buy the wrong kind of pot, or a weird kind of cheese, or the least useful kitchen appliance? What do you know? You don't even cook! No need to worry—we rounded up 40 gifts that'll impress any food lover this year.
 The Right Electric Shaver Is the Key to Unlocking Your Grooming God Status Electric shavers are for optimizing your grooming routine, and you're all about "optimization," aren't you? You want to live the most optimized version of your life, right?! You don't want any part of your day to be non-optimized, do you? Whew. Sorry about that. Optimization really gets us going. No matter how busy you are, investing in an electric shaver is the absolute best way to ensure you don't get memed by some impudent young whippersnapper at work. One day you'll be confidently checking in on the team-wide Slack channel secure in your facial hair choices and the next the entire office will be laughing at a poorly photoshopped image of your mean mug alongside George Clooney's. Take it from us man, you don't want to be memed. Buy the damn shaver.  Unemployed in America: 'There's No Foundation at All Right Now. We're on Gravel.' When Jamie Pratt lost her job in the pandemic, she had to get herself unemployment. Then she had to help her son and family and friends. Then she helped strangers as an activist, and in her new temp job. She's an expert on a system at the brink. Her son still has not seen any benefits. The system would freeze up, lock him out, and over time it became impossible to get through. A paperwork snafu left a cousin in bureaucratic limbo. He tried calling his state agency 357 times in 1 day with no luck. But hers is also the story of life in low-wage America. Even before the pandemic, she had to supplement her job at a utility company with a DoorDash gig. "I was living paycheck to paycheck, trying desperately to keep on top of my bills," she told Esquire's Jack Holmes, who tells her story here.
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Sunday, December 20, 2020
'Tomorrow's Gonna Suck': The Hotshots Fighting California's Wildfires
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