While much of Los Angeles was processing the devastation in Altadena and the Pacific Palisades in January of 2025, Jacob Soboroff, national correspondent for Ms Now (MSNBC’s new moniker), was busy writing a book about it: Firestorm: The Great Los Angeles Fires and America’s New Age of Disaster.
Recently, Soboroff returned the Palisades — where he grew up — ahead of his book’s release, and THR joined for the tour. He began at the Palisades Recreation Center, where his family had been just a few days before the fires. He pointed to an empty patch of dirt surrounded by a chainlink fence: “we called that the Snack Shack. It was a little tennis shop, but really we would go in there and just buy junk food.”
A few blocks over in the Huntington Palisades, Soboroff visited the remains of his childhood home, which he returned to for the first time on camera,…
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