On Nov. 7, a man stormed into the Borderline Bar & Grill in Thousand Oaks, Calif., a city 40 miles northwest of Los Angeles, and fired into the crowd, killing 13 people by the end of the night, including himself. Among his 12 victims was Telemachus Orfanos, a 27-year-old U.S. Navy veteran whom female patrons described to me as a “big brother” figure—the kind of gentlemanly guy who walks women to their cars late at night. Orfanos, whom everyone called “Tel,” was also a survivor of the Las Vegas massacre last year. He didn’t survive this second shooting. 

For days, the sun and moon were blood-orange—that is, if you could see them through the thick haze of ashes and smoke. Three major wildfires in California in November—the Camp Fire in Northern California, the Woolsey and Hill Fires in Southern California—devoured hundreds of thousands of acres, killing at least 80 people and destroying thousands of homes. In some areas, the haze was so dense that it tinted everything orange-yellow, as though the world had transformed into an old sepia photograph.

When I first started working on my series on homelessness, I remember walking the streets of downtown Los Angeles one night with a homeless man named Ronald, listening to him point out places that reminded him of the not-so-distant past. 

Last weekend, I attended the fourth annual Politicon at the Los Angeles Convention Center. Politicon is a bipartisan convention billed as the Comic-con for political nerds, though from my experience, it’s more like the WWE for politics—it’s a rambunctious, theatrical wrestling match of the minds, in which political bigheads wing it out in the ring, each side trying to “destroy” the other with the Camel Clutch of logic, snark, and verbal gymnastics.

Hips sway. Hands clap. Arms wave in the air, heels bounce, and faces lift up wide smiles as the choir belts out, “You are good, and Your mercy endures forever.” The audience smiles as it listens. Irresistibly, a toe starts tapping along to the beat, shoulders begin loosening, and heads begin bopping.

That’s the magic of gospel music. A synergy of vocals, facial language, and body movement, a genre of Christian music dating back to the late 19th century, when African-American churches in the U.S. South fused classic hymns with traditional African-American spirituals and beats.

Last week, I joined California Republican gubernatorial candidate John Cox on a walk with Los Angeles police through Skid Row—a 50-block mini dystopia in downtown LA with one of the highest concentrations of homelessness and crime in the United States. 

I recently spent 12 vacation days on a World War II tour in Europe, retracing the steps of Winston Churchill in London, the Allied troops in Normandy and Bastogne, and Adolf Hitler in Munich.