I swear this is the last time I will post about my new book YUCK!!

But this one feels warranted. The Los Angeles Times today published an opinion essay that I somehow snuck through the slush pile. Hundreds of comments and dozens of complaints sent previously to LA Times in protest of Gustavo Arellano’s plagiarism of my El Aliso reporting were, apparently, not enough to put me on a blacklist permanently.

Read it: https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2025-11-18/joshua-trees-climate-change-extinction

The article is brief and not exactly brand-new info to any diligent Dumpster diver but it’s quick and punchy, worthy of sharing with your uncle, or co-worker, or teacher, or ex-boyfriend, or anyone who might enjoy learning something surprising about the world they inhabit.

It’s also a powerful bit of validation for a strange small book that was supposed to die alone unread in an underwear drawer.

It’s also a little hopeful.

I love that it is the stubborn weirdness, the confounding grotesquerie of the Joshua tree itself that furnishes—maybe—the source of its hope.

It’s almost poetic, possibly enough to weave a weird book around…

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Other non-news: I’ve been sitting on ton of writing and not hurling it here. Not yet. But rest assured, deep down beneath the Amazon Prime boxes, the Hello Fresh boxes, and the Chewy boxes, a fertile bed of fetid embers burns.

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