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Most people know Sonoma County, the Northern California region sometimes called America’s Provence, for its lush vineyards, Mediterranean-style villas, and farm-to-table restaurants. But when I traveled to wine country last year, it was to observe a side of Sonoma that few outsiders know about: a dead-of-night animal rights protest at an industrial chicken slaughterhouse, located within a stone’s throw of a gastropub, an organic bakery, and a major vegan cheesemaker.  Sign up here for Future Perfect’s biweekly newsletter from Marina Bolotnikova and Kenny Torrella, exploring how the meat and dairy industries shape our health, politics, culture, environment, and more. Have questions or comments on this newsletter? Email us at [email protected]! Run by a subsidiary of the poultry giant Perdue, which raises hundreds of thousands of chickens on factory farms across Sonoma, the slaughter plant typifies the unusual politics of agriculture in this part of the country, where a cultivated image of gentle, humane farming sometimes sits uneasily alongside an increasingly consolidated agriculture sector. The county has also seen a recent influx of new residents fleeing rising housing prices in San Francisco, a longtime center of animal rights activism and utopian thought. The region’s rural heritage and progressive politics will collide next month when Sonoma County residents vote on a first-of-its-kind ballot measure that could banish Perdue’s chicken facilities, along with all other large factory farms. The proposed law — which would cap the size of animal agriculture facilities and phase out all large factory farms in the county within three years — faces long odds. If successful, it could reshape the face of farming in the county and set a precedent that has terrified agricultural interests in California and across the country.  Known as Measure J, the proposal has produced fierce debate in the county over the environmental, public health, and animal welfare impacts of modern animal agriculture. It’s poised to generate the highest campaign spending of any ballot measure in Sonoma County history, with about $2 million in contributions made for and against — the vast majority of which has been spent by industry in opposition.  Measure J is one of a pair of local ballot initiatives this fall seeking to abolish industrial animal agriculture. In Denver, a historic center for the Western livestock trade and still an important hub for the US sheep industry, voters will decide next month whether to ban slaughterhouses in the city. The measure’s passage would shut down a lamb slaughter plant that butchers up to 500,000 lambs per year, accounting for between 15 and 20 percent of all US lamb meat.  Both measures face opposition from their respective political elites, including the local Democratic Parties in Denver and Sonoma and the entire Sonoma County Board of Supervisors. While some prior farm animal welfare ballot measures — like California’s historic 2018 animal welfare law, Proposition 12 — have been more limited in scope, aiming to incrementally improve horrific factory farm conditions, the Sonoma County and Denver measures are more clearly perceived as bans.  The measures are easily perceived as negative, as snatching things away from people — and they put proponents in the awkward position of trying to persuade voters to effectively abolish an industry, at least locally, on which they depend for abundant cheap meat. It’s already famously expensive to live in California in part because it’s difficult to build housing, and some Sonoma residents may roll their eyes at Measure J as yet another bid to make it prohibitively expensive to do business in the Golden State. But industrial animal agriculture — a sector that exacts immense costs on the public in the form of greenhouse gas emissions, pollution, strain on local resources, disease risk, and animal suffering — makes a more worthy target for a ban. In principle, there’s a lot of sense in capping the size of factory farms. Measure J’s proponents are betting that progressive Sonoma County, better known for its tasting rooms than its slaughterhouses, can push California — and the nation — in that direction. Measure J, advanced by a coalition of animal rights, environmental, and public health groups known as the Coalition to End Factory Farming, would require farms classified by the US Environmental Protection Agency as large “concentrated animal feeding operations” (known as CAFOs) to either downsize or shut down within three years. The proposal is similar to a farm reform bill introduced by Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) that would phase out large CAFOs by 2040. Sonoma doesn’t have the mega factory farms found in the Midwest or South, or elsewhere in California, that pack together millions of chickens or several thousand cows in one place. But it does have big industrial farms that employ standard factory farm methods.  Weber Family Farms, one of the county’s top egg producers, was hit last year with a bird flu infection and killed its flock using “ventilation shutdown plus” — a highly controversial, painful method being used on many large farms to mass cull poultry birds by sealing up sheds and pumping in extreme heat, killing them via heatstroke.  The Yes on J campaign has compiled a list of 21 farms in Sonoma County that they believe meet the large CAFO threshold, including several egg farms and chicken meat farms, six dairies, and one duck farm. Dairy operations of 700 or more mature dairy cows are classified as large CAFOs, while chicken farms can house up to 125,000 birds before being considered large CAFOs.  “The trend is toward mergers and toward ever-increasing sizes in animal agriculture,” Woody Hastings, a Sonoma County resident who works in climate policy and supports Measure J, told me. Hastings has worked with environmental justice organizations in California’s Central Valley, a far more CAFO-dense, ultra-productive agricultural region where residents are afflicted by air and water pollution and terrible odors. “What I learned in my work in the Central Valley is seeing how bad things can get if there is no cap on the size,” he said.  Animal farming industries have mobilized an all-out war against Measure J, pushing social media campaigns, TV ads, and a direct mail blitz, at times making exaggerated claims about the measure’s potential to wipe out all animal agriculture in the county or cause a dramatic spike in food prices.  One direct mailer sponsored by Western United Dairies (WUD), a dairy trade group, claimed the measure would shut down “more than 60 organic dairy farms” — but there are only 50 dairy farms of all categories in the county, according to the most recent USDA data, and most of them don’t meet the threshold to be affected by Measure J. “We do not differentiate between any dairy farming operations,” WUD told me in a statement, adding that they were concerned that Measure J would affect all dairy farms.  The measure is written in a confusing way, and there’s been uncertainty in the county about its scope, with some arguing that it could be construed to include farms that are smaller than large CAFOs. The measure says that it would phase out both medium and large CAFOs, but because the definition of a medium CAFO requires that it directly discharge manure into surface water, no known farm in the county, based on EPA data, meets the EPA’s standard to be a medium CAFO.    Much of the opposition to Measure J has centered on Sonoma County’s dairy industry, which has been declining in recent decades and has almost entirely converted to organic, pasture-based operations because they command higher retail prices, according to Daniel Sumner, an agricultural economist at UC Davis. Although the measure wouldn’t affect consumer prices much because grocery stores would simply stock more milk from elsewhere in the region, Sumner said, it is likely to reduce significantly how much milk is produced in Sonoma.  That’s left some Sonoma voters asking: Why punish dairies that are doing things better than the vast majority of the US dairy industry? Measure J “threatens what is probably one of the best progressive dairy environments, certainly in California, probably in the country,” Roy Smith, a small farmer in Sonoma County, told me. “Yes, there are compromises that are made, but if we wanted to improve the well-being [of animals], I would suggest that more dairies reopen here, and close the ones that are low-welfare in Wisconsin.”  No dairy farm in Sonoma is as big as America’s biggest mega-dairies, and it’s undoubtedly true that cows with access to a pasture have it better than those raised on conventional factory farms. But organic dairies can still qualify as CAFOs. Most of Sonoma’s milk cows are still concentrated on farms that are very large, and large-scale dairy production of any kind is hard to justify on environmental and animal welfare grounds.  Whether they’re raised organic or conventional, ruminant grazing requires a lot of land and water — the latter increasingly scarce in the parched American West — and produces significant greenhouse gas emissions. Organic dairy CAFOs, including some in Sonoma, share some of the characteristics of conventional ones, like the use of manure lagoons — giant pools of animal waste that pollute air and water and can harm human health. And, organic or not, the dairy business model depends on repeatedly impregnating dairy cows and taking away their newborns (highly social animals that are then generally forced to live alone in small hutches) to extract the cows’ milk, keeping them alive just as long as they remain productive. A recent Atlantic investigation into one of the nation’s most celebrated organic dairies, a few counties north of Sonoma, found pervasive animal cruelty, including some techniques that were unique to the organic model. (Because milk from cows that have ever received antibiotics can’t be marketed as organic, cows can be denied them even when they really need them for a painful disease or injury.)  In my experience writing about the livestock industry, it’s often the worst factory farms that set the bar for how we talk about animal agriculture, allowing other producers — including organic facilities — to appear idyllic by comparison. We rarely frame the conversation around what animals truly deserve: Does it really make sense to mass produce another mammal for its milk, separating mothers from babies, all for a product that isn’t nutritionally necessary and that climate scientists say is so high in emissions that we have to scale it down?  Measure J, a blunt instrument for shrinking a bloated industry, offers one possible answer: We have to make less of it.  In Denver, meanwhile, the proposed slaughterhouse ban, led by the advocacy group Pro-Animal Future, looms like a “black cloud” over the US sheep industry, as one sheep feedlot employee put it.  Over the last 50 years, American lamb farming has declined precipitously; the Denver slaughterhouse that would be shut down by the ballot measure, run by top lamb producer Superior Farms, is one of relatively few important facilities remaining.  If the measure passes, it’s possible that some producers will be able to send their animals to be slaughtered elsewhere or that a new slaughterhouse will open outside Denver limits. Or, Sumner told me, the measure could hasten the death of the lamb industry altogether. Not many investors are saying, “Gee, I think I’ll go into the lamb slaughtering business,” he said. “Mostly they look for something that’s growing, and nobody thinks the lamb business is growing.”  Pro-Animal Future, much like the coalition campaigning for Measure J in Sonoma County, sees the ballot initiative as a means to start civic conversations about building a more humane, planet-friendly food system, without making people feel like the only option available to them for making change is to go vegan.  The lamb industry, particularly an industrial slaughterhouse, is a reasonable target for such a reckoning: Most people rarely eat lamb — making them perhaps more sympathetic to them as animals — while slaughterhouses are, pretty much invariably, sites of terrible violence. The per-serving climate impact of sheep’s meat is also significant, second only to beef. The Superior slaughterhouse, under the name Mountain Meadows, was also recently fined by the EPA for Clean Air Act violations, and has been fined multiple times for labor violations. This week, the Intercept published findings from a recent undercover investigation into conditions at the Superior slaughterhouse, including gruesome footage of partially eviscerated, thrashing lambs hanging upside down on the slaughter line, with one lamb appearing to lift its head and open its mouth, and injured lambs who are unable to walk being thrown, dragged, and kicked toward slaughter. It also documented what appears to be the use of “Judas sheep”: sheep who live at the slaughterhouse and have been trained to greet incoming truckloads of lambs and lead them to slaughter. Superior Farms spokesperson Bob Mariano told me in a statement that “nothing included in the footage we have seen is evidence of extreme violence, animal cruelty, or halal violations [the slaughterhouse is halal-certified]. This is yet another example of proponents of the slaughterhouse ban misunderstanding or misrepresenting standard, legally compliant parts of the slaughter process in an attempt to shock voters and influence an election. This is not the first time our workers have been attacked by activist groups falsely claiming that illegally obtained footage shows things that it simply does not.”  The investigation’s findings echoed a recent Denver Post op-ed by Denver resident Jose Huizar, who worked at the slaughterhouse decades ago: “Someone has to wield that knife — over and over,” he wrote. “Spending your day slitting throats, stepping in guts, ripping the skin from the spasming bodies of animals who were alive moments ago — it’s hard to go home to your family after that.”  The slaughterhouse, located in Denver’s low-income, majority nonwhite neighborhood of Globeville, employs about 160 people — people who don’t want to lose their jobs. Like Measure J, the Denver ballot initiative directs local government to prioritize people whose jobs are eliminated as a result of the measure in workforce training programs.  “Our hope is not just to stick it to this one slaughterhouse, but to draw a connection to the fact that this is how the industry is run generally,” Olivia Hammond, an organizer for Pro-Animal Future, told me.  Woody Hastings, the Sonoma resident, compared the fight against factory farming to oil and gas phase-outs: Just as we need to transition away from fossil fuels, we know we need to scale down industrial animal agriculture. We also know there will be economic impacts to such change that ought to be distributed fairly, and workers who lose their jobs ought to be treated with dignity.  The anti-factory farming movement has a long way to go in convincing the people of Sonoma County and Denver to see industrial animal agriculture the way they do fossil fuels. And without meaningful change in either the underlying demand for meat and dairy, or in nationwide regulation of CAFOs, isolated local initiatives are, for now, likely to only shift production elsewhere.  But should even one of the ballot measures succeed next month, political leaders might be persuaded that their constituents care enough about farm animal issues to create momentum for further reform. Win or lose, though, animal advocates will still face the wearying task of trying to bridge the public’s cognitive dissonance about where our meat comes from and channel it productively into politics.  This story was featured in the Processing Meat newsletter. Sign up here. Update, October 10, 4:45 pm ET: This story, published October 10, has been amended to clarify the scope of Measure J.

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Hurricanes Milton and Helene have absolutely devastated large swaths of the United States. But residents who are cleaning out waterlogged homes and businesses have another challenge to their recovery, one that hasn’t let up — viral disinformation.  There’s the rumor that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is limiting payouts to disaster survivors to $750. False, according to a fact-checking page the agency has set up.  What about the one that says FEMA is blocking private planes from landing in affected areas to deliver supplies? Also false.  These rumors have turned political, with some Republican politicians, including former President Donald Trump, repeating them to large audiences. As FEMA administrator Deanne Criswell said recently, the swirl of misinformation is “absolutely the worst that I have ever seen.”  “Misinformation is not uncommon in disasters. They come on fast. People see things that don’t end up being true,” Juliette Kayyem, a crisis management expert at Harvard who served as the assistant secretary of Homeland Security in the Obama administration, told Today, Explained’s Sean Rameswaram. “I think in many ways what we’re experiencing now is purposeful lying.” Kayyem is also the author of the book The Devil Never Sleeps: Learning to Live in an Age of Disasters. Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, and Stitcher. For people who may have missed this disaster of facts, can you just tell them what’s going on?  If you look on social media, at the atmosphere of response, there’s a lot of false facts about how the Biden administration is responding, about basic disaster response capabilities and rules. They are then amplified by, in particular, Donald Trump and Elon Musk, and create their own reality that then has to be shot down by already-overburdened first responders, emergency managers, and FEMA, which has put up a rumor page on their website just to combat this crap.  One example is Donald Trump consistently saying that the money that should go to Americans who are impacted by the disaster was all used for housing illegal immigrants. Not true. There was a separate line item to support migrants and sheltering that Congress passed. That money was sent to FEMA to administer, but it wasn’t replacing disaster management funds. It didn’t even overlap. It’s just the same entity distributing these funds. This creates a false division between the immigrants, who are not getting this money, and Americans, who might be mad that the money that they want for disaster relief is not available. They demoralize emergency managers and volunteers. They put them at risk. I have talked to people at FEMA about what’s happening on the ground. They are deploying people in larger numbers because they’re worried about what the reaction will be. Most importantly, it’s confusing victims about what they should do, what they have access to, and what’s available to them.  You’re saying that Donald Trump is perpetrating some of this misinformation. Where is he doing it?  At his rallies; on social media. Recently at a rally, he suggested that resources weren’t going to red states, that more Republicans were dying. There’s just no factual basis for it.  What’s interesting is you’re seeing Republican governors push back on that narrative, saying that they are getting the resources they want. They know that they have to work with the federal government to protect their citizens and begin these recoveries.  One of the most obnoxious, disgusting rumors being amplified out in the communications space involves whether FEMA would take your home. FEMA has a process where they can buy your home. It’s a very small program. It’s if you, the homeowner, and FEMA agree on a fair market value and you don’t want to live there anymore because it’s been flooded four years in a row, and this is a rational transactional decision.  This narrative that they’re going to take your home — what does that do? Well, it makes people very nervous about leaving their home. And so you hear people now saying, “I’m not going to leave, because if I leave my home, the government’s going to take it.” Those are the real-world impacts of all of these lies.  And you’re saying this is being amplified not only by other Republican politicians, but by the owner of Twitter?  Yes. He is probably the biggest amplifier of disinformation, retweeting things that are clearly false.  What they’re trying to do is create divisions in communities in two ways. One is the divide between the citizen and government, which has always been a tactic by that wing of MAGA-ism. Then also [there’s the divide] between citizens and their neighbors. That creates chaos, confusion, and divisions.  I think why you’re seeing such a concerted pushback by GOP governors, but also by FEMA and others who are calling this out, is because they know it can harm their response capabilities. I should say this is being done at a time when we’re seeing our very communication networks under stress. Communications are down. It’s hard to communicate with people. And so they have that vacuum being filled by this noxiousness of which has life-and-death consequences.  Back during Hurricane Sandy, I distinctly remember social media being useful for people. It was useful for people going through Sandy, it was useful for government agencies to get out information. Is that era of social media being a helpful tool in a disaster over?  It’s over. Elon Musk broke “Disaster Twitter.”  Twitter’s moment of birth, the moment that its founder realized its benefit, was during a minor earthquake in San Francisco. It had been just one of those other social media platforms. But it was that real-time, authenticated information that was flowing in people’s feeds that the leadership at Twitter began to take its responsibility in a disaster very seriously.  You had an entire system, including the government relying on Twitter to amplify good information, and that whole system is down. This is the first domestic disaster where that is entirely clear, that Twitter is broken across the board for disaster management. Is the mis- and disinformation around Milton as bad as that we saw after Helene? You saw it more online than, say, from political leadership.  You saw much more aggressive government [and] FEMA pushback on that. They were sort of ready now. Helene was — I think they were sort of caught [by surprise]. So you saw just a lot of outreach, a lot of push back on the misinformation and even from [Florida Gov. Ron] DeSantis, who pushed back on some of that. Do you think this makes an agency like FEMA more prepared for the next hurricane and for the next storm, if you will, of misinformation? Yeah, I think it will, on the misinformation and the lies front. I think it’s just going to be part of your emergency management plan. You’re going to push back on the rumors in a very formal way. It used to be done, but it was very piecemeal. I saw language coming out of FEMA spokespeople, which I’d never seen before, essentially just calling out the lies, in particular on social media. So they’re using the language, the sort of freewheeling language, of social media, which I think is important, rather than the sort of more formal language of government.  I think from the hype around Milton, there was this sense that, like, it could destroy Tampa. And it’s early yet, but I don’t think that happened. Do you think that sort of confirms and fuels this misinformation engine after an event like this? Yeah, it will be viewed as overreach, as “the government’s incompetent, it doesn’t know what it’s doing.” I think the next evacuation will be harder if you don’t see the kind of damage and the kind of death that everyone was worried about. This is something that’s common, it has a name: the preparedness paradox. If you are ready, you get houses ready, you get communities ready, you get them to evacuate, and the thing comes through and the damage is less than you were worried about — that’s why you wanted the evacuation. That’s why you wanted the houses to be ready.  People will say, “What were you so worried about in the first place?“ In other words, the government’s reaction, which may have minimized harm and damage and death, may very well, paradoxically, be viewed as the government’s original assessment was wrong.  Could FEMA be doing a better job during Helene and now Milton?  It’s hard for me to know right now. In some ways, FEMA’s biggest challenge is going to be recovery. How quickly can they deploy resources?  In Helene, the biggest lesson learned is how we communicate risk to Americans who may not view themselves at risk. Looking back, the only warnings that were given were a flood warning given to communities where there could be a flood. That is likely because people remember the soil was very saturated from rains in the days before. And I wonder if, in hindsight, flood warning — does it get people to move? Maybe we should think about how we communicate risk, especially because we’re getting these events that don’t really have historical precedent.

Editor’s note, October 10, 4:10 pm: On October 10, 2024, Netflix announced that John Mulaney would be hosting a live weekly talk show for the streamer starting in early 2025. John Mulaney’s new, just-concluded Netflix comedy limited series, Everybody’s in LA, felt experimental in a number of ways. It’s not only Netflix trying out an interesting format — the show debuted live on May 3 and played out over the past week in a series of six nightly live episodes — but it also feels like Mulaney soft-launching a side gig.  As the host to a motley crew of Los Angeles natives and town-invading comedians, Mulaney seems to be testing the waters for what kind of comedy his audience wants from him now. His 2023 confessional special Baby J won an Emmy for outstanding writing and delved into his recent struggles with sobriety, but it brought mixed reviews from critics — some of whom seemed skeptical at best that Mulaney had done enough to bare his soul for the rest of us.  After a rough few years for Mulaney, such cynicism about the comedian seemed to be the prevailing sentiment. In particular, 2021 saw him enter rehab for drug addiction. Shortly after his release, it became clear that Mulaney had chosen to end his marriage to his then-wife of six years, Anna Marie Tendler, and begun a relationship with actor Olivia Munn — the timeline of which has been described as “tight.” No sooner had Mulaney filed for divorce than rumors of an affair leaked, followed by news that Munn was pregnant.  The scandal hit the public unusually hard in a pandemic-era culture that clung to its heroes, and Mulaney’s transgressions spawned both intense backlash and intense discourse about whether our parasocial relationships have gotten too warped. The period severely damaged Mulaney’s relationship with his core audience, once full of people who responded to his idealistic charm. Those folks didn’t seem to move on easily — not even by April 2023, when Mulaney, through Baby J, proffered a way forward via the more traditional route: a redemptive confessional.  Jump ahead to May 2024, and perhaps, if attempt one didn’t totally set a clear path forward for the comic, attempt two will: enter, an intentionally random daily comedy talk show built around the threadbarest of excuses. The show’s raison d’être: LA is weird. The solution: gather an unexpected bunch of funny people and locals together to talk about how weird LA is. The host: a comedian famed for his own likable random weirdness. Mulaney seems to be covering his bases. “We are only doing six episodes,” he explains in the introduction to Everybody’s in LA, “so the show will never hit its groove.” If this flops, it’s fine. Mulaney jokes that he doesn’t know why he’s doing the show, which functions as a side event for Netflix’s elaborate LA comedy festival, Netflix Is a Joke. “I need structure,” he says, a non-justification that also doubles as a subtle reminder for some viewers that we’re looking at a person who has a history of addiction and is presumably in recovery.   That’s about as deep as this show gets, however; though we do get some gestures to sociocultural topics like environmentalism and the incessant problem of LA traffic, they’re handed to us in the guise of, for example, a coyote wrangler or a gonzo helicopter journalist. Mulaney features famous comedians, yes, but also everyone from hypnotherapists to former OJ Simpson prosecutor Marcia Clark. (And really, what could be more LA than that?) In between conversations, Mulaney features pretaped sketches from more guest comedians and Daily Show-style comedy correspondents. As if that’s not chaotic enough, he also has call-in guests. At one point during episode five, a seismologist sits quietly by while a caller recounts being awakened by an earthquake while sleeping in the nude. These probably aren’t the talk show beats you’re used to. Mulaney’s one-week fling with the city also works out well for Netflix. Despite trying on and off for years to make Netflix talk shows a thing, and despite intermittently bringing David Letterman back to do one-off long-form interviews, the platform has never nailed the format before this. The nightly show seems to be making a small impact; it’s currently hanging around at No. 10 on the Netflix US Top 10 shows for the day, and it’s moved up and down the chart for most of the week.  Not a bad beginning; the beginning of what, exactly, remains somewhat unclear. Netflix could also be using this show as a pilot entry for similar themed efforts from other temporary hosts — in other words, more appointment TV. It certainly seems that the entire week, beginning with Katt Williams’s live standup special Woke Foke and the jarringly uncomfortable Roast of Tom Brady, was an experimental make-or-break week for Netflix and live programming.  Or perhaps Netflix will do this again next year during its next comedy fest; perhaps in a few months, Mulaney will move to another quirky American city with another quirky band of guests. It’s an interesting concept: What would this type of series be like if it took both it and the city it’s in a little more seriously? What would viewers make of it if we didn’t know as much about the city itself as we’ve absorbed about Los Angeles from decades of cultural osmosis? I’m not saying Everybody’s in Boise is the way to go, but I am saying I’d probably watch it for the local color. Whether this is enough to restore Mulaney to the top of the comedy world seems equally uncertain. The main charm of the show, all told, has less to do with the assemblage of guests than watching Mulaney’s effortless wrangling of them. Night after night, Mulaney embraces all the awkwardness of live comedy, and it doesn’t always embrace back: Often the guests are hostile; the sketches don’t always land; the callers are too eager to grandstand. Mulaney sidesteps it all like it’s Dance Dance Revolution and he knows this particular song by heart. As a host, he’s fab. Yet the idea of Mulaney as a talk show host on an ongoing basis feels like a net loss rather than a gain. Sure, he can bring together comedy titans and make sure they don’t run over an hour, but he’s probably fit for better things. If the dominant criticism of Baby J was that it coasted too lightly over Mulaney’s self-recrimination, then Everybody’s in LA directs his talents entirely outward; it’s intentionally lighthearted, deliberately shallow. There’s meaning in the edges, but that usually has little to do with why we love Mulaney himself. The arguable best moment in the series, in fact, doesn’t involve Mulaney at all, but rather a pretaped segment in episode two that reunites core members of the LA punk scene. They sit around reminiscing, then write a silly punk song together on the fly.  It’s fun, it’s poignant. But it’s not as fun or poignant as Mulaney himself can be when he’s alone onstage with only his flaws and a thousand people willing to laugh at and then forgive them. If Everybody’s in LA brings his audience closer to a suspension of hostilities, then it will have been well worth it. Update, October 10th, 2024: Updated with news of John Mulaney’s upcoming talk show for Netflix.