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People keep saying the scenes out of Los Angeles look like something from a movie. Except they don’t, not really. Movies need a protagonist. Every on-screen apocalypse has a leader. So where is ours?
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I would love a deus ex machina to change this story line or for the real-estate developer and would-be mayor Rick Caruso to divert the dancing fountain at his mall, the Grove. For now, I’d settle for some reassurance that there is a plan. That it’s going to be horrific, but that we will get through this. Los Angeles will endure and rebuild. Together. For someone to, you know, lead.
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I can’t keep up with Rudy Giuliani’s criminal indictments, but after Sept. 11, America’s mayor stood at ground zero and assured a broken city that the terrorist attacks would only make us stronger. Will someone — anyone? — stand in the detritus of the Pacific Palisades or Pasadena and say the same about Los Angeles?
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In those dark early Covid months, Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York didn’t deliver niceties. (I’m not sure he’d know how.) But his daily briefings became essential.
Who is this person in the Times pining away for Rudy and Andrew? Who wants someone to go on teevee and pretend to do stuff, even if that stuff is catastrophic? Who just wants the tragedy to be a fun little story on TV, like her other fun stories on TV, like The Politics Show?
Chozick began writing about Clinton in 2007, while working for The Wall Street Journal.[4] In 2008, she was a member of the traveling press of both Clinton and Barack Obama.[3] That year, Chozick wrote an article in The Wall Street Journal questioning whether Obama was too thin to be elected president, given the average weight of Americans; commentator Timothy Noah wrote that this was a racist dog-whistle that invited white people to focus on his appearance and consequently "dwell on…his dark skin."[5]
After writing for the Journal for eight years, she joined the Times in 2011 to write about corporate media.[6] In 2013, she was promoted to the Times' political team, with a focus on Hillary Clinton and the Clinton family.[7] In 2016, she said that as a result of her reporting on Clinton, specifically on her clinching the Democratic nomination for president in June of that year, that she had received death threats from supporters of Clinton's rival in this campaign, Bernie Sanders.[8]
She is the author of Chasing Hillary, a memoir about covering Clinton. With Julie Plec, Chozick adapted the book as a television series called The Girls on the Bus.[9]
In 2023, Chozick wrote a story extolling the putative transformation of Elizabeth Holmes, who was convicted for fraud in her role with Theranos, into a harmless suburban housewife. The piece was accompanied by glamorous photos of Holmes, including holding her two babies with a backdrop of the Pacific Ocean. Some media criticized Chozick for whitewashing a white collar criminal,[10][11] but others said the profile succeeded in capturing Holmes in the act of fooling the journalist assigned to profile her.[12]