nothing here but a more brutal world
issue 325 - 13th September, 2026
CJW: Welcome welcome welcome, lovely people. Glad to have you back. As ever, if you’d like to support us, those links are:
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The Team
Daniel Harvey (DCH) - Designer, writer, provocateur. Pro-guillotine tech critic. @dancharvey
Marlee Jane Ward (MJW) - is also Mia Walsch. Writer & visual artist. Meme collector.
Corey Jae White (CJW) - author, voidwitch, cascade.
Lidia Zuin (LZ) - Writer and purveyor of melancholy whimsy.
Climate Change & The Environment
DCH: The World Is Adapting to Extreme Heat, But Not Nearly Fast Enough by Kate Yoder at Grist
Early estimates found that at least 35,000 excess deaths were recorded as temperatures soared, and that only accounts for the first four heat waves in about half the continent. But all this, the World Health Organization said, was just a "dress rehearsal." The coming summers are bound to be even hotter.
Thirty-five thousand people did not die from a mystery. They died from a temperature threshold that governments agreed to in 2015 and are now on track to blow through years ahead of schedule. Wealthy countries with early-warning systems and cooling centers are still losing this fight, which tells you what awaits countries without either.
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CJW: Climate change past the point of no return, UN says, as worst impacts are now unavoidable - CBC News
In a strategic retreat in the fight against climate change, the United Nations has acknowledged that Earth has lost its chance to prevent some of the worst of global warming's harms. Officials say the world must now figure out how to get temperatures below the danger zone and back to safety.
I knew this (I think I even said it in the newsletter at some point last year), anyone paying attention knew this, but it's still sobering for the UN to admit that we're officially past 1.5°C.
Geopolitics & Empire
CJW: How 'stop the boats' changed the world - Anna Levy at ABC News
A thorough history detailing how Australia developed and exported horrendous systems for denying refugees entry into the country, in a way that demonised the refugees (feeding the right-wing media that has been behind the ascendant fascism we see today), allowed room for untold human rights abuses, enriched private companies at the tax payer's expense, and solidified these sorts of inhumane practices as an example for other nations of the world to emulate.
It's our home-grown addition to the horrors of the current moment and the future, where these systems - and worse - will be used to maintain a global climate apartheid.
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DCH: Israel Starved Gaza. Now Doctors Fear It Has Permanently Damaged a Generation. by Tareq S. Hajjaj at Mondoweiss
"What we fear is that we are facing the targeting of an entire generation," al-Farra said. "A generation that will suffer in the future from problems with cognition, understanding, and interaction, as well as chronic neurological problems and stunted growth."
Israel's siege reshaped Gaza's children at the cellular level, stunting growth and altering hormone systems years before any ceasefire could reverse it. Doctors at Nasser Hospital are documenting the targeting of an entire generation, tracked in bone density scans and delayed puberty. The famine's architects always knew children's bodies would carry the invoice, long after the guns stopped. The damage was built to last.
Tech & Design
CJW: Play is doing its work even if we’re not keeping score - Justin Neuman at Aeon
[Winnicott']s most radical claim still hits like an urgent diagnosis: ‘It is creative apperception more than anything else that makes the individual feel that life is worth living.’ He contrasts this with compliance, a relationship to external reality that ‘carries with it a sense of futility’. It is worth pausing to unpack this fully. Winnicott is arguing that what makes life meaningful is ultimately not achieving goals, having a family or even making art. It’s about how we see the world. ‘Apperception’ names a mode of encounter in which perception is not passive reception but active engagement. The difference is subtle but decisive: in ordinary perception, the world is simply there and the self adjusts to it; in creative apperception, we co-create the world, forging something between self and environment in the zone of play.
Compliance, by contrast, is life lived on someone else’s terms, following scripts, bowing before scores and metrics: moving through a world already defined in advance. Nothing new is risked, nothing genuinely one’s own is made. Most people, Winnicott believed, experience just enough creativity to recognise its absence, sensing that they are mostly ‘living uncreatively, as if caught up in the creativity of someone else, or of a machine.’
Gamification as social (spiritual?) ill, which is especially interesting when it's exactly what I foresaw/feared when I read Jane McMonigal's Reality is Broken.
But anyway, this is a great prompt to help get us all thinking about how we spend our time - filling it unnecessarily (heaven forbid we ever allow ourselves to be bored or sit with our own thoughts), or filling it with pastimes gameified to death.
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DCH: A Secretive DHS 'Predictive Policing' Unit is Analyzing Americans' Financial Habits and Pulling Them Over by Joseph Cox at 404 Media
"The bottom line is genuine probable cause cannot be synthetically generated," said Jake Laperruque, deputy director of the Security and Surveillance Project at the Center for Democracy and Technology. Border Patrol, he said, is using parallel construction to cloak the reason behind its car stops in secrecy. "If we can't meaningfully review and evaluate these systems, we can't trust them."
Border Patrol built a surveillance pipeline that reads Americans' bank activity, hands a name to local police, and lets a bent license plate do the talking in the report. The agency has a name for this now, Predictive Intelligence Targeting Teams, and a track record of teaching cops how to manufacture a pretext after the real reason already exists.
Society & The Culture
CJW: Dolly, Josephine, And Me - Peter Coviello (originally) at Defector
Like almost nobody else, Dolly Parton made goodness—actual humane large-hearted unbelittling funny filthy gregarious workaday decency—seem like the most natural thing in the world, an ordinary habitude, as easy as stepping off the bus. It shines off her like a cloak of light. And if she is so radiantly good, and that goodness is so unstrained and ready to hand, shouldn’t we all be able to access it as well? To find that deep flowing river of it murmuring along somewhere inside us?>Here I’ll speak for myself: I do not find it easy, no. I am clotted and clogged. I am rather like my mom—so it pleases me to think—but I also feel such toxifying quantities of unrelieved anger at the world all the time, am filled with such garish and extensive visions of what Emerson called secret retributions, that I legit startle myself, some phone-stricken mornings on the train. Let me speak less just for myself: I cannot believe, not for a living hour of the late-imperial American day, that this is unique to me.
On Dolly Parton's goodness, and so much more.
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CJW: The Ambiguity of Contemporary Fascism: Simulacra and the Consumer Society - Adam C. Jones at Prometheus Magazine
The detachment of fascist signs and their consumption from their own history presents the history of fascism with its own absorption into simulation—fascist signs as copies of copies (simulacra) of historical tropes which are divorced from their original political milieu because they circulated in an economy designed to dissolve mass political organisation rather than facilitate it. This is what I call Simulacral Fascism.
An interesting essay about modern fascism (and if it can even be called that). One part I found compelling was the notion that neoliberalism is perfectly capable of reproducing fascist policies etc without needing to embrace actual fascist politics. Hard to find fault in that reasoning looking at the last few years (or even decades).
It’s a long piece, with a lot of history and theory leading up to the main points of the essay, so if you just want to get down to the nitty gritty you can start at Part IV where it says “First Hypothesis”
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DCH: You Wanted a More Brutal World by Nathan J. Robinson at Current Affairs
"I stand exposed as a hypocrite who got what he asked for," he writes in an essay for The Spectator. "I spent years demanding this agency be let off the leash. And so it is. I wanted millions indiscriminately deported, and said so, loudly, and in worse words. You have me."
Man, fuck this guy. Milo Yiannopoulos spent years demanding checkpoints at supermarkets and gas stations, then acted shocked when the machine he championed came for him too. His confession reads less like remorse than inventory, a man cataloguing his own cruelty as proof of consistency rather than grounds for change.
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CJW: Charlie Kirk is the Harambe of Gen Alpha - Ryan Broderick at Garbage Day
I thought for sure at the time that Kirk’s murder was going to be Trump’s Reichstag fire, but there was never any chance of that happening. No one gave a shit about the guy! But that said, it’s actually taken me a year to fully understand what happened — or, rather, what didn’t happen — last September.
Looking back at it now, I’d say it all fell apart at Kirk’s funeral. Like everything else in Trump’s America, it was, simply put, a flop. And, in retrospect, part of a larger pattern plaguing the second Trump administration. One I suspect will be looked back on as their undoing. They simply can’t throw an event. Or, perhaps put a better way, they have no idea how to project the same level of all-consuming spectacle in real life that they do online.
A great summation of the 12 months post- The Kirkening and how it demonstrates the collapsing nature of Trump's second administration. Any just for fun, some examples of that racist, homophobic, transphobic, and generally fascist piece of shit’s memeification:
I’m sure you’ve seen many, many more.
Health, Cooking, and Related
DCH: Dan Osborn: 'I'm Not Interested in Talking to the CEOs interview by Alex Skopic at Current Affairs
"That's where it starts. It starts from the people doing the work. I'm not interested in talking to the CEOs because they're just going to want to figure out how to appease their stockholders."
Osborn is a former Kellogg's striker running for Senate in a state where corporate PAC money buys both parties equally well, and his answer names the actual chain of command behind U.S. health policy: stockholders first, patients whenever there's room.
Labour & Economics
DCH: 'Treated Worse than Cattle': 2,500 Tyson Workers Laid Off, Plant Shutters Overnight by Caitlyn Clark at Labor Notes
Tyson CEO Donnie King took home nearly $35 million in total compensation last year, 781 times more than the median Tyson worker and double the average CEO-to-worker pay ratio among S&P 500 companies.
Tyson liquidated a town's dependency on it overnight, giving zero notice to the union, the workers, or the 56 residents of Joslin who now share unemployment with 2,500 neighbors. Executives blame a cattle shortage while the company's own quarterly filings show operating income up 8 percent. The union that once sued the federal government over ICE raids signed a closure agreement four days later and told members to file for unemployment.
Movies + TV
LZ: Lucky (2017)
I saw a reel with a scene where David Lynch has a monologue about a tortoise and how people think only about it being slow, but, in fact, it carries its home and its coffin on its back its whole life, and that is a heavy burden. Lynch has always delivered lines with such emotion and commotion. He says that his tortoise, President Roosevelt, affected him… and this monologue, for sure, affects everyone who watches it. So I decided to watch the whole film, which was directed by his son, John Carroll Lynch, starring Harry Dean Stanton in his last leading role before dying that same year.
Harry is 90 in the movie, and he plays a grumpy man called Lucky. He lives in a small town in the United States, and everybody knows him well. He has his routines that include yoga, coffee, cigarettes, and crosswords. He walks miles to a diner where he has more coffee. He buys a single carton of milk in a small shop. And so life goes, until he suddenly falls and starts to ponder his mortality.
I suppose when you’re 90, death is one of the main things you will be thinking constantly, but making a movie about that is something else. But I guess actors have it differently. I saw my grandfather in Harry, but he’s not an emasculated elderly man– despite many people trying to make him so. It’s a very interesting and touching movie, and I surely recommend you all watch it when you can.
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LZ: The Vampire Lestat
Ok, that’s official. I am an Anne Rice stan now, at the ripe age of 36. I never read the books, but I watched the movies before and liked them, but never got too invested. I guess it was so popular back then that my edgy ass thought I would be different if I didn’t care about it so much. But the series are SO GOOD! Both Interview with the Vampire and The Vampire Lestat are so amusing, so sharp, so beautifully dramatic, and full of darkness.
I found myself in that meme that says something like “girls watching their comfort show,” and it’s true crime. Well, IWTV and TVL became my comfort shows, and I’m rewatching both of them AGAIN right after finishing it. I never did this in my life, so I would like you to take me seriously when I say they are good shit.
In this series, we see Lestat’s point of view and other things unravel in their story. Since I haven't read the books yet, I don’t know what’s in there and what’s part of the director’s ideas, but I thought everything was very well executed, and Sam Reid is an ABSOLUTE star! Lestat is now a rockstar, and his songs are not as dark as in the movie Queen of the Damned. Also, Akasha makes an appearance, and she’s muuuuuch scarier and more disconcerting than the beautiful rendition by Aaliyah. I love this show; I want more, and I will watch all the podcasts talking more about it because it’s so comforting to me! Am I unwell? Yes, beautifully unwell.
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LZ: Good Boy (2022)
If you’re into horror or weird movies, you've probably seen something about this Norwegian film where a guy has a pet dog, but it’s actually a man dressed as a dog. I first thought it could be something like a furry thing, but it’s something else. It’s more like American Psycho meets Joseph Fritzl, and make it Scandinavian. It tells the story of this girl who matches with this millionaire on Tinder, and then she’s obviously seduced both by his looks and his money, so she doesn’t mind the dog thing so much until it’s not just weird, but more.
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LZ: Talk to me (2022)
It took me a long time to watch this one, but I finally did, and I do recommend you guys watching! It’s disturbing, innovative, thrilling. It tells the story of this group of teenagers who play with a hand that was supposedly chopped off from a psychic. By performing a certain ritual, they can summon spirits, and whenever they incorporate them, it’s almost like they’re getting a high, so even though it’s scary at first, it’s still exhilarating enough to keep doing it like a drug. Until something goes terribly wrong, and things go reeeeally south. There’s a bit of a Hereditary vibe in this movie, especially because the descent is really steep.
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MJW: It Ends (2026)
This is writer/director Alexander Ullom’s debut. It Ends follows four old friends in their early twenties getting together after time apart at college/in the military. After getting picked up, the four follow their GPS to a turnoff leading to a forest-lined two-lane road… that never ends. When they stop, crowds of desperate people pour out of the forest and try to take their car, so they can only pause for ninety seconds at a time before they are mobbed. Their car continues to run as they drive for days, months, years. They experience no hunger, no need to sleep, none of the other natural cycles and rhythms of life. They can only keep going. The slow horror of their never-ending journey builds and builds and doesn’t stop.
I’m not a horror fan, but SO MUCH interesting stuff is coming out in the genre these days, so I’ve been trying to be brave and watch. I just hate being scared!
But apart from a few frightening moments here and there, it wasn’t scary. It was a sort of surreal, psychological road movie. I really fucking enjoyed it; I am known for my love of bleak. The real horror comes from the feeling of being trapped in an endless, repetitive situation with no timeline for an end: I wonder where the youth might have got that from, huh? Some kind of formative isolation??? It’s a film about resilience, endurance, and ultimately, hope and I highly recommend it.
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MJW: Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (2026)
Look, I’m a bit of a silly bitch. I know I am extremely smart in some ways, and really fucking stupid in others, and I have 100% come to terms with it. It was in this spirit that I walked out of Camp Miasma thinking: I have no idea what all that meant, but I fucking loved it.
the painted backgrounds
Sorry to objectify, but Hannah Einbinder’s tits and thighs: OMG
CJW: I still think my favourite Jane Schoenbrun film might be We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, but only because it really affected me when I watched it, not because there is anything lacking in either TV Glow or Camp Miasma. I loved Miasma, especially the two leads, and I think I’ll only like it more on rewatch, when I know how the movie is about to unfold. It’s brilliant and beautiful and absurdist and fun, while also having plenty to say below the surface.
The Memes
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