nothing here but cannibal chic
issue 322 - August 2nd, 2026
CJW: Hello again, lovely people. Thank you for joining us again. Can you believe it’s August already? Where the fuck has this year gone?
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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, daughter.
Lidia Zuin (LZ) - Writer and purveyor of melancholy whimsy.
Geopolitics & Empire
CJW: ICE’s Secret Weapon Is in Your Community - Melissa Gira Grant at New Republic
Whatever political and propaganda value there was in ICE storming into communities has perhaps been drained. It is as if someone advised the mass deportation crowd that if that’s what they really want, it’s better achieved without witnesses. Or, worse: It’s as if those elected Democrats who don’t oppose ICE per se but merely want it to produce better optics, got their wish—see the calls to have ICE unmask and identify themselves, without fundamentally questioning the agency’s mission. This is what is meant by “Abolish Trump’s ICE”—not “Abolish ICE”—as some Democratic candidates have campaigned. It is too soon to know just what, if anything, has changed at the top of ICE, other than that Noem’s replacement at the Department of Homeland Security hopes the press will look away. But we must not confuse what we aren’t seeing day in and day out with an institutional turn away from Trump’s signature promise: to ethnically cleanse the United States, using federal law enforcement. We must not ignore how the police around us day in and day out are marshaled in service of that campaign.
A great piece covering ICE’s shift in tactics - away from the massive, media attention grabbing occupations and instead working with local police and other federal agencies to increase the number of deportations while minimising pushback. And from what I see on social media, it looks like it’s working.
Tech & Design
“Meta has previously been warned by civil rights groups that facial recognition in smart glasses could endanger abuse survivors, immigrants and LGBTQ+ people. And by normalising the tech through the stylish sheen of tasteslop, whether by paying fashion influencers or hiring hotshot photographers, the company is effectively attempting to legitimise the arrival of a surveillance state.” - idle gaze 078: surveillance chic - CJW: A great piece with lots to say about surveillance tech and the current spate of surveillance tech as fashion that we’re seeing with new pervert glasses.
Society & The Culture
CJW: The open universe - Many Brown, A Working Library
Too much of our technology—and I reach here, as I often do, for Ursula Franklin’s definition of technology as practice, as how we do things—is oriented towards giving us a comfortable, reassuring place to be. A phony place, that is. This is not to say that we should not seek, or that we do not deserve, comfort. But that the only way to achieve unending comfort is to wall ourselves in, close up the doors, lock them inside and out. When we train ourselves to expect easy and efficient answers to every question, to tolerate only smooth, vapid dialogue, we refuse the glory and necessity of escape. When, instead, we reach for that terrible and hopeful future, when we notice the seeds of it in the present, we break out. Out into the unlikely and the uncomfortable and the unyielding, the doors wide open, the wind urging us on.
Earlier in this piece, Brown quotes Le Guin coming out against cosy genre fiction, which I'm surprised I hadn't come across before, seeing as cosiness in fiction and gaming has been subject to much discourse in the last couple of years. Le Guin is discussing escapism, but states that escaping into cosy fiction is a hollow form of escapism, unable to offer any real insight to our world and its complexities. I guess the idea is to escape the real world for a time, but do it with a book that will give you something worth bringing back to your life, whatever that might be. It's an argument I wholeheartedly support, and it aligns with how I've always tried to write - with something to say about the world and/or life, even if I don’t always succeed.
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CJW: Anthropophagy art flips the cannibal worries of colonialism - Sofía Cándano at Aeon
Which brings us to the question of what anthropophagy actually asks of us. Cannibalism is not a gentle metaphor. But Andrade was precise: Indigenous anthropophagy was not indiscriminate hunger. It was ritual, selective, deliberate. The enemy was devoured to absorb its strength and be changed by the encounter. The act required attention. And time.
This distinction matters now more than it did in 1928. To encounter culture today is to be constantly addressed by images, sounds and narratives that arrive already shaped, already carrying meaning. The dominant mode is not devouring. It is scrolling: the fastest possible movement through the largest possible quantity of content, leaving nothing behind and taking nothing in. Consumption without digestion. Exposure without encounter.
Anthropophagy proposes the opposite. The Portuguese verb mastigar – to chew – captures the anthropophagy process more precisely. Chewing implies duration. Resistance. The breaking down of something before it becomes part of you. It is the difference between swallowing whole, and tasting – or between letting culture pass through you, and allowing it to change you.
This essay on the Brazilian decolonial art movement Anthropophagy is great, not just for its exploration of Anthropophagy itself, but for what it says about art as cultural resistance more generally, and also what it suggests about creating art in The Time of AI (Being Shoved Down Our Throats Constantly). GenAI consumes and devours all culture, but what it emits has no intentionality. Argue all you want about the intention of the person writing the prompts (ugh), but you cannot resist the colonialist and fascist drive to flatten culture without understanding what you're consuming and without knowing what you need to say. And I use "need" specifically. In that sense it relates to the above piece from Mandy Brown.
Health, Cooking, and Related
A researcher’s 50-year hunt for the source of chronic pain - Stephani Sutherland at Aeon - CJW: On a researcher’s decades’ long attempts to find the source of chronic pain. A lot of really interesting stuff in here.
Books
MJW: Whalefall - Daniel Kraus, 2023
I’m writing a novel about survival situations at the moment. I’ve always loved survival stories: Alive by Piers Paul Reid, Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer, When I Fell From The Sky by Juliane Koepcke are some of my faves. They’re all non-fiction — these types of stories are most often told from personal experience. So when I saw the trailer for the upcoming film, and saw that it was based on a fiction book, I thought it might be relevant to my interests.
Whalefall is the story of a kid getting swallowed by a whale. Like, really! No, not like Jonah or Pinocchio. Well, kinda. But different! And it’s good!
It’s horror. Or a thriller. Or a scientifically accurate description of personally exploring the digestive tract of a whale. But it’s also a family drama; a book about fathers and sons, expectations, discord, and disappointment. 17-year-old Jay goes diving off the California coast, searching for the remains of his estranged father, Mitt, who was a respected old diver in the local scene, and who died by suicide in the area. Into this personal father-son drama comes a giant squid with a sperm whale on its tail.
Jay gets caught up in the hunt and sucked into the mouth of the whale—you know how that kind of thing happens! What follows is a story that moves between Jay in the present (with one hour of air left in his tank as he goes through the gullet of the whale), and the past — telling the story of Jay and Mitt, how they fell out. I really liked the way it was written, although it did slip into overly fancy prose from time to time. It felt real, immediate, and readable: the clock ticking and the oxygen gauge falling into the red. I thought Whalefall was super compelling, emotional, claustrophobic, icky, squishy, squeezy, and scary.
Movies + TV
LZ: She and Her Cat (Everything Flows)
I used to have a very big ick when it came to Makoto Shinkai after I watched “Your Name” and “5 Centimeters Per Second”, because I thought they were all so sugary and bullshit-y that I hesitated to watch the series “She and Her Cat”, but it’s literally only four episodes, eight minutes each, with an opening and an outro. It’s nothing, really, but it was enough to make me bawl. It’s hard to talk about this without spoiling, since it’s a very short story, but I think it’s gonna hit a nerve on those who have gotten a cat while they were still a child and grew up with them.
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LZ: Paris, Texas
I saw this movie in an Instagram post about loneliness in film, but if someone would ask me what this title is about, I wouldn’t say loneliness… Yes, there’s a lot of solitude and isolation in here, but I don’t think that’s the core of the story. We follow the story of Travis, this guy who is just randomly walking in the desert, all dressed up, until he passes out in a sort of shop in the middle of nowhere. Luckily, they manage to locate his brother, who rescues him and hosts him at his place.
We learn that Travis disappeared four years ago, and he has no memory of what has happened so far. His brother and sister-in-law stayed with his son, Hunter, who has grown used to calling them father and mother instead. But then Travis wants to reclaim his son, and slowly the boy starts to trust him again. They leave abruptly to search for his former partner, Hunter’s mother, only to be disappointed with what she has become. Sort of. I’m not going to spoil.
What stood out to me was that Wim Wenders is so subtle with his love stories. I remember watching Until the End of the World many many years ago, and I liked it so much how he combined the landscape with the characters’ narrative. The same happens here. Travis’ brother works with billboards, and even the billboards have some messages. By the end of the movie, you can spot a billboard saying something along the lines of “together we can make this happen”, but reality is a little bit harsher than that. I guess hopeless romantics like myself tend to believe that if you really want something, you’re gonna make it happen, no matter what… but many people, if not most, prefer to simply leave.
Travis roamed in the desert only to be saved by a stranger who luckily contacted his brother, completely devoid of the consequences of his actions. You expect the character’s arc to be about redemption, but certain things never change, and I suppose given the period when this movie was released, I wouldn’t doubt people thought Travis’ last act was heroic even. Nah. To me, he’s the same coward, and perhaps he knew he was a coward and decided to stay one. And I bet if we were to follow his next years, he would happen to be “found” by someone once again.
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The humanitarian crisis in Gaza “haunts” her, she adds. “I’m just doing what I think is, frankly, the Jewish thing to do, which is to value human life and try to contribute to healing the world.”
She adds: “I am incredibly privileged, because smears of being an anti-Semite don’t stick to me. I’m such a proud Jew. But I’m certain there are community members who hate me for this, many of them in my business, and they won’t work with me and want nothing to do with me.”
Instead of feeling anger, she says she feels a sense of sadness and loss. “I am sad for them. They are trapped in an ideological prison that stops them from seeing other people’s humanity. They’re trapped because of the massive propaganda campaign waged against them since the moment they could understand language.” Her views have cost her familial relationships, too. “I don’t know that they will ever be repaired, but I have found a family elsewhere in the rich anti-Zionist Jewish community.”
I watched the first season of Hacks and thought it was great, but also fucking stressful, so I haven’t gone back for more. But I am very excited to see Jane Schoenbrun’s Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, and reading this profile of Hannah Einbinder only made me more excited.
Videos
LZ: We've Been Lied To About Our Spiritual History (& The Hidden World of Esoterica) - Dr. Justin Sledge
I’ve been following ESOTERICA for a while now, and I started watching this long interview (3h22) a few weeks ago. I really like Dr. Justin Sledge. Not only is he very knowledgeable and didactic (once you get past the slightly academic vibes), but he’s very humble and no bullshit.
It’s kind of hard to find someone who talks about magic, occultism, and esoterism that doesn’t fall into complete disbelief and pure academic talk or practitioners who do believe in what they’re doing. I’m neither of those. In fact, I have been trying my best to believe in something, but to no avail so far. I have tried to follow Dr. Angela Pucca’s work, but she really didn’t click with me, and the fact that she uses AI to create corny-ass images of herself as a witch flying in a broom to market her content… I cannot… lol
Anyway, this is a long conversation about history and belief from both academic and personal viewpoints. Sledge shares personal anecdotes and offers his opinion on his role in the community: someone who talks about these topics and spreads the word for free, with quality, respect, and curiosity. It’s less about telling what is real and what is not, but being humble and curious enough to accept that the scientific discourse is not the only one. In fact, he even mentions the story about how Descartes, who is a very central name in rationalism, got his ideas in dreams, and he studied occultism as well.
While Sledge shows old manuscripts throughout the video, it’s totally possible to consume it as a podcast instead, and I wouldn’t think this is a one-sit experience, so take it slow and enjoy it as the fine wine that it is!
Music
LZ: Black Math Horseman
If you are a fan of Subrosa and female-fronted psychedelic doom rock, this one is for you. It's full of distorted guitars, powerful vocals, and a trippy, yet "doomed” (drum roll) feeling, rendered by melodies that are both desperate and comforting, somehow. I think the highlight goes to the most listened-to track on Spotify, Tyrant, which has very impressive and catchy drums, but their cover of Nirvana's All Apologies is also very cool and authentic, I would say.
I also just watched their official video for The Bough, and I wasn't expecting their aesthetic to be more gothic. I usually associate psychedelic music variants with a more bohemian style, even if it has a darker take to it, but nay!
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LZ: Chelsea Wolfe - Death is not the end
This album has not been released yet, but we already have three released singles – Cold, The Dark, and Death is not the end. I need to say that I'm really glad she's back to more acoustic guitars and piano, like in her Unknown Rooms acoustic album era, but still carrying a lot of the darkness she's built over the past albums. I noticed that she has also been filming more videos and making more fashion-oriented promo pictures. Her most recent video has her dressed in Ann Demeulemeester, even!
She has been more open about her exploration of occultism and witchcraft, which she said once helped her with her depression, so I feel like this album is very esoteric, occult even. I am looking forward to seeing what she has cooked for us. I think The Dark is my favorite track so far, and also the most witchy because… what do you mean when you have a verse that literally says “ To be, to be the darkest thing / In the woods, in the woods / Ever I'll be". GOALS!!!
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LZ: Pale - Pale
I found out about this Japanese post-black metal band through a screamo playlist on Spotify, but I knew there was something different than the weird labels the app uses. If you like Deafheaven and MØL, this is totally for you. Zodiac was the track that introduced me to this EP, but I would say the whole compilation is amazing, and there’s even some bits of jazz at some points. This is no surprise to me, considering another Japanese band I like a lot, downy, who use a lot of jazz (if not completely going for it) in their music.
The Memes
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