Current* conditions near Chicago, IL:

Current* conditions near Chicago, IL:

Was one of those nu-tech symposiums a while back where the diseased little fuck-ups at Kalshi insisted their whole project was not just a casino, a fees pit and a steaming buffet for thirsty insiders, but a virtuous "financial instrument" to hedge against disaster. Everything is always only this.

SUBSCRIBE TO MAGAZINE WORLD! A new Flaming Hydra tier with a print issue coming soon, plus broadsides throughout the year, the first of which you can read right now! flaminghydra.com/magazine-wor...

My favorite double feature was never made:

Duvall told a story that during Lonesome Dove he drove way out in West Texas because he heard the old quarterback Sammy Baugh was living there on a ranch. Baugh had a great white beard when he came outside. Baugh kept doing this thing with his hands when he talked, so Duvall stole it for Gus McCrae.

Current* conditions near Chicago, IL:

Wrote about Philip Seymour Hoffman for The Small Bow www.thesmallbow.com/p/like-a-sha...

Flaming Hydra officially turned 2 last Friday. It's one of the truly special and exciting places on the internet. I feel proud all the time of what a great thing it is. flaminghydra.com/issue-492/

Was in a bar Saturday night for the Bears game, and there really is an amazing dumb-crazy voodoo in a crowded place rising all at once from the dead during a comeback. All that begging! All these dear friends. Who's that guy? Raining sweat, babbling to himself? Who cares. You'd bail him out of jail.

Wyo Hill North, 1/8/2026, 5:19:32 PM

We're going to make it

There's a scene in Gay Talese's book about building the Verrazzano Bridge where a half-foot long steel bolt falls from way up and hits an iron worker in the cheek with such insane force the tip of the bolt punctures all the way into his throat. Few weeks later he was back working on the bridge again

Hell yes

Wrote about going home for this month's Hydra flaminghydra.com/home-for-the...

This is one of the best and most exciting things I read all year. It's a profile of these two terminators, but there is so much brilliant, wonderful stuff in here too about human genius, obsession, confidence, & the nature of sports narratives. It's dynamite. bookshop.org/p/books/chan...

Yes, true. @flaminghydra.com is $3/month, it is a coop 100% owned by 60+ writers / artists who make it Recent unpaywalled pieces: @samthielman.com on Platner's tattoos: flaminghydra.com/boys-lives/ @josie.zone and @zachrabiroff.com on Marvel's secret ghostwriter: flaminghydra.com/a-swingin-su...

The fiction Colin's written for Hydra the last few months has really knocked me on my ass

Flaming Hydra is a coop. All you can do with your share is sell it back to the coop (for $1), and nobody can have more than one. You have to be ready for growth to take a long time. Journalism is a public trust that should be accountable to readers alone, and that means readers alone pay for it.

This rocks

Wrote about Italy, Caravaggio and man against the machine flaminghydra.com/caravaggio-s...

Current* conditions near Michigan City, IN:

Maybe nothing in sports as close to hard drugs as watching a bullpen rollicking in and out of jams, wet hair and strange jewelry, spitting and cursing, having entire conversations with themselves. A ship of filthy pirates drunk on the high seas.

Clairemont, San Diego @rbuas.bsky.social @damonagnos.bsky.social

Current* conditions near Grand Haven, MI:

There's an ancient-looking tree on the corner between us and the elementary school and some city guys came by to take it down. They sent one of them up into the air in the little bucket with a chainsaw, and every time he cut a branch off the schoolkids all went nuts like there was a walk-off homer.

Drinking the last half of a beer as Dennis Santana gets Ohtani swinging and deciding the 63-77 Pirates will make the playoffs

This is really great

"Whoa whoa whoa. Take a look at this. Now if you're the confederacy, you like that they've put you in this position. Look at this action here by the Union, trying to cross the Rappahannock under the rebel guns. This is as foolish as anything you will see in the league"

"Okay, we have a significant numerical advantage on the left flank. What we want to do is attack that flank, turn it, and roll the Confederates on back to Richmond. But McClellan doesn't see that clearly. He hesitates. And now Lincoln's gotta think about 'can I trust my commanding general here?'"

Re-watching the Ken Burns Civil War doc and doing Hubie Brown Voice as we scan across another battlefield McClellan has let get away from him.

Seek and destroy: defector.com/seek-and-des...

Current* conditions near Michigan City, IN:

There's a lot to be repulsed by in The Argument -- the tone of haughty "We Finally Figured It Out" that permeates the entire project; the flaccid mediocrity of all the people involved, blundering pedants like Yglesias & slimy zeros like Derek Thompson. This was a really sharp, thoughtful discussion.

Watching the Bear Cam is mostly a spaced-out, cooling Zen — Alaskan rivers in the heavy summer months — but there's a strange terror too when a bear arrives in the morning with some fresh & undocumented injury, an enormous gash down the shoulder, a broken jaw flapping open like an old paperback.

There's an excellent crank theory that insists we're playing a lot of old music at least twice as fast as was originally intended, and I wrote about it (and about the collapse of the Western order) for Defector's music week: defector.com/are-we-playi...

This is the real deal