Try Heat Death, a newsletter that's a melting pot of connections between nature, history and culture, run by @saulelbein.bsky.social and myself. Issues feature either our writing or incredible commissioned guest pieces, which most of the money we make goes to pay for!

And we could not have asked for a better managing editor

Austin weather right now is insane

Never not thinking about the out-of-work British mill workers who agitated *against* the UK intervening on the side of the South and getting their jobs back because they fucking hated slavery

In 1862, @saulelbein.bsky.social writes, suffering textile workers streamed into a Manchester meeting hall. At stake: whether Britain should join the Civil War on the side of the Confederacy. Proponents of "kitchen table politics" can learn a lot from what happened next. New, on Heat Death!

This is a really sobering read.

Come for the prophesized doom of the suburbs, but also come for the first published account of the time @asherelbein.bsky.social almost gave our mother a heart attack by means of a snapping turtle heat-death.ghost.io/the-suburbs-...

I've been covering forests and fire for more than a decade and until we were pitched this piece, the connection between the federal crusade against fire and the sterility of the suburbs had never occurred to me.

Sure sure but what if also he shaved his head

Worth also thinking about this nonsense in the context of @saulelbein.bsky.social’s piece on antisemitism — people can will themselves to believe that we are always on the precipice of pogrom (one mayor away!) if that is a useful ideological notion for your politics. bsky.app/profile/ashe...

This really is the divide I’m pointing to, which is above all a divide within the Jewish community: Cuomo arguing that Jews need him to protect them from other non-Jews. heat-death.ghost.io/the-myths-of...

If there’s any great lesson from the AI age it’s that liberal arts may have been the smarter thing to study than tech

By which I mean: the specific kind of antisemitism we now face is a specific tic of post-19th C blood and soil nationalism. It is *new and contingent,* not timeless, and that has to inform the strategy for confronting it.

Connecting the dots here is not hard.

This article was amazing. Highly recommend you read it

"Don’t say we didn’t know, A genocide in the name of all of us" (rhymes in Hebrew) Recorded in Jerusalem, Israel 👇

It’s really everywhere once you start seeing it heat-death.ghost.io/the-myths-of...

What if I were to tell you that “the oldest hatred” was about as old as the telephone

Everyone from Bari Weiss to Mike Johnson has been out running their mouths about antisemitism. Andrew Cuomo's doing so tonight on live TV. @saulelbein.bsky.social has a very important question: what the fuck are these guys talking about?

A forgotten pogrom teaches us about how we’ve been thinking about antisemitism wrong: heat-death.ghost.io/the-myths-of...

We need to start rethinking how we talk about "antisemtism," and whether the stories we tell about it -- or that the idea of it makes us tell -- are true.

This is misguided because it falls into the fatal mistake of Trump’s oil people = Big Oil. That’s wrong. Exxon has a lot to answer for, but they were fine with the Paris Accords and ”net zero by 2050” as long as they still owned everything in 2050.

Solar as a bridge to natural gas plants is really insane lol

New, on HEAT DEATH! Against the backdrop of a relentlessly changing climate, guest writer Israel Kolawole explores the strange history of a longstanding American dream: the ability to bring rain on demand.

Man this one wrecked me

Up close I swear to god their breathing sounds like Darth Vader

It is weird though to think of the Niemoller thing (and I’m not sure this was wrong even in the original context) as being about edgelords needing to stay edgy

These books rule. They are an oasis in the modern wasteland of dried-out IP, you will not get a better use of your time for $6

This is a really good job for a Texas journalist looking to build a platform, and The Barbed Wire is a great outfit to be associated with.

Who knew that taxonomy needed so badly to be Disrupted

oh fuck they followed them literally

Worth remembering that civilians don't *have* a commander in chief, as @samadlerbell.bsky.social and @mattsitman.bsky.social pointed out a while ago

If you think of Bari Weiss's main art as the mountebank-ish performance of journalism, then I think we have to recognize the CBS thing as her Mona Lisa — as I argued to @oliviamesser.bsky.social

Far from enhancing productivity, the push to add AI tools to every scrap of enterprise software may be ... destroying it? Which makes sense! There's been a madcap push to stick addictive work-simulating software into every digital space where people collaborate ... hbr.org/2025/09/ai-g...

We've also been getting a lot clearly AI generated fungus-themed pitches, so if you have those please send. To be clear, we categorically won't use them, and will probably blacklist those who send them, as we do other AI submissions. But! They *would* be helpful for a coming piece, so

Tapping the sign

We're just nine people away from hitting our 500th subscriber. Anyone want to help us get there?

Saul and Asher write beautifully on a number of ecological, sociological, folkloric, and art/cultural topics, and the essays they commission are just fantastic across the board. Really, really recommend shifting away from big pubs and into reading things like Heat Death.

Your occasional reminder that there are a small, specific, known and deeply unpopular group of people both 1. pushing for this outcome and 2. that we do nothing to avoid or even forecast it

The big question is: does the Democratic Party have within it the structural ability for real reform?

www.desmog.com/2025/09/29/r... Follow the money. Exactly zero companies are betting their own $ on a new bitumen pipeline, while global investments in renewables and battery storage are surging. Canada needs to skate to where the puck is going, not where it was last decade. @mark-carney.bsky.social

… at a time when there is a real right-wing push to treat homelessness as crime

If the Trump administration has its way, nearly *four million* people—half of them children—will be at imminent risk of eviction and homelessness. Let that sink in.

I love it when he cooks

Pitch us, and we’ll take your weird stories and make them sing

#Humberto is now a Cat 5! It’s the first time in nearly a century with back to back seasons with Cat 5’s in the Atlantic. We are seeing our warmer future unfold in real-time, IMO. 1/

It is, you might say, a ratchet

Just a cock- roach, on a stalk, bros