"That money helped entrench a political movement openly hostile to democratic norms. This was not an accident. Authoritarians are better for fossil fuel business...The fossil fuel industry...[i]s actively underwriting democratic decay." - @emorwee.bsky.social heated.world/p/actually-i...

One thing to add here: in Texas particularly, fracking cash — spent by new-money paleocon oilmen like Tim Dunn — explicitly underwrote the rise of the far right. It really is a different beast than, and funded even harsher politics, than prior “Big Oil” donors

PSA for freelance climate journalists: I'm taking pitches for HEATED These are the types of stories I'm interested in. Particularly looking for stories in categories 2 and 3.

The brutal PFAS stories coming hard and pfast these days www.propublica.org/article/fore...

@txsharon.bsky.social warned people about this as early as 2010

The thing that has to be said here is that (1) this is still going on and (2) it’s actually getting worse, because the industry is producing ever more waste per barrel of oil or MMBTU of gas, because the easily accessible stuff is long gone.

For decades, Texas let drillers spread staggering amounts of radioactive and PFAS-ridden waste on the fringes of the nation’s fourth largest metro area — while making it virtually impossible for the public to know where. Absolutely fucking insane story from @saulelbein.bsky.social today

thebarbedwire.com/2026/02/11/a... The take-home message here is that there are likely tens of millions of tons of radioactive and forever chemical laid in waves spread across the fourth largest metro area in the United States and no one knows where it is.

I’ve been thinking about what it would look like to talk about the fossil age not in a technical register, but in a moral or religious one

Today, on Heat Death! @saulelbein.bsky.social gives the fossil fuel industry and its underworld kings a bracing dose of that old-time religion.

The Butlerian Jihad will be planned on 3x5 notecards

all-seeing eye dog

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!

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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.