Luke O'Neil

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A callous and careless feat of engineering

You're performing advocacy one way or the other whether you're aware of it or not

Yesterday writer Emily Bazelon posted a lengthy thread on Twitter defending her work in a recent story for the New York Times Magazine. Thin-skinned Times writer unable to accept criticism from the left as colleagues circle the wagon isn't exactly news but nevertheless. The piece in question was

I'd been expecting him to die for so many years

This essay appears in my book Welcome to Hell World. It was originally published in Esquire. The fifth time I went to watch my father die was the one that finally took. He'd been in and out of hospitals, and hospice, and nursing homes for so many years.

It’s not just sitting around listening to music all day and being cool

We've got a music-centric two-parter today. Down below I talk with Jen Malone, the widely lauded TV and film music supervisor, about her colleagues' recent decision to try to unionize the profession, as well as what it's like curating music for shows like Atlanta and

A Friday night with the Winklevoss Twins band

by Connor Scully Most of us became familiar with the Winklevoss Twins via 2008’s The Social Network, the film that made them famous for their two main things: fumbling the Facebook bag and being tall. And yet somehow these guys have managed to stay in the public consciousness ever

I suppose it is better than nothing

Subscribe now please and thank you I'm not especially enthusiastic about this reportedly bipartisan gun legislation proposal from what I've seen so far. It seems to be conceding to the framing of the right that our epidemic of gun violence is a school fortification and mental

Enough chaos to call all future elections into question

Do you ever think about how they got it so you can't smoke cigarettes anywhere anymore like ten to twenty years ago? That effort would not work if we tried it for the first time now. You'd have chuds burning heaters in the grocery store in

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He's drowning right in front of you and you won't help

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She was too busy helping some other people

A comprehensible tragedy

Subscribe now The impulse is to try to write something beautiful. Something stirring that crystalizes how we're feeling. Devastated yes but not defeated. Not fully defeated. Not even now. To reassert our collective humanity. To remind ourselves that this is all worth it somehow. Living in the first

Go ahead and execute him anyway

Hello. Please subscribe if you can thank you. 15% off forever The thing is the fucking cop knew what he was about to do was stupid. I always assumed they were just walking around with a void inside of their skulls like a robot on sleep mode that switched to

You can always find some way to have the past justify what you want to do now

Your continued support as a paid subscriber is greatly appreciated. Earlier this week the sickos on the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled on a case called Jarkesy v. SEC finding that the Securities and Exchange Commission violated a hedge fund's constitutional rights by trying them and punishing

The longstanding battle of pen versus sword

Hello and thank you for being a free subscriber. As a quick note the url for this newsletter's home is now welcometohellworld.com [https://www.welcometohellworld.com/]. You can get in touch with any issues or tips by replying to this email or using luke [at] welcometohellworld [dot

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Look at what we can do. Even this. And what will be done about it?

As wide a circle of people as the law can implicate

I write about the epidemic of wage theft in the country down below but up first today Shane Ferro joins us to write on the passing of Kathy Boudin and the scourge of felony murder convictions. Please chip in to support our work here if you are able to. Here&

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They will never return the favor

We can rely only on ourselves

Thanks for being here. Support this newsletter with a subscription [https://hellworld.ghost.io/ghostttttt] if you can. If you missed the most recent issue here it is below. Make sure you whitelist Hell World in your email as some people tell me it's been going to spam.

Wanting the government to help people is free

A real shitty sleight of hand we do in this country goes like this: We tell kids they have to go to college to succeed. You'll never "make it" if you don't we say. You'll have to work menial jobs forever etc.

We couldn’t have done it unless we worked together

Here's 25% off a subscription [https://www.welcometohellworld.com/ghostttttt] if you'd like to support my work. Thanks for reading. On Thursday of last week employees of the Chicago Reader, the city’s fifty year old alt-weekly, rallied outside of the home of one of its

The most American thing you can think of

Quick what are the two most quintessentially American things you can think of? Cars and guns right? I guess you could say jazz or hip hop or I don't know watching a guy get chronic traumatic encephalopathy while we eat nachos on the couch if you wanted to

I gotta get out of here man

Hello. I am leaving Substack and switching over to another newsletter platform called Ghost which you are looking at right now. Ideally this won't change anything for you the subscribers in any way and you don't have to change or update your payment settings. At least

These people have stolen everything

Today’s main feature is a dispatch by Andrew Quemere from an anti-carceral protest this week in Massachusetts against the proposed construction of a massive and expensive new women’s prison. Quemere writes the newsletter The Mass. Dump Dispatch which you should subscribe to if you care about public records

You can’t carry a thousand deaths around with you

Remember how proud we all were of healthcare workers there for a while? It was a whole thing. Clapping for them and shit. Big sappy TV ads thanking them. As we enter what may be another surge [https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/once-again-u-s-faces-another-covid-19-surge-as-cases-rise-nationally] (?) I thought it might be worth

A lot of people had the rug pulled out from under them

A reader wrote in on how the expiration of the child tax credit payments has impacted his family. “So I will preface this with my family is middle class and doing okay and there are definitely people doing worse who were affected more,” he started and I certainly understand that

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Everything happens for a reason