Luke O'Neil

We agonized over the decision to kill my father

M. is on a Mazzy Star kick I guess and keeps showing me pictures of Hope Sandoval from the 90s and I have to act like I haven't seen every single picture of Hope Sandoval from the 90s. Today we're going to talk a lot about watching your parents die.

The movement to Stop Cop City isn’t going anywhere

Back in January Rachel Garbus reported for Hell World on the movement against the construction of Cop City in Atlanta and the aftermath of the police killing one of the protesters. Today Micah Herskind catches us up on what's transpired over the past few weeks, including the release of an

All I got was this inertia

I just heard Marc Maron say in an interview that he actually enjoys going to the post office and now I don't know if I can trust anyone ever again. Everything we've been told is a lie. Not just about making our postage needs more convenient but everything. The real

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The real truth about it is we're all supposed to try

It’s one of the best things that's ever happened to me

I posted a new excerpt from my book A Creature Wanting Form today. Paying subscribers can read it here: Playing deadWelcome to Hell WorldLuke O’Neil Buy a full-priced yearly subscription to Hell World today and I'll send you a free copy of one of my books as a thank

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Playing dead

I’m not saying you shouldn’t try to help (free preview)

Today's thing is a sequel of sorts to one of the stories in A Creature Wanting Form which should be arriving pretty soon if you ordered it! You'll have to be a paid subscriber to read this piece below in full which you can find here.  Here's a coupon for

I’m not saying you shouldn’t try to help

Today's thing is a sequel of sorts to one of the stories in A Creature Wanting Form which should be arriving pretty soon if you ordered it! 25 % OFF SUBSCRIBE NOW I was looking at my phone on the couch when D. looked up from her phone on the couch

When you’re famous you don’t belong to yourself

Today's Hell World is lighter and a bit more fun than we usually have around here and I'm sorry about that. It begins with a very strange thing that happened to me the other day. I sat down in the morning and opened up a book and I read the

That's what makes a wax museum timeless

This piece was originally published in Esquire. For the first time in history Tom Brady looks like garbage. If it weren't for the number 12 jersey on his back or the football clasped awkwardly in his tiny hands, you wouldn't know it was him. Granted, it's merely a likeness—one

I'm worried they might finally get the answer they're really looking for

A Creature Wanting Form my new book of short stories and poems should be shipping within a few weeks. For the next five people who buy a full price yearly subscription to Hell World I'll send you a free copy of that or one of my other books. Reply to

Racism and xenophobia won't fix the Canadian housing crisis

(This piece was sent out to paid subscribers last week but I'm taking it out from behind the paywall today. Subscribe if you can to support our work here.) SUBSCRIBE NOW by Matthew McCreadie The day that the Canadian Federal Budget was announced last April, a man was crushed to

Bachelor parties suck so bad

Bachelor parties tend to suck so fucking bad, dude. Especially the stereotypical "weekend in Vegas with the boys" variety, which are already a nightmare of hyper-consumption, and, yes, performance of masculinity. Except all the ones I've been on which were nice and normal. In their new graphic novel Boys Weekend,

I know some really greasy dentists

If you never read this Hell World in which a couple dozen people shared their dental nightmares it's a rough one. I was rigid in the chair crying from both fear and shameIt was so bad I would sit on a cold winter basement floor in pain swigging whiskey to

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Throwing water on a grease fire

They don’t see us as equals

Today a dispatch from one of the ongoing protests in Peru that have arisen after the attempted self-coup and subsequent removal from power of president Pedro Castillo in December. At least sixty people have been killed and hundreds of others have been injured largely by police violence. Help pay for

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They had to go to something that was more effective

Stopping Cop City, the murder of Tortuguita, and the trees that got us here

Today we have some great on the ground reporting from the protests against "Cop City" in Atlanta. First a couple things from me. Pay to support independent journalism please and thank you. Subscribe now Cops killed more people in 2022 than any year since we've counted. 1 in 47 adults

I don't care where just far

I was looking through some old boxes of shit that I finally took from my parents' house a while back and it reminded me of a piece I wrote about the experience of going home to clean up your history for Boston Magazine a couple years ago. I decided to

How to Throw Your Life Away

A version of this piece was originally published in Boston Magazine a couple years back. I went back in this week and made it worse. Consider subscribing to this newsletter for free or with a paid subscription if you can thank you. SUBSCRIBE NOW Also my new book of short

We had a really good scene down there for a long time

Today we're going to talk a lot about how we talk. I asked a bunch of people to tell me about their relationship to their regional accent. Whether like me they sometimes feel a kind of weird internalized shame about it and may have tried to lose it or perhaps

How much death works

Autumn Harris' lungs were so filled with fluid they weighed four times what a normal person's lungs should weigh during her autopsy. The thirty four year old died in an Alabama prison in 2018 after going untreated for pneumonia by medical staff for weeks according to a malpractice lawsuit filed

You will get less than you desire and more than you deserve

Whenever I finish a film or TV series I immediately want to read as much about it as possible. That's true whether or not I loved it or I thought it fucking sucked. Sometimes trying to answer the question wait why did this fucking suck? is crucial. There are some

To be caught happy in a world of misery...

25% off a yearly subscription You might consider ordering my forthcoming book of short stories and poems A Creature Wanting Form. None of this shit below is in it. 1. The stripped-bare branches against the wintry backdrop of the hills like the airways of the human lung I thought kneeling

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Predator mesh breach