Behind the bravado there was a pair of sad eyes
The heat has finally broken in Massachusetts. It is dry and gorgeous this morning. It will never be that hot and gross out again. Mark it down.
I didn't really pay attention to what was going on in D.C. last night. Seemed like a lot of symbolism to me. I've had quite enough of that to last me a lifetime. Hope everyone had fun though.
We've got a nice two-parter today. First up Dumb Funny Shit for (Gender Neutral) Dudes Week continues with our man Dan Ozzi writing about Danny McBride's new book of short stories Thrilling Tales of Modern Men, Tim Robinson, Conner O’Malley and the dumbest dumb shit of them all Mr. Donald Trump.
"None of these men ever face their trauma directly," he writes. "None of them ever take accountability or admit wrongdoing. And they certainly never apologize for anything. They feel misunderstood, but were never given, nor worked toward, the communication tools to properly express themselves. Thrilling Tales of Modern Men is the 'men would rather ____ than go to therapy' meme playing out over 354 pages."
You can also find that piece here.
Luke O’Neil
Dan previously wrote for Hell World about his favorite Weezer songs and his ancestral homeland of Staten Island.
John Oakes also returns to write about Donald Trump's obsession with gold and his fear of germs.
"A terror of infection goes hand-in-glove with an obsession for gold, for Trump the only material that will render what is unclean clean, and stay clean," he writes.
I interviewed Oakes a couple years back about his book The Fast: The History, Science, and Philosophy of Doing Without. He also wrote about hunger strikes and the TV series Say Nothing for Hell World here.
You can read it here or down below.
Luke O’Neil
Hey did you know We Had It Coming hasn't been out for anywhere close to a year yet? Hard to believe right? It's practically still warm from the presses. Please feel free to read it. I would like that very much.
A golden age for dumb guys
by Dan Ozzi
It has been said countless times, but if it weren’t for the looming sense of societal collapse, the Trump administration would be the most hilarious era of history to live through. Every day the world watches with morbid curiosity as this big dumb oaf accidentally gets himself stuck in an entirely avoidable jam, whether it’s something as dire as a war with Iran or as frivolous as renovating a pool, and spends the subsequent days and weeks and months fucking up all aspects of it in ways that would make Mr. Bean blush, scrambling on the spot and pulling nonsense out of his internet-melted brain on national television. It’s all very funny if you can stomach it.
The cycle has been playing out the same, predictable way for over a decade now. First comes the fuck up. Maybe he has conjured a fact or statistic out of thin air, something he half-remembered one of the morning show toadies say on Fox News. Maybe he has made up a new kind of math where it’s possible for drug prices to fall by 500, 600 percent. Thousands of percents. “It’s amazing, really, when you think about it,” he says, trusting that no one will actually think about it.
Act two is the double down. Even when presented with the irrefutable facts of reality, he insists he is right. He flails. He digs in deeper. He calls anyone questioning him “very stupid” and “piggy.” This is a man whose ego is so fragile that he finds it easier to try to gaslight every single person on earth than to ever, even once, admit fault.
The third act is less funny, when he simply decides it’s time to move on from this mess of his own making. One which is usually so egregious it would have cost literally any level of employee their job at literally any company. Yet for the most powerful dumb guy alive it is just another Tuesday.
It’s not surprising that this period of consequence-free incompetence has been a fertile time for male comedians who can satirize this sort of toxic masculinity that is rapidly eating society from the inside like a cancer. (Perfect timing then for Tim Heidecker and The Onion to relaunch Infowars yesterday as a parody of disgraced tinfoil hat conspiracist Alex Jones.) But the three comedians best capturing the defects of today’s men are Tim Robinson, Conner O’Malley, and Danny McBride, who have all created their own distinct cinematic universes of toxic guys.
Robinson is a savant at portraying men who take things way too far and have a clinical inability to pick up on social cues. A typical character is the last guy in the room to realize that the problem, actually, has been him this entire time. In most I Think You Should Leave sketches, Robinson gets backed into a corner of his own wrongdoing until he ultimately vomits, melts down, or simply runs off screaming.
O’Malley’s guys exist on a similar wavelength but their damage is a direct product of the late-capitalist manosphere. He plays the kinds of men who have had their minds warped by decades of podcasters selling them unregulated brain pills, gas station energy drinks, Pornhub gooning, vape tricks, Worldstar videos, rap battles, Deadpool humor, and a certain intangible spiritual quality we’ll call Jokerfication.
And then there are the guys of Danny McBride’s world. Loud, narcissistic, arrogant. Infallible protagonists of their own reality. But unlike Robinson and O’Malley, who largely work in short-burst sketches and clips, McBride has had more room to flesh out his flawed male characters across multi-season episodic TV shows, and he’s used that space to give them a depth that’s not always evident for the other two.
Maybe depth is too strong a word. Let’s call it a motive—a tiny bit of insight into their inner-workings that might provide more context and make them less two-dimensional, or at least provide an answer to the question: What’s this guy’s fuckin’ deal anyway?
To make audiences laugh at dumb men is easy, but McBride has taken the harder route of eliciting empathy. A hyper-cocky washed up athlete is a funny premise, but what made Eastbound and Down’s Kenny Powers one of TV’s all-time greatest characters was the war within himself to kill his own massive ego in order to find peace. Behind the bravado there was a pair of sad eyes that had seen the mountaintop to which his talents had taken him and had subsequently spent every day since watching the descent brought on by his own hubris. Same goes for The Righteous Gemstones’ Jesse Gemstone, a swaggering preacher driven by his need to be perceived as the alpha male in a family of tremendous means that he believes himself entitled to simply by being born into it.
McBride made his literary debut last week, releasing the collection of short stories Thrilling Tales of Modern Men. McBride the author writes like a TV script writer. No flowery prose or fancy literary devices. Just dialogue and action. For anyone who has followed his acting career, the characters in these short stories will seem familiar. In fact, it’s downright impossible to read the quotes in them without hearing McBride speaking. What other voice could possibly come to mind when reading a character say “I have to do diarrhea?”
Like his TV characters, the ones in his short stories are largely insecure men driven by a singular unaddressed issue. Just about every story follows a man who has not come to terms with grief, or a divorce, or being laid off. Instead of confronting these things head-on, they go through great lengths to compensate and drag everyone around them down with them in the process. In the opening story a divorced dad who only sees his kids twice a month decides to quit his job to pursue stunt magic. In another a man copes with guilt over his wife’s death by making threats to a successful author who he believes has stolen his life’s story. A third endures an extreme experimental procedure to deal with the insecurity stemming from his hair loss.
None of these men ever face their trauma directly. None of them ever take accountability or admit wrongdoing. And they certainly never apologize for anything. They feel misunderstood, but were never given, nor worked toward, the communication tools to properly express themselves. Thrilling Tales of Modern Men is the “men would rather ____ than go to therapy” meme playing out over 354 pages.
“With a lot of the characters that I’ve written about, I think their morals and their values and how they see themselves [are questionable]. But I also think their biggest advocates are themselves. They have some sort of understanding of who they think they are that doesn’t usually align with the way others see them. There’s always this constant sort of need to prove oneself or to step over the line of what’s decent in order to get you to where you need to be,” McBride told The Ringer’s Alan Siegel.
Fragile masculinity is obviously not a new phenomenon. Look through the history section at any library and you’ll find countless books about countless men who have done their part in ruining the planet by stepping over the line to prove themselves. But there is a commonality among the toxic males of today’s society that many journalists have tried to dissect over the last few years. They’ve blamed it on the “male loneliness epidemic” and “the breadwinner dilemma” and “social isolation.” McBride does not need to delve too deep into the psychology of it all. He has an innate handle on why men are the way they are today. Simply put, they were raised for a world that never came to be. McBride’s modern men are the products of a time when boys were reared to be strong and masculine and take up space. This archetype has gone extinct, or was at least on the way toward going extinct for a while there in today’s world, so they must keep one foot in an alternate reality where they are still useful and dominant.
“Growing up in the ’80s, you were being sold machismo, action, ‘kill ’em all, let God sort ’em out,’” McBride explained to the New York Times’ David Marchese. “That was pounded into anyone’s brains that came up on cable television or watching movies. I think it took me a little while to realize that’s not real life. That’s not how things work. Maybe there is this slow waking of, like, everything I’ve been told isn’t necessarily how it’s supposed to be, and then it’s that awkwardness of finding out what is important to you or what your values are.”
Thrilling Tales of Modern Men finds men at that intersection, where the promise of the past has collided with the reality of the present. It has left men stumbling around, searching for purpose in a world in which they’re not really needed, and making it everyone else’s problem as they struggle to figure it out. It’s all very funny if you can stomach it.
Dan Ozzi is the author of three books including SELLOUT: The Major-Label Feeding Frenzy That Swept Punk, Emo, and Hardcore (1994 - 2007). He writes about music, books, and other crap at his beloved and wildly popular newsletter ZERO CRED.
A fear of the unclean and imperfect
by John Oakes
The list of Trump’s fixations is long, but in his dotage he keeps coming back to two things: germs and gold. Both are intertwined, even interdependent.
Through six bankruptcies and innumerable promises made and broken, only gold remains for Trump. It is his one unyielding constant. Gold is not merely something shiny that he wants to surround himself with. It represents stability and purity to a degree hard for most of us to imagine. Gold is god, and it is at his fingertips.
On Sunday, September 28, 2025, not four hours after he had learned that a U.S. Marine veteran had killed four people in a Michigan church and set it on fire, Trump posted on Truth Social a 37-second-long video that panned silently across gold-covered decorations scheduled to be installed at the White House. The silence, uncharacteristic of the president, underscored a moment of reverential contemplation.
To accompany the video, Trump posted: “Some of the highest quality 24 Karat Gold used in the Oval Office and Cabinet Room of the White House. Foreign Leaders, and everyone else, ‘freak out’ when they see the quality and beauty. Best Oval Office ever, in terms of success and look!!! President DJT.”
Shortly after more than 170 people were killed in the U.S. bombing of a girls’ elementary school in Minab, Iran, at a March 2, 2026 ceremony convened to award the Medal of Honor to three members of the U.S. armed forces, Trump found himself again diverted by gold, this time the golden drapes in the White House. “I picked those drapes in my first term,” he said, as he gestured to them. “I always liked gold . . .”
Why gold, and how is it connected to slime? No germs gather on Trump’s gold, or anyone’s gold. Few ideas are more powerful than the fear of infection, and germ-free and bio-inert gold is a shield against this fear. And few people fear germs more intensely than Trump, described by a Politico journalist as “the most germ-conscious man to ever lead the free world,” a claim backed repeatedly both by the president’s words and his actions.
During Trump’s time in the public eye, several incidents occurred that attest to his deep-seated mysophobia, what he himself has often referred to as “germophobia,” a fear of the unclean and by extension the imperfect. His obsession over the slime “polluting” the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool is only the latest manifestation. When his aide Kellyanne Conway coughed at a staff meeting in the aftermath of his first campaign in 2016, Trump reportedly “went nuts” and left the area. During an interview with George Stephanopoulos for ABC News in 2019, when his then-chief of staff Mick Mulvaney coughed, Trump ordered him to leave. At a press conference on February 11, 2025, in the Oval Office together with Elon Musk and his four-year-old son, Trump could be seen looking askance as the little boy picked his nose and wiped it on the Resolute Desk. Thereafter, as Trump proclaimed in a Truth Social post, he had the 1,300-pound desk disassembled and removed for “a light refinishing—a very important job.” Trump even cited his phobia as a defense against the notorious dossier that claimed he was the recipient of a “golden shower” in a Moscow hotel room: “Does anyone really believe that story? I’m also very much of a germaphobe, by the way, believe me.”
And un-gold, a total lack of gold as manifested by a deluge of bacteria- and germ-soaked matter, is what Trump’s enemies merit: on October 18, 2025, the same day as millions expressed their opposition to his regime in “No Kings” rallies across the nation, Trump re-posted an AI-generated video of himself wearing a golden crown, dumping excrement on protesters in Times Square. His opponents deserved to be drowned in filth.
A terror of infection goes hand-in-glove with an obsession for gold, for Trump the only material that will render what is unclean clean, and stay clean. “I can’t tell you how much that gold cost,” he told reporters gathered in his revamped Oval Office in September 2025, gesturing to the new gold finishes. “A lotta money. There’s nothing like gold, and there’s nothing like solid gold, but this beautiful office needed it,” he said. “It had to be represented. When we took it over it was dirty, not clean.” Gold’s duality here asserts itself. Its lifelessness and its unchangeability mesh with a fear of infection and foreignness, and outweigh its attribute as a store of value. Gold is transformed into a weapon against what is “alien” and “dirty,” or germ-infested. The one ethnic minority Trump has taken a shine to—South African whites—comes from a country known for its gold output (and, for generations, its brutal exploitation of Black gold miners). Save the whites, save the gold.
A Freudian might remind us that mysophobia has its roots in early childhood. A baby likes to grasp. When a baby releases its poop they lose something they created. An unhealthy “doubting mania” that magnifies opposing forces can result, says Dr. Michael Garfinkle, a psychologist at the Icahn School of Medicine, and neurosis can be the outcome. Poor baby Trump. Forced to release his crap, which was all that he could create, and told that he couldn’t play with it because it was bad: dark and dirty. The boy took the message a little too closely to heart.
If “dirt is matter in the wrong place” (as Freud wrote in English in his otherwise German-language 1908 essay “Character and Anal Erotism”), gold is matter put just right. Gold is the opposite extreme of filth, which is disgusting, chaotic, and corrupt, by definition impure. We cast filth aside. It is not precious. Filth is a prelude to or by-product of death, but gold is stable, divine output, complete and pure.
Trump’s connection to gold becomes a litany that dulls the metal’s star-born shine. He redecorated the Oval Office with gold finishes, he’s put it in the bathroom, he had a twenty-two-foot-tall golden statue of himself installed at one of his golf clubs, he called a U.S. residency purchasing program for wealthy-would be immigrants the Trump Gold Card. Even “gorgeous paper” that had to be signed “for a general” could be elevated by the application of a golden flourish: “I said, “Throw a little more gold on it. They deserve it.”
But of course what the president has done, caught up in psychosis and a pointless, destructive quest for personal, cultural, and racial purity, is to devalue the thing that he loves above anything else—because something that is spread everywhere becomes commonplace. It loses its impact. And the rest of us pay the price.
John Oakes is the author of the forthcoming book Precious Metal: 79 Ways of Looking at Gold. He is publisher of The Evergreen Review.
The Evergreen Review was nice enough to publish an excerpt from We Had It Coming a while back. You can read it here:
Congratulations to Hell World contributor Mel Buer for her Southern California Journalism Award!
Read some of Mel's reporting for Hell World here:
Luke O’Neil
Luke O’Neil
Luke O’Neil
This get's a big lol, lmao from me.
Joe Wilkins
There’s a silent epidemic building in colleges and universities throughout the country — and as you might imagine, it has everything to do with AI.
As one New York financier told Financial Times journalist Gillian Tett, new hires who were seen as “AI natives” are turning out to have alarmingly shallow ideas. So much so, the anonymous finance worker admitted, that his firm now actively avoids seeking out AI-literate STEM graduates, and opts to comb through humanities students instead.
What did I just say about symbolism!
This shit almost made me optimistic for a second.
This post is true and also reminded me of something I wrote a couple years ago which I will now share.
Blessed are the poor
I watched this Spanish movie called The Platform last night. It’s one of these heavy handed class disparity films they make now. It’s set in a massive tower or tunnel structure in which two prisoners are bunked to a floor for a certain period of time. Our knowledge of how deep or tall the structure is and therefore how many are being tortured thusly is parceled out slowly. Once a day a large table set with a lavishly prepared feast descends from the kitchen above and pauses at each floor long enough for the prisoners to hurriedly gorge themselves before it resumes its descent.
By the time it reaches the lower floors you can probably imagine the absolute state of things.
They should’ve called it The Leftovers if that title weren’t already taken.
Remember that show? What a beautiful show. To be honest I didn’t retain much of it besides the waste-laying Max Richter musical theme. Justin Theroux’s stupid muscles. Carrie Coon.
My god Carrie Coon.
Someone told me recently that Lapsed Catholicism is the one true faith and I believe that.
I just accidentally swiped over to the left on my phone screen to the place where the news app and a bunch of other useless widgets live and read a headline that said “China begins drilling one of the world’s deepest holes in hunt for discoveries deep inside the Earth” and one that said “Rare wolverine spotted in California – the second in 101 years.”
“Ukraine accused Russia of blowing up a major dam” read a third and then “Second flight arrives in Sacramento carrying migrants with Florida documents.”
“A new CEO says employees can’t work remotely after all, and they revolt” was another and then finally and this is very big if true “Arnold Schwarzenegger says heaven is a ‘fantasy.’ We won’t see each other again after we’re gone.”
“When people talk about, ‘I will see them again in heaven,’ it sounds so good, but the reality is that we won’t see each other again after we’re gone. That’s the sad part. I know people feel comfortable with death, but I don’t,” he said.
You cannot bench press death. Can’t even dead lift it haha.
Hmm.
I’m looking at the more evil app now my favorite of all the evil apps and just read another headline.
“Arby's employee found dead inside freezer ‘beat her hands bloody trying to escape.’”
Maybe heaven isn’t real but you'd have to hope at least that the other place is.
Each of the prisoners in the Platform are allowed to bring in one item from the outside. A knife. A baseball bat. Our protagonist is a sturdy sort of fellow but somewhat idealistic. He chooses a copy of Don Quixote. He’s a principled man. A stupid man maybe. Sturdier than you or me in any case.
I would have done things differently than he did certainly. For example I would have simply died after about twelve hours in there. Maybe fewer. I would not do well in normal prison never mind dystopian torture prison. May none of us ever end up in a prison that is a metaphor for anything. Not even for something good. I can barely sit here everyday in my nice home with all the comforts one would ever need.
There’s a pot of carrot and lentil stew boiling as we speak. Some nice bread and olive oil for dipping while it heats. To tide me over. A liberal grinding of pepper and sea salt.
I would not recommend eating dinner while watching The Platform however. I genuinely fucked up trying to pull that one off.
From time to time bodies plummet through the table-sized gaping hole in the cells. Bludgeoning themselves on the ledges as falling bodies do.
Once a month the prisoners are gassed and then awaken on a random floor numbering from one to at least one hundred and maybe more. It’s understood that it’s worse being up high on the feasting levels because you are always conscious of the fear that your next posting will be horrific. That anxiety. Surely not as bad as scrounging on the subsistence levels but psychologically speaking that is.
The poorest can dream of salvation while the gluttonous have only the anticipation of their inevitable falling.
Something to look forward to.
I also saw these two guys this week.
Kind of pale in comparison to the guys my sister saw the other day but what can you do. It's not a competition!
Ok be good everyone. I'm cheering for you.
