The air in D.C. felt evil

Luke O'Neil

24 Feb 2026 • 15 min read

We went to D.C. thank you

This has been the longest coldest snowiest winter of my life. I do not care if that is technically true or not it is how I feel and that is valid.

Hell World Chief Jacob Elordi Correspondent Rax King returns to write about the new Emerald Fennell film “Wuthering Heights.” She previously wrote about his ass in Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein and Sofia Coppola's Priscilla.

"Sex, for Fennell, is just another way for bodies to ooze," she writes. "It seems to me she’s less interested in creating a mood of genuine eroticism than in detailing every possible type of goop that can drip out of a person."

You'll need to be a paid subscriber to read this piece in full here or down below.

Good writing is good

First some of my nonsense.

Here's a newish piece by me. Originally published at Flaming Hydra. You can read another one later on in the newsletter.

The situation with the bull

We finally managed to wrangle the damn bull out of the china shop. Which admittedly took some doing. There was a moment or two there amidst the heavy breathing and collecting ourselves afterwards where we thought it might run off back to—I guess the rodeo? A barn? Wherever these bulls emerge from. Save us any more trouble. Naturally it headed straight for the fruit stand next door. Kicked the living hell out of it as you’d imagine. Watermelons ricocheting everywhere out into the middle of the street. Drivers all backed up and honking now. A guy zipping by on a scooter not paying attention absolutely ate shit when he hit one and we all had a pretty good chuckle about that before we realized he was seriously hurt. I guess it goes without saying that the timing of the workers trying to install a big plate of glass on a shopfront window up the block could not have been worse. Someone had the idea to go ask the bull what it wants. To negotiate with it. See if it could be bought off perchance. I know bulls don’t think like us he said. I’m not stupid. But we were out of ideas and so he tried that. Boom. Bull horn right up the butthole. It was a direct shot. Like a bullseye I suppose. Wait is that how they came up with that term? Once again we were at an impasse here with respect to the bull. What about shooting it someone suggested. Right in the fucking head. With this here gun.

The air in D.C. felt evil last week. In a tangible way I mean. The wind and the rain and the cold weren't helping matters. I know the air in D.C. is always evil no matter who is president I'm not a dipshit. And I've been back there a number of times while Trump was in office including just a couple of months ago. Not to mention that time at the actual White House with the Patriots. But I'm telling you it is different now. Could be that I hadn't spent too much time recently in "D.C." as opposed to the city itself which is an otherwise normal and lovely city.

I had gone down to do a reading with a bunch of other nice folks for Lost City Books and it went great. Performed well as my character Loud Boston Idiot That Somehow Knows How to Read (and Has a Heart of Gold.)

Watch me reading The Rules here if you like:

Please enjoy me reading The Rules the other day in DC if you like
— Luke O'Neil (@lukeoneil47.bsky.social) 2026-02-21T14:47:29.356Z

A smart person:

M. came along and she hadn't been to any kind of D.C. since she was a kid so we did a lot of bar hopping and stereotypical touristy stuff and had a generally lovely time. We went to the Lincoln Monument and I felt nothing like inspiration and walked along the Mall to the World War II monument where I felt nothing and then over to the Washington Monument where – well you guessed it buddy. Then the Air & Space Museum where I declared that flying is fake and that planes are fake which was a big mistake in retrospect because we had the scariest most turbulent flight of my life on the way home. I apologize to the Flying Gods for my hubris.

It was so rough I didn't even get to have my little can of tomato juice :(

The American History Museum was particularly fucking bleak – again especially now – but the Natural History Museum was cool. Animals being so much more interesting than people. And harder to lie about.

I found this display a bit on the nose though.

Indeed.

Then again as I wrote in this one...

I don’t know if I’m any good at going to museums anymore...

With so much quiet it's hard for me to block out the part of my brain that’s operating in the background going you are in a museum.

You are in a museum and it is time to be moved by art.

And then we stumbled upon a protest. I asked a few people what was going on and they explained very kindly and patiently to me that it was all a land grab. I knew that but I let them tell me because I could tell they were worked up about it.

Turns out most of the evil guys in the world had clocked in at the Evil Factory to work an evil shift.

It was the first meeting of the Board of Peace at the Donald J. Trump United States Institute of Peace! A big occasion.

Jonathan Katz had a good run down of what that was all about the other day.

The meeting itself was a macabre joke, focused mainly on the plan by Trump, Steve Witkoff, and presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner to raze what is left of Gaza and turn it into Atlantic City with concentration camps. (Not to be confused with the administration’s $45 billion plan to build warehouse concentration camps here at home.) “The coastline alone [is worth] $50 billion on a conservative basis!” Marc Rowan, the billionaire CEO of Apollo Global Management, enthused.

Member states pledged $6.5 billion for the effort, an impressive amount on paper, though a) those are merely pledges, b) where or to whom the money would go remains totally unclear, and c) is a drop in the bucket of the $70 billion the actual U.N. says is needed to rebuild after two years of Israeli destruction. Trump also promised an additional $10 billion from the U.S., but Congress has not approved that money, and seemingly no one reached by the press for further details had any idea what he was talking about

So that explained all the aforementioned surplus of evil in the air.

Thank you Cardinal Pizzaballa.

Ah fuck hold on I gotta go shovel again. Let me hand it over to Rax now. It's a good one. More from me after that. Music, movies, a bunch more pictures. Whatever else it is I do.

Chip in if you want to keep reading. Thank you. I love you forever.

The eternal push and pull of their doomed yearning

by Rax King

You almost had to be there at the Saturday night showing of Emerald Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights.” (Quotation marks very much sic, and we’ll address them in a minute.) It was less a night at the movies than a Roman orgy, merry and tipsy and loud. This was at the kind of theater where the staff takes your drink order at your seat, and the audience ran those poor servers ragged all night, to the point that my memory of the film includes a seemingly endless parade of cocktail trays overburdened by highballs and coupes. It stank like a dive bar and sounded like a bachelorette party. The approximate audience breakdown by gender was 80/20 female/male, which seems about right for the book too.

About halfway through the film’s bloated two-and-a-quarter hour runtime, I began keeping a tally of the audience sounds I heard most often. I counted fourteen ribald squeals, seven ooooohs, four uproarious laughs at moments that weren’t supposed to be funny, and one unmistakable orgasmic moan. When the lights came up at the end, I looked to the seats behind me to see no fewer than three heterosexual couples still macking hard in their seats. It was a teenage making out, the kind that looks from the outside like the participants are trying to suck the life out of each other, even though all parties appeared to be in their thirties.

I relay this data from my movie theater experience of “Wuthering Heights” because Fennell seems to have made the film for no purpose other than eliciting precisely these noisy reactions. The quotation marks are at the director’s behest to account for how she’s slashed and burned her source material almost beyond recognition, which is her right as an artist. I didn’t like her adaptation very much, but it screams “BE SHOCKED BY ME!” at every turn, and viewers certainly were. Given her success in this regard, would it really be appropriate to call the movie bad?

To be fair, it serves up many pleasures with ease, making it an uncommonly fun movie regardless of whether it’s good or not. Most films of this length spend much of their runtime slowly and carefully luring in viewers. But Fennell wants your full attention and she wants it now, from the very first scene of a freshly hanged man popping a death boner. From start to finish, her “Wuthering Heights” is a semi-literal sight for sore eyes. Even its many revolting moments are sensory feasts. Every color is saturated to its most fiery expression, and she’s not afraid to punch up the contrast of light and shadows so that certain shots are truly arresting. One such shot of Margot Robbie’s Cathy sitting upright on a bed with half the room in shadow made me gasp out loud. (Damn! It’s only now occurring to me that I should have been tallying gasps too.)

The less said about the book, the better, probably — this movie works best if you know nothing whatsoever about the novel from which it diverges so thoroughly. But it’s important to note that in the book, protagonists Heathcliff and Cathy do not fuck. Indeed, there’s no book at all without the eternal push-pull of their doomed yearning, the mechanism by which author Emily Brontë explored the racial and class mores of early 19th century England. The two are famously selfish and cruel to each other as well as everybody else. They jeer, they harass, they fight, they chase one another up and down the moors screaming invective, but they don’t have sex, and the book is all the sexier for it.