The past is a foreign country but it's also a hostile one

It seemed like a person could fall for forever from this height

Luke O'Neil

23 Apr 2026 • 23 min read

Photo by M. Crowley

Hello.

M. has been in Iceland this week and is seeing some amazing sites like the one above. I thought that was a good enough excuse to share this one from ACWF that I think is one of my best. It's based loosely on the time I went to Iceland myself. You can read it here or down below.

It seemed like a person could fall for forever from this height.

All of a sudden nothing was beautiful anymore.

I thought about what would happen if a person fell into a pit that was deep enough that the bottom never arrived and if after a while you would adjust to the dropping and have time to reflect on how screwed you were or if instead your heart would give out after a minute or two of the falling.

If you would have phone reception and time to call everyone you loved.

I love it when enough time has passed since I've read a story of mine where I can be like what was going on with this fucking guy? Are you ok man?

First here's a bunch of chockablock about the news of the week. A real fucking hodgepodge. A potpourri or mélange if you will.

We'll be back again soon with a more coherent piece about the spate of new internet privacy laws. Sooner than you think probably. Sometimes Hell World takes a while to come and sometimes it comes real quick. I like keeping everyone on their toes.

Hey check this out. One good thing.

Tim Heidecker thought The Onion had ghosted him. When the Tim and Eric star first heard that the satirical news sight was looking to acquire Infowars — the extremist media outfit founded by conspiracy theorist Alex Jones — Heidecker reached out through his agent. He had parodied Jones’ gruff, hysteric mannerisms before, and although he didn’t precisely have a plan, he knew he wanted to offer up his services.

“Frankly, I didn’t hear back. It got put on the back burner,” Heidecker tells Rolling Stone. Over a year later, he would get a response. The Onion had finally closed a deal to take over the famed conspiracy website, and they wanted to reshape it as a comedic outfit with Heidecker at its creative helm.

The Onion first entertained the possibility of taking over Infowars in 2024, in the aftermath of a verdict in favor of a coalition of Sandy Hook families who sued Jones for defamation over his baseless claims that the school shooting had been a false-flag hoax. The verdict pushed Jones and Infowars into bankruptcy, and his assets have been placed under a court appointed monitor through which the Sandy Hook families will recieve the proceeds of the liquidation of his assets.

Another good thing (?)

You know I'm not usually one to hand it to Democrats but good for them in Virginia for putting forward and passing redistricting legislation. There is no such thing as a fair fight against Republicans. There is no referee despite how many newspaper and TV men try to convince us otherwise. Using power for good things is good and using it for bad things is bad. Simple as.

Of course the right and plenty of "reasonable" centrists at outlets like the NYT are rending their garments over how untoward it all is. Shocked at the other party daring to do things that are taken as a matter of course when the other tries them. And now a judge in Virginia has blocked certifying the results of the vote. That is not underhanded by the way. That doesn't count as dirty politics. That is just Republicans getting to control everything. Which is the natural state of the world.

I know they don't ever mean the farm workers when they say shit like this. The people who do the actual farming. By farmers they mean corporations and land owners. People whose votes are of course supposed to count more than residents of a city (who are all rich by the way). All solidarity and respect to the workers but fuck "the farmers" and fuck you.

Everywhere else though the Democrats seem to be under the impression – perhaps with good reason – that they're gonna cruise to midterm victory by doing nothing and offering nothing and are using the interim as a freebie to punch left to make sure the voters don't get any ideas. More so than usual I mean. They don't really need an excuse to punch left.

They're like a team owner who is just happy to host one home playoff series a year and pick up the extra gate revenue. Fans can't complain too much because they're "competitive."

Let's hone in on some "A.I." stuff real quick.

“I’m actually not on Twitter or X or whatever that is,” said Gilgan, who spoke to us from her home in the Western Canadian province of Saskatchewan. But she “wasn’t that worried,” she said, “because AI wasn’t used to generate that content.”

That contention, it turns out, is a bit semantic. As Gilgan conceded to The Atlantic, she did make use of a variety of chatbots — ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, and Perplexity — for conceptualizing and editing the piece, though she denied copying and pasting anything directly from an AI into her essay.

Hey check this out:

The act of typing out words is one part of the job of writing. Thinking and generating ideas and conceptualizing and editing are also aspects of the job of writing. So if you used "A.I." for any of those you used "A.I." to write your piece.

This story right here is what I mean when I say "A.I." is the tool of and the prevailing aesthetic of fascism.

Nostalgia is a thought terminator.

Wilford identifies “nostalgia porn” as a common first step on a radicalisation pathway. Good old-fashioned “back in my day” content is now getting the AI treatment. A rash of social media accounts with names such as Nostalgia Cat, Purest Nostalgia and Maximal Nostalgia pump out soft-focus clips of fresh-faced (almost always white) youngsters unsullied by the bleak realities of the 21st century. “I had one the other day that was a boy walking around the streets in the 80s saying how much better everything was,” Wilford says.

The 1980s or 90s setting of much of this generative content reveals its origins in the hands of gen Z creators. They are feeding demand for nostalgia among fellow young digital natives who fetishise a pre-smartphone era of mix tapes and Blockbuster stores; think Stranger Things without the monsters. But their videos are hitting a nerve among older cohorts becoming accustomed to a diet of “boomerslop” – clips that range from weird AI twists on traditional cat content to the kinds of unhinged videos being shared by rightwing influencers including boomer-in-chief Donald Trump.

You ever notice how much better the world was back when me and the boys were riding around with the Kerplunk cassette blasting in the tape deck $5 in our pockets for BK no bills no back pain no pain no pain no pain?

Yes the past is a foreign country but it's also a hostile one.

Setting the "A.I." part aside for a moment I wrote a rather famous version of this kind of story about old people getting radicalized by the slop they consume – mostly about Fox news – a few years back if you somehow never read it.

Here's something one person told me that I think about a lot:

The night before my mom died she made us turn on Tucker Carlson while we ate dinner in her hospital room. We ate tacos in silence as Tucker was ranting about the border.

This was in January, she died two days after inauguration. I was watching when my dad called to tell me to come out to Arizona because she wasn’t going to leave the hospital. She was diagnosed with lung cancer in October and ended up in the hospital with pneumonia right at New Year’s. It was really fast. The thing is my mom was never Republican, my dad was always the standard fiscal Republican who didn't care really about social issues. She was a Brooklyn Jew who taught nursery school. The flip switched in 2008 and she just got scared of the world. Between Fox News and Facebook it just was a feedback loop of fear and hate. I went the other direction, I've slid pretty far left over the years. My brother and dad are both slightly Republican but got scared of my mom and I decreed whenever I visited she was not allowed to be blasting Fox 24/7 in front of my kids. She agreed and we ignored politics besides me seeing her like Ted Cruz posts on Facebook.

The night before she died (she chose to be taken off oxygen the next day) I guess she decided she needed one more hit and it was worth it to break our agreement. It was a Tucker segment about immigrants streaming over the border. I ate in silence, said goodnight and cried in the car.

Rax wrote a good one about the dangers of back in the day recently:

Older people's memories have a strong tendency to be reactionary like this, or maybe the word I want is "conservative" — not politically, emotionally. The world is always churning out newness, and the newness gets old quick. At some point in your life, the final thing will be invented that you're able to develop a taste for. The older you get, the more you suspect that point has already passed. The new things are no longer being designed with you in mind, which makes it easy to assume that your youth objectively had more of the good stuff and less of the bad. That this feeling rarely stands up under scrutiny — that the 15-minute doctors' appointments have been happening to you for thirty years instead of two — does little to negate its power. After all, your body is worsening in all sorts of obvious and quantifiable ways as you get older. Why not society, too? Who among us can always resist the temptation to experience society as a metaphor for ourselves?

Anyway back to "A.I."

Catch me lagging then! Not my problem. Bringing up the rear. Sucking wind. Etc. It is – again – not my problem.

I'm seeing a new lane emerge among the way people talk about "A.I." (Did I already write this exact shit in here? I don't remember!). A sort of centrist lane for the discourse. "It has some good uses." But I also do not care about the rational guy "this stuff is actually going to be pretty important one day" takes either.

OK! Well let me know when it actually works man.

We don't usually have hear about the run up to any other experimental product every day of our lives for years. If there were going to be flying cars in 15 years that would be a pretty interesting article to read like once. "Damn that's crazy" etc. They wouldn't have an article every single day counting it down though. And perhaps most importantly the flying car inventor wouldn't try to sell it by saying "Here's the flying car. Fuck you you're poor now lol."

Listen I'm sure there are some newish computer programs that make certain jobs easier now. That's fine but it's none of my business! Why does the general public need to be made aware of it constantly? Because "A.I." is fake and a con and a scheme to enrich liars and they are trying to push it through despite most people's very natural skepticism.

This is all a media story mostly. No one left in the desiccated corporate media wants to write about some new lines of code that helps some nerds be more efficient at some niche science task. So they enthusiastically let themselves be conned by the hucksters so they can feel like they're writing a more important story than the press release they are actually writing.

"This rich guys says he's changing the world and here I am talking to him about it. Hmmm come to think of it I'm changing the world too."

You may well be but not in the way you think you are.

Always a good reminder.

Wow coming from a liberal? You don't say.

Image unrelated.

None of this counts as violence either.

SNAP helps over 41 million people in the United States afford food, and under Donald Trump, it’s been thrown into chaos. It’s “completely unprecedented as to what we’re dealing with,” said Gina Plata-Nino, director of SNAP policy and advocacy at the Food Research & Action Center. In July 2025, when the Trump administration’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, or H.R. 1, was signed into law, it included the largest cuts to SNAP in history. With that came new work requirements, costs of the program shifting to states, and other sweeping changes that could lead to more than 3 million people losing access within the next few years. Then, in November, the program paused for the first time ever, when the Trump administration refused to fund benefits during the government shutdown, which left many without food assistance for nearly two weeks, a decision that had lasting detrimental effects. People were forced to go hungry, choosing between paying for bills or for food, or not eating to ensure children were fed. Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Agriculture approved waivers that allow 18 states to restrict some foods from being purchased with SNAP, creating confusion for retailers and recipients, according to CivilEats. All this is unfolding amid an affordability crisis with continued high costs for medical care, housing, and, of course, food.

Nor does this:

When Moynihan opened in 2021, it was feted for its main hall, its art installations, and for the all-around contrast it strikes with nearby Penn Station, that much-maligned warren lurking beneath Madison Square Garden. But people noticed the lack of seating, too. A raft of elected officials, including U.S. Congressman Jerry Nadler and State Senator Brad Hoylman-Sigal, wrote a letter to Amtrak and the Metropolitan Transit Authority, requesting more places to sit. Their letter, signed by representatives of various government bodies who possessed no collective ability to regulate Amtrak or the MTA, had no apparent effect.

Still, the letter acknowledged the most popular theory as to why so little seating was available. “We are aware that a number of unhoused individuals frequent this neighborhood,” wrote the signatories, “which might cause some concerns.” To stop homeless people from sitting or lying down, the authors implied, the hall deprived almost everyone of a place to sit.

...

While it would be obviously ridiculous to shutter the MTA or close the local library to prevent homeless people from using these resources, eliminating benches is now accepted practice. It’s not even clear that the strategy works. While waiting for my train at Moynihan, I watched a young man with a stiff, shuffling gait circle the station over and over in shoes that were much too big and full of holes.

You've probably seen this footage of The Strokes playing Coachella from last weekend by now but in case you haven't please watch it here. I love this song Oblivius so much.

What side you standing on?

And then Julian didn't do or say anything else notable or weird this week on any YouTube shows so don't even worry about it.

Here's most of my writing on The Strokes over the years.

Here's some other shit Israel has been up to in the meantime.

When they received the call to respond to an Israeli airstrike in the city of Mayfadoun, in southern Lebanon, most of the paramedics held back, having previously seen colleagues killed by double-tap attacks targeting rescuers. But the medics from the Islamic Health Association (IHA) rushed to the scene.

By the time the other emergency workers arrived at the site, they found the IHA medics had indeed been caught in a second strike. They started evacuating their wounded colleagues, only for their ambulances to be hit in two further attacks.

One of the paramedics covered his ears and screamed, convulsing in pain as shrapnel shattered the back window of the ambulance.

The rescue mission on Wednesday afternoon had turned into a nightmare as Israel carried out three consecutive strikes on three sets of ambulances and medical workers.

How many fucking bombs do these motherfuckers have?

Let us also check in on our country's own war crimes real quick.

A group of Ecuadorian fishers have described how they were attacked in a double drone strike and then detained at gunpoint by soldiers on a US-flagged patrol vessel, in a rare first-hand account by victims of Donald Trump’s militarized campaign against alleged drug-trafficking boats off South America.

At least 178 people have been killed in US military airstrikes in the Caribbean and Pacific since the offensive began in September, according to a tally by the Washington Office on Latin America (Wola).

The US has provided no evidence that any of the vessels were involved in drug trafficking, and legal experts and rights groups say the attacks amount to extrajudicial killings as they apparently target civilians who do not pose any immediate threat. The White House insists the killings are lawful.

What's Bill O'Reilly up to lately you might be wondering for some reason. Still killing it it seems like.

Speaking of cold dead craters look at this shit man. Just... wow.

We all know our phones will never take a good photo of the moon except for in this one rare exception.

Let's all use this post-moon fever to take a few minutes and listen to what is simply one of the most beautiful songs ever written.

All I want in life's a little bit of love to take the pain away.
Getting strong today.
A giant step each day.

This new shit here is real fucking nice too by the way. All fuzzy and spacey and lofi. Forget everything I said earlier nostalgia is good again.

I was sorry to miss this Magnolia & Johnson Electric Co. show the other day but my pal Brad took a bunch of great videos which you can find here. Man they sound great.

Alright here's the story. Read it again even if you already did.

There’s a hole in the earth

This story appears in my book A Creature Wanting Form.

We were sitting in the sulfurous hot spring rubbing the mud they have there on our faces and going like look at me I’m a mud man I’m going to kill your entire family haha and laughing even though it wasn’t that funny. Just to be somewhere else made everything lighter at first. I said the guy at the front desk had told me that there’s a place not far from here where you can dive down between two tectonic plates and you dunked your head under to wash the monster off of you and came back up and said you had to piss real bad. I looked around and said it’s probably fine it already smells weird.

There was some kind of earthquake that was a big thing in the 1700s the guy said and now there’s a hole in the earth and the water that rushed in to fill it is all silvery and there’s one part they call the Cathedral I imagine because if you get down there it probably gets you to start believing in God.

The majesty of creation and so on.

I said the continents drift a little further apart by like one inch every year according to what the guy told me and then I started thinking about how small you are and how very small all of us are and how we’ve been drifting apart too because it’s impossible for humans to think of anything but ourselves. I thought about tectonic plates grinding against one another and it made me think about the pain in my knee which was more real to me than geology.

Are there any sharks down there you asked and I said I don’t know probably. The guy didn’t say anything about sharks one way or the other.

They had shark penis on the menu at the place we went the night before and everyone thought that was pretty funny so you ordered it as a gag but then you had to follow through and eat it because it was honestly very expensive and on top of that you didn’t want to seem too American.

What does it taste like I asked and you said it tastes like shark penis.

It never really occurred to me until then that sharks would have penises although I guess that basically checks out. It’s not like sharks just spontaneously emerge into existence. Not yet anyway.

Then I was thinking about sharks fucking for a minute.

On one of our first dates we went to see a movie at the Kendall Square cinema called Open Water. It’s about a couple who go on a scuba diving vacation somewhere in the Bahamas I think. Somewhere near there. Near enough to there that it doesn’t matter. They go to the ocean anyway. At some point ocean is just ocean.

Due to a miscount by the person leading the scuba expedition the couple emerge from the depths to realize the boat has left them behind. At first they presume that the mistake will be rectified in the way that we all do when something goes wrong. Well this is fucked but certainly order will be restored presently we think.

“Other people go on vacation and spend their days just laying around,” the husband says at one point. “We have a story we’re going to be telling for the rest of our lives,” he goes and indeed they did it’s just that their lives didn’t end up being as long as they had imagined they would be.

A day is so long but a life is very short.

As they float further and further away from the original dive spot they bicker and blame one another and grasp for something different they could have done that would have saved them from this ordeal.

As if logic is a shield against chaos.

Eventually the realization that there is no order to things and that two people can in fact be left behind like this dawns on them.

I guess it’s partly based on a true story about a couple in Australia this happened to although I don’t think that matters for the film or for our purposes here. It’s true either way.

So thirst sets in quickly and the sun burns their faces as they bob on the tide and swarms of jellyfish sting and sharks begin to circle. All that’s left is for the two of them to continue living borne along on the waves for as long as they can not knowing which of them is going to die first.

To watch it happen and to describe it makes it sound horrific which it is but it’s also just a sped-up version of how life works as a matter of course. There’s no rescue boat coming and the sharks have spotted us. You hope you go before the person you love because you can’t bear to watch it happen to them when there’s nothing you can do.

It made me think just now about how a million Americans have died over the past two years from the sickness. Their loved ones sitting by helplessly watching and waiting for a different kind of drowning to begin.

It’s probably not a spoiler to tell you how the film ends anymore so than it is to spoil how any life ends which is that it ends.

It’s the waiting though.

Every moment thinking even now even now even now someone might be coming over the horizon to save you.

Even now.

Surely I am blessed among all others.

Later we went for a hike along some craggy mountains and a black sandy beach along the coast and I goofed around like we were in Game of Thrones. I’m gonna kill the White Walkers I’m gonna fuck my sister haha I said and you pretended you didn’t hear me.

Someone told me they filmed it here I said. That’s why I said the thing about fucking my sister.

Ok you said.

I wasn’t going to fuck my sister I figured that was obvious but who knows.

When we got back to the place we were renting someone had left a baby carriage parked out front on the sidewalk with a whole baby inside of it all wrapped up warm like a burrito and I was about to shit myself but you said that was normal to do here you saw another one earlier when you went to get the coffee so thankfully the baby wasn’t my problem like I imagined it was going to be. A whole hypothetical thing averted.

You looked at the baby a little longer than I thought necessary like it was a baby you knew from somewhere. An old friend from high school or something.

Also like this baby existing instead of another one was something I had engineered.

The baby looked back up at you like you were someone he knew from later on.

There was a Subway across the street and I got depressed about that for a minute then I got over it and thought about going in for lunch. I didn’t go in though I thought it would represent a failure of my character of some kind.

Did you know there are no American chain restaurants in Bermuda I said. I think they think of it like an invasive species type of thing. Once you have one they multiply.

I’m going to fuck the guy at work you’re worried about you said.

You didn’t actually say that but I imagined you saying it in your head so then I was mad about that.

The next day we got in a van to ride out toward the mountain we were going to hike and I pretty much wanted to cry about how beautiful it all was the entire way. Not only no stores but no nothing. Lots of nothing I mean. All of nothing.

All of old. Nothing else ever.

Green and brown and white. It’s too bad we didn’t get to come during the aurora borealis the guy driving said and I said I’ve heard it’s very beautiful. The sky and what have you. You should come back again some time and I said that I definitely would. I pictured the colored star mist or whatever it is in my mind and thought about how very small you are and how very small all of us are and about how the stars are like how someone can be right there but also very distant because it’s impossible for humans to think of anything but ourselves.

We were going to see the site of a memorial they had set up for a dead glacier called such and such that we had watched a documentary about. They said it was the first named glacier here to melt and lose its status as a glacier. To be demoted. It wasn’t the first glacier to melt but the first one that had a name which is meaningful because when things that have names die it fucks us up more than if they don’t.

The hike up basically fucking sucked and I wanted to complain the whole time but I kept it to myself.

After an hour or so we finally made it.

“Memorials are not for the dead, they are for the living,” one of the scientists in the movie said about the glacier. At the rate we’re going all the glaciers are pretty much fucked they said. They had a little plaque there recognizing the spot of the glacier that had died and it said something like “This monument is to acknowledge that we know what is happening and what needs to be done. Only you know if we did it.”

I wonder if we end up doing it or not but I guess that’s not my concern.

Then the guy told me to be careful and not to get too close to the slope there because it was a steep drop and I looked over and for the first time realized how high up we were. I never wanted a parachute so badly before in my life. They should have given us all a parachute.

We should have all been born with wings. We were at one point but you know how the one guy ruined that.

It seemed like a person could fall for forever from this height.

All of a sudden nothing was beautiful anymore.

I thought about what would happen if a person fell into a pit that was deep enough that the bottom never arrived and if after a while you would adjust to the dropping and have time to reflect on how screwed you were or if instead your heart would give out after a minute or two of the falling.

If you would have phone reception and time to call everyone you loved.

Or what if we all fell into the hole as a group at the same time. Would one of us die first right there in midair next to everyone else in the descent? The living accelerating at the same horrible velocity as the dead and unable to ever leave any of them behind.

Screaming into the face of a plummeting corpse you once knew into the silvery chasm.