You have to believe that things can get better

Luke O'Neil

08 Nov 2025 • 25 min read

After only a few days on the road I am fucking beat dude. This shit is a young man's game. Not just touring but everything.

I had an absolutely lovely time in D.C. and Philly meeting so many of you though. Graded on the curve for how much enjoyment I can get out of anything that is. Everyone who read or interviewed me is very talented and kind and I am so lucky to have friends and colleagues all over who appreciate and support what I do. That includes you too! Hello. How's it going?

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I was going to send this one out sooner but I left my laptop on the train the other day like a goddamn asshole. I honestly cannot believe how much time I spent trying to track it down. But then the craziest thing happened. The Amtrak police eventually found it and kept it waiting for me in Boston. It's like I always say "I love the cops."

I had to go running around South Station panicked asking every security figure I saw if they knew where it was though. Where is my son? No one could have given less of a shit. It was like a grimy 1970s psychological thriller with exceptionally low stakes. Eventually I had to shlep out to a sketchy parking lot on Frontage Rd. in Dorchester – no one wants to go to Frontage Rd. for anything good – to make the hand off. And now I can post again. A miracle.

The flight home from Philly yesterday started off a little nerve-racking though.

Pilot just came on to say it’s his last flight ever and he’s retiring. Come on man don’t say that to me. Don’t tell me that right now.
— Luke O'Neil (@lukeoneil47.bsky.social) 2025-11-07T16:05:01.289Z

Here are a few pictures taken by Chris Gale in D.C. I cuffed my pants too high!

A few more angles of the pants. 📷 @m0nastic.bsky.social I call the 4th one Bullpen coach watching his reliever walk them loaded in the 8th.
— Luke O'Neil (@lukeoneil47.bsky.social) 2025-11-06T13:40:48.643Z

This bar was as cool as everyone said it was.

And here's one of the gang in Philly.

I've got two appearances back to back in Harvard Square today if you're around. Both nice and early.

I'm gonna share my talk with Patrick Reis down below and a few pieces written by the lineup for today's book party. But first I would be remiss if I didn't note the passing of one Richard Bruce Cheney the man who got everything he ever wanted. May that weigh forever on his eternal soul if such a thing exists. If not enjoy the dirt hole bitch. See you there sooner or later.

Let's take a look back at this one shall we? One of the first good Hell Worlds ever.

But this rehabilitation of Bush and McCain and the other architects of the Iraq War into kindly old grandpas, a throwback to the good old days of politics when we all had our disagreements, sure, but everyone lined up and shook hands then hit the showers together after a sporting debate, is a fucking bridge too far. Imagine seeing Dick Fucking Cheney anywhere outside of an iron maiden in Hell and finding something to be nostalgic about?

For a more thorough evisceration of Cheney read Spencer Ackerman in the Nation.

I also want to congratulate Zohran Mamdani for his big win and perhaps more importantly say lol eat shit dumb asshole to Andrew Cuomo. Two time loser in the same race. Pack your shit for Florida big boy.

I am very sorry to all of the psychos crashing out about Mamdani's victory the world over. I only wish he was going to do half the things you've been lying about.

Also RIP to Teen Vogue. It was a good lefty political publication as everyone should have long since recognized by now. Of course that's exactly why they would want to fuck with it. Read Mel Buer for more on that.

There were a few more excerpts from the book up this week at Protean Mag.

Here are some pieces today's panel at the Sinclair have written for Hell World that you may have missed.

Bill Shaner:

In the background, a Worcester police officer looks at the desperate woman holding her baby trying to stop the agents from taking her mother and says "Do you want to stay with your baby?" The tacit threat of separation for her protestation of another separation. Later he would complain "She's putting the baby in harm's way." A classic move: "harm" goes undefined because the harm is him.

Maydee, still confronting the officers, says "Where is the warrant?" Officer Lugo, according to his nameplate, says "Ma'am we are trying our best but they are federal."

Morales again asks for the warrant.

"They're federal."

"They still need a warrant."

Another officer, frustrated, says "They don't need a warrant." Finally, one of them tells the truth. Due process is not a matter they're concerned with. The deportation must proceed. Trying to stop it is the unlawful thing. At this point an ICE agent starts pushing me away, but not very hard. Lazy jabs, his mind elsewhere. Too many people, too much pushing to be done. I return to my pre-push position. I keep filming. I don't know what else to do.

Read a follow up piece here.

Eoin Higgins:

“I think they should be described as terrorists, not as writers or reporters,” Peter Thiel raged in an interview with PE Hub in 2009. “I don’t understand the psychology of people who would kill themselves and blow up buildings, and I don’t understand people who would spend their lives being angry; it just seems unhealthy.”

Thiel wasn’t alone in his fury at the press. Dissatisfaction with the mainstream media was growing in Silicon Valley. After a decade of fawning, excessively laudatory coverage, reporters— slowly but surely—were asking harder questions. The shift took hold in the mid-2010s, as the glow of the Obama era wore off and the challenges of surveillance and monopoly began to rear their hydra-like heads, connected, dangerous, and impossible to ignore.

But Thiel’s anger was more personal. In 2006—just a few years after he founded Palantir, his tech company that spied on Americans and collected revenue from the US government—Gawker Media launched Valleywag, a blog that mocked, attacked, and generally disrespected the titans of the tech industry, removing their mystique and making them look like fools. The attacks from the site’s writers crossed a line for Thiel when they effectively outed him in 2007. In Silicon Valley it was an open secret that Thiel was gay, but he had never publicly acknowledged his sexuality. Though he profited immensely from spying on others, Thiel did not like his private life made public.

Evan Greer:

As they often do, the politicians and pundits pushing these Bad Internet Bills are exploiting legitimate fears and grievances, but pedaling false solutions. They point to legitimate problems: like pervasive online harassment targeting women and people of color, antisemetic and racist posts artificially amplified by profit-driven algorithms, and the spread of horrific child abuse material online. But rather than going after the business model, profit incentives and material conditions driving these harms, the proposals that have advanced the furthest in Congress have mostly focused on expanding government censorship and requiring tech companies to engage in more surveillance. (Making sure all kids have access to enough food, a safe place to live, and don’t have one of their parents needlessly incarcerated would do a lot more to reduce child abuse and exploitation than any law we could pass policing the Internet, but no one in Congress seems to want to talk about that.)

I think we can all agree that the internet is pretty great. But the hyper-centralized, surveillance-driven corporate hellscape version of it dominated by Big Tech sucks. And it’s true that it especially sucks for kids, although the research on exactly how and why it sucks is not quite as clear as a lot of politicians and pundits make it out to be.

Here's another good one in Teen Vogue.

Dave Wedge:

“I don’t drink, I don’t smoke, I don’t do drugs anymore. I’ve done all the drugs I’ve needed in my life,” he said. “It’s just good for me to be sober. Sometimes I go, ‘Yeah, a doobie wouldn’t be a bad idea.’ But then if I have one joint, next thing I’d be drinking beer for hours, then it’d be vodka and then it’d be coke. I know what will happen so I don’t go.”

He was honest with me about his hard won sobriety.

“I used to go, ‘How will I enjoy music anymore?’ he added. “But it still goes on. I don’t have to be a participant anymore. I don’t want to.”

I covered every Ozzfest that came through Massachusetts, each summer setting aside a day to go listen to metal bands old and new, all of whom were there only because of Ozzy. I have so many incredible memories of those days, traversing parking lots and hanging out backstage, experiencing the camaraderie, passion and excitement of the metal community created by Ozzy.

“When everything is in its right place and it’s going well and my voice is on form and, you know, and the crowd is giving me some craziness … there’s nothing in the world to come anywhere near – love, sex, drugs, there’s nothing can touch it,” he told me. “It’s the best feeling you can ever have in your life.”

Read an excerpt from his new book here at Boston Magazine.

Patrick Reis: There’s a story about a family that doesn’t realize that it’s their last time having dinner together. And I thought of how poignant that is. I recently had that dinner, and it sticks with me and it haunts me. But what I love about this book is over and over again, you read it and you don't feel so alone. And I can't believe that you managed to put that in a book that also includes an essay about how we've normalized mass shootings, and another one, and I really thought this was going to be unique before you read it out loud, an essay about how posting is a poor answer to fascism.

So I'm wondering, you don't write like anyone else writes. You have a unique writing voice. Where does that come from? And how closely does it mirror your inner monologue?

Luke O'Neil: It's pretty close. I think about this a lot, because as a writer I think about myself constantly.

I rolled my pants up too high! They looked great when I was standing up. What was the question? Sorry.

It was about deli meats.

My voice! Yeah. I'm pretty much the guy. I mean, people who read me know. They’ll be able to tell. Maybe like 40% of them are fiction and weird shit, and like, 40% of them are like, oh, that's obviously Luke in this story. I'm pretty much who I present myself as online if you read me on Bluesky or before on Twitter or whatever. It's pretty close to what I am. I put a little extra mustard on it sometimes. I’m not constantly going around getting in fights with people or miserable all the time. I'm only miserable, like, maybe 85% of the time.

That's the right amount.

But it is my inner monologue. These stories might seem like this guy just wrote this in like ten seconds. But it takes a lot of work to make it seem like that.

There is a line in there about moving the word “that” around. I felt that. It made me calculate how many hours of my life I will spend moving “that” back and forth.

The word “that” is a snare drum. And if you're a writer you know this. This is something I say a lot. The drums have to be tuned. It's in a piece in the book about AI. Fuck AI by the way. Everyone here can agree with that. But like I say the drums have to be tuned. I was a musician for most of my life and things have to be tuned. Each note has to be in its right place.

That doesn't mean that they always are! There might end up being a bum note from time to time.But I'm more concerned with the percussion of the language than anything else.

Have you always written this way? Like when you started to get into journalism? This is a tough sell at the Boston Globe right?

No. I used to write like a normal person. I did the whole journalism thing for many years. But a weird thing happened in that I either quit in anger or got fired from every newspaper or magazine I ever worked at. Not because I'm the asshole! They were the assholes!

Do you want to tell the Bill Kristol story?

It's funny that Bill Kristol is like this big liberal hero now. Somewhat famously, a few years ago, I wrote an article for the Boston Globe saying one of the biggest regrets of my life was that I didn't piss in his salmon when I waited on his table in Cambridge.

How did that go over?

Not good! John Henry, the billionaire owner, stepped in and retracted the article. And then Tucker Carlson put me on his show, and Ben Shapiro and Rush Limbaugh. But the best part about that is for my Welcome to Hell World book I put blurbs from each of them on the back. “The Left's New Low! -Tucker Carlson.” But even better than that, my favorite blurb for that book, because the Globe really sold me out on that, the first blurb is “Luke O’Neil is not on staff -The Boston Globe.”

How much time did you spend with HR? Is that part of your distance past?

No, no. Because the funny thing is, and this is related to Hell World…. I'm not saying this to be cool, but I have written a couple thousand articles for every newspaper or magazine you've all heard of. Dozens and dozens of them. And never once in my entire life did I have an actual job at any one of those places. Like 20 years ago when I started that was a trend that was starting to happen. So I didn’t ever even get the dignity of being fired. It’s just like one day they stop assigning you articles.

Well, I'm sorry you missed that experience.

I'm sure it's cool.

Do you have any influences? The thing that I wondered as I read your book is how do you get from the way we're all taught to write in high school to this?

Cocaine.

All right, thanks everyone!

I wish. I don't do cocaine anymore. I wish I was young enough to. My influences have been the same forever. Like, I was very influenced by Virginia Woolf at a young age and Don Barthelme. Not so much in this one, but in the last book there was some George Saunders-like stories, but I always said I'm not ripping off George Saunders, I’m ripping off Donald Barthelme who George Saunders was ripping off. So it's different.

An important distinction.

But those are two really big ones for me. And it really just came about when I started the Hell World newsletter about seven years ago. One day I just started writing it like this. It was like… oh my god! It felt right. I’m not going to say that I'm equivalent to Bruce Springsteen in cultural impact, but if you've seen that new movie, which I haven't, I'm sure there's a scene where he picks up the guitar and just plays something and it feels so right. And so I'm basically like that.

Being different is daunting. And it's something that a lot of people don't find in their whole lives. As you've progressed in that, how do you think other people can find their own voice in the way that you did?

People have asked me for advice all the time and it's weird because, jokes aside, I don't really think I’m some hot shit or whatever. I've given so much bad advice over the years to people, because it’s always just like, do whatever you want, you know? And that doesn't always work out. It just happened to work out for me. When the newsletter thing started so many people asked me how do I do this? How do I do this newsletter business? Because I happened to be early on that. And I just told people you have the opportunity right now to write whatever you want, however you want, and nobody's gonna.… It's good and bad to not have editors, but editors are basically cops. You know, all editors are bastards.

I have read that.

You can do writing for work to make a living and you can do writing for your passion or whatever you want to do. And I think it's important to keep those two things separate. One thing I always told people about trying to be a writer is to not have some bullshit writing job. People will say I’m going to write ad copy or whatever. And those people are rich now. I probably should have done that. But I feel like it saps or takes away some of your creativity. So if anyone's trying to be a writer, I highly recommend doing any other job in the world besides writing for your living. I waited tables for like 20 years and that was so much of a better education on what humanity is like than being some editorial assistant at… Slate.

Well, again, good night.

I used to write for Slate too! They were some of the hardest editors back then.

Well they had standards.

They did.

Do you have a favorite story from waiting tables?

Yeah the Bill Kristol piss.

How about a story that didn't get you released from the Boston Globe?

I honestly miss waiting tables so much. Like, it really was my radicalizing moment. Just seeing the disparity between the front of the house and the back of the house, and the ways that the owners never give a shit about anyone. And you're not really an employee. You can be fired at any time. If you’re a waiter you can be there for eight hours and walk away with $30 if nobody comes in. My accent just came out. Thirty dollars. I’m trying. How am I doing on the accent?

As a studious practitioner of suppressing accents I really feel you on this.

You think you're fucking better than me? I really do miss the camaraderie of it. And that's one of the things that I love about this new project Flaming Hydra, which is this worker owned website cooperative that we're all doing. That’s what I was maybe missing from all those years of freelancing, when you feel like you're sort of pushed out a little bit. I like being part of something with people, you know, and that's what restaurants give you. I think everyone should have to work at restaurants or at least in retail or something like that in their life.

I want to go to a line in this book that has really stuck with me again and again. And I think it's sort of at the heart of your book, although this might be a great moment for you to dunk on me and tell me that I'm wrong.

“You have to numb some parts of yourself or else who could ever get out of bed?”

At the heart of your work is facing up to things as they are and getting out of bed anyway. How do you walk that balance? And how do you suggest other people find a way to live a moral life without being so bogged down?

It's hard. And I'm sure everyone here knows it. Especially the past few years. How does a person live? You asked earlier what is this book about. It’s how does a person live? Especially if the boot isn't quite yet on your face, but you can smell the leather. I’m not a healthy, mentally healthy person at all. And I cope with the horrors of the world by chain smoking and drinking too much. But I have a very healthy friend life and family life and beautiful wife who loves me and takes care of me. And so that's the question I'm constantly going back and forth with it. Why am I so miserable if I have all these people around me and everything's good and I'm getting to write about whatever I want? But that's the question of the book and of my life. How does a person live? I don’t know. I can barely keep it together.

I think you do. And I think you make it easier for other people to, with what you've written.

Thank you.

And I know personally how this world can weigh on you. And I think I speak for a lot of people who've read this book when I say that we are appreciate the opportunity to sort of share that pain.

Well thank you so much. That's very nice.

I'm gonna move on before one of us cries.

I'm an easy crier.

The book's first story is nominally about birds, which drew me in right away. But it has another line after the narrator of the book interrupts a situation where one bird's about to eat another. And then the narrator asks him or herself, did they help a bird escape? Did they do a good thing? Or did they starve a predatory bird and do a bad thing? And then you really hit the nail on the head with, “maybe this is why God doesn't bother anymore.” A lot of this book to me is about how to lead a good life, a helpful life. I wouldn't presume to ask you to advise everyone on how one does that. But I am curious in your writing, how much do you think of that question and how does it inform what you write?

I think about that constantly. And that reminds that one was in particular influenced by David Berman, who's a huge influence on me, both with his poetry and his music. There's a song on the last album he put out, the Purple Mountains album. If people aren’t familiar with that check it out. There’s a song called Margaritas at the Mall. And the line is “How long can a world go on under such a subtle God? How long can the world go on with no new word from God?” And it's this idea of the absent God. Which is not new. We all think about that every second of our day right? If you're like me. Where the fuck is God?

I put that one first because I wanted to set the tone for the entire book. And that one happened to be sort of real. I was sitting out in my backyard. I have a very tiny backyard, you know, about 15 miles west of Boston. And we have this little patch of grass, but the most beautiful tree. It's such a giant tree, and it's such a stupid poet brain thing, but I love to just sit there and look at the tree and watch the birds. Not stoned while this happening! It's just normal. But there really was this raptor of some kind, it was going after the little birds, and I threw a rock and I thought what did I just do? As you said, did I fuck up that big bird's day or did I save this other dude's ass? And I don't know. I feel like that sort of thing runs throughout the entire book.

I really hope that people will give themselves a chance to read that particular story because it'll give you a stomach ache for a good couple weeks. But it also helps you think a lot about what you do with your life. Another of my favorite lines in the book is “the criteria for me thinking about the end of the world are not especially rigorous.” And I have to ask, is it like your Roman Empire? Like, how many times a day are you thinking about what comes after this?

I think about it constantly. There's like two layers to the “we had it coming” thing. There’s the imperial boomerang, which is getting our asses right now, which quite frankly, we had coming. And then there's the person who perhaps indulged in a bit more unhealthy behaviors than they should have, so there's a lot of stories about addiction and things like that in there. So the end of the world for a writer, and for a narcissist, I don’t think I'm a narcissist. but if you're a writer, there's some of that in there.

At least in the neighborhood.

Right. They’re cousins. I think it all about it all the time. I mean, not when the Patriots are on and winning. They’re good right now, by the way kid! I'm a normal person, by the way. I have nice walks in the park with my wife or whatever, and I have friends and we laugh. So I don’t want to, like, pour on the fucking Trent Reznor shit too much.

I was going to ask if you would follow this with a Nine Inch Nails rendition.

I'm going to do an A cappella version of Head Like a Hole after this. But you shouldn’t have had to numb yourself to everything that’s happening. I do. I don't know. I don't. How does a person live? I don't know.

Your book is absolutely infused with New England. And having recently married into a Boston family that has come into my life, in many ways welcome, and in some ways….

And so I'm wondering, do you think this book would be the same if you grew up in, like, Southern California? Is it your awareness of place or is it the place where you grew up?

Well, there's a story in there about California and how it's this mythical place. We all think of California and Los Angeles in particular as a mythological place. But I really wanted it to be grounded in New England and specifically Massachusetts and Maine, because those are the two places I’ve spent the most time. Maine is a very special place to me, specifically the coast. I like it when writers, or bands for that matter … A lot of this book was influenced by musicians and my time writing songs. People love it when a book is about a specific place. People just like that. Even if you've never been there. I did an interview the other day where I was talking about the book by Tommy Orange from a couple years ago. It was all set in Oakland. I didn’t spend time in Oakland, but it was so great. This must be what Oakland is like. And so I'm trying to do that as much as possible. And also, you know, as like a Boston guy, I have the chip on your shoulder thing where you're trying to tell everyone how good of a place to grow up it is

I have read about that. Last night something sort of unexpected and special happened in New York. And a lot of your book is about things breaking bad. And a lot of your writing, particularly on Hell World, is about things breaking bad. What if that doesn't happen? Like, what if things break for the best that you can imagine? What does that look like?

I think you have to get up every day and expect that there's a chance. Why else get up? I wrote something like I wake up every day and my heart breaks again then slowly mends itself over the course of the day or whatever the line is. I do wake up every day heartbroken. But you have to believe that things can get better. That's what we do in our lives. And I don't know, I think I have to maybe downgrade my expectations. Maybe I’ll just be a progressive liberal and I can just be satisfied about that for now. I guess the revolution isn't coming anytime soon.

We might be a few tweets away.

Yeah, I'm going to post so good I disrupt capitalism. No, but I think, I obviously want things to be better. Maybe just getting up every day is what it’s all about.

Audience questions:

When you were writing A Creature Wanting Form you mentioned that you were listening to a lot of The War on Drugs. What were you listening to predominantly on and off when you were writing this book?

The last one I listened to so much War on Drugs and it definitely wormed its way into the rhythms of it. I think there is definitely something watery and ocean-like to a lot of their music. This one I was listening to a lot of David Berman and Jason Molina, who are huge influences on me. Because they're both dead. They’re both known for being sad depressing bands, but they're both very funny. Particularly David Berman. Jason Molina is very funny too. He doesn't get as much credit for it. Elliott Smith is also funny and he doesn't get as much credit for that. So I was definitely listening to those two. I was listening to a lot of Wednesday and MJ Lenderman who are both sort of influenced by bands of my age. It's kind of this weird loop thing. MJ Lenderman, I'm sure most of you know him, but he has this way of just like matter of factly getting right into a story. There’s no preamble to it. All of a sudden you're in the middle of it. That’s something that I do a lot of in the book. And I was like, ok, am I influenced by this 25 year old kid who's influenced by the bands that were already influencing me? It was like this weird wraparound.

One of your tweets that you sort of lodged in my memory is the one about your [nieces and nephews] where they’re too young for you to get them into socialism, but too old to make them laugh with poop jokes anymore. I have two nieces, six and two. And I wonder a lot about the extent to which the state of the world is affecting them… If they can understand the nuances of it. So I guess do you have any advice for me?

I'm a very prolific uncle as a Massachusetts Irish Catholic. I have like 27 nieces and nephews. No children of my own. But it's such a weird thing, that period. I guess it’s similar for parents, but I wouldn't know. One day they think you're so funny. You can just say poop to them and it's the best thing in the world. And I think poop is funny too. It's very funny. And then for a couple years they don’t… they start to think you're cringe. I guess they start to think you're six seven? Is that a thing they say? I don't know what it means. But I think the only thing you can do is like… One thing I want to do for my nieces and nephews is to show them that there is something you can do besides just pursuing money. There's so much of that. Even when I was young that was the idea. You have to go to college or you're going to be a bum. I would really like to impart that lesson to these kids. That you can be happy without material wealth.

And if you don't want material wealth you should write books for leftist indie publisher.

Is that all? I have to go have a cigarette.

I have one. Nihilism and narcissism have come up a lot tonight. I have heard it said that to be a writer, particularly a writer of fiction, you have to have at least some degree of a God complex. I'm curious how you find that that manifests for you?

I don't think so for me. I don't want to tell anyone what to do. I don't want power. I don't want power. I have no desire for power. No desire for wealth. Obviously I like nice things. I would love to have a house on the water, as I write in the book. That's all I want. It doesn't have to be a nice one. I just want to be able to look at the ocean.

You do need wealth for that. I'm not going to ever have a house on the ocean. Unless you guys all buy a thousand copies each of the book. Which would be cool.

Like I said I'm embarrassed to be a writer. I think it's embarrassing to be a writer and I don't have any ego about it. I just happen to have worked hard putting stupid little words together.

And I would like to enforce socialism on everyone at the barrel of a gun. But that has nothing to do with me as a writer.

Am I an asshole for sharing this one?

Doctors don't recommend this.

a peek inside the purse of someone who is DOIN' FINE (congrats to @lukeoneil47.bsky.social on the beautiful new book though for real)
— raina douris (@rahrahraina.bsky.social) 2025-11-07T04:09:41.892Z

Hello I need the most Catholic guilt you have. ... No that's too much.

My last read (left), my next read (right). Graham Greene has a lot to live up to. Please get @lukeoneil47.bsky.social’s latest…it’ll make you feel terrible, but then you’ll feel really good. Plus this skeet has more commas in it than the whole book.
— Christopher Harris (@harrisfootball.com) 2025-11-05T00:01:32.420Z

Sorry to talk about myself so much today. I am getting pretty sick of it pretty fast. I am looking forward to no longer Being Perceived for a while once this is all over.

Thank you for indulging me and for being here as always. I love you.