Happy Birthday, Flaming Hydra

Severance is such a good TV show. It’s about a group of workmates who’ve just discovered that the bland pleasant world they’d been mindlessly toiling in together, amid flashes of shared disquiet, has been a horrible dystopia all along. Their bosses, who represent and serve corporate power, are abusing everyone inside the company and out. But our friends, isolated and imprisoned by surgical and other wild speculative-fiction methods, can’t get outside to sound the alarm.

Then—taking terrible risks, and under titanic strain—they find a way to force open a door and get the word out, out, out, for as long as they can hold that door open. It’s exhilarating to see them, oppressed and scared as they are, joining forces, making notes and maps, scouring barely relevant books, gathering their shared resolve and seizing their moment.

There are layered meanings in Severance about the unconscious mind, about corporate power, and about the possibilities or otherwise of human connection, but I’ve been watching this absorbing story unfold with jolt after jolt of recognition as a journalist, as a person who’s seen that when power and truth come into conflict, power will betray the truth again and again with no qualms at all.

Severance is a crystalline depiction of the condition in which independent-minded people now find themselves. Writers, scholars, artists, media professionals, all kinds of vocal and engaged citizens, have likewise been imprisoned by corporate power in a world that papers over its cruelties with the promise of a hamburger or a mega yacht or a Birkin bag or some other absurd consumer treat. We were all meant to be lulled into a passive state of consumption, and that worked for hundreds of millions of people for many decades, but the last few years—the last few days—have made that dreamy, burger-sated passivity no longer tenable, no longer even possible. 

It may be time to consider that there are other and better things we want, beyond that somnolent state.

In related news: Happy Birthday, Flaming Hydra! Our beloved many-headed serpent is one whole year old today. One whole year of brilliantly vivid, painful, beautiful, humane, funny and glorious work. We have published 246 issues of Flaming Hydra in a state of complete editorial independence and complete business independence: the work of sixty-plus writers and artists beholden only to our readers, and to one another.

In honor of this day I’ve chosen ten Flaming Hydra pieces I love to make free for all to read. Please read and share them. What a thrill it’s been!

Stand By for News

So it begins. The news blasts out from the newsrooms—or wherever it is they make news these days—like a hurricane. Like a city-consuming firestorm. Like the seventeenth once-in-a-century-weather-event to hit since the sixth time you hit snooze this morning. Not on an alarm clock but on your phone,

Flaming HydraBen Ehrenreich

What Was the Horny Profile?

By Anna Merlan Once upon a time, in the dark days of the early 2000s, we were beset on all sides by horny profiles. This was a replicable genre, wherein a writer—usually, but not always a man, met a subject—usually, but not always, a woman, often a model

Flaming HydraAnna Merlan

Like Common People

by Julianne Escobedo Shepherd I spent election night at a private watch party in Manhattan hosted by a literal billionaire. A friend who was working there invited me, saying he needed moral support. I had intended to observe the returns in my apartment with a blanket, my boyfriend, and my

Flaming HydraJulianne Escobedo Shepherd

The Power All Along

by Sam Thielman There is perhaps no more American book than L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz, which completed its first printing in January of 1901. It opened a fantasy cycle that spans fourteen books written by Baum himself until his death in 1919, at which point the

Flaming HydraSam Thielman

The End and After

Fiction by Luke O’Neil The rules I was fighting fascism with the power of love and kindness and just really getting my ass handed to me. A total bloodbath. The referee would have stepped in by now but they had knocked him out with a steel chair. The only

Flaming HydraLuke O’Neil

Asking and Telling

By Parker Molloy I’ve been thinking a lot lately about whether I made a mistake. For more than a decade, I’ve written openly about being transgender. When I started, it felt like the obvious thing to do. Society seemed to be moving in a more accepting direction—slowly, yes, but

Flaming HydraParker Molloy

House of Cardinals

by Osita Nwanevu There are few institutions as ready made for cinema as the Catholic Church. High aesthetics and high drama, much of it swirling around one of the most recognizable and influential men in the world⁠—this is a well that will never run dry. And because films and

Flaming HydraOsita Nwanevu

‘The Believer’ and Me

by Josephine Riesman “None of us is innocent,” I wrote in my diary at age 19 and a half. I had just left Israel’s Holocaust memorial/museum, Yad Vashem. “I want to cry, but that is pornography. Rich Jews. Rich fucking Jews.” I started scribbling my words larger and

Flaming HydraJosephine Riesman

A World Built for House Sparrows

by Tom Scocca The house sparrow is not an interesting bird. That may have been what finally caught my attention: how hard it was to pay attention to them. Their little drab forms are everywhere—I started phone-typing this paragraph walking down a cross street, and a half-dozen of them

Flaming HydraTom Scocca

Rushing Right Past It

by Yemisi Aribisala I was in the back of a car going way over the speed limit on the Lagos Benin Expressway, headed in the direction of my secondary school, Federal Government Girls College in Benin City. I attended that school for three years before my parents decided to move

Flaming HydraYemisi Aribisala

I don’t love the kind of world we find ourselves living in right now, but I believe we have a chance. We are going to choose life and freedom in every minute we’ve got. Maybe we can even force our own door open wide enough and hard enough that it can stay open, and we can inform one another fully, and figure out how to preserve all that’s worth saving, and build new and better things. 

In the case of online publishing, local and independent outlets of all kinds can and will band together with independent communities, readers, publishers, archivists, writers, artists, scholars, librarians, and others to ensure that needed information is protected and preserved and remains freely available to all. We’re ready.

Who will help us to hold the door open?

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