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And now we are two

Celebrating Flaming Hydra’s second birthday
Buncha Flaming Hydras and a festive cake with a blazing "2" can

Happy Birthday, Flaming Hydra!

It’s our Birthday!! Our beloved many-headed mythical beast is two whole years old today. We are so proud to be publishing Issue No. 492 of Flaming Hydra exactly the same way as Issue No. 1: as a cooperative wholly owned by our contributing writers and artists, with no ads and no outside investors. Flaming Hydra is editorially and financially independent and free to publish what we want, and we mean to continue this way forever.

A fiery roar of thanks to all our subscribers and donors, who are continuing to make this magic possible.

We’re also celebrating with a new Flaming Hydra Books page, offering books written by Hydra contributors. We are linking to Moon Palace Books in Minneapolis to help support them in the struggle against fascism.

Here are some exceptional moments from year two of Flaming Hydra, unlocked for all to read and enjoy—a very small selection! it hurt to leave so many brilliant pieces out.

Thank you, everyone, so much, for reading and Supporting Our Serpent.

‘Sally Forth’

Time of the Preacher

February 7, 2025

The “fork in the road” emails keep coming, each time slightly sweetening the deal. People must not be taking it. They must be desperate for us to take it. They must realize we have more power if we stay. A lot of us have been talking—when Musk sent the same “fork” email to Twitter employees, many agreed to resign and he... never paid them. It’s still tied up in court. I guess that’s what the fork really is, a joke. Making a joke of the jobs we keep to feed our families, jobs that serve the public interest. I heard that employees were responding in chats with the spoon emoji and then management removed the spoon emoji from the list. You hear a lot of things. This particular thing, I later read in the paper.
'Sally Forth', 'Time of the Preacher' February 7, 2025

Sam Thielman
One Small Step
March 19, 2025

Collectivism works very well for CENTIPAWN. This may be obvious. The colony under consideration here is not a LENIN (LR) code colony, though we understand that another team of researchers is pursuing the LR hypothesis with a second promising group that has a discernible lineage of individual leaders. In the case of our subjects, it emerged that the number of roaches living in a building in the Sunset Park neighborhood of Brooklyn was large enough to achieve a more complex consciousness, to enjoy it, and to allow it to flourish, albeit with some KROPOTKIN (KR) conditions. We understand that this is a large number of small arthropods to consider and have elected to add a content warning here. It gets much worse. Or better, depending on the strength of your spirit of inquiry. We have recently relocated our office to a system of caves under a large North American mountain range, which should give you some idea of the gravity of the following. As of press time our organization has begun to assess whether even this precaution will ultimately cut the astrophysical mustard, as it were.
Sam Thielman, ‘One Small Step’ March 19, 2025

Yemisi Aribisala
Of Men and Palm Oil
April 24, 2025

Our Nigerian palm oil is not a gentleman. The end product we want is not perfection or mildness. This idea of odourless, colourless oil is not something that excites the palate of West Coastal Africa. This is a legitimate generalisation. You cannot hide unprocessed palm oil in anything, specifically not in any cookie, cake, or gluten-free bread. It stains dramatically, bellows nuttiness, fattens the soup, and stands its ground, flooding, sinking, rising, insisting on being both at the bottom of the pot and at the face of the soup. This is how we want it. You can’t skimp on it, any more than you would skimp on blood in making a human being.  Europeans tend to despise its weight and insistence in food. They complain about the heaviness of this cloying red powerful fat that won’t know its place. For acceptance in food of the Northern Hemisphere palm oil has to more or less disappear, stripped through processing of its nutritional characteristics. There is no global appetite for the palm oil that Nigerians cook with; it isn’t the stuff that is spurring one of the worst environmental disasters of our time.
Yemisi Aribisala, 'Of Men and Palm Oil' April 24, 2025

Brian Hioe
Airplane Movies
April 25, 2025

And yet, the villains in the film express no specific political or ideological goals. What does HYDRA want? What will world domination mean for them? And what does it say about America that a completely amorphous Nazi organization could go undetected in the highest institutions of the land for so long, and recruit so many top-ranking officials? This remarkable state of affairs, too, goes unremarked. [IMAGE: Chris Evans and Sebastian Stan in Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014)
Brian Hioe, 'Airplane Movies' April 25, 2025

Amy Chu
Girling and Growing Up
June 12, 2025

Last month, I attended a wedding and ate dinosaur nuggets with my high school friends before the reception. I watched my prom date’s baby grow up through Instagram posts. I have multiple friends who’ve lost their parents; my mom still calls to ask if I’m eating enough, or if I have a crush on any boys I’d like to play house with. At the advice of online skincare gurus, I began using retinol when I turned 25. It’s as if every milestone, conversation, and advertisement in my 20s is a reminder of my fleeting girlhood.
Amy Chu, 'Girling and Growing Up,' June 12, 2025

Josephine Riesman and Zach Rabiroff
A Swingin’ Surprise or Two
June 17, 2025

The truth of many or even most of these uninhibited remarks is open to question. But what we do know is that Ron Whyte was at Marvel Comics in 1966, where he did work with Stan Lee and Roy Thomas, Jack Kirby, John Romita, and Wally Wood, and all the other leading lights of that early heyday of the Marvel Age. And curiously, in the large collection of Ron Whyte’s papers at Yale University—he got an MFA in playwriting from the Yale School of Drama in 1967—tucked away amid his scripts for films and plays, audiotape reels, cassettes and albums, videotapes, and personal letters, there are scripts for some of the most storied and beloved comics of that period. Comics eventually published in Stan Lee’s name.
Josephine Riesman and Zach Rabiroff, ‘A Swingin’ Surprise or Two’ June 17, 2025

Tod Seelie
Tony Hawk’s Holiday Office Parties Go to Extremes
August 27, 2025

Whizzing through the desert on a hand-built train at night
Normally, photographers are not allowed to share private events that we photograph for celebrity clients—weddings, birthdays, bar mitzvahs, engagement parties, etc. But in the case of Tony Hawk’s holiday office parties, that veil has been lifted. Thanks to some recent publicity on these events, I’m able to share what goes on when Hawk and his office staff decide to celebrate the end of the calendar year.
Tod Seelie, ‘Tony Hawk’s Holiday Office Parties Go to Extremes’ August 27, 2025

Miles Klee
How Dare a Dumb Thug Appreciate Tony Soprano?
September 3, 2025

Predictably, a number of far more popular Sopranos meme accounts told the every-frame dude to “[s]hut the fuck up,” with one fan going so far as to insinuate that his own family despises him. He fired back with quips such as “Catch AIDS and die” while blathering in direct messages to yet another critic that a “civil war” was coming, and that he himself had forgone a “social life” to devote himself to gym exercise and the bible in preparation for this looming cataclysm. To call this mere “loser shit” is an irresponsible understatement. Anyway! Why was I so irritated to realize this was just some chud piggybacking on a masterpiece he can never hope to comprehend, and, far worse, a literal Nazi whose idiotic babbling received enthusiastic support from likeminded white nationalists? I already knew he was a nobody with a cheap gimmick—who cares if he’s a bigoted English incel? Surely that was too pathetic a fact to inhabit my brain for long. Nevertheless, I struggled with it for a couple of days. What a piece of shit, I thought, poaching a ready-made audience for marvelously complicated art only to announce himself a proud fascist.
Miles Klee, ‘How Dare a Dumb Thug Appreciate Tony Soprano?’ September 3, 2025

Diana Moskovitz
Robert Redford, Reporter
September 25, 2025

Maybe things were indeed more like this for reporters in the early 1970s, near the end of the golden age of U.S. newspapers, but in the past couple of decades most reporting has involved even more yelling and a lot more failure. One scene in the film stood out to me glaringly this time. It’s when Bernstein goes to interview Judy Hoback Miller, a bookkeeper for Nixon’s re-election campaign (she goes unnamed in the movie; the screenplay refers to her only as “bookkeeper.”) What surprised me was her obvious fear. Bernstein slithers in by asking her sister to bum a cigarette; Hoback tells him to leave; he sits down, and she insists on telling him nothing. He asks her questions anyway, and all she says in response is, “A lot of people are watching me. They know I know a lot.”
Diana Moskovitz, ‘Robert Redford, Reporter’ September 25, 2025

Tom Scocca and Maria Bustillos
Ezra Klein Does Politics the Wrong Way
September 29, 2025

MB: I am a big fan of TNC and I also unequivocally disagree. At some point this has to be addressed. Look at all this mealy-mouthed language! These are the most exalted, highest-paid people in what is left of our profession. The ones who should be saying the true things loudest and best. That’s not delicacy. That’s drawing back. TS: I didn’t read Coates’s side that way. All of this happened in the context of Coates having already written in Vanity Fair that Klein was the equivalent of a Confederate sympathizer. MB: Well… that is true, about the Vanity Fair piece. And I know it’s not Coates’s sole responsibility to drag Ezra Klein into some state resembling sanity. Even so I am longing for the Joe Welch moment, every day. TS: And honestly early on the piece, when Klein told Coates he’d written his praise of Kirk because he wanted to “sit with” Kirk’s family and admirers “in their grief,” and because after seeing this political figure killed, “I thought about me, I thought about you,” and Coates said “But was silence not an option?”—I had to physically get up and take a little walk around, like after you see someone knocked out in a fight.
Tom Scocca and Maria Bustillos, ‘Ezra Klein Does Politics the Wrong Way’ September 29, 2025

David Roth
Winning Isn’t Everything
October 3, 2025

The struggle against the forces of repression in One Battle After Another is quite probably lost, but it is not over. The resistance movement of the film’s first act cracks under the pressure of constant pursuit from the state and the fragmenting force of its members’ individual ambitions and appetites. Every revolutionary we meet during that act is killed or captured or chased into hiding, and those captured invariably cut deals with the oppressors. Everyone who can run and hide does so; authorities that have nothing more on their mind and nothing more to offer than chasing them down busily do so. If you want to be charitable about it, it is a stalemate. In the ’70s films of my long winter, people wind up crushed against this edifice like bugs on a windshield; there is no force propelling them into that last splat beyond their own stubborn sense that something has gone wrong and that they should try to fix it. That is vanity, mostly, and it ends the way that vanity ends. There is a decent helping of vanity in the French 75 movement from One Battle After Another, as well, but in the longer and more defeated moments in which the back two-thirds of the film unfolds there is also something else—not the lonely defeat of those old protagonists, but a more communal and more defiant and much less settled defeat, of some with names and some without, who have resolutely refused to accept the end of it.
David Roth, ‘Winning Isn't Everything’ October 3, 2025

John Saward
Caravaggio, Sam Altman, and Me
November 3, 2025

He was often consumed by what seemed like nihilism and apathy, indifferent about his work, and at other times driven by violent passion, getting into duels over women, over a tennis match. He once smashed a plate into a waiter’s face over a dispute about some artichokes. Intermittently he painted, portraits of Men Of Note, regionally known priests and politicians, little busts of wisemen and military heroes and getting paid per head. Pictures of fruit and of flowers, junk for the fascination of dull northerners and rustic bumpkins. He changed his address 10 times between 1592 and 1595. He lived with a priest who fed him only salad. Another place where he slept on the straw floor of a sort of barn and got kicked by a horse so hard he never went back. He went door to door to art dealers, sold his work to secondhand shops. X-rays done on these early paintings reveal little evidence of any traditional technique, planning, or revision at all, any evidence that the lessons of his apprenticeships ever really took. He was a delinquent student who resorted to his own methods, and in the process invented this spooky theatrical showdown between light and darkness. Scenes that are both ghostly and alive; biblical tragedies set in dusty taverns and back alleys.
John Saward, ‘Caravaggio, Sam Altman, and Me’ November 3, 2025

Anna Merlan
A Gift Shop to Remember
December 19, 2025

Anna Merlan, ‘A Gift Shop to Remember’ December 19, 2025

Carrie Frye
A Heart as Big as a Whale
January 2, 2026

The two first met on a hike and picnic at Monument Mountain. A handful of other writers were present, but because Melville, then aged thirty-one, was the only one who had been a sailor on several sea voyages, we can assume he was the most (or the only?) physically coordinated writer in attendance. He clambered up a high rock and sat showily on the precipice. A thunderstorm came and created a mood of shouting and hooting joy for the men as they ran for cover from the rain. After the picnic, Hawthorne went home and read the five books Melville had published so far. Melville’s review of Hawthorne’s Mosses from an Old Manse was published soon after (it may have been written before they’d met or maybe not). It includes these lines, which, even after adjusting for “it was a different time,” shiver with innuendo: “[Hawthorne] expands and deepens down, the more I contemplate him, and further and further, shoots his strong New England roots into the hot soil of my Southern soul.”
Carrie Frye, ‘A Heart as Big as a Whale’ January 2, 2026

Tom Tomorrow
FAMOUS MEME Comics
January 14, 2025

Panel one: the top reads FAMOUS MEME COMICS, in a font meant to echo the old CLASSICS ILLUSTRATED comic books. It shows the distracted boyfriend meme, with the boyfriend labeled “exhausted political cartoonist,” the girlfriend looking at him aghast labeled “relentlessly bad news,” and the woman in the foreground labeled “literally any other topic. Panel two: caption at top reads THE WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS POEM. A bedraggled figure meant to represent the artist looks at a laptop, in a room with peeling walls and a bare light bulb. He is typing: “This is just to say/I have written another parody of that poem about the plums.” Panel three: Same visuals, but with the artist’s cat popping up in the background. The poem continues: “which has been done to death on social media/Forgive me/It was so easy/and so quick.” Panel four: caption reads THE PAGLIACCI JOKE.” A bald, goateed psychologist says, “My prescription for your melancholy is simple — go read that amusing comic strip featuring Sparky the penguin!” A voice off-panel replies: “But doctor — that strip is incredibly depressing!” Panel five: reverse camera angle reveals that the offscreen voice is Sparky, saying, “Also— how are you my shrink when you don’t even know my name? This joke doesn’t make any sense at all.” Panel six caption: THE SIX WORD STORY A man, woman and baby. The woman says “For sale — baby shoes, never worn!” Man: “Kid didn’t like them and we missed the return window!” Woman: “Why is everyone being so weird about this?”
Tom Tomorrow, ‘FAMOUS MEME Comics’ January 14, 2025
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