Skip to content

Fresh Hell

The best dispatches from our grim new reality

CHOCOLATE!!!!!!

Nearly thirty-five thousand Americans have died from the coronavirus and over twenty-two million have filed for unemployment benefits—on all counts the ideal circumstances for millionaire speaker of the house Nancy Pelosi  to give the huddled masses a peek at her impressive stockpile of chocolate ice cream. “I like it better than anything else,” the speaker gushes—“it” being “chocolate” and not “acting as a sturdy barricade to any and all progressive change,” which the historical record indicates is, in fact, her all-time favorite thing to do. 

 

A Lunch by Any Other Name

Just Eat, a “global hybrid marketplace for online food delivery,” discovered this week that its legion of telecommuting employees were struggling to find time between back-to-back meetings to engage in the company’s namesake activity: eat. That got their “chief people officer” thinking: What if workers had “guilt free time away from meetings” to “have lunch”? What if—and this is where the jaw-dropping innovation comes in that justifies exorbitant executive compensation—it was called the “JUST EAT Power Hour,” or as others may know it, the “lunch break”?  

 

Alexa, Save My Life

The United States is a great place, a land in which an elderly woman dying of coronavirus in a nursing home can spend her final days pleading for help from Amazon’s Alexa, which, unlike God, may be listening 24/7/365.

 

In the Land of Oz

Two grossly unqualified and eminently deranged gasbag “doctors” first introduced to the public by new age propagandist and frozen food maven Oprah Winfrey reared their grease-painted faces on national television this week to dispense some words of wisdom as the country prepares to normalize ritual human sacrifice on an untold scale as the cost of doing business. First up, Dr. Oz, determined to get the nation’s “mojo back,” urged the country to seize the “appetizing opportunity” to reopen schools—even if it meant “2 to 3 percent” of the population were to perish. Later in the week, Dr. Phil argued that we shouldn’t get so worked up about all this coronavirus mass death ballyhoo; after all, he alleged, checking his notes, three hundred sixty-thousand people die every year “from swimming pools.” 

 

Look Into Their Eyes and See What They Know

Anxious to get back to the good old days of workaday wage slavery, thousands of protestors—organized by conservative groups connected to the DeVos clan, which almost certainly has no vested interest jumpstarting the economy whatsoever—swarmed Michigan’s state capital on Wednesday to express their considerable dissatisfaction with efforts to protect their health. Elsewhere, in the lovely state of Ohio, protestors also turned up to fight for their God-given right to shop in a display of dead-eyed lunacy reminiscent of the American classic Dawn of the Dead.  

 

I Believe You Have the Stapler of My Dreams

Just because you’re trapped in your domicile beaming your labor over the internet straight into the heart of Moloch doesn’t mean you can’t have a pleasant working environment. Consider putting that stimmy check toward sprucing your exploitation-space up with this $137 stapler with twenty-three-karat gold accents

 

The Telecommuter Must Wear Prada

Or else you might consider improving your wardrobe while showing some patriotic support for a Medicaid-hating shit governor  with this $380 hand-embroidered cashmere sweater proclaiming that Andrew Cuomo should be president when, in fact, he should not. If it’s not to your taste, at the very least, according to this man, we all need to get over our depression about this whole mass death whatever and stop wearing sweatpants in Zoom calls. Show some respect, god damn it!

 

The Flaming Wreckage of Societal Collapse, in Your Inbox

Did you know? Fresh Hell is now available in handy newsletter form. Get your personal news briefing from the front lines of our techno-dystopia in the comfort of your own inbox. Click here to sign up.