Weather Report #56: A folk horror political thriller about Indigenous genocide in Latin America, and more...
Consuming 30/08/2026
Welcome to your Weather Report, a (sometimes) weekly column where I recommend a plethora of media – like good journalism, books, movies, and music – for readers to consume.
Here's what you're getting this week:
- Listen to the second part of my history of America's colonial empire podcast;
- Essays, articles, and columns about: the US government's boatstrikes as extrajudicial killing, how sanctuary states continue to collaborate with immigration enforcement, and a profile of the Puerto Rico governor's right-hand man;
- A folk horror film about the aftermath of Indigenous genocide in Latin America;
- A playlist of video game start menu music.
If you're interested in seeing the recommendations – and supporting Heavy Weather's quest to keep tabs on collapse – you can become a paid subscriber by clicking the button below. Paid subscribers get access to the MEDIA LIST, a comprehensive list of every book, movie, and video game I've ever recommended. If you're already a paid subscriber, thank you very much! This newsletter would literally not be possible without your support.
What I Did This Week:
Over the last two weeks, I hosted two episodes of It Could Happen Here were I talked with journalist James Stout about how the United States overseas colonial empire got started and how the imperial boomerang has ricocheted back towards the imperial metropole.
The first episode was a semi-brief primer about the current inhabited colonies and how the United States' overseas colonial expansion was kickstarted by wanting guano aka "white gold" aka bird and bat shit that's good for fertilizing crops. Imperialism has always been a business enterprise. And for the US, overseas territorial expansion started with the Guano Islands.
Meanwhile, the second episode went into how the War of 1898 was a war for territorial expansion and how the US gained control of its current and former colonies (Puerto Rico, Guam, American Samoa, the Northern Mariana Islands, the U.S. Virgin Islands, the Philippines, and Cuba (unofficially)). The last ~10 minutes or so looked at how Trump's overtures to taking control of the Strait of Hormuz, Venezuela, Greenland, and more are standing on the framework built by its current colonies and the Insular Cases, a series of racist Supreme Court decisions that has defined life in the colonies for more than a century.
I was also invited to be on last week's Executive Disorder (a news roundup) where I talked about Puerto Rico's drought, the US government starting to murder civilians in the Caribbean and the Pacific again, and how sanctuary cities continue helping Trump's deportation campaign even though they're not supposed to.
P.S. I realized that I embedded these links in the newsletter when I meant to paste them, so they didn't show up in the email. Sorry about that. It's been fixed for this newsletter.
That's it for this week's free stuff. If you want to see the media recommendations and the link roundup, you can become a paid subscriber today.
