Weather Report #55: A Beautiful Musical about Colonialism in the West Indies, and more...

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:

1. The first part of a podcast on how the US built its colonial empire;
2. Essays, articles, and columns about: the revenge of the Nerd Reich, Mamdani's surveillance dragnet, and the future of the Global South;
3. A phenomenal movie musical about French colonialism in the Caribbean that is just as relevant today as it was when it came out nearly 50 years ago;
4. A good podcast on the technical as a weapon of war.

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:

You should listen to my most recent It Could Happen Here podcast. I talked with journalist James Stout about the United States' hidden colonial empire and how it was built on literal bird shit. Most of this episode is laying out the country's overseas colonies (Puerto Rico, Guam, American Samoa, the Northern Mariana Islands, and the U.S. Virgin Islands) and how its colonial empire was kickstarted by the conquest of the Guano Islands (now known as the U.S. Minor Outlying Islands) from the 1850's to the early 1900's.

Part 2 – which centers on how the US took over its inhabited colonies – comes out next week!

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.