John Merrick

Pitching What We Publish We’re interested in original ideas and clear, compelling writing that breaks down complex subjects for an engaged but non-expert audience. The best guide to what we might like is to…

Submissions for ISSUE #3 – AIRBORNE, are now open!

We are accepting pitches exploring the importance of air in the climate and ecological crises, its role in environmental history and activism, and its future on a transformed planet.

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Write for us!!

We're taking pitches for our third issue until December 5th

Send us your ideas for essays, dispatches, photojournalism, memoir, the works!

Full details at the link. 👩‍💻📚

Screengrab of a Guardian article with headline “UK to announce plans to emulate stringent Danish immigration system” https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/nov/08/uk-to-announce-plans-to-emulate-stringent-danish-immigration-system

Screengrab of a Guardian article with headline “Centre-left tipped to lose Copenhagen for first time in electoral history” followed by the text “Political rivals say PM's divisive politics have encouraged voters to ditch the Social Democrats for the far right” https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/nov/18/centre-left-tipped-to-lose-copenhagen-for-first-time-in-electoral-history

The Danish Social Democrats who have pursued far right policies on immigration and governs with the centre-right are set to lose in Copenhagen for the first time in a 100 years, while the left looks set to win a major victory today.

fantastic interview on the history, state of research, and problems with geoengineering. Very much in line with my writing on SRM

Plastic Planet | Venus Bivar Stalled negotiations and accelerating accumulation in the global petrochemicals industry

Happy to have written about plastic for @thepolycrisis.bsky.social. Thanks to @70sbachchan.bsky.social for sourcing the excellent graphics. And thanks to @rebecca-altman.bsky.social and @anjakrieger.bsky.social for being my go-to's on all-things plastic.

www.phenomenalworld.org/analysis/pla...

Destitute by design: trapped in the immigration system Migration policy is not only failing people forced to arrive in Britain by boats. In an extract from a new edited volume, Daniel Trilling reports on t...

In 2023 @tom-clark.bsky.social got me to write a chapter for his book on UK poverty about how immigration limbo, which Labour wants more of, makes people destitute. It was the most distressing piece I've ever worked on. We sent a copy to every MP. www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/society/6081...

The real threat isn’t a ‘woke right’ – it’s conservatism’s old demons | The Observer

Excellent, by @kenanmalik.bsky.social, on the resurgence of a deep reactionary strain in conservatism, and the return of overt racism and white nationalism to mainstream politics
observer.co.uk/news/columni...

The Long Heat, by Wim Carton and Andreas Malm, from Verso Books.

Utterly compelling, deeply alarming. Wim Carton @wimcarton.bsky.social and Andreas Malm's The Long Heat (following Overshoot from last year) sets out the extent to which we are fucked. The planet is overheating. Fossil-fuel capitalism is doing it, and it is not stopping. From @versobooks.bsky.social

We're now open for pitches for Issue #3 of @the-breakdown.bsky.social, AIRBORNE, on the importance of air in the climate crises, its role in environmental history and activism, and its future on a transformed planet.

If you have ideas for a piece, send them our way www.break-down.org/pitching/

All Betz Are Off - The Ideas Letter Once solely the language of the far-right fringe, warnings of an impending “civil war” in Britain have gone mainstream, carried by figures like David Betz, a professor at King’s College…

For the Ideas Letter, i tried to understand what's going on with the constant summoning forth of an immanent civil war on the British right. Featuring ethnic determinism, remigration, and the strange radicalisation of conservative intellectuals
www.theideasletter.org/essay/all-be...

This rancid trash understands the significance of Labour's anti-refugee policies.

Inside the BBC’s Gaza Fiasco • EQUATOR How the world’s most trusted media organisation fell apart

It was very common to be dismissed whenever it was said that Gaza would unravel everything, and this essay really does acutely show how true and poignant that was www.equator.org/articles/ins...

UK set to limit refugees to temporary stays Shabana Mahmood is expected to say the era of permanent protection for refugees is over, in major changes to the UK's asylum and immigration system.

This contribution to the volume of human misery is yet another policy from Labour based on a false premise, in this case that refugees are overly attracted to Britain. It will increase bureaucratic limbo, thus making worse the problem of "cohesion" it purports to solve.
www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Bumping this, on David Betz, Matt Goodwin and the spectre of civil war

Extraction w/ Thea Riofrancos Featuring Thea Riofrancos on Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism. The green energy transition requires a vast array of inputs: copper, cobalt, rare earth elements, and the focus of this disc...

Pleased to post this new Dig ep w/ my partner in all things @triofrancos.bsky.social on her beautiful book Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism. We go from Chile to Nevada, from dawn of colonialism to geoeconomic conflict between the US and China—and more www.thedigradio.com/podcast/extr...

Full details of how and where to pitch are on our website: www.break-down.org/pitching/

We're now open for pitches for Issue #3 of @the-breakdown.bsky.social, AIRBORNE, on the importance of air in the climate crises, its role in environmental history and activism, and its future on a transformed planet.

If you have ideas for a piece, send them our way www.break-down.org/pitching/

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This piece launches our new series on (re)reading radical thinkers for a time of ecological crisis.

Small subscriptions make our work possible—subscribe digitally for access to our fill archive of essays, conversations and journalism for just over £1 a month:

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Reading Stuart Hall for the Climate Crisis Stuart Hall’s politics of culture offers the left a blueprint for confronting the climate crisis.

"People have to have a language to speak about what other possible futures are available to them,” Hall wrote. One task...is therefore to devise a language that expands the sense of what is possible"

NEW: Casey A. Williams reads Stuart Hall for the Climate Crisis

www.break-down.org/reading-stua...

Really good long read here, folks

This is exactly right, i think. Huntington but directed inwards, to British society itself.

Also interesting that his book on fortifications starts with a story about him running around a British base in Afghanistan

The decade from 1968 to 1978 is filled with these kinds of warnings/murmurs about civil conflict –– an era bookended by the Rivers of Blood Speech and the publication of Clutterbuck's Britain in Agony, with Christopher Priest's Fugue for a Darkening Island nearly bang in the middle

The Richard Clutterbuck era!

This is part of a new series we'll be running, (re)reading radical thinkers for the climate crisis. If you have pitches/ideas for other writers and thinkers we should cover, then send them to us! www.break-down.org/pitching/

Inside the BBC’s Gaza Fiasco • Articles • EQUATOR How the world’s most trusted media organisation fell apart

New: for @equatormag.bsky.social I spent months talking to BBC journalists, from front-line reporters to the former head of the World Service, about how the corporation came unstuck over Gaza. But as I was working on the story, it collided with something... bigger... www.equator.org/articles/ins...

Bumping this, on David Betz, Matt Goodwin and the spectre of civil war

Reading Stuart Hall for the Climate Crisis Stuart Hall’s politics of culture offers the left a blueprint for confronting the climate crisis.

New on @the-breakdown.bsky.social, Casey Williams rereads Stuart Hall in an age of climate breakdown
www.break-down.org/reading-stua...

Governments and companies worldwide are increasingly investing in solar radiation management as a "fix" to global warming. Our podcast of the week explores how billionaire-backed research has normalized geoengineering.

With Sofia Menemenlis on @poltheoryother.bsky.social

buff.ly/heeIBDo

Brett Christophers · Assume the worst: Where our waste goes Just as Big Oil has repeatedly failed to deliver on pledges to begin decarbonising, so too the promises of plastics...

I got to write about our global waste problem for @lrb.co.uk, in dialogue with 3 really good books, by @alexclapp.bsky.social, Oliver Franklin-Wallis and John Scanlan.

You can read it here: