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The hottest day

!Epic Tomorrows

By Tadzio Mueller; originally published in German on the blog Peaceful Sabotage. Republished with permission.

Dear people,

It’s Saturday, June 27th, 6:27 a.m. I’m sitting in the kitchen, a small pot of green tea beside me, my laptop on my lap, writing these lines. This isn’t my usual routine; when I work on a Saturday, I usually don’t start until 10 a.m., after I’ve had a bit of a lie-in and finished reading the morning paper in bed. But today is supposed to be one of the hottest days in Germany since records began. Yesterday, a weather station in Saarbrücken recorded 41.3 degrees Celsius, the highest temperature ever measured. Today, this record will likely be broken; 39 degrees Celsius is forecast for this afternoon in Berlin, the highest temperature I’ve ever experienced in Germany. Neither my office nor our apartment has air conditioning, and I’m under pressure to finish this book, so here I am at 6:46 a.m., already hard at work, because it will simply be too hot from midday onward. It will be too hot to work, too hot to think, too hot to tell stories. It will simply be too hot for everything. End of June. In northern Germany, not in Ecuador.

And this heat wave is just the beginning. The world’s oceans are warmer than ever before, or at least not within the context of a stable, human-friendly climate. In the Pacific, the “Godzilla El Niño” is gaining momentum, and in the North Atlantic, the “cold blob” is causing alarm, already influencing the monsoon in India and representing the first clearly visible sign of the coming collapse of the AMOC, which will one day trigger a climate catastrophe of its own in Europe. When? We don’t know, but the date is getting closer and closer since I started reading the studies on the subject.

It’s the last weekend in June, normally a weekend packed with festivals, Pride marches, village celebrations, and whatnot – and news is pouring in from all over Germany that most of them are being canceled this weekend. My good friend and fellow collapse enthusiast Scully wanted to go to the Christopher Street Day (CSD) in Ilmenau: canceled because of the heat; I had considered going to the CSD in Bernau with Wolf, like Scully, to make sure there were more of us there than potentially disruptive fascists: canceled because of the heat.

Yesterday, the hottest day in Germany since records began, roads collapsed, people died, and Berlin felt like a ghost town; nobody wanted to be outside, nobody wanted to be in the sun. About an hour north of Berlin, the left-wing alternative music festival Fusion is taking place this weekend, as it always does at the end of June. Around 50,000 hedonistic holiday communists are partying there exuberantly for several days, a significant number of them drunk, stoned, or high on amphetamines. I myself spent many a sleepless night there in my younger days. For several years now, I haven’t gone to Fusion myself, but every year when I’m not there, I experience FOMO, or ” fear of missing out .” Someone else might be having more fun than me.

This year I’m not worried about missing out. This year I’m worried that people will collapse there in droves, possibly even die of heatstroke. I’ve read *The Heat Will Kill You First * and * Ministry for the Future *; I know how, in extreme heat, our bodies dissolve in on themselves, how our insides turn to scrambled eggs. I’m afraid of the heat, and this year it will reach up to 40 degrees Celsius at Fusion. I’m afraid that people will simply die a miserable death while partying because, as a society, we’re just not prepared to live in *Hothouse Earth *, as an influential paper described it a few years ago.

It’s Saturday, June 27th, 6:28 a.m. Today will likely be the hottest day in Germany since records began. And tomorrow the record might be broken again. As the well-known meteorologist Özden Terli reminded us in yesterday evening’s news: we are emitting more greenhouse gases, not less, and as I predicted a few years ago, the more the climate catastrophe escalates, the less we care about climate protection.

It’s Saturday, June 27th, 6:29 a.m., and the last report on Deutschlandfunk radio before the 6:30 news is about the lack of civil defense in Germany. I didn’t hear everything; it’s still early, and I’m just making my green tea. A middle-aged man is asked when he last experienced a siren alarm: he replies that it must have been quite a while ago, perhaps 40 years? I promise myself I’ll listen to this report again later; maybe I’ll find a few more good quotes in it.

Quotes that are supposed to prove something? That I woke up on June 27th in a different world than the one I described in the last chapter. A world where “disaster preparedness” is something to be ridiculed, something to be dismissed as “fascist prepperism” with all the self-assurance of those who have never had to react to a disaster themselves. A world where it’s becoming increasingly clear: disasters are coming, in fact, they’re already here. You can prepare, or you can’t—but if you don’t, then things are going to go wrong.

June 27, 2026, is one of the few days I’ve experienced that truly feels like this: like a world on the brink of collapse. A world where everything is falling apart. A world that, in a crucial sense, is coming to an end. And this is casting its shadows. Shadows that many are still ignoring. But the exciting and dangerous thing about heat is: it’s hard to ignore, and expensive. So we now have a brief window in which we’ll talk about heat waves, climate collapse, and civil protection. The window will close again quickly because of our society’s tendency to deny the truth. But perhaps it will stay open long enough for me to finish my book about collapse and preparing for collapse. Cognitively, that would be stupid, because heat makes you stupid. But symbolically, it would fit. And stories are all about symbols. So here we go : the world is ending, this book will soon be too, let’s wrap it up, people.

With diligent but heat-worried greetings,

Yours truly, Tadzio

Modern poetry is anarchism, South Korea

Shave

!Epic Tomorrows

By Seonku Yang

My father’s chin
was a wall covered with moss.

Father,
the moss is drying.

You can rest now.

“Everything changes.”

My father’s words
quiver between cracked bricks.

His body
grows lighter and lighter.

Like an empty hanger
swaying on a clothes rack.

Father,
where are you going?

From that hanger
hangs a coat
with worn sleeves.

When I take his hand,

a severed lizard’s tail
crumbles from his palm
into dry sand.

My father, reduced to dust,
keeps settling

on the window,
along the windowsill.

Father,

I call your name,
but no answer comes.

With my index finger,

I wipe away
my father’s name.

From my own chin,

cactus spines
begin to grow.

DIARIES & MEMOIRS: COUNTRIES A-Z, Exclusive to COTW, Reflections, Ukraine

Dancing During War (Ukraine travel memoir) #2: Wednesday August 14, 2024

!Epic Tomorrows

by Keith Hennessey, 2024

I came to Ukraine because I hate war and imperialism and wanted to extend solidarity to people suffering from it. Also I’m deeply curious about, and inspired by, how people, and artists in particular, think-feel-work-dance-heal-create-connect under extremely difficult conditions. How to survive a war? How to keep dancing, or not, during a war? From previous experiences* and extensive political reading I know that witnessing is a powerful act of solidarity. I came to listen and look, with a willingness to be changed and a commitment to not turn away, not be silent. I was sincerely invited and warmly welcomed.

I also came because I’m restless and confused with my own life which teeters between fabulous, and lonely alienated political despair. With the overly scheduled and distracted attention of my everyday life I don’t have the capacity to focus or learn at the level I’d like to be engaged, at the level I have found only when I leave home and immerse myself in a place and a history with the people most impacted.

I also came because it was easier, logistically and culturally, than going to Sudan, Palestine, Venezuela, or Congo, where I am also interested in learning, witnessing and offering solidarity. In early August 2024 I had paid work relatively nearby in Vienna and I had been to Kyiv before the 2022 invasion and knew some Ukrainian dancers. Karl Frost, a dancer friend, had made the trip a few months earlier to offer contact improvisation (CI) workshops in Kyiv and Lviv. Karl connected me with Lilia, a dancer-organizer from Lviv who organized a talk, classes, and dance jams around my visit. I declined invitations to go to Kyiv because the trip is long and the likelihood of bombing and regular air raid sirens was much higher.

In discussing what I might offer in this situation, Lilia said, “we’re trying to hold together a dance community during the war, to keep our love and humanity alive.”

I responded:
“I am not a therapist or trauma specialist but I recognize the healing or calming potential of the practices we do in a dance class, in somatic awareness exercises, in paying close attention to our breath and body sensations, in tuning in to another person or group. Most healing focuses on the individual. I am more interested in “political healing,” which recognizes how we share many symptoms (anxiety, depression, alienation) with other people (and other beings) and that our pain/harm is caused by social and political forces more than by isolated individuals. My work tends more to the whole forest than to the individual tree.”

Lilia responded:
“Dear Keith, First of all I appreciate your desire to come and teach in Ukraine. For us it’s very important when people abroad would like to come and to spend some time in Ukraine. To see how we keep on living and keep on dancing in this crazy world. In a war world full of violence, anger and horrible things around, somehow we choose to love, to be kind and to be honest with each other. It is a miracle for me. How is it possible in these hard circumstances to choose the humanity? We are living in the high risk right now. It’s a revolutionary world. For me CI practice is kind of the same revolutionary dance form with a high risk and a strong survival mode.

CI practice is supporting our nervous system and is helping to survive our body both physically and mentally. In your workshop in Ukraine, Keith, I’d like to experience how the physicality of CI practice meets our Ukrainian context. Through the CI exercises focused on physicality and gravity. Through the scores and performative structures. How the Russian war changed us and keeps on changing. How the political and social forces change us. How do we meet these changes? How open are we to speak and to dance with complicated things in our lives — like war for Ukrainians and like women`s rights, queer rights and so on? We have done it every day since 24.02.2022. I think we are ready for that risk — putting seeds and uncomfortable questions. We are in survival mode.

I trust you as a CI teacher and I trust your experience. We are not expecting something big from you. We are inviting you to come and dance with us and to share your experience. This is enough. Your active solidarity position is a key. And of course we’ll be healing together while gathering and doing simple CI things but risky
physical things related to the survival mode.”

Due to the ongoing war employing drones and air missiles there were no commercial flights into Ukraine. I flew to Krakow Poland were I had a lovely day of rest, and enjoyed 2nd hand shopping, hipster ramen**, and the hotel spa. Then I took a 7-hour FlixBus to Lviv. I’d heard that the border was unpredictable and we could be there for hours. I was imagining a more militarized situation… maybe like an Israeli checkpoint but it was just slow bureaucracy, not malevolent. Fortunately I had packed a lot of food.

My host Lilia, a dancer, organizer, and mother of two small kids, met me at the station. We hugged warmly despite never having met before. She told me that when she texted me that morning she wondered if I would really come, imagining that I might cancel at the last minute. In the taxi Lilia tried to explain the destabilizing and exhausting unpredictability of the Ukrainian situation. She said they no longer had any concept of the future. She went to a CI festival in Austria last year and observed that people who seem to know their future feel plastic to her after 3 years of war. I asked, plastic? She explained, “They walk around oblivious like plastic people who can count on their future unfolding in a predetermined way.” While in Ukraine I heard many versions of this feeling of alienation or critical distance from people who are not also living with war as a daily reality or who act as if a war at the border of Eastern Europe and Russia doesn’t concern them.

On my first walk around the city center, with its multiple cathedrals and churches over 300 years old, and quaint cobblestone streets lined with vibrant and crowded outdoor cafes, I saw the first visible sign of war. A church with protective covers on its stained glass windows and historic sculptures. After dinner I came upon a street musician who had a large audience of over 100 people, mostly in their teens and 20s. I was attracted by what sounded like a singalong, choral singing. Later I played the recording for someone to ask about the song and learned that it was a pop Ukrainian song from the 90s that many people know. There’s a curfew for everyone at midnight, which I appreciated because here in the dense city center there are many busy cafes, restaurants, bars, and ice cream shops just outside my window.

*My previous war and conflict experiences: Bosnia and Croatia in 1995, Chiapas after the 1997 Acteal massacre perpetrated by paramilitaries against the indigenous Zapatistas, Cairo after the 2011 uprisings, Oslo during and Bratislava following anti-gay shootings in 2022 and 2023.
**Not sure why this is turning into an Eastern Europe ramen tour but for reference, the ramen restaurants in Vienna are cheaper than SF, cheaper in Krakow than in Vienna, and cheaper again in Lviv compared to Krakow. In Lviv a dinner-size bowl of delicious ramen in a trendy spot is US$5-7. I 💜 ramen.

Collapse chats & diaries, DIARIES & MEMOIRS: COUNTRIES A-Z, Ecology of the absurd, Featured blogs, sites & lit works, Germany

Hitzewellenupdate: The heat will kill you first…

!Epic Tomorrows

By Tadzio Mueller; originally published in German on the blog Peaceful Sabotage. Republished with permission.

25/6/2026

My dears,

I’m in the final stretch of my book-writing marathon, or rather, writing the final season, and my biggest fear is that I’ll botch the landing just like the creators of Game of Thrones botched season 8 – and if that doesn’t mean anything to you: it started out great, and ended in disaster. So there you go 🙂

But the heat wave is raging, and at least in the short term, even as a highly adept society at denial, we can’t completely ignore the impending collapse – partly because it’s so hard to ignore heat. I’ve already written a few texts about heat and my fear of it; here’s the one with the most information on how heat actually endangers us: https://steady.page/de/friedlichesabotage/posts/64ec9c82-e8ea-4819-b92c-d19203735ea1

But the press is also full of interesting articles, so today you’ll get a kind of annotated collection of links, and in English no less – because, to be honest, I’m just posting my daily social media thread #BadNewsOfTheDay here. I hope you’ll forgive me:

Morning, your #BadNewsOfTheDay are largely that it’s very, very hot. Actually, it’s hotter than ever before 😬

1. “The UK has broken its all-time temperature record for June and France has recorded its hottest day ever for the second day running.”https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jun/24/uk-records-hottest-june-day

2. But before I go on about #heat in Europe, let’s recall the fact of #climateINjustice: “Families across Papua New Guinea are facing depleted harvests and hunger after El Niño brought frost and dry conditions that have destroyed food gardens providing sustenance & income for thousands.” https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jun/25/el-nino-pacific-papua-new-guinea-png-food-shortages

“While Papua New Guinea is experiencing the most severe impacts, countries across the Pacific were also being affected. As many as 4.7 million people faced increased risks of hunger, poverty and disease due to El Niño-related droughts, erratic rainfall and frost…”

3. Back to sweltering Europe & the way #HeatKills: silently, and very unjustly. “One in every 6 babies in England are living in overheated homes, causing sleep disruption and serious health risks.” Babies, old folks, the ill & unhoused suffer the most. Where’s the #climatejustice movement?https://www.theguardian.com/society/2026/jun/25/one-in-six-babies-in-england-live-in-overheated-homes-analysis

4. Environmental injustice is transnational: those who cause the problems suffer less than those who don’t: “French struggle with heat-trap homes as climate inequality grows: Many of France’s buildings are not designed for hot weather – and low-income housing estates are suffering the worst” https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jun/25/french-heat-trap-homes-climate-inequality-grows

Extreme heat is a hell that’s hard to escape: “Extreme heat has led to higher air pollution, a rise in hospital admissions, school closures & train cancellations. It’s caused power cuts to thousands of homes. French nuclear energy output was reduced as heat limited access to cooling water.”

5. Excessive #heat can cause the body to #collapse. Extreme heat can lead to collapse. High temperatures cause blood vessels to dilate, resulting in a drop in blood pressure. In extreme cases, the brain no longer receives sufficient blood flow, and the affected person loses consciousness. https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/hitzewelle-gesundheit-hitzschlag-100.html#Tipps

6. And while Europe is burning, the trade union movement is solidly pro fossil jobs: “2 of Britain’s biggest trade unions are increasing pressure on Andy Burnham not to pick Ed Miliband as the UK’s next finance minister, arguing that his North Sea oil policy has damaged jobs in the sector.” https://www.ft.com/content/74410b7b-cee2-48e0-84d5-77b567530dc3?syn-25a6b1a6=1

7. One big political conflict will be the aircon-question: who gets it, who doesn’t? And who’s negatively affected by it? “Hospitals cancel operations owing to lack of air conditioning: Hospitals across Britain have been forced to reduce services owing to the record-breaking heatwave…” https://www.ft.com/content/fb187483-f496-4432-976e-0aaa9d0506fd?syn-25a6b1a6=1

8. And just for final kicks: “DJ Alok: ‘There’s a way to fly mindfully. Like, I don’t have my own plane any more’.” 🤣 Of course there is. & good for you. The level of stupid self-justifying bullshit we’ll have to endure in the future will be unbearable. But also just a tiny bit funny… https://www.theguardian.com/music/2026/jun/23/dj-alok-dance-music-sustainable-rave-the-world-tour

That’s all for now. Take care in the heat, and if you’re going to Fusion or another festival: drink plenty of fluids, don’t dance too wildly in the heat, and try to be less high during the day. I’m speaking from experience.

I myself will try to finish writing my book at 39 degrees Celsius, which is great because higher temperatures also impair our cognitive abilities. What fun…

With heat-weary greetings,

Yours truly, Tadzio

DIARIES & MEMOIRS: COUNTRIES A-Z, Exclusive to COTW, Letters to the editors, Popular & established authors, South Korea

Letter from Jo Eun Young to Matthew, COTW editor

!Epic Tomorrows

Dear Matthew,

I hope you have been doing well.

After returning from Europe, I took about a week to recover from jet lag and regain my energy.

For this journey, I printed fifty copies of our leaflet, and I was able to leave forty-eight of them at bookshops along the way.

My first stop was the conference in Siena, where I shared the leaflet with professors and several students in Korean Studies. They were genuinely interested, especially in the translations, and I promised to send them the original Korean poems after returning home.

After Siena, I visited Florence and Rome. The experience was quite different from my visit to Lisbon in 2019.

In Lisbon, I felt warmly welcomed. Perhaps it was because Fernando Pessoa is celebrated throughout the city, with bookstores and shops proudly displaying books and souvenirs inspired by him. It felt like a city that embraces its poets.

Florence and Rome, however, felt different. After returning home, I found myself reflecting on why.

First, Florence and Rome are much more tourism-oriented cities than Lisbon. Perhaps people naturally saw me as a tourist rather than as a writer.

Second, I wondered whether my limited English, together with being an Asian visitor, made communication more difficult.

Third, many of the bookshops I visited also operated as cafés, restaurants, or bars, which may have made it less practical for them to introduce or display independent literary projects.

Because the leaflet was written in English, one bookseller—who I believe was probably a staff member rather than the owner—suggested that I should instead visit bookshops specializing in English-language books.

In Florence, every bookshop kindly accepted my leaflet. In Rome, one bookshop politely declined. It appeared to be one of the busiest bookstores in the neighborhood, and the staff explained that any decision to display printed materials had to be discussed and approved at a staff meeting.

I cannot say that I was enthusiastically welcomed everywhere, but I also realize that this expectation was my own. If even one person becomes interested and a genuine connection begins, I will consider this journey worthwhile.

Most importantly, this small adventure was meaningful because I was able to share a leaflet that we created together—you, the illustrator Han So-jin, and I. Thanks to this project, I wandered far beyond the usual tourist destinations and explored the small streets and independent bookshops of Florence and Rome.

Back in Korea, I am currently teaching as a professor while also working with a local cultural foundation on a project interviewing independent neighborhood bookshops. Looking back, from March through August, I have been on a continuous journey through local bookshops in both Korea and Europe.

Thank you, Matthew, for accompanying me on this journey through your work and encouragement.

Now many projects are waiting for me again.

I hope to spend this summer working, reading, writing, and loving.

With my sincere gratitude,

JO EUN YOUNG

P.S.

I’ve been documenting this journey on my Instagram (@bella_joeun), if you’re interested.