Death to Hogs!
Hellish plague of feral hogs was unleashed by the Spanish conquistador de Soto
The population of Texas may soon be replaced by super-tough, super-intelligent feral hogs with vitals armored by plates of gristle and tusks that can reduce your innards to jelly.
Millions must die.
The year was 1539, and Hernando de Soto knew not the wrath he had already wrought upon the New World. The Spanish conquistador had sailed west to plunder and colonize the Americas; unknown to him, aboard his armada were the makings of an epidemic that would lay suffering upon the American Heartland for centuries to come. Not as the result of smallpox nor influenza, though the sailors were surely rife with those diseases. It was the domesticated Sus scrofa — otherwise known as the European boar, three hundred of which made the 1539 voyage with de Soto before he released them into the Texas wildlands with the hope that they would proliferate enough to provide sustenance for coming generations of conquistadors.
Over time, these once-domesticated boars sprouted sloping snouts, grew coarse hair and brutish tusks, and proliferated with exponential zeal throughout the woods and grasslands of …
Bouquets & Brickbats
To Timothee Chalamet. We like Timothee Chalamet, even though the costs of approval can often seem exorbitant. We don’t understand why sane people are supposed to enjoy the experience of spending five hours and twenty-one minutes watching sand, or whether the giant sandworms that occasionally emerge from this bleak landscape are good or bad. We’ll tolerate the fact that he shows up regularly on Celebrity Row looking like a refugee from a Livestream where he ate Tide pods. We’ll even tolerate the double “e” in his first name. Such is life in these United States.
On the other hand, we thought that Timothee Chalamet’s version of Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown was better than anything that the master himself has made available onstage for the past 25 …
Draw Me
This story is excerpted from the novel What Came West by Josh Weil, available from Random House on June 2, 2026.
My parents chose her for a maid because she was a mute. Hoping that without a voice she might be half the presence of anyone else. Even less if she avoided me, as they surely instructed her to. By then they had long since become accustomed to my inability to withstand proximity to others.
Tantrums, they’d called them when I was young. Fits that would come over me, caused by something simple as a scent: bread rising on an afternoon of baking with my mother, and my father barging in reeking of his veterinary work, lighting a pipe. …
