SO THIS IS HOW IT ENDS: JIZZBERG vs. FATBERG

Typical New Yorkers

"They call it a 'jizzberg' because the active ingredient is human semen," said Anton Jones, lead engineer on the repair project. "It's miles and miles of ejaculate, kleenex, lotion, and torn up love poetry blocking the pipes, which causes a backup when it rains hard."

Masturbation is inversely related to human fertility, so this report that New York's sewers are being clogged by a "jizzberg the length of Long Island" should ring alarm bells about the survival prospects of modern urban Western man – just as London's notorious fatberg, which has a more established news pedigree, should raise concern about the dietary habits of sedentary Londoners.

But while London's Fatberg is merely grotesque, nothing captures the moral depravity and existential horror of what the West has become as successfully as jizzberg, a giant globule of clotted-up cum blocking up the rat-infested sewers of "the city that never sleeps." This is what modernity represents – the coagulation of humanity, all races, all sexual practices – those involving males, anyway – in one undifferentiated amoral, stomach-churning mass. Even if this story turns out to be part of the "bullshitberg" of the internet, it is nevertheless a perfect symbol of our modern world.