Memorable Stuff I Read This Week

Two brass rings:
ornaments, curatives, punishment,
what’s the difference,
pain swims for a microscope.
The rings around Saturn swim too,
a girdle of mist which hurts space.

— Fanny Howe / “Original”

That’s what white supremacy, what racism is. It is an act of violence. What was new was the cameras. There was certain technology that was able to take that into the living rooms of America. And we’re going through a similar thing right now, but the violence is not new.

–Ta-Nehisi Coates / “Ta-Nehisi Coates on Police Brutality: The Violence is Not New, It’s the Cameras That are New” / Democracy Now

III. Do Luna Moths Hurry?

When life is but ten
days: one turns sage in a week.
Wide eyespots evolve.
One disdains food—thinks only:
legacy, new moon, lift, glow.

— Antoinette Brim-Bell / “Insomniac Tankas”

The worst heatwaves are being supercharged by climate change, posing a threat to ecosystems and to people’s health and livelihoods. Scientists used predictive models and looked at historical data to discover that the most extreme heat waves are getting longer, and their duration increases faster with each degree of warming. In equatorial Africa, for instance, heatwaves that are longer than 35 days are projected to be more than 60 times more common in the near future (2020–2044) than in the recent past (1990–2014).

— Flora Graham / “Extreme heatwaves are accelerating fastest” / Nature Briefing

I was alive in a decade. Sometimes
dreaming of another region
was my religion. It was
a place before trees, prior
to the flame. When the deer died,
I was in my house dreaming. Then
the drought came. Cessation
of sound. Flames as red as apples
lodged inside my throat hissing.

— Andrea Rexillus / “The Way Language Was”

An artificial-intelligence system called Centaur can predict the decisions people will make in a wide variety of situations — often outperforming classical theories used in psychology to describe human choices. Trained on data from 160 psychology experiments in which 60,000 people made more than 10 million choices, the system can simulate human behaviour in tasks from problem-solving and gambling, and even those it hasn’t been trained on.

— Miryam Naddaf / “This AI ‘thinks’ like a human — after training on 160 psychology studies” / Nature

I was digging a hole to virtue
in the body of a beast.

— Fanny Howe / “The Original”

What I’m Listening To:

When I police myself I never made contact
When you betray yourself
You’re only revealed
And when I see your face
I never see reason
How can you move so well
Spinning inside yourself
And not understand me now?

— Loma / “Half Silences”