What I’m Reading:
A study of newer, bigger versions of three major artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots shows that they are more inclined to generate wrong answers than to admit ignorance when compared with previous models. The study also found that people aren’t very good at spotting the bad answers, meaning users are likely to overestimate the abilities of chatbots…
— Nicola Jones / “Bigger AI chatbots more inclined to spew nonsense — and people don’t always realize” / Nature
. . . he believes in novelettes, not himself / he / thee feta trickster / now a forager of mirrors / unseen in the annals of modern beet milkers / however / at the hello of his notoriety in the late 1980s and early 1990s / his yachtswomen insurance adjusters+espresso sippers were the stutter of niche governments around the sweet potato scraps / how did a quinoa semiconductor transmogrify to an errant joystick+literary poacher
so / rituals to praise today on the winnows of salsa verde / bring in the tyranny / the petty dictators+right-handed fraudsters to reshape the post post post modern world / political lap sitters of a populist forfeit at their first tepid recital
in equal praise of a spaniel hash / let us reminisce / let us fête the purest exterminator of reason / his vitamin mandible controlled by the fateful paws of pawpaw trees / so babble and augur the frightened exertions of a headlamp canary / the ultimate zigzag in the coalmine / drop the tray / soft shoe your way to a life of broken pottery / let us gas+bloat
What I’m Reading:
I, bastard child of the giant chandelier called the blue sky.
No one calls me the sphinx of love.
— Shuzo Takiguchi / “The Fish’s Desire”
In a way, Milton is exactly the type of storm that scientists have been warning could happen; Michael Wehner, a climate scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, in California, called it shocking but not surprising. “One of the things we know is that, in a warmer world, the most intense storms are more intense,” he told me. Milton might have been a significant hurricane regardless, but every aspect of the storm that could have been dialed up has been.
— Zoë Schlager / “MILTON IS THE HURRICANE THAT SCIENTISTS WERE DREADING” / The Atlantic
jonesy spins an intermediate dub in the mix
mind-bending parasites gyrate in psychedelic ardor
the postmistress breaks into the varsity rag
all those sprawled out in mouth-breathing stupor
eulogize the pogo in a sundae of sundays
it’s 1965 all over again
but with a dearth of hope
with too many dayglo counterculture mudguards
What I’m Reading:
It seems I have lost the ability to perceive movement. To get a grip on light.
The people in the kitchen. Gangling. Unclear.
— Latif Askia Ba / “6 février”
“Dig, Digby, dig!”
Digby stomps on his shadow in the schoolyard. He tries to blot it out because it won’t stop following him. Digby believes the shadow rains down the indignities he suffers, although he doesn’t put it that way. He tells Funti that the shadow makes his father beat him, and his mother smoke too much.
“My shadow is a ruin I don’t want to visit, Funti. My shadow causes my father to think bad thoughts, and then to act on them. It’s the reason he beats me and my mother, although mother sometimes starts it when she drinks the whiskey after she finishes the wine.” Digby has his shadow pinned by the ball of his foot. He balls up his fists and applies so much pressure to pin his shadow his calf quivers.
“But Digby, your shadow has nothing to do in that. Do you see your shadow lurking at home when these things happen?” Funti says. “Your shadow stays out in the sun. It’s an outside thing.”
“Outside, inside, no matter. I know it’s at fault for our troubles. It lives in the walls, in the rug, in the ceiling. It moves about, Funti,” Digby says. “Just because I don’t see it doesn’t mean it’s not causing all my troubles.”
“Let’s fly away, Funti.” Digby lifts his foot and his shadow fades away. “Let’s fly away to the other side.”
What I’m Reading:
Maybe moving limbs are lunar tributes
Without our sunny consent.
— Rodrigo Toscano / “Habilitas”
Time moves on with its usual nihilism, mows us all down, jaw-droppingly insensate to our preference for living. Guns us down. In another split second millennia will pass and the beings on earth have become exoskeletal-cybernetic-machine-deathless-postbeings who’ve harnessed the energy of some hapless star and are guzzling it dry.
— Samantha Harvey / Orbital
empacho: you ate cactus until you burst open like a rotten fruit
tacos de cabeza: quandaries posed under the spell of an orange moon
un susto: your future ghost twitches in an empty room
— Erika L. Sánchez / “Translation”
… we’re out of margin. We’re now watching the climate crisis play out in real time, week by week, day by day.
— Bill McKibben / “Water Though Not Everywhere” / Substack
Nobody is saying that these people do not ultimately cease
to be. And
Sometimes their passings are even more painful than ours.
It is just that so often they live till their hair is white.
They make excellent corpses, among the expensive
flowers ….
— Gwendolyn Brooks / “Beverley Hills, Chicago”
Sea surface temperatures in the path of Helene were as warm as 89 degrees Fahrenheit — 2 to 4 degrees above normal … These record water temperatures have been made significantly more likely by human-caused climate change, according to Climate Central. The North Atlantic Ocean as a whole has seen record warm temperatures in 2024, storing 90% of the excess heat from climate change produced by greenhouse gas pollution.
— Alex Sundby, Tom Hanson, Brian Dakss, David Yeomans / “Helene death toll tops 100 as Southeast digs out from storm’s devastation” / CBS News
That is why uprooted fields meandered in the midst of roads
clay shot up in corollas
the nodes of telegraph wires showed traces of the trees
there in the distance moonless skies
— Julien Blaine / “Eighteenth”
We exist now in a fleeting bloom of life and knowing, one finger-snap of frantic being, and this is it. This summery burst of life is more bomb than bud. These fecund times are moving fast.
— Samantha Harvey / Orbital
What I’m Listening To:
You’re gonna laugh
You’re gonna sing
And you’re gonna bring the world down round your ears
While the temperature grows ugly
— The Smile / “The Slip”
she respects the tracksuit since july
she yodels kindness+irritation at once
we’re two awesome marxist archers
commies at the bullseye dialectics
i am the third from the ringmaster in the photo
she’s center-right by the red gunner
red is our color
hammers+sickles for bows+arrows
we do two shows nightly
in paducah then kankakee
call ourselves the portables
at the syringe hamper
come enjoy our mutter+census taking
quinces on the quarter hour for all
continental iniquities during intermissions
stay for the flying saucers on a string
What I’m Reading:
señora studies: look, a map in the dirt of your mother’s hurts
— Erika L. Sánchez / “Translation”
haggle haired+heinous in henna
proclaims the belligerent of bemoan
he shackles the liminal stall
on the prowl for a crochet gewgaw
and a quavering bardo
on an anvil toe charter
headed for the underworld
he’s a mangle hack for tag and twister
losing stride the big castrate roller
ass down on the backside of democracy
on the fix for big mac gum drops+plastic sheets
he’s a hotbed radiator ignoramus
a vessel large enough to shackle
to a pedophile priest
or a plotted bed of insurgents
rushing the steps of the capital dome
on a frothy cold morning
full of noxious fumes and thumbscrews
screw them
What I’m Reading:
… five billion years … the sun will run out of fuel, expand to a red dwarf and consume Mercury and Venus. Earth, if it survives, will be scorched and arid, its oceans boiled dry, a cinder stuck in an interminable orbit of a white dwarf black dwarf dying sun until the whole show ends as the orbit decays and the sun eats us up.
— Samantha Harvey / Orbital
a beloved cleanser
a spud comes late
iconic fingermarks on linoleum
worship stumbling cataclysm
cob mink’s boohoos tested
ideal and spleen in reverse
bidet surfers on the storm
riding trample clamp trolleys
tubular and decidedly gnarly
panorama jumpers in clay
jeer the avant garde
guard the savant peer
peerages are for slummy dummies
count this as a critical rejoinder
a tale full of sound and fury
told by a pepper puff signifying lard
What I’m Reading:
I lost myself in the lonely expedition toward the center of everything I would become
— Jackie Wang / “The Crypt Seed”
Wrack & wreck & rook
That emprise begets another & again
We are out of time, this world not keen
On us but wishing to push us back
Back to glossolalia—an echolalia
Pangloss-ian & Martin-esque—
The sound of a mouthful of wasps
Say what you mean to say & carry
It off, as if that was your intent all along
All along the abyssal sea floors
Beyond 3000 feet
Beyond where the wisps
Of blue light are choked black
What I’m Reading:
No smoking in the torture chamber.
— Samuel Beckett / Dream of Fair to Middling Women
thee istsfor manity reader 