The Sunday Papers

Sundays are for trying to work out why your feet don’t work. I wore too-tight shoes during a house move a few months ago, and now if I walk for too long I get pain under my third and fourth toes. Fortunately, I don’t read with my feet. Here are some internet worderings that caught my attention this week.

Sarah Kendzior revisits The Gas Station and remembers talking to Leatherface about Ahab and ‘impolite horror’.

“Leatherface! I mean, Gunnar,” I said. “When I was in college, I was supposed to interview him about Chainsaw. But we ended up talking about everything. Carl Jung and horror literature and the collective unconscious. Ocean life and ecology. He could recite Moby Dick. He made me want to go to Maine.”

“I proposed to you in Maine,” my husband interjected. “Maybe that should be your top memory of Maine.”

“It is,” I said. “But I was 20 and didn’t know anything. Leatherface gave me life advice.”

Novelist Sally Rooney is one among many literary luminaries, including poet Alice Oswald, who have spoken out against the UK’s designation of Palestine Action as a “terrorist group”. Here is Rooney in the Irish Times.

In recent years the UK’s state broadcaster has also televised two fine adaptations of my novels, and therefore regularly pays me residual fees. I want to be clear that I intend to use these proceeds of my work, as well as my public platform generally, to go on supporting Palestine Action and direct action against genocide in whatever way I can. If the British state considers this “terrorism”, then perhaps it should investigate the shady organisations that continue to promote my work and fund my activities, such as WH Smith and the BBC.

Tiffanie Kim deploys her understanding of quantum physics to investigate her feelings about the Korean diaspora and her birth parents. You might um and err about the fast-and-loose account of quantum physics, here. Further reading: Karen Barad on “re-turning, re-membering, and facing the incalculable”.

A few years after Korean heritage camp, a friend went back to Korea to meet her birth mother. She discovered she had younger sisters. She was the only one who was unwanted. I imagined her family living in Korea, a happy sum of its parts that added up to a complete family unit. One that did not include her. I imagined the family waiting at the door to greet my friend with her embarrassingly white parents. I imagined the two families struggling to find intersections of personal traits–favorite colors, favorite foods–via the clunky imprecision of a novice translator. When my friend returned to the United States, she seemed distant, distracted, somehow less herself. There was a sadness about her that I didn’t want to experience. She knew the truth. Her wave function had collapsed.

Puzzle gamers from around the world recently joined forces to 100% Every 5×5 Nonogram – a web collection of all 24,976,511 possible 5×5 nonograms that can be solved “without guessing”. For context, a nonogram is a simple logic puzzle in which blank grid cells are filled in according to numbers at the edges to reveal a hidden picture. It’s a heart-warming community endeavour, and it’s interesting to read the app creator’s thoughts about how they defined and modelled “guessing” vs “logic”.

Former Guantánamo Bay detainee Mansoor Adayfi interviews two others, Moath al-Alwi and Khalid Qassim, about the art they created inside the camp.

Inside Guantánamo, he used whatever he could—mop ropes, dental floss, toothpicks, cardboard—to keep building his elaborate miniature ships. Every ship Moath created there tells a story: of stolen journeys, buried dreams, and unbroken spirits. His art bears the official U.S. government stamp not by accident, but by design. He insisted that every piece carry that stamp, turning a symbol of captivity into one of defiance.

Last thing: AI art “poisoning” tool Nightshade is now freely available for artists to use. In brief, the tool subtly alters images to fuck with any models attempting to use them for “training”. The thinking behind it isn’t to ruin the generative AI industry, but to address a “power asymmetry” and force companies to buy a license for any art they add to their datasets.

Real last thing: I haven’t listened yet, but people I trust have made positive noises about this video essay on “the complex psychological mechanisms behind the current comedy era”.