Poet Diana Garza Islas, in the Paris Review, Rorschach:
Two monkeys with wings defecate suspending a ballerina whose skull is split. Her tutu reveals thighs from the fifties, toned. Their hands are on her poor wounded head; she has no feet. One of the monkeys, the one on the left, has a badly defined jawline. The woman has a perforated abdomen.
Janna Levin talking with Natalie Priebe Frank in Quanta, What Can Tiling Patterns Teach Us?:
FRANK: [David Smith] was part of an online community of tiling enthusiasts that stretches across the world. And he was looking for interesting tiles in the following way that’s commonly practiced. So what you do, you can start with a hexagonal tiling of the plane. So it’s just all hexagons. And then put a dot in the center of the hexagon. And draw a line from that dot in the center to the middle of each edge. Not the vertices, but the middle of each edge. And so you end up making the hexagon look like six little kite-shaped things stuck together — they’re called polykites.
And so what you do is you take those little kite-shaped things and you just simply regroup them. And you just say, “OK, now that set of eight of them that are all stuck together, that’s my tile. Let me see if I can tile with it.” And so, people have categorically gone through the low levels of all the possible combinations of those things. Someone in the literature a few years prior had pointed out a tile with a very large corona or possibly a tile that didn’t tile. And so David started playing with this particular version.
LEVIN: Yes, and he called his “the hat” because it vaguely sort of looked like a big top hat.
FRANK: They decided it looked like a hat.
LEVIN: Some people called it a T-shirt.
FRANK: Yeah. But it got called the hat and that’s fine.
Finally, Noah Kalina on fireworks:
I used to be obsessed with fireworks. Fountains specifically. You know, the kind that only go about ten feet high. Was it because I was born on the fourth of July? Probably not. I liked fireworks for the same reason most people like them. I enjoyed fireworks for their hypnotic visual displays and their captivating booms and crackles. They have an undeniably mesmerizing effect. Also, fireworks are often associated with celebrations and communal gatherings, evoking feelings of nostalgia, joy, and togetherness. I think those are the normal and healthy reasons to like fireworks.