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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.

I’m a couple of weeks behind on this one, but this letter from Donald Sutherland to Hunger Games director Gary Ross about the character of President Coriolanus Snow is pitch perfect.

Power. That’s what this is about? Yes? Power and the forces that are manipulated by the powerful men and bureaucracies trying to maintain control and possession of that power? Power perpetrates war and oppression to maintain itself until it finally topples over with the bureaucratic weight of itself and sinks into the pages of history (except in Texas), leaving lessons that need to be learned unlearned.

Heather Cox Richardson, July 1, 2024:

Today the United States Supreme Court overthrew the central premise of American democracy: that no one is above the law. It decided that the president of the United States, possibly the most powerful person on earth, has “absolute immunity” from criminal prosecution for crimes committed as part of the official acts at the core of presidential powers. The court also said it should be presumed that the president also has immunity for other official acts as well, unless that prosecution would not intrude on the authority of the executive branch.

Mara Quint, Supreme Court-Approved Ways to Celebrate the Fourth of July:

Representational democracy had a good run, but the Supreme Court has finally rediscovered the founders’ original intent. Sure, they were against kings, but it turns out, after 248 years, we had completely misunderstood that they actually liked when someone has the powers of a king; they just didn’t like the word “king.” It rhymes with too many other words and leaves the nation open to getting absolutely destroyed in a rap battle. With “president,” you just have “resident,” “hesitant,” and maybe “negligent,” but that’s sort of a stretch.

Anne Helen Petersen interviews Soraya Chemaly, author of The Resilience Myth: New Thinking on Grit, Strength, and Growth After Trauma, about the importance of nurturing relationships in getting through hard times:

I think my idea of resilience was a pretty common one in that I thought of resilience in almost entirely personal terms, as an individual characteristic or trait. Over years I had really absorbed the idea that resilience was 9/10th the ability to persevere, be gritty, try to stay optimistic, etc. and 1/10th having a supportive social circle. When my family was thrown into the deep end of a crisis, it became clear that nothing I could do as an individual could compare to what we all needed, which was a combination of love, friendship, compassionate listeners, and actual material resources, such as access to good health care and medicine.

What I concluded, after that experience and through writing this book, is that that our individual/collective resilience ratios should really be reversed or, a better formulation, that the more accurate and helpful way to think of “supportive social circles” is broadly: as the connections, material resources, and political entitlements that serve as the foundation for our individual strengths and capacities.

Cody Delistraty in The Paris Review, on Agnes Martin and Grief:

Combining linear rigidity and spatial abstraction, in Martin’s works I saw an idea of the world that is guided by plans and sure outcomes—a world made whole again. Martin’s own life was imperfect and traumatic (though she’d likely bristle at the word): she said she was raped as a girl on four occasions, dissociating each time; she lived a seemingly lonely existence, chafing against middle-class sensibilities. I figured she desired, like me, exactness and rightness, apparent salves for the broken. I supposed this aspiration was a core reason for her grids and lines. In fact, she suggested something of the opposite: to view the world as though it were perfect but to understand that it is not – and to see that perfection need not be pursued. “Perfection is not necessary. Perfection you cannot have,” she once said. “If you do what you want to do and what you can do and if you can then recognize it you will be contented.”