➰➰➰ is a publication somewhat preoccupied by recursion.
In our six years, our contributors have included New York Times bestselling authors, academics, programmers, poets and artists who fuck with recursion.
For more on this project, see our Editor’s Letter. The written name is “➰➰➰”; when spoken, it’s “many loops.” For more on the name, click the strange loop on the bottom right of this page.
Concept, design, build: Melissa Mesku
Contributing Editors: Kala Jerzy, Joe P. O’Brien, Sonya Hammons, Matthew Baker
We launched in 2019. This was our mission statement at the time of launch: The intelligible face of an AI backend, ➰➰➰ is being taught via machine learning to recognize instances of recursion in literary works. The vision is that it will eventually publish whatever it sees fit.
Now, in 2025, it is clear that both AI and recursion have different meanings. We have always tracked the cultural significance of recursion, and will continue to do so, especially as its meaning has shifted. But as for our original AI ambitions, we’ve halted them. We have never published AI-generated work, and do not wish to further AI-ification of the literary arts. We do happily publish content about AI insofar as it has to do with recursion, or is just fucking weird. So please forgive any em dashes—know that AI stole them from us and not the other way around.
Pitches and submissions are reviewed on a looping basis.
We welcome essays, prose, fiction, poetry, photo essays and artwork, alongside hybrid forms and literary work that makes use of the browser. We are uniquely interested in text that contains markup and scripts, and small programs written in JavaScript; examples include Strange Loops of Translation by Doug Robinson, The Extinction of Homo Sapiens or Ephemeral by Matthew Baker, and 𓄿 by Kevin Maloney. Do reach out if you’re unsure whether your work will work.
We don’t just want diverse, we want divergent. Aside from themes of recursion, AI, and the abyss, we delight in the odd and clever. Surprise us.
Contact
Email submissions to: email [at] melissamesku.com
Follow or DM us on Twitter: @many_loops
Some things that would make us lose the game...
Ouroboros programs
The meta
The Droste effect
A map the size of the world
Fucked up math for laypeople
The fourth wall
The The
The Never Ending Story
Nagel and Newman’s "quotation marks"
A definitive answer on why the first “P” in PHP stands for PHP
Labyrinths, mazes, lost places and places to get lost
Wittgensteinian humor
An analysis of Tupper’s self-referential formula
The Multiocular O
Xyzzy
Zzyzx
"Double you" and "I griega"
"It's turtles all the way down"
"Si hoc legere scis nimium eruditiones habes."
“As above, so below”
Philosophy of mind
Locutionary acts
Wonderland
Robert Anton Wilson
Scale invariance
Ingres
Mise en abyme
The replicator
Talking about oneself in the third person
Essays about essays, reviews of reviews
Jorge Luis Borges
Andrew Plotkin
A treatise on the ethics of obscurantism
How to blow a Klein bottle
I Am A Strange Loop
An interview with Douglas Hofstadter
In programming, recursion refers to the process of a function calling itself, looping infinitely until a final base case is reached. As an element of engineering and higher mathematics, recursion is essential. Yet while we improve our ability to communicate with machines and machines improve their ability to interact with us, elsewhere in the world there are languages that possess only numbers that can be counted on one hand.
Such languages – ones that have words for only one, two, and many, like that of the Pirahã of Brazil or the Warlpiri of Australia – defy the accepted notion that all natural languages contain a universal grammar.
At the core of a universal grammar is recursion, which functions as a kind of scaffold that enables complexity to take shape. The notion that a human language exists outside of the universal grammar opens the odd possibility that the human mind as we know it could exist without recursion. Beyond just its role in language, recursion is thought of as the process by which we develop self-awareness. Some, like Douglas Hofstadter in I Am A Strange Loop, have proposed that recursion is what enables the notion of a persistent self to even exist.
And yet we can assume that the mental life of an entire people, the Pirahã or the Warlpiri in this case, contains every bit as much complexity as does any other. Without linguistic recursion, the form in which that complexity manifests may therefore take a shape quite unlike anything we can immediately recognize or even conceive of.
As the world continues to witness the loss of the last indigenous languages, so too does it lose the complexity by which it might be understood and interacted with. Everything is held in the many. It makes sense that the Pirahã would have a better sense of what that might mean than we do.
