Contributors

Kristen Arnett is the NYT bestselling author of the debut novel Mostly Dead Things  (Tin House, 2019). She is a queer fiction and essay writer. She was awarded Ninth Letter’s Literary Award in Fiction and is a columnist for Literary Hub. Her work has appeared at The New York Times, North American Review, The Normal School, Gulf Coast, TriQuarterly, Guernica, Buzzfeed, Electric Literature, McSweeneys, PBS Newshour, Bennington Review, The Guardian, Salon, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. Her story collection, Felt in the Jaw, was published by Split Lip Press and was awarded the 2017 Coil Book Award. She is a Spring 2020 Shearing Fellow at Black Mountain Institute. Her next two books (Samson: A Novel and With Foxes: Stories) will be published by Riverhead Books. | @Kristen_Arnett

Named one of Variety’s “Ten Storytellers to Watch,” Matthew Baker is the author of the story collections Why Visit America  (Henry Holt, 2020) and Hybrid Creatures  (LSU Press, 2018), and the children’s novel Key Of X, originally published as If You Find This  (Little, Brown, 2015). Stories have appeared in publications such as The New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review, American Short Fiction, One Story, Electric Literature, and Conjunctions, and anthologies including Best of the Net and Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy. Born in the Great Lakes region of the United States, Mx. Baker currently lives in Iceland. | @mwektaehtabr

Tyler Barton‘s debut full-length book of fiction, Eternal Night at the Nature Museum, is forthcoming from Sarabande Books (2021). He’s the author of The Quiet Part Loud  (2019), winner of the Turnbuckle Chapbook Contest from Split Lip Press. Now an event producer for FEAR NO LIT, a literary organization he co-founded with Erin Dorney, he has organized and hosted live readings, workshops, and literary experiences for 8+ years. His short fiction has been published widely in journals and magazines such as Kenyon ReviewSubtropicsThe Iowa Review, Gulf Coast, Cincinnati Review, Copper Nickel and others. Stories from Eternal Night at the Nature Museum have been awarded prizes and honors from Kenyon Review, Phoebe Journal, The Chicago Review of Books, Best of the Net, and Best Small Fictions 2020. As a literary advocate, he offers free writing workshops for residents of assisted living communities and long-term care facilities.

Jordan Calhoun is a writer in New York City. His forthcoming book Piccolo Is Black is a celebration of the common adaptations we made while non-diverse pop culture helped us form identities. He holds a B.A. in Sociology and Criminal Justice, B.S. in Psychology with a minor in Japanese, and an M.P.A. in Public and Nonprofit Management and Policy. He is currently the editor in chief of Lifehacker. | Instagram @JordanMCalhoun | Twitter @JordanMCalhoun

Steen Christiansen is Professor of Popular Visual Culture at Aalborg University, Denmark. He is currently working on weird cinema and television, with particular interest in how atmospheres are produced in these audiovisual works. He is also working on ideas and concepts of time in visual culture, with particular interest in Alfred North Whitehead’s ideas of time and temporality. His books include Drone Age Cinema  (2016), The Dissemination of Science Fiction  (2016), and Post-Biological Science Fiction. He has also published broadly on visual popular culture, particularly in terms of affect, posthumanism, and post-cinema. | @dissemination

Patrick Crerand teaches in writing at Saint Leo University. His recent work has appeared in Flyway, Hobart, Quarter After Eight and other magazines. His mini-collection of stories, The Paper Life They Lead, was published by Arc Pair Press in 2018. He lives in Florida with his lovely wife and three children.

Gabriele de Seta is a media anthropologist currently based in Taipei, Taiwan. His research work, grounded on ethnographic engagement across multiple sites, focuses on digital media practices and vernacular creativity in East Asian societies. He is also interested in experimental music scenes, internet art, and collaborative intersections between anthropology and art practice. More information is available on his website http://paranom.asia.

Gunnar De Winter is a biologist and writer. | @evolveon | @gunnardewinter.bsky.social

Chance Dibben is a writer, photographer, and music-maker living in Lawrence, KS. His poems and shorts have appeared in Split Lip, Reality Beach, Horsethief, Yes Poetry, Matchbook, Hobart, and others. | @chancedibben

Rick Dove is a London-based poet whose work blends ancient and modern themes, taking a keen interest in both societal and personal change, and how these forces interact as we grow. He is the author of Tales From the Other Box  (Burning Eye Books, 2020). | @multistable

Eric J. Eckert is an artist who’s been drawing mazes since he was seven. In 2014, he broke the world record for the largest hand-drawn maze, but it wasn’t accepted due to some technicalities, so he broke it again in 2018 and became the official record holder of the world’s largest hand-drawn maze. He lives in Nebraska with his wife and two daughters and spends his free time skateboarding and shooting photos/videos. | @idrawmazes

Andrew Edghill is a writer and educator from northern New Jersey, living in Washington, D.C. He works in a middle school, teaches a youth poetry workshop, coaches soccer, and researches for a think tank. | @acedghill

Josette Akresh Gonzales is the author of Apocalypse on the Linoleum, forthcoming from Lily Poetry Review Press. Her work has been published in Atticus Review, JAMA, The Pinch, The Journal, Breakwater Review, PANK, and many other journals. A recent poem has been included in the anthology Choice Words (Haymarket, 2020). She co-founded the journal Clarion and was its editor for two years. Josette lives in the Boston area with her husband and two boys and rides her bike to work at a nonprofit medical publisher. | @vivakresh.

Sonya Hammons is an artist. Her fascination with recursion began as a teenager when she crocheted a Fibonacci sequence scarf. After collecting degrees from fancy schools she worked as a shepherd, scientist, diplomat, composter, sailmaker, and executive director. She shows artwork internationally and is proud to stay in touch with friends through snail-mail. The interaction between handmade objects and the people who make them is a passion she looks forward to exploring in her recurring column for ➰➰➰.

Chenoe Hart is an architectural designer interested in exploring the impending intersection of the internet and the built environment, particularly the potential for interactivity to transform the existing role of physical space as an abstract cultural medium. | @chenoehart

Adam Hartnett is a writer who lives in New Mexico.

Made in Poland and via London, Kala Jerzy lives and writes in New York City. She is trilingual. Through the languages she speaks (English, Hebrew, and Polish), and thanks to different perspectives they give her, Kala explores the nature of identity and obsession. Her strongest creative influences are rooted in surrealism, magical realism, and avant-garde. Kala is pursuing an MFA in Fiction at Brooklyn College. | @kalajerzy

Natasha Joukovsky is a writer and strategy consultant based in Washington, D.C. She is the author of The Portrait of a Mirror   (Abrams Overlook Press, 2021). | @natashajouk

Alee Karim is a writer from California. His first novel, The Anglekeeper, is available as a digital edition on Gumroad. | @resonant_city

Kate Kenneally is a software engineer and sometimes-poet based in Manhattan. She is a strange loop. | @saxrohmer2

Shashi Krishna is an educator and database admin currently working at an international school in Doha, Qatar. He has had roles inside the classroom as a Computer Science teacher and outside as a tech/database administrator for 20 years. | @skrish2017

Mateo Perez Lara is a queer, non-binary, Latine poet from California. They received their MFA in Poetry from Randolph College. They have a chapbook, Glitter Gods, published with Thirty West Publishing House. Their poems have been published in EOAGH, The Maine Review, and elsewhere. | @KillerEmm

Amanda Leiserowitz is an undergraduate in the not-so-disparate-fields of game design and creative writing. | @_grumpymonday

Kat Lewis graduated from Johns Hopkins University where she held the Saul Zaentz Innovation Fund Fellowship. In 2018, she received a Fulbright Creative Arts grant in South Korea. Her work has appeared in PANK Magazine, Maudlin House, and The Rumpus. She is currently an MFA student at the University of South Florida. | @katjolewis

Rachel Lyon is the author of the novel Self-Portrait With Boy (Scribner 2018); her shorter work has appeared in Joyland, Iowa Review, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. She is a cofounder of the reading series Ditmas Lit, in her native Brooklyn, NY. | @manateesintrees

Kevin Maloney is the author of The Red-Headed Pilgrim (Two Dollar Radio, Jan 2023), Horse Girl Fever (CLASH Books, 2024), and Cult of Loretta (Lazy Fascist, 2015). | @kevinrmaloney

S. S. Mandani runs Saltwater Coffee in the East & West Village of NYC. He studied fiction at The University of Florida and holds an MFA in Creative Writing from The New School. His stories appear in Shenandoah, Passages North, Hobart After Dark, X-R-A-Y, Longleaf Review, 3:AM, and twenty other venues. He has been recognized by the Kenyon Review, Martha’s Vineyard Institute, and Periplus Collective writing communities, and served as a Bread Loaf Administrative Scholar in 2022. In 2021, he was nominated for Best of the Net (Nurture), Best Microfiction (No Contact), and Best Small Fictions (Lost Balloon) and, in 2022, he made the Wigleaf Top 50 Longlist. A locally famed macaroni & cheese joint, S'MAC, in the East Village is currently handing out 10,000 copies of two of his flash fictions on an orange foldout to hangry New Yorkers. His novel-in-progress explores a generational family of jinn. He writes about drinks and culture as a columnist for Liquid Carriage at No Contact. | @SuhailMandani

Camille Martin is a Canadian poet and collage artist originally from Lafayette and New Orleans, Louisiana. Home is a moveable feast, and she has made hers in Toronto since 2005. Her last two books of poetry are Sonnets (2010) and Looms (2012), both published by Shearsman Books.

Charles J. March III is a neurodivergent Navy hospital corpsman veteran currently living in Orange County, CA. His works have appeared in or are forthcoming from Atlas Obscura, Litro, Chicago Tribune, LA Times, 3:AM, Queen Mob’s Teahouse, Taco Bell Quarterly, Maudlin House, Joyless House, Misery Tourism, Blood Tree Literature (prize), The Babel Tower Notice Board, Bareknuckle Poet, Heroin Love Songs, Anti-Heroin Chic, Synchronized Chaos, Defenestration, Versification, F(r)iction, Literary Orphans, Centre for Experimental Ontology, Otoliths, Oddball Magazine, et al. Links to his pieces can be found on LinkedIn and SoundCloud.

Ian Martin specializes in poetry, fiction, game design, DJing, music, technical writing, and swearing. | @ianmart1n

Simone A. Medina Polo is a philosopher and a PhD candidate at the Global Centre for Advanced Studies for Philosophy and Psychoanalysis.

Melissa Mesku is a writer, editor and software engineer. Her essays have appeared in National Geographic, Creative Nonfiction, Guernica, and dozens of print and digital magazines. She is the editor of this publication. | @melissamesku

Joseph Nechvatal is an American artist and writer periodically living in Paris since 1995. His book of 1993-2006 essays Towards an Immersive Intelligence was published by Edgewise Press in 2009. In 2011 his Open Humanities Press book Immersion Into Noise was published by the University of Michigan. He has also published two books with Punctum Press: Minóy (ed.) (2014) and Destroyer of Naivetés (2015), a book of his farcical erotic poetry. | Instagram @josephnechvatal | Twitter @twinkletwink

Joseph P. O’Brien founded FLAPPERHOUSE magazine, and served as managing editor during its five year-run. Joseph’s writing has appeared in Entropy, Queen Mob’s Teahouse, Yes Poetry, and Matchbook, among other places. By day, Joseph works in a public library and runs a Musical Storytime program for children. Joseph writes most of their work in a room with a giant poster of Uma Thurman as Mia Wallace. | @josephpob

Lisa Oliver is a writer and artist living in New Orleans, Louisiana.

Jonathan Otto is a software engineer and the creator of Prerender.cloud. | @jotto

Gideon Prester is an Astro PhD in the UK who has dabbled with engineering, law and climatology. When not working in law enforcement he attempts to write fiction and haiku, plays with his cats and thinks about consciousness and ideas.

Douglas Robinson is Chair Professor of English at Hong Kong Baptist University, where the Chair Professor of English is a guy named Douglas Robinson, Doug for short. He has written a lot of books on translation, literature, language, rhetoric, semiotics, and cognitive science, and in 1997, around the time of the publication of Le Ton Beau de Marot, was invited to participate in the Indiana University cognitive translation studies graduate seminar of Douglas Hofstadter, Doug for short. | Twitter @doug11rob | Instagram @whotranslates | Facebook doug11robinson

Joshua Roebke is an author and instructor at the Institute for Historical Studies at The University of Texas at Austin. He is finishing his first book, a cultural history of particle physics, titled The Invisible World. The book will published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux and will appear in a dozen or so other countries and languages around the world. An excerpt from the book won a Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant. | @joshua_roebke

Emmalea Russo is a writer living at the Jersey shore. Her books are G  (2018) and Wave Archive  (2019). Her poetry and writings on film, philosophy, and art have appeared in Artforum, BOMB, The Brooklyn Rail, Granta, Hyperallergic, Los Angeles Review of Books, SF MOMA’s Open Space, and elsewhere. She is pursuing a PhD in Philosophy and she edits the multidisciplinary journal Asphalte Magazine. | @emmalea.russo

Amit Saha works in software and is interested in programming, software tools, systems and infrastructure. He is the author of Doing Math with Python and writes about software on his blog and elsewhere.

Sarah Sarai is the author of Geographies of Soul and Taffeta (Indolent Books) and The Future Is Happy (BlazeVOX). She lives in NYC.

Rowan Sharp received the 2019 Bread Loaf Katharine Bakeless Nason Award for Fiction. Her work has appeared in The Literary Review, the Beloit Poetry Journal, and Natural Bridge. | @RowanxSharp

David Smith has no bio because what’s the point. He lives in Indonesia, where he has, miraculously, not yet met anyone who shares his namesake.

Kyra Thomsen lives and works on Dharawal Country (NSW, Australia). Her fiction and poetry have been published most recently in Cordite, AntipodeanSF, and Seizure, and she has reviewed books for Mascara, RABBIT Poetry Journal, the NSW Writer’s Centre and Writer’s Edit. Kyra was selected for the Slinkies Under 30s program by Spineless Wonders in 2016 and co-won the Questions Writing Prize in 2012. | @kyrathomsen

Jack Vening writes short fiction and memoir out of Melbourne, Australia. His fiction letter, Small Town Grievances, goes out to a few hundred mainly European strangers every couple of weeks. | @JerkVening

Kara Vernor’s fiction and essays have appeared in Ninth Letter, The Normal School, Gulf Coast, Best Small Fictions, Best Microfictions, the Wigleaf Top 50, and elsewhere. Her chapbook, Because I Wanted to Write You a Pop Song, is available from Split Lip Press. | @KaraVernor

Ursula Villarreal-Moura is the author of the story collection Math for the Self-Crippling (Gold Line, 2022) and the forthcoming novel Like Happiness (Celadon, 2024). | @ursulaofthebook

David Joez Villaverde is a Peruvian American multidisciplinary artist living in Detroit, Michigan. He is the winner of the Black Warrior Review 2018 poetry contest. His poems in Crab Fat Magazine and L’Éphémère Review are 2018 Best of the Net nominees. He has been recently published in Yemassee, RHINO Poetry, The Indianapolis Review, and Yes Poetry. Visit him at schadenfreudeanslip.com.

A. E. Weisgerber is a 2018 Chesapeake Writer, the 2017 Frost Place Scholar, and a Kent State Reynolds Journalism Fellow. Her work has been published in 3:AM Magazine, DIAGRAM, The Alaska Star, SmokeLong Quarterly, Essaying Daily, Gravel, great weather for MEDIA, Matchbook, and the Zoetrope Cafe Story Machine. | @aeweisgerber

Eric Williams lives on the lithified remains of a Cretaceous seaway in Austin, TX. Books by him include his collection of short stories Toadstones (Malarkey Press, 2022) and Night Fears: Weird Tales in Translation (Paradise Editions, 2023).

James Yu is a speculative fiction writer living in San Francisco, where he spends his days wondering if the universe really is a giant sentient Turing machine. He formerly lived and breathed computers, building everything from CPUs to VR worlds. | @jamesjyu

➰➰➰: one, two, many.

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.

➰➰➰

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