Dear Reader,

Greetings from the heatwave! I write to you through the haze of a hot apartment, a kid who keeps waking up from bad dreams, the hammering of the roofers (gotta love a surprise re-roof!), the jackhammering of the workers across the street… and that’s not even to mention current affairs. Still, but, and, nevertheless, here we are. Thanks as always for reading. I wish you well in these crazy days.

– Jasper

In 2021, the great children’s book writer Phoebe Wahl (Little Witch Hazel, The Blue House, Sonya’s Chickens) made a short film with felt stop-motion impresario Georgia Love. Titled Tulip, the 9-minute artwork went out on the festival circuit and won a few audience choice prizes—but most of us didn’t get to see it. Now, though, it’s up on YouTube for anyone to watch. And it’s lovely. Come for the thoughtful retelling of Thumbelina, stay for the subtle felt shading on an old woman’s ruddy cheeks. Beautiful color grading and an iconically northwest hipster score round off a perfect little film.

(Shoutout to the tiny bit of print ephemera that the mole is reading in the screengrab above: a magazine called The Snouted Sommelier.)

For a short film in a completely different register, don’t miss Conner O’Malley’s latest, Irish Zionist. Swerving, surreal satire of TikTok algorithmic slop, the 2026 manosphere, and the styles of video that keep us staring at our phones. This one leans into the vibrating repulsiveness of AI-generated video. The piece ultimately works (for me) both on the level of weird art and on the level of media criticism.

(If you’re not familiar with O’Malley’s work, I wrote about a few of my other favorites of his oeuvre almost precisely one year ago.)

In Wednesday’s Garbage Day, Ryan Broderick uses this video to try to think through the questions, “Can you make ‘good’ AI art? Or, rather, use AI to make good art? And is O’Malley doing it?” I find the question to be an important one, and this video is a well-chosen jumping off point. But Broderick maybe makes too much hay around the ethical questions of whether it’s okay to use these (obviously destructive) tools. An important question, but I’m at least as interested in the aesthetic qualities of this new breed of data center-generated footage, and what ‘good’ might mean granted these degraded materials.

I for one find that the stuff gives me a nauseated, “uncanny valley” feeling, but even more than that it makes me feel estranged from the real world, like I’m in a plastic nightmare. (See the sample videos in this Tyler Stahlman gear bag video for a “real life” example.) O’Malley leans into these qualities, exploits their latent potential, and really unleashes their repulsiveness. If you’re going to use AI in your art—a big if! really I’d say don’t!—but if you do, you better be running towards the particularity and strangeness of the tools, not trying to conceal it or pass the final product off as handwork.

On the topic of how not to use AI, Cory Doctorow had a good screed the other day arguing that “No one wants to read your AI slop”:

Doctorow is especially worked up by people sending him chatbot-generated critiques of his own writing. And rightly so! But I think the broader principle is right, too. Whenever I encounter one of these forwarded transcripts, I find myself leaping as far as I can over the expanse of chatbot dialogue to hopefully find some safe paragraph of commentary or explanation actually written by the person. I’m like a kid playing “the ground is lava”—LLM prose is lava!

And this stuff abounds. None other than Margaret Atwood (Margaret the author of The Handmaid’s Tale Atwood) recently posted one such chatbot transcript to her newsletter. A plague of dullness buzzing across our literary world!

There’s an interesting piece on the long history of palmistry in the latest LRB. But I was rather shocked by a paragraph towards the end where the author, sociology of science professor emeritus Steven Shapin, dares himself to actually experience a palm reading, immediately chickens out, and then—well, read for yourself:

Where to even start with this?! I’m struck by the unbearable, almost erotic shame he feels imagining his own embarrassment at not being able to “control my facial expression well enough to appear sincere and openminded.” I’m equally struck by the evident lack of shame he has about admitting here his own insincerity and close-mindedness around the very topic he’s already spent several thousand words discussing. And then I’m just about knocked out by the straw man move of not just consulting a chatbot, not just reproducing its sycophantic answers, but having the gall to snidely dunk on the phrases and terminology of contemporary palmistry as deployed by literally ChatGPT.

It’s one of the most bad faith attempts to engage with a magical practice that I’ve ever seen. I’m not even into palm-reading! I don’t really feel the need to defend it. But I know someone deep in the grips of scientism when I see one. This writer’s curiosity just totally dries up when faced with contemporary folks engaging in non-scientific practices. Instead, he seems filled by a vacuous urge to debunk.

Magic: the men of science have big feelings about it!

(This reminds me of the time prominent tech writer and markdown inventor John Gruber spat absolute venom at supernatural beliefs around eclipses.)

I think it’s a moral obligation to know that so far this year 13 people have died in ICE custody—three times as many as had died in custody by this time last year. The latest to die, Royer Perez-Jimenez, was only 19 years old. A kid. He was Mayan Tzotzil, from San Juan Chamula, an autonomous Tzotzil Maya community in Chiapas. He allegedly committed suicide.

Perez-Jimenez’s life hinged when he did something people do in my neighborhood every single day: he rode a scooter somewhat chaotically. Here’s L.A. Taco explaining his crime:

He then tried to evade police (I wonder why) on his scooter for a quarter mile. He was charged with two misdemeanors and did 30 days in county jail, before being handed over to ICE.

The concentration camp where he died is the Glades County Detention Facility. Here’s L.A. Taco again:

13 deaths in three months is too many! Last year’s 4 deaths in three months was too many! Any death in government custody is a travesty. The next time decent people have power in this country, it won’t be enough just to “limit usage of the facility.” We must abolish ICE.

Country Livin’ Lifestyle Porn is a well-established genre, with Liziqi as maybe its greatest practitioner. The other night as I was putting slipcovers back on our couch pillows, I watched a new twist on it: Azerbaijani Grandparents Country Livin’ Lifestyle Porn. The video I watched was “Sun Dried Tomato Bread | Rustic Village Baking.” The pleasure lies in the dream of rural life, the rhythm of cats playing in a spacious backyard, the meditative quality of old people picking chamomile flowers, and the physical intelligence of a master home baker making dough, readying the wood-fired oven, scoring the loves, and then eating the final product. The main false note is when the editor cuts away from the lovely backyard footage to give us bland, interchangeable drone shots. I want to yell, Don’t whisk me away from this backyard idyll!

I had two mangos that looked like they needed eating, so I peeled ‘em, threw ‘em in the blender, funneled the purée into my popsicle molds, and threw ‘em in the freezer. The result: delicious flavor, great texture, healthy treat, more please!

(Two big mangos made six popsicles using these molds.)

I’m so glad to have you as a reader. If you’ve enjoyed this email, have you considered forwarding it to a friend?