✅ List Dump: 5 July 2026

just a list of things I want to share in no order other than the sequence of remembering

Bismillah. We begin everything with the name of Allah. We recite Bismillah to initiate an act, acknowledging the intention and ethics that follow.

Words (not including the ones describing the words I am typing to tell you about the word count):

3,282

Welcome back to another list!

Check out the first one, or TL;DR: territorial mice, nipple injury, improv, an expensive orifice, dumplings, games, garden poems, friendship lore, and good times.

1. In the last newsletter, I wrote, “And believe it or not, I have already drafted the next two newsletters.” In under an hour, a friend sent me a hilarious voice note.

   

   I felt confident about my changed ways, but this put a battery pack in my back. This newsletter emerges from the bowels of spite and shame-based motivation, written primarily to prove him wrong secondarily because I have some things I'm genuinely excited to share.

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2. Speaking of this newsletter, I have archived all my past posts before June 28th. In a recent interview, I spoke with someone who discussed how they actively remove works from view — works they want to have a different audience. I am doing that, too. As I approach 41, I am thinking more deeply about access.

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3. Last newsletter note, I updated the about me page :-) Read more here, but a snippet below:

   What is crossed out below was gleefully aspirational, ha!

   This newsletter is a series of lists, science infodumping (or everything infodumping), event announcements, bad jokes, and lore. I have tried for a few years to make this newsletter “thematic,” but I am not one to stay on topic, ever, and not sure why I tried to do this here. I love tangents, misdirections, and wanderings. Your girl has a lot of interests and never enough time. I won’t promise a focused approach, because I will only let you down! And I don’t want to do that to you! This newsletter is me yapping on a digital substrate.

   […]

   I explore the poetics and politics of non-compliance and disobedience across written, spoken, and visual systems of communication. In doing so, I consider the radical possibilities of noise, unintelligibility, discrepancy, and the refusal of frictionless datafication. I create language-saturated installations, film/video (poems?), handheld physical and digital text objects to be read, performance-adjacent improvisational artist talks, archival collections, scores/prompts for humans, software, esoteric fiction stories and loglines, (intergenerational) learning environments, curricular materials, stand-up comedy sets, wayward translations, (unrecorded) infodump lectures about special interests, devotional kits, walking paths, theremin sound works, and photographs.

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4. Happy Fourth of July from Gil Scott Heron. Whitey on the Moon was released as the ninth track on his debut album in 1970. Below is without the drums, but you can find it with the drums here.

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5. Also, Happy Fourth of July from Nina Simone. "Mississippi Goddam" was released on Nina Simone in Concert in 1964.

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6. What is it called when your abusive and manipulative ex-husband, whom you’ve blocked on everything, for whom you changed your entire going out schedule to avoid them, and have spent countless years in recovery therapy to quell extreme anxiety, is then suggested to you as a good match on a dating app?

   

   Bumble App, count your MF days. Another reason not to trust AI! I need to sue for emotional distress, ha! I had a good chuckle. And then a sad reminder that I will always feel fear at the sight of his face. Thankful to Allah (swt) for guiding me out of what could have become a truly terrifying situation. There is no other side to leaving an abusive relationship; there are just future days. I have spent the last several years trying to feel safe in my body, in my home, and in my neighborhood. I have so much to say about marriage, specifically, the contours of how people weaponize marriage in Islamic communities, despite the Qur’an mentioning divorce on so many occasions. Realizing that Allah (swt) would rather see me alive and divorced than psychologically tormented and married was a transformative moment that has made leaving other things much easier. Now, my favorite thing to do is say, “Yeah, nah, I am not doing that!” I can’t believe this process began in 2021, half a decade ago, and through it all, I just kept grinning like an idiot because I had no choice but to keep going. I cannot wait until I can say 10 years ago, 15 years ago, I don’t even remember how many years ago.

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7. Has anyone seen Castle Rock? I want to talk to someone about it :)

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8. Some time ago, I was assigned a nutritionist because I would forget to eat, and by the time I did, it was terrible, and it was 11 pm. Recently, I learned that I can only eat at home if the meal is quick and pre-cooked. I have been on a bone broth kick and have been making big pots of this bone broth soup, which I top with crumbled tortilla chips. If you have food texture issues and the kind of hyperfixation that prevents you from transitioning tasks without a lot of annoyance and energy, I suggest blocking out 60 minutes on Saturday to make enough microwaveable bone broth soup for the week. My recipe:

   • five cups of chicken bone broth

   • 14oz of extra firm tofu

   • 1 pound of thinly sliced chicken breast

   • bok choy

   • spinach

   • baby bella mushrooms

   • green onions

   • a lot of garlic

   • a tiny bit of salt

   • jalapeno pepper

   • white miso paste (do not add while cooking!)

   You will need about 30 minutes to chop everything, so please account for that. I listen to Jersey club music to keep myself focused.

   Not a chef, but here is what I do:

   1. I toss the sliced chicken breast with a little sesame oil, salt, and pepper, then throw it into the air fryer as I bring 5 cups of chicken bone broth to a slight boil.

   2. I toss in a bag of spinach and let it wilt with the lid on.

   3. Put in the chicken.

   4. I toss in all the other veggies and let them hang out for 20 minutes.

   5. I put in a little salt.

   6. Let everyone hang out a little more.

      Separate them into some containers and put them in the fridge. When I am hungry, I just microwave with a little water. I add a tiny bit of white miso, stir, add something crunchy on top, and eat. And this is something I can easily make while traveling this summer.

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9. Also, for my dehydrated girlies, get yourself some electrolyte packs, particularly in this heat. I can go a whole day without coffee, then it will be like, “Why do I have a migraine?” I make a gallon of water with a little electrolytes sprinkled in and set it prominently on my workstation so it can taunt me. You can, of course, make your own electrolytes, but if making them slows you down from staying hydrated, choose the low-barrier-of-entry option.

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10. After a panel some time ago, a woman walked up to me and said, “You are terrifyingly intelligent.” This was in the same register that many white people have spoken to me throughout my life. This is not a humble brag; it is an expression of exhaustion because I have to choose between smiling and nodding or engaging in verbal gymnastics about what makes my intelligence so surprising or extraordinary. I am tired.

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11. Speaking of public engagements, I gave one earlier this week, and someone chose to tell me they did not like the way I speak. Funny thing is, the lecture was about the expectation of standard expression and its intersection with my emerging research on noise and speech disabilities. Some people know this, but I was in speech therapy as a young person. Since elementary school, I have been to camouflage, but last fall, when I was under a lot of stress and severely exhausted in Europe, I found it slipping in despite decades of unconscious suppression. It was startling. I struggled to get words out in a “normal cadence.” I chalked it up to exhaustion, which was part of it; I was running between several European cities installing multiple works, not sleeping, not eating, and just generally burnt out. I speak about this a little more openly now than I have in the past, even though I still worry about redirecting attention away from people whose speech differences are more readily perceived and who have been treated far less kindly because of that perceived severity. If nothing else, I am a master masker; even if I do not understand the metrics of “normality,” I can watch, analyze, and mimic.

    

    

    When I go home with family, I say “I let my tongue get heavy,” meaning I am in the company of others for whom I do not have to perform. In elementary school, I had speech therapy. My “disorder” was fast speech and transposing sounds. Part of this is anatomical — my mouth is simply too small. This year, I had a tooth pulled, which I think improved my speech, but then I got Invisalign to reposition the remaining teeth, which resulted in slurred speech and a noticeable lisp. I finally learned how to work with the retainer to get back to “normal” speech: I do a sucking gesture and reposition my tongue, hold, then speak.

    

    I spent the last several years being blindsided by neurodevelopmental “disorders.” I have diagnosis fatigue. I need to see a speech pathologist, but I am also exhausted by being told something is off or wrong with me and my brain. I am aware that I struggle with executive processing, and this impacts my speech. I know that I struggle with fluency at times.

    

    To be honest, at this point, seeing a speech pathologist is more for others than it is for me. I’d make the argument that an unfortunate portion of diagnostic work seems to be less about the person learning about the intricacies of the difference, and more about teaching them to make those differences less prominent — to be made more legible, to prioritize everyone else’s comfort. We are taught to accommodate others. In fact, I do not even like the word accommodate.

    

    I want something different. I want a diagnosis to offer the person being diagnosed greater self-understanding, compassion, and self-reflection within the context of the larger social and structural forces that shape how difference is constructed, perceived, and weaponized. At the same time, we must all interrogate our relationships to legibility and efficiency.

    I am considered “low support needs,” so maybe I am not the right person to write about this. I do not know.

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12. If you go to a restaurant and order avocado toast, make sure it says 'avocado' and not 'avocado spread'. The latter is some unholy pea, avocado, green mush.

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13. I wore open-toe sandals for the first time in maybe a decade! One of my greatest fears (after returning home to my apartment full of opossums) is someone vomiting on my feet. Well, I wore my open-toe sandals and no one vomited on my feet, so I now have a data point (possibly) in the direction of more open-toe shoes. I will keep you posted! My next fashion adventure is wearing a color other than black. I will report back.

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14. I once actively wrote autocorrect poems. We must return to this, because it is so fun, collaborative, and full of poetic surprises! I like writing poems, but do not want to be a poet. I do not know if I’d call these poems as much as I’d call them compost. It is usually detritus — words and phrases that linger, and I find a home somewhere on the page/wall because I will not abandon them entirely.

    

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15. I started doing Gua Sha. I have no idea if it means anything, but I never realized how amazing a face massage is. I almost didn’t leave the house because I was so relaxed.

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16. Once upon a time, I wanted to be a guest writer for Harper’s Index, a poetic hodgepodge of science news smashed together in hilarious ways. Reflecting, it is still a dream of mine, so if anyone knows Rafil Kroll-Zaidi, the current writer, let me know. I want to share a few of my Harper’s Index ersatz goods. Actually, scratch that! Erastz implies inferiority, and I rebuke all proclaimations of inferiority! This offering is just different. I reinaugurate this, the 🕸️ Primitive Hypertext Index, in honor of Octavia Estelle Butler, who reminds us:

    

    So here are a few past ones (with grammatical edits, lol):

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    “Alien” Wow! Signal, Conspiracy Theory Generator, Human Eggs “Woo Sperm,” “Glacier Mating,” Ice Cores with Stories, + Glycerol=Better Bubbles, Underwater Bubbles for Survival

    20 January 2025

    The Ohio State University Big Ear radio telescope detected the Wow! Signal in 1977, becoming one of the most noteworthy examples of alien intelligence. However, a non-peer-reviewed paper published on arXiv last year “hypothesize[d] that the Wow! Signal was caused by a sudden brightening of the hydrogen line in these clouds triggered by a strong transient radiation source, such as a magnetar flare or a soft gamma repeater (SGR).” When prompting Bitlife, an AI-powered conspiracy theory text generator with the word “eggs,” we are given “[s]ome conspiracy theorists believe that eggs, particularly chicken eggs, hold mystical properties that are linked to alien civilizations.” In 2017, Joe Nadeau, principal scientist at the Pacific Northwest hypothesized that sexual selection happens after copulation when the egg attempts to “woo sperm” instead of “passively” awaiting random fertilization. Other fertilization approaches are found amongst farmers in Pakistan's highlands of Baltistan who are racing against climate change by attempting to produce “glacier babies” using an ancient ritual of “glacier mating” of mixing chunks of white glaciers (presumed to be female) with black or brown glaciers (presumed to be male) in order to create a new water source for farming. At the University of Copenhagen’s Niels Bohr Institute, scientists store ice cores containing bubbles of Greenland air from more than two millennia ago, which can provide details on the progression of climate change. Scientists have developed an optimized recipe for making giant bubbles, which requires that the surface-active agent (a chemical compound that reduces the surface tension between two substances) not be too high, that the bubble solution include long, flexible polymer chains, and that glycerol provide stability and resistance to evaporation. Possibly to escape predators, water anoles and semiaquatic lizards produce a bubble behind their nostrils that allows them to breathe underwater for 20 minutes. Alongside Lindsey Swierk’s water anole research, other scientists have found that the alkali fly (Ephydra hians) uses superhydrophobicity to create a bubble of air around its body (but not around its eyes) while underwater in Mono Lake, California. And some water beetles form a temporary bubble to carry the oxygen they need while underwater.

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    AI-Generated Images of Rat Genitalia, Ants Perform Life-saving Amputations, Japanese Honeybees Swat Invading Ants, Mapping the Seafloor, and Measuring the Mind's Eye

    12 August 2024

    A graphic of a rat with exaggerated genitalia was published in Frontiers. It was later retracted because it was an AI-generated image, raising concerns about the increasing, knowingly or unknowingly, use of AI-generated images and texts in scientific journals. Researchers found that Florida carpenter ants would amputate the injured legs of nestmates to survive. Using their ability to differentiate between different wound types, these ants can deploy different treatments, marking what scientists are calling the first “nonhuman animal performing an amputation on a fellow member of its species to save its life.” A new study revealed that a species of honeybee native to Japan uses its wings to slap back Japanese pavement ants that attempt to invade its hive. Researchers strap a camera and other tracking devices to endangered Australian sea lions to map the seafloor. Scientists learned that sea lions visited six diverse benthic (seabed) habitats: macroalgae reef, macroalgae meadow, bare sand, sponge/sand, invertebrate reef, and invertebrate boulder. Aphantasia, a new phenomenon coined only in 2015 but described by Francis Galton in 1880, refers to the inability to conjure mental images and may remind us that naming a phenomenon is not the same as the first recorded instance of observing it. Many early aphantasia studies rely on self-reporting, leading researchers to ask: “How do you measure someone else’s inner reality?” and “Could reported differences in visual imagery be a language disconnect, given the ambiguity in how we describe our inner worlds?” thereby making aphantasia not an objective binary reality or even a well-defined spectrum, but something that challenges both systems of research methods and the failure of language. More recent research uses ultra-high-field 7T fMRI to compare domain activation across subjects.

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    Microplastics in Semen, Floppy Disks Are Retired in Japan, Synchronized Fruit Dropping Across Europe, Bitcoin Noise Pollution Terrorizes Texas Town, and Greedy Cannibal Stars

    22 July 2024

    A study of 40 healthy men found microplastics in all 40 semen samples, raising concerns about male fertility and the continued decline in sperm count. After Taro Kono, Japan’s digital minister, declared and presumably won its “war on floppy disks,” the national abandonment of the seemingly anachronistic storage system, he has a new target: retiring the fax machine. Masting, or the synchronized production of seeds by plants, is finally seen at a continental scale, with European beeches dropping their fruits simultaneously across several nations. Noise pollution from a newly installed Bitcoin mining facility is causing health issues for residents of Granbury, Texas. A 2022 study exposed Jupiter as a greedy little planet that “cannibalized baby planets” as it grew, or in a more dramatic summary: “Jupiter’s innards are full of the remains of baby planets.” A 2024 study investigating stellar chemical compositions found that at least one in twelve stars shows evidence of planetary ingestion. Planetary ingestion, or “stellar ingestion” or “stellar murder,” is when a star eats a planet. NASA predicts that in about 5 billion years, our Sun will undergo an “end-of-life transition” by ingesting a few familiar planets: Mercury, Venus, and likely Earth. The soft halo of anthropomorphization follows the description of astrophysical phenomena everywhere, such as bestowing planets with the ability to establish healthy boundaries with their parent star — “planets should never feel too comfortable as they orbit their parent star.” Do some stars have dietary restrictions? A 2019 study seems to suggest that it may just be a matter of proximity: a planet migrates into the stellar envelope and eventually becomes a meal. Is there ever a point at which ingestion exceeds stellar social norms, and a star is forced to take some stellar Ozempic or a more generic GLP-1? Do some stars meal prep their planetary courses? If a star eats a planet that doesn’t taste as good as desired, does the star regurgitate the planet? Unsure! But, a quick inquiry into the cosmic dietary practices tied directly to stellar life cycles reveals that some black holes form from a dead star. One black hole shredded up, not swallowed up, a star that got too close, and according to a 2022 study, the black hole began “burping out” the energy from the shredded star two years later.

See you next week for another list!

Thanks for being a pal!

All the best, always,

Kameelah 👽

How to cite this newsletter: Rasheed, K. (Year, Month Day). Newsletter Title. I Will (?) Figure This All Out Later. URL