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This essay understands what it meant and what it means to read The Pentagon Papers in a few related ways. First, when it appeared in 1971, there were at least three different versions of the Papers available. Because, in other words, the reader had to choose between versions from the very start, The Pentagon Papers had to be read both as a text and as a textual event. Second, although the Papers are often remembered as an unmediated document dump, the whole was, in fact, a highly mediated and intensely narrative document, an effort to present the incoherent story—the violence—of Vietnam as a coherent discourse. As a result, they not only demand but also assume interpretation. Finally, the fact that Leslie Gelb, the Department of Defense editor of the Papers, officially introduced its more than seven thousand pages with a pointed reference to Moby‐Dick encourages us to look for and to understand how something unexpectedly novelistic supports and maybe subverts the documentary force of The Pentagon Papers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Early modern paper, formed from the fibers of recycled linen rags, captured the imagination of early modern writers, translators, and readers. Drawing on paper's material properties and history, seventeenth‐century chymists — including Thomas Tymme, Michael Maier, and Otto Tachenius — repeatedly imagine papermaking as a chymical purification in order to claim paper as a chymical invention. In doing so, these chymists seek to demonstrate their art's centrality to early modern knowledge production, circulation, and preservation. At the same time, by imagining papermaking as chymistry, these writers probe the boundaries of art and nature, the mechanical and liberal arts, and the ordinary and alchemical. Further, because of readers' familiarity and proximity to linen and paper, the material book offered proof of chymistry's usefulness, grounded in the tacit knowledge of daily experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While postmodern metafiction (or reflexive fiction) is commonly positioned outside the scope of the Ontological Turn due to metafiction's association with postmodernism's insistence on "world as text," this article argues that metafiction's proximity to scientific theories of reflexivity engenders a shift toward what the article calls body as text, a shift that is synchronous with reflexivity's evolution from cybernetics to biological autopoiesis. To trace metafiction's aesthetic evolution from world as text to body as text, the article examines Jorge Luis Borges's short story "The Circular Ruins" (1940) alongside early-order cybernetic theories of reflexivity before examining Salvador Plascencia's The People of Paper (2005) alongside later theories of biological autopoiesis. While both narratives demonstrate an interest in the world-building powers of the text, the article argues that Plascencia's novel demonstrates reflexivity's autopoietic ability to examine the interstitial relationship between material embodiment and nonhuman agencies. By moving away from Borgesian self-regulation toward self-assembly, The People of Paper gradually sheds the epistemological preoccupations of its world-as-text aesthetic in favor a more ontological body-as-text aesthetic, thereby opening up the possibility of interpreting Plascencia's novel as an aestheticization not of the construction of reality but of the construction of the body itself. In marking a distinction between world-as-text metafiction and body-as-text metafiction, the latter emerges as a uniquely useful heuristic in the Ontological Turn for modeling molecular embodiment and nonhuman agency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses two computer science research papers concerning artificial intelligence (AI). Topics explored include the susceptibility of deep convolutional neural networks to input pertubations acknowledged in the 2013 study "Intriguing Properties of Neural Networks," by Christian Szegedy and colleagues, and the capability of sequence-to-sequence language models to execute short computer programs reported in the 2014 study "Learning to Execute," by Wojciech Zaremba and Ilya Sutskever.