The good news is I am currently writing the conclusion to my dissertation, which is to say the end is in sight! The bad news is now I must uh, draw conclusions, and the conclusion cannot be "I am so burned out by academia, why must we pretend this matters at all please just pass me and let my weary soul rest."

It’s the least we can do, I think, piece together the story from the rings and scars of the fallen.

"What Time Is It?" Claire Kovac for Jeff Sharlet's newsletter Calling All Syllables

We simply do not know what our writing does.

"There is No Software", Friedrich Kittler

There's noise, so much noise, but there's also signal and the signal was that they were here that they were everywhere.

We are all communists with our closest friends, and feudal lords when interacting with children.

"Debt, Violence, and Impersonal Violence: Polanyian Meditations", David Graeber

Gun culture has made it impossible to slap people like Moe Howard so the progression from chucklehead to numbskull is never halted.

A correction: last week’s newsletter cited a Substack note sentence that was in fact a quote from Philip K. Dick’s VALIS, not an original statement from the author. We regret the error. Thanks to Saga for bringing this to our attention.

what am i to do with all this sand in my chest

“A Conversation with My Mother About the Bloodstains on My Shirt”, Darius Simpson

Submissions are carrying this week as I was finishing revisions on one chapter while writing the last full chapter of the dissertation. I still have to wrap the chapters in an intro/conclusion and add an appendix and give the whole thing an overall edit (while remixing parts of one chapter into a journal article), but getting All The Chapters done feels like a pretty good milestone.

Apparently, the tallest ghost in the world was shorter than six feet.

"The Last Resort", Ash Sanders for The Believer

I have met crows that should be in jail.

“walking through los angeles when the crows are screaming and going through your garbage”, Kaleb Horton for his newsletter

Submitted by @symbo1ics.bsky.social. I was not all that familiar with Kaleb Horton’s work while he was alive, and I regret that now. His passing has put a lot of his writing on my timeline. What a tremendous voice of California.

And the everything-else of Kirk’s politics amounted to little more than a loathing of those whose mere existence provoked his ire.

"Charlie Kirk, Redeemed: A Political Class Finds Its Lost Cause", Ta-Nehisi Coates for Vanity Fair

Still working through the whiplash of Vanity Fair publishing this from Coates and days later announcing a plum job for Olivia "History of Wild Violations of Journalistic Standards" Nuzzi. Every day is a winding road!

Very submission-heavy week—the current dissertation chapter is in some ways not as intense of a writing task as the previous two now that I know it doesn't have to be 20,000 words, but has involved a lot more writing whole paragraphs and then realizing they will send me well beyond scope and scrapping them (well, pasting them into another document in case I need them later). Also: what a week, fuck.

That is like an onion asking "How do I take care of a star?"

"The Fly”, Alien: Earth

I submitted two dissertation chapters this past week, which was a little anticlimactic but still relieved. Thanks to the sentence submitters who kept this from being a very bare bones newsletter entry.

And, you know, I hate competing symmetrically with government approved monopolies.

Someone I interviewed for my dissertation

I’m in pretty deep on dissertation writing for the next few months, which means less time for recreational sentence reading. Submissions appreciated—not just from a “having material for the newsletter” perspective but from needing reminders of other things in the world while I toil in the scholarly prose mines.

Events in the real world may supersede our feelings of moral superiority.

“Thinking Ahead to the Full Military Takeover of Cities”, Hamilton Nolan for his newsletter How Things Work

In fairness to Kneecap and Sally Rooney, if I had to embroil myself in a battle of wits with a world leader, I’d probably pick Keir Starmer too.

“Surrealing in the Years: Starmer has chosen the wrong opponent in Sally Rooney”, Carl Kinsella for The Journal

Like all things tech, I have purposely decided not to learn much about AI, but this week I decided to dip my toe in, and wrote this as a memorial to the brain cells lost.

Another fact: Kincaid hates England.

“The Evolution of a Beloved Postcolonial Critic and Literary Giant”, Mychal Denzel Smith for The New Republic

Monopoly men fight for the privilege to spy on us and rob us blind.

An update: this newsletter just hit the “over 1,000 subscribers” mark (welcome, new readers!). This is flattering, but also means that now I have to pay Buttondown $29 a month. Luckily I’m not fully out of pocket for this, thanks to the generous paying subscribers whose support means that I am already at the almost-break-even point. If you are able to contribute to make this newsletter fully break-even (links to do so in footer) it’s appreciated but not required.

But editorial indulgence has resulted in such a sludge of footnotes and block quotes that the eye must often dismount and continue on foot.

“Zero Tolerance”, Andrea Long Chu for New York Magazine

Sort of a shorter sentence collection this week. I’m going upstate on Wednesday partly for a weirdo art thing organized by some friends and partly for dissertation work, so next week will probably be largely submissions-driven.

In geologic time, all infrastructures suffer an Ozymandian fate.

The Marvelous Clouds: Towards a Philosophy of Elemental Media, John Durham Peters

Syntax buckles beneath the pressure of empty stomachs.

“Beneath the Howl of Hunger”, Alaa Alqaisi for ArabLit Quarterly

Quartz is lovely, translucent, and pure but, frankly, a little inarticulate.

All smiles have become archaic.

“The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas”, Ursula K. Le Guin

Submitted by Wesley.

Besides the bygone stairway to hog heaven, the scans also revealed the foundation of what was once a soap factory.

“Ghost stairs and pig bones sit in the way of new NYC train tunnel”, Stephen Nessen for Gothamist

Incredible headline, also.

What were you doing the day the president attended the opening of an American concentration camp in the Everglades?

“The Grand Opening of an American Concentration Camp”, Melissa Gira Grant for The New Republic

I wish I could say I was doing something appropriately solemn on the day of the opening of an American concentration camp in the Everglades. But the main things I did were go to CVS to pick up a prescription and hem a jumpsuit in preparation for going out of town for a July 5 wedding—a wedding in Miami, actually, not that long of a drive away from the concentration camp, but it seemed bad form to propose a protest excursion to my naturalized citizen Lebanese in-laws who’d come all the way from Beirut to see a nephew get married.

The Lebanese side of the family was outnumbered at the wedding by University of Miami alumni. The nephew had attended the school on a football scholarship and then stayed for law school, and was marrying a former team cheerleader. The father of the bride gave a toast composed entirely of football metaphors and the DJ played “Mr. Brightside”, which I think is a contender for the white millennial wedding version of “Sweet Caroline.” I didn’t really expect anyone giving speeches or making small talk to acknowledge the concentration camp, but that didn’t make it less weird to note its conversational absence.

Thanks to the many excellent submitters this week, with special thanks to MVP submitter Wesley.

In a universe in equilibrium we would simply not exist as thinking and feeling beings.

White Holes, Carlo Rovelli

And they wait, and they hope; and they hide the truth from themselves, that it is barbarism, the supreme barbarism, the crowning barbarism that sums up all the daily barbarisms; that it is Nazism, yes, but that before they were its victims, they were its accomplices; that they tolerated that Nazism before it was inflicted on them, that they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples; that they have cultivated that Nazism, that they are responsible for it, and that before engulfing the whole edifice of Western, Christian civilization in its reddened waters, it oozes, seeps, and trickles from every crack.

Discourse on Colonialism, Aimé Césaire

Submitted by Erin, via the “imperial boomerang” Wikipedia entry.

I'm going to be in the Bay Area June 17-27 to do dissertation interviews, which will likely reduce my time to do perfect sentence collecting. Submissions strongly encouraged in the coming days.

They belonged to a race quite capable of admiring its own image in a mirror, and equally capable of cutting its own throat before the altar of some tribal god, such as the deity of Daily Shaving.

A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter Miller

Several weeks ago, much to my extreme displeasure, I found myself at Erewhon, staring balefully at an $88 jar of electric blue sea moss gel.

“Nowhere, Man”, Anna Merlan for Flaming Hydra

I could only hope that future historians would get it right: whatever came next in the wreckage of empire, the $20 strawberry was not to blame.

It’s to stand aboveground and pontificate about the marvels of this bright new magic, to be dazzled by all its flickering, glittering glory, its smooth mirages and six-fingered messiahs, its apparent obsequiousness in response to all your commands, right up until the point when a sinkhole opens up and swallows you whole.

“Toolmen”, Mandy Brown on her blog A Working Library

This was the time when the mythic achievements of the conquest were blown like glass from the glory hole of the Queen’s will.

If something is telling me to change my life and that something is not Rainer Maria Rilke, my nose for bullshit is automatically activated.

“against the fleeing to europe industrial complex”, Kate Wagner in her newsletter The Late Review

Submitted by Erin.

The Cheesecake Factory: A bacchanalian multiverse where the splendor of Rome meets the appetite of America.

TikTok by Jonathan Kite

Kite's main bit on TikTok is the most spot-on Anthony Bourdain impression you'll ever see, and he never disappoints.

This struggle is sweeter than a life without dignity.

Mahmoud Khalil in a letter to his son, published in The Guardian

I was destined to become the eternal museum viewer.

A bad week of reading for me (sick, then preoccupied with dogsitting a very active pup) but a very good week of submissions. Thanks, submitters.

"Irrespective of their age, they were able to get a lot of ants," he told Reuters.

“Four people, including two Belgian teens, plead guilty to trafficking giant ants in Kenya”, Reuters via ABC News

As a belated Indie Bookstore Day gesture, book links in this newsletter are to my neighborhood store.

THE GARDEN IS AN OASIS FROM THE MALICE OF OUR TIME.

A note left on the fence of a neighborhood community garden

It says that the only way to enjoy art is in knowing that it is hurting somebody.

“A.I.: The New Aesthetics of Fascism”, Gareth Watkins for New Socialist

Submitted by Moon.

Haggis pakora has been described as a "highly improbable Indo-Caledonian alliance making use of the Scots' most potent culinary weapons: sheep pluck (heart, liver and lungs) and deep-fat frying."

Wikipedia entry for haggis pakora

Submitted by Chris.

I haven’t been sure how much to disclose in this newsletter, but: the not-so-great but maybe-manageable news I got in mid-March spiraled into essentially a torching of my relationship with my PhD advisor in the last couple of weeks. It’s been sad, because I do respect my advisor as a scholar and thought she was someone I could trust. (The specifics are internecine and tedious and probably airing them here will cause problems; it involves questionable decisions about grant spending and her leaving for a new job, and it affects multiple students.) This heel turn situation is, basically, a required rite of passage of doing a PhD. I cannot recommend it! It’s very destabilizing.

Maybe the more important part: while I kind of just have to write a pretty bad dissertation by the end of the year and I think I can do it, I also will be figuring out my next move because aside from academia being entirely on fire right now, this whole process has made me wary of trying to succeed in a field that so blatantly rewards sociopathy. Advice, strategizing, passing along gigs, and tip jar donations very welcomed in this shitty moment. (And, of course, always sentences.)

The Rohingya are people, not lessons.

You will, I hope, forgive me my instruments.

“What Will You Do?”, Kaveh Akbar for The Nation

The sofa bed was designed for someone different from me—not just smaller but also, it seemed to me, with a different personality.

Respectfully, theory does not come easy to me as a grimy materialist nestled in my pit of archives and filth.

Me, being kind of a brat in a dissertation draft

With half-hearted apologies to my dissertation committee, I am fundamentally just a dumb goblin for whom “critical spatial theory” sometimes sounds like a riddle from a sorcerer who won’t let me cross the river so I am mostly annoyed by the insistence that I demonstrate how I’m contributing to it.

Over the course of the last week I got some fairly high-stress news that isn’t exactly terrible, but does introduce some new chaos into my work life and finances. The news is partially related to the ravages of New American Authoritarianism (need to think of a better term here as this suggests a dictatorship of moderately upscale restaurants guaranteed to have truffle fries), though the situation I find myself in could have just as easily occurred in another timeline. I do wish that some of it hadn’t unfolded on my birthday, though.

All of this may affect the quantity of sentences collected week to week in the coming months. As always submissions are appreciated. Poetry and perfect sentences will not singlehandedly destroy the fascists, but it has to hold some utility if fascists are so insistent on crushing creative expression.

I wouldn’t piss on him if his heart was on fire.

Big Balls may dream of a bigger Cybertruck today, but soon enough his dreams will turn to statins, and to summer nights cool and quiet enough to sleep with the windows open.

“The US of AI”, talk by Matthew Kirschenbaum at Princeton
University

Submitted by Richard.

Using the wrong words has the magical ability to make objects disappear; the boots, bullets, and batons all become invisible if you say the wrong words, in jest or in fury.

Perfect Victims and the Politics of Appeal, Mohammed El-Kurd

A few runner-up perfect sentences from this:

Power, in this analysis, is an immutable, indelible structure set in stone rather than an imposing yet tenuous entity resting on sand.

Buffaloed onlookers have groped for precedent.

“Speed Up The Breakdown”, Quinn Slobodian for The New York Review of Books

The future Zuckerberg went on to pitch was a delusional fever dream cribbed most obviously from dystopian science fiction and misleading or outright fabricated virtual reality product pitches from the last decade.

Perhaps no dream in American culture has recurred as often as the one in which a group of spiritual adepts remake the world they have inherited in the image of their own ideals.

From Counterculture to Cyberculture, Fred Turner

I made my CS Ethics students read an excerpt from this book, alongside “The Californian Ideology” and “A Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace”, this week. The computer history segment feels more demoralizing this semester; my educator song and dance of “all this could have been otherwise, all that is could be otherwise!” doesn’t quite land with 20-year-olds who’ve basically only known political chaos and big tech as villain for most of their lives. After all, it’s not otherwise and it fucking sucks. Still, someone had to tell them about Minitel and I guess it might as well have been me to tell them.

I missed this when I sent out last week’s newsletter but there are a bunch of new subscribers thanks to a very generous shout-out by Robin Sloan in his newsletter. Thanks, Robin! And hello, new readers!

I’m not sure if this new crop of subscribers is the reason that there were a lot of submissions this week but regardless: great work, everyone.

When I say I had not heard of “Benson Boone,” I meant I was not aware of the existence of the person in this video, who looks a bit like Paul Mescal if he was playing Freddie Mercury in a touring production of something called Bohemian Rhapsody: The Live Experience and also was taking 300mg of Wellbutrin daily.

A brief ambivalent note: I think of this newsletter as part reading blog, part elliptical diary. Amidst a not-quite bloodless coup, attending to one’s diary can feel frivolous at best, at worst a self-aggrandizing attempt to render inaction as “bearing witness.” One worries about coming across as all talk and no action, especially when seeing people who seemingly have greater access to levers of power like Congressional Democrats post through it instead of, say, doing literally anything.

This is not a #resistance project, it is a personal and curatorial one. Maybe I will look back on the time I spent on this amidst collapse as denial, persisting in little routines when I should have been stationing barricades. But it’s not exactly an either/or thing (people certainly have kept diaries while at the barricades) and despite everything I want to believe it is worthwhile to continue paying close attention to language. It is, after all, a primary concern of the fascists who I expect might rename it the US Department of Portation given their childish fervor to erase all things trans from state speech.

But that may prove to be the defining feature of life under the second Trump administration: For now, to survive and move strategically, we will have to live with the whiplash of having to take the cruelty of men who are not very bright very seriously.

baboon heart is an outlook, a point of view; we watch these movies through an ape’s eyes.

Tricia Lockwood on Bluesky

All English speakers think daily in contraband, even those who would rather not.

Apologies first to @freecraigslistsnob.bsky.social because he nominated Liz Lopatto’s sentence last week; I had already encountered and added it but did not mean to appear to engage in stolen sentence valor.

Nothing like a nice Delta-Epsilon Proof for my post-nut clarity.

An anonymous Pornhub user quoted in “We Asked the Math Tutor Who Posts His Lessons on Pornhub: Why?”, Koh Ewe for Vice

inside the piss bush, i saw half a dozen men pissing. one of them, with his dick in his hand, shouted, "i'm watering the tree of liberty!" and the other piss men cheered.

molly conger on Bluesky

The Vatican is even shot and lit in pale grays and harsh fluorescents, to honor Conclave’s cultural homeland of Hudson Books at JFK International Airport.

I know your burning arrows.

“The Abject Lover”, Meleager of Gadara

Via Mouse posting on Mastodon.

Danielle was the Sentence Submission MVP last week but I didn't see her email until after I'd sent out 104; please enjoy her submissions below.

Colors can make for incomprehension, or sense, or violence.

“The Reality of Our Seeing”, Hilton Als for The Believer

On a day I didn’t have my phone with me, I decided to follow the dogs of Venice.

The Minotaur at Calle Lanza, Zito Madu

I met Zito briefly when he did an “in conversation with” event for Joanne’s novel at Wonderville. I haven’t actually read all that much Italo Calvino, so I at best ambiently understand the extent to which the book evokes his work. A vestigial effect of having a journalist dad who regularly pushed me to pare down my elementary and middle-school works (he did not appreciate the premise of the “five-paragraph essay” homework assignment) is that I am a total sucker for writers who can be creatively unsparing in spare prose. The Minotaur at Calle Lanza is short, but not brisk. It dwells in time. It often has the quality of sinking below the surface of a lake, watching the light change underwater, before rising back into the world.

Some other bangers:

Lots of submissions this week! I appreciate this, because it was a hard week and my reading was scattershot.

Betrayal was not the word, it had too many syllables.

Enter Ghost, Isabella Hammad

In Rome, the old rug that ties Western Civ together, empire began with Caesar thrice refusing the crown.

“Mobs beget mobsters”, Matt Pearce in his newsletter

Robin submitted half of this sentence as a “perfect phrase”, which unfortunately breaks the rules of the newsletter. And I think it actually is pretty perfect with the rest of it. “Ceasar thrice refusing the crown” could be a Mountain Goats song.

I have no malice toward the Sad Beige Home, but I, personally, am thrilled I do not live here.

“Bad Influence”, Mia Sato for The Verge

It’s as if 3M’s accidental invention of Post-It notes while failing to make space glue landed them a UN veto.

I feel bad that this, the 100th Perfect Sentences, isn’t an especially perfect collection. 100 has such pomp and circumstance to it. But, this week came with some (sort of good, we’ll see) news that required me to do a lot of work all of a sudden, and The Holiday Season tends to be a time where I’m much more easily derailed. Submissions encouraged in the coming weeks.

So much of what we do demands inattention (our current emphasis on mindfulness neglects the mind’s need for incoherence, to rest, coast, spread out, incohere).

Lauren Berlant in a 2014 interview in Make Literary Magazine