I submitted my dissertation manuscript on December 5th! I will find out by December 12th whether or not it is "defensible"! Thank you to all the people who have sent encouraging comments over the last few weeks and months. I am excited to read fiction and magazines again.

Why it matters: The intoxicated suspect was a raccoon.

"Raccoon gets drunk at Ashland ABC store and passes out in bathroom", Sabrina Moreno for Axios Richmond

I turn in my dissertation manuscript this Friday, which means last week was mostly editing my own sentences. Given the deadline, the I'm aiming for "defensible" sentences in the manuscript more than perfect, so it's not been a very inspired week. Thanks for all of the submissions covering my limited free reading time.

If you cut me open, I’d be just styrofoam and bird feathers.

Rachael Cain as quoted in an article in Gothamist

It really is the greatest business plan in the history of capitalism: “We will create God and then ask it for money.”

"OpenAI Has a Business Plann", Matt Levine for Bloomberg

Submitted by Wesley.

babies are born worshipping unknown gods

@reki.gay on Bluesky

Submitted by Kelsey. This has been memed as an official Dwarf Fortress bug report comment, but the actual bug report does not use this phrase. All credit to Reki!

I say my dog because this experience taught me something about fascists: if you don't admit to owning the world's stray dogs, they'll shoot them.

"My Life Under Fascism, or Franco Killed My Dog", William Gibson for Space Junk

(Light spoiler for those who might not want to read an essay involving a dog dying that the dog doesn't actually die! This does not really detract from Gibson's point, I think.)

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.