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

What sort of times are these — where a conversation about trees comes close to crime, because it contains a silence about so many misdeeds?

“To Posterity”, Bertholt Brecht

Submitted by Wesley, who notes that he came across this translation of the poem “because it is referenced on my great grandfather's tombstone, and feels uncannily fitting for the current moment.”

Well, I did pass my qualifying exams last week. I guess that’s good?

In all seriousness, I’m very glad past me insisted on finishing that process before they called the election. If not, it’s a lot more likely I’d be planning to drop out. (Being at the state of all-but-dissertation means I am more inclined to complete the process, if partly out of a slightly childish sense of spite that I will not be broken in this final round by of all things a mediocre state university.)

Like many of you, I am angry and sad and riding waves of both anticipatory and present-tense grief (also, I miss my dog more than ever). I am exhausted from election postmortems and incoming regime pre-catastrophizing, but remain easily seduced by spiraling into both just to feel some sense of control. Spending time with friends this week has helped a bit. Take care of yourselves, and take care of people around you.

Also, commit petty vandalism when you can. On Friday I poured an iced coffee onto the hood of a car parked on my street that had a big Trump banner and it felt really great. Except for the part where I had to buy another iced coffee.

Here lie the limits of assemblage theory; granting agency to the non-human material earth while severing that material’s relations from the humans who have known, shaped it, and lived with it so intimately for generations.

“Notes on the Underground in Gaza”, Hadeel Assali for Society for Cultural Anthropology

Hadeel is involved with Gaza Mutual Aid Solidarity, which does extraordinary work that I hope you will support if you can.

It is difficult to encounter such a thing and not overrun the page with the fervency of my gladness.

“The Best American Grilled Cheese Sandwich Essay”, Talia Lavin’s newsletter The Sword and the Sandwich

Submitted by Anne.