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.

A very limited set of sentences this week due to a sad personal update: my dog passed away unexpectedly around 4 in the morning on October 15. It was sudden, but she was at home with her family and we were able to hold her and love her to the very last moments. This is my partner’s first dog, and worrying about his family in Lebanon has left him pretty frayed already so I am more worried about him than deeply involved in my own grief. But she really was the love of my life.

It’s meant so much to have friends and neighbors and our vet’s techs reach out to us. She was so loved by so many people. Please give your animal companions extra affection today, for me. Here’s a picture of her from 2019 that is one of my favorites and captures her a few months into being our dog.

For a variety of reasons despite being in mourning I am still doing the written part of my qualifying exams this week, so I will likely not collect too many sentences for next week’s newsletter. Submissions are extra-highly encouraged, thanks in advance.

In the beginning it felt like this: the earth opened beneath us, but for a moment it seemed as though gravity forgot itself.

“A Rupture In Time”, Sarah Aziza for The Baffler

Lots of perfect sentences in this:

It is October, warped and too warm in this era of climate emergency, and nothing can be the same.

This week an IDF air strike damaged the Beirut cemetery my partner’s grandfather is buried in. It is very disorienting to hold that information alongside day-to-day tasks and work. A year ago I had tested positive for covid and had to miss a friend’s child’s birthday party; that child, who happens to be Palestinian-and Lebanese-American, continues to live in a world where people with extraordinary power would rather see children like her dead. People have been exceptionally kind in the last few weeks—friends checking in, friends bringing food, neighbors showing kindness—and I try to find some grace in that.

In the arena of the war, nothing has changed, except everything changes: the death counts, the severity of atrocities, the number of hospitals bombed, schools bombed, universities destroyed, journalists targeted, the records broken — largest cohort of child amputees in the world, fastest man-made famine in the world — the territory blasted and caught up into the flames.

“A Year of War Without End”, Lina Mounzer for The Markaz Review

This week has not been very good for sentence gathering. Partly, because I had to do a lot of sentence writing (results largely average, hopefully some approaching perfect) and partly because we were watching my partner’s home country of Lebanon get bombarded by the IDF. His parents and last remaining grandparent are currently holding up as best they can in Beirut but getting out isn’t currently an option (all flights are booked up into mid-October, and that assumes that the airport doesn’t get bombed). Escalation in Lebanon is of course only an extension of horrors that have been ongoing for nearly a year in both southern Lebanon and Gaza, but it does feel like an ominous turn.

I am grateful for the friends who have reached out and shown up in the last two weeks. Still working through the dissociation of it all and trying to show up. Sentence submissions highly appreciated as my own capacity for sentence gathering remains diminished.

PLAY INSECURITIES LIKE A PIANO.

Mr. Lochridge, an experienced submersible pilot from Scotland, said he tried to calm his boss down and asked him to hand over the PlayStation controller that was used to pilot the vessel.

“OceanGate Founder Crashed a Submersible Years Before Titan Disaster”, Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs for the New York Times

Honorable mention for this follow-up furthering Lochridge’s characterization as a Man of The Sea:

Mr. Rush obliged by throwing the controller at Mr. Lochridge, hitting him in what Mr. Lochridge called the “starboard side” of his head.

We should rid our writing of this dreadful innocence.

“The Shapes of Grief”, Christina Sharpe for the Yale Review

Some other bangers from this essay:

There is something about the plane, its untethering space, between times and places, that allows me to meet so readily the many gifts of the book—among them language and memory.

The dead can’t seek justice in court, but they have other ways.

“Let the Dead Sleep: On Alien Romulus and Digital Resurrection”, Matt Zoller Seitz for RogerEbert.com

Submitted by James.

Sheep ate men, in middle America just as in England.

Truncated quote of Immanuel Wallerstein’s The Modern World-System Vol. I in “Environmental Crises and the Metabolic Rift in World-Historical Perspective”, Jason W. Moore

Turns out this is part of a longer sentence in Wallerstein, which is fine, but not quite as punchy.

I got back home from two weeks of traveling after a redeye flight from Portland (yes, I regret this). Most of this edition was actually drafted on Friday afternoon and Saturday night at the airport. This is my first time scheduling Perfect Sentences!

The last XOXO festival was bittersweet; the only other one I attended was in 2014 and boy howdy do I feel 37 when I remember being 27. But it was good to see Erin and Peter, whose old apartment I still live in, and see their terrific almost 11 (!) year old kid who I last saw when she was 5. I cried a lot: out of anger, envy, self-pity, awe, grief, joy, and at one point over an old McDonald’s mural. I should try to write out the morass of feelings in greater detail, maybe.

These lived fast, died young, and their deaths drove the cosmic factory of the chemical elements.

Hello from a basement apartment Airbnb in Vancouver. This is my first time visiting Vancouver and most of my research meetings fell through, so please send recommendations of things to do and places to sit and read. (I have already been told, repeatedly, about Stanley Park.)

Having a very multi-modal transit experience on this trip: flew to Seattle, took a ferry to Victoria, took a bus and ferry to Vancouver, and in a couple of days getting on an Amtrak to Portland. Here’s a picture of Galiano Island I took from the to-Vancouver ferry.

I’m visiting some family in Washington State and flew out late last night, so I am very tired and this week was a lot of preparation to go out of town and general weird vibes from tropical storm weather. Thanks to the people who submitted sentences for this week, it really filled out the newsletter.

He begin with general abstractions arrived at ideally rather than with any detailed study of how actual social and political institutions work.

“The Spatial Fix: Hegel, Von Thünen and Marx”, David Harvey

I got an annoying summer cold this week (it’s not covid at least?) and have generally been very distracted by life stuff, so I’m a little behind on PhD exams reading. This week’s sentences feel very scattershot. I’m ready for summer to end but not ready for the responsibility of fall.

Next week I’m traveling to visit family in the Pacific northwest so newsletter may go out a little late.

It is fundamentally weird to care so much about what other people do when it doesn't affect you at all.

History then becomes a pack of tricks we play on the dead.

"Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas", Quentin Skinner

In 2019, scientists expressed concern that the torrents of cocaine-infused urine flooding into the River Thames in London was "another problem eels don't need," while freshwater shrimp have repeatedly tested positive for the drug in recent years.