It is still Werewolf Month, now almost three months later.

"#036 - Moonstruck (1987)" Kit Buckley's newsletter the unbearable weight

What an opening sentence!! This is still probably my favorite newsletter. Some runner up sentences:

Driving through Lexington, KY, I imagine that every Jersey Mike’s sandwich restaurant is not a franchise named after a singular Michael but is instead an independent owner-operator concern, each run by a different guy named Mike from New Jersey, signposts from some great Michael-from-New-Jersey diaspora.

A while back as a procrastination activity I started working on an application to The Onion fellowship, which is due tomorrow but I will probably not submit because 1) I'm a coward and probably too old to pivot to comedy writing, and 2) abruptly relocating my life to Chicago for six months for an incredibly cool opportunity also smacks a bit of running away from my current set of problems.

That being said, the writing sample part of the application is a lot of fun—writing a good Onion headline is hard, especially in an era where Onion-esque headline writing has become a weird norm. Because I am a show-off in addition to being a coward, I am sharing my favorite drafted headlines, since a news headline is sort of sentence-adjacent.

• Geologist’s Hinge Profile Way Too Niche

• Federal Trade Commission Blocks Polycule Merger (maybe more of a Reductress joke)

I am deep in the throes of PhD exams (my program calls them "comprehensive" exams, others call them "qualifying" exams, I am using either term here because most of you are not fucking nerds) preparation, meaning that I need to read and annotate at least one book (or a few journal articles) a day basically until the end of the summer. This means that aside from the submitted sentences, a lot of this week's sentences are from the introductions or first few chapters of academic texts, because those are the parts of books you're "supposed" to read for exam preparation.

It is very disheartening to learn that a lot of PhD exam studying is learning how to efficiently skim books. It feels disrespectful to the book, and it does not alleviate my suspicion that these exams are a hazing ritual invented by bad people!

I am trying to find ways to make this process helpful for me (namely, a person who has zero expectations of landing a real academic job down the line and who wants to write books and make art mostly), with mixed results, but at least many of the texts themselves are pretty good. Advice from survivors of PhD exams welcomed.

It must borrow shame because the consensus doesn’t feel it, not yet, not today.

"The Right Side of Now", Lauren Michele Jackson for The New Yorker

Let us never forget: that the poem was entombed in a collapse of the earth.

With bio communication, it's monkey flowers all the way down.

The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth, Zoë Schlanger

Submitted by Winston.

Winston is currently doing a GoFundMe to raise money that can help him move his family to a trans-affirming state for the sake of his oldest daughter's health and well-being. If you can spare it, please consider contributing. (I asked Winston for permission to share this; while the subscriber base of this newsletter isn't huge or as far as I know especially wealthy, it is an audience that I hope is largely sympathetic and inclined to help.)

(When I was three months on testosterone, I flew to California to end a five-year relationship, tried cocaine, and briefly stopped speaking to my family.)

"Jane Schoenbrun Finds Horror Close to Home", Holden Seidlitz for The New Yorker

What I love about this sentence is that it could be an opening sentence in a very different essay but is instead a parenthetical in a profile. It's important in profile writing to strategically acknowledge one's own subjectivity—how to make yourself known in the text without making the profile About You Entirely—because a profile is in part about comprehending the gap between how a profile subject wants to be known and whatever the profile author is bringing to the table.

Submissions are strongly encouraged for this coming week! I will be traveling Tuesday, at what looks to be a pretty dry academic conference Wednesday and Thursday, and then traveling again on Friday so my reading time is going to be a bit curtailed.

That the ivory tower is a tower, and not the source of a waterfall or a pile of spent nuclear rods at the bottom of the sea.

"Your Work is Not Academic", Kendra Albert

It has now been 13 years since Christopher Hitchens got to discover at last whether hell is real.

"The Ghosts of New Atheism Still Haunt Us", Erik Baker for Defector

Submitted by Rusty.

Actual fern sex turned out to be much weirder.

The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth, Zoë Schlanger

I'm a little less than halfway through this and really enjoying it! Another great one:

Through the chatter of their cells, plants are self-organizing systems.

This week's sentences were sent out late because I am on a little vacation to upstate New York and was wrangling my big dog on long drives and puppy meetings. As penance for the delay I offer this image of my dog having a nap with a friend's puppy.

Everything might seem meaningless during a genocide but only because we’re made to reckon with all that is suddenly possible.

In the absence of tyrants bootlicking is essentially ballet.

John Darnielle on Bluesky

Her mouth had filled with light as they gave her TV teeth and a Barbie cunt.

Lest this become too morose, I will note that the benefits of having a power grid at all are self-evident.

A third draft of my CS Ethics student's paper on decarbonizing the power grid

You're not really supposed to have favorites when you teach, but some students just really go above and beyond. This student made a working model of a utility pole with a functioning transformer as part of her final presentation!! Teaching engineers is sometimes delightful.

Infrastructure is the imagined materialization of this thing called an economy.

"Infrastructural Time", Hannah Appel in The Promise of Infrastructure

That certain sensation that things can be so different is our long game.

Actually, that’s an insult to serpents, because serpents are beautiful creatures.

David Dastmalchian in an interview with Variety

But Shafik, it seems, is currently answering a higher calling—the call to tongue-bathe the boots of Congressmember Elise Stefanik and the rest of the Republican-led House of Representatives Committee on Education and the Workforce, which this year has been grilling the leaders of institutions on whether they support Israel ferociously and blindly—I mean, "oppose antisemitism."

The act of discernment is not merely punished; it’s made infelicitous.

"Disambiguation, A Tragedy", Nan Z. Da in N+1

Even in the midst of health and busyness, human beings dance with death.

We have an accidentally very animal-heavy week of sentences, which is pretty nice.

Some shameless (well, actually pretty ashamed) commerce self-promotion: between unexpected life expenses and taxes I am doing some extra hustling this week. Do you like beautiful plotter art? There's some small work for as low as $20 and some more fancy work for more than that. (20% discount code for subscribers available upon request.)

Subscription and tip jar links at the bottom are always appreciated of course, but I do really like these little plotter drawings so sharing them is nice.

It wasn't an especially rich week for sentences, most of these are pretty silly. I had a weird week of good but sort of anticlimactic events—my first peer reviewed journal article was approved for publication (official early access here, I can send you the preprint if you want), which is nice but I have zero sense of if the paper's even readable at this point, and a still-secret project entered into a more "it's real" phase but not yet an "I can tell you about it" phase. Feeling distracted and it's hard to focus on one thing at a time when spring weather is still fickle.

Being a kid from a pretty conservative and yet very tumultuous home in the belt buckle of the Bible Belt, I've been both supremely terrified of and yet uncontrollably drawn to the shadowy corner of the room.

David Dastmalchian in conversation with Trent Reznor, Interview magazine

This is the story of all colonialisms: settlers build their tall, shiny things on the embers of the societies they torch, export the spoils and bury their guilt in their families, splaying out on the terraces, declaring themselves home at last.

"Hating it Lush: On Tel Aviv", Kaleem Hawa for The White Review

A runner-up from this essay, perhaps made more resonant with the context that it is discussing Los Angeles and Tel Aviv:

In a sense, both cities sell the promise of forgetting.

Guilt imposes itself like a nagging cavity, you are acutely aware of its presence, but you continue to shovel the same sweets in your mouth, until your teeth rot, until you self-destruct.

"Are we indeed all Palestinians?", Mohammed El-Kurd for Mondoweiss

Wow, you have a lot of melodicas lying around!

Don't we face enough fucking imponderables?

Al Swearenegen on Deadwood

Via Brian Haley on Twitter. We do face a lot of fucking imponderables, IMO.