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.

This was a great week for submissions! Thanks to all of you for keeping an eye out for perfection.

There is too much evidence that the arc of the moral universe does not bend towards justice; powerful men can make their massacres seem necessary and righteous.

"The Shoah After Gaza", Pankaj Mishra for The London Review of Books

Fighting a somehow-not-covid cold this weekend (it's mostly manifesting as laryngitis) which maybe explains the sentence selections leaning toward the terse.

The day, as I am writing, is like a crystal without faces.

"The Secret Life", Patricia Lockwood in the London Review of Books

To fill one's mind with the apprehension of the Sunday paper there, at the door.

In the Heart of Another Country, Etel Adnan

The first layer of this anthropocenic geology is all Gaza destroyed—because you have to put the rubble somewhere.

When faced with the truculent realities of flesh and culture, cybernetics collapsed like a flan in a cupboard.

Systems Ultra, Georgina Voss

George is a friend and I am proud of her for putting out this book! While the "flan in a cupboard" part of the above sentence is a tribute to Suzy Eddie Izzard that should be acknowledged, pairing it with "truculent realities of flesh and culture" is pretty great. Some runner-up sentences from the part of the book I've read so far:

As someone with an emotional investment in gigantic machinery, it was wonderful; a personalized springtime festival of infrastructure.

You're on your own out there with those man-eating semicolons.

Steering the Craft, Ursula K. Le Guin

A conversation ensues in which the mugger starts recommending adaptive technology.

I marvel at the sky: How lucky we are it does not fall and crush us without announcement.

"A Day in the Life", Noura Erakat for The Nation

This entire package of essays is incredibly good and I have only picked two sentences, which was difficult.

Despite the usefulness of his calculations, Bailey did not qualify the years of hardship represented in each delicious fruit.

"The First Green Revolution: Debt Peonage and the Making of the Nitrogen Fertilizer Trade, 1840–1930", Edward D. Melillo

A great city is the most mighty of dung-makers.