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.

Everyone on the road that day drove with the heedless abandon they always displayed when the fighting started up again in Beirut—that is, they only drove slightly more recklessly than usual.

The Hundred Years' War On Palestine, Rashid Khalidi

It smelled of clean emptiness in a way human places never do.

Spend enough time with their meticulous tables and figures the precision itself begins to feel like rage.

"Meta in Myanmar, Part II: The Crisis", Erin Kissane

Submitted by Wesley.

And who is the character with the hair?

Somewhere in the Night

It helps to know this is said in the film by a very 1940s noir dame about another very 1940s noir dame.

Look at that, we've been doing this newsletter for a whole year! Many thanks to readers who have been part of this little side project to help me be a more attentive and appreciative reader. Also a huge, huge thank you to folks who have reached out in various ways during periods of financial and general life instability this year.

“Not everybody enjoys killing monsters in dungeons,” said Isaac Childres, the designer of Gloomhaven, which is about killing monsters in dungeons.

"The Personal, Political Art of Board-Game Design", Matthew Hutson for The New Yorker

This must be our constant betrayal, to know now that the lyric is not as valuable as the polemic.

"Notes on Craft: Writing in the Hour of Genocide, Fargo Nissim Tbakhi in Protean Magazine

—you would have said, "this peat is as salty as a day's honest work, and as sweet as the first sip of vodka past my lips at sundown"

Starting from the point of view of Euclidean spacetime, the spacetime vectors and spinors that are related by Wick rotation to Minkowski spacetime degrees of freedom behave differently than usual, with a distinguished imaginary time direction.

Summary of a recent talk by Peter Woit on his blog

Submitted by kad. I think of myself as sometimes operating in a "distinguished imaginary time direction."

Then I know that there are still pleasures amidst the terrors of indeterminacy.

The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing

Re-reading this for school and liking it more than I did the first time around, maybe because I'm older and understand what the book is doing more.

Some other contender sentences:

Maps are slippery customers.

"Deconstructing the Map", J.B. Harley

Listening to these ghosts can quickly become a cacophony of demands and seemingly irreconcilable desires.

This past week was hard even though nothing especially bad happened—if anything, the last few weeks have brought small reprieves from the key stressors I've been dealing with the last few months. But learned helplessness has set in from the stress barrage, which makes faith that things will (continue to) improve pretty difficult. (To be fair: there's still a genocide happening and with each day we're inching closer to the re-election of a fascist into the White House, so doubting a linear narrative of progress is pretty reasonable!)

For now I seem to be out of the mindset where I'm absolutely convinced I have to kill myself, but it's been pretty touch and go all week. This is, to be clear, not a new phenomenon for me, and I don't share it to shock so much as to be accountable for dealing with it. More on this later in the newsletter.

Anyway, this scary mindset and my attempts to get out of it is visible in some of the sentences that stood out to me this week: lots of stuff about shared risk and collective organizing, taking actions to retain one's integrity no matter how small they may feel in the grand scheme of things.

Testing the waters: if I made an end of year "2023 in best sentences" zine compilation of this first year of the newsletter, would you like a copy? I briefly considered creating an end of year "best sentence of 2023" bracket tournament but realized that there were simply too many for that to be practical and anyway, it feels weird to make the sentences compete when they are all Perfect.

Controversy came quickly to the cyborg.

Feminist, Queer, Crip, Alison Knafer

These are the contradictions that we are expected, as Palestinians, to solve within ourselves: to exist without talking about why we exist.

"At the Threshold of Humanity, Karim Kattan for The Baffler

And, its final gut-punch of a sentence:

The world itself echoed in this voice on the phone telling me: there is a solution, if only you weren’t so stubborn, there is a solution, which is to vanish within the contradictions wrought upon you; if only you could disinvite yourself from the world, if only you did not complicate the world with your existence, if only I did not have to talk to you, if only I did not have to listen to you, if only.

But everyone has to start where they are, warts (aka wishes for dick-choking deaths) and all.

"The Place Where You Fall Down", Charlotte Shane's newsletter Meant for You

Expect a language that allows us to see grief as a fleeting shadow out of the corner of one's eye, there and beckoning, waiting for us to be ready.

Dog surgery update: it went OK, she is recovering nicely and we are very relieved! Thank you to people who sent notes of encouragement and well wishes for her.

My mom broke her ankle in a bad fall and it requires surgery*, so I'll be going down to help her out this week. This will either mean a decent amount of reading time or another paltry week, sentences-wise. It mostly depends on my mom's willingness to follow her doctor's orders to rest.

*I worry that it sounds like I am making up the cascade of Bad News of the last...six months, just about? I am increasingly convinced someone has been poking a little voodoo doll of me or something. Hoping that the extra evil eyes I've put up around the apartment provide some cover.