A non-perfect sentences but adjacent cross-promotional update: I made a Valentine’s Day zine of dedication pages from books I own. It’s titled Dedication TK. You can buy it here for the book nerd in your life, or for yourself.

Lurk is a Turing-complete language for recursive zk-SNARKs.

“A Programmer’s Introduction to Lurk“

I enjoy how all of these words are technically real words with computer science meanings but also I would absolutely believe this sentence came from a goofy fantasy novel. Good job, nerds.

The poem is something less idiosyncratic and, with luck, more useful; the poem is a map, but after the fact: not a way of getting somewhere, but a record of having been lost, of where that lostness brought me, until what was uncharted country became, for the space of the poem, a place to live.

My Trade Is Mystery: Seven Meditations from a Life in Writing, Carl Phillips

I don’t know if I fully trust that semicolon but (in the way that only poets can do this) it’s clear Phillips is making a decision with that semicolon and we simply have to respect that. Also, I mean: the poem is a map, but after the fact? Just terrific. Some other good sentences from this essay collection:

Prizes are part of the politics that attend art the way flies attend horses.

Living in language includes what’s casually overheard.

Past which, like the sea where the land gives out, yes: a silence opens.

Bonus: this poem by Carl Phillips is maybe my favorite poem ever written, and it’s made up of three sentences and all of them are perfect.

Do you realize that if I posted a video to Instagram and it got 150 views I would kill myself?

Kate by Kate Berlant

This one’s perfection is admittedly more a matter of delivery: it’s said by Berlant onstage in front of an audience of about 150 people who have paid money to see her one-woman show, after watching her repeatedly fail to cry on cue. Reader, I nearly cried laughing at this line as an audience member.

There were more than 500 units in my building — were all of my neighbors sedentary nudists?

“New Yorkers Never Came ‘Flooding Back.’ Why Did Rents Go Up So Much?”, Lane Brown in Curbed

(Spoiler: they were not.)

The next stage in the evolution of the car bomb’s lethality owes something to the Wisconsin Fish and Game Department and the innocent author of Pothole Blasting for Wildlife.

Buda’s Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb, Mike Davis

This book appears to be out of print, which is too bad because it’s pretty interesting. Some other great sentences:

The car bomb, when all is said and done, is an inherently fascist weapon guaranteed to leave its perpetrators awash in the blood of innocents.

(Mike Davis: not known for pussyfooting around the point!)

With so many people trying to kill each other for so many different reasons, Beirut became to the technology of urban violence what a tropical rainforest is to the evolution of plants and insects.

(This sentence follows a comparison of the internecine conflicts of the Lebanese Civil War to fractals and matryoshka dolls, both fantastic metaphors, but the sentence itself is a little clunky.)

To write an introduction to a novel, generally, is like attempting to describe, in advance, the lineage and mechanics of a magic trick to the audience, who will shortly see the real thing for themselves.

Kelly Link’s introduction to a new edition of Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven, published on LitHub

Tasting notes ranged from “peach ring with an emphasis on the ring” to “what Port Authority tastes like.”

“The Brash, Chaotic, Enduring Taboo of Four Loko”, Jaya Saxena for Punch

I have many regrets from the years before I got sober. “Not trying original Four Loko when it was available” isn’t high on the list, but I appreciated this remembrance of essentially the feral, caffeinated precursor of hard seltzer.