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

There is no science that can explain the British.

“Dishwashing Debates: The Soapy Science Behind Everyone’s Favorite Chore”, Gastropod podcast

Submitted by Ranjit.

I am not Pollyanna and I do not expect, you know, the American Federation of Government Employees to morph into the Zapatistas.

“Lean Into the Punch”, Hamilton Nolan in How Things Work

It's like somebody sniffed glue and hallucinated the normal contents of a desk drawer.

“Can Someone Please Write Normally About This Fascinating Woman?”, Albert Burnkeo for Defector

The Vanity Fair essay that this sentence is talking about has produced very polarized takes! I am willing to give a lot of weirdo prose that swings for the fences some benefit of the doubt, though I agree with Burnkeo that the amount of swinging and missing in the essay is a bit much. I also think that 29 year old white guys who went to Bennington and have parents who can subsidize 9-month long reporting trips are generally more frequently encouraged to swing for the fences than The Rest of Us (a reality further reinforced by the fact that legacy media guys on social media rushed to defend the 29 year old “kid” who wrote the essay; perhaps they recognized the conditions of their own wunderkind ascensions in said “kid”). That, coupled with the highly fucked up dynamics of the essay’s subject matter (and the fact, as Rose pointed out, journalists are haters to the core), made for a perfect shitstorm. Anyway, I feel a little validated for never really getting into Cormac McCarthy now.

When I tell you this Taco Bell is a mirage / I mean it both is and is not a Taco Bell

“When I Tell You the Taco Bell is Haunted Now”, Erin Keane

No bitterness, mine or yours, will build a bridge.

“Perfect Little Baby”, Grace Byron for the Los Angeles Review of Books