inside the piss bush, i saw half a dozen men pissing. one of them, with his dick in his hand, shouted, "i'm watering the tree of liberty!" and the other piss men cheered.
The Vatican is even shot and lit in pale grays and harsh fluorescents, to honor Conclave’s cultural homeland of Hudson Books at JFK International Airport.
“PopeCrave”, John Paul Brammer for his newsletter ¡Hola Papi!
Runner-up sentence:
I am surrounded by haters, and I am beholden to the rules.
I think of the Supreme Court the way Batman thinks of Superman: an extremely powerful being who is untethered from the laws of physics and therefore must always be considered a threat to free society.
“The Supreme Court Must Be Stopped” Elie Mystal for The Nation
Submitted by John, who also offered up this sentence from the same piece:
These nine people will not stop devouring democracy until there is none left to eat.
I got into celebrity gossip the same way and for the same reason I got into drinking Diet Coke: gradually, and because it was everywhere and also felt like a little treat.
Y2K: How the 2000s Became Everything, Colette Shade
I love real shit and sad jokes.
You Get What You Pay For, Morgan Parker
Submitted by Mars, who notes that The Free Black Women's Library has chosen this book for their online reading group for January 2025.
The air outside smells of exhaustion, and the sky over the palm trees is the color of dirty water from a janitor’s bucket.
“Fires and the Facts”, Matt Pearce in his newsletter
At my first one-to-one with David, I concede I’m struggling to incorporate cancer into the “Who am I?” question: cancer feels like “somebody else’s jumper”.
“‘Silence put my cancer into focus’: how a retreat helped me put my diagnosis into words”, Emma Hall for The Guardian
Yuva actually submitted a fragmenting of this and subsequent sentences:
Cancer feels like ‘somebody else’s jumper’. It fits me, looks good even. But, ultimately, I just cannot believe it’s mine.
Which as a set of phrases is quite resonant but is unfortunately three sentences.
Never imagined I'd be this disappointed that I don't have a living insect in my ear
This is a compelling demonstration that jujitsu and MMA training (or hunting pigs in Hawaii or making your neck real thick or whatever) isn’t going to help you act aggressive if you’re constitutionally bitchmade.
“Mark Zuckerberg lies about content moderation to Joe Rogan’s face”, Liz Lopatto for The Verge
As I told my psychoanalyst recently, my superego looks less like my mother these days and more like the X user interface.
“what the fuck are we doing”, Kate Wagner’s newsletter The Late Review
The idea I keep coming back to is that the big platforms, like Dickens' Marley, were dead to begin with, and are now something particularly bad, which is dead on their feet.
“Bad shape”, Erin Kissane on wreckage/salvage
Runner-up sentences:
A tractor structurally can't spare a thought for the lives of the fieldmice; shouting at the tractor when it destroys their nests is a category error.
The computer dream’s rapidly evaporating and over-salinated shallows are still keeping the tech industry’s dumbest boats afloat, but the platforms have been scraping bottom for years while their owners slap on layers and layers of patches and bilge-pumps and bucket brigades manned by people from former colonies.
Which leaves me wondering: What emotions would the lone occupant of my waifu capsule learn?
“Tiny anime girl cyberprison shown at CES”, Lincoln Carpenter for PC Gamer
Why fight a mist if all that lay ahead was more of the same?
Hummingbird Salamander, Jeff VanerMeer
Via Jeff posting an excerpt of the book on Bluesky, ruefully noting its prescience. These weeks of twilight before the formalizing of fascist authority have been surreal.