It was, by his account, a no-brainer, and it does seem as though the number of brains involved was narrowly circumscribed.

"Did Starbucks Really Put Olive Oil in Coffee?", Gideon Lewis-Kraus for The New Yorker

Submitted by v, with this runner-up that v claims is less funny out of context but it made me laugh before I actually read the story:

There was little to say but that it tasted like a large spoonful of olive oil in coffee.

On a neon sign in Biomilq’s office, the words “MAKING MAGIC” hang beneath the curve of a decorously abstract lactating breast.

"Milking It", Molly Fischer for The New Yorker

I went to high school with Molly and while the extent to which we stay in touch is largely failing to schedule a book club, it's nice to see her continue to write delightfully good sentences that clearly come from a joy at finagling language. (Molly is a very joyful person for someone who once eviscerated Pamela Paul.)

In that moment Ged understood the singing of the bird, and the language of the water falling in the basin of the fountain, and the shape of the clouds, and the beginning and end of the wind that stirred the leaves; it seemed to him that he himself was a word spoken by the sunlight.

A Wizard of Earthsea, Ursula K. Le Guin

I'm currently listening to the audiobook version of this as my thing-to-listen-to-while-doing-chores, and the version available from my library is narrated by the science fiction writer Harlan Ellison. Based on poking around online it seems like his performance is divisive—Ellison is a very dramatic and exaggerated reader, which is a bit much for some. I find delightful. It just sounds like he's having a ball with this wonderful novel! The astonishment in Ellison's voice with this particular sentence is really lovely; he seems to be expressing both Ged's wonder and Ellison's own marvel at Le Guin's ability to craft a world.

Every historian of the multitude, the dispossessed, the subaltern, and the enslaved is forced to grapple with the power and authority of the archive and the limits it sets on what can be known, whose perspective matters, and who is endowed with the gravity and authority of historical actor.

Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicalsl, Saidiya Hartman

I'm currently working on a thesis that tries to fill a gap in the Historical Record by reading between the lines of that same gap-filled record. My advisor recommended I go back to Hartman, whose work isn't about indigenous miners in mid-century Brazil and central Africa but does grapple with the limitations of (extremely serious academia voice) The Archive.

How fleeting are all human passions compared with the massive continuity of ducks.

Gaudy Night, Dorothy L. Sayers

Actually encountered in a screenshot from Tumblr, on an Instagram meme account, probably shared by Courtney who always finds the Good Memes.