Buffaloed onlookers have groped for precedent.
“Speed Up The Breakdown”, Quinn Slobodian for The New York Review of Books
The future Zuckerberg went on to pitch was a delusional fever dream cribbed most obviously from dystopian science fiction and misleading or outright fabricated virtual reality product pitches from the last decade.
“Zuckerberg Announces Fantasy World Where Facebook Is Not a Horrible Company", Jason Koebler for Vice
Submitted by Wesley.
A kind of wild forest blood runs in your veins.
“Pause”, Mary Ruefle for Granta
By the same token, the ability to dismiss an argument with a “that sounds nuts,” without needing recourse to a point-by-point rebuttal, is anathema to the rationalist project.
“The Zizians and the Rationalist death cults", Max Read’s newsletter Read Max
Submitted by Lionel.
Lorne has lost his fucking mind and someone needs to shoot him in the back of the head.
Tim Robinson, regarding Lorne Michaels’ decision in 2015 to have Donald Trump host Saturday Night Live, as quoted in a Daily Beast article
It’s very easy to imagine Tim Robinson saying this, which adds to the perfection.
If my survival is a betrayal, make no mistake: I'll betray.
“Apocalypse Logic”, Elissa Washuta in the edited volume The Lyric Essay as Resistance: Truth from the Margins
Submitted by Mars.
The adolescent administrative pyromania.
More of a fragment than a sentence but highly resonant.
You’re beginning to learn that there is an upper limit to the amount of caffeine you can consume before having a bad day, digestively.
“The Ideal Candidate Will Be Punched In the Stomach”, Scott Smitelli on his personal website
Submitted by Andreas.
It struck us that the abstraction of distance on a map means very little to a human body, or, in the same way that spatial classification matters most in relation to the ground—what is an acre but how many people can live safely upon it?
“Terra infirma: On the base map in urban cartography and GIS”, Clancy Wilmott and Alexis E. Wood
It felt like getting away with something, and this sometimes is all survival ends up being anyway.
Lessons for the End of the World, Hanif Abdurraqib for The New Yorker
Submitted by Hannah. Some runner-ups, from me:
Despair, too, because of how accessible escape is becoming in a world that requires more rigorous close looking, every day.
The crises have no ego, no desire for acknowledgment.
Heartbroken by his inconsiderate behavior, intoxication, and the fact that he is having sex with so many groupies, Emily leaves him.
Wikipedia entry for the 2001 movie Rock Star
The mild incoherence of this sentence delights me. “The fact that he is having sex with so many groupies” is for some reason not grouped under “inconsiderate behavior”; the writer of this plot grasping blindly through the veil of language unable to recall the word infidelity; the present-tenseness of the phrasing making it sound as though in the moment of Emily’s departure this man is having sex with so many groupies.
I suppose that is, technically, miso ramen. But it’s miso ramen in the same sense that instant coffee is coffee: an upsetting, watery betrayal.
Hokkaido: Recipes from the Seas, Fields and Farmlands of Northern Japan, Tim Anderson
Submitted by Krish.
The professor yearns for the mines.
A student in my class, after I went off on a tangent about minerals during a discussion
I love my students.