Several weeks ago, much to my extreme displeasure, I found myself at Erewhon, staring balefully at an $88 jar of electric blue sea moss gel.

“Nowhere, Man”, Anna Merlan for Flaming Hydra

I could only hope that future historians would get it right: whatever came next in the wreckage of empire, the $20 strawberry was not to blame.

“I tried the viral $20 strawberry. It tasted like the end of the American empire”, Lois Beckett for The Guardian

Via the Anna Merlan essay linked above, feel bad I didn’t catch this essay when it ran a few months ago. Some nice symmetry to the fact that the Merlan sentence is the opening line and this is the closing line of Lois’.

All it can do is assemble probability chains from old Usenet threads and public-domain IKEA instructions.

“The Beast”, John Birmingham from his newsletter Alien Sideboob

Submitted by Neil. Hell of a title for a newsletter, IMO.

He withers in the sunlight of facts.

Cynthia Nixon as quoted in the New York Times

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Nixon was speaking here about Andrew Cuomo.

I am not afraid of death, but I am increasingly worried that these maniacs are going to kill us all.

“We’re Not Going to Colonize Mars”, John Warner for his newsletter The Biblioracle Recommends

Submitted by Ed with this runner-up sentence:

Who needs an Earth when you can be a brain in a jar?

A federal office is a veritable jungle gym for a writer’s eye, as every room and detail is telegraphing DO NOT NOTICE.

“Low-Risk Flier”, John Paul Brammer in his newsletter of the same name

I was listening to a video of it — for research purposes — and if you don’t have the mental fortitude to click in and listen for yourself I would describe the experience as a quarterly performance review describing sex the way a corporate help line would help you rebook a missed plane ticket.

“Drowning in "burrito taxi" discourse”, Ryan Broderick for his newsletter Garbage Day

Submitted by Wesley last week but I missed it.

My vow to ignore her because she worked in the defense industry had been derailed by the inconvenient fact that the two of us were soulmates.

“Pirates of the Ayahuasca”, Sarah Miller for n+1

If boredom, as Walter Benjamin wrote, is “the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience” – if boredom is a crucial spur to activity, to the capacity to surprise oneself with one’s thoughts and impulses – then one consequence of the last decade or so of technological and cultural change has been the total destruction of that dream bird’s natural habitat, cleared for the strip-mining of the dopamine that drives the attention economy.

“‘The Mozart of the attention economy’: why MrBeast is the world’s biggest YouTube star”, Mark O’Connell for The Guardian

Submitted by Julia.

The Vietnam War was possibly the most well-orchestrated and skillfully managed bad idea in history.

Arriving Today: From Factory to Front Door — Why Everything Has Changed About How and What We Buy, Christopher Mims

I don’t know how I feel about a book title having both a colon and an em dash.

Also, both works — and I don’t know what to do with this — contain long speeches about lakes.

“A Storied Black Family Faces Itself in Purpose”, Jackson McHenry for Vulture

He is an original nepo baby: a sapling carved after his mighty oak father, Kirk, down to the indentation on their chins.

“What Is Wrong With Men? Let Michael Douglas Explain.”, Alexandra Jacobs for the New York Times

Chris submitted the title of this book review as a diptych of perfect sentences; while together they are pretty great I went with this one from the actual text.

Even more interesting for our purposes is the fact that Richelieu included provisions for his cats in his will, although they were offered only monetary allotments and not positions in government.

Marx for Cats: A Radical Bestiary, Leigh Claire La Berge

Submitted by Sophie.