I'm going to be in the Bay Area June 17-27 to do dissertation interviews, which will likely reduce my time to do perfect sentence collecting. Submissions strongly encouraged in the coming days.

They belonged to a race quite capable of admiring its own image in a mirror, and equally capable of cutting its own throat before the altar of some tribal god, such as the deity of Daily Shaving.

A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter Miller

Submitted by Anne, with credit to the Shelved By Genre podcast for “bringing [her] back to this banger.”

In one way or another, from Plato on, utopia has been the big yang motorcycle trip.

“A Non-Euclidean View of California as a Cold Place to Be”, Ursula K. Le Guin

A runner-up sentence:

One of our finest methods of organized forgetting is called discovery.

Since his youth just about everyone around him has despised him because he has always been a miserable racist little shit whose evil heart is manifested in his detestable rodent-like visage.

“You're a Bunch of Cowards!”, Hamilton Nolan for his newsletter How Things Work

Submitted by Chris.

If I could make you understand that, I could make you understand California and perhaps something else besides, for Sacramento is California, and California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension; in which the mind is troubled by some buried but ineradicable suspicion that things had better work here, because here, beneath that immense bleached sky, is where we run out of continent.

"Notes From a Native Daughter", Joan Didion

I am overdue on submitting a commissioned essay for an artist's exhibition catalogue (a series of uncanny photo collages of drone imagery of Silicon Valley Superfund sites) so I went back to Didion and Le Guin to try and get back into California Brain. While I did grow up in Silicon Valley, at this point I have no family left there and have spent a little over half of my life in the mid-Atlantic so I don’t feel like I have much of a claim to “know” it any better than anyone else. I cannot tell if the Bay Area is a fundamentally dissociative place or I just spent a lot of my childhood and adolescence dissociating.

The enduring emptiness of our technology debates has one main cause, and his name is Tim O’Reilly.

“The Meme Hustler”, Evgeny Morozov for The Baffler

I returned to this 2013 essay this week because of some things I’ve been thinking through for the dissertation (mostly around open source and how its political porousness is low-key great for capitalism). I still hold it against Morozov that he ripped off Eden Medina’s work back in the day when he first wrote about Cybersyn, but will admit that he is a top-tier hater in prose and this is still kind of the most thorough critical read of O’Reilly’s legacy.

(IMO Morozov gives Richard Stallman and the free software movement more political coherence than it actually had and it’s weird to read about Richard Stallman without mention of his extraordinary creep behavior, but I think that Morozov wanted an easy “things could have been different” narrative and Stallman’s shittiness wasn’t entirely common knowledge back in 2013.)

It was also kind of sad reading this in 2025 with O’Reilly significantly diminished from its 2013 state: no more conferences, no more printed books, mostly in B2B (selling platform subscriptions to other companies so their software teams can I guess use it for learning and stuff). Also they seem to be going hard on AI, which is embarrassing.

Before ChatGPT distorted Eugene Torres’s sense of reality and almost killed him, he said, the artificial intelligence chatbot had been a helpful, timesaving tool.

“They Asked an A.I. Chatbot Questions. The Answers Sent Them Spiraling.”, Kashmir Hill for the New York Times

Submitted by Daniel.

Owning the Roman Empire, even if it was only for a total of sixty-six days, sounds wonderfully romantic; a real business coup.

The Business, Iain Banks

We live in a golden age of Ancient Greek accentuation, which Dieu’s excellent tome helps us celebrate.

Review of Traité d’accentuation grecque, by Jesse Lundquist, for the Bryn Mawr Classical Review

Submitted by Evan.