I’ll tell you right now: I’ve been a writer for most of my life, and we are about as important as a fart in the wind.

"How much money do we think Substack lost last year?", Elizabeth Lopatto for The Verge

Analysis slides off Prince Hat like water off a duck engendered from dark matter.

"Prince Hat Underground", Kelly Link (in the short story collection White Cat, Black Dog)

First read in Kristen Roupenian's review of White Cat, Black Dog in The New Yorker; it was enough to convince me I should own this in hardcover.

President Trump embodies the American people—our psyche from id to super-ego—as does no other figure; his soul is totally bonded with our core values and emotions, and he is our total and indisputable champion.

Statement from the New York Republican Club on Trump's indictment

To be clear: this sentence is perfect in the way that fascists really love to tell on themselves and accidentally provide coherent descriptions of how utterly fucked the project of the United States of America is, but I suspect the writers didn't really understand that's what they were doing. I mean, it's true that no one represents tax-evading settler colonial capitalist fascism quite like a racist scammer real estate scion from Queens! Maybe we categorize this sentence as perfect evidence, the kind of thing a leftist historian in the future will look upon and say "Holy shit, they just outright said this sort of thing?" assuming that we have leftist historians in the future.

Other people's parents are often a delight.

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, Gabrielle Zevin

Simple, perhaps obvious, but its appearance in the text is perfectly arranged. A runner-up sentence that might be perceived as a spoiler, consider yourself warned:

An untethered strip of police tape lent the room a festive feeling.

Yeah Betty, poppets are like super bad now.

The Good John Proctor, Talene Monahon

A lot of the perfection here lies in the hilariousness of the word "poppet" and in the fact I heard this line said in dead seriousness by Susannah Perkins playing Abigail Williams, a 12-year-old girl living in late 1600s Salem, Massachusetts. The Good John Proctor is a play about the events leading up to the Salem Witch Trials which means it is also a play about the other play about the Salem Witch Trials, Arthur Miller's The Crucible. Miller's play (remembered mostly as a pointed commentary on McCarthyism) is notably historically inaccurate in its representation of Williams, who Miller wrote as a volatile 17-year-old seductress presumably to make the affair between her and John Proctor seem less like straight-up grooming and assault (although when you think about it, it still is). The Good John Proctor is not the first play to point out this discrepancy, but it might be the first to center and explore what being a young girl in Salem was probably like (pretty awful!). At the same time, it's incredibly funny thanks in part to Monahon's deft interweaving of contemporary and 17th-century vernacular, exemplified by the above poppets line. I'm really glad I went to see this play during its recent run.