I turn in my dissertation manuscript this Friday, which means last week was mostly editing my own sentences. Given the deadline, the I'm aiming for "defensible" sentences in the manuscript more than perfect, so it's not been a very inspired week. Thanks for all of the submissions covering my limited free reading time.
If you cut me open, I’d be just styrofoam and bird feathers.
Rachael Cain as quoted in an article in Gothamist
There is no past, only the forever-now of infinite kill-time.
"Dancing like no one is watching in a panopticon of slop", Aaron Straup Cope on his blog
Killer title on this, also.
Sheer physical and financial impossibility may have killed The Line, but it was always doomed by the assumption that universal human laws could be tossed aside and people would thrive in a sci-fi prison sandwiched between two panes of glass, as if trapped inside their phones.
"The Line was the zenith of our age of insanity", Sam Holden for his newsletter Dispatches from Post-growth Japan
Submitted by Matt.
The other truth, I believe, is that you rise to the level of your training and practice, not to the level of your imagined self.
"We Don't Know Where We Will End Up...", Mariame Kaba for her newsletter Prisons, Prose & Protest
Submitted by Patricia.
On the eve of Mallrats’ October 1995 release, MTV held a splashy premiere party hosted by the veejay Kennedy and featuring live music from Sponge, a sentence so perfectly ’90s that it just Rocked the Vote for Ross Perot.
"'The Little Movie That Couldn’t': ‘Mallrats’ Turns 30", Kate Baker for The Ringer
When a doctor told me I’d come close to dying, and that the play had to stop using real knives, I remember thinking: “You just don’t understand theatre.”
"Experience: I was stabbed in the back with a real knife while performing Julius Caesar", Olly Hawes for The Guardian
Submitted by George.
JCO is a remarkable creature: a literary author who, having shed her former skin as a regular contributor to the New Yorker, found her true calling in her eighth decade of life as the most extraordinary shitposter who has ever lived.
"Musk and Epstein in Hell", Zach Rabiroff for Flaming Hydra
Submitted by Ed.
Thanksgiving, as it tends to be celebrated, is the most honest American holiday: all appetite, no apology.
"The Best Part of Thanksgiving, Bones and All", Helen Rosner for The New Yorker
And in the need to maintain relevance by offering edge, a reader detects thirst and swagger, desperateness and swanning.
“How the Elite Behave When No One Is Watching: Inside the Epstein Emails”, Anand Giridharadas for the New York Times
Submitted by Angela.
He manages to rejuvenate the picked-over corpse of Karl Marx!
"Is everything you ever learned about capitalism wrong?", Hamilton Cain for the Boston Globe
It's the exclamation point that seals this one for me.
In the early days of the Koch administration, there were more deputy mayors than secretaries in City Hall, culminating in a kind of Kochian night of the long knives in which many were removed through no fault of their own.
Stan Brezenoff as quoted in an article in Vital City
Submitted by Natalie.
She doesn't care about cheese in any other shape; the feline mind is unknowable.
"I Have Created A Turkey Fiend", Barry Petchesky for Defector
The album’s emotional range covers the spectrum from light longing to light infatuation, contributing to the overall sense that Nine Track Mind is aimed exclusively at hairlessness: children, prepubescents, the discomfitingly waxed.
Review of the album Nine Track Mind by Jia Tolentino for Pitchfork
Submitted by rrmutt.
Storage: the word itself is dull and flat sounding, like footfalls on linoleum.
Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination, Matthew Kirschenbaum