I am saying that we have, as a species, a deep and unexamined relationship to cubes.
"The truth behind the 2026 J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference", Abhishaike Mahajan for their newsletter Owl Posting
Submitted by Ranjit.
Sometimes, images from my childhood and adolescence would come back to me: my father's shadow slipping away down the corridors of the house as if it were a weasel, or a ferret, or to employ a more appropriate simile, an eel in an inadequate container.
By Night in Chile, Roberto Bolaño, translated by Chris Andrews
an eel in an inadequate container?? Are you kidding me?? There are other very perfect sentences in this book that I did not include here because they were also like three pages long. Few writers can pull off a multi-page sentence quite like Bolaño. Another brief banger:
A patience that seemed to have come from outer space.
Anyways, this is all to say that we live in hell and everything is embarrassing everywhere all the time.
"Was "Stranger Things" season 5 written by AI?", Ryan Broderick for his newsletter Garbage Day
Submitted by Kara.
Only gods and mothers can do that, fool!
This Year: 365 Songs Annotated, John Darnielle
I belatedly decided to start reading each day's entry on the day, which is a nice little ritual. Some runners-up from the days I missed:
Water, windows, fruit: the inviolate early Mountain Goats troika!
Set a scene and put some ghosts in it, then get excited about the ghosts.
I didn't actually mind not having a TV, but once the TV was in the room, the opportunity to be weird about it kind of presented itself.
Talent is a tenant that collects rent.
"A MF MONSTER", John Paul Brammer in his newsletter
Submitted by Rusty.
Give me the ghost of my wife but just the bad parts.
Chris Fleming in a standup set
I think this is perfect absent the context it is the punchline to a riff about mocktails, but that context is quite good.
The past was in no way superior to the present, and what the present is like I have no need to tell you.
The Queen's Necklace, Antal Szerb
Submitted by v.
If finance is the fine print of imperialism, money is its inkjet.
"Counterfeiting Palestine", Hicham Safieddine for The Funambulist
The mechanical typefaces of the series numbers are evidently an additional process, a different color, another layer, but that helvetica 20 intervenes rudely into the intaglio layer of the printing plate itself.
"The Almighty Dollar", Lily H. Chumley for The Funambulist
Forgot what a treat it is to just sit down someplace and Read A Whole Magazine.
What looks like discipline is often just impatience dressed up as process.
The Playbook newsletter
Submitted by Ellen via an email forward; the domain for the newsletter seems to be misconfigured at time of writing so I have no link to the original source.
Watching reasonable people assemble sober arguments for a disaster was, to put it mildly, searing.
"The Folly of Sober-Minded Cynicism", Ta-Nehisi Coates for The Atlantic
You ought not to be rude to an eagle, when you are only the size of a hobbit, and are up in his eyrie at night!
The Hobbit, J.R.R. Tolkien
Submitted by Sam.
Except for the real sickos, most people have always found writing code to be incredibly tedious.
"All Gas Town, No Brakes Town", Rusty Foster in his newsletter Today in Tabs
To paddle the Gowanus of today is to encounter a body of water that is neither fully alive nor quite dead.
"A Super Fund Thing I'll Never Do Again", Olivia Geiger for New York Review of Architecture
The moral is that if you take lots of hard drugs and fuck with the government, everything will work out fine in the end.
My Glorious Defeats, Barrett Brown
I haven't actually started the book but saw this, the last sentence, while flipping through it in a bookstore. (Apologies for the mild spoiler on a book that came out in 2024.)
You just read issue #160 of Perfect Sentences. You can also browse the full archives of this newsletter.
