The homeland arrived pre-plated and compliant with state health codes.
"Empire Loves a Dark Sky", Mohamad Naleh for Places Journal
Amazon has since removed the Weirdo and sand tray from sale and said it was investigating the gorillas.
"Five toys on sale in Britain found to contain asbestos in tests for Guardian", Anna Tims for The Guardian
Submitted by John.
Suddenly I felt happy, immensely happy, capable of anything, although I was aware that meanwhile all that I believed in was collapsing forever, and that many people, several friends of mine among them, were being hunted down or tortured.
Distant Star, Roberto Bolaño (translated by Chris Andrews)
There are many ways that the current moment in the United States is not Chile in 1973, but this sentence resonated quite a lot. Other bangers from this novella:
In any case, wrote Bibiano at the end of his letter, no one deserves to be killed for writing badly, especially not under the age of twenty.
Under Stalin, his pathetic existence could have inspired a great picaresque novel, but in Latin America in the '70s, it was just a pathetic existence, full of little acts of meanness, some of which were not even intentional.
Better to become an undercover poet.
The fragment containing the erudition of the "promising poet Carlos Wieder" broke off abruptly, as if Ibacache had suddenly realized he was stepping into a void.
Sooner or later, we trust the disappointment more than the dream.
"St. Paul Remade Human History. How Did He Do It?", Adam Gopnik for The New Yorker
Submitted by Levi.
I know that David Blaine shouldn't be trusted on these kinds of quests.
"Discussing Skateboarding with Werner Herzog", Jenkem Magazine
the doppler effect of his whiny voice as car crested the hill was saddest sound in the world
Submitted by Jesse.
Out of a desire to understand male/female interaction in our matrix, I procured an online AI girlfriend.
Paul Schrader on Facebook as quoted in Variety
Not a sentence included as an endorsement of Shrader (who, as the article notes, was accused of sexual harassment and assault in 2025), but kind of a perfect encapsulation of him as a particular kind of guy. "I procured" is doing a lot of work here.
Because witchcraft is like 180 from God.
A student writing about The Crucible
Submitted by Joe, from his grading pile.
There are some outlier lines that hint at abundance or gluttony—your lines of coke or conga—but lines generally broadcast supply problems: breadlines, Cuban bodega lines, embargo-era gas lines.
"Whose Line is it Anyway?", Zach Helfand for The New Yorker
Submitted by dfg.
I mean absolutely no disrespect to the clown community but every time I leave the house I feel like I am uncomfortably close to accidentally winding up at an orgy where everyone honks each other's noses
the only thing i'll miss is that i've met some absolutely god damn wonderful people who are angels in spite of a land consumed by the spirit of adolf hitler.
Submitted by Natalie.
The goal of a tech company is never to be quite a customer, and never to be quite a vendor, but rather to be an elastic, membranic tissue through which other tech companies touch each other, collapse into each other.
"Very Big Tech", Marek Poliks and Roberto Alonso Trillo for Spike Art Magazine
As one of the grouchy Marxist literalists the authors take aim at in this essay, I have some points of disagreement (i.e., land and resource grabs are not incidental implementation details in speculative money-into-money schemes) but I do think de-centering the surveillance capitalism narrative that valorizes consumer data traces as economically critical alchemical force as opposed to sideshow of a broader B2B apparatus is a fair point that deserves more consideration.
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