The town that hosts the world’s largest convenience store smells like ass.
"Leave it to Beaver", Forrest Wilder for The Baffler
this man had the pleasure of nothing, besides his own importance
State capacity is not so different from managing the electricity system or, for that matter, cutting carbon emissions, in that there is little political reward for getting it right.
"The U.S. Government’s Screwworm Screw-Up", Robinson Meyer for Heatmap
Submitted by Erik, who noted that "it isn't quite as punchy and evocative as maybe the true "perfect sentence" needs to be", but that the sentence "concisely speaks volumes about governance, expertise, citizenship and even journalism."
If we harvest fog, we are getting rid of our little friends in the air.
Ferran Garcia-Pichel in a statement from Arizona State University
There’s Something Living Inside Fog, Scientists Find
Headline of article on Futurism where I first read the previous sentence
For this we build and train a simple neural network on the videogame Age of Empires II, and note that any entity in a sufficiently-powerful substrate, such as LEGO or the Greater Boston Area, could also present such attributes.
Abstract for "If LLMs Have Human-Like Attributes, Then So Does Age of Empires II", Adrian de Wynter
Some of this is simply the comedy of the research endeavor the sentence describes, but "such as Lego or the Greater Boston Area" is very funny.
There may be an entire town made of pie out there.
"Pie Town Is Calling You", Hamilton Nolan for his newsletter How Things Work
Submitted by Chris.
The gorgeous mosaic of Queens has come together to say, “fine, whatever,” to the casino plan.
"The Null Hypothesis", Jefferson Mao for Urban Omnibus
I lost two cities, lovely ones.
"One Art", Elizabeth Bishop
Re-read this week while trying to remember how villanelles work. When I was a teenager I became very attached to this poem as a lens on my father's early-onset Alzheimer's and eventually on my various self-destructive coping mechanisms; in retrospect I think Elizabeth Bishop might have rolled her eyes at this engagement with her work.
Essentially this small black box eats audio alive, then chews it up and spits it out in what can only be described as a deeply offensive manner.
A since-deleted post on the Circuit Benders shop
Submitted by Paul.
One Sunday afternoon when they awoke for breakfast to find the place full of lesbians, shattered minor poets and self-pity, they looked at each other across the debris and knew, lease or no lease, the time had come to move on again.
The Disenchanted, Budd Schulberg
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