This was also a real boom time for unsalted Legume Surprise and macrobiotically balanced grain mush that tasted like macrame owl.
"Blue skies over Mastodon", a blog post by Erin Kissane
This was the first sentence I added into the draft of this week's entries even before Miikka submitted it. All hail macrame owl.
But even with the defenestration of the hammer brigade, people continued to yell at Matt Yglesias, who continued to be unable to block them.
"Bluesky showed everyone's ass", Sarah Jeong for The Verge
Apologies for repeated Platform Content in this week's entry, but "defenestration of the hammer brigade" cannot go unacknowledged.
The repeating fluorescent strips shining a hard white light on every cubby like a Dan Flavin nightmare.
"Merchandizing the Void", Kelly Prendergast for Dilettante Army
Some great atmosphere in this essay.
The ordinary tasks of being an artist transform relatively inarticulate materials into a fluent object.
"Bad Reviews", Elisabeth Nicula for Momus
What I love about this sentence is it captures a lot of what I love about Elisabeth's writing and artwork: it's weirdly graceful and poetic while still grounded and genuine.
What is this knowing, portentous tone supposed to achieve, other than the reader’s gradual lobotomization?
"The New New Reading Environment", a letter from the editors at N+1
I've been wanting to get back to pitching stories now that I'm out of thesis writing. While this essay is more about the landscape of things to read online, as a writer it made me think about how much about publishing stuff online has changed in the last decade. If I wanted to pitch the essay I wrote in 2014 about the activists who destroyed GPS satellites as an anti-war action in the early 1990s today, I have absolutely no idea where I'd even take it. It's too weird and unpegged to anything newsy for the current tech section of The Atlantic (and I suspect the only reason The Atlantic took it back in the day is because Rob Meyer probably put in a good word for me and because I had recently been fired from a tech job, which meant I had enough severance pay that I could afford being paid next to nothing for the essay—I think it was $250).
It's not entirely that there's a total lack of outlets for elliptical, timely-but-not-necessarily-newsy writing (the previous two perfect sentences in this week's newsletter, for instance, would fall into that category) but it does feel like there's less space for it. I think it has to do with something the N+1 essay gets at, which is the way that so much of the current landscape of online publications attends to an ultra-urgent now, the now more than ever that has prefaced every fundraising email since 2016. Back to zines for me, I guess.
I grew up on a false plateau I took for infinity.
Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock, Jenny Odell
Cute segway into talking about the time book, huh? There are other great sentences in this, but I read it in fits and starts over a couple of months and only finished it this week. I only sometimes remembered to underline or highlight things. I probably will need to reread it. Here's a good sentence from the same section the above sentence comes from.
To look into the future is to look around; to look around is to look into history—at not the apocalypse coming but the apocalypse past, the apocalypse still unfolding.
I remain wary of a sentence that has both a semicolon and an em-dash, but the sentiment is excellent. I find that wading through the stuff of history is a good way of unsticking time from linear convention. When I make the effort to go look at archival primary sources it becomes apparent that whatever linear narrative I'd been told about some historical event was actually much more complicated and weird and contested, and entangled with lots of weird right-now stuff. I'm glad that Jenny has found a niche writing books like this; for my own selfish sake I hope the market has room for more.