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Bittersweetness is the governing tone as you age.
John Darnielle in an interview with Under the Radar
they’re selling millennial-branded emergency radiation exposure medication (pills you take when nuclear war starts to increase your odds of survival) with buy-now-pay-later options.
Submitted by Kelsey. Perfect in a deeply cursed sense.
Those werewolves aren't even famous.
Creased Comics, Brad Neely
Although it feels increasingly pointless and embarrassing to refute the rantings of a man who increasingly looks and speaks like a Furby, it is still valuable to do so.
"Three Vaccines Is Less Vaccine Than One Vaccine, According To Donald Trump", Sabrina Imbler for Defector
Submitted by Joe.
"there's something weird going on with this whole Dobby pipeline story"
You can't make investors have a hard on for a ramp that doesn't connect to the cloud.
"The "Disability Dongle": Why Silicon Valley Hates Me and you", Robert Kingett for his blog Sightless Scribbles
Submitted by Alyssa.
It is terribly easy to excoriate a book for its bad arguments when you yourself have inserted them into the text.
"No-One Makes You Shop at Amazon", Henry Farrell for his newsletter Programmable Mutter
On the way home, I mainly thought about two things: the speed limit and wigs.
Cloudthief, Nathaniel Rich
I read this quickly because it is a heist novel and that's what heist novels are set up for. I probably should have taken my time to sit with the "data centers circa 2014" of it all.
Some runner-up sentences, arguably more evocative and melancholic than the one selected above and therefore more representative of the text overall:
But desire, as you probably know, is a white liar.
("as you probably know" does a lot here!!)
She closed her eyes—in pleasure, annoyance, acceptance, I couldn't tell and I couldn't ask.
There was no particular thing we were trying to steal, which is another way of saying that we were trying to steal everything.
The financial markets, massive oil companies, the banks that finance them, the travel industry, car companies, your career and job security, the people you’re having dinner with who don’t want to be bummed out, all of these incentives and forces don’t want you to know you are eating a big, weird gourd.
"The Gargantuan Lie That is Collapsing The World’s Climate", Adam McKay for Current Affairs
Submitted by Chris.
I can't be the only person out there staring at these torrents of fish mud and wondering about the tasting notes.
"Let Me And A Food Scientist Sample The Abandoned Fish Sauce Terrorizing A Small Canadian Town", Giri Nathan for Defector
If there's anything Spaniards and Mexicans have always agreed upon, it's that nobody is less qualified to govern than the government itself.
You Dreamed of Empires, Álvaro Enrigue
Submitted by Kalbir.
There’s a sort of turducken of things that I find off-putting all rolled into this anecdote: hippie shit, motivational posters, AI “art.”
"Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t understand how to live", Elizabeth Lopatto for The Verge
Many of the photos are of wild pigeons that the Newmarks have fed over the years, including a recently deceased one that Craig named Ghostface Killah.
"Reluctant billionaire: The elusive Craigslist founder is ready to talk", Drew Magary for SFGate
Submitted by Sean.
The green glow of the airport screens suggested better, faster, next-generation mobile networks, and the lonely Norwegian hut of Ludwig Wittgenstein, and more environmentally friendly oil rigs.
Air, Christian Kracht (translated by Daniel Bowles)
Also very good:
And this is how it really should be in this disgraceful world, with its lack of boundaries, Instagram, and the horrors of vernacular architecture.
A NAS is basically just a toaster for hard drives that you staple to your internet router
"I made a plex server", Henry Desroches on his personal website
Submitted by Nat, who has been such a consistently good sentence submitter over the years that I'm letting this one in despite it actually being the first half of a sentence broken up by a colon.
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