If all goes well, "BuzzBallz is turning two Pop-Tarts flavors into cocktails" will be the worst thing you hear all day.
"Everything is computer", Andrew Womack for the newsletter The Morning News
Submitted by Travis.
Paul tried to ignore that feeling gnawing at his insides that the world was growing noticeably flatter.
Air, Christian Kracht (translated by Daniel Bowles)
Also very good:
Land, on the other hand, was precarious and indistinct.
(The only exception to this pattern appears to be, for some reason, France, where Gérard de Nerval used to walk a pet lobster on a leash and where Jean-Paul Sartre at one point became erotically obsessed with lobsters after taking too much mescaline.)
"What's the Point If We Can't Have Fun?", David Graeber for The Baffler
Submitted by Angela. Man, I miss David Graeber all the time.
When you expand the boundary of the system to include the people building and deploying it, the case becomes much less science fiction and more like incompetence.
"The System From Nowhere", Eryk Salvaggio from his newsletter Cybernetic Forests
A succinct articulation of a lot of Computer Problems, many such cases.
At first there was, understandably, the suspicion that Ebola was the Hitler of apartheid, but now it has become abundantly clear that Ebola is actually the George W. Bush of being forced to listen to someone's podcast.
Known and Strange Things, Teju Cole
Submitted by Winston.
I've been displaced by geopolitics, like Paddington Bear!
Isa in conversation
Northern France and Belgium still produce a so-called annual “iron harvest” of first world war shells turned up by farmers every spring.
"Europe’s wildfires have raised the danger posed by unexploded WWII bombs", Sarah Njeri and Christina Greene for The Conversation
Submitted by Kira.
It was the culmination of long years of highlighting, for the books were full of sentences that would never be found elsewhere—a phosphorescent signature that no one else seemed to see.
Will There Ever Be Another You, Patricia Lockwood
I'm admittedly a sucker for "phosphorescent" but also this sentence felt very aligned to the whole deal of this newsletter. It was hard to pick even runner-up sentences from this book because there's a lot of really good ones. As an arbitrary constraint here are only ones that start with the letter "B":
Barthes had a particular kind of parenthesis (inside it, you are safe from being hit by a laundry van).
But there was a real emerald, and it was what had really happened, that night she was visited by "all she had ever read or had been told or felt or thought about jungles"; the fact that she had almost died, which she said had separated her from other people for a very long time.
Before she learned of the existence of "alien hand syndrome", she had tentatively diagnosed herself with a new illness called Who Foot Is That.
Sun Tzu wrote a whole book about not giving your ops this much to work with.
Submitted by Kelsey.
Forget your dignities and your directions and the new weight of June
A poem read at the SFPC summer showcase but I didn't write down the author's name, sorry, it was a student in the "Page Against The Machine" class
Are we really going to make Taylor Farms answer for the entire expressive range of the human anus?
"When You Really Think About It, Everything Makes You Poop (by Taylor Farms)", Jack Loftus for McSweeney's
Submitted by Andreas.
Let's be fucking serious.
"Woke What? Let's Be Fucking Serious", Kelly Hayes for her newsletter Organizing My Thoughts
A classic, expertly deployed here.
She felt that no sane wolf in sheep's clothing would have taken such elaborate pains to look like a pantomime wolf.
Meet the Tiger, Leslie Charteris
Submitted by Sam.
Every day, scientists are allowed to publish sentences like, “Many assume there is a close connection between human history and culture (Donaldson 2019)," and yet English departments are the problem?
"Humanists Have Done Nothing Wrong", David Hollingshead for Defector
Submitted by Hugh.
You just read issue #191 of Perfect Sentences. You can also browse the full archives of this newsletter.
