I can't remember if I mentioned in previous newsletters that for most of the summer I have been waiting to find out if I would have funding to actually go to my PhD this fall. I did find out I got the funding two and a half weeks ago (thanks, the Sloan Foundation); school starts this week. Mixed feelings, generally. It will probably mean more weird academic sentences and weird primary source research sentences, which could be fun at least.
I have already mentioned that Aristotelian dynamics, in spite—or perhaps because—of its theoretical perfection, was burdened with an important draw-back; that of being utterly implausible and completely unbelievable and unacceptable to plain sound common sense, and obviously contradictory to the commonest everyday experience.
"Galileo and Plato", Alexandre Koryé
I had to read this for the "methods in history of science, technology, and medicine" class I'm taking this semester. We are apparently starting with absolute first principles material, which means a lot of early/mid-20th century readings on the history of Science. I love how this sentence tries to be super diplomatic while also completely ripping into Plato. Get his ass!
Most bones are moist while in use.
A post by @jonrosenberg.bsky.social on Bluesky
Submitted by Chris, with the comment that this sentence "has such an alarming aftertaste that it horseshoes back around."
He and his colleagues fetch a ten-gallon bucket of ice from the freezer and follow the body-bag protocol.
"What a Heat Wave Does to Your Body", Dhruv Khullar for The New Yorker
Submitted by Jason.
(It’s embarrassing to refer to tweets in real life, but since I have to start typing the word Pablo-matic soon, my dignity precedes me.)
"We're Alive, Pablo is Dead", Elisabeth Nicula for Momus
Elisabeth tells the truth in a way that I deeply appreciate. Also she is just so very funny.
In 2014 he married Yael Cohen, an elegant mining heiress whom he met after watching her TEDx talk about founding a cancer charity.
"The Many Faces of Scooter Braun", Anna Silman for Insider
The perfection of this sentence lies in the abject self-parodying behavior of its awful subject(s). A perma-hustling, allegedly toxic talent manager who uses his clients to self-aggrandize? Married a mining heiress? Who he met at a TEDx talk? About her cancer charity? I almost didn't know if I needed to finish reading the story because with this sentence I pretty much immediately understood what kind of guy Scooter Braun is. (I mean, I also kind of understood from the name Scooter Braun—this is a name for a villainous American exchange student character in a Heartstopper fanfic.)
The paragraph with this sentence ends with this one:
Between sun-kissed family beach snaps and workout videos, Braun's Instagram was peppered with inspirational quotes from Marcus Aurelius and Maya Angelou.
I have no stake in the disintegration of this guy or the careers of the celebrities he manages/previously managed, but I appreciate an eye for the absolute worst details.
It is in the turning over of a work, of debating it and viewing it from different vantage points, again and again and again, that something becomes more meaningful than simple escapism or the stimulating of nerve-endings.
"Wayfinding at SFO Museum", Aaron Straup Cope
I have at times described Aaron as one of my "Internet dads" although we are sporadically actually in touch. I respect how much care he puts into everything he does, including posting notes from his conference talks and making his conference talks about things like a technical project for his job at the San Francisco Airport Museum into a broader analysis of cultural heritage institutions.
He would later say that he felt himself melting "into the grayness."
The Anthropocene Reviewed, John Green
Some of the credit here goes to Jerzy Dudek, whose memoir Green quotes here.
I have been listening to the audiobook of The Anthropocene Reviewed, for the second time, because John Green has a reassuring voice which helps when I am extra-anxious (which I am, lately) and also because I agreed to review a book about "the six raw materials that shape modern civilization" and I found the book really annoying. One reason I found it annoying is because it didn't have any sense of personal stakes. There was a lot of talk about the materials that go into "your" phone or "your" electric car or even "your" table salt but the implication seemed to be that these materials are by default taken for granted and through knowing their grand journey from raw mineral commodity to alienated fetishized manufactured commodity one can encounter them with greater wonder and appreciation.
The problem with this approach, to me, is that it neglects the extraordinary intimacy of that which is "everyday." Salt can bring up up all sorts of core memories in people—maybe a family recipe, a chaotic restaurant job, a particularly bad wipeout at a beach and the mouthfuls of saltwater coughed up as a result. (One memory that it brings up for me: the little lunch spot that initially only sold soup that opened near my college my senior year, run by tall gaunt twin brothers who always went light on the salt just in case and always forewarned you of this when they gave you the soup. Their soups were always filling and pretty cheap and they always had vegan soups, so I went there a lot. Since this memory takes place in Baltimore, in addition to salt their tables all had shakers of Old Bay. Delightfully, this place appears to still be in business.)
Phones are where breakups and job offers and world-changing news alerts and political movements have unfolded for millions of people. The reason all of those "blood in your phone/laptop" campaigns attract attention and an emotional response is precisely because of the personal attachments people have to computers! And the wonder or gravity (to me, anyway) comes from simultaneously grasping the personal and planetary registers of the so-called everyday materials, not in treating them as secondary to that experience.
The above sentence doesn't really have anything to do with this critique, it's just a really nice one. This sentence, from the "Sunsets" essay, is maybe more relevant:
I'm scared to even write this down, because I worry that having confessed this fragility, you now know where to punch.
I don't think that John Green should write a Big Systems book (unless he wants to) and I don't think that Big Systems writers should just copy John Green's style—that's not the point. But sometimes I think that the reason people (although let's be honest, it is usually men) writing Big Systems Books so readily treat "everyday" as a synonym for "that which is taken for granted and that people never think about/have no personal attachments to" is because they are afraid of the vulnerability that a different framing might require.