Thank you so, so much to everyone who sent words of encouragement, potential gigs, and straight up cash following last week's highly embarrassing plea. That being said, amazingly it ended up being a bit of an out-of-the-frying-pan-into-the-fire situation: I started the week with, I am serious, my 70-something year old lived-in-the-building 43 years landlords informing us they are selling the building and unrelatedly my phone getting bricked. Facing both these events with a negative bank balance would have been far more miserable, so you all helped a lot!

The phone thing has been resolved; the building thing has enough variables in the air (our lease ends in August, sales take time, NYC real estate is a chaos vortex anyway) that in the immediate present I'm just trying to take time each day to appreciate everything I've loved about my home and neighborhood for the last six years. I'm very lucky to have friends and family and neighbors and yes, newsletter readers who have been super kind and supportive. (Also: uh, any leads on apartments that will take giant old dogs welcomed.)

You are ashamed of not grasping what it is to speak of millions of light years?

Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society, Bruno Latour

Nobody told me that this Latour guy is absolutely hilarious. That being said, I instinctively read this sentence imagining the same tone as the infamous "jail for mother" tweet from Patricia Lockwood which may have augmented the comedy. Another great sentence from this book:

Remember that the few men and women sitting inside the Natural History Museums, Geological Surveys, Census Bureaus or other laboratories do not have especially huge brains.

Sewn endbands on a case binding are kind of like putting spinning rims on a $500 minivan: they might look nice, but why go to all the trouble.

"Case Bindings, Part 1" blog post by Henry Hebert

Submitted by Karen. As someone with a BFA in printmaking and a concentration in book arts, I endorse this sentence.

At the beginning of the 1970s no direct relationship existed between larvae and fishermen.

"Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation: Domestication of the Scallops and the Fishermen of St Brieuc Bay", Michel Callon

Maybe it's not merely Latour is funny (though he is) so much as Actor-Network Theory lends itself to extremely funny setups. Runner-up sentences from this paper:

In fact the three researchers will have to lead their longest and most difficult negotiations with the scallops.

A few larvae are considered to be the official representatives of an anonymous mass of scallops which silently and elusively lurk on the ocean floor.

Loosely following the design concept "What if Peter Lorre died and became a debauched ghost?" Boo Berry is the fun-time heathen party animal of the cereal monsters.

"General Mills Cereal Monsters, ranked", Emily St. James for Episodes

Submitted by James.

Around the time the structuralist Ferdinand de Saussure became more famous than the philologist Ferdinand Sommer, the study of the history of words left serious conversations to become etymology, legitimate only for the use of poets, dinner party guests, and the kind of academic everybody resents.

"A Loss for Words", Jo Livingstone for BookForum

There's a fair amount of intellectual insider baseball in this sentence but enough lightheartedness to make it clear that Livingstone understands the game is a bit silly.

There is no way to rationality—to actually existing worlds—outside stories, not for our species, anyway.

Modest_Witness @Second_Millennium FemaleMan Meets_OncoMouse: Feminism and Technoscience, Donna Haraway

Donna Haraway is sort of notorious for her florid and at times totally batshit (non-derogatory) sentences. This is one of the less complex ones linguistically but there's a lot going on: defining rationality as "actually existing worlds", declaring actually existing worlds as stories, offhandedly reminding us that snails are doing fine without rationality thank you very much.

Haraway published this book in 1998 which explains its weird excitement over email addresses; little did she know that email would become a source of exhaustion for most. There's also this great sentence which is a bit long but has some great flourishes and is, unlike the email stuff, hilariously prescient:

Whether unlimited clean energy through the peaceful atom, artificial intelligence surpassing the merely human, an impenetrable shield from the enemy within or without, or the prevention of aging ever materializes is vastly less important than always living in the time zone of amazing promises.

(the time zone of amazing promises!! Donna what the fuck you legend!!)

Both activities generated a large number of often mutually contradictory theories, and as a result medical knowledge consisted of a chaotic diversity of schools of thought.

"The Disappearance of the Sick-Man from Medical Cosmology, 1770-1870", N.D. Jewson

Submitted by Wesley.