Testing the waters: if I made an end of year "2023 in best sentences" zine compilation of this first year of the newsletter, would you like a copy? I briefly considered creating an end of year "best sentence of 2023" bracket tournament but realized that there were simply too many for that to be practical and anyway, it feels weird to make the sentences compete when they are all Perfect.

Controversy came quickly to the cyborg.

Feminist, Queer, Crip, Alison Knafer

In the history of hot, stony detectives, there have been those as slick as Reacher, those as quick as Reacher, but absolutely no one’s neck has been quite as incredibly thick as Reacher’s.

"Exactly How Big is Jack Reacher in 'Reacher'?", Jodi Walker for The Ringer

Submitted by v, who said this was a second submission for the week but I can't find the first one (probably because my Mastodon server crashed for a few hours this week). Anyway, the song "Gaston" in Beauty and the Beast walked so this sentence could run.

Nerve cells (tendrils in this microscope image) turned to glass inside the brain of a young man who died in Mount Vesuvius’ A.D. 79 eruption, preserving these neurons for nearly 2,000 years.

"These human nerve cell tendrils turned to glass nearly 2,000 years ago", Laura Sanders for Science News

Submitted by Keith.

Owner [REDACTED's] quest for an efficient solution to combat bird damage led him to the cutting-edge laser bird deterrent, [REDACTED].

A screenshot of a PR email my journalist friend Michael received and posted to his Instagram stories, subject line "Bird Laser Video Goes Viral: Oregon Vineyard Protects Grapes from Birds"

There's a lot going on here. I would take points off for the repetition of "bird" but "combat bird damage" and "laser bird deterrent" are both pretty good.

Since each of us was several, there was already quite a crowd.

A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari translated by Brian Massumi

I had to read this for class and honestly, some of it is beautifully weird but I really feel like I'm supposed to be on drugs while reading it (there's a whole genre of academic writing that nobody wants to admit you're supposed to read on drugs and I think a lot of people would be less stressed out by academia if they knew about the drugs part). Other winning sentences:

In a book, as in all things, there are lines of articulation or segmentarity, strata and territories; but also lines of flight, movements of deterritorialization and destratification.

Animal and plant, couchgrass is crabgrass.

If I had to guess, his ashes are in a house in Tennessee where I am neither welcome nor unwelcome.

Untitled blog post, Emma Stamm

Submitted by Wesley.

If legal heterosexual marriage was at the heart of plant life, then Linnaeus was thorough in placing "sex" at the heart of plant taxonomy—plants that reproduced through vegetative and clonal means were deemed asexual, and non-seed-bearing plants such as ferns, mosses, algae, and fungi were grouped together within Cryptogamia (plants that marry secretly).

"Reimagining Reproduction: The Queer Possibilities of Plants", Banu Subramanian and Madelaine Bartlett

The key takeaway of this reading for me was, basically, that Linnaeus was a very horny scientist who saw boring heterosexual sex everywhere. Also: plants that marry secretly !