When faced with the truculent realities of flesh and culture, cybernetics collapsed like a flan in a cupboard.
Systems Ultra, Georgina Voss
George is a friend and I am proud of her for putting out this book! While the "flan in a cupboard" part of the above sentence is a tribute to Suzy Eddie Izzard that should be acknowledged, pairing it with "truculent realities of flesh and culture" is pretty great. Some runner-up sentences from the part of the book I've read so far:
As someone with an emotional investment in gigantic machinery, it was wonderful; a personalized springtime festival of infrastructure.
It resembles an architectural turducken, an edifice nested within an edifice.
For me, makerspaces invoke, at best, an Island of Dr. Moreau affair, where folks have space to make their strange beasts in an affectionately chaotic studio while a tiny 3D printer wheezes its guts out in the corner.
Americans are notorious for having a troubled relationship with geography.
The Rare Earth Observer newsletter
This is one of those wildly expensive industry-insider publications (I get the free version) that I can't say I fully agree with politically but is sometimes very useful, and if nothing else its highly snarky tone offers some insight into what rare earth market experts think everyone else is getting wrong.
Longhua starts to feel like the dull middle of a dystopian novel, where the dread sustains but the plot doesn't, or the later levels of a mediocre video game, where the shapes and structure start to feel uglily familiar, where you could nod off into a numb drift.
The One Device, Brian Merchant
Brian graciously joined my CS Ethics class via Zoom this past week to talk to my students who read a couple of chapters of the book. It was really nice! You can read the chapter this sentence is from excerpted in The Guardian. I honestly would have been satisfied with this sentence if it just had the dystopian novel comparison, but the video game comparison stretches it out in a way that makes "numb drift" pay off.
And I flee into myself so deeply it’s like (I can feel myself overusing similes; I can feel the poor quality of this work like I could feel bad paper; I am overladen with metaphors because I cannot hold anything, anything else) being underwater.
"Writing Under Water", Talia Lavin for her newsletter The Sword and The Sandwich
In exchange for the Székelys’ courageous (and not altogether successful) service over several centuries of war, the Székely tribe was accorded special rights, such as tax exemption and, not infrequently, early and gruesome death.
Ballad of the Whiskey Robber, Julian Rubinstein
Submitted by Ranjit. Ranjit also submitted a great two-sentence lineup from this New Yorker article ("I’m going to keep it mysterious. But it’s a clown school."); while it is a great pair I worry that having two-sentence picks will eventually just lead to copy-pasting multiple paragraphs into this newsletter rather than the short and sweet format that we've been working with.
I rather expect this exotic example would not be handled gracefully by most resolvers...
An issue discussion on the Github repository for domain, a Rust library for DNS
Submitted by Wesley. The ellipsis really adds some suspense IMO.