(When I was three months on testosterone, I flew to California to end a five-year relationship, tried cocaine, and briefly stopped speaking to my family.)
"Jane Schoenbrun Finds Horror Close to Home", Holden Seidlitz for The New Yorker
What I love about this sentence is that it could be an opening sentence in a very different essay but is instead a parenthetical in a profile. It's important in profile writing to strategically acknowledge one's own subjectivity—how to make yourself known in the text without making the profile About You Entirely—because a profile is in part about comprehending the gap between how a profile subject wants to be known and whatever the profile author is bringing to the table.
I was to close out the conference with a thirty-minute speech to an audience of five hundred — a sort of valedictory of grievances, I gathered.
"An Age of Hyperabundance", Laura Preston for N+1
Submitted by Heather. Some runner-up sentences I enjoyed:
Their conversations bounced around me in jolly rat-a-tats, but the argot evaded interpretation.
The graphics, curiously alike across the displays, were a combination of Y2K screen saver abstractions and the McGraw Hill visual tradition.
She was not even a person in the database, but a hysterical pronoun.
Is ink piss?
I watched maybe two-thirds of this on a plane from San Francisco to New York, on closed caption because I only had wireless headphones and on principle did not want to pay $7 for wired headphones from the airline. (Watching the clip later, with sound, was somewhat enlightening.)
Was this movie "good"? No, of course not. Was it good in a camp sort of way? Honestly, also mostly no. But Jason Momoa and a sassy octopus sidekick is definitely camp, and having Jason Momoa ask "is ink piss?" after being sprayed by the sassy octopus is certainly camp. Feels related to the "My Octopus Girlfriend" essay included in last week's sentences. (See also: Tilda Swinton voicing a horny octopus on The Boys.)
And in time we come to see that not only are we on the sidelines of the universe but that it’s of a universe of sidelines, that there is no centre, just a giddy mass of waltzing things, and that perhaps the entirety of our understanding consists of an elaborate and ever-evolving knowledge of our own extraneousness, a bashing away of mankind’s ego by the instruments of scientific enquiry until it is, that ego, a shattered edifice that lets light through.
Orbital, Samantha Harvey
Submitted by Suzanne.
Perhaps turning to magic or the occult is also one of the last few options to reclaim a sense of agency as so little else seems available to counter the current direction of travel.
Sigil Séance Against Space Billionaires, Lucile Olympe Haute and David Benqué
Submitted by David, with this runner-up:
Future goal: peer-to-peer séance infrastructure using WebRTC
Why the pigeon decided to reciprocate his feelings remains a mystery.
Unknown text I took a screenshot of, probably from Mari's Instagram Stories
This world bruises us into retreat.
"Notes from Therapy", We Alive, Beloved: Poems, Frederick Joseph
For want of it, our so-called philosophies are castles of cards, erected today, blown down to-morrow.
Our Planet, Its Past and Future, William Denton
Encountered as an epigraph in Dana Luciano's How the Earth Feels. Mostly perfect for "castles of cards", a nice alliterative alternative to houses.
The Swede-American caught Adalberth’s attention last year when he voiced a short documentary on the financial value of nature.
"Hollywood star Alexander Skarsgård is Spotify’s new voice of conscious capitalism", Ryan Hogg for Fortune
While I understand it is probably just a description of his dual citizenship, repeatedly describing Alexander Skarsgård as a "Swede-American" is very funny to me. Also this sentence implies that a Swedish tech guy didn't know about Alexander Skarsgård, the well-known Swedish (sorry, Swedish-American) actor, until seeing some documentary short he probably narrated as a pro bono gig.
The headline for this article feels a little like a perfect sentence, though I think if they'd called him "Hollywood Swede-American star Alexander Skarsgård" it would have been truly perfect.