A while back as a procrastination activity I started working on an application to The Onion fellowship, which is due tomorrow but I will probably not submit because 1) I'm a coward and probably too old to pivot to comedy writing, and 2) abruptly relocating my life to Chicago for six months for an incredibly cool opportunity also smacks a bit of running away from my current set of problems.
That being said, the writing sample part of the application is a lot of fun—writing a good Onion headline is hard, especially in an era where Onion-esque headline writing has become a weird norm. Because I am a show-off in addition to being a coward, I am sharing my favorite drafted headlines, since a news headline is sort of sentence-adjacent.
- Geologist’s Hinge Profile Way Too Niche
- Federal Trade Commission Blocks Polycule Merger (maybe more of a Reductress joke)
- Local Anorexic Mad Everyone Thinks It’s Just Ozempic (this maybe only works with people who've experienced disordered eating and cope with jokes, and also maybe reads as a callback that betrays just how long I've been reading The Onion)
- Methane Emissions Sick of Being in Carbon’s Shadow
- Nation's Moms Dangerously Close To Finding Out About Chappell Roan
- Movie Star Lab That Engineered Glen Powell Not Sure What Else To Fucking Do Here (Funny probably only to me, because I'm pretty sure Glen Powell is a 3D printed psyop in response to the rise of gangly little rat boys as standard bearers of Hot Men in Hollywood. Every review I've read of movies he's in has this tone of "this guy should be a bona fide movie star" (as though he is not literally starring in the movie being reviewed), almost chiding America for not being completely beside themselves over this 35 year old man in reheated variants of 90s genre movies.)
- Hot New AI Startup Actually Just Some Ghosts in Haunted Data Center
- Healing Crystals Work, File for Union (this is the best one, I think)
OK, back to the actually perfect sentences.
We are beginning to think of democracy not in terms of the history of an idea or the emergence of a social movement, but as the assembling of machines.
Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil, Timothy Mitchell
Sure sure sure reviving a frozen head is great, but how does the frozen head get a credit card?
"Celsius Wants Some Money Back", Matt Levine for Bloomberg
Submitted by George with the comment "This gives me a perfect dystopian 'financialization of everything' sort of vibe."
Based on Edgar's intuition that the puppets are fueled by racist ideology, Markowitz recites a Hanukkah prayer, summoning a puppet to the hotel kitchen; the survivors set upon it an disable it, discovering it to be filled with amethyst.
Wikipedia plot summary of Puppet Master: The Littlest Reich
Just a real rollercoaster of a sentence.
But in the crude day-to-day, there is just that life without history.
"what i'm doing about alice munro", Brandon Tyler in his newsletter sweater weather
Academics are incredible at taking the most radical positions while doing nothing.
I SAID I LOVED YOU AND I WANTED / BOUNDARIES TO DISAPPEAR
"Intifada Incantation: Poem #8 for b.b.L.", June Jordan