I got back home from two weeks of traveling after a redeye flight from Portland (yes, I regret this). Most of this edition was actually drafted on Friday afternoon and Saturday night at the airport. This is my first time scheduling Perfect Sentences!

The last XOXO festival was bittersweet; the only other one I attended was in 2014 and boy howdy do I feel 37 when I remember being 27. But it was good to see Erin and Peter, whose old apartment I still live in, and see their terrific almost 11 (!) year old kid who I last saw when she was 5. I cried a lot: out of anger, envy, self-pity, awe, grief, joy, and at one point over an old McDonald’s mural. I should try to write out the morass of feelings in greater detail, maybe.

These lived fast, died young, and their deaths drove the cosmic factory of the chemical elements.

The Planet in a Pebble: A Journey into Earth’s Deep History, Jan Zalasiewicz

I don’t love some of the anthropomorphic language applied in the first chapter of this book; describing colliding stars and stuff as “violence” feels like an unhelpful moralizing of cosmic happenstance. But there’s some juicy material more generally and I am interested in the problem of making deep time compelling to people who might otherwise find it sort of dry.

We were so irreplaceable we'd come with replacements.

Blindsight, Peter Watts

Submitted by Wesley.

The ants are one of the true communists out there.

Pepe Mujica in an interview with The New York Times

Life is short, problems are innumerable, but the horizons of the unknown are wider yet.

Pomegranate Roads: A Soviet Botanist’s Exile from Eden, Gregory Levin

Submitted by Matt, by way of Alexis Madrigal’s Oakland Garden Club newsletter.

The trope of a small band of evidence-based individuals facing down the woke mob is a staple of internet discourse, a sort of 300 for the terminally online, but beneath the culture-war name-calling there may be something useful to be excavated from this spat.

“Above Politics”, Hari Kunzru for Harper’s

They measure two things, and then find that when one of them changes the other also changes: this is called a beautiful correlation, and it is pursued with a solemn, dead-pan intensity, as if a correlation were a thing in itself.

Science is a Sacred Cow, Anthony Standen

Submitted by Wesley.

God bless all petty thieves with tins of oysters up their sleeves

“Steal Smoked Fish”, The Mountain Goats

This song takes place, per its opening line, “across the Burnside bridge before anyone shot their movies there.” I took the 20 bus across Portland’s Burnside bridge when I got to town on Wednesday night, which was my first moment of thinking about this song. On my way to meet Nate for dinner a few blocks from my motel I passed by a Plaid Pantry convenience store, which is where the song’s protagonists venture (“two on point, and two on sentry”) to shoplift. I doubt that this song was written about that specific Plaid Pantry, but I thought about the song a lot during the trip.

Dr. Brett Kagan, the chief scientific officer at Cortical Labs, who worked on the Pong-playing brain cells but was not involved in the latest study, said the hydrogel system demonstrates a basic form of memory similar to the way a riverbed records a memory of the river.

“Scientists enable hydrogel to play and improve at Pong video game”, Nicola Davis for The Guardian

Submitted by Justin.

To him all writers were precocious children; creatures to be tolerated and encouraged but not overexcited in case they cried before bedtime.

A Mind to Murder, P.D. James

Submitted by Sebastian, with this additional sentence:

In life he had thought her as graceless and unattractive, and death had lent her no dignity.

As a sometimes-writer who has been on the verge of or consumed by tears a lot in the last 48 hours, this was a bit on the nose but I respect it.