Sheep ate men, in middle America just as in England.
Truncated quote of Immanuel Wallerstein’s The Modern World-System Vol. I in “Environmental Crises and the Metabolic Rift in World-Historical Perspective”, Jason W. Moore
Turns out this is part of a longer sentence in Wallerstein, which is fine, but not quite as punchy.
This is in part because fascism isn’t just a form of social and political organization but an idea about the future—hence you can have fascists without fascism just as you can have communists without communism.
“Fascism Late, Early; Fascists Now, Then”, Jasper Bernes for the Brooklyn Rail
The history of the world is, you could argue, the history of advances in the technologies of organizing the collective to various ends: the nomadic tribe, the citadel, the infantry battalion, the joint-stock corporation, the group text.
Sarah Thankam Matthews’ contribution to “GROUP CHAT: Group Chats” in the Los Angeles Review of Books
When I walked into the funeral home, there were more flies around the single standing spray of flowers than people in attendance.
“Love in the Time of Hillbilly Elegy”, Justin B. Wymer for LitHub
Tied maybe with this sentence, though its perfection is less evocative and more starkly precise:
Vance doesn’t know who he is, so he sells a version of himself he thinks will afford him more power.
In other words, we are discovering the inevitable idiosyncrasies of everyone's individual setup, the vagaries of various operating systems, the intrinsic difficulty of following documented steps in a procedure, the hidden bits of implicit knowledge or not-fully-articulated steps that are nevertheless necessary, the high prevalence of ordinary error and failure in everyday life, and the awful grip of chance on human affairs in general.
Slide from “Modern Day Plain Text Computing”, a course taught by Kieran Healy
Submitted by v.
I do not think we can include the Rocketeer (1991) in this list because frankly I don’t think the titular hero was weird enough; he was like the least weird guy in the whole movie.
“038 - Birdy (1984)”, kit buckley’s newsletter the unbearable weight
And you know, all my expectations turned out to be wrong: both the expectation that nobody would have studied cat phonology in any systematic way, and the expectation that, if anyone had studied it, they would have reached some kind of clear answer about what sounds are articulable by a cat.
“Interesting Abyss, Where Are You?”, Elif Bautman’s newsletter The Elif Life
Submitted by Robin.
“Welcome to Bad Vibes Abbey, everyone here is a fucking monster, glad you came on hog blood day”
Steven Spielberg did not bless us with the summer movie season so that we could watch $200 million TV shows.
Outlaw Vern’s review of Deadpool and Wolverine
Submitted actually last week by James but I lost track of it while traveling, sorry James!