Mr. Lochridge, an experienced submersible pilot from Scotland, said he tried to calm his boss down and asked him to hand over the PlayStation controller that was used to pilot the vessel.
“OceanGate Founder Crashed a Submersible Years Before Titan Disaster”, Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs for the New York Times
Honorable mention for this follow-up furthering Lochridge’s characterization as a Man of The Sea:
Mr. Rush obliged by throwing the controller at Mr. Lochridge, hitting him in what Mr. Lochridge called the “starboard side” of his head.
The earth is, of course, a huge place, and obviously it cannot be squeezed into a meeting room for discussion.
Thinking about the Earth: A History of Ideas in Geology, David Oldroyd
This book is very, very out of print which is a shame because it’s a very accessible read on concepts in the geosciences! I am borrowing a copy from my advisor. I think it’s the “of course” that really holds this sentence together for me.
I thought Ramsey wanted to rewatch Alien but he torrented Romulus and said he had made a gcal invite titled "alien baja blast" which he assumed I would understand.
Submitted by Chris. I feel like in general I am disqualified from including my own sentences in this newsletter, but “alien baja blast” is admittedly pretty funny. (Ramsey and I ended up just watching original recipe Alien and man, what an incredible work of cinema. Rewatch it if you have time.)
This book will not kill off cartography by itself; the belief system will likely stagger on among scholarly and lay commentators alike, but I hope to at least severely injure it.
Cartography: The Ideal and Its History, Matthew Edney
Not since the Golden Globes have so many great actors been totally wasted at once.
Review of Saturday Night by David Ehrlich for IndieWire
At night, when you cannot see the hideous shapes of the houses and the blackness of everything, a town like Sheffield assumes a kind of sinister magnificence.
The Road to Wigan Pier, George Orwell
Encountered in the essay “Tailpipe Katabasis” by David Huebert for Hazlitt, which includes its own share of great sentences (see below).
If we look hard enough, almost all of us carry a story like this—a small, quiet, bruise of a story that tells the ubiquitous banality of our proximity to petroculture.
Tailpipe Katabasis” by David Huebert for Hazlitt
Honorable mention:
I am certainly not a pro-oil writer, but I wouldn’t quite say I’m an anti-oil writer either—I’m more of an oil spectator, a bitumen flaneur.
At universities around the country, administrators want us to feel guilt for having a conscience when they have none.
“False Profits: Why I Am Not Teaching in the Classroom This Fall”, Steven W. Thrasher for LitHub
On Monday, I attended a presentation given by the Bangladeshi graduate students in my department about the recent revolution in their home country and their participation in it, both on the ground and as part of the diaspora. There were a lot of people moved to tears, including me. As they spoke, I noticed an email from the office of the university president announcing that the school plans to no longer use its institutional voice to discuss political topics.
It is a fairly obvious marker of my university’s mediocrity that it took them weeks to copycat the more prestigious universities who set this precedent. It isn’t especially surprising and maybe has its upshots (as one person pointed out, fewer meaningless emails from the President’s Office), but mostly it reminded me of the extraordinary gap between what institutions think schools are supposed to be and the extraordinary, mostly under-appreciated work that happens in classrooms.