There was a big jump in subscribers over the past week, I think because Daniel Pink highlighted Perfect Sentences in his newsletter. Hello new readers, hope you have a nice time and thanks Daniel Pink, who I've never met and I didn't know was a subscriber.

The waiting room across the hall / was filled with hostile stepsons.

"From Cantos for James Michener: Part II", David Berman

The homeland arrived pre-plated and compliant with state health codes.

"Empire Loves a Dark Sky", Mohamad Naleh for Places Journal

Amazon has since removed the Weirdo and sand tray from sale and said it was investigating the gorillas.

I didn’t know it at the time that I was working with him, but he was kind of like the Marlon Brando of seagulls.

Jaume Collet-Serra in an interview in Vulture (but you can avoid the paywall by going to its cross-posting on Slate)

And to anyone who’s worried they’re going to miss pebbles, don’t worry—you’re going to love sand.

Definitely, the ante continues to get upped in the vulgarity sweepstakes.

Richard Kelly in an interview with GQ

We went to see Wallace Shawn introduce a screening of Southland Tales at Metrograph, because watching Southland Tales on the Fourth of July is a household tradition over here and hearing people involved in its production talk about the film is of great interest to me. The above interview with Kelly, loosely on the occasion of the film's 20th anniversary, came out the day before the screening. America 250/Southland Tales 20 feels a bit auspicious, though some of the GQ piece's claims of clairvoyance are a bit overblown. (The cars in the movie don't look that much like cyber trucks.)

There are two screenings of Southland Tales happening in the coming week at BAM. What I'm saying is the film seems to be having a moment. I cannot say that it is "comprehensible" and many readers will probably find it frustrating to watch, but I do think it is a fascinating and useful artifact for thinking about 21st-century America. If nothing else, in a time where it feels a lot of US cinema is deeply risk-averse it's nice to watch a filmmaker really swing for the fences (even if sometimes he misses).

Whenever there’s some tension around the legality of what people are doing with their bodies, interesting things always happen.

Rennie McDougall in an interview for Urban Omnibus

I actually read this sentence months ago when doing a first-pass edit on this interview.

A correction: in Perfect Sentences 172 I mistakenly attributed a sentence submitted by Joe to Closing Time by Joseph Heller. It was in A Right to Be Merry by Mother Mary Francis, P.C.C. We regret the error.

Voice has no relationship to becoming rock, so the earth cannot remember it.

"Fossil Songs", Laura Marris for The Believer

It became a structure of feeling I could no longer inhabit.

Salt Lakes: An Unnatural History, Caroline Tracey

Runner-up sentences:

I wanted to be a cowboy because I wanted to earn the West like a merit badge.

Violence, if we must, let's talk about it, but by seeing it first for what it is: a word.

"Here and Now for Bobby Seale", Jean Genet for Ramparts, translated by Judy Oringer

Via Zito on Bluesky.

A charismatic technology shapes the whole field around it, the way a magnet organises iron filings.

"AI got the blame for the Iran school bombing. The truth is far more worrying", Kevin T. Baker for The Guardian

Submitted by Anne.

The high sign that rules this summer is increasing fragmentation.

"Apartheid U.S.A.", Audre Lorde

It’s like watching a squirrel try to disarm a nuclear weapon—no surprise that he fails to do it, but the reader is left wondering why he even wanted to try.

This was not an especially adept reading week for me because I was at a conference and conference brain does not lend itself to a lot of close reading. Thanks to people who sent submissions!

A situation called scrotum catastrophe, in which the entire population of the empire ends up enclosed in a transparent pouch, in a situation of theoretical stalemate and of grave physical and psychic discomfort.

"On the Impossibility of Drawing a Map of the Empire on a Scale of 1 to 1", Umberto Eco in the collection How to Travel With a Salmon and Other Essays

There is within me an unslaked hunger for preposterous adventure movies.

Roger Ebert's review of The Mummy

Anyone clothed by the US is literally NAKED!

This was what I expected both from the examples of previous editions and from a press release emphasizing “transition,” “mood and texture,” “tenderness,” and other words that are not ideas.

Review of the 2026 Whitney Biennial by R.H. Lossin for e-flux Criticism

I would say somehow a six-foot dandelion stumbled on some cocaine and tore itself out of the earth.

I paused, considering that I had been playing a reasonable game of chess for two weeks with a naked baby.

The Writing Life, Annie Dillard

The snow is like, the color of horrific industry, just a grotesque dark gray.

The placated, brainrotted viewer is expected to see only the projection, to imagine themselves into the role of kevlar-swaddled goon, even as they flop onto the couch in cheap sweats, furiously tapping buttons, the only muscles getting exercised the ones in their thumbs.

"Pseudo-culture", Mandy Brown on her blog A Working Library

Unfortunately cones don’t work on baby giraffes, they end up turning Greyhounds into the Pixar lamp.

Middle seat is a ham sandwich, and there is nothing to see out the reinforced windows, just the undigested blur of the nation.

John Henry Days, Colson Whitehead

I picked this up from a used bookstore while in DC last week, helping out my mom following a partial knee replacement. This is early on in the novel and it feels a little cheap to go with an opener, but it's really great. I love that the protagonist having this thought realizes further down the page that he hasn't eaten in a while.

Some other great sentences:

A shorter entry this week, though I've realized that over the last year this newsletter has gotten longer and longer as submissions have become more frequent.

[Disclosure: Prior to his election, the author was Councilor Green’s DM in a Dungeons & Dragons campaign.]

"How to tear gas children", Sarah Jeong for The Verge

And anyway, pleasure and menace are not so contradictory.

Elisabeth Nicula's letter from the editor in issue two of the San Francisco Review of Whatever

it was chaos, like a country collapsing in the midst of a civil war, or mid-2010's Google.

It can feel kind of slapstick, until you remember that they will destroy someone’s life today, and that they can kill you.

"ICE vs. Everyone", Erin West for n+1

I read this essay on Monday; on Saturday, ICE murdered Alex Pretti in broad daylight on the street in Minneapolis.

I am saying that we have, as a species, a deep and unexamined relationship to cubes.

"The truth behind the 2026 J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference", Abhishaike Mahajan for their newsletter Owl Posting

Submitted by Ranjit.