Look at that, we've been doing this newsletter for a whole year! Many thanks to readers who have been part of this little side project to help me be a more attentive and appreciative reader. Also a huge, huge thank you to folks who have reached out in various ways during periods of financial and general life instability this year.

“Not everybody enjoys killing monsters in dungeons,” said Isaac Childres, the designer of Gloomhaven, which is about killing monsters in dungeons.

"The Personal, Political Art of Board-Game Design", Matthew Hutson for The New Yorker

This must be our constant betrayal, to know now that the lyric is not as valuable as the polemic.

"Notes on Craft: Writing in the Hour of Genocide, Fargo Nissim Tbakhi in Protean Magazine

—you would have said, "this peat is as salty as a day's honest work, and as sweet as the first sip of vodka past my lips at sundown"

Starting from the point of view of Euclidean spacetime, the spacetime vectors and spinors that are related by Wick rotation to Minkowski spacetime degrees of freedom behave differently than usual, with a distinguished imaginary time direction.

Summary of a recent talk by Peter Woit on his blog

Submitted by kad. I think of myself as sometimes operating in a "distinguished imaginary time direction."

Then I know that there are still pleasures amidst the terrors of indeterminacy.

The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing

Re-reading this for school and liking it more than I did the first time around, maybe because I'm older and understand what the book is doing more.

Some other contender sentences:

Maps are slippery customers.

"Deconstructing the Map", J.B. Harley

Listening to these ghosts can quickly become a cacophony of demands and seemingly irreconcilable desires.

This past week was hard even though nothing especially bad happened—if anything, the last few weeks have brought small reprieves from the key stressors I've been dealing with the last few months. But learned helplessness has set in from the stress barrage, which makes faith that things will (continue to) improve pretty difficult. (To be fair: there's still a genocide happening and with each day we're inching closer to the re-election of a fascist into the White House, so doubting a linear narrative of progress is pretty reasonable!)

For now I seem to be out of the mindset where I'm absolutely convinced I have to kill myself, but it's been pretty touch and go all week. This is, to be clear, not a new phenomenon for me, and I don't share it to shock so much as to be accountable for dealing with it. More on this later in the newsletter.

Anyway, this scary mindset and my attempts to get out of it is visible in some of the sentences that stood out to me this week: lots of stuff about shared risk and collective organizing, taking actions to retain one's integrity no matter how small they may feel in the grand scheme of things.

Testing the waters: if I made an end of year "2023 in best sentences" zine compilation of this first year of the newsletter, would you like a copy? I briefly considered creating an end of year "best sentence of 2023" bracket tournament but realized that there were simply too many for that to be practical and anyway, it feels weird to make the sentences compete when they are all Perfect.

Controversy came quickly to the cyborg.

Feminist, Queer, Crip, Alison Knafer

These are the contradictions that we are expected, as Palestinians, to solve within ourselves: to exist without talking about why we exist.

"At the Threshold of Humanity, Karim Kattan for The Baffler

And, its final gut-punch of a sentence:

The world itself echoed in this voice on the phone telling me: there is a solution, if only you weren’t so stubborn, there is a solution, which is to vanish within the contradictions wrought upon you; if only you could disinvite yourself from the world, if only you did not complicate the world with your existence, if only I did not have to talk to you, if only I did not have to listen to you, if only.

But everyone has to start where they are, warts (aka wishes for dick-choking deaths) and all.

"The Place Where You Fall Down", Charlotte Shane's newsletter Meant for You

Expect a language that allows us to see grief as a fleeting shadow out of the corner of one's eye, there and beckoning, waiting for us to be ready.

Dog surgery update: it went OK, she is recovering nicely and we are very relieved! Thank you to people who sent notes of encouragement and well wishes for her.

My mom broke her ankle in a bad fall and it requires surgery*, so I'll be going down to help her out this week. This will either mean a decent amount of reading time or another paltry week, sentences-wise. It mostly depends on my mom's willingness to follow her doctor's orders to rest.

*I worry that it sounds like I am making up the cascade of Bad News of the last...six months, just about? I am increasingly convinced someone has been poking a little voodoo doll of me or something. Hoping that the extra evil eyes I've put up around the apartment provide some cover.

Not as much reading done this week mainly because I had covid (still out there, friends). It was mild in the sense that my only symptoms were shortness of breath and heart palpitations, but it turns out those two symptoms make doing a lot of work pretty fucking difficult.

Updates on my dog, for those who have expressed concern: what I assumed was renal failure may not be renal failure but we're still not sure what it is; after exhausting various channels of less-invasive testing she is undergoing exploratory surgery this week to get biopsies done. After that we should have more clarity on what the treatment options are for her. She is in good spirits despite all this, but please keep her in your thoughts. I love her so much. Here is a picture of her telling me to get off the computer and play with her.

What interests me now is the transformation undergone by the soil, now bound up in words.

Pandora's Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies, Bruno Latour

As our transport reentered the Habitat, the first fresh view of that great empty space was enough to reintroduce me to the digestive effects of soul-searing vertigo.

I don't love that numbering this newsletter means I now know there are 12 weeks left in the year, but it's nice to have stuck with it this long. (Sorry I reminded you there are 12 weeks left in the year.)

Skepticism has an ancient pedigree; it corrodes complacency and convention, and for that reason alone the skeptic who makes life so awkward for the securely institutionalized practitioner should be cherished like the most maddening of mad uncles in a well-knit family.

"Here and Everywhere: Sociology of Scientific Knowledge", Steven Shapin

He had no time for town council pragmatism, but instead entered with a progressivist, imperial swagger, and a tincture of injured colonial pride.

Einstein's Clocks, Poincaré's Maps: Empires of Time, Peter Galison

Some people think that science communication is about simple explanation of complex abstract concepts. I think it's about using phrases like "tincture of injured colonial pride." Another banger from this book:

Twelve inches in a foot, three feet in a yard—neither plumber nor physicist could cherish such a hodgepodge.

Thank you so, so much to everyone who sent words of encouragement, potential gigs, and straight up cash following last week's highly embarrassing plea. That being said, amazingly it ended up being a bit of an out-of-the-frying-pan-into-the-fire situation: I started the week with, I am serious, my 70-something year old lived-in-the-building 43 years landlords informing us they are selling the building and unrelatedly my phone getting bricked. Facing both these events with a negative bank balance would have been far more miserable, so you all helped a lot!

The phone thing has been resolved; the building thing has enough variables in the air (our lease ends in August, sales take time, NYC real estate is a chaos vortex anyway) that in the immediate present I'm just trying to take time each day to appreciate everything I've loved about my home and neighborhood for the last six years. I'm very lucky to have friends and family and neighbors and yes, newsletter readers who have been super kind and supportive. (Also: uh, any leads on apartments that will take giant old dogs welcomed.)

You are ashamed of not grasping what it is to speak of millions of light years?

I hate opening a newsletter that's mostly just for fun with an ask for help, and yet: this year has been, and probably will continue to be, a unique financial low. I get paid this Friday, but am starting the week with a negative bank balance and would really prefer to be back at zero just to avoid more overdraft fees and also there's a medium-high possibility that I'm going to have to take my dog to the emergency room this week (we're waiting on some test results but it's either early stage renal failure or some other unspecified gastrointestinal crisis). Short-term help, medium-term help (freelance assignments, maybe you would like to buy some art, angry phone calls to the Fordham HR office which for bureaucratic error reasons has kept me locked out of the timesheet submission system for three months which means a part-time supplemental hustle has been effectively in limbo), long-term help (I don't know, advice? Talk me through this??) are all deeply appreciated but absolutely not required. God, this is embarrassing. Let's move on.

They are not commonly seen, but leave ample evidence of their passage, treating fences as minor inconveniences to be gone through or under.

The Wikipedia entry for wombat

Why, we must ask ourselves, have individuals of unquestionably great powers chosen to play with their minds like captive monkeys with their genitalia?

Rats, Lice and History, Hans Zinsser

A professor in my department had a nervous breakdown of some kind and abruptly left last year; he did not clear out his office. This was among the books he left that were otherwise probably just going to be tossed. I picked it up because of the title and because of the incredible author bio included in the front which featured this perfection-adjacent sentence:

Behind the history-making accomplishments was what Time described as an "affectionate, voluble, energetic, terrier-like man," a man who made friends all over the world with his chronic courage and unfailing wit.

I can't remember if I mentioned in previous newsletters that for most of the summer I have been waiting to find out if I would have funding to actually go to my PhD this fall. I did find out I got the funding two and a half weeks ago (thanks, the Sloan Foundation); school starts this week. Mixed feelings, generally. It will probably mean more weird academic sentences and weird primary source research sentences, which could be fun at least.

I have already mentioned that Aristotelian dynamics, in spite—or perhaps because—of its theoretical perfection, was burdened with an important draw-back; that of being utterly implausible and completely unbelievable and unacceptable to plain sound common sense, and obviously contradictory to the commonest everyday experience.

"Galileo and Plato", Alexandre Koryé

In the deep sea, it is always night and it is always snowing.

"The Wonders that Live at the Bottom of the Sea", Robert Moor for the New York Times Book Review

I felt like she had taken my ideas, fed them into a bonkers blender, and then shared the thought purée with Carlson, who nodded vehemently.

I think every stone dreams about the kind of ripples it could make when it hits the lake.

"The Poet Laureate of Fan Fiction", Adam Carlson for The Awl

Submitted by v.

Believe me, when I’m making diets, I get blood all over my arms.

"It's Bloodsicle Time", Maggie Kloza as told to Dan Kois for Slate

Submitted by Jason.

They are missing a key ingredient: the conceptual dementedness of average internet users.

"Is A.I. the Greatest Technology Ever for Making Dumb Jokes?", Max Read for the New York Times

Shitposting is the bouncer at the edge of oblivion.

In certain uptown literati circles, this is like watching a Borzoi be fed to a wood chipper.

"The Old Guard Is Out at Penguin Random House", Shawn McCreech for New York Magazine

Just a wildly evocative alien sentence amidst a story that is otherwise mostly alien in a bygone-era, imagine-having-that-kind-of-financial-stability sort of way. Do people who live uptown disproportionately own Borzois? Are wood chippers a standard amenity of Upper West Side co-ops? Mysteries abound.

No one wants to be food, but it feels somehow more demeaning to be gum.

"They Don't Want Us and We Don't Need Them", David Roth for Defector

Only the ineducable tyro can fail to sense the presence or absence of wolves, or the fact that mountains have a secret opinion about them.

From above, it looked like a monster had chewed off chunks of flesh, gaping wounds in the body of the forest.

"Are Multi-Sensory Maps Possible?", Madhuri Kurak for Container

Submitted by Kelsey with the following comment: "The piece itself offers dense information, easily digestible, about mapping indigenous places in the face of encroachment by capital and Palm Oil plantations. Forests are instrumental to 'seeing like a state,' and what I like best about this quote is that it offers an alternative, that aerial views can reveal to people what remains of a world beset by the machine of capital."

This week I learned that "walking pneumonia" is a real diagnosis that you can get at an urgent care facility! I'm actually not sure if it's the correct diagnosis for what I have (or if it is less a formal viral/bacterial infection type and more just a shorthand for "hella sick but not as sick as you could be"), but I can say whatever I've got is a pretty shitty thing to have in the summer. Apologies if the selections this week have been diluted as a result.

The words they used were strange, odd souvenirs, tiny fragments that had been chipped off an alien business meteorite.

Apex Hides the Hurt, Colson Whitehead

We’re halfway through 2023 and I’ve managed to actually maintain doing this newsletter every week! This is not an impressive achievement for most people but for me it’s pretty good. Thanks for reading it!

I want to be able to know precisely how cruelly we have robbed ourselves.

“I don’t know how to write about all that hasn’t happened since the fall of Roe”, Alexandra Petri for The Washington Post

Trees are plants that people call trees—a term of dignity, not botany.

Elderflora: A Modern History of Ancient Trees, Jared Farmer

Submitted by Charlie via Liat.

What the machine has is the exotic, uncanny allure of its authorship.

“AI Writing Proves the Author is Very Much Alive”, Connor Wroe Southard for Blood Knife

Submitted last week by Kelsey but I have been very bad at email the last few weeks and I missed it.

he’s like a saltwater taffy store where the girls are all named kimberly

Tricia Lockwood posting on Bluesky

Sometimes I think about what kind of world we lived in if only poets were allowed to post. Also, this sentence is about reading Don DeLillo.

She wouldn't give you the time of day if she had two watches.

The Man I Love, dir. Raoul Walsh (link is to trailer)

Seen on one of those old movie clip Instagram accounts. I have no idea if the movie is any good, but I'm a real sucker for fast-talking, chain-smoking old-timey dialogue full of zingers like this. Also, this still from the trailer seems like a meme in the making:

Sullivan, a man notorious for having once chased a burglar out of his house with a gun while wearing nothing but his underwear and a cowboy hat, still despises Francis.

“Inside the Stunning Rise and Fall of Girls Gone Wild”, Sacchi Koul for (RIP) Buzzfeed News

This entire story is full of stories that must have been heartbreaking to edit into mere asides. Top-notch.

Now the lupine duel has finally resolved, and the cyberwolf of techno-optimism registers its final processes as it lies twitching in a pool of its own coolant.

"Doug Rushkoff is Ready to Renounce the Digital Revolution", Malcolm Harris for Wired

Malcolm never disappoints when it comes to gonzo perfect sentences.

This was also a real boom time for unsalted Legume Surprise and macrobiotically balanced grain mush that tasted like macrame owl.

"Blue skies over Mastodon", a blog post by Erin Kissane

This was the first sentence I added into the draft of this week's entries even before Miikka submitted it. All hail macrame owl.

Of course an amateur is simply a person / who loves, who brings love to bear / on a particular subject.

“Orpheus in Spring”, Jenny George

Via Courtney’s IG stories.

This bagel pulses with the blood of cream cheese, and the knowledge that God is dead.

"The Cream Cheese Stuffed ‘Tax-Free Bagel’ Is a Crime Against Nature, NYC", Christopher Robbins for Hell Gate

Hell Gate continues to be the best thing to happen to NYC media.

Good news: I successfully defended my master’s thesis on Friday and finished remaining revisions suggested by my committee. Because academia is obsessed with credentials and has slightly broken my brain in ways I don’t like, having achieved a master’s degree in geography mostly feels like hitting a midpoint marker on the way to a PhD rather than an accomplishment in and of itself. But I am still relieved to be through this particular hazing ritual.

Man, fuck this place, and by place I mean / The land lords.

“What We Do Every Day is Activism” by Vickie Vértiz in “Gold in the hills, but not for us” in March 1, 2023 issue of High Country News

The sexual outlaw sat alone in her room, considering her options.

Sexual Outlaw, Erotic Mystic: The Essential Ida Craddock, Vere Chappell

Via a screenshot on Mari’s instagram stories. Could also work as the opening to a The Hold Steady song—imagine Craig Finn shouting this along the lines of “Charlemagne in Sweatpants.”

I’ll tell you right now: I’ve been a writer for most of my life, and we are about as important as a fart in the wind.

"How much money do we think Substack lost last year?", Elizabeth Lopatto for The Verge

Analysis slides off Prince Hat like water off a duck engendered from dark matter.

Good news everyone, I submitted my thesis to my committee last Friday. Hope they let me get my stupid master's degree so I can get my stupid doctorate. I'm so tired.

Powder metallurgy, though in its infancy, is a lusty and promising babe.

"Metal Sinews of Strength: This Is a War of Many Metals, for We Live in an Age of Alloys", Frederick G. Vosburgh for National Geographic (April 1942)

In the past week I’ve written some 9,000 words of my master’s thesis which is due to my committee this Friday. I have read and written a lot of not especially perfect but probably good enough to get a degree sentences in the process, and my brain is mostly soup. Many thanks to readers who submitted sentences this week—they buoyed my spirits and also mean this week was not kind of a wash sentences-wise.

Each one miniaturized an emotional world, matching TikTok’s hummingbird heartbeat.

“The Pulse of Pop Music Is Changing”, Spencer Kornhaber for The Atlantic

It was, by his account, a no-brainer, and it does seem as though the number of brains involved was narrowly circumscribed.

"Did Starbucks Really Put Olive Oil in Coffee?", Gideon Lewis-Kraus for The New Yorker

Submitted by v, with this runner-up that v claims is less funny out of context but it made me laugh before I actually read the story:

There was little to say but that it tasted like a large spoonful of olive oil in coffee.

It looks like a beard trimmer that plays Phil Collins songs.

"Get a Load of This Sorry Piece of Crap", Albert Burneko for Defector

While this sentence is perfect as a sick burn on the Tesla Cybertruck, it is a little harsh on Phil Collins.

A bunch of new subscribers signed up in the last week—welcome! A gentle reminder that if you enjoy this newsletter that I have a tip jar for one-time gestures of appreciation. (Apologies for crass acknowledgment of money but I am also a grad student piecing together freelancing and selling art to supplement a $22,000 research assistant stipend and my summer funding is in the air and in this economy, etc.)

DC-based readers: I'll be speaking with Malcolm Harris at Solid State Books on March 3 (this Friday!) about his recently published book Palo Alto. Some sentences from the advanced review copy of the book previously appeared in this newsletter.

OK, on to the sentences.

I wanted to write something someday with that kind of first sentence and I wanted that kind of first sentence to be written to me every day for the rest of my life.

Heavy: An American Memoir, Kiese Laymon

Feels important to include the sentence Laymon’s writing about here, which is from the preface to Toni Cade Bambara’s short story collection Gorilla, My Love:

It does no good to write autobiographical fiction cause the minute the book hits the stand here comes your mama screamin how could you and sighin death where is thy sting and she snatches you up out your bed to grill you about what was going down back there in Brooklyn when she was working three jobs and trying to improve the quality of your life and come to find on this page that you were messin around with that nasty boy up the block and breaks into sobs and quite naturally your family strolls in all sleepy-eyed to catch the floor show at 5:00 A.M. but as far as your mama is concerned, it is nineteen-forty-and-something and you ain’t too grown to have your ass whipped.

This week was light on non-academic reading and heavy on trying to comport myself to the task of academic writing, which made for a smaller selection of perfect sentences for this newsletter. Such is the curse of the semester actually starting and entering the cadence of academia time.

One of the things I hate about academic reading is it tends to emphasize knowledge extraction over poetics; while I read and highlighted a lot of sentences this week whether the sentences were any good (or, more to the point, whether I could take the time to appreciate them) was another matter. This is partly why I set up this newsletter in the first place. Anyway, I'm working on it but this week was a bit light.

And with them, or after them, may there not come that even bolder adventurer—the first geolinguist, who, ignoring the delicate, transient lyrics of the lichen, will read beneath it the still less communicative, still more passive, wholly atemporal, cold, volcanic poetry of the rocks: each one a word spoken, how long ago, by the earth itself, in the immense solitude, the immenser community, of space.

A non-perfect sentences but adjacent cross-promotional update: I made a Valentine’s Day zine of dedication pages from books I own. It’s titled Dedication TK. You can buy it here for the book nerd in your life, or for yourself.

Lurk is a Turing-complete language for recursive zk-SNARKs.

“A Programmer’s Introduction to Lurk“

This was another week spent mostly at the National Archives, so my reading was once again a bit limited. Keep those submissions coming, friends—I have to actually start writing the thesis now so my reading time will be a bit curtailed.

The study of phantoms is at the same stage as previously reported.

September 1945 report on the Quartz Program in Brazil, Record Group 57 (US Geological Survey), Records Concerning the Quartz Commodity Program in Brazil, 1944–1945, Box 2.

A lot of these sentences were encountered and added on Tuesday, so I’ve been sitting with them for a while and I hope they aren’t overcooked.

Early on, the software had the regrettable habit of hitting police cruisers.

“Elon Musk’s Appetite For Destruction”, Christopher Cox in The New York Times

I spent most of this week at the National Archives doing research for my master’s thesis, so a lot of my reading has been frankly kind of dry government documents which do not lend themselves to perfect sentences. Nevertheless, the week (and even the archives) had some great ones.

Even if the crisis were to become worse, Communist propaganda would be confronted in the Argentine by a profound indifference to the future.

Report “Allegedly Prepared by Swiss Minister” on Argentina, Record Group 234 (Reconstruction Finance Corporation), Field Preclusive Operations Files 1942-47, Box 2