(When I was three months on testosterone, I flew to California to end a five-year relationship, tried cocaine, and briefly stopped speaking to my family.)

"Jane Schoenbrun Finds Horror Close to Home", Holden Seidlitz for The New Yorker

What I love about this sentence is that it could be an opening sentence in a very different essay but is instead a parenthetical in a profile. It's important in profile writing to strategically acknowledge one's own subjectivity—how to make yourself known in the text without making the profile About You Entirely—because a profile is in part about comprehending the gap between how a profile subject wants to be known and whatever the profile author is bringing to the table.

Submissions are strongly encouraged for this coming week! I will be traveling Tuesday, at what looks to be a pretty dry academic conference Wednesday and Thursday, and then traveling again on Friday so my reading time is going to be a bit curtailed.

That the ivory tower is a tower, and not the source of a waterfall or a pile of spent nuclear rods at the bottom of the sea.

"Your Work is Not Academic", Kendra Albert

It has now been 13 years since Christopher Hitchens got to discover at last whether hell is real.

"The Ghosts of New Atheism Still Haunt Us", Erik Baker for Defector

Submitted by Rusty.

Actual fern sex turned out to be much weirder.

The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth, Zoë Schlanger

I'm a little less than halfway through this and really enjoying it! Another great one:

Through the chatter of their cells, plants are self-organizing systems.

This week's sentences were sent out late because I am on a little vacation to upstate New York and was wrangling my big dog on long drives and puppy meetings. As penance for the delay I offer this image of my dog having a nap with a friend's puppy.

Everything might seem meaningless during a genocide but only because we’re made to reckon with all that is suddenly possible.

In the absence of tyrants bootlicking is essentially ballet.

John Darnielle on Bluesky

Her mouth had filled with light as they gave her TV teeth and a Barbie cunt.

Lest this become too morose, I will note that the benefits of having a power grid at all are self-evident.

A third draft of my CS Ethics student's paper on decarbonizing the power grid

You're not really supposed to have favorites when you teach, but some students just really go above and beyond. This student made a working model of a utility pole with a functioning transformer as part of her final presentation!! Teaching engineers is sometimes delightful.

Infrastructure is the imagined materialization of this thing called an economy.

"Infrastructural Time", Hannah Appel in The Promise of Infrastructure

That certain sensation that things can be so different is our long game.

Actually, that’s an insult to serpents, because serpents are beautiful creatures.

David Dastmalchian in an interview with Variety

But Shafik, it seems, is currently answering a higher calling—the call to tongue-bathe the boots of Congressmember Elise Stefanik and the rest of the Republican-led House of Representatives Committee on Education and the Workforce, which this year has been grilling the leaders of institutions on whether they support Israel ferociously and blindly—I mean, "oppose antisemitism."

The act of discernment is not merely punished; it’s made infelicitous.

"Disambiguation, A Tragedy", Nan Z. Da in N+1

Even in the midst of health and busyness, human beings dance with death.

We have an accidentally very animal-heavy week of sentences, which is pretty nice.

Some shameless (well, actually pretty ashamed) commerce self-promotion: between unexpected life expenses and taxes I am doing some extra hustling this week. Do you like beautiful plotter art? There's some small work for as low as $20 and some more fancy work for more than that. (20% discount code for subscribers available upon request.)

Subscription and tip jar links at the bottom are always appreciated of course, but I do really like these little plotter drawings so sharing them is nice.

It wasn't an especially rich week for sentences, most of these are pretty silly. I had a weird week of good but sort of anticlimactic events—my first peer reviewed journal article was approved for publication (official early access here, I can send you the preprint if you want), which is nice but I have zero sense of if the paper's even readable at this point, and a still-secret project entered into a more "it's real" phase but not yet an "I can tell you about it" phase. Feeling distracted and it's hard to focus on one thing at a time when spring weather is still fickle.

Being a kid from a pretty conservative and yet very tumultuous home in the belt buckle of the Bible Belt, I've been both supremely terrified of and yet uncontrollably drawn to the shadowy corner of the room.

David Dastmalchian in conversation with Trent Reznor, Interview magazine

This is the story of all colonialisms: settlers build their tall, shiny things on the embers of the societies they torch, export the spoils and bury their guilt in their families, splaying out on the terraces, declaring themselves home at last.

"Hating it Lush: On Tel Aviv", Kaleem Hawa for The White Review

A runner-up from this essay, perhaps made more resonant with the context that it is discussing Los Angeles and Tel Aviv:

In a sense, both cities sell the promise of forgetting.

Guilt imposes itself like a nagging cavity, you are acutely aware of its presence, but you continue to shovel the same sweets in your mouth, until your teeth rot, until you self-destruct.

"Are we indeed all Palestinians?", Mohammed El-Kurd for Mondoweiss

Wow, you have a lot of melodicas lying around!

Don't we face enough fucking imponderables?

Al Swearenegen on Deadwood

Via Brian Haley on Twitter. We do face a lot of fucking imponderables, IMO.

This was a great week for submissions! Thanks to all of you for keeping an eye out for perfection.

There is too much evidence that the arc of the moral universe does not bend towards justice; powerful men can make their massacres seem necessary and righteous.

"The Shoah After Gaza", Pankaj Mishra for The London Review of Books

Fighting a somehow-not-covid cold this weekend (it's mostly manifesting as laryngitis) which maybe explains the sentence selections leaning toward the terse.

The day, as I am writing, is like a crystal without faces.

"The Secret Life", Patricia Lockwood in the London Review of Books

To fill one's mind with the apprehension of the Sunday paper there, at the door.

In the Heart of Another Country, Etel Adnan

The first layer of this anthropocenic geology is all Gaza destroyed—because you have to put the rubble somewhere.

When faced with the truculent realities of flesh and culture, cybernetics collapsed like a flan in a cupboard.

Systems Ultra, Georgina Voss

George is a friend and I am proud of her for putting out this book! While the "flan in a cupboard" part of the above sentence is a tribute to Suzy Eddie Izzard that should be acknowledged, pairing it with "truculent realities of flesh and culture" is pretty great. Some runner-up sentences from the part of the book I've read so far:

As someone with an emotional investment in gigantic machinery, it was wonderful; a personalized springtime festival of infrastructure.

You're on your own out there with those man-eating semicolons.

Steering the Craft, Ursula K. Le Guin

A conversation ensues in which the mugger starts recommending adaptive technology.

I marvel at the sky: How lucky we are it does not fall and crush us without announcement.

"A Day in the Life", Noura Erakat for The Nation

This entire package of essays is incredibly good and I have only picked two sentences, which was difficult.

Despite the usefulness of his calculations, Bailey did not qualify the years of hardship represented in each delicious fruit.

"The First Green Revolution: Debt Peonage and the Making of the Nitrogen Fertilizer Trade, 1840–1930", Edward D. Melillo

A great city is the most mighty of dung-makers.

Everyone on the road that day drove with the heedless abandon they always displayed when the fighting started up again in Beirut—that is, they only drove slightly more recklessly than usual.

The Hundred Years' War On Palestine, Rashid Khalidi

It smelled of clean emptiness in a way human places never do.

Spend enough time with their meticulous tables and figures the precision itself begins to feel like rage.

"Meta in Myanmar, Part II: The Crisis", Erin Kissane

Submitted by Wesley.

And who is the character with the hair?

Somewhere in the Night

It helps to know this is said in the film by a very 1940s noir dame about another very 1940s noir dame.

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."