What sort of times are these — where a conversation about trees comes close to crime, because it contains a silence about so many misdeeds?

“To Posterity”, Bertholt Brecht

Submitted by Wesley, who notes that he came across this translation of the poem “because it is referenced on my great grandfather's tombstone, and feels uncannily fitting for the current moment.”

Well, I did pass my qualifying exams last week. I guess that’s good?

In all seriousness, I’m very glad past me insisted on finishing that process before they called the election. If not, it’s a lot more likely I’d be planning to drop out. (Being at the state of all-but-dissertation means I am more inclined to complete the process, if partly out of a slightly childish sense of spite that I will not be broken in this final round by of all things a mediocre state university.)

Like many of you, I am angry and sad and riding waves of both anticipatory and present-tense grief (also, I miss my dog more than ever). I am exhausted from election postmortems and incoming regime pre-catastrophizing, but remain easily seduced by spiraling into both just to feel some sense of control. Spending time with friends this week has helped a bit. Take care of yourselves, and take care of people around you.

Also, commit petty vandalism when you can. On Friday I poured an iced coffee onto the hood of a car parked on my street that had a big Trump banner and it felt really great. Except for the part where I had to buy another iced coffee.

Here lie the limits of assemblage theory; granting agency to the non-human material earth while severing that material’s relations from the humans who have known, shaped it, and lived with it so intimately for generations.

“Notes on the Underground in Gaza”, Hadeel Assali for Society for Cultural Anthropology

Hadeel is involved with Gaza Mutual Aid Solidarity, which does extraordinary work that I hope you will support if you can.

It is difficult to encounter such a thing and not overrun the page with the fervency of my gladness.

“The Best American Grilled Cheese Sandwich Essay”, Talia Lavin’s newsletter The Sword and the Sandwich

Submitted by Anne.

A very limited set of sentences this week due to a sad personal update: my dog passed away unexpectedly around 4 in the morning on October 15. It was sudden, but she was at home with her family and we were able to hold her and love her to the very last moments. This is my partner’s first dog, and worrying about his family in Lebanon has left him pretty frayed already so I am more worried about him than deeply involved in my own grief. But she really was the love of my life.

It’s meant so much to have friends and neighbors and our vet’s techs reach out to us. She was so loved by so many people. Please give your animal companions extra affection today, for me. Here’s a picture of her from 2019 that is one of my favorites and captures her a few months into being our dog.

For a variety of reasons despite being in mourning I am still doing the written part of my qualifying exams this week, so I will likely not collect too many sentences for next week’s newsletter. Submissions are extra-highly encouraged, thanks in advance.

In the beginning it felt like this: the earth opened beneath us, but for a moment it seemed as though gravity forgot itself.

“A Rupture In Time”, Sarah Aziza for The Baffler

Lots of perfect sentences in this:

It is October, warped and too warm in this era of climate emergency, and nothing can be the same.

This week an IDF air strike damaged the Beirut cemetery my partner’s grandfather is buried in. It is very disorienting to hold that information alongside day-to-day tasks and work. A year ago I had tested positive for covid and had to miss a friend’s child’s birthday party; that child, who happens to be Palestinian-and Lebanese-American, continues to live in a world where people with extraordinary power would rather see children like her dead. People have been exceptionally kind in the last few weeks—friends checking in, friends bringing food, neighbors showing kindness—and I try to find some grace in that.

In the arena of the war, nothing has changed, except everything changes: the death counts, the severity of atrocities, the number of hospitals bombed, schools bombed, universities destroyed, journalists targeted, the records broken — largest cohort of child amputees in the world, fastest man-made famine in the world — the territory blasted and caught up into the flames.

“A Year of War Without End”, Lina Mounzer for The Markaz Review

This week has not been very good for sentence gathering. Partly, because I had to do a lot of sentence writing (results largely average, hopefully some approaching perfect) and partly because we were watching my partner’s home country of Lebanon get bombarded by the IDF. His parents and last remaining grandparent are currently holding up as best they can in Beirut but getting out isn’t currently an option (all flights are booked up into mid-October, and that assumes that the airport doesn’t get bombed). Escalation in Lebanon is of course only an extension of horrors that have been ongoing for nearly a year in both southern Lebanon and Gaza, but it does feel like an ominous turn.

I am grateful for the friends who have reached out and shown up in the last two weeks. Still working through the dissociation of it all and trying to show up. Sentence submissions highly appreciated as my own capacity for sentence gathering remains diminished.

PLAY INSECURITIES LIKE A PIANO.

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.

We should rid our writing of this dreadful innocence.

“The Shapes of Grief”, Christina Sharpe for the Yale Review

Some other bangers from this essay:

There is something about the plane, its untethering space, between times and places, that allows me to meet so readily the many gifts of the book—among them language and memory.

The dead can’t seek justice in court, but they have other ways.

“Let the Dead Sleep: On Alien Romulus and Digital Resurrection”, Matt Zoller Seitz for RogerEbert.com

Submitted by James.

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.

I got back home from two weeks of traveling after a redeye flight from Portland (yes, I regret this). Most of this edition was actually drafted on Friday afternoon and Saturday night at the airport. This is my first time scheduling Perfect Sentences!

The last XOXO festival was bittersweet; the only other one I attended was in 2014 and boy howdy do I feel 37 when I remember being 27. But it was good to see Erin and Peter, whose old apartment I still live in, and see their terrific almost 11 (!) year old kid who I last saw when she was 5. I cried a lot: out of anger, envy, self-pity, awe, grief, joy, and at one point over an old McDonald’s mural. I should try to write out the morass of feelings in greater detail, maybe.

These lived fast, died young, and their deaths drove the cosmic factory of the chemical elements.

Hello from a basement apartment Airbnb in Vancouver. This is my first time visiting Vancouver and most of my research meetings fell through, so please send recommendations of things to do and places to sit and read. (I have already been told, repeatedly, about Stanley Park.)

Having a very multi-modal transit experience on this trip: flew to Seattle, took a ferry to Victoria, took a bus and ferry to Vancouver, and in a couple of days getting on an Amtrak to Portland. Here’s a picture of Galiano Island I took from the to-Vancouver ferry.

I’m visiting some family in Washington State and flew out late last night, so I am very tired and this week was a lot of preparation to go out of town and general weird vibes from tropical storm weather. Thanks to the people who submitted sentences for this week, it really filled out the newsletter.

He begin with general abstractions arrived at ideally rather than with any detailed study of how actual social and political institutions work.

“The Spatial Fix: Hegel, Von Thünen and Marx”, David Harvey

I got an annoying summer cold this week (it’s not covid at least?) and have generally been very distracted by life stuff, so I’m a little behind on PhD exams reading. This week’s sentences feel very scattershot. I’m ready for summer to end but not ready for the responsibility of fall.

Next week I’m traveling to visit family in the Pacific northwest so newsletter may go out a little late.

It is fundamentally weird to care so much about what other people do when it doesn't affect you at all.

History then becomes a pack of tricks we play on the dead.

"Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas", Quentin Skinner

In 2019, scientists expressed concern that the torrents of cocaine-infused urine flooding into the River Thames in London was "another problem eels don't need," while freshwater shrimp have repeatedly tested positive for the drug in recent years.

It is still Werewolf Month, now almost three months later.

"#036 - Moonstruck (1987)" Kit Buckley's newsletter the unbearable weight

What an opening sentence!! This is still probably my favorite newsletter. Some runner up sentences:

Driving through Lexington, KY, I imagine that every Jersey Mike’s sandwich restaurant is not a franchise named after a singular Michael but is instead an independent owner-operator concern, each run by a different guy named Mike from New Jersey, signposts from some great Michael-from-New-Jersey diaspora.

A while back as a procrastination activity I started working on an application to The Onion fellowship, which is due tomorrow but I will probably not submit because 1) I'm a coward and probably too old to pivot to comedy writing, and 2) abruptly relocating my life to Chicago for six months for an incredibly cool opportunity also smacks a bit of running away from my current set of problems.

That being said, the writing sample part of the application is a lot of fun—writing a good Onion headline is hard, especially in an era where Onion-esque headline writing has become a weird norm. Because I am a show-off in addition to being a coward, I am sharing my favorite drafted headlines, since a news headline is sort of sentence-adjacent.

• Geologist’s Hinge Profile Way Too Niche

• Federal Trade Commission Blocks Polycule Merger (maybe more of a Reductress joke)

I am deep in the throes of PhD exams (my program calls them "comprehensive" exams, others call them "qualifying" exams, I am using either term here because most of you are not fucking nerds) preparation, meaning that I need to read and annotate at least one book (or a few journal articles) a day basically until the end of the summer. This means that aside from the submitted sentences, a lot of this week's sentences are from the introductions or first few chapters of academic texts, because those are the parts of books you're "supposed" to read for exam preparation.

It is very disheartening to learn that a lot of PhD exam studying is learning how to efficiently skim books. It feels disrespectful to the book, and it does not alleviate my suspicion that these exams are a hazing ritual invented by bad people!

I am trying to find ways to make this process helpful for me (namely, a person who has zero expectations of landing a real academic job down the line and who wants to write books and make art mostly), with mixed results, but at least many of the texts themselves are pretty good. Advice from survivors of PhD exams welcomed.

It must borrow shame because the consensus doesn’t feel it, not yet, not today.

"The Right Side of Now", Lauren Michele Jackson for The New Yorker

Let us never forget: that the poem was entombed in a collapse of the earth.

With bio communication, it's monkey flowers all the way down.

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

Submitted by Winston.

Winston is currently doing a GoFundMe to raise money that can help him move his family to a trans-affirming state for the sake of his oldest daughter's health and well-being. If you can spare it, please consider contributing. (I asked Winston for permission to share this; while the subscriber base of this newsletter isn't huge or as far as I know especially wealthy, it is an audience that I hope is largely sympathetic and inclined to help.)

(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."