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.