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

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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.