Over latest days, I took on a frightening job — however a pleasant one. I reviewed all of the passages of prose featured within the For the Love of Sentences part of my Occasions Opinion e-newsletter in 2023 and tried to find out the perfect of the perfect. And there’s no doing that, a minimum of not objectively, not when the harvest is so bountiful.
What follows is a pattern of the sentences that, upon recent examination, made me smile the widest or nod the toughest or want essentially the most ardently and enviously that I’d written them. I hope they provide you as a lot pleasure as they gave me once I reread them.
I additionally hope that these of you who routinely contribute to For the Love of Sentences, bringing gems like those under to my consideration, understand how grateful to you I’m. This can be a crowdsourced enterprise. You’re the sensible and deeply appreciated crowd.
Lastly, I hope 2024 brings all of us many nice issues, together with many nice sentences.
Let’s begin with The Occasions. Dwight Garner famous how a sure conservative cable community presses on with its distortions, regardless of being referred to as out on them and efficiently sued: “Fox Information, at this level, resembles a automobile whose windshield is thickly encrusted with site visitors citations. But this automobile (absolutely a Hummer) manages to barrel out anew every day, plowing over six extra mailboxes, 5 extra crossing guards, 4 aged scientists, three communal enterprises, two trans youngsters and a photo voltaic panel.”
Erin Thompson mirrored on the destiny of statues memorializing the Confederacy: “We by no means reached any consensus about what ought to change into of those artifacts. Some had been reinstalled with further historic context or positioned in non-public arms, however many merely disappeared into storage. I like to think about them as America’s strategic racism reserve.”
Pamela Paul examined an embattled (and later dethroned) Home speaker who tried to divert consideration to President Biden’s imagined wrongdoing: “As Kevin McCarthy introduced the impeachment inquiry, you might nearly see his wispy soul sucked out Dementor-style, becoming a member of no matter ghostly stays of Paul Ryan’s deserted integrity nonetheless wander the halls of Congress.”
Tom Friedman minimize to the chase: “What Putin is doing in Ukraine isn’t just reckless, not only a warfare of selection, not simply an invasion in a category of its personal for overreach, lying, immorality and incompetence, all wrapped in a farrago of lies. What he’s doing is evil.”
Maureen Dowd eulogized her buddy Jimmy Buffett: “When he was a younger scalawag, he discovered the Life Aquatic and conjured his artwork from it, making Key West the capital of Margaritaville. He didn’t waste away there; he spun a billion-dollar empire out of a shaker of salt.” She additionally assessed Donald Trump’s relationship to his stolen-election claims and concluded that “the putz knew his push for a putsch was dishonest.” And she or he sat down with Nancy Pelosi proper after Pelosi gave up the Home speaker’s gavel: “I used to be anticipating King Lear, howling on the storm, however I discovered Gene Kelly, singing within the rain.”
Bret Stephens contrasted the 2 Republicans who signify Texas within the Senate, John Cornyn and Ted Cruz: “No matter else you would possibly say about Cornyn, he’s to the junior senator from Texas what pumpkin pie is to a jack-o’-lantern.”
Jamelle Bouie identified the issue with the Florida governor’s presidential marketing campaign: “Ron DeSantis can not escape the truth that it makes no actual sense to attempt to run as a extra competent Donald Trump, for the easy cause that the whole query of competence is orthogonal to Trump’s enchantment.”
Alexis Soloski described her encounter with the actor Taylor Kitsch: “There’s a lonesomeness on the core of him that makes girls need to save him and males need to purchase him a beer. I’m a mom of younger kids and the temptation to supply him a snack was typically overwhelming.”
Jane Margolies described a rising development of company workplace buildings trimmed with greenery that requires much less upkeep: “As manicured lawns give approach to meadows and borders of annuals are changed by wild and woolly native crops, a looser, some would possibly say messier, aesthetic is taking maintain. Name it the horticultural equal of bedhead.”
Nathan Englander contrasted Tom Cruise in his 50s with a typical film star of that age 50 years in the past: “Attempt Walter Matthau in ‘The Taking of Pelham 123.’ I’m not saying he wasn’t a dreamboat. I’m saying he displays a life nicely lived within the firm of gravity and pastrami.”
And David Mack defined the endurance of sweatpants past their pandemic-lockdown, Zoom-meeting ubiquity: “We are actually demanding from our pants attributes we’re additionally searching for in others and in ourselves. We would like them to be forgiving and reassuring. We would like them to nurture us. We would like them to say: ‘I used to be there, too. I skilled it. I got here out on the opposite aspect extra carefree and fewer inflexible. And I discovered concerning the significance of air flow within the course of.’”
The moral shortcomings of Supreme Courtroom justices generated some deliciously pointed commentary. In Slate, for instance, Dahlia Lithwick parsed the generosity of billionaires that Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas have so richly loved. “A #protip that may little question make these justices who’ve been lured away to elaborate bear hunts and deer hunts and rabbit hunts and salmon hunts by rich oligarchs really feel a bit unhappy: In case your shut private buddies who solely simply met you after you got here onto the courts are memorializing your time collectively for posterity, there’s a good likelihood you’re, in reality, the factor being hunted,” she wrote.
In The Washington Put up, Alexandra Petri mined that materials by mimicking the well-known opening line of “Pleasure and Prejudice” by Jane Austen: “It’s a fact universally acknowledged that an American billionaire, in possession of enough fortune, should be in need of a Supreme Courtroom justice.”
Additionally in The Put up, the e book critic Ron Charles warned of censorship from factors throughout the political spectrum: “Speech codes and e book bans might begin in opposing camps, however each heat their arms over freedom’s ashes.” He additionally famous the publication of “Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Wants,” by Senator Josh Hawley: “The e book’s closing cowl comprises simply textual content, together with the title so outsized that the phrase ‘Manhood’ can’t even match on one line — like a dude whose shoulders are so broad that he has to show sideways to flee via the doorways of the Capitol.”
Rick Reilly put Mike McDaniel, the sunny head coach of the Miami Dolphins, and Invoice Belichick, the gloomy head coach of the New England Patriots, aspect by aspect: “One is as open as a brand new Safeway, and the opposite is as closed up as an previous submarine. One will inform you something you need; the opposite will hand out data on a need-to-go-screw-yourself foundation. One seems to be like a nerd who bought misplaced on a stadium tour and wound up as head coach. The opposite seems to be like an Easter Island statue nursing a grudge.”
Matt Bai challenged the argument that candidates for vp don’t have an effect on the outcomes of presidential races: “I’d argue that Sarah Palin mattered in 2008, though she was much less of a working mate than a working gag.”
David Von Drehle noticed: “Golf was for many years — for hundreds of years — the province of people that cared about cash however by no means spoke of it brazenly. Scots. Episcopalians. Members of the Walker and Bush households. Individuals who constructed big properties then did not warmth them correctly. Individuals who drove round with massive canine of their previous Mercedes station wagons. Individuals who greeted the supply of a scotch and soda by saying, ‘Nicely, it’s 5 o’clock someplace!’”
And Robin Givhan examined former President Jimmy Carter’s method to his remaining days: “Hospice care isn’t a matter of giving up. It’s a call to shift our efforts from shoring up a physique on the verge of the top to offering solace to a soul that’s on the cusp of ceaselessly.”
In his e-newsletter on Substack, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar appraised the Lone Star State’s flirtation with secession: “This motion known as Texit and it’s not simply the folly of 1 Republican on the grassy knoll of idiocy.”
In The Chronicle of Larger Schooling, Emma Pettit skilled cognitive dissonance as she examined the educational bona fides of a “Actual Housewives of Potomac” forged member: “It’s uncommon for any professor to star on any actuality present, not to mention for a Johns Hopkins professor to star on a Bravo collection. The college’s picture is intently aligned with world-class analysis, public well being and Covid-19 monitoring. The Actual Housewives’ picture is intently aligned with promotional alcohol, cosmetic surgery and sequins.”
In The Los Angeles Occasions, Jessica Roy defined the cussed refusal of plastic baggage to remain put: “As a result of they’re so gentle, they defy correct waste administration, floating off trash cans and sanitation vans like they’re being raptured by a rubbish god.”
In The Information & Observer of Raleigh, N.C., Josh Shaffer contemplated the peculiarity of the bagpipe, “formed like an octopus in plaid pants, sounding to some like a goose with its foot caught in an escalator and performed throughout historical past’s most lopsided battles — by the dropping aspect.”
In Salon, Melanie McFarland mirrored on the futility of Chris Licht’s makes an attempt, throughout his short-lived stint on the helm of CNN, to get Republican politicians and viewers to return to the community: “You would possibly as nicely summon Voyager 1 again from deep area by pointing your TV distant on the sky and urgent any downward-pointing arrow.”
In Politico, Wealthy Lowry contextualized Trump’s look at his Waco, Texas, rally with the J6 Jail Choir: “It’d be a bit of like Richard Nixon working for the 1976 Republican presidential nomination, and campaigning with a barbershop quartet made up of the Watergate burglars.”
In The Atlantic, Tom Nichols noticed that many Republican voters “need Trump, except he can’t win; in that case, they’d like a Trump who can win, a candidate who reeks of Trump’s low-cost political cologne however who will correctly put on considerably much less of it whereas campaigning within the crowded areas of a common election.”
Additionally in The Atlantic, Derek Thompson needled inaccurate recession soothsayers: “Financial fashions of the long run are maybe greatest understood as astrology faintly adorned with calculus equations.”
And David Frum famous one of many many peculiarities of the televised face-off between DeSantis and Gavin Newsom: “Within the debate’s opening segments, the moderator, Sean Hannity, confused time and again that his questions can be fact-based — like a proud host informing his company that tonight he’ll serve the costly wine.”
In The New Yorker, Jonathan Franzen mulled an emotion: “Pleasure will be as sturdy as Everclear or as gentle as Coors Gentle, but it surely’s by no means not pleasure: a blossoming within the coronary heart, a sure to the world, a sure to being alive in it,” he wrote.
Additionally in The New Yorker, David Remnick analyzed the uncooked, warring interpretations of the bloodbath in Israel on Oct. 7: “There have been, after all, details — lots of them unknown — however the narratives got here first, all infused with histories and counterhistories, grievances and 50 sorts of fury, all speeding in on the velocity of social media. Individuals had been going to imagine what they wanted to imagine.”
Zach Helfand defined the fascination with monster vans by way of our worship of measurement, noting that “folks have at all times appreciated actually massive stuff, significantly of the pointless selection. Stonehenge, pyramids, colossi, Costco.”
And Anthony Lane discovered the pink palette of “Barbie” a bit a lot: “Watching the primary half-hour of this film is like being waterboarded with Pepto-Bismol.” He additionally supplied a zoological breakdown of one other hit film, “Cocaine Bear”: “The animal kingdom is represented by a butterfly, a deer and a black bear. Solely one among these is on cocaine, though with butterflies you’ll be able to by no means actually inform.”
In The Guardian, Sam Jones paid tribute to a remarkably sturdy pooch named Bobi: “The late canine, who has died on the spectacular age of 31 years and 165 days, has not a lot damaged the file for the world’s longest-lived canine as shaken it violently backward and forward, torn it to items, buried it after which cocked a triumphant, if aged, leg over it.”
In The Wall Road Journal, Jason Homosexual rendered a damning (and furry!) judgment of the group that oversees faculty sports activities: “Handing the N.C.A.A. an investigation is like throwing a Frisbee to an aged canine. Possibly you get one thing again. Possibly the canine lies down and chews an enormous stick.” He individually took challenge with a prize his daughter gained at a state honest: “I don’t know what number of of you personal a six-and-a-half-foot, vivid blue stuffed lemur, however it’s not precisely the kind of merchandise that blends into a house. You don’t put it in the lounge and say: good. It immediately turns into essentially the most ineffective merchandise in the home, and I personal an train bike.”
Additionally in The Journal, Peggy Noonan described McCarthy’s toppling as Home speaker by Matt Gaetz and his fellow right-wing rebels: “It’s as if Julius Caesar had been stabbed to dying within the Discussion board by the Marx Brothers.” In one other column, she skewered DeSantis, who provides off the vibe “that he would possibly unplug your life help to recharge his cellphone.”
On her web site The Marginalian, the Bulgarian essayist Maria Popova wrote: “We had been by no means promised any of it — this world of cottonwoods and clouds — when the Huge Bang set the attainable in movement. And but right here we’re, atoms with consciousness, every of us a dwelling improbability cast of chaos and useless stars. Youngsters of likelihood, we’ve made ourselves into what we’re — creatures who can see a universe of magnificence within the feather of a fowl and may flip a blind eye to one another’s struggling, creatures able to the Benedictus and the bomb.”
Lastly, in The Mort Report, Mort Rosenblum despaired: “Too many citizens immediately are simply conned, deeply biased, impervious to reality and bereft of survival instincts. Opposite to delusion, frogs leap out of heating pots. Stampeding cattle cease at a cliff edge. Lemmings don’t actually commit mass suicide. We’ll discover out about People in 2024.”
