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    The Best Sentences of 2023

    Over recent days, I took on a daunting task — but a delightful one. I reviewed all the passages of prose featured in the For the Love of Sentences section of my Times Opinion newsletter in 2023 and tried to determine the best of the best. And there’s no doing that, at least not objectively, not when the harvest is so bountiful.What follows is a sample of the sentences that, upon fresh examination, made me smile the widest or nod the hardest or wish the most ardently and enviously that I’d written them. I hope they give you as much pleasure as they gave me when I reread them.I also hope that those of you who routinely contribute to For the Love of Sentences, bringing gems like the ones below to my attention, know how grateful to you I am. This is a crowdsourced enterprise. You are the wise and deeply appreciated crowd.Finally, I hope 2024 brings all of us many great things, including many great sentences.Let’s start with The Times. Dwight Garner noted how a certain conservative cable network presses on with its distortions, despite being called out on them and successfully sued: “Fox News, at this point, resembles a car whose windshield is thickly encrusted with traffic citations. Yet this car (surely a Hummer) manages to barrel out anew each day, plowing over six more mailboxes, five more crossing guards, four elderly scientists, three communal enterprises, two trans kids and a solar panel.”Erin Thompson reflected on the fate of statues memorializing the Confederacy: “We never reached any consensus about what should become of these artifacts. Some were reinstalled with additional historical context or placed in private hands, but many simply disappeared into storage. I like to think of them as America’s strategic racism reserve.”Pamela Paul examined an embattled (and later dethroned) House speaker who tried to divert attention to President Biden’s imagined wrongdoing: “As Kevin McCarthy announced the impeachment inquiry, you could almost see his wispy soul sucked out Dementor-style, joining whatever ghostly remains of Paul Ryan’s abandoned integrity still wander the halls of Congress.”Damon Winter/The New York TimesTom Friedman cut to the chase: “What Putin is doing in Ukraine is not just reckless, not just a war of choice, not just an invasion in a class of its own for overreach, mendacity, immorality and incompetence, all wrapped in a farrago of lies. What he is doing is evil.”Maureen Dowd eulogized her friend Jimmy Buffett: “When he was a young scalawag, he found the Life Aquatic and conjured his art 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 also 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 sat down with Nancy Pelosi right after Pelosi gave up the House speaker’s gavel: “I was expecting King Lear, howling at the storm, but I found Gene Kelly, singing in the rain.”Bret Stephens contrasted the two Republicans who represent Texas in the Senate, John Cornyn and Ted Cruz: “Whatever else you might say about Cornyn, he is to the junior senator from Texas what pumpkin pie is to a jack-o’-lantern.”Jamelle Bouie diagnosed the problem with the Florida governor’s presidential campaign: “Ron DeSantis cannot escape the fact that it makes no real sense to try to run as a more competent Donald Trump, for the simple reason that the entire question of competence is orthogonal to Trump’s appeal.”Alexis Soloski described her encounter with the actor Taylor Kitsch: “There’s a lonesomeness at the core of him that makes women want to save him and men want to buy him a beer. I am a mother of young children and the temptation to offer him a snack was sometimes overwhelming.”Jane Margolies described a growing trend of corporate office buildings trimmed with greenery that requires less maintenance: “As manicured lawns give way to meadows and borders of annuals are replaced by wild and woolly native plants, a looser, some might say messier, aesthetic is taking hold. Call it the horticultural equivalent of bedhead.”Nathan Englander contrasted Tom Cruise in his 50s with a typical movie star of that age 50 years ago: “Try Walter Matthau in ‘The Taking of Pelham 123.’ I’m not saying he wasn’t a dreamboat. I’m saying he reflects a life well lived in the company of gravity and pastrami.”And David Mack explained the endurance of sweatpants beyond their pandemic-lockdown, Zoom-meeting ubiquity: “We are now demanding from our pants attributes we are also seeking in others and in ourselves. We want them to be forgiving and reassuring. We want them to nurture us. We want them to say: ‘I was there, too. I experienced it. I came out on the other side more carefree and less rigid. And I learned about the importance of ventilation in the process.’”The ethical shortcomings of Supreme Court justices generated some deliciously pointed commentary. In Slate, for example, Dahlia Lithwick parsed the generosity of billionaires that Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas have so richly enjoyed. “A #protip that will no doubt make those justices who have been lured away to elaborate bear hunts and deer hunts and rabbit hunts and salmon hunts by wealthy oligarchs feel a bit sad: If your close personal friends who only just met you after you came onto the courts are memorializing your time together for posterity, there’s a decent chance you are, in fact, the thing being hunted,” she wrote.Greg Kahn for The New York TimesIn The Washington Post, Alexandra Petri mined that material by mimicking the famous opening line of “Pride and Prejudice” by Jane Austen: “It is a truth universally acknowledged that an American billionaire, in possession of sufficient fortune, must be in want of a Supreme Court justice.”Also in The Post, the book critic Ron Charles warned of censorship from points across the political spectrum: “Speech codes and book bans may start in opposing camps, but both warm their hands over freedom’s ashes.” He also noted the publication of “Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs,” by Senator Josh Hawley: “The book’s final cover contains just text, including the title so oversized that the word ‘Manhood’ can’t even fit on one line — like a dude whose shoulders are so broad that he has to turn sideways to flee through the doors of the Capitol.”Rick Reilly put Mike McDaniel, the sunny head coach of the Miami Dolphins, and Bill Belichick, the gloomy head coach of the New England Patriots, side by side: “One is as open as a new Safeway, and the other is as closed up as an old submarine. One will tell you anything you want; the other will hand out information on a need-to-go-screw-yourself basis. One looks like a nerd who got lost on a stadium tour and wound up as head coach. The other looks like an Easter Island statue nursing a grudge.”Matt Bai challenged the argument that candidates for vice president don’t affect the outcomes of presidential races: “I’d argue that Sarah Palin mattered in 2008, although she was less of a running mate than a running gag.”David Von Drehle observed: “Golf was for decades — for centuries — the province of people who cared about money but never spoke of it openly. Scots. Episcopalians. Members of the Walker and Bush families. People who built huge homes then failed to heat them properly. People who drove around with big dogs in their old Mercedes station wagons. People who greeted the offer of a scotch and soda by saying, ‘Well, it’s 5 o’clock somewhere!’”And Robin Givhan examined former President Jimmy Carter’s approach to his remaining days: “Hospice care is not a matter of giving up. It’s a decision to shift our efforts from shoring up a body on the verge of the end to providing solace to a soul that’s on the cusp of forever.”In his newsletter on Substack, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar appraised the Lone Star State’s flirtation with secession: “This movement is called Texit and it’s not just the folly of one Republican on the grassy knoll of idiocy.”In The Chronicle of Higher Education, Emma Pettit experienced cognitive dissonance as she examined the academic bona fides of a “Real Housewives of Potomac” cast member: “It’s unusual for any professor to star on any reality show, let alone for a Johns Hopkins professor to star on a Bravo series. The university’s image is closely aligned with world-class research, public health and Covid-19 tracking. The Real Housewives’ image is closely aligned with promotional alcohol, plastic surgery and sequins.”In The Los Angeles Times, Jessica Roy explained the stubborn refusal of plastic bags to stay put: “Because they’re so light, they defy proper waste management, floating off trash cans and sanitation trucks like they’re being raptured by a garbage god.”In The News & Observer of Raleigh, N.C., Josh Shaffer pondered the peculiarity of the bagpipe, “shaped like an octopus in plaid pants, sounding to some like a goose with its foot caught in an escalator and played during history’s most lopsided battles — by the losing side.”Space Frontiers/Getty ImagesIn Salon, Melanie McFarland reflected on the futility of Chris Licht’s attempts, during his short-lived stint at the helm of CNN, to get Republican politicians and viewers to return to the network: “You might as well summon Voyager 1 back from deep space by pointing your TV remote at the sky and pressing any downward-pointing arrow.”In Politico, Rich Lowry contextualized Trump’s appearance at his Waco, Texas, rally with the J6 Prison Choir: “It’d be a little like Richard Nixon running for the 1976 Republican presidential nomination, and campaigning with a barbershop quartet made up of the Watergate burglars.”In The Atlantic, Tom Nichols observed that many Republican voters “want Trump, unless he can’t win; in that case, they’d like a Trump who can win, a candidate who reeks of Trump’s cheap political cologne but who will wisely wear somewhat less of it while campaigning in the crowded spaces of a general election.”Also in The Atlantic, Derek Thompson needled erroneous recession soothsayers: “Economic models of the future are perhaps best understood as astrology faintly decorated with calculus equations.”And David Frum noted one of the many peculiarities of the televised face-off between DeSantis and Gavin Newsom: “In the debate’s opening segments, the moderator, Sean Hannity, stressed again and again that his questions would be fact-based — like a proud host informing his guests that tonight he will serve the expensive wine.”In The New Yorker, Jonathan Franzen mulled an emotion: “Joy can be as strong as Everclear or as mild as Coors Light, but it’s never not joy: a blossoming in the heart, a yes to the world, a yes to being alive in it,” he wrote.Also in The New Yorker, David Remnick analyzed the raw, warring interpretations of the massacre in Israel on Oct. 7: “There were, of course, facts — many of them unknown — but the narratives came first, all infused with histories and counterhistories, grievances and 50 varieties of fury, all rushing in at the speed of social media. People were going to believe what they needed to believe.”Zach Helfand explained the fascination with monster trucks in terms of our worship of size, noting that “people have always liked really big stuff, particularly of the unnecessary variety. Stonehenge, pyramids, colossi, Costco.”And Anthony Lane found the pink palette of “Barbie” a bit much: “Watching the first half-hour of this movie is like being waterboarded with Pepto-Bismol.” He also provided a zoological breakdown of another hit movie, “Cocaine Bear”: “The animal kingdom is represented by a butterfly, a deer and a black bear. Only one of these is on cocaine, although with butterflies you can never really tell.”In The Guardian, Sam Jones paid tribute to a remarkably durable pooch named Bobi: “The late canine, who has died at the spectacular age of 31 years and 165 days, has not so much broken the record for the world’s longest-lived dog as shaken it violently from side to side, torn it to pieces, buried it and then cocked a triumphant, if elderly, leg over it.”In The Wall Street Journal, Jason Gay rendered a damning (and furry!) judgment of the organization that oversees college sports: “Handing the N.C.A.A. an investigation is like throwing a Frisbee to an elderly dog. Maybe you get something back. Maybe the dog lies down and chews a big stick.” He separately took issue with a prize his daughter won at a state fair: “I don’t know how many of you own a six-and-a-half-foot, bright blue stuffed lemur, but it is not exactly the type of item that blends into a home. You do not put it in the living room and say: perfect. It instantly becomes the most useless item in the house, and I own an exercise bike.”Also in The Journal, Peggy Noonan described McCarthy’s toppling as House speaker by Matt Gaetz and his fellow right-wing rebels: “It’s as if Julius Caesar were stabbed to death in the Forum by the Marx Brothers.” In another column, she skewered DeSantis, who gives off the vibe “that he might unplug your life support to recharge his cellphone.”On her website The Marginalian, the Bulgarian essayist Maria Popova wrote: “We were never promised any of it — this world of cottonwoods and clouds — when the Big Bang set the possible in motion. And yet here we are, atoms with consciousness, each of us a living improbability forged of chaos and dead stars. Children of chance, we have made ourselves into what we are — creatures who can see a universe of beauty in the feather of a bird and can turn a blind eye to each other’s suffering, creatures capable of the Benedictus and the bomb.”Finally, in The Mort Report, Mort Rosenblum despaired: “Too many voters today are easily conned, deeply biased, impervious to fact and bereft of survival instincts. Contrary to myth, frogs leap out of heating pots. Stampeding cattle stop at a cliff edge. Lemmings don’t really commit mass suicide. We’ll find out about Americans in 2024.” More

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    The Week in Business: Trump on TV

    Giulio BonaseraWhat’s Up? (May 7-13)CNN’s TrumpcastUntil last week, former President Donald J. Trump had not appeared on CNN since 2016. But at a town hall hosted by the network on Wednesday night, Mr. Trump, the Republican front-runner in the 2024 presidential campaign, resumed the lies and name-calling that marked his presidency. Answering questions from the anchor Kaitlan Collins, he repeated misinformation about the 2020 election, called the writer E. Jean Carroll, who won a suit accusing him of sexual abuse and defamation, a “wack job” and derided Ms. Collins as a “nasty person.” When Ms. Collins tried to correct Mr. Trump’s lies, he often talked over her. The largely sympathetic audience cheered him on throughout the evening. Critics of CNN’s forum said it was reckless to give Mr. Trump such a large platform for his message, especially because it proved difficult to fact check his statements in real time. The chairman of CNN, Chris Licht, defended the broadcast on Thursday, saying it underscored that covering Mr. Trump would “continue to be messy and tricky.”Inflation Is SlowingA closely watched report on Wednesday showed that inflation in the United States had reached a noteworthy milestone: April was the 10th straight month that the pace of price increases slowed. The Consumer Price Index climbed 4.9 percent from a year earlier, surpassing analysts’ expectations — in a good way. Economists in a Bloomberg survey had forecast a 5 percent climb. Core inflation, which strips out volatile food and fuel costs, also fell slightly. The report comes on the heels of the Federal Reserve’s 10th consecutive increase to its benchmark rate. The latest inflation data, along with other signs of a slowdown in the economy, could make the May increase the last one for now. Elon Musk’s AnnouncementElon Musk long ago asked users on Twitter if he should step down as chief executive of the platform. “I will abide by the results of this poll,” he said. The results came in: Almost 58 percent of the 17.5 million people who voted agreed that Mr. Musk should leave his post. But it was still somewhat surprising when Mr. Musk announced on Friday that he had chosen his replacement: He said his successor would be Linda Yaccarino, the chair of global advertising and partnerships at NBCUniversal. Mr. Musk said Ms. Yaccarino, who recently interviewed him onstage at an advertising event in Miami, would focus on business operations while he would continue to work on product design and technology.Giulio BonaseraWhat’s Next? (May 14-20)Senate Hearings on the Banking CrisisTwo groups that have sought to blame each other for the recent bank failures will appear at a pair of Senate hearings this week — the heads of those banks and the federal regulators who oversee them. On Tuesday, Greg Becker, the former chief executive of Silicon Valley Bank, who stepped down from his post after the bank’s collapse in March, will testify before the Senate Banking Committee. Two former top executives from Signature Bank, which failed two days later, will also testify. They are expected to meet a harsh reception from lawmakers. In a letter summoning Mr. Becker to appear, the chairman of the committee wrote, “You must answer for the bank’s downfall.” Regulators can expect a grilling, too, at a separate hearing on Thursday. When regulators appeared before the committee last month, members of Congress on both sides of the aisle faulted shortcomings in oversight for the banking crisis. Regulators also pointed the finger at the banks’ mismanagement.More Turmoil at FoxDominion Voting Systems’ defamation suit against Fox News, which was settled for $787.5 million in April, may have been only the opening salvo in a long fight to hold the network accountable for airing misinformation about the 2020 presidential election. Last week, Nina Jankowicz, a prominent specialist in Russian disinformation and online harassment, filed a new defamation suit accusing Fox of spreading lies about her that led to serious threats to her safety and harm to her career. That’s not Fox’s only legal trouble. It still faces a defamation suit from another election technology company, Smartmatic, which is seeking $2.7 billion in damages. Meanwhile, Tucker Carlson, the network’s star host who was recently ousted and is still under contract, has said he is starting his own show on Twitter, a sign that negotiations to reach an amicable separation with the network have broken down.Report Cards for Big Box StoresWalmart and Target, two of the country’s largest retailers, will release their quarterly earnings reports this week, providing a glimpse at how inflation — which is falling but persistent — is affecting consumers. For the three months that ended in January, Walmart reported that its revenue was 7.3 percent higher than a year earlier and said December was its best month for sales at its U.S. stores in its history. But the company warned of dimmer prospects for the rest of the fiscal year, suggesting that consumers’ ability to absorb higher prices could be approaching its limit. Other retailers struck similar downbeat notes, suggesting that they expected conditions to worsen in the coming months.What Else?Goldman Sachs said on Monday that it would pay $215 million to settle a gender bias suit accusing the bank of hindering women’s career advancement and paying them less than their male colleagues. Disney, in its quarterly earnings report last week, said that it had narrowed its streaming losses but that revenue from its old-line TV channels had fallen sharply. And Peloton said it was recalling more than two million exercise bikes because of reports of a faulty part. More

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    Chris Licht of CNN Defends Decision to Host Trump Town Hall

    “People woke up, and they know what the stakes are in this election in a way that they didn’t the day before,” Chris Licht said in a morning call at the network.The chairman of CNN, Chris Licht, issued a robust defense on Thursday of his decision to broadcast a live town hall with former President Donald J. Trump, an unruly and at times bewildering event that has prompted criticism inside and outside of the network.On a network-wide editorial call, Mr. Licht congratulated the moderator, Kaitlan Collins, on “a masterful performance” before acknowledging the public backlash. “We all know covering Donald Trump is messy and tricky, and it will continue to be messy and tricky, but it’s our job,” Mr. Licht said, according to a recording of the call obtained by The New York Times.“I absolutely, unequivocally believe America was served very well by what we did last night,” Mr. Licht added. “People woke up, and they know what the stakes are in this election in a way that they didn’t the day before. And if someone was going to ask tough questions and have that messy conversation, it damn well should be on CNN.”The town hall, which aired in prime-time on Wednesday, featured Mr. Trump deploying a fusillade of falsehoods, sometimes too quickly for the moderator to intercept. It was a preview of what American journalism can expect from a 2024 campaign with the former president, who despite his ubiquity in political life has rarely appeared on mainstream TV outside of Fox News since leaving office.If the 2016 campaign showed that many Americans could not agree on common facts, the Babel-like nature of Wednesday’s New Hampshire town hall suggested that voters now occupied wholly different universes. Mr. Trump repeated a web of conspiracies about a stolen election and the “beautiful day” of the Capitol riot, language that was likely to befuddle half the viewing audience and resonate as gospel with the rest.“The election was not rigged, Mr. President,” Ms. Collins said at one point. “You cannot keep saying that all night long.” (He kept saying it.)The live audience, a group of Republicans and Republican-leaning independent voters, often cheered him on, even when he derided Ms. Collins as a “nasty person.”“While we all may have been uncomfortable hearing people clapping, that was also an important part of the story,” Mr. Licht said on Thursday, “because the people in that audience represent a large swath of America. And the mistake the media made in the past is ignoring that those people exist. Just like you cannot ignore that President Trump exists.”Critics said it was reckless for the network to provide a live forum to Mr. Trump, given his track record of spreading disinformation. Even the network’s own commentators appeared taken aback by what had transpired on its airwaves. “We don’t have enough time to fact check every lie he told,” Jake Tapper told viewers on Wednesday night.The town hall was watched by 3.3 million people, according to Nielsen, a significant increase from CNN’s typical audience on an average weeknight at 8 p.m. That was slightly more than the average viewership for Tucker Carlson’s Fox News program, which was seen by an average of 3.2 million people in the first three months of the year.Mr. Licht, who took over CNN last year after the network was acquired by Warner Bros. Discovery, has had a rocky tenure, and some journalists there have bristled at his public comments that the network had veered too far into an anti-Trump stance when Mr. Trump was in the White House. Mr. Licht has said CNN must appeal to more centrists and conservative voters, a strategy that has support from his corporate superiors.There were signs on Thursday that frustration inside CNN about the town hall was bubbling up. The network’s own media newsletter, “Reliable Sources,” published a tough assessment after the event, noting, “It’s hard to see how America was served by the spectacle of lies that aired on CNN Wednesday evening.”The newsletter cited several critical posts on social media about the forum, including some people who faulted the network for choosing a town hall-style format where voters were free to cheer Mr. Trump and jeer Ms. Collins, the moderator.CNN said it selected the audience members in the same manner as it had for past candidate forums. A network team traveled to New Hampshire and coordinated with community groups, faith-based organizations, local Republican officials and the student government at Saint Anselm College, which hosted the event.CNN said the aim was to fill the auditorium with citizens representing a range of conservative views, but the network declined to identify specific groups that were consulted, saying it did not want activists trying to game the system at future events.In keeping with past network practice, the Trump campaign was provided invitations for about 20 guests to attend the town hall, although these guests were not allowed to ask questions of the candidate. Officials at Saint Anselm College were allowed to invite about 70 people. The total audience was 300 to 350 people.In the days leading up to the town hall, Ms. Collins prepared with the team in New Hampshire extensively, according to a person familiar with the matter, going over potential falsehoods Mr. Trump might utter onstage. Mr. Licht gave feedback, and Mr. Trump was played in mock debates by Mark Preston, CNN’s vice president of political and special events programming,Mr. Licht’s decision to select Ms. Collins for the high-profile assignment underscored her rising prominence as an on-air anchor at CNN. The network is finalizing a multiyear contract with Ms. Collins that will make her the anchor of CNN’s currently vacant 9 p.m. hour, according to three people with knowledge of talks. That hour is a crucial time slot for advertisers, and Ms. Collins’s recent tryout in that time-slot last month drew favorable ratings.Puck earlier reported that Ms. Collins was nearing a deal with CNN.Ms. Collins’s deal, combined with Don Lemon’s recent ouster from CNN, means that the network will have to retool its morning show. The network is looking for new co-hosts to pair with Poppy Harlow, Ms. Collins’s co-anchor on “CNN This Morning.”Some CNN critics had asserted that the network cut away early from the Trump event, which ended around 9:10 p.m. In fact, the event was always intended to last an hour or so, with a panel of analysts ready in a studio to take over coverage at the start of the 9 p.m. hour. More