The NY Times' Frank Bruni's subscriber-only newsletter has a regular feature, For the Love of Sentences, in which readers who spot good writing pass it on to him. As a lover of good writing, I think it, alone, is worth the price of admission.

The first one I read is amazing. From now on, go get it yourself from the source.

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Kevin D. Williamson let it rip in a recent essay in The Wall Street Journal about how far American democracy has fallen. Here’s one whooshing stretch: “With the old media gatekeepers gone, right-wing content creators rushed in and filled the world with QAnon kookery on Facebook, conspiracy theories powerful enough to vault the cretinous likes of Marjorie Taylor Greene into Congress, fake news sponsored by Moscow and Beijing and fake-ish news subsidized by Viktor Orban and his happy junta, and whatever kind of poison butterfly Tucker Carlson is going to be when he emerges from the chrysalis of filth he’s built around himself. The prim consensus of 200 Northeastern newspaper editors has been replaced by the sardonic certitude of 100 million underemployed rage-monkeys and ignoramuses on Twitter.” (Thanks to Lisa Lee of Newton, Mass., and Emily Hawthorn of San Antonio for nominating this.)

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I am delightd by at “whatever kind of poison butterfly Tucker Carlson is going to be when he emerges from the chrysalis of filth he’s built around himself.” Chrysalis of filth. God, I wish I could write like that.

I am proud of “golden glow of nostalgia,” but that isn’t even Triple-A ball compared to Williamson. Too, a 77-word sentence might seem like someone winning a bet (I’ll bet I can slip a 77-word sentence past the copyeditor at the WSJ), but I admire the lucid structure beneath it.