Words

I just adore Frank Bruni’s weekly column and the “For the love sentences” section in particular.

Here’s the latest installment:

Sometimes a columnist speaks for just a small subset of readers. The opposite of that is Bret Stephens in The Times on the junior senator from Texas: “Ted Cruz is to my brain what durian fruit is to my nose.” (Thanks to Miki Smith of Worton, Md., and David Calfee of Lake Forest, Ill., for nominating this.)

Staying on the topic of political revulsion, here’s Michael Gerson, who once wrote speeches for President George W. Bush, in The Washington Post: “In my political youth, conservatives praised state governments as ‘laboratories of innovation.’ Now they’re graveyards of sanity and public spirit. And the actual graveyards provide evidence.” (Christine Allen, Charlotte, N.C.)

Also in The Washington Post, a survey of Apple upgrades by Chris Velazco and Tatum Hunter notes, skeptically, a new $4.99-a-month Apple Music Voice plan for playing songs upon verbal command: “The details are hazy, but anyone familiar with Siri’s constant mistakes and misfires may be shuddering. If I wanted to pay money to be consistently misunderstood, I’d buy a plane ticket to my mother’s house.” (Joe Hornung-Scherr, Holland, Neb.)

Here’s David Remnick in a recent article about Paul McCartney in The New Yorker: “To retrieve the memories and sensations of the past, Proust relied mainly on the taste of crumbly cakes moistened with lime-blossom tea. The rest of humanity relies on songs. Songs are emotionally charged and brief, so we remember them whole: the melody, the hook, the lyrics, where we were, what we felt. And they are emotionally adhesive, especially when they’re encountered in our youth.” (Del Shortliffe, Norwalk, Conn.)

In The Times, Jason Farago’s review of the exhibition “Surrealism Beyond Borders” noted that it, like several other recent shows, “conceives of Surrealism as not quite a movement, but a broad, tentacular tendency. Its forms and its aims mutated as they migrated, and therefore simple narratives of this-one-influenced-that-one won’t cut it. This is something grander, messier and much more compelling: an unstable cartography of images and ideas on the move, blowing across the globe like trade winds of the subconscious.” (Robert Dana, Minneapolis)

Finally, here’s Ligaya Mishan in The Times on night-blooming flowers: “Starting around dusk (depending on where in the world you are, how warm the day, the ponderousness of clouds), the pale, waxy buds, which resemble elongated artichokes, start to open, the pink-tipped sepals peeling back millimeter by millimeter until, by midnight, the secret is told: the blossom announcing itself, so white it seems to glow, with skinny yellow streamers at its throat. Its life is a matter of hours; in the light of day, it retreats and shrivels, a ball gown turned to rags. (Carole King, Nashville, Tenn.)