Good morning. The Spurs slipped past the Knicks last night, 115-111, ending a 13-game winning streak that lasted more than a month. President Trump and Zohran Mamdani were there. There’s more news below. I’m going to start today, though, with some great American sentences.
Word choicesHere’s a great sentence now: “The United States was written into being 250 years ago.” My colleagues wrote it to introduce a project we’re unveiling today. It’s about six sentences that have shaped the American story over the past two and a half centuries. I love theirs because the words “written into being” say so much about the birth of our nation — conjured not out of conquest or lineage, but out of shared principles and philosophies that led to our independence from the British crown. We write laws, literature, songs and speeches to tell us who we are. And when we write them well — with precision and rhythm that match our ambition, our bravado, our anger, joy, grievances or dreams alike — we can imagine a kind of American exceptionalism that derives not from power or politics, but from language itself. Here’s the first of the six. It’s the most famous sentence of the Declaration of Independence, written quickly and collectively in Philadelphia in 1776: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. Our A.O. Scott wrote about that one. As he notes, many pages have been written about these 35 words, about the ideology that girds them, about the history that led to them, about where in classical and early modern thought they emerged. That makes them no less remarkable for their sweep, and for their radicalism, he says. We are equal. We have rights. Those rights define our humanity.
Of course it’s a slippery bit of poetry, too, both a sacred text and a promise that, for many, has yet to be achieved. He writes: Even the simplest gloss — the near-heretical attempt to put the language of the Declaration “in other words” — hints at the complexities rippling through the crystalline clarity of the prose. Every word is a fighting word, begging to be contested. What exactly did they mean by “equal”? By “Creator”? By “Liberty”? By “We”? Yesterday, I called Tony (A.O.’s been Tony to me since … college) to ask him about what it was like to write about these words we’ve all seen so many times. “There’s real gravity and authority to them,” he told me. “We call it a ‘founding document’ and ascribe a lot of complexity and baggage to it. But the most accurate description of what kind of writing it is? It’s a memo.” And yet, what a memo. “It goes so far beyond anything that they could have imagined,” Tony said. “That’s fascinating to me. Words are words. Sentences are sentences. But this writing is not static. It has the power to endure, even to change over time. And it gave me a little chill to realize that.” Please explore the whole package here, starting with Tony. Together the sentences provide an American narrative, a way of reading our history that helps us to understand our present — and to think about our future. American SentencesAll this talk of American sentences reminded me of the poet Allen Ginsberg, who wanted to create an American version of haiku, the Japanese poetic form that calls for stanzas of five syllables, then seven syllables, then five once more. Ginsberg proposed the American Sentence instead, a 17-syllable single-line poem, no other rules. He put a lot of them into his 1994 collection, “Cosmopolitan Greetings.” Some may say something about the American story, too: Put on my tie in a taxi, short of breath, rushing to meditate. Get used to your body, forget you were born, suddenly you got to get out! To see Void vast infinite look out the window into the blue sky.
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The current ebola outbreak could become the worst ever. It can still be contained, Jeremy Konyndyk writes, “but only if the world finds the will to do it.” About a quarter of wild-caught seafood comes from boats that scrape the bottom of the ocean with giant weighted nets. The technique kills thousands of marine species. There are better ways to fish, Paul Greenberg writes. Human made. Human played. 75% off. Subscribe to New York Times Games for 75% off your first year. Our best offer is only available for a limited time. Relax and recharge with our full portfolio of games, including Wordle, Spelling Bee, Connections, the Crossword and more — all mindfully made by humans.
Artisanal or exploitative? Viral videos claim Adidas exploited Indigenous women to sew World Cup jerseys. The women say they like the work. Screen theory: Modern smartphones hit shelves in 2007. Fertility rates began falling that year. Two studies say there’s a connection. Your pick: The most clicked link in The Morning yesterday was a spaghetti carbonara recipe. Windsurfer: Hoyle Schweitzer helped create a sailboard that allowed people to glide across lakes and oceans. It was a garage experiment that grew into a global sport. He died at 93.
31— That is how many religious affiliations the Defense Department now allows service members to choose from for their personnel records, down from more than 200. Among others, the list no longer includes atheist, pagan, Unitarian Universalist or Wiccan.
College football: A Texas state court granted a temporary injunction that will let the Texas Tech quarterback Brendan Sorsby play this fall, despite his admission that he made at least 40 bets on Indiana football when he was on the Hoosiers’ 2022 roster. World Cup: The former Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel said no to hosting games in this year’s tournament. He doesn’t regret it.
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