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 choices
Here’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 Sentences
All 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.
THE LATEST NEWS
War in the Middle East
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.
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.
TODAY’S NUMBER
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.
SPORTS
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.
I suppose you could make this recipe for easy chicken tacos easier by using a rotisserie chicken instead of cooking boneless, skinless thighs. But you’d miss out on the silky gravy, which soaks into tortillas beautifully, and the dry white meat would bum you out. Serve with diced raw onion, cilantro, wedges of lime and a hot sauce with backbone — Crystal, say. I don’t recommend Tabasco.
A HOLLYWOOD ICON
Popular movies bond us to one another, no matter what’s happening in the world, writes Wesley Morris in a sprawling, lovely profile of Steven Spielberg. And Spielberg’s films have been a top-shelf glue.
Wesley talked to the director about fear, catharsis and being human. “I can’t express enough how therapeutic and healthy it is for me to keep doing this job over and over and over again,” Spielberg said about making movies. “I work so much out through this process. So much out. I get to bleed off some of the darkness instead of letting it fester inside me. You get to let it fester inside you.”
Watch “Spider-Noir” on Amazon Prime. Our critic calls the show “a superhero story dressed up in classic-Hollywood drag: gangster violence, smoky musical numbers, screwball patter, mad-doctor horror.” Fun.
Blast away grime and moss and just about anything else with the best pressure washers recommended by the wet-shoed property managers at Wirecutter.
Exercise outside. There’ll be plenty of time for the gym come winter.
