From Frank Bruni–“I’m revisiting especially fine passages of prose from the past 12 months.”

You should click through to read them all but here’s a taste to get you going.

In Golfweek, Eamon Lynch reflected on Trump’s grifting: “There was a time when it would have been scandalous for a sitting U.S. president to use the office to serve his personal business interests, but that was back when America had attorneys general who didn’t think an emoluments clause was the disclaimer on a moisturizer.”

In The Deseret News, Addison Graham explained the lopsided logic of Senator Lisa Murkowski’s vote for Trump’s megabill: “Murkowski delivered a dessert bar to America’s billionaire class just to take home some Tootsie Rolls to Alaska.”

In The Atlantic, Helen Lewis reported from the Riyadh Comedy Festival, which paid big-name comedians big bucks to come to Saudi Arabia: “The festival is an outgrowth of Vision 2030, the grand Saudi project to prepare for the kingdom’s post-oil future. The old Saudi brand was ‘austere theocracy,’ but the new one is ‘fun, fun, fun, but still with beheading.’” 

In The Boston Globe, Christopher Muther visited a New England roadway rest stop with food options beyond the norm and ordered the poutine: “I know what you’re thinking. ‘Rest stop poutine? Are you sure?’ Rest stop poutine sounds like the name of an indie rock band, or a French Canadian laxative.”

Charles also observed that the scolds who ban books have taken issue with “Maurice Sendak’s ‘In the Night Kitchen,’ which has been proven in the state of Florida to turn straight white Christian boys into polygender Marxists who eat only quinoa.”

Kwame Anthony Appiah sounded a hopeful note for movie scripts created by flesh-and-blood humans rather than A.I.: “There will always be an audience for work that spurns the template — for writers who, shall we say, think outside the bot.”

The writer envy is strong with this one. This one being me.

#thiswritinglife Chatter Frank Bruni The Best Sentences of 2025