FOR THE LOVE OF SENTENCES

Frank Bruni’s addendum to his column, For the Love of Sentences, is worth the price of a subscription to NYT. I can only dream that someday you’ll see one of my sentences here.

Jennifer Lopez in “This Is Me … Now: A Love Story” Prime, via Associated Press

Jennifer Lopez released an ego-smooching tandem of new movie and new music titled “This Is Me … Now,” and Lopezologists were ready.

Wesley Morris in The Times: “When Beyoncé explored love-pain, she called her project ‘Lemonade.’ When Lopez does it, heartache becomes cardio, lots of sweating and suffering and boxing and panting and heaving. You admire the shape of her body as much as you mourn her emotional discontent. It’s ‘Lululemonade.’” (Thanks to Josh Futterman, Manhattan, and Allen Tarlow, West Hollywood, Calif., among others, for nominating this.)

Anne Branigin in The Washington Post: “It will certainly take home the trophy for The Most J-Lo Thing J-Lo Has Ever Done. In it, she’s the magnetic center of the universe: She sings, she dances, she channels all of her rom-com superpowers — she even raps. It is her Magnum Lopez.” (Virginia Matish, Chesapeake, Va.)

Wesley also weighed in recently on a very different kind of performer in a very different kind of movie, appraising Paul Giamatti’s Oscar-nominated performance in “The Holdovers” as a profoundly — but not hopelessly — embittered prep school teacher: “You can measure the emotional magnitude of his righteousness by the creases, lines and squiggles that striate Giamatti’s forehead. What he’s after is richer than plain fury. Yes, he can give you Vesuvius. But here, in the most deeply inhabited, most sharply etched use to which that brow has yet been put, Giamatti has also located Lake Placid and charts a course toward it.” (Bonnie Oberman, Chicago, and Doug Sterner, Fort Lauderdale, Fla., among others)

Sticking with The Times, John McWhorter had some translingual fun with the first person plural: “In the Kwaio language of the Solomon Islands, the word for ‘we’ differs depending on whether you mean yourself and the person you’re talking to or yourself and someone else. There are also different words for ‘we’ if you are talking about yourself and three people including whom you are talking to or three people not including whom you are talking to or more than three people. Kwaio can leave an English speaker with we-ness envy.” (Sheldon Seidenfeld, Teaneck, N.J., and Keith Friedlander, Lloyd Harbor, N.Y., among many others)

Dwight Garner marveled at the writer Carson McCullers’s daily pharmaceutical intake as described in a new biography of her: “The lists of pills fill entire paragraphs. She must have rattled when she walked.” (Sally Hinson, Greer, S.C., and John Jacoby, Cambridge, Mass.)

And in a letter to the editor, Larry Stein of Glendale, Calif., observed: “President Biden would be an awful contestant on ‘Jeopardy!’ Instant recall and exact phrasing are not his strengths. But presidents do not play Foreign Policy for $200. They play it for real.” (Tim McFadden, Encinitas, Calif.)

To return to The Washington Post, Robin Givhan checked in on Senator Tim Scott’s stumping for Trump and saw “someone who has stared directly into the blinding sunlight of ambition and is trying to convince folks that he can still see clearly and accurately.” “Truth,” she continued, “floats around him like afterimages, those dark spots that bob in and out of focus.” (Betsy Snider, Acworth, N.H., and Robert Meadow, Los Angeles, among others)

In USA Today, Rex Huppke reviewed the shimmering gold sneakers that Trump recently branded and brandished: “They’re the go-to athletic shoe for people fleeing responsibility.” (Jon Rasmussen, Honolulu)

In Jacobin, Alissa Quart explored the disappearance or shrinking of many publications: “Pitchfork, long my go-to for tart and encyclopedic endorsements or takedowns of music, has been folded, in a much-reduced form, into GQ — two media entities that, if they were people, would have never spoken to each other in high school.” (Jazmyn Strode, Brooklyn, N.Y.)

In JoeBlogs, Joe Posnanski noted the significance of the baseball coach Don Mattingly’s rearing in the Hoosier State: “Don obviously grew up playing basketball; this being Indiana, after all, where both parents have to make consecutive free throws in order to take their baby home from the hospital.” (Perry Sailor, Longmont, Colo.)

In The Spokesman-Review of Spokane, Wash., Ammi Midstokke reacted to the latest compliment from her husband. “I was struck by a realization: Either I am perfect or my husband enjoys the relative peace that reigns when we both pretend I am,” she wrote. (Blake Albretsen, Spokane Valley, Wash.)

And in Bloomberg, Howard Chua-Eoan mulled the cheapening of “influence” as a concept and word: “The influencer culture has, for all practical purposes, blandly redefined influence as a commercial subset of social media. Its purpose is ever more followers and the monetization of those numbers, a frothy kind of circular prosperity. But real influence is made of sterner stuff — soul and sinew and heat and love. That’s what you see in the legacy of a truly influential American, restaurateur David Bouley, who died this week at the age of 70. Much more than a mountain of likes, he’s legend.” (Michael Costa, Bristol, R.I.)

To nominate favorite bits of recent writing from The Times or other publications to be mentioned in “For the Love of Sentences,” please email me here and include your name and place of residence.