So it took us until mid-January to catch this — probably because we’d never heard of the publication who posted it before — but The Pickup was recently recognized as having produced one of the best sentences of 2025.
Hey, that’s neat! Has anybody ever heard of these guys? It’s some outfit called The New York Times. (Let us know in the comments, if so.) From a quick scan of their site, it seems like they’re a real up-and-comer in the media space.
Anyway, it’s a pretty long post and the majority of it seems to be fixated on Donald Trump, but if you scroll down a ways, sure enough, there’s John Paul Brammer getting recognized for what is undeniably an awesome series of sentences he wrote for his story about Legends Tower this summer:
I don’t mean to say OKC doesn’t deserve iconic architecture. Far from! I simply think that buildings should reflect the character of a place, like how Santa Fe is all adobe and how Dallas looks designed by a sentient Ford F-150.
That’s the good stuff right there. Hey, let’s keep things rolling. If you thought that sentence was good, we picked out a bunch more good sentences The Pickup published in 2025. And if you’re a subscriber, your dollars funded them. So thanks for that!
One last thing — we hard-launched The Pickup a year ago today! Alicia, Zack and I are grateful for your readership, and we’re looking forward to writing more great sentences in Year 2. Alright, now on to the fun stuff.
From Becky Carman’s review of a monster truck rally:
Would I go see more monster trucks, knowing what I know now? Man, probably. Even with all the quibbles, I still found myself invested, earnestly muttering things like, “Is Tiger Shark having an off day? He really shit the bed in the Wheelies,” and, “Why does Bigfoot smell worse than a truck named Gunkster?”
From Mitch Gilliam’s review of Japanese psych legends Acid Mothers Temple’s concert at Mercury Lounge:
Fuck flower power. This was flower violence, a buildup that ran straight off a cliff into a full doom drop-off—a drowning minor-key fistfight on fumes that landed gracefully into a lake of lava-lamp viscosity and Pink Floydian interspace.
From Mark Brown’s personal essay on his family recipe for garlic cheese:
I once saw our grandfather nibble through the mold on a rat cheese. “That’s the good part,” he said. He was wrong, but his countenance was stronger than mind. There is good mold and there is bad mold, and I have consumed both, a habit I got from him. For example, the mold on a Roquefort is there by happy accident: edible and fine. The rot that bloomed on a Crottin de Chavignol after I put it on the ledge of our Paris hotel window—and ate with a demi of Champagne for a picnic on the Pont des Artes, in the rain—was not, and nearly killed me.
From Ellen Ray’s essay on public art, a killer simile:
Locating art in places that are well-funded and well-groomed is like sticking another magnet on the fridge where you’d grab food regardless.
From my review of MJ Lenderman’s show at Cain’s Ballroom:
It’s worth pausing here to clarify that this reverb-heavy doofus resource extraction enterprise that Lenderman’s involved in is cruelty-free and even morally admirable. There’s a richness to the interior world of these characters bubbling underneath the surface-level stuff about basketball, not to mention the cartoons and semen. His doofuses (doofusii?) may or may not reflect on the social annoyance, distress or harm they cause others, but they still desire, longing for a better world than the one they inhabit.
From Zack's takedown of the dumb boulders:
“The Big Boulders” is an immersive, experiential work comprising a set of locally-sourced stone boulders, optimally placed for individual displacement. This work seeks to explore the “liminal space” of city sidewalks by obstructing them and making them ugly as hell.
From Fraser Kastner’s trip to Sheridan Church to gawk at Pastor Jackson Lahmeyer:
Lahmeyer is a fascinating specimen. I can best describe him as a human LinkedIn profile.
From Tulsa Bae columnist Corinne Gaston’s, story about the difficulties of the local dating scene, a superb character introduction:
My date showed up peacocking, in a silk shirt, with dice-themed rings and necklaces, and a very expensive-looking cowboy hat (odd, since he was from the east coast). He rattled off some obviously rehearsed flirty lines and some frankly odd beliefs about gender roles, then—when I was ready to bolt for the exit—whipped out a pack of gold playing cards.
From Alicia's review of Clayton Keyes' ceramics exhibition Subterfuge:
The snakes coiling within and around the familiar shape of a rose window—a hallmark of Gothic religious architecture—sent out a plume of suggestions: the sinister note lurking within a symbol of divine order, the promise of regeneration, the luxurious beauty of nature, the venom that waits to kill.
From David Chandler’s reflection on Tulsa’s more Joycean qualities:
In my own experience, James Joyce is about as Tulsa as Coney Islander and midtown potholes.
From Becky Carman’s beautiful essay on reconnecting with her Korean heritage, one of our absolute favorite stories we published in Year 1:
Not all grief is cut from the same cloth. Some days, it’s a weighted blanket; others it’s a tulle canopy, creating a gauzy haze between me and the rest of the world.
From Angela Evans’ delirious series of recommendations for where to eat on 4/20:
La Michoacana Plus is like if Lisa Frank took a dab, exploded out of your Trapper Keeper™, and reincarnated as a psychedelic ice cream fever dream. Calling it an “ice cream shop” is straight-up disrespectful. It’s a glitzy, tropical acid trip moonlighting as a fruity, frozen oasis built for the blissed-out and sugar-zooted sweet tooth.
From Emily Blackshear’s survey of the food at local strip clubs:
Remember going to Sonic in high school with friends on a Friday night and ordering a Route 44 Cherry Limeade just so you could pour half of it out and replace it with Popov vodka your best friend’s older sister bought you with a fake ID? Walking into Sensations is similar in spirit, minus the vodka.
From my description of the flavor profile of Quittin’ Time, QuikTrip’s new (old) beer, which Zack actually ghost wrote because he didn't want anybody to think he'd broken sobriety (he didn't):
It’s a beer you could sit down and have a beer with.
From Portlyn Houghton-Harjo’s walking trip down Route 66:
What I love about the landscape of Tulsa is the persistence of nature. Beside our efforts to cover ourselves in asphalt, animals have their own journeys with their own routes. A scissor-tailed flycatcher will flit around and an armadillo will walk—at least until struck down by a passing vehicle. Tulsa’s a car city, after all.
From my quickie blog on the differences between Tulsa King and The Lowdown:
If Taylor Sheridan embraces the “Great Man” theory of history, then Sterlin Harjo seems dedicated to rendering that great man as a dunce. In The Lowdown the closest thing we see to a great man is Donald Washberg, a delightfully doofusmaxxing Kyle McLachlan, who gets mixed up in questionable land deals and cries after sex.
Wow, what a bunch of great sentences! Here's to more of them in Year 2 of The Pickup.
