Some writer over at The Atlantic intrudes on my "Gatsby project" territory.

You remember the old Gatsby project, where I'd isolate one sentence from "The Great Gatsby" and deal with it as complete in itself — a narrative arc, a container of meaning enough, a jumping off point for wild ideation. Some of us got so wrapped up in it that we find it hard to leave a room without yelling "Ewing!"

So here comes The Atlantic isolating a "Great Gatsby" paragraph and proclaiming it "The Most Dazzling Paragraph of The Great Gatsby" — on the authority of a writer named Susan Choi. One sentence isn't sufficient. She has to go with a whole paragraph. And it's not enough just to look deeply at that one thing. There has to be a proclamation that it is the best of all the paragraphs, and that just makes me want to open my hulking cabinets full of Gatsby sentences and begin throwing them, one by one, before you — sentences of little pig sausages and hot whips of panic and warm human magic, until a tray of cocktails floats at us through the twilight, and suddenly, the eyes of the editors at The Atlantic leak isolated and unpunctual tears.