There’s nothing like a perfect sentence to take the reader by the scruff of their neck and shake them awake. On Business Insider’s Discourse team this year, we wrote thousands of sentences to illuminate the urgent and the fascinating in business and tech.
Here are some of our favorites. They delighted us, enchanted us, and forced us to send them in our group chats. They made sense of the senseless. They’re plucked from stories about the death — and possible resurrection — of workplace loyalty, how even workaholics no longer work on Fridays, and AI researchers prepping for the AI apocalypse. Some were crafted by us. Others are quotes from sources: young founders full of conviction, investment bankers, a scholar of fetishes, and Steve Bannon. They’re cobbled together in a kind of prose poem.
Here’s to more whimsical, weird, delicious, nauseating, rollicking, thunderbolt sentences that awaken us to the gift of being alive in 2026.
My pitch was simple: It was impossible to date as a lesbian in Japan.
“You cannot truly be fulfilled as a man and be in education for long.”
Ew has morphed into oorah.
When everything seems like a scam, it’s easier to justify becoming a scammer.
Everything’s casino, and you’re either getting in on the action or getting left behind.
“It’s a problem when the dogs won’t eat the dog food.”
Gen Z may be the most rejected generation in human history.
Like it or not, the avocado-toast-loving, brunch-obsessed generation is now running the show. And many millennials do not like it.
In all my preparation, I failed to consider that my story would piss off an entire other cohort: Gen Xers.
We’re well past the peak of “OK, boomer,” the meme, but we’re still in the midst of “OK, boomer,” the sentiment.
“I follow her personality more than her journalism,” a lawyer who asked to be identified as “handsome, successful, and Jewish” said.
“He’s a techno-feudalist. We are on the side of the human being.” Bannon, like Musk, is a disrupter — but he draws the line, apparently, at disrupting God.
“I see people retire and sit down and die.”
While Kelly Starrett merely counted his morning boners, Johnson measures his overnight Johnsons and compares them to his son’s.
Bryan Johnson, the 48-year-old centimillionaire and nocturnal-erection-measuring longevity influencer, sits in the lotus position on a white loveseat, his knees grazing the knees of Kate Tolo, his 29-year-old business partner and, today, his spiritual guide through his psychedelic mushroom trip.
What does it mean to be a “good” rich person? “I was watching Disney Channel movies in that era of ‘Richie Rich.’ And I was like, ‘They’re the bad guys. We’re the bad guys.'”
“They’re the people who are most in favor of legalizing drugs. They’re in the favor of long hair. They’re the people most in favor of homosexuality or fornication or indiscriminate, shall we say, sexual misbehavior. Everybody knows what’s going on.”
The result: an opportunity for some eggs-cuse-flation.
Applying to a job in 2025 really is the statistical equivalent of hurling your resume into a black hole.
For many workers at the end of the week, the W in WFH is in scare quotes.
There’s a certain level of zen that comes with boarding an airplane.
If we Gen Zers can’t find stability in the tumultuous world of modern dating, maybe it’s coming in the form of homeownership.
Most concerning was a plaid shirt, disembodied into three pieces and strung across a window as a makeshift curtain, a horror my best friend later named The Shirtain™.
“I look at ‘TBPN’ as an existence proof of heaven.”
“I like throwing weird orgies, and I’m like — well, we’re going to die. What’s a weirder, more intense, crazier orgy we can do? Just do it now.”
Zak Jason is the executive editor of Business Insider’s Discourse team.
Business Insider’s Discourse stories provide perspectives on the day’s most pressing issues, informed by analysis, reporting, and expertise.
