“The fences insured against a time when a scavenger in Gautam Nagar might learn that a shot of rare Scotch consumed in ten minutes at the Sheraton’s ITC Maratha cost exactly as much as he earned in seven hundred fourteen-hour days picking up aluminum cans and used tampon applicators, and find that information too much to bear.”

—Katherine Boo, “Opening Night,” The New Yorker, February 23, 2009.

Why it's great: The sentence is a story in itself. It creates a texture landscape in the reader’s mind (taste that rare scotch, sharp and warm in your throat; then feel the ache in your lower spine, and your own gathering revulsion, as you hunch into your 14th hour of trash-picking). But more incredibly, it distills one of the humanity’s most pressing and intractable problems – the problem of global inequality – into a short burst of exquisite detail. There is a fence across the whole world. On one side is the scotch and on the other is the tampon applicator. And the tension between the two sides is ever mounting.