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In matters of foreign policy, Congress, and especially the Senate, was designed as a hedge against the abuses exhibited by European monarchs who for centuries had whimsically entangled their countries…

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From a June 7, 1923, letter sent to the personal secretary of Leon Trotsky, then Russian minister of defense, by the Nestle Laboratory for Hair Research in New York City,…

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From remarks in the Montana State Legislature concerning a bill allowing drivers to salvage the carcasses of antelope, deer, elk, and moose killed in automobile accidents. In 2011, there were…

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From The Charleston Bulletin Supplements, dictated by Virginia Woolf to her nephew Quentin Bell when he was a child. Between 1923 and 1927, Bell and his brother Julian hand-produced a…

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From 2,945 occupations listed in the current edition of India’s National Classification of Occupations. Spinning Master Taxing Master Numismatist Rock Slicer Impression Taker Weather Observer

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From a recording of a 1983 meeting between Orson Welles, the film director Henry Jaglom, and an HBO executive. Beginning in 1978, Jaglom met Welles regularly for lunch, and at…

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From an open letter written in March by Bernhard Paul, founder and director of Germany’s Circus Roncalli, to Peer Steinbrück, the Social Democratic candidate for German chancellor, who in February…

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By Diane Williams, from a collection in progress. Williams’s most recent book is Vicky Swanky Is a Beauty. True! Yes! Mother always gave me a tribute with a sigh. I…

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By Patrizia Cavalli, from My Poems Won’t Change the World: Selected Poems, a bilingual edition to be published in September by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Cavalli is the author of…

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By Liao Yiwu, from For a Song and a Hundred Songs, out next month from New Harvest. Liao, who was born in China in 1958, spent four years in prison…

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By Nick Laird, from Go Giants, to be published in September by W. W. Norton. Laird is the author, most recently, of the novel Glover’s Mistake.

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From more than 3,000 terms used in emails between employees engaged in corporate wrongdoing, collected from fraud investigations since 2009 and used by the accounting firm Ernst & Young in…

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From the transcript of a March 7 Senate Banking Committee hearing on enforcement of the Bank Secrecy Act of 1970, which requires U.S. financial institutions to help the federal government…

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From more than 200 questions posed by jurors over two days in March during the trial of Jodi Arias. Arias, who stands accused of the 2008 murder of her former…

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By Joshua Cohen, from Attention! A (Short) History, published this month in the United Kingdom by Notting Hill Editions. Cohen, a contributing editor of Harper’s Magazine, is the author, most…

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From an exchange last summer between Jean-Pierre Decool, a member of the French National Assembly, and Defense Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian. Translated from the French by Jess Cotton. question Jean-Pierre…

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From correspondence recently received and sent by members of Washington State’s Personalized License Plate Review Committee. shgnwgn — We feel that this plate could be offensive to good taste and…

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By Mary Ruefle, from Issue 2 of Unstuck. Ruefle is the author of several books, including, most recently, Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures. The day the living room flooded…

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From a February 4 complaint by the U.S. Department of Justice against the credit-rating agency Standard & Poor’s, charging that S&P fraudulently inflated ratings on residential-mortgage-backed securities (RMBS) and collateralized…

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