From an October 26 letter from Dina Kourda to Joe Dillman, the street-maintenance superintendent in Irvine, California. As a concerned citizen of Irvine, I am writing today on behalf of…

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From a complaint filed September 7, 2012, by Stephanie Kirschner and Brad J. Kane against the owners and operators of Eden Memorial Park, a cemetery in Mission Hills, California. In…

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From A History of Future Cities, by Daniel Brook, to be published next month by W. W. Norton. Brook’s article “New Hampshire Goddam” appeared in the November 2012 issue of…

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From Responding to Climate Change in New York State, a November 2011 report prepared for the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority. Rising sea levels and extreme weather…

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From the instruction manual for Catan: Oil Springs, a scenario-expansion kit for the board game The Settlers of Catan. Developed by the Worldwatch Institute and the game’s manufacturers, the scenario…

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From comments on the Facebook page of the Jefferson County, Alabama, sheriff’s office, posted last January in response to a photo of Dustin McCombs, who was wanted on charges of…

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From a selection of openings to abandoned short stories by Zsuzsi Gartner included in Five Dials number 25. As part of an ongoing project, Gartner issues adoption certificates to readers who request…

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From an 1851 “list of imitation book-backs” sent by Charles Dickens to a London bookbinder, who fabricated mock books with the fake titles. The New York Public Library re-created part…

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From almost 2,000 comments about student loans sent to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and released on its website last June. Americans currently owe more than $1 trillion in outstanding…

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From source material quoted by al-Khatib al-Baghdadi, an eleventh-century scholar, in his humorous survey of Islamic scholarship concerning uninvited guests. Selections from the Art of Party-Crashing in Medieval Iraq, abridged and translated…

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From a response by the Russian literary critic Viktor Shklovsky (1893–1984) to a question by Serena Vitale, during an interview in Moscow in December 1978. Yevgeni Polivanov, who like Shklovsky…

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From Natasha, Pierre, & the Great Comet of 1812, an electropop opera by Dave Malloy based on Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace, which ran last fall at Ars Nova in New York City.…

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From comments on the Wikipedia entry for the Beatles. Last fall, Wikipedia conducted a community-wide poll to settle the below dispute, which began in 2004. Users voted for lowercase “the.”…

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By Gordon Lish, from the fall 2012 issue of Salmagundi. A new edition of Lish’s novel Peru (1986) will be published next month by Dalkey Archive Press. I do not…

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By A. R. Ammons (1926–2001), from the Summer/Autumn 2012 issue of Chicago Review. If one of these helicopters tried to put down in my yard, the branches of my many…

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From a May 24, 1943, memo to British foreign secretary Anthony Eden, from Owen O’Malley, the British ambassador to the Polish government in exile, in the collection of the Franklin…

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From Two Cheers for Anarchism, published last month by Princeton University Press. Scott is Sterling Professor of Political Science at Yale University. In the summer of 1990, in an effort…

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