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Humor

Operation Dessert Storm

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…

Charles Dickens’s Mock Book Titles

by Harper’s Magazine,

From an 1851 “list of imitation book-backs” sent by Charles Dickens to a London bookbinder.

Weekly Review

by Justin Stone,

“A paleoanthropologist determined that prehistoric man ate pandas, researchers disproved the Five-Second Rule, and a cat discovered 2,000-year-old catacombs in Rome.”

Chore List of Champions

by Kurt Vonnegut,

From a January 26, 1947, contract between Kurt Vonnegut and his pregnant wife, Jane, to whom he had been married for sixteen months. Kurt Vonnegut: Letters, edited by Dan Wakefield,…

Family Ties

From character descriptions for the Afghan television show The Ministry, written by the show’s producers, Kaboora Productions. The show, which aired on Afghanistan’s Tolo TV in August, is shot in…