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State book of Massachusetts?

Some schoolkids petitioned their representative to declare Moby-Dick Massachusetts’ state book. The Boston Globe suggests other possibilities.

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The periodic returnee father

In Zadie Smith’s “Hanwell Senior,” published in The New Yorker this week, a father gives his young son some penny bangers and then disappears.

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Happy weekend from the absent father

  Zone Johnston, my granny’s father, was always dragging his wife and kids to carpentry jobs throughout Texas, Louisiana, Missouri, and beyond, and then abandoning them in favor of a new pretty face. According to my mom, “[his wife’s] people would have to come to where they were and take them home until Zone finished his work and wandered back . . .

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Revolution to republic in prints and drawings

  The New York Public Library’s “From Revolution to Republic in Prints and Drawings” exhibition runs through July 7. There you can see “An Exact View of the Late Battle of Charlestown, June 17, 1775,” contemplate “The Fruits of Arbitrary Power, or The Bloody Massacre Perpetrated in King Street” (above), enjoy the political cartoons of the day, and gaze at . . .

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