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E.B. White’s other pig story

If you’re loading Instapaper with holiday reading, be sure to include E.B. White’s gorgeous “The Death of a Pig,” on grief over losing livestock, written before Charlotte’s Web. (Via, via; on White & the environment.)

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Stop the clocks: how Twain celebrated Thanksgiving

This cartoon — found in Mark Twain Himself: a Pictorial Biography, thanks to Macy Halford — exposes my beloved Twain as a fellow noise-intolerant freak. Evidently he rose on Thanksgiving night at the cartoonist’s house “to stop the clocks that were interfering with his sleep.” I myself have gotten out of bed to silence clocks in other people’s houses. I . . .

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Legs, scenery, and Amens: Sarah Palin’s Alaska

I invited myself to D.E. Rasso’s place to watch Sarah Palin’s Alaska. It was every bit as vacuous and grating as Nancy Franklin says, and also filled with fundamentalist dog-whistle moments. We wrote about it (after three bottles of wine) for The Awl.

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The inconvenient timing of revision epiphanies

“Why is it that as soon as you hand [your draft] to a reader, you get your best ideas for the story and you want to snatch it out of their hands and make them wait for the results of the next round of revisions?”

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