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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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