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e56893f
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Being a nerd, which is to say going too far and caring too much about a subject, is the best way to make friends I know.
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Sarah Vowell |
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06717ca
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We are flawed creatures, all of us. Some of us think that means we should fix our flaws. But get rid of my flaws and there would be no one left.
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individuality
inspirational
flaws
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Sarah Vowell |
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78c6ccf
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I talk about going to [George W. Bush's] Inauguration and crying when he took the oath, 'cause I was so afraid he was going to
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Sarah Vowell |
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15d62ec
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Like Lincoln, I would like to believe the ballot is stronger than the bullet. Then again, he said that before he got shot.
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Sarah Vowell |
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d9af4fa
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Being a nerd, which is to say going too far and caring too much about a subject, is the best way to make friends I know. For me, the spark that turns an acquaintance into a friend has usually been kindled by some shared enthusiasm . . . At fifteen, I couldn't say two words about the weather or how I was doing, but I could come up with a paragraph or two about the album In high school, I made the first real friends I ever had because one o..
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Sarah Vowell |
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6f5de04
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Buffy's high school was built on top of a vortex of evil, the Hellmouth. And whose wasn't?
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Sarah Vowell |
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c6e7adf
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In these fast and fickle times, it's nice to know that there are some things you can always count on: the enduring brilliance of the last page of The Great Gatsby; the near-religious harmonies of the Beach Boys' "California Girls"; and the lifelong friendship of Matt Damon and Ben Affleck."
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Sarah Vowell |
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50dac2f
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The only thing more dangerous than an idea is a belief.
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zealotry
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Sarah Vowell |
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b9bd73e
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I guess if I had to pick a spiritual figurehead to possess the deed to the entirety of Earth, I'd go with Buddha, but only because he wouldn't want it.
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religion
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Sarah Vowell |
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0873c3a
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I'm always disappointed when I see the word "Puritan" tossed around as shorthand for a bunch of generic, boring, stupid, judgmental killjoys. Because to me, they are very specific, fascinating, sometimes brilliant, judgmental killjoys who rarely agreed on anything except that Catholics are going to hell."
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pilgrims
puritans
roman-catholicism
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Sarah Vowell |
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3138749
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The true American patriot is by definition skeptical of the government.
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Sarah Vowell |
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a755955
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I wish that in order to secure his party's nomination, a presidential candidate would be required to point at the sky and name all the stars; have the periodic table of the elements memorized; rattle off the kings and queens of Spain; define the significance of the Gatling gun; joke around in Latin; interpret the symbolism in seventeenth-century Dutch painting; explain photosynthesis to a six-year-old; recite Emily Dickenson; bake a perfect..
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Sarah Vowell |
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d66dabe
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There are two kinds of people in the world: the kind who alphabetize their record collections, and the kind who don't.
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Sarah Vowell |
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3b601d5
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Behind every bad law, a deep fear.
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Sarah Vowell |
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b7dca0f
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I have a similar affection for the parenthesis (but I always take most of my parentheses out, so as not to call undue attention to the glaring fact that I cannot think in complete sentences, that I think only in short fragments or long, run-on thought relays that the literati call stream of consciousness but I still like to think of as disdain for the finality of the period).
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Sarah Vowell |
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fe207f8
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When I think about my relationship with America, I feel like a battered wife: Yeah, he knocks me around a lot, but boy, he sure can dance.
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Sarah Vowell |
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62f10d6
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Except for the people who were there that one day they discovered the polio vaccine, being part of history is rarely a good idea. History is one war after another with a bunch of murders and natural disasters in between.
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Sarah Vowell |
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d015158
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Martin Luther King, Jr.] concluded the learned discourse that came to be known as the 'loving your enemies' sermon this way: 'So this morning, as I look into your eyes and into the eyes of all my brothers in Alabama and all over America and over the world, I say to you,'I love you. I would rather die than hate you.'' Go ahead and reread that. That is hands down the most beautiful, strange, impossible, but most of all radical thing a human b..
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Sarah Vowell |
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988861b
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But when I am around strangers, I turn into a conversational Mount St. Helens. I'm dormant, dormant, quiet, quiet, old-guy loners build log cabins on the slopes of my silence and then, boom, it's 1980. Once I erupt, they'll be wiping my verbal ashes off their windshields as far away as North Dakota.
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Sarah Vowell |
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bad35e4
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You know you've reached a new plateau of group mediocrity when even a Canadian is alarmed by your lack of individuality.
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humour
oneida-cult
mediocrity
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Sarah Vowell |
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1ed20e0
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Dig deep into its communitarian ethos and it reads more like an America that might have been, an America fervently devoted to the quaint goals of working together and getting along. Of course, this America does exist. It's called Canada.
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Sarah Vowell |
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9c7d812
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As recently as fifty years ago my grandmother was picking cotton with bleeding fingers. I think about her all the time while I'm getting overpaid to sit at a computer, eat Chinese takeout, and think up things in my pajamas, The half century separating my fingers, which are moisturized with cucumber lotion and type eighty words per minute, and her bloody digits is an ordinary Land of Opportunity parable, and don't think I don't appreciate it..
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Sarah Vowell |
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9856340
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That's what I like to call him, "the current president." I find it difficult to say or type his name, George W. Bush. I like to call him "the current president" because it's a hopeful phrase, implying that his administration is only temporary."
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Sarah Vowell |
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53197de
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That, to me, is the quintessential experience of living in the United States: constantly worrying whether or not the country is about to fall apart.
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Sarah Vowell |
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ea71e29
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Robert Todd Lincoln, a.k.a. Jinxy McDeath.
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humor
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Sarah Vowell |
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1372777
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Along with voting, jury duty, and paying taxes, goofing off is one of the central obligations of American citizenship.
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Sarah Vowell |
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3f75165
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If I looked in the mirror someday and saw no dark circles under my eyes, I would probably look better. I just wouldn't look like me.
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Sarah Vowell |
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e8ed1f9
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While the melodrama of hucking crates of tea into Boston Harbor continues to inspire civic-minded hotheads to this day, it's worth remembering the hordes of stoic colonial women who simply swore off tea and steeped basil leaves in boiling water to make the same point. What's more valiant: littering from a wharf or years of doing chores and looking after children from dawn to dark without caffeine?
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Sarah Vowell |
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de59ecb
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Heaven, such as it is, is right here on earth. Behold: my revelation: I stand at the door in the morning, and lo, there is a newspaper, in sight like unto an emerald. And holy, holy, holy is the coffee, which was, and is, and is to come. And hark, I hear the voice of an angel round about the radio saying, "Since my baby left me I found a new place to dwell." And lo, after this I beheld a great multitude, which no man could number, of shoes...
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heaven
life
miracles
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Sarah Vowell |
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66f97fd
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The only thing more dangerous than an idea is a belief. And by dangerous I don't mean thought-provoking. I mean: might get people killed.
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morality
religion
religious-extremism
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Sarah Vowell |
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337c8ab
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I wish it were different. I wish that we privileged knowledge in politicians, that the ones who know things didn't have to hide it behind brown pants, and that the know-not-enoughs were laughed all the way to the Maine border on their first New Hampshire meet and greet. I wish that in order to secure his party's nomination, a presidential candidate would be required to point at the sky and name all the stars; have the periodic table of the ..
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politics
patriotic
nerdiness
politics-of-the-united-states
opinion
patriotism
nerds
nerd
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Sarah Vowell |
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e506406
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The best part about being a nerd within a community of nerds is the insularity - it's cozy, familial, come as you are. In a discussion board on the Web site Slashdot.org about Rushmore, a film with a nerdy teen protagonist, one anonymous participant pinpointed the value of taking part in detail-oriented zealotry: Geeks tend to be focused on very narrow fields of endeavor. The modern geek has been generally dismissed by society because their..
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Sarah Vowell |
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36ca4d7
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However, displayed right alongside all the Confederate flag paraphernalia is a bunch of American flag merch - American flag place mats, patriotic "body crystals," flag stickers you attach to your skin. Personally, I'm small-minded and literal enough that I see the two symbols as contradictory, especially in a time of war. But I fear that the consumer who buys a Confederate flag coffee cup, which she will then put on her American flag place ..
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Sarah Vowell |
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1a57cb7
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A couple of times he called the second he'd finished reading a novel and just had to tell me about it, and I know it sounds hokey and librarianish to say so, but I just swooned when he did that.
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Sarah Vowell |
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163bc83
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The people who visit the [Lincoln] memorial always look like an advertisement for democracy, so bizarrely, suspiciously diverse that one time I actually saw a man in a cowboy hat standing there reading the Gettysburg Address next to a Hasidic Jew. I wouldn't have been surprised if they had linked arms with a woman in a burka and a Masai warrior, to belt out 'It's a Small World After All,' flanked by a chorus line of nuns and field-tripping,..
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Sarah Vowell |
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f08f720
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Winthrop and his shipmates and their children and their children's children just wrote their own books and pretty much kept their noses in them up until the day God created the Red Sox.
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Sarah Vowell |
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a34c8a4
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For Americans, Acts 16:9 is the high-fructose corn syrup of Bible verses--an all-purpose ingredient we'll stir into everything from the ink on the Marshall Plan to canisters of Agent Orange. Our greatest goodness and our worst impulses come out of this missionary zeal, contributing to our overbearing (yet not entirely unwarranted) sense of our country as an inherently helpful force in the world. And, as with the apostle Paul, the notion tha..
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history
the-bible
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Sarah Vowell |
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76a639f
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the air has that bracing autumnal bite so that all you want to do is bob for apples or hang a witch or something.
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new-england
fall
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Sarah Vowell |
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2c62760
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Until that moment, I hadn't realized that I embarked on the project of touring historic sites and monuments having to do with the assassinations of Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley right around the time my country iffily went off to war, which is to say right around the time my resentment of the current president cranked up into contempt. Not that I want the current president killed. Like that director, I will, for the record (and for the FB..
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Sarah Vowell |
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44f950f
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The modern mocha is a bittersweet concoction of imperialism, genocide, invention, and consumerism served with whipped cream on top
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Sarah Vowell |
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d4ba8cb
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Clemenza's overriding responsibility is to his family. He takes a moment out of his routine madness to remember that he had promised his wife that he would bring dessert home. His instruction to his partner in crime is an entire moral manifesto in six little words: 'Leave the gun. Take the cannoli.
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Sarah Vowell |
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dc7a44c
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In the U.S.A., we want to sing along with the chorus and ignore the verses, ignore the blues. . . No one is going to hold up a cigarette lighter in a stadium to the tune of "mourn together, suffer together." City on a hill, though -- that has a backbeat we can dance to. And that's why the citizens of the United States not only elected and reelected Ronald Reagan; that's why we ARE Ronald Reagan. "
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Sarah Vowell |
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8003586
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Because of the "city upon a hill" sound bite, " " is one of the formative documents outlining the idea of America. But dig deep into its communitarian ethos and it reads more like an America that might have been, an America fervently devoted to the quaint goals of working together and getting along. Of course, this America does exist. It's called Canada."
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america
communitarianism
john-winthrop
city-on-the-hill
canada
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Sarah Vowell |
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858c16c
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Considering Independence Hall was also where the founders calculated that a slave equals three-fifths of a person and cooked up an electoral college that lets Florida and Ohio pick our presidents, making an adolescent who barely spoke English a major general at the age I got hired to run the cash register at a Portland pizza joint was not the worst decision ever made there.
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Sarah Vowell |