Hands across America: Before Daylight Savings Time was implemented as we now know it, the Committee for Time Uniformity surveyed hundreds of populous cities to better quantify how confused America's clocks became each year. "...Of 130 cities with populations of 100,000 or more 59 of them remained on standard time while 71 shifted to daylight saving time last year," wrote Felix Belair in 1965. He added: "Until West Virginia adopted daylight saving time on a statewide basis in 1963 the 35-mile run between Steubenville, Ohio, and Moundsville, W. Va., traversed seven different local time standards." And, as Ben McGrath points out at the New Yorker, New York City regulations tell residents to adjust their clocks at different dates.
Lord Byron and his amazing dancing bear? At the Paris Review Daily blog, Timothy Leo Taranto illustrates the pets of a half-dozen writers, from Flannery O'Connor's peacocks to E.B. WHite's Daschund.
We were thrilled to see Naira Kuzmich's story, "The Fearcatcher of East Hollywood," listed among the "notable nonrequired reading of 2012" in this year's Best American Nonrequired Reading anthology. The story was first published in CutBank issue 77. Do yourself a favor and seek out more of Kuzmich's work, including the excellent "In a Name" at Guernica.