he would remember very clearly a more esoteric epiphany, gleaned from a particular clerical error in November 1945. Six hundred and fifty men from Quarantelli’s unit had been temporarily assigned elsewhere that Thanksgiving, but Quarantelli found it was simpler to erroneously report in his paperwork that they were all still present, rather than figure out how to squeeze a convoluted explanation for their absence into the standardized forms. Consequently, his unit was sent a glut of extra food for the holiday; the cooks were ecstatic. Official records, Quarantelli realized, were “social
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