Third para of "She Was Good-She Was Funny":
In the meantime there was plenty to do. Walt hauled water uphill by sled from a hole he had chopped in the lake. He split and stacked firewood. He shoveled snow from his rather lengthy driveway. He taught himself to cross-country ski and visited his few and odd neighbors.
Second para of third story in My Morning Glory and other flashes of absurd science fiction:
“My man,” he says, sliding into the booth. “Where’s Vera?”
Two very short collections by David Marusek (who I met when we were room-mates for the 2004 Worldcon in Glasgow). "She Was Good-She Was Funny" is a Playboy short story about a guy in Alaska (where Marusek lives) who has a fight with his neighbour about a girl; OK but not remarkable. You can get it here.
The three very short pieces in My Morning Glory and other flashes of absurd science fiction are all sparkling, though – each takes a single sf idea and just develops it for a few pages. They were all originally published in Nature. You can get them here.
These were the shortest books on my pile acquired in 2012. Next, if I can find it, the 2012 Doctor Who Annual.
That Foreign Policy article was one of the more realistic essays I’ve read since the Paris attack – thanks for sharing.