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- On New Year’s Day 2013, two-time Pulitzer Prize–winner Gene Weingarten asked three strangers to, literally, pluck a day, month, and year from a hat. That day—chosen completely at random—turned out to be Sunday, December 28, 1986, by any conventional measure a most ordinary day. Weingarten spent the next six years proving that there is no such thing.
—blurb for One Day: The Extraordinary Story of an Ordinary 24 Hours in America
- Young, healthy people are most likely to do life-threatening things late at night on Fridays and Saturdays, so organ transplants often occur at 1 or 2 a.m. on Sundays and Mondays. That’s because it takes roughly 24 hours of lab work and paper-pushing to set everything up; felicitously, 2 a.m. also happens to be when operating rooms are free of scheduled surgery.