The Questioning Librarian

In the last few years, there have been a slew of articles all managing, in one way or another, to disparage and malign millennials. From the NPR articles engaging in controlled hand-wringing about how the economy needs millenials to buy the cars and houses that they aren't buying, to articles about how millennials are having kids without marriage as a matter of course (gasp!), or worse,  don't want kids  at all (scandal!) and are leaving the church in droves, all the Very Serious People agree that millennials are all-around terrible human beings who would rather go back to living in their parents' basement after college instead of becoming Highly-Responsible Adults with grown-up jobs. Even other millennials have jumped on the millennial-hate bandwagon, feeling it their place to tell us all to just grow up already! Millennials are deeply entitled, and may not even be " cut out " for today's job market, the Very Serious People decree, after having been cod...

If there was any doubt as to who Congress works for, it should have evaporated after the passage of the so-called "Cromnibus" spending bill last week. Included in the funding bill were provisions so odious to good sense that more representatives in Congress should have stood up in protest. One of these, a provision repealing certain regulations on derivatives trading, is so outrageous an act that every single member of Congress who voted for the bill should be ashamed to return to their home districts for Christmas. To make it even worse, the provision was drafted by Citigroup , one of the rogues whose reckless gambling through derivatives trading helped wreck the economy in 2008. Adding insult to injury, the same bill contained a provision raising the maximum allowable political donation so that a couple can now contribute a maximum of $3.1 million to a political party of their choice, as though our system of government was not already awash in money.  It is fitting th...

It's no secret to anyone who knows me that the upcoming holiday season is quite possibly my least favorite time of year. Whenever I mention this, without fail, I get derided as a Grinch, a Scrooge, or at the very least a generally joyless person. Yet I would be more likely to welcome and enjoy this part of the year were it not for the fact that Christmas, and the months surrounding it, have been turned into an unending festival of greed. Christmas has become the most wonderful time of year only for companies looking, as always, to turn the holidays into one last occasion for the year to take our money and have us thank them for it.  This is an old complaint, certainly. Famously Charles Schulz had Charlie Brown ask, "Isn't there anyone who knows what Christmas is all about?" back in 1965. He too, nearly fifty years ago, was disheartened by the commercialization of the season. The answer he got, of course, was the religious meaning of the season for practicing Chri...

This morning, I watched a short TED talk on crafting realistic worlds, given by author Kate Messner. I'd never heard of her before, but her thoughts on the subject are close to others I've read, and to some of my own thoughts on the matter. The talk is worth watching for anyone interested in writing, whether or not they entertain ideas about writing fantasy or science-fiction. I've been writing in some form or other since I was in fifth grade, almost all of it science fiction or fantasy. While continually trying to improve my writing is a struggle, world-building is and always has been one of the true joys for me, more entertaining by far than trying to craft realistic dialogue. Call it the historian in me, but I love crafting a fictional history for the stories I write, drawing deeply from the real-world history I know. Nothing that happens today takes place in a vacuum, and similarly no fictional story can exist absent a history. Good writers know this intuitiv...

There can be no doubt that our veterans have sacrificed much more than we can imagine. We duly honor them every Veteran's Day and Memorial Day, remembering those who served. We honor not only those who survived and are still with us but those who died, those who gave limbs and eyes and sacrificed forever their peace of mind when they served. We are exhorted to "support the troops," but if we really want to honor our veterans, supporting our servicemen and women has to be far more than a bumper sticker slogan.  We can honor our veterans by not being so eager to make more of them in the first place. Whether it is the Ukraine , Nigeria , or Syria , a number of politicians are ever-eager to send American troops into countries around the world, often without full consideration of whether this is even a good idea. American troops were sent into Iraq on what turned out to be a lie , and as a result over three thousand servicemen lost their lives, with countless more wounded...

Having been a great fan of Half the Sky , I was very excited when I found out that Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn were coming out with another book, this time focused on how more effective charities can make a real difference around the world. My high expectations were certainly not disappointed, and the authors penned a wide-ranging book that talks about topics from how to better target your charitable giving, how charities can be more effective, and how a multitude of different approaches can effectively help solve many of the seemingly intractable problems around the world. Sometimes we seem to be confronted with problems that are so massive that we believe solutions to be impossible. How can we tackle disease, rampant poverty and illiteracy, sex trafficking, and other problems that affect millions around the world? The very scale of the problems seems to make solutions elusive. But this would be a mistaken perspective. These problems are not only solvable, but they a...

If there was any doubt that American media has become the equivalent of a babbling idiot, the past month should have thoroughly erased it. The coverage of the outbreak of Ebola, and the small number of cases that have been diagnosed in this country, should prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that our news outlets have lost their minds . In the face of this disease, novel and thus frightening in this country, the public needs facts rather than intense speculation, but what they have been given by our media can hardly be considered the level headed presentation of facts that we need. Instead, we've been treated to ridiculous speculation about how a larger outbreak could happen, like conservative darling Dr. Ben Carson being given a platform on Fox News to spread his idiotic ramblings: Little better, CNN brought on fiction author Robin Cook to hype fear about the disease, calling his fiction work Outbreak  " prophetic " and giving him a forum to question whether the ...

I freely admit a very great and growing disillusionment with Michael Shermer. While previously I had immense respect for him and what he had to say, I've been disappointed with some of his recent columns in Scientific American, and freely criticized his post dismissing the problem of income inequality in the United States when it was posted a few weeks ago. His libertarian flag is flying high again in his August column for the magazine in which he appears to side with known climate change denier Bjorn Lomborg in asserting that climate change is just one of many problems we face, and by no means the most important. The article is somewhat muddled, making it difficult to determine just what, exactly, Shermer is calling for.  He agrees that climate change is real, and a threat, and that something should be done, but he attempts to cast a lot of doubt on how severe the effects of climate change will be. Shermer writes that while global warming is real, "predicting how mu...

It is remarkable the uses to which the creativity of our species is turned. The same cognitive abilities that create the iPhone and The Odyssey  summon up sarin gas and cluster bombs. It also turns itself to finding a myriad of ways to make alcohol, and this is on display in Amy Stewart's The Drunken Botanist , a natural history that represents a near-exhaustive catalog of all the plants we use to create the drinks that many of us love. If a plant is palatable and non-toxic, someone, somewhere has tried to ferment it.  While there is little of depth in this work, the sheer breadth is remarkable. Starting with the usual suspects we are accustomed to in our booze, from barley and grapes to rye and potatoes, Stewart proceeds to take us on a whirlwind journey through some of the lesser known plants that make an appearance in some of the alcohol we love--and some we may not even consider trying, like sorghum beer, wine made from the nuts of the monkey puzzle tree, or tobac...

A poster for the 1966 film version of Bradbury's novel I miss Ray Bradbury. Even having lived for 91 years and authored over three hundred short stories, it seems still too short a time to have graced our society with his presence, still too few works for someone of his talent. I don't remember exactly when I first read Fahrenheit 451 , sometime in junior high, followed quickly by the haunting stories in The Martian Chronicles , but I know that like many of the classics I read in 7th and 8th grade I didn't understand it nearly as well as I should have. Fahrenheit 451  strikes me much more now than it did then, perhaps because we are much closer to Bradbury's dystopian future than when I first read it. I recently finished re-reading the book in advance of a book discussion at the library this week, and it is remarkable how prescient Bradbury was, writing in the early fifties during a time of increased paranoia about the advance of communism and censorship of oppos...

A night sky in Wyoming. Photograph by Eric Hines. I never tire of the view during my walk. When I have time, I head up into the development above the apartment where I live, where the relatively wealthy of the area live in what might be called a gated community without the gate. On the upper street, you can look out across the entire valley. The view is something I cannot imagine ever getting tired of, seeing the little town where I work from above, looking out at the seemingly endless hills stretching out into the distance. I often think of how these hills, part of the Appalachian Mountains, are impossibly ancient. The mountains were pushed up before the first dinosaurs started to walk the earth, rising when there were still trilobites crawling on ancient seabeds over 480 million years ago. They were there when the first fish walked onto land, standing as life radiated out from the seas. They saw the rise and extinction of the early reptiles, dinosaurs, the enormous mammals of ...

I hate the practice of tipping. Don't get me wrong, I tip every time I eat out, and I try to tip generously. I mostly eat alone when I do eat out, so I appreciate the friendly service I generally receive. But I find the idea of tipping the server as a normal part of their pay to be demeaning to them and nothing short of a swindle for the customer. The debate over tipping can be acrimonious at times, and I can quite understand. Waiters and waitresses have plenty of stories about being stiffed by the customer after they work hard to ensure that the customer's time eating out is a pleasant experience, and anyone who has eaten out has an inevitable story about a bad experience with a server. But that's precisely the point. Food servers of all stripes work hard, let's be clear about that. They don't deserve the uncertainty that comes with a tipped minimum wage, and they certainly don't deserve to depend on the good graces of the customer for a large part of th...

A few blog posts ago, I wrote about how librarians make a difference in the lives of people they serve, in myriad ways. This qualitative take on the value of libraries doesn't cover the whole picture, however. While that alone would, to my mind, be enough to justify the continued presence of libraries in our communities, the quantitative data that exists that further bolsters our case. Libraries make a difference in the lives of people we serve, and we also make a difference in the economies in which we exist. I was thinking about this more last week after having helped several people in our little library. The first was a man in his forties who was in the process of job searching. As a condition of receiving his unemployment, he visited the library every day, five days a week, to dutifully continue searching for a new job. One day he came to me for help--he needed to attach his resume to an email to send off in applying for a job and didn't know how. I showed him how...

What do presidents as diverse as William McKinley, George W. Bush, Harry Truman and both Teddy and Franklin D. Roosevelt have in common? Each one issued more executive orders than Barack Obama. The chart  from The American Presidency Project at the University of California, Santa Barbara, is useful in charting both the number, and the frequency, of executive orders both past and present. Two things are quite evident when you start to look at the numbers. The first, interesting as a student of history, is that up until the presidency of Ulysses S. Grant, fated to be president at the ending of Reconstruction, no president issued more than one hundred executive orders during their time in office. After Chester Arthur, no president has issued fewer than one hundred executive orders, even those who served only a single term.  The second thing looking at the numbers reveals is that Barack Obama has issued fewer executive orders than nearly any president in the last century, wit...

It has been interesting, lately, to see the venomous rage directed by conservatives at the most recent influx of immigrants coming across the border. Fleeing increasingly violent drug wars in Central America, some 57,000 children have recently made the treacherous journey from their home countries, across Mexico and into the United States, overwhelming the Border Patrol and existing facilities. The response of the right has been fairly predictable. Xenophobia and hatred of undocumented immigrants has, after all, been a staple of right-wing politics for quite some time, most recently in the backlash against George W. Bush's attempt at immigration reform. But with this new group of immigrants, the ugly side of conservativism's immigration stance has again come to the fore, with sign-waving protesters and right-wing militias descending on the border, determined to "secure" it, while accusing the President of being soft on immigration at best, of perpetuating some kin...

Normally, I hate the term "personal responsibility." Most of the time the term is thrown out in political dialogue, a rather meaningless weapon conservatives use to batter the poor and further erode the social safety net. Regardless, when the term is taken without its political context, it serves a useful purpose in everyday life. It could be referred to, rather clumsily, as a sort of personal "personal responsibility," a responsibility that applies to our personal lives rather than our politics. It really has two separate connotations, both personal responsibility as applying to our own actions, and also the idea that our lives are the result of the actions we take, and thus we are alternately at fault or worthy of accolades for how our lives turn out. In its most extreme form, advocates of personal responsibility decree that we rise or fall entirely on our own merits and hard work. But this is certainly wrong, contrary to the lived experiences of millions of peop...

Yesterday marked the one hundredth anniversary of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, an act which proved to be the spark that set off the First World War. Four years of pointless, mechanized slaughter followed, in which over 65 million people died. The history of our civilization is rife with useless wars that accomplished next to nothing, but the First World War must surely rank as one of the most pointless conflicts we've ever engaged in. Worse than that, the conflict continues to affect our world in ways both numerous and negative.  A crowd in London celebrate's Britain's declaration of war, 1914 Humanity seems to need little pretext to start to kill one another. We go to war over reasons both large and small, petty in both senses of the word. We battle each other over resources, territory, because our neighbors are a different ethnicity than us, because we quibble over the precise interpretation of a religious text, because we have a divine mand...

When I went to my book club last week, I was looking forward to discussing the Anita Shreve novel that had been selected, a book that was interestingly written even if the story itself was a little dull for me. The way our book club is set up is that each of us takes a turn talking about what we thought about the book and got out of it, and with the diversity of people there, ranging from a retired German teacher, an old Presbyterian minister, to a local artist, the discussion is always interesting. But what was most striking for me this time was the response to the book from a member of the group who spoke very little about the novel itself. Instead, he talked about how when he lived in California he walked several miles to the library to take out books, how he treasured them, how a handful of books that he had taken out of the library changed his life. It really turned out to be a profound mediation on the power of books to alter a life in the most surprising ways.  Where I ...

Some days, I find it hard to feel that humans are essentially good. Most people must experience this feeling, I think, especially if they work with the public. It is easy to slip into a permanent state of mind, wherein humans are only to be viewed through the lens of our worst qualities. Certainly there is enough fodder to fuel this; we are driven by greed, by malice and hatred towards our fellow human beings, both ones we know and ones we don't, people who are different from us. We destroy ancient forests for a few dollars, we kill each other over absolute pettiness, like whether or not the communion wafer literally becomes the body of Christ, or the fact that our skin is a different color. The litany of the crimes we've committed against each other is long and never ceases to grow. Our history as a civilization is littered with purges and pogroms, assassinations and Terrors, and that doesn't even begin to cover what we've done to other species, blithely sending thous...