The Questioning Librarian

A few weeks ago, I came across an essay by the late Marina Keegan, a beautiful piece of writing marking the end of her time at Yale. " The Opposite of Loneliness " is an exploration of the uncertainty of the transition from college into life afterwards, and so much more than that, yet I was struck particularly by a line within. In disparaging the idea that once you leave college it is too late to change anything, she remarks that "We're so young. We're so young . We're twenty-two years old. We have so much time." Yet sadly, Keegan had very little time; she died in a car crash not long after her graduation. I admire the essay, and know that the line I cite is in service to the larger point of it. But I disagree. You don't have all the time in the world, even at twenty-two, even if you live to be ninety. The worst thing, the absolute worst, that you can do to yourself is to in any way justify your life by saying there is still plenty of time.  ...

Last evening, I was listening to Icelandic composer Johann Johannsson, whose music is a delight to hear. Most recently, he composed the soundtrack to the film The Theory of Everything , but I have known and listened to his alternately haunting and moving music for years before that. His powers are on full display in his Fordlandia album, music inspired by the failed experiment of Henry Ford, such as this extended piece below. It made me wonder just what it is about the character of Iceland that has crafted artists like Johannsson, like Sigur Ros or Olafur Arnalds. For that matter, what was it about Russia that crafted Tolstoy and Dostoevsky? Not too many years ago, some doyens of English literary criticism insisted that the work of an author was to be analyzed without the context of the author's life, which would also exclude considering the larger culture at the time. This was a paltry view, to my mind, for we are products of our culture and do not exist independently of ...

Increasingly, the economic news has been better and better. Unemployment continues to decline, to a current low of 5.6% , while the stock market has never been higher . Officially, the recession ended a few years ago . Yet the pain of the recession hasn't abated for the many millions who remain unemployed, including a large number of unemployed millennials, whose unemployment rate stood at 15% as of September 2014, especially those who have lost unemployment benefits. It does not lessen the pain of a family with two working parents, struggling to get by, who have had their SNAP benefits cut by Congress. The nearly one in four children in this country who live in poverty don't care a bit about how high the stock market has gone. The schools, universities and libraries across the country that have seen sharp cuts in funding can take little solace in decreasing unemployment, as they come up with increasingly creative ways to keep the lights on. The disconnect between politi...

A lot of the official story of the economy in the past few years has been about the ending of an unprecedented increase in home-ownership in a wave of foreclosures. Owning your own home is not just part of the American Dream but is also considered a marker of how well the larger economy is doing, with home purchases and construction of new homes routinely tallied and announced as part of the monthly economic news. Yet this focus solely on home ownership leaves out a very large number of people from the calculus, namely those who rent. The number of people who rent may not be something we tout, but that number is growing. Over a third of people in the United States rent rather than own their own homes. While the percentage of renters was 31% in 2004, the percentage has grown to 35% as of 2012. In numerical terms, it means that around 43 million households are renting . That translates to over 100 million people who live in rental units. While discussion often ignores this vast...