The Questioning Librarian

I realized this week that I've given up on my early stories. I've been writing since I was in fifth grade, but I hit my stride in high school, churning out story after story, some short but with several longer works each clocking in at around two hundred pages typed. While I knew that the writing itself was not the best, I cared deeply about some of the characters I created, and the stories mattered to me. They matter still. I always thought that I would go back and take up the storylines again, re-write them to be worthy of being published. Slowly that thought has eroded away, and now I no longer want to revisit them. Writing them was practice. Even if I were to become a wildly-successful novelist, those early stories should never see the light of day. I wouldn't want them to, for that matter, as they do not represent my best efforts. These stories are alive only to me, and just barely at that. I wonder how many other stories share the same fate--to have their author spen...

A pair of Republican would-be presidential candidates outdid themselves this week, trying to explain how freedom was best served by allowing parents to skip out on vaccines for their children. For Rand Paul, the legitimate health concerns of many parents were far outweighed by the need for irrational, wooly-headed parents to be able to exercise their anti-science thinking. "It is an issue of freedom," he declared . Paul, under serious fire for his comments, attempted to backtrack later on, and in fairness other Republican leaders condemned him for his statements. Yet the stance of Chris Christie and the younger Paul on vaccines are a reminder that many on the Right have very strange ideas about what constitutes "freedom." The idea that parents should be free to allow their children to become carriers of preventable diseases like measles is hardly the oddest notion coming from the self-proclaimed standard-bearers of liberty. The Affordable Care Act was governm...

In reading the new biography of George C. Marshall, I found my thoughts drawn back to the place where I had my first library job, Marshall's hometown of Uniontown, Pennsylvania. A co-worker and I were talking at lunch about places we'd lived in the past, and I wondered if I was allowed to feel nostalgia at twenty-six, or whether that somehow seemed too early. I can't explain the feeling, because in many ways the months spent in Uniontown were the worst of my life. While I loved my co-workers, the ugliness and poverty of the place depressed me, the tightness of my financial state constantly gnawed at me, the reality of life after graduation clashing heavily with what I had hoped would come next, and I found that my natural tendencies towards melancholy and self-pity bottomed out into complete and endless depression.  I had a similar feeling of nostalgia last week when I was browsing the Earth and Mineral Sciences library on Penn State's main campus. It drew me back ...