The Questioning Librarian

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...

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...