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When the Culture Wars Come for the Public Library | The New Yorker

A Montana county’s battle shows how faith in public learning and public space is fraying.

By E. Tammy Kim, April 20, 2023

Illustration by Emmanuel Polanco

Every public library is an exception. The world outside is costly and cordoned off, but here no one is charged, and no one is turned away. People browse for books and go online. They learn English, meet with friends, dawdle, nap, and play. For children, the public library is a place to build an inner life, unencumbered by grownups. Story time is an invitation to that experience. A librarian reads a book aloud to a huddle of kids seated cross-legged on the floor.

It’s part early-literacy tool, part theatre, and looks basically the same wherever it happens. The public libraries in Flathead County, Montana, a region of mountainous beauty bordering Canada and Glacier National Park, offer seven story times per week, for babies on up. Three scattered branch locations—in Kalispell, Columbia Falls, and Bigfork—serve a population of a hundred and eleven thousand people, spread out over five thousand rugged square miles.

When the Culture Wars Come for the Public Library | The New Yorker

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The “Dazed and Confused” Generation | The New Yorker

People my age are described as baby boomers, but our experiences call for a different label altogether.

By Bruce Handy, March 2, 2023

Article screenshot…

It has long been fashionable to hate baby boomers, “America’s noisiest if no longer largest living generation,” as the Times critic Alexandra Jacobs wrote recently. But I remain on the fence.

I believe that you can appreciate the late David Crosby’s music, for instance, while not endorsing buckskin jackets, walrus mustaches, and lyrics that address women as “milady.”

What I most resent about baby boomers is that, technically, I am one. The baby boom is most often defined as encompassing everyone born from 1946 to 1964, but those nineteen years make for an awfully wide and experientially diverse cohort. I was born in 1958, three years past the generational midpoint of 1955. I graduated from high school in 1976, which means I came of age in a very different world from the earliest boomers, most of whom graduated in 1964.

When the first boomers were toddlers, TV was a novelty. We, the late boomers, were weaned on “Captain Kangaroo” and “Romper Room.” They were old enough to freak out over the Sputnik; we were young enough to grow bored by moon landings. The soundtrack of their senior year in high school was the early Beatles and Motown; ours was “Frampton Comes Alive!” Rather than Freedom Summer, peace marches, and Woodstock, we second-half baby boomers enjoyed an adolescence of inflation, gas lines, and Jimmy Carter’s “malaise” speech. We grew up to the background noise of the previous decade, when being young was allegedly more thrilling in every way: the music, the drugs, the clothes, the sense of discovery and the possibility of change, the sense that being young mattered.

Source: The “Dazed and Confused” Generation | The New Yorker

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The Philosopher Who Believes in Living Things | The New Yorker

Jane Bennett argues that the stuff that surrounds us isn’t inert—it has a will of its own.

By Morgan Meis, February 28, 2023

https://media.newyorker.com/clips/63fccf789ab40df90761e871/720p/pass/Meis_Bennett_Living_Things_animated.mp4
Illustration by Sean Dong

I often watch the television show “Hoarders.” One of my favorite episodes features the pack rats Patty and Debra. Patty is a typical trash-and-filth hoarder: her bathroom contains horrors I’d rather not describe, and her story follows the show’s typical arc of reform and redemption.

But Debra, who hoards clothes, home decorations, and tchotchkes, is more unusual. She doesn’t believe that she has a problem; in fact, she’s completely unimpressed by the producers’ efforts to fix her house.

“It’s just not my color, white,” she says, walking through her newly de-hoarded rooms. “Everything that I really loved in my house is gone.” She is unrepentant, concluding, “This is horrible—I hate it!” Debra just loves to hoard, and people who want her to stop don’t get it.

Source: The Philosopher Who Believes in Living Things | The New Yorker

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The Archives of the East Village Eye Go to the New York Public Library | The New Yorker

Leonard Abrams started the paper, which chronicled the cultural life of downtown New York, in 1979. After trying for eight years to place its archives, he handed them off to the library last fall.

By Hannah Gold, February 7, 2023

“You could read the Eye and feel fully fed, with all cultural, sensory, and political bases covered,” the cultural historian Tim Lawrence noted.Source photographs courtesy East Village Eye

In November, Leonard Abrams opened every box in his storage locker in Ridgewood, Queens, and inspected its contents. Half contained his personal belongings.

In the other half were seventy-two yellowing issues of the East Village Eye. The newspaper, which Abrams published and edited from 1979 to 1987, covered the era’s monumental art scene, the gentrification of downtown Manhattan, and the swelling AIDS crisis in real time. This was the day he would finally part with its physical remnants, having sold his archive to the New York Public Library.

I watched as Abrams made his way through each of the cardboard boxes: one was a wine box, one was from Amazon, some were ripping along the folds. He unearthed a menorah, a ceramic peach, a dress coat he’d meant to wear to a recent wedding, and an old address book, in which he showed me the entry for the famed drag queen Ethyl Eichelberger.

Abrams’s archival broker, Arthur Fournier, held a clipboard, checking off each of the nineteen official boxes and accordion folders as Abrams located them in the piles stacked taller than any of us. When the full inventory was accounted for, the two men loaded the boxes onto a dolly, and then into Abrams’s cherry-red minivan.

Source: The Archives of the East Village Eye Go to the New York Public Library | The New Yorker

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When Americans Lost Faith in the News | The New Yorker

Half a century ago, most of the public said they trusted the news media. Today, most say they don’t. What happened to the power of the press?

By Louis Menand, January 30, 2023

Popular distrust of the news media has been traced to the coverage of the stormy 1968 Democratic National Convention. Photograph from Bettmann / Getty

When the Washington Post unveiled the slogan “Democracy Dies in Darkness,” on February 17, 2017, people in the news business made fun of it.

“Sounds like the next Batman movie,” the New York Times’ executive editor, Dean Baquet, said.

But it was already clear, less than a month into the Trump Administration, that destroying the credibility of the mainstream press was a White House priority, and that this would include an unabashed, and almost gleeful, policy of lying and denying.

The Post kept track of the lies. The paper calculated that by the end of his term, the President had lied 30,573 times.

Editor’s Note: Read more, see link below for original item...

Source: When Americans Lost Faith in the News | The New Yorker

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Returning, Again, to Robert M. Pirsig | The New Yorker

All roads lead to “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.”

By Jay Caspian Kang, October 25, 2022

As readers, we believed Robert M. Pirsig could see the Buddha in a well-maintained carburetor. We wanted to see it, too, and we wanted to work as he did.Photograph from Alamy

Every writer I know has memories they return to in their work over and over again. There is rarely much logic to the choices, nor do such memories tend to align with the sorts of significant events that traditionally make up the time line of one’s life.

My point of fixation, one that’s appeared a few times in my writing, occurred during a solo cross-country road trip I took at the age of nineteen. I was driving to Seattle, where I knew nobody, and was planning to stop for the night in Billings, Montana. It was already late, and I had been keeping myself awake with a non-stop chain of cigarettes and vending-machine coffee I’d dutifully bought at every rest stop along the way. I had a pile of books on tape on the passenger’s seat.

About an hour outside of Billings, I put in “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” which, coincidentally, starts out on a road trip to Montana. The first line—“I can see by my watch, without taking my hand from the left grip of the cycle, that it is eight-thirty in the morning”—had a hypnotic effect on me. I blew through Billings that night, and for the next six hours I listened to Robert M. Pirsig’s barely fictional meditation on fatherhood, Chautauquas, Zen, tools, and the idea that quality—the main conceptual preoccupation of Pirsig’s life—lay in the repetition of right actions.

Editor’s Note: Read more, see link below for original item...

Source: https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/returning-again-to-robert-m-pirsig