🔖 Read Two Wins for Public Libraries This Week at the Polls by Kelly Jensen (Literary Activism).

Good things are happening but we need to remain vigilant. The people trying to take books out of libraries and take control away from library professionals are immensely well-funded.

🔖 Read:

Thanks @gr36 for directing my attention to Whiona!

🔖💻 Read Why the Internet Isn’t Fun Anymore by Kyle Chayka (The New Yorker).

🔖📚 Read A Pennsylvania Public Library Had Funding Cut Because of LGBTQ+ Books. Then, An Olympian Stepped In..

An important reminder from Kelly Jensen about how libraries are on the ballot today in many places.

🔖 Read The US library system, once the best in the world, faces death by a thousand cuts by Brewster Kale (The Guardian).

A useful reminder that even publishers come for libraries now, with restrictions on digital lending.

🔖📺 Read How The Haunting of Hill House conveys the horror of family.

In the world of Hill House, devotion to family is a tender kind of madness that exists just on the other side of mourning, a ghostly insistence that the love that binds us is also the thing that keeps us chained.

🔖🖼️ Pokémon teams up with Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam

My kid doesn’t like art museums and only tolerated the Van Gogh museum because the scavenger hunt involved getting a prize at the end. I wish they’d had this going on when we were there!

🔖🖖🏻 Happy Star Trek Day! I just read Teaching in Trek: A Look at the Education System of the Future by @joepraska@universeodon.com.

I love thinking, reading, & writing about this stuff. This is great timing as I watch Keiko O’Brien start the school on DS9. Thanks for writing this, Joe!

🔖 💻 Read Now is the time for grimoires: It isn’t data that will unlock AI, it is human expertise by Ethan Mollick (One Useful Thing).

This is the most helpful take on generative AI that I’ve seen: create a prompt that is basically a computer program written in prose instead of code.

🔖📚 Read Shadow and Bone author Leigh Bardugo: ‘People sneer at the things women and girls love’ by Sian Cain (The Guardian).

She really is my hero.

🔖📚 Read Falling in Love With the Avengers, America’s Most Toxic Work Force by Leigh Bardugo (New York Times, gift link)

I love Leigh Bardugo so much.

🔖🖖🏻 Read ‘Star Trek: Picard’ Had to Update the Look of Beloved Characters — and Battle the Pitiless Gaze of HD.

I love that they were able to let Worf’s skin be the same color as Michael Dorn’s.

🔖 Read To Be a Consumer of Culture Means Living in a Hostage Situation by Aaron Bady (Slate)

A great exploration of the role of fan labor in culture work.

📚🔖 Read The Parentified Protagonist: From Shifting Roles to Shapeshifter, a guest post by Stephanie Willing (Teen Librarian Toolbox).

🔖 Read On looking down.

A lovely meditation from @dwalbert on the things we notice when we walked. Our family stayed in Le Vésinet, a garden city outside of Paris, for a couple of weeks in May and their greenways existed in a state of studied neglect. Wildflowers sprouted all along the sidewalks. It was beautiful—and something we were only able to notice because we had to walk a kilometer to get to the train station.

🔖 Read The Coming Enshittification of Public Libraries.

Karawynn Long compares the trajectory of Overdrive/Libby to platforms like Amazon and Facebook and finds a lot to worry about. An important read for those of us in libraryland.

🔖 Skimmed Publicize Your Principles.

This idea might be helpful for articulating Micro.blog’s principles. ATTN: @manton @jean

🔖📚 Read IN A WAVE OF GREEK MYTHOLOGY RETELLINGS, WHERE ARE THE GREEK WRITERS? by Lyndsie Manusos (Book Riot).

Lots of exciting recommendations in here.

🔖🍿 Read Greta Gerwig’s Barbie is a Fascinating, Spectacular Philosophical Experiment by Olivia Rutigliano (Literary Hub).

Well, I was already interested in seeing Barbie, but now that I know it’s about existential crises, I really want to see Barbie.

🔖📚 Read Let the Kids Get Weird: The Adult Problem With Children’s Books by Janet Manley (Literary Hub).

🔖📓 Read Six Ways of Looking at Crip Time by Ellen Samuels (Disability Studied Quarterly).

🔖🎭📚 Read It’s Getting Hard to Stage a School Play Without Political Drama by Michael Paulson (NYT, gift link) via Book Riot’s Literary Activism newsletter.

When I was in Europe reading censorship news from the US, I kept thinking, “I just want to fight censorship and make theatre.” Turns out these two things are related.

🔖 Read What Is A Third Place? (And Here’s Why You Should Have One) by Emily Torres (The Good Trade).

I’ve been thinking about third places, their role in fiction, what they look like online, & how they overlap with affinity spaces for a few days so it felt like serendipity when this hit my inbox.

🔖 Read Katy Simpson Smith on Writing a Southern Woman Louder Than Herself.

Writing, as a career, is inherently boat-rocking.

🔖📚💖 A couple of links about pleasure reading for your reading pleasure: