Libraries: Cathedrals of Our Souls

Everything I am is based on this ugly building on its lonely lawn--lit up during winter darkness; open in the slashing rain--which allowed a girl so poor she didn't even own a purse to come in twice a day and experience actual magic: traveling through time, making contact with the dead--Dorothy Parker, Stella Gibbons, Charlotte Brontë, Spike Milligan.

A library in the middle of a community is a cross between an emergency exit, a life raft and a festival.

No new libraries will be built to replace them. These libraries will be lost forever.

And, in their place, we will have thousands more public spaces where you are simply the money in your pocket, rather than the hunger in your heart. Kids--poor kids--will never know the fabulous, benign quirk of self-esteem of walking into "their" library and thinking, "I have read 60 percent of the books in here. I am awesome." Libraries that stayed open during the Blitz will be closed by budgets.

A trillion small doors closing.
Caitlin Moran, Libraries: Cathedrals of Our Souls, 2012

Author Joyce Carol on Elon Musk

“So curious that such a wealthy man never posts anything that indicates that he enjoys or is even aware of what virtually everyone appreciates— scenes from nature, pet dog or cat, praise for a movie, music, a book (but doubt that he reads); pride in a friend’s or relative’s accomplishment; condolences for someone who has died; pleasure in sports, acclaim for a favorite team; references to history. In fact he seems totally uneducated, uncultured. The poorest persons on Twitter may have access to more beauty & meaning in life than the ‘most wealthy person in the world.’”
Author Joyce Carol on Elon Musk. Post on X, 8 November 2025.

Kids will never lie to you about whether something’s fun or not.

“Kids will never lie to you about whether something’s fun or not.”
From Brick by Brick: How Lego Rewrote the Rules of Innovation and Conquered the Toy Industry by David Robertson and Bill Breen (2013), a work of business journalism detailing the near collapse and eventual renewal of the LEGO group. Brick by Brick is cited as being one of the best case studies about a large corporation ‘listening to its customers’ and returning to its core purpose and values to find the path forward after suffering self-inficted wounds. The full quote/context is: “Today, LEGO regularly engages children in the process of character development, storytelling, and providing feedback on new playset ideas. ‘LEGO has a great expression for why they listen to kids when developing new toys…Mads Nipper, the former head of marketing and product development, liked to say, ‘Kids will never lie to you about whether something’s fun or not.’”

A very American thing

Careless People, Facebook and de Tocqueville

To me, it seems like a very American thing. When Alexis de Tocqueville visited the US in the nineteenth century, he was on a rickety steamboat that hit a sandbar and capsized, and he nearly drowned. Afterward he found the manufacturers and asked them why they didn't make the vessels safer. They explained that technological innovation in America happened so quickly there was no point; by the time they made the necessary changes, the boats would be obsolete anyway. Better just to take a chance on what you have. If some drown, no need to dwell, safe in the knowledge that something better is just around the corner. That cheerful recklessness combined with passivity, that forward motion without introspection, that's what Javi's team has.
From Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism by Sarah Wynn-Williams, a former director of public policy at Facebook. Page 54. “Javi” is Javier Oliván, who was head of Facebook's “growth team” from 2007 to 2022. He is currently Meta's COO.

Bleak House

“One study, published last year, found that fifty-eight per cent of students at two Midwestern universities had so much trouble interpreting the opening paragraphs of Bleak House, by Charles Dickens, that ‘they would not be able to read the novel on their own.’ And these were English majors.”
What Happens After A.I. Destroys College Writing? By Hua Hsu. The New Yorker [soft paywall]. June 30, 2025.

For reference, this is the opening paragraph of Bleak House:

LONDON. Michaelmas Term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snow-flakes gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill-temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if the day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.