The teaching profession is one of the most female-dominated in the United States. Among elementary school teachers, 89 percent are women, and in kindergarten, that number is almost 97 percent.

Many sociologists, writers and parents have questioned whether this imbalance hinders young boys at the start of their education. Are female teachers less understanding of boys’ need to horse around? Or would male role models inspire boys to learn their letters and times tables? Some advocates point to research that lays out why boys ought to do better with male teachers.

But a new national analysis finds no evidence that boys perform or behave better with male teachers in elementary school. This challenges a widespread belief that boys thrive more when taught by men, and it raises questions about efforts, such as one in New York City, to spend extra to recruit them.

“I was surprised,” said Paul Morgan, a professor at the University at Albany and a co-author of the study. “I’ve raised two boys, and my assumption would be that having male teachers is beneficial because boys tend to be more rambunctious, more active, a little less easy to direct in academic tasks.”

As Borras-Chavez and Sperou watched Nora guard her lifeless pup, they felt mixed emotions. "It's being a scientist and a researcher and realizing that this is such a fascinating thing going on, and our curiosity just sparks," Sperou said. "And then there's the flip side of it, where it's like we are humans, and we are seeing a mother carrying around her dead baby." Or, as Borras-Chavez put it, "you weep a little bit." The researchers abstained from flying drones or sampling the seals when they were with pups, dead or alive. "Our model is usually science-first," Borras-Chavez said. "But if an action that we're taking would have been disrespectful for us, if somebody else would do it, then we don't do it."

When Nora eventually abandoned her pup in 2023, the researchers retrieved it for a necropsy. The pup was female, and her teeth had just begun to poke out from her gums. Her stomach was empty, suggesting she had not been suckling and likely died of emaciation. Many of her bones had been crushed but only after her death, likely when her mother lay on top of her small body. The researchers called the pup Rafaella, after the lagoon.

It's not clear why no leopard pups seem to survive in Chile. An unpublished genetic analysis on Rafaella ruled out inbreeding as a cause of death. More generally, the researchers suspect the conditions of the lagoon, while peaceful and predator-free for adult seals, are less than ideal nurseries, given that the lagoon's ice floes break apart in a matter of days. One of the researchers' hypotheses is "that they're having their pups on these small icebergs, and the icebergs are breaking or melting, and the pups fall into the water and will instantly drown and freeze," Sperou said. Besides, the lagoon itself is no forever home for the seals, as the glacier will continue to recede until it vanishes entirely.

The obvious question underlying this research—why a leopard seal would spend days lugging around the 150-pound body of a pup that has died—is impossible to answer, at least for now. Sperou suspects the response is largely physiological. Whenever a mammalian mother—human, seal, or otherwise—has a baby, their body flushes with serotonin, dopamine, and oxytocin. These hormones help bond the mother to her baby. "It's out of her control," Sperou said. "It's her hormones and her body telling her to stay with her pup."

Scientists are often resistant to call behavior like this "grief" to avoid accusations of anthropomorphism, the act of interpreting animal behavior through human terms. Borras-Chavez offered "after-death caregiving" as a friendlier alternative than "post-mortem attentive behavior." As Sperou makes clear, "Do we know if she's actually grieving? No, we don't." But, she added, "I think it's understandable to say this could be some type of grieving behavior"—emphasis on the could.

Right now, there is a general belief that people of all ages are losing the ability to speak easily to one another. Increasing political polarization, the ubiquity of screens, the COVID-19 pandemic — all have contributed to a malaise and neuroticism around the practice of conversation. In the U.K., the phenomenon of young people failing to return to school since the pandemic has become so widespread that they are collectively labeled “ghost children.” A teacher friend told me that some of these children have confessed to her that their biggest fear is anticipating negative conversations they could have with their peers. After so long engaging almost exclusively with other children over social media — platforms that can intensify and melodramatize even the most quotidian encounters — they have forgotten what face-to-face interactions are like. The truth is, my teacher friend told me, the majority of conversations kids have with one another throughout the school day are neutral or often quite nice.

As lockdowns lifted, there were numerous reports of people feeling anxious about their atrophied social skills. Even before the pandemic, psychologists had found that more of us are choosing to break ties with loved ones. A 2019 psychology study suggested that more than a quarter of Americans are currently estranged from a relative — and that the majority of those interviewed in the study found the experience “emotionally distressing.” Even if estrangement is a choice necessary to our health or safety, we remain haunted by the absence of the people we leave. We dream of some alternative way it all might have gone: If we’d just found the right words to articulate our position, they might have come to understand or accept it; if we’d only kept to certain topics and avoided others.

In response to these worries about conversation and connection, a glut of self-help-adjacent books has appeared, promising to teach us to do it better: Alison Wood Brooks’s TALK: The Science of Conversation and the Art of Being Ourselves, David Robson’s The Laws of Connection: The Scientific Secrets of Building a Strong Social Network and Jefferson Fisher’s The Next Conversation: Argue Less, Talk More, among many other titles. For several weeks, I lugged these books around between the library and various social occasions. I am long out of my adolescent period of social anxiety. And yet while reading them, I became acutely aware once more of how I engage in conversation.

Jill Freud, a stage star who was also the inspiration for the character of Lucy in CS Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, has died aged 98.

The news was announced by her daughter, Emma Freud, who wrote: “My beautiful 98-year-old mum has taken her final bow. After a loving evening – where we knew she was on her way – surrounded by children, grandchildren and pizza, she told us all to fuck off so she could go to sleep. And then she never woke up. Her final words were ‘I love you’.”

[...]For more than a century, the cultural norm in the United States was that nudity was acceptable—at least within same-sex environments. Over the past couple of decades or so, that idea has largely dissolved. This sort of nudity is so rarely discussed that we don’t really have vocabulary for it. The term nonsexual nudity feels inadequate, because for some, changing in a locker room could carry a charge of eroticism. Communal nudity is no better, evoking images of orgies or nudist colonies rather than once-routine forms of unclothed life. The fact that the practice never really had a name suggests how unremarkable it once was.

This decline partly reflects shifts in the culture: In a world that recognizes a wide range of gender identities and acknowledges attraction across those boundaries, the old mainstream assumption that same-sex facilities were inherently asexual—and therefore appropriate settings for nudity—no longer holds. At the same time, broader conversations about consent, sexual assault, and vulnerability, as well as the ubiquity of phone cameras, have raised questions about the discomfort or even legal liabilities that such spaces can create.

Although these changes are largely positive, they also introduce a new reality: Today, the only naked bodies that many Americans will likely ever see are their own, a partner’s, or those on a screen. Gone are our unvarnished points of physical comparison—the ordinary, unposed figures of other people. In their place, we’re left with the curated ideals of social-media posts, AI-generated advertising, and pornography. The loss may seem trivial, but it also may change how people see themselves. Without exposure to the normal variety of bodies, we may become less comfortable with our own, more likely to mistake common characteristics for flaws—and more inclined to see every bare body as an inherently sexual object, making nudity even more charged.

[...]Their name implies that security guards exist to provide security. I had expected to observe how they responded to dangerous situations and kept people safe, but the reality was quite different. As Chinese cities have gotten safer, what security guards are protecting most of all is property prices and the class status they imply.

When guards first began to appear in Chinese residential communities, security was indeed their purpose. From 1990 to 2010, due to the widening gap between rich and poor, the rise in population mobility, and a shortage of police officers, the crime rate in Chinese cities increased. Burglary was a frequent concern.

In subsequent years, crime in Chinese cities has dropped significantly. In 2016, China’s homicide rate was 0.62 per 100,000 people, one of the lowest in the world, while major violent crimes dropped by 43% between 2012 and 2016. The murder Liu responded to was the exception, not the rule.

But that doesn’t mean the middle class’s yearning for heavily guarded gates has diminished. In somewhat of a contradiction with dropping crime rates, the private security industry has continued to flourish. According to the China Security Association, as of July 2021, there were over 13,000 security service companies and more than 6.4 million security guards nationwide.

Instead, security guards are now the answer to different fears. The commercial mindset tied to real estate development is rooted in the deep anxieties of China’s middle class about losing their economic status and class identity. During the decades when housing prices in Chinese cities soared, a home became most families’ most important asset. As such, homeowners are extremely sensitive about any factors that might lead to a decline in property prices.

[...] Creative work done for artistic purposes is thought to exist for reasons above money. "Love and honor” is a convenient excuse to not compensate for it, “exposure” too. Creative work for commercial purposes, on the other hand, can be handsomely rewarded. However you’re doing a job for somebody else.

The people who make the first kind of work are historically called “fine artists.” The people who make the second kind of work are called “commercial artists.” These two roles defined the creative landscape for centuries. There’s work you do for yourself (capital-A Art) and there’s work you do for others (sometimes Art, but also decoration, ego-fluffing, and market-driven motivations). Most creative people straddle a hybrid of both: commercial art for their livelihoods, fine art for their souls.

In recent decades a similar but distinct creative role has emerged: the creator. People who make a living from subscriptions, crowdfunding, selling merch, and other forms of direct exchange unlocked by the web.

Like artists, creators have a lot of freedom in what they do. They’re even more free in some ways, as they aren’t confined to the canon of what they’re “supposed to do.” All tools of the market are at their disposal: from products to livestreams to memecoins to ghost kitchens to limited edition drops. Unlike artists, they don't have to navigate the academy system or art world politics to do it.

Creators don’t answer to a boss, but they do answer to an audience. For most this is a smaller audience than they hope. For a few this means fame and attention beyond imagination whose pressure can create a performative cycle that can eventually lead to burnout and debilitating narcissism.

Also unlike artists, creators are explicitly commercial in what they do. They want you to smash that like and subscribe button. They launch courses and new products to further monetize themselves. They see their work as inherently commercial, even industrial. The opposite is true for most artists.

Trumpism’s most revealing and defining moments – not its most important, nor cruelest, nor most dangerous, nor stupidest, but perhaps its most illuminating – came earlier this autumn. In the course of a few weeks, the US president started showing everyone his plans for a gilded ballroom twice the size of the White House and then began unilaterally ripping down the East Wing to build it. Then, after nationwide protests against his rule, he posted on social media an AI video of himself wearing a crown and piloting a fighter jet labeled “King Trump”, which proceeded to bomb American cities and Americans with a graphically vivid load of human poop.

He has done things 10,000 times as bad – the current estimate of deaths from his cuts to USAID is 600,000 and rising, and this week a study predicted his fossil fuel policies would kill another 1.3 million. But nothing as definitional. No other president would have dared – really, no other president would have imagined – unilaterally destroying large sections of the White House in order to erect a Versailles-style party room, with the active collaboration of some of the richest Americans, almost all of whom have business with the government. And no one – not Richard Nixon, not Andrew Jackson, not Warren Harding, not anyone – would have imagined boasting about defecating on the American citizenry. Even the worst American leaders were willing to maintain the notion that they represented all the people; Trump has managed to turn America’s idea of itself entirely upside down. And he has done it with the active consent of an entire political party. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, when asked about the poop video, for once did not bother lying that he had not seen it. Instead he said: “The president uses social media to make the point. You can argue he’s probably the most effective person who’s ever used social media.”

As disorienting as it is to watch the president try to upend the old idea of democracy and replace it with its polar opposite, there is one large group of Americans who should not find it completely novel. That is those of us – in older age cohorts a near majority – who were raised as mainline Protestant Christians.

We have watched over the years as rightwing evangelical churches turned the Jesus we grew up with into exactly the opposite of who we understood him to be. At its most basic, they turned a figure of love into a figure of hate who blesses precisely the cruelties that he condemned in the Gospel; we went from “the meek shall inherit the Earth” to “the meek shall die of cholera.” This has happened more slowly, over decades instead of months, but it is nonetheless unsettling in the same ways, a disorienting gut punch for many of us.

Invidious: https://inv.nadeko.net/watch?v=rHzjC17-tso

YouTube: https://youtu.be/rHzjC17-tso

Video description (only relevant parts of description):

Sacha Baron Cohen. He’s the man behind Borat, Bruno, Ali G, The Dictator, and the show Who Is America. He’s been banned from countries, kicked out of hotels, chased by angry mobs, and sued more times than any other actor in Hollywood. But beneath the mankini, the fake accents, and the absurd disguises, is one of the most important comedians of our time. Because what he is doing is not just comedy. He is exposing people to reveal who they really are. So today, let’s dive into the career of Sacha Baron Cohen. The most sued actor in history… and maybe one of the most important satirists of the 21st century.

#sachabaroncohen #borat #greatsucces

[...]does having interstellar technology automatically mean they must be scientific? Could there be technological but nonscientific aliens out there, capable of crossing the vast emptiness of space without understanding the physics of their amazing leaps?

It’s tempting to think that aliens would have to be scientific to develop that technology. But is that leap of logic founded in insight—or ignorance? Is mathematical, scientific thought actually a requirement for advanced technology, or is it just the only path we can imagine to achieving space travel?

Our own history tells us that the connection between science and technology is not so simple. On Earth, civilization has been technological for thousands of years, well before the recent advent of what we consider modern mathematical, empirical science.

How did the ancient Egyptians build the pyramids? It wasn’t ancient aliens. This would be a much shorter book if it were. To construct their monumental architecture, ancient Egyptians did not rely on physics and material science as we understand them, either. What built the pyramids was a skilled grasp of technology, honed through practice, accident, and cultural memory. A couple of thousand years after he died, the designer of the first pyramid was worshipped as a god, which is sort of like the Nobel Prize of the ancient world.

Similarly, blacksmiths learned to make swords that kept their edge by experimenting with various techniques, making discoveries through happy accidents, and refining their craft over generations. The very precise craft of metallurgy that forms the foundation of a skilled sword maker’s work was explained primarily through the how. The question of why was secondary.

The same is true of beer, bread, yogurt, and cheese. Humanity has a weird alliance with a variety of opportunistically cooperative microorganisms that make some of our favorite treats. Techniques to take advantage of these micro-critters were discovered and developed independently over and over again in many places, well before anyone invented a microscope and figured out what was going on. Until then, it seemed like such a magical process that most places that developed fermentation also had an associated god who was kind enough to make it possible. Even today, one can make an excellent soufflé by following a recipe, without understanding the kitchen chemistry at the heart of the process. A soufflé is not a spaceship, but you get the idea.

To make bread or swords, humans didn’t have to know what was going on at the microscopic level. People all over the globe had fantastically impressive technology long before we had our modern, mathematical, empirical science.

Westerners could admit at any point that we have misread our place in the cosmos and shift toward this older, still living worldview: humans not as commanders of the natural world but as kin, interconnected equals among other beings and systems.

This suggestion might sound sentimental and naive in a political moment when even extending compassion to other humans meets resistance. Refugees are being turned away at ports of entry – grim proof of how easily our empathy falters. But new ideas are hard precisely because they threaten the story that keeps our lives coherent. It is natural for our minds to leap to defend old ways before testing new ones.

Psychologist Erik Erikson, writing in the shadow of the world wars, described our human tendency towards pseudospeciation – the desire to split the world into “us” and “not us” – in order to justify mistreatment. Pseudospeciation grants us the psychological distance to degrade other beings we deem inferior without troubling our conscience. That psychological distance becomes a powerful permission slip.

But humans are capable of self-reflection and growth, and I believe this point in the Earth’s history requires us to use those abilities and begin to question the ways we center human experience. In fact, our very ability to use the best of our social human traits – and advanced scientific knowledge – could alter the course of life on Earth.

You should visit China. It’s vast, very diverse, safe, easy to get around, inexpensive, interesting, not what you expect, and increasingly important in the world. Go see for yourself.

However, unlike the rest of the world, China uses its own parallel set of apps that you will need to operate there. Here are what I consider the essential mobile apps for independent travel in China. A good rule of thumb is to download your apps outside of China before you leave, because most are behind their great firewall. Make sure you are downloading the “international” version of the app (if it has one) so that it uses English.

Iceland’s former prime minister, Katrín Jakobsdóttir, has said that the Icelandic language could be wiped out in as little as a generation due to the sweeping rise of AI and encroaching English language dominance.

Katrín, who stood down as prime minister last year to run for president after seven years in office, said Iceland was undergoing “radical” change when it came to language use. More people are reading and speaking English, and fewer are reading in Icelandic, a trend she says is being exacerbated by the way language models are trained.

She made the comments before her appearance at the Iceland Noir crime fiction festival in Reykjavík after the surprise release of her second novel of the genre, which she co-wrote with Ragnar Jónasson.

“A lot of languages disappear, and with them dies a lot of value[and] a lot of human thought,” she said. Icelandic has only about 350,000 speakers and is among the world’s least-altered languages.

“Having this language that is spoken by so very few, I feel that we carry a huge responsibility to actually preserve that. I do not personally think we are doing enough to do that,” she said, not least because young people in Iceland “are absolutely surrounded by material in English, on social media and other media”.

Along Greenland’s coastline, small villages became ghost towns decades ago after the Danish government relocated their populations to larger cities. In some, though, communities have been reclaimed as summer getaways for former residents and their descendants.

Qoornoq is one of the villages that was shut down as part of modernization efforts that began in the 1950s and ‘60s, when the Danish government wanted to consolidate the population. But in recent decades, it’s become a popular summer spot for former residents and their descendents.

“Many of the people here, we live in Nuuk, so we use the houses here as summer cottages,” Victoria Martins explained. “We have [solar electricity] and freezers, so I can live here for many months.”

Archaeologists in Peru have found new evidence showing how the oldest known civilization in the Americas adapted and survived a climate catastrophe without resorting to violence.

A team led by the renowned Peruvian archaeologist Ruth Shady, 78, concluded that about 4,200 years ago, severe drought forced the population to leave the ancient city of Caral, and resettle nearby.

In the new settlements, they left intriguing friezes depicting victims of a famine with messages for future generations, Shady said.

“They left behind all this evidence so that people would not forget that the climate change was very severe, causing a crisis in Caral’s society and its civilization, and they did not want people to forget what caused it,” she said at one of sites where she was examining a temple pyramid.

Medical Aid in Dying remains one of the nation’s most divisive moral quandaries. Supporters say the practice offers autonomy and relief from debilitating, dignity-stripping suffering. Critics contend it devalues life and opens a door to efficiency masquerading as compassion. Ultimately, the question remains: How much control should we have over the terms of our deaths?

Increasingly, Americans want expanded end-of-life options for the sickest adults among us. MAID is now legal in 11 states, plus Washington, D.C. Delaware approved the practice this year, and at least 17 other states have introduced legislation on the issue.

Denver Health opened its MAID clinic in 2018, two years after Colorado’s law passed, deciding to fold the legislation into its mission to handle the region’s most complex medical cases. The clinic operates out of Denver Health’s outpatient medical center near downtown. The fourth-floor office has a couch and comfy chairs for patients and their families, though most consultations are done online to eliminate time-consuming and uncomfortable trips.

Any Colorado resident who qualifies for MAID can get care from the clinic, regardless of their ability to pay the $755 fee for two consultations and a prescription for the lethal dose of amitriptyline, diazepam, digoxin, hydromorphone, and phenobarbital that comes from one of the state’s compounding pharmacies. (Some physicians charge up to $3,000 for the same service.)

[Denver Health physician Kerri] Mason predicts this year will be the busiest yet for the clinic and expects to see at least 400 patients—roughly 100 more than last year. That growth will be fueled, in part, by Colorado lawmakers, who in August 2024 expanded access for adults whose deaths are most imminent. Prior to the law’s adoption, patients often died within a mandated 15-day waiting period between the first and second consultations—or declined so significantly they no longer could self-administer the medication. The state Legislature remedied that, dropping the waiting period to seven days and giving physicians wide latitude to waive waiting times entirely for the direst cases.

I fired up the old email machine this morning and one of my morning emails informed me that a Michigan elected official is married to a neo-Nazi, and apparently some constituents have a problem with that. Some, I thought, is significantly less than you'd want to see for something like that. The official in question is Maple Valley Township Treasurer Meghyn "Meg" Booth, who it just so happens is a Republican if you can believe it. Her husband is Johnathan Christopher “Chris” Booth, and he'd been posting on YouTube videos that make claims like "Black people oppress themselves" and "America was built by and for white people” and talk about Nazis in the 1930s breaking “the chains of Jewish tyranny in Germany.” And there's a lot more, too. It's really sickening. Read up!

Anyway, the community is divided, I guess, because their Treasurer is married to what can only be described as a Nazi, and she's liked a number of his Facebook posts dealing with extremist themes, and because her husband has issued some rather direct and menacing threats against those who criticized him, and while she says she doesn't condone what he's said, she doesn't condemn it either, and she doesn't think differences of opinion should break up relationships—a position that frames being a Nazi as a "difference of opinion," rather than an alignment with an ideology that is absolutely unacceptable, given that in living memory it industrially murdered human beings by the thousands every day, day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year.

And this is an increasingly common position! The adult leaders of Young Republicans were just caught in a group chat loving Hitler and slurring it up, and the criticism they received for this was so great that it inspired Vice President Juvenile Delinquent "JD" Vance to hitch up his big-boy pants and trot out to the cameras to admonish people for making such a big deal about what a few misguided little 30-year-old kids have to say behind closed doors. Some prominent Democratic influencers and advisors have even started recommending we redraw the lines of what is permissible to include a lot of this sort of thing, in order to "win." And there are many people, Democratic influencer or otherwise, who will make the point that the reason the community is divided is because some people make Nazi-adjacency a hardline purity test, which makes it hard to build a coalition ... with Nazis, I guess.

Twice a month, they gather over Chinese food at the Sunset Park branch of the Brooklyn Public Library: a romance book editor, a photographer, an environmental activist, tech workers, high school students, retirees. They are the co-creators of the Library Newsroom. Teens bring their friends. Parents invite their adult children. Some days more than twenty people show up. Drawing inspiration from tenant newsletters and community noticeboards, they assess the neighborhood’s needs, map its landmarks, study its governing bodies and civic institutions, and discuss journalistic ethics and skills. 1 They ask, what are we curious about? Then, how can we learn more?

Soon they publish the first issue of the Sunset Park Sun, with a welcome message in English, Spanish, and Chinese. Judith C.’s investigative piece on renovations to the local rec center is accompanied by a list of resources she used in her reporting. There is an explainer on ranked-choice voting, a summary of new trash and composting rules, a guide to the Newsroom’s methods and standards, and an invitation to attend future meetings. 2 In later issues, Diana M. recounts childhood memories of the library, and Ciel J.P. introduces a community archive initiative. Other writers profile local businesses, compile resources for immigrants, and review a photo exhibit on the lives of street vendors.

It’s a “social project” as much as a newspaper, said organizer Terry Parris, Jr., a veteran of nonprofit newsrooms at ProPublica and The City, now an editor on the solutions journalism desk at The New York Times. He helped start the first “Open Newsroom,” six years ago, in an effort to “understand how information finds its way to and through a community” in an age of epistemological collapse. 3 People want to know what’s going on in the world, but how do they decide what news is important or useful or trustworthy? 4 The library — where “meaning is made,” where “information is both generated and shared,” according to Brooklyn’s former chief librarian, Nick Higgins — seems like a good place to sort that out. 5

One way to promote the critical use of information media is to teach people how it’s made. “It’s a new kind of grassroots infrastructure,” Chaplin said. “If things get better, great, we’ve just created pipelines for more diverse voices to get involved with traditional newsrooms. If things don’t get better, we’re creating underground networks to keep reliable news and information flowing … [and] keep the sparks of democracy alive.” 10

Here civic infrastructures — especially libraries — can play an important, stabilizing role. Libraries are founded on the core journalistic values of openness and truth, and they’re widely accessible. With more than 17,000 U.S. locations open to the public, and another 100,000 in schools and universities, they are (almost) everywhere we need them to be. 11

[...]The mutualism enacted through organized, open exchange between communities wealthy and poor, small and large, across borders, beyond walls, is an existential threat to Trump’s doctrine of stupidity and control. The advocacy group EveryLibrary has made an urgent plea for “library sector solidarity” in response to legislative threats, since an attack on one is an attack on all. 29 But if we take that idea a step further, we find that the “library sector” includes the reading public — you, me, all of us.

The library is not meant to be an on-demand service provider, a node in the just-in-time-economy that puts a rights-restricted copy of Abundance in our AirPods. It’s meant to be an accessible portal to our government, our collective holdings, the place we go to access shared information, knowledge, wisdom, and to contribute our own resources to that pool, to make meaning with others. We loan books from the local library, or we loan books through it from a library far away. But we also lend ourselves to the library — committing our attention, our time, our presence at board meetings, our tax dollars and donations — enlarging the commons and participating in the political project of making an informed society. The arcane, technical architecture of interlibrary loan needs our defense. But so, too, does the social architecture of extralibrary loan. 30

Libraries are engines of cultural production. Music critic, poet, and essayist Hanif Abdurraqib has described the wonders of the Livingston branch library in East Columbus, Ohio, where as a child in the 1990s he discovered bands like The Clash through CD shuffles loaded in spaceship-like listening pods. 39 Now libraries are creating their own streaming platforms to compete with Spotify. In Mood Machine, Liz Pelly reveals how the commercial music industry shortchanges artists and flattens culture through playlists of algorithmically tuned “content” that promote passive, uncritical listening. But she also presents an alternative: librarians and others in Iowa City, Seattle, Austin, Pittsburgh, Minneapolis, Copenhagen, Eau Claire, Chapel Hill, Madison, Edmonton, Salt Lake City, Denver, and Ann Arbor who are building streaming services that celebrate and validate local musicians and scenes, pay a fair licensing fee, and commit to preserving the work. These platforms are rooted in discovery, thoughtful and attentive engagement, privacy, integrity, and sustainability, rather than surveillance, extraction, distraction, and monetization. 40

Media-making programs and tools are a big draw for public libraries. The Info Commons at Brooklyn’s Central Library hosts classes on music production, street photography, coding, and more. There is a recording studio; workstations with video, audio, and design software; equipment to digitize audio cassettes, vinyl records, and VHS tapes. And the library has partnered with BRIC (Brooklyn Information & Culture) to host media education programs with illustrious local creators. Across the country, many libraries have created podcasts connecting their collections and services to the community. At least one library, in Westport, Connecticut, runs its own record label. 41

Can libraries afford to stretch their mandate in this way? Can they afford not to? “On a collective level, we have to be active participants in the cultural economies we want to see flourish,” Pelly writes. “We have to validate the culture we want to see in the world.” 42 If we appreciate information and media as public goods, we need to build and care for infrastructures that scaffold the production, storage, preservation, and distribution of cultural works. Libraries are uniquely positioned to help — sometimes by making those infrastructures and sometimes by hosting them, drawing in local partners and cultivating coalitions.

Margaret Atwood is doing her grocery shopping in her local supermarket in Toronto, and it is taking longer than usual. This is not because The Handmaid’s Tale author turns 86 this month, but because she is checking the provenance of every item before it goes in her trolley: California satsumas out; Canada spuds in. Atwood is a passionate environmentalist, but at the moment she is more worried about boycotting anything that comes from over the border in the US than air miles. “Elbows up!” she declares, taking a furious stance in the fruit and veg aisle.

Back in her kitchen she shows me a YouTube skit of Canadian prime minister Mark Carney and comedian Mike Myers in the national hockey kit to explain the significance of “Elbows up”, a growing gesture of Canadian resistance. “Oh, they’re angry. They’re furious,” she says of the reaction to President Trump’s proposed plans to make Canada the 51st state of America. “We’ve not got a very big army. If they wanted to invade they could do so. But I don’t think they would. Do they have any idea what it would be like to try to occupy a hostile Canada? It would not be a joke.” Trump would have to deal with Atwood, for starters.

On a recent autumn evening in Düsseldorf’s Kunstpalast museum, the guide Joseph Langelinck paused next to a Renaissance sculpture of a man with a wooden club and challenged his flock of 18 visitors to name the mythical hero depicted.

“Hercules?” a woman in the front row proposed in a soft voice. “If you know the answer, why can’t you tell us in a way that those at the back can hear you, too?” Langelinck admonished the visitor, before challenging her to name the 12 labours in chronological order. A non-answer elicited an eye roll and a tut. “Oh god, I feel like I’m back at school,” sighed the woman, 62-year-old Corinna Schröder.

The museum advertises Langelinck’s tours, which cost €7, as “grumpy” and “highly unpleasant”, though that might still be an understatement. Over the course of the 70-minute walk, the ponytailed art historian points fingers into visitors’ faces, tells them off for checking their phones or sitting down, and berates them for their general ignorance, all while stomping through the palatial corridors of the Kunstpalast at breakneck speed.