I'm only 15 minutes into this episode and you already have me reminiscing about libraries and audiobooks.
I've been going to libraries ever since I could read (1st grade). My mother gets the credit for getting me started on that. I felt limited by the number of books I could check out at the time (5!); it helped a lot when I got a bit older and the limit was raised to 10.
Until a few years ago, I lived about a 20 minute walk from my downtown library and I visited about once a week, in particular to read various magazines, e.g. Aviation Week & Space Technology, and see what was in the New Books section.
Now I live further away -- and the magazine reading has been replaced by Substack, blogs I've followed for many years, and podcasts like this one. My primary library use is to search their catalog and request holds on books that catch my interest -- of which one in the past year was Meghan's "Life would be perfect if I lived in that house".
I've loved audiobooks for decades -- does anyone remember Dick Estelle, "The Radio Reader" who was on many public radio stations in the 70s and later? (I see from Wikipedia that his broadcast continued many more years than I realized).
And then Audible got started around 1997 or so, at first using devices that could hold at most about 2 hours of a book at a time. And the unabridged audiobook catalog at the time was very limited, so different from today.
I've thousands of miles walked with an audiobook, along with tens of thousands of miles driven.
maybe you already know this but if you have a library card you can download the app Libby, and access a ton of ebooks and audiobooks via your library for free, without ever having to go to your library. your log in is usually your card number, and password is the last 4 digits of your phone number. if it doesnt work, ask the library to help you and they can show you how to access it. i have friends in new york i ask them to get me a NYPL card bc the collection is huge. basically i've been able to access NYPL when I don't even live in the country. its amazing. if a friend moves to a big city then I convince them to get me another card/use theirs, i've developed a bit of a collection over the years lol. the LAPL collection is actually slightly better than the NYPL. i live in montreal currently, and as its a bilingual place they have both libby (not as good of a collection as the big US libraries though), and a francophone equivalent app, which nice bc french audiobooks are more difficult to find.
Imagine a young adolescent's surprise when he, while perusing a copy of Playboy purloined from a friend's older brother's stash, finds a dirty cartoon by Shel Silverstein, among other items of interest (stereo reviews, an interview with Gabriel Garcia Marquez, etc.) Hey, it's the Where the Sidewalk Ends guy! Apparently the sidewalk frequently ended at Hef's mansion. Beloved children's author, incorrigible horndog. An early lesson that people contain multitudes.
I continue to subscribe to A Special Place In Hell because I can count on you two to take me through the whole gamut of emotions in each episode. Laughing, nodding in agreement, exasperated, infuriated. But never (so far) disgusted. How can such intelligent women say such stupid things? Only to turn around and say something that feels so right. So, thanks for that. I do learn things.
Thought I would share a story about a banned book, which I own, and is a treasured relic of my native region. Out of the Red Brush, by Kermit Daugherty, written in the 1950s, but set in the early 1900s. Inside my copy is a tag noting "Banned in Jackson County" (Ohio). Daugherty grew up in the Red Brush country (still memorialized by the Red Brush Ramblers, a bluegrass band). And was the county superintendent of schools when the book was published. Many of the sometimes salacious (by 50s standards) stories he related were true, with names changed. But locals knew those folks, some he wrote about were still living. Guess it was quite a ruckus, with many people wanting him fired and run out of the county. Today the public library displays in a glass case a paperback copy of the novel, with a lurid cover and the inscription "A Tobacco Road of the Ohio Hills".
Finally, I have never read any of Shel Silverstein's books. But he was also an accomplished songwriter, if you like country music. The two most famous: Johnny Cash's "A Boy Named Sue" and Loretta Lynn's "One's On the Way".
It's a sad commentary when you're reluctant to point out a simple fact that fatherless homes are more than twice as prevalent among blacks as in other racial groups. With a hat tip to J.D. Vance, poor whites are creeping up on the 30% of all births range, but that's not on the same planet as blacks, who are near 70% by most estimates. As your friend Jesse Singal might say, sometimes there's no need for throat clearing before you make factual assertions. As long as heterodox classical liberals are afraid of being lumped in with the Heritage Foundation, the discourse goes nowhere.
So if the head of the Heritage Foundation walks outside and says, "it's about 80 degrees and sunny" - are we supposed to act as if he's wrong just because of who he is?
Since I'm black and the child of a poor black teenage mother and met my father once as a toddler, I'm happy to say it for you. There is nothing "problematic" about Magic Wade's post, unless the truth is now problematic.
On your other topic: Given your age, I'm sure you remember the movement to "ban" Judy Blume books back in the early 1980's.
I got dragged on Black Twitter (i.e. Black Womenx Twitter) more than 3 years ago and it was the worst dragging of my life and still kicks up again every now and then. I learned my lesson.
Sorry to hear that - since I'm not on Twitter I had no idea. (Do you mind telling us in a nutshell what you said that drew so much ire? This is a safe space.)
I hope that "Womenx" is a typo but sadly I suspect it's not.
Lest I come across as some paragon of courage, I also self-censor in certain spaces, especially real life. No way am I going to my college's annual black alumni picnic and espousing views that I freely say here, or on Blocked and Reported, Glenn Loury Substack, and other bastions of online anonymity.
I made a stupid comment about Jill Biden calling herself "Dr. Jill Biden" even though she has an Ed.D. and the overall pretentiousness of certain academics that do this. (Stupid, I know.) And somehow it turned into a racial thing. I kid you not.
I was joking about "Womenx." Just meant it was mostly angry black women with PhDs. And boy were they mad. It was pretty epic.
I vaguely recall you mentioning that little contretemps. I'm guessing none of your detractors were perverts for nuance so they didn't bother to explain the backstory of their objection - it was easier to just call you a racist.
Anecdata alert: Ever notice how frequently MLK is referred to as "Dr. King" even though he "only" has a PhD? (I've never heard anybody say "Dr. Einstein" or "Dr. Hawking")
Remember during the heyday of his tv show how Bill Cosby put himself in the credits as "Dr. William H. Cosby, Ed.D.?
There's a long tradition of ADOS blacks with non-medical terminal degrees using and being referred to as "Doctor". It seems to date back to the Jim Crow era when very few people got terminal degrees so the term was an honorific more than an accurate descriptor of their academic attainment.
I have no way to prove this as I have not conducted any peer-reviewed studies: of the non-medical terminal degree holders in the US who insist on being called "Doctor", I would bet a significant percentage are ADOS blacks. (And since black women getting higher ed degrees greatly outnumber black men, a little intersectionality comes into play.) And I would further bet that like Jill Biden, a substantial percentage of that subset are Ed.D.s
Caveat: All of the foregoing applies to people of a certain age. I have no clue if 27 year-old newly-minted PhDs are insisting on being called "Doctor".
I suppose context matters, but a few states have made it illegal to identify oneself as a doctor in a healthcare setting unless you are a medical doctor. This is in reference to the proliferation of doctorates in nursing practice, pharmacy, physical therapy, and so on. This incites a lot of controversy, but regardless of what your diploma says, the colloquial meeting of a "doctor" is much more specific, and I don't think it's doing any great disservice to anyone else to have words mean specific recognizable things.
It's hard to describe the evisceration white women perform on one another over race language. Meghan is not positioned especially well to talk about it unless she wants to be compared to Ann Coulter (and I do have respect for Coulter's incisive words though I find her vulgar).
That being said, you're right to encourage us to speak precisely and honestly.
Point well taken. We would all do well to.listen to Heather Mac Donald who has no qualms about speaking simple truths on race. But true that Heather gets called a racist and not everyone has the thick skin required to endure the abuse. (I would also mention Kay Hymowitz in a similar space).
I also concede that Meghan's professional and personal relationships are probably to the Left and she doesn't want torch them all. Jesse Singal is in a very similar position.
To be fair, neither Hymowitz nor Mac Donald are trapped in the crucible of academia. They are with independent think tanks so not beholden to the Leftist ideological plantation.
Was she on the Glen Show? I skipped that episode, but I am interested to examine the data she presents. It seems so obvious without needing facts to support the argument, but it would be nice to have them.
And FWIW, fathering a bunch of children out of wedlock creates shitty outcomes for poor whites, too. This almost ruined both of my brothers’ lives (and did ruin one of their children’s lives, who is currently serving a life sentence in prison for committing a horrific violent crime). Luckily, they lived in a place where they could get good union jobs without college degrees (and with felony records). Most people don’t live in places like that because so few exist.
Some guy (on a reality TV show of all places) said something that has stuck with me recently, which is “these are first-world problems, but guess what? We are in the first world. So they are valid problems.” I thought about that a lot listening to this episode and when I hear stories about big city decay and the deterioration of public, shared spaces.
I think we’re stuck in this way -- it’s difficult to argue against the social justice position because it sounds incompatible with compassion.
But the thing is, public spaces were created to a certain standard for benefit of the *public* -- that means everyone, regardless of class or any other distinction.
To that, the social justice type might say “exactly, therefore we let anyone into the library to do as they please.” But they’ve done something sneaky that they might not even realize they’ve done -- they perceive standards of behavior to be discriminatory. Which they are. BUT, they are discriminatory toward *what you do* not who you are.
This kind of discrimination is perfectly reasonable, even in public spaces, and it wouldn’t take too many extreme hypotheticals to find areas where even social justice activists would draw a line.
This is a bit of a half-formed thought that perhaps you can expand upon if inspired. “No shirt, no shoes” isn’t discrimination. It’s a standard (and not an unreasonable one). So to flip the script on the social justice perspective, maybe we draw a line between discrimination against people (which we all agree is wrong) and against behavior, I.e., setting and enforcing behavioral standards for public spaces (no sex work in the library bathroom, or passing out in your own piss in a drug haze next to children coloring) which requires a certain kind of democratic consensus and public consent.
I loved the conversation about libraries and I am so glad meghan asked her friend about this. I would love if she interviewed her on her podcast, or someone else about the state of libraries and the library profession in general. how she described it is pretty accurate in a lot of areas. i used to work in libraries and went to library school. youre definitely trained similarly as a hippocratic oath, where you develop values to best serve your community/patron/user in your practice. sarah is right that this is a generational shift happening. and meghans friend is right about the library essentially becoming the social safety net for drug and homeless issues. but also its a nice resource for parents/kids and lonely old people. libraries are great, but a lot of librarians in public libraries get burn out for the reasons you listed. and yeah theres a lot of politics around the American Library Association and their demand for people to have a masters, and a lot of debate whether its even good training for people that aim to work in a niche like public libraries. theres a lot of broad roles though in the field, but in academic libraries and public libraries its definitely extremely progressive. though theres also a lot of other roles under the 'information profession' umbrella, that dont necessarily have the title librarian.
my degree was called information studies, which is a bit more of an IT degree, but with more of a user behavior perspective. i focused mostly on medical and government information. during the pandemic i was doing my degree, watching everything fall apart, and wanted to continue working from home. so in my last semester i took a bunch of data science courses and quickly pivoted to become a data analyst. i am pretty glad i did.
anyway, would really love if meghan did an episode on the unspeakable interviewing a public librarian. public libraries are a really interesting and valuable institution, i think that have a lot of potential to do more for a society with a decline in community and decline in spaces to spend time in where money doesnt need to be spent. you should check out the book the Palaces for the People, by Eric Klinenberg. that describes the importance of social infrastructure (which includes churches as well as libraries). a lot of librarians also enter this career path with these ideals and not just bc they like books, but unfortunately its pretty difficult for that to happen and maybe totally unrealistic bc of politics, the social issues listed, funding, amongst other reasons im sure.
People talk about the Hippocratic Oath, but it has been revised significantly and most medical schools don't use it at all (https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/984492?form=fpf). The alternatives are customized ones for "modern values" which variously emphasize things like public health and prevention, don't mention pesky topics like assisted suicide, and predictably, they have started to adopt various social justice maxims. Do no harm isn't in there any more.
It's sort of like how Google used to say "don't be evil" and then they stopped saying that.
Can't you get a bunch of digital material from your library through apps like Libby?
Also, though libraries are universally praised, I've wondered if it's ethical to use a library frequently if you can afford to buy the books you seek. Is there any hidden resentment from authors toward libraries? Maybe not since physical books have been relatively scarce and there was some limit on how many could be checked out at once, but I wonder if that has changed as digital has become more accessible.
Of course it's ethical; you're paying for the library through your taxes; usually property taxes.
My sense is that the book publishers like to limit the number of digital copies that can be "checked out". That's a bit like the streaming music services saying that only X number of people can listen to a certain song at a time. Book publishers have not caught up to the current reality.
Authors can speak for themselves, but I would hope they regard libraries as a way to gain additional exposure for their works.
I guess the question is what is the purpose of a library in the digital age and should it be means-tested? The function of a library can't be to make most books free to everyone or there would be virtually no market for authorship. This is evidenced by the artifical limitation on digital material, as you mention. But this artificial limitation makes no sense other than to retain a market for book selling, and it creates the strange possibility that artificially scarce books are checked out by those who can afford books over those who can't. Wouldn't a better solution be to grant unlimited digital access to those who can't afford book buying and exclude those who can to sustain the market?
Good podcast. As a librarian, I enjoyed hearing about your experiences with libraries. However, I disagree with some of Megan's conclusions and the NYT essay by Walther.
To some extent, I sympathize with Walther's disdain for Banned Books Week. I think of the typical Banned Books event as the library's version of a 4th of July celebration. In both cases, lofty platitudes are expressed with a maximum sense of self-satisfaction and a minimum of risk. Yet, it is hard to begrudge a library for its Banned Books display any more than I begrudge a city for its 4th of July picnic and parade. Celebrating ideals has value even at superficial level.
Unfortunately, banned books week has been dragged into the culture war this year. Wokeness is naturally attractive to many librarians. We frequently are well educated, poorly paid, and have low status. Believing that we are fighting racism and oppression by changing the words that we use to catalog a book or by putting up a display of radical magazines confers a sense of importance to our work that we complain is misunderstood by those who undervalue us. The special appeal of the current banned books campaign is that it allows librarians to be woke and anti-censorship at the same time b/c it is the reactionaries who are doing all the banning (at least according to the ALA press releases). It's not surprising that you don't see books by Milo Yiannopoulos or Abigail Shrier on library banned book lists. Nor am I surprised that the extent of conservative efforts to ban books has been greatly exaggerated (as indicated by the evidence cited by Megan).
Nevertheless, the values celebrated in banned books events -- best expressed the Freedom to Read Statement (https://www.ala.org/advocacy/intfreedom/freedomreadstatement ) -- still are important. Saying that books banned by a library are available elsewhere or that a librarian should curate a collection that "meets the needs of their community" is unsatisfying. Who decides what "community" the librarian is serving? If a librarian lives in a city in which 70% of the people are Muslims who believe that the "Satanic Verses" is sacrilegious, is the librarian's community that 70% or the 5% who want to see what Rushdie has to say? The idea of the "freedom to read'" like the first amendment, is that the curiosity of unpopular minorities ought to be protected too. Librarians, as part of the broader literary community, ought to stand for that principle at the same time that they serve the popular needs of the local majority.
The recent PEN report, "Booklash: Literary Freedom, Online Outrage, and the Language of Harm" (https://pen.org/report/booklash/ ) shows how "freedom to read" cliches pull in the right direction despite inclination of many librarians to turn them into a cudgel for the woke culture war. PEN uses the language of library banned book campaigns to criticize efforts to cancel the publication of books by online social media mobs -- a principle that I think that we all (Megan, Sarah and me) would agree with.
I find it hard to believe Sarah is old enough to remember the old era of "BONG-BONG-SCCREEEEE!!!!" dial-up modems. (Mostly I remember my sister occasionally picking up the phone in her bedroom to call a friend and ruining my connection.)
I also find it hard to believe that Meghan would actually drink water from a fountain that was just mouthed-over by some random dude. She's trolling you, Sarah. Barbarism!
I often visit libraries as a frequent traveler; the AC, wifi, bathrooms, and power outlets are clutch even though I have no interest in the printed books. Many of them are indeed de facto homeless shelters, and in some cases it is to the point where it's hard to use the library for any other reason.
The design of the new MLK library in downtown DC is interesting. It has some printed works, a lot of event space, a passport office, and a floor of exhibits of very specific DC political history. It's cavernous and fancy and was quite empty when I visited. I think a lot of these newer libraries are built in ways that are trying to make them implicitly less friendly for homeless people who want to live there, including less seating and more open space so they can't hide. The hours also tend to be limited for this reason I suspect.
It is also close to CityCenter, which is one of the few areas that has new, functioning high-end retail for in-person shopping. But the true fan roots for Sarah Haider no matter where she buys her outfits.
Gosh, I remember Difficult People, it was a hoot. I remember when John Cho joined the cast, and me and my ex both said "this guy is a curse, every show he goes on gets cancelled!", and of course that was the last series. Poor John, he's great but he is a jinx!
Funnily enough, you bring up the question of if the story changes if the child in The Giving Tree is female. Sarah says that if you don’t want a gender element, then the child should be male. I don’t know if this is your opinion on how things should be approached, but the way you say it sounds like it is. All I feel like doing is dropping this quote from another “banned book” that observes this phenomenon of male-as-default:
“Man is defined as a human being and woman as a female – whenever she behaves as a human being she is said to imitate the male.”
Maybe we should flip both and make the tree male and the child female 🤷♀️ I’m also not a fan of the book, but I cannot stand the idea that man is default (there are obvious exceptions).
FIRST
Freaking hell this is getting harder
Is this an appropriate venue for "That's what she said" jokes? No?
Consent not granted
SECOND
Someone really says FIRST in the comments section? What are we, a bunch of Gen Xers who grew up in the early days of the internet or something?
You must be new here :)
Definitely. And I'm CERTAINLY not joking. ;-)
I'm only 15 minutes into this episode and you already have me reminiscing about libraries and audiobooks.
I've been going to libraries ever since I could read (1st grade). My mother gets the credit for getting me started on that. I felt limited by the number of books I could check out at the time (5!); it helped a lot when I got a bit older and the limit was raised to 10.
Until a few years ago, I lived about a 20 minute walk from my downtown library and I visited about once a week, in particular to read various magazines, e.g. Aviation Week & Space Technology, and see what was in the New Books section.
Now I live further away -- and the magazine reading has been replaced by Substack, blogs I've followed for many years, and podcasts like this one. My primary library use is to search their catalog and request holds on books that catch my interest -- of which one in the past year was Meghan's "Life would be perfect if I lived in that house".
I've loved audiobooks for decades -- does anyone remember Dick Estelle, "The Radio Reader" who was on many public radio stations in the 70s and later? (I see from Wikipedia that his broadcast continued many more years than I realized).
And then Audible got started around 1997 or so, at first using devices that could hold at most about 2 hours of a book at a time. And the unabridged audiobook catalog at the time was very limited, so different from today.
I've thousands of miles walked with an audiobook, along with tens of thousands of miles driven.
maybe you already know this but if you have a library card you can download the app Libby, and access a ton of ebooks and audiobooks via your library for free, without ever having to go to your library. your log in is usually your card number, and password is the last 4 digits of your phone number. if it doesnt work, ask the library to help you and they can show you how to access it. i have friends in new york i ask them to get me a NYPL card bc the collection is huge. basically i've been able to access NYPL when I don't even live in the country. its amazing. if a friend moves to a big city then I convince them to get me another card/use theirs, i've developed a bit of a collection over the years lol. the LAPL collection is actually slightly better than the NYPL. i live in montreal currently, and as its a bilingual place they have both libby (not as good of a collection as the big US libraries though), and a francophone equivalent app, which nice bc french audiobooks are more difficult to find.
Thank you -- I know my local library system has something like this, so I'll have to check it out.
Imagine a young adolescent's surprise when he, while perusing a copy of Playboy purloined from a friend's older brother's stash, finds a dirty cartoon by Shel Silverstein, among other items of interest (stereo reviews, an interview with Gabriel Garcia Marquez, etc.) Hey, it's the Where the Sidewalk Ends guy! Apparently the sidewalk frequently ended at Hef's mansion. Beloved children's author, incorrigible horndog. An early lesson that people contain multitudes.
See also Roald Dahl. (I love his books)
The originals or the updates for modern audiences?
Ha. OG of course
If Banned Books Day is kind of losing its luster, maybe we need a Stealth Edited With Orwellian Newspeak Books Day.
I continue to subscribe to A Special Place In Hell because I can count on you two to take me through the whole gamut of emotions in each episode. Laughing, nodding in agreement, exasperated, infuriated. But never (so far) disgusted. How can such intelligent women say such stupid things? Only to turn around and say something that feels so right. So, thanks for that. I do learn things.
Thought I would share a story about a banned book, which I own, and is a treasured relic of my native region. Out of the Red Brush, by Kermit Daugherty, written in the 1950s, but set in the early 1900s. Inside my copy is a tag noting "Banned in Jackson County" (Ohio). Daugherty grew up in the Red Brush country (still memorialized by the Red Brush Ramblers, a bluegrass band). And was the county superintendent of schools when the book was published. Many of the sometimes salacious (by 50s standards) stories he related were true, with names changed. But locals knew those folks, some he wrote about were still living. Guess it was quite a ruckus, with many people wanting him fired and run out of the county. Today the public library displays in a glass case a paperback copy of the novel, with a lurid cover and the inscription "A Tobacco Road of the Ohio Hills".
Finally, I have never read any of Shel Silverstein's books. But he was also an accomplished songwriter, if you like country music. The two most famous: Johnny Cash's "A Boy Named Sue" and Loretta Lynn's "One's On the Way".
Ah yes, that good old gamut of emotions. It certainly isn't like the blandness of most contemporary media.
I wrote something on my Substack that relates to the conundrum of absent fathers and gun violence. The causal arrow doesn’t always point in the assumed direction, it’s more like a snake eating its own tail: https://open.substack.com/pub/1000citiesproject/p/when-gun-control-laws-fail-and-harsh?r=d65gn&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post
Dearest Meghan,
It's a sad commentary when you're reluctant to point out a simple fact that fatherless homes are more than twice as prevalent among blacks as in other racial groups. With a hat tip to J.D. Vance, poor whites are creeping up on the 30% of all births range, but that's not on the same planet as blacks, who are near 70% by most estimates. As your friend Jesse Singal might say, sometimes there's no need for throat clearing before you make factual assertions. As long as heterodox classical liberals are afraid of being lumped in with the Heritage Foundation, the discourse goes nowhere.
So if the head of the Heritage Foundation walks outside and says, "it's about 80 degrees and sunny" - are we supposed to act as if he's wrong just because of who he is?
Since I'm black and the child of a poor black teenage mother and met my father once as a toddler, I'm happy to say it for you. There is nothing "problematic" about Magic Wade's post, unless the truth is now problematic.
On your other topic: Given your age, I'm sure you remember the movement to "ban" Judy Blume books back in the early 1980's.
I got dragged on Black Twitter (i.e. Black Womenx Twitter) more than 3 years ago and it was the worst dragging of my life and still kicks up again every now and then. I learned my lesson.
Sorry to hear that - since I'm not on Twitter I had no idea. (Do you mind telling us in a nutshell what you said that drew so much ire? This is a safe space.)
I hope that "Womenx" is a typo but sadly I suspect it's not.
Lest I come across as some paragon of courage, I also self-censor in certain spaces, especially real life. No way am I going to my college's annual black alumni picnic and espousing views that I freely say here, or on Blocked and Reported, Glenn Loury Substack, and other bastions of online anonymity.
I made a stupid comment about Jill Biden calling herself "Dr. Jill Biden" even though she has an Ed.D. and the overall pretentiousness of certain academics that do this. (Stupid, I know.) And somehow it turned into a racial thing. I kid you not.
I was joking about "Womenx." Just meant it was mostly angry black women with PhDs. And boy were they mad. It was pretty epic.
I vaguely recall you mentioning that little contretemps. I'm guessing none of your detractors were perverts for nuance so they didn't bother to explain the backstory of their objection - it was easier to just call you a racist.
Anecdata alert: Ever notice how frequently MLK is referred to as "Dr. King" even though he "only" has a PhD? (I've never heard anybody say "Dr. Einstein" or "Dr. Hawking")
Remember during the heyday of his tv show how Bill Cosby put himself in the credits as "Dr. William H. Cosby, Ed.D.?
There's a long tradition of ADOS blacks with non-medical terminal degrees using and being referred to as "Doctor". It seems to date back to the Jim Crow era when very few people got terminal degrees so the term was an honorific more than an accurate descriptor of their academic attainment.
I have no way to prove this as I have not conducted any peer-reviewed studies: of the non-medical terminal degree holders in the US who insist on being called "Doctor", I would bet a significant percentage are ADOS blacks. (And since black women getting higher ed degrees greatly outnumber black men, a little intersectionality comes into play.) And I would further bet that like Jill Biden, a substantial percentage of that subset are Ed.D.s
Caveat: All of the foregoing applies to people of a certain age. I have no clue if 27 year-old newly-minted PhDs are insisting on being called "Doctor".
Yes to all of the above. I knew someone who wrote on the Cosby show years ago and apparently all of the staff called him Dr. Cosby.
OMG I vaguely remember that about Cosby.
I suppose context matters, but a few states have made it illegal to identify oneself as a doctor in a healthcare setting unless you are a medical doctor. This is in reference to the proliferation of doctorates in nursing practice, pharmacy, physical therapy, and so on. This incites a lot of controversy, but regardless of what your diploma says, the colloquial meeting of a "doctor" is much more specific, and I don't think it's doing any great disservice to anyone else to have words mean specific recognizable things.
It's hard to describe the evisceration white women perform on one another over race language. Meghan is not positioned especially well to talk about it unless she wants to be compared to Ann Coulter (and I do have respect for Coulter's incisive words though I find her vulgar).
That being said, you're right to encourage us to speak precisely and honestly.
Point well taken. We would all do well to.listen to Heather Mac Donald who has no qualms about speaking simple truths on race. But true that Heather gets called a racist and not everyone has the thick skin required to endure the abuse. (I would also mention Kay Hymowitz in a similar space).
I also concede that Meghan's professional and personal relationships are probably to the Left and she doesn't want torch them all. Jesse Singal is in a very similar position.
I have to admit, it's easier as a center right white woman. #whatwouldheatherdo
To be fair, neither Hymowitz nor Mac Donald are trapped in the crucible of academia. They are with independent think tanks so not beholden to the Leftist ideological plantation.
I like the reminders though. To develop my tolerance for being shamed. It's silly to feel pushed around all the time.
I'm hoping that the recent Melissa Kearney book on marriage/family formation will help open the discourse.
Kearney is a Gen X white female liberal from academia.
Was she on the Glen Show? I skipped that episode, but I am interested to examine the data she presents. It seems so obvious without needing facts to support the argument, but it would be nice to have them.
And FWIW, fathering a bunch of children out of wedlock creates shitty outcomes for poor whites, too. This almost ruined both of my brothers’ lives (and did ruin one of their children’s lives, who is currently serving a life sentence in prison for committing a horrific violent crime). Luckily, they lived in a place where they could get good union jobs without college degrees (and with felony records). Most people don’t live in places like that because so few exist.
It’s a tough needle to thread.
Some guy (on a reality TV show of all places) said something that has stuck with me recently, which is “these are first-world problems, but guess what? We are in the first world. So they are valid problems.” I thought about that a lot listening to this episode and when I hear stories about big city decay and the deterioration of public, shared spaces.
I think we’re stuck in this way -- it’s difficult to argue against the social justice position because it sounds incompatible with compassion.
But the thing is, public spaces were created to a certain standard for benefit of the *public* -- that means everyone, regardless of class or any other distinction.
To that, the social justice type might say “exactly, therefore we let anyone into the library to do as they please.” But they’ve done something sneaky that they might not even realize they’ve done -- they perceive standards of behavior to be discriminatory. Which they are. BUT, they are discriminatory toward *what you do* not who you are.
This kind of discrimination is perfectly reasonable, even in public spaces, and it wouldn’t take too many extreme hypotheticals to find areas where even social justice activists would draw a line.
This is a bit of a half-formed thought that perhaps you can expand upon if inspired. “No shirt, no shoes” isn’t discrimination. It’s a standard (and not an unreasonable one). So to flip the script on the social justice perspective, maybe we draw a line between discrimination against people (which we all agree is wrong) and against behavior, I.e., setting and enforcing behavioral standards for public spaces (no sex work in the library bathroom, or passing out in your own piss in a drug haze next to children coloring) which requires a certain kind of democratic consensus and public consent.
lmao @ library water.
I loved the conversation about libraries and I am so glad meghan asked her friend about this. I would love if she interviewed her on her podcast, or someone else about the state of libraries and the library profession in general. how she described it is pretty accurate in a lot of areas. i used to work in libraries and went to library school. youre definitely trained similarly as a hippocratic oath, where you develop values to best serve your community/patron/user in your practice. sarah is right that this is a generational shift happening. and meghans friend is right about the library essentially becoming the social safety net for drug and homeless issues. but also its a nice resource for parents/kids and lonely old people. libraries are great, but a lot of librarians in public libraries get burn out for the reasons you listed. and yeah theres a lot of politics around the American Library Association and their demand for people to have a masters, and a lot of debate whether its even good training for people that aim to work in a niche like public libraries. theres a lot of broad roles though in the field, but in academic libraries and public libraries its definitely extremely progressive. though theres also a lot of other roles under the 'information profession' umbrella, that dont necessarily have the title librarian.
my degree was called information studies, which is a bit more of an IT degree, but with more of a user behavior perspective. i focused mostly on medical and government information. during the pandemic i was doing my degree, watching everything fall apart, and wanted to continue working from home. so in my last semester i took a bunch of data science courses and quickly pivoted to become a data analyst. i am pretty glad i did.
anyway, would really love if meghan did an episode on the unspeakable interviewing a public librarian. public libraries are a really interesting and valuable institution, i think that have a lot of potential to do more for a society with a decline in community and decline in spaces to spend time in where money doesnt need to be spent. you should check out the book the Palaces for the People, by Eric Klinenberg. that describes the importance of social infrastructure (which includes churches as well as libraries). a lot of librarians also enter this career path with these ideals and not just bc they like books, but unfortunately its pretty difficult for that to happen and maybe totally unrealistic bc of politics, the social issues listed, funding, amongst other reasons im sure.
People talk about the Hippocratic Oath, but it has been revised significantly and most medical schools don't use it at all (https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/984492?form=fpf). The alternatives are customized ones for "modern values" which variously emphasize things like public health and prevention, don't mention pesky topics like assisted suicide, and predictably, they have started to adopt various social justice maxims. Do no harm isn't in there any more.
It's sort of like how Google used to say "don't be evil" and then they stopped saying that.
Guilty of saying “pitch it” growing up in Indiana.
Can't you get a bunch of digital material from your library through apps like Libby?
Also, though libraries are universally praised, I've wondered if it's ethical to use a library frequently if you can afford to buy the books you seek. Is there any hidden resentment from authors toward libraries? Maybe not since physical books have been relatively scarce and there was some limit on how many could be checked out at once, but I wonder if that has changed as digital has become more accessible.
Of course it's ethical; you're paying for the library through your taxes; usually property taxes.
My sense is that the book publishers like to limit the number of digital copies that can be "checked out". That's a bit like the streaming music services saying that only X number of people can listen to a certain song at a time. Book publishers have not caught up to the current reality.
Authors can speak for themselves, but I would hope they regard libraries as a way to gain additional exposure for their works.
I guess the question is what is the purpose of a library in the digital age and should it be means-tested? The function of a library can't be to make most books free to everyone or there would be virtually no market for authorship. This is evidenced by the artifical limitation on digital material, as you mention. But this artificial limitation makes no sense other than to retain a market for book selling, and it creates the strange possibility that artificially scarce books are checked out by those who can afford books over those who can't. Wouldn't a better solution be to grant unlimited digital access to those who can't afford book buying and exclude those who can to sustain the market?
@Sarah Haider, What was the title of the book you read about the Moynihan Report?
Good podcast. As a librarian, I enjoyed hearing about your experiences with libraries. However, I disagree with some of Megan's conclusions and the NYT essay by Walther.
To some extent, I sympathize with Walther's disdain for Banned Books Week. I think of the typical Banned Books event as the library's version of a 4th of July celebration. In both cases, lofty platitudes are expressed with a maximum sense of self-satisfaction and a minimum of risk. Yet, it is hard to begrudge a library for its Banned Books display any more than I begrudge a city for its 4th of July picnic and parade. Celebrating ideals has value even at superficial level.
Unfortunately, banned books week has been dragged into the culture war this year. Wokeness is naturally attractive to many librarians. We frequently are well educated, poorly paid, and have low status. Believing that we are fighting racism and oppression by changing the words that we use to catalog a book or by putting up a display of radical magazines confers a sense of importance to our work that we complain is misunderstood by those who undervalue us. The special appeal of the current banned books campaign is that it allows librarians to be woke and anti-censorship at the same time b/c it is the reactionaries who are doing all the banning (at least according to the ALA press releases). It's not surprising that you don't see books by Milo Yiannopoulos or Abigail Shrier on library banned book lists. Nor am I surprised that the extent of conservative efforts to ban books has been greatly exaggerated (as indicated by the evidence cited by Megan).
Nevertheless, the values celebrated in banned books events -- best expressed the Freedom to Read Statement (https://www.ala.org/advocacy/intfreedom/freedomreadstatement ) -- still are important. Saying that books banned by a library are available elsewhere or that a librarian should curate a collection that "meets the needs of their community" is unsatisfying. Who decides what "community" the librarian is serving? If a librarian lives in a city in which 70% of the people are Muslims who believe that the "Satanic Verses" is sacrilegious, is the librarian's community that 70% or the 5% who want to see what Rushdie has to say? The idea of the "freedom to read'" like the first amendment, is that the curiosity of unpopular minorities ought to be protected too. Librarians, as part of the broader literary community, ought to stand for that principle at the same time that they serve the popular needs of the local majority.
The recent PEN report, "Booklash: Literary Freedom, Online Outrage, and the Language of Harm" (https://pen.org/report/booklash/ ) shows how "freedom to read" cliches pull in the right direction despite inclination of many librarians to turn them into a cudgel for the woke culture war. PEN uses the language of library banned book campaigns to criticize efforts to cancel the publication of books by online social media mobs -- a principle that I think that we all (Megan, Sarah and me) would agree with.
I find it hard to believe Sarah is old enough to remember the old era of "BONG-BONG-SCCREEEEE!!!!" dial-up modems. (Mostly I remember my sister occasionally picking up the phone in her bedroom to call a friend and ruining my connection.)
I also find it hard to believe that Meghan would actually drink water from a fountain that was just mouthed-over by some random dude. She's trolling you, Sarah. Barbarism!
Are you kidding? I'm a tap water absolutist.
I often visit libraries as a frequent traveler; the AC, wifi, bathrooms, and power outlets are clutch even though I have no interest in the printed books. Many of them are indeed de facto homeless shelters, and in some cases it is to the point where it's hard to use the library for any other reason.
The design of the new MLK library in downtown DC is interesting. It has some printed works, a lot of event space, a passport office, and a floor of exhibits of very specific DC political history. It's cavernous and fancy and was quite empty when I visited. I think a lot of these newer libraries are built in ways that are trying to make them implicitly less friendly for homeless people who want to live there, including less seating and more open space so they can't hide. The hours also tend to be limited for this reason I suspect.
It is also close to CityCenter, which is one of the few areas that has new, functioning high-end retail for in-person shopping. But the true fan roots for Sarah Haider no matter where she buys her outfits.
Gosh, I remember Difficult People, it was a hoot. I remember when John Cho joined the cast, and me and my ex both said "this guy is a curse, every show he goes on gets cancelled!", and of course that was the last series. Poor John, he's great but he is a jinx!
Funnily enough, you bring up the question of if the story changes if the child in The Giving Tree is female. Sarah says that if you don’t want a gender element, then the child should be male. I don’t know if this is your opinion on how things should be approached, but the way you say it sounds like it is. All I feel like doing is dropping this quote from another “banned book” that observes this phenomenon of male-as-default:
“Man is defined as a human being and woman as a female – whenever she behaves as a human being she is said to imitate the male.”
Maybe we should flip both and make the tree male and the child female 🤷♀️ I’m also not a fan of the book, but I cannot stand the idea that man is default (there are obvious exceptions).