This is good. Conversations with reporters and artists and architects. Air Weiwei has a provocative, independent mind. It’s a new book, a paperback from Columbia University. It’ll be in stores or they’ll get it for you. $20. It’s worth it. 

In a ‘Library of America’ video Amanda Gorman recites a poem of her own and one by Langston Hughes. And she says how important a place the Los Angeles Public Library was/is to her. She’s wonderfully unstoppable. 

https://youtube.com/watch?v=M87hMyxjIhk&feature=share

In The Guardian: Book sales jump a third in first week of bookshops reopening in England and Wales.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/apr/21/book-sales-jump-a-third-in-first-week-of-bookshops-reopening-in-england-and-wales?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

BLAKE BAILEY WHO WROTE the new big biography of Philip Roth and who is now said to have had a bad sexual past, reviewed the ‘Cleveland Edition’, a weekly paper I started, in 1985 for ‘Northern Ohio Live’ magazine. Someone there may have known him somehow—he was not from Cleveland—or seen that he’d written about alternative weeklies somewhere. I don’t have it, but it was positive, as I recall.

‘I do not know if all cops are poets, but I know that all cops carry guns with triggers.’
                                   ― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

 

‘I’ve worked for two billionaires. Here’s my advice for rich people who want to buy a newspaper.’ A Washington Post piece by Margaret Sullivan.                                                                 https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/media/billionaires-buy-newspapers/2021/04/17/520de30a-9e0e-11eb-9d05-ae06f4529ece_story.html

This guy Shamichael Hallman runs the major library in Memphis. He believes in his library’s potential to inspire and connect. He’s giving a TED presentation here. He’s cool. Cooler than you think of libraries maybe. Give this video a look:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=JI2CLgq3LLk&feature=share