If you dropped a needle on Joni Mitchell’s brand-new LP in January of 1974, you might have expected yet another hour of her signature elegies. On her two previous records, 1971’s Blue and 1972’s For the Roses, Mitchell excavated arresting songs from deep within her psyche. They are complex but accessible, often pairing Mitchell’s lithe voice with her own accompaniment on sombre piano or supple dulcimer. They are melancholy and sparse. And they aren’t very fun.

Court and Spark starts in a familiar Jonian fashion: mournful piano chords, poetic lyrics, Mitchell’s skyscraper voice. “Love came to my door with a sleeping roll and a madman’s soul,” she coos. “He thought for sure I’d seen him dancing in a river in the dark, looking for a woman to court and spark.” But when she unfurls the title of the album, something unexpected appears: a stuttering hi-hat. A beat in a Joni Mitchell song. And with that rhythm, the Joni of the past was gone. Joni the Confessional Poet, Joni the Selfish and Sad, Joni the Lonely Painter was no more.

My wife and I are covering the mortgage for a house on which my mother placed a seven-figure down payment, while I’m taking my mother to appointments, hauling out her garbage, and doing her internet troubleshooting. In exchange, we’re living in a space and a long-gentrified neighbourhood we love, one we couldn’t otherwise afford. We also get free child care that consists of trips for dim sum and lightly supervised iPad time for my eight-year-old daughter.

And yet that narrative still gets steamrolled by the stigma. At an appointment at the kidney clinic, my mom will tell the nurse that we live together. I am always quick to blurt out my qualifiers: WITH MY WIFE! AND MY CHILD! (WHOM I CONCEIVED DOING ADULT THINGS!) ON SEPARATE LEVELS!

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I came to librarianship the way most other librarians do: I fell into it. After a full-time job that had thoroughly burned me out, I found a student job in the college library; this one was part-time and entailed reshelving large academic books and sitting at the big circulation desk with a stamper, ready to land that perfectly placed due date. It came with a lot of quiet and a lot of time to read—excellent for repairing burnout, terrible for teaching me what working in libraries was actually like. 

People who do not work in libraries tend to have a romanticized view of what it is to work in libraries, and I was no exception. Once I graduated and needed to find another job, I did the next best thing and applied to work at a public library as a library associate in the children’s department. 

Unlike my last library job, this one was not quiet, did not come with reading time, and after seven years, thoroughly re-burned me out so hard I would spend years unlearning toxic workaholic traits I’d picked up there (an unlearning that is still in process). This particular public library served a population of 200,000 well-educated, affluent, self-described library lovers. They were also Tea Party Texans who saw taxes as an affront to their personal liberty; they loved the library, just not enough to fund more branches or a larger staff. 

The place was as busy as a Target on Saturday every day of the week. And because we were the only library in town, we ran the place like an amusement park. Story time was a back-to-back affair—every half-hour from 10 a.m. to noon, Tuesday through Friday—and was filled to capacity for nearly every slot. 

While our patron base was mostly conservative, white, and straight, we wanted our collection to reflect the community it served—which also included a large immigrant population and a handful of queer families. With that in mind, one of our librarians used story time to read The Family Book by Todd Parr. The Family Book won a Scholastic Parent and Child Magazine Best of 2003 Award; it also contains a single page that says “Some families have two mommies; some families have two daddies.” One parent raised such a stink with our manager that we were told to stick with reading “noncontroversial” books at story time, lest we risk losing all the queer books in the collection. 

This was in 2013. Ten years later, things haven’t changed for the better. I still work as a librarian, albeit in a different major Southern city. But my work has changed drastically. I’m trained in violence de-escalation, trauma-informed reference, and medical and mental health first aid, which includes overdose prevention training. I have intervened in fights, talked people down from suicide, removed domestic violence victims from their abusers, hugged strangers, and been screamed at and threatened. My coworkers once solved a murder. 

Yes, sometimes I even recommend books. But increasingly, being a librarian is less and less about books and more and more about community survival. We are a lifeline for populations that have slipped through the spaces in a weakening social safety net; we are a target for organized harassment and censorship campaigns. Yet, people are grateful for our help. They hold our hands and thank us, they tell us we are blessed, they say they can’t believe someone so kind found them so deserving of love. 

In library school, the threats of censorship and propaganda were drilled into us constantly—but mostly in the context of past authoritarian regimes, and never with the idea that past might become present. The last three years, in particular, have been difficult ones in librarianship, but they are also the ones in which I have felt most committed to the job. The work I’m doing now is possibly the most important of my life. 

“Have you been to the library lately?” asked Nicholas Hune-Brown in The Walrus earlier this year. No, really—have you? Because whatever ideas you have about what it’s like to work in libraries these days, I can assure you it’s not like that. It’s frustrating, depressing, and underpaid. It’s also life-affirming. Some days feel like utopia; many days feel like war. That’s life on the library front lines. Welcome. 

Have You Been To The Library Lately? (Nicholas Hune-Brown, The Walrus, June 2023)

When I first read this piece, I saw something I hadn’t in a long time: a realistic portrayal of life in public libraries. In fact, it inspired this very reading list.

Hune-Brown doesn’t mince words, doesn’t shy away from hard truths, but also doesn’t only focus on the toxic mix of vocational awe and trauma porn that currently overshadows life in public librarianship. Yes, the job is necessary, even admirable. Yes, it’s extremely difficult and downright dangerous at times. No, none of us who got into libraries expected to be doing this kind of work. But what I love most about this piece is that Hune-Brown cuts right to the heart of the issue. If a society feels it acceptable to cut funding to social necessities like housing, education, and  healthcare, are we really that surprised that that same society wouldn’t see a problem with allowing an underpaid, women-driven profession such as librarianship to pick up the pieces? 

When people tell the story of this transformation, from book repository to social services hub, it’s usually as an uncomplicated triumph. A recent “love letter” to libraries in the New York Times has a typical capsule history: “As local safety nets shriveled, the library roof magically expanded from umbrella to tarp to circus tent to airplane hangar. The modern library keeps its citizens warm, safe, healthy, entertained, educated, hydrated and, above all, connected.”

That story, while heartwarming, obscures the reality of what has happened. No institution “magically” takes on the role of the entire welfare state, especially none as underfunded as the public library. If the library has managed to expand its protective umbrella, it has done so after a series of difficult decisions. And that expansion has come with costs.

The Small Town Library That Became a Culture War Battleground (Sasha Abramsky, The Nation, August 2023)

Let’s go back to the basics of the censorship conundrum libraries currently find themselves in. When I started working in libraries 15 years ago, we regularly talked about how librarians were some of our most trusted public servants, right behind firefighters and nurses. Book bans were vestiges of the past; when they came up, our minds would settle on imagery from Nazi book-burning parties and the cover of Fahrenheit 451. Phew, we said. At least we don’t have to deal with that anymore. 

Fast forward to 2023 and librarians are being cast as public enemy number one, pedophiles, and groomers-in-chief, courtesy of extremist groups like Moms For Liberty. The year 2022 saw a record 600-plus book challenges leveled against library collections, and 2023 is on track to beat that number handily. From the outside, this might appear to be a groundswell of public support for censorship—however, a recent Washington Post analysis of the American Library Association’s 2023 “State of America’s Libraries” report showed that the majority of book challenges being leveled at library boards around the country originated with eleven people. Eleven. 

Abramsky’s piece is a perfect cross section of the nationwide fight, distilled into one rural library’s story. Library lovers had better wake up, because the other side is currently going faster than we can drive. 

In the coming years, the conservative three-person Board of County Commissioners will likely continue to appoint people to the library’s board who reflect the values of Ruffcorn and her fellow petitioners. In other words, Ruffcorn could lose in November and yet still ultimately come out on top, setting a precedent in which a few angry citizens would get to dictate to librarians which books should carry warning labels, or be relegated to the top shelf of the adult section, or require parental approval for a child to check out.

The Coming Enshittification of Public Libraries (Karawynn Long, Nine Lives, July 2023)

Speaking of library lovers needing to wake up to the myriad threats facing public libraries, I feel compelled to highlight this Substack from Karawynn Long that dives deep into the now-defunct user recommendation feature from OverDrive (the increasingly powerful middle man between e-books, libraries, and their patrons) and what it portends for the other outsourced reader services libraries have come to rely on. 

Long is a library lover herself, and she highlights an uncomfortable truth about libraries and how they must exist in this increasingly capitalistic world: we have to buy in to our exploitation in order to survive. And because we’re forced to buy in to this exploitation thanks to the popular tech business practice known as “functional monopolism,” libraries are vulnerable to the whims of those vulture businesses, such as KKR (who also recently purchased Simon & Schuster), who exist to extract ever more money from their customers—libraries. 

Every extra dollar that KKR sucks out of libraries is another dollar they don’t have for buying books, or for librarian staffing, or for supporting any of the dozens of other small but important services that public libraries provide their local communities, like free access to computers and the internet. Some libraries that already struggle for funding might be starved out of existence…. And if OverDrive goes belly-up at some point in the future, crushed by KKR’s leveraged debt, it’s going to take down access to the digital catalogs of nearly every public library in North America. Between now and then, I expect the user experience to degrade precipitously. The removal of the recommendation feature, I believe, is the canary in the coal mine.

What They Didn’t Teach Us In Library School (Chip Ward, TomDispatch, April 2007)

Chip Ward’s heartbreaking essay has been cited by many in the library sciences tasked with advising new recruits. Written in 2007, it treats the idea of library as social safety net as a little-known concept. Ward talks about going to conferences on housing and homelessness, and other attendees wondering what in the world a librarian would be doing there. Now, librarians, housing advocates, social workers, and first responders are all too familiar with the work the others do; while I’d like to consider this a win, it only proves that we are more than 15 years down the road and conditions have only remained the same—that is, if they haven’t worsened. 

In the meantime, the Salt Lake City Public Library — Library Journal’s 2006 “Library of the Year” — has created a place where the diverse ideas and perspectives that sustain an open and inclusive civil society can be expressed safely, where disparate citizens can discover common ground, self-organize, and make wise choices together. We do not collect just books, we also gather voices. We empower citizens and invite them to engage one another in public dialogues. I like to think of our library as the civic ballroom of our community where citizens can practice that awkward dance of mutuality that is the very signature of a democratic culture.

And if the chronically homeless show up at the ball, looking worse than Cinderella after midnight? Well, in a democratic culture, even disturbing information is useful feedback. When the mentally ill whom we have thrown onto the streets haunt our public places, their presence tells us something important about the state of our union, our national character, our priorities, and our capacity to care for one another. That information is no less important than the information we provide through databases and books. The presence of the impoverished mentally ill among us is not an eloquent expression of civil discourse, like a lecture in the library’s auditorium, but it speaks volumes nonetheless.

Are Libraries the Future of Media? (Kate Harloe, Popula, August 2023)

I’d like to end a difficult reading list with this universal truth: public libraries and their librarians are scrappy. Always have been. Over and over again, the world proclaims the death of libraries; over and over again, libraries respond by ascending from the grave. Don’t count us out, and don’t call our resilience a comeback.

Kate Harloe’s piece provides a perfect example of a library understanding its role in a community and leveraging it to better serve the public. Here, the Albany Public Library pairs with the local newspaper to provide citizens with publicly funded, community-owned and accessible journalism, the library and local journalists reporting and publishing community stories together. As Harloe puts it, people may not trust the media but they “really, really love the library.” And why wouldn’t they? Libraries are the last place where “your ability to exist as a human being doesn’t depend on your ability to pay.” Combine that with quality community reporting that isn’t hidden behind a paywall and you’ve got a KO combination. 

As she finished speaking, the crowd was in tears. There were many reasons for that, but for me, one was the way in which Koepaomu captured how libraries feel—how, often, they can be experienced as places outside of space and time; as small territories to retreat from the unstable, transactional realities of the world, and as pathways to a sense of belonging, and even safety, in a deeply unsafe time. Libraries represent the best of our efforts to take care of one another. Their ongoing existence is a reminder that—not just in some far-off future, but even today—other ways of being are possible.

Lisa Bubert is a writer and librarian based in Nashville, Tennessee. Her work has appeared in The Rumpus, Texas Highways, Washington Square Review, and more.

Editor: Peter Rubin

Copyeditor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands

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The incalculable human cost of institutionalization. An homage to rappers gone far too soon. A profile on the trans son of an anti-trans zealot. A summer camp that helps children to process grief, and bearing witness to the survivors of the 2020 explosion at the Port of Beirut.

1. The Ones We Sent Away

Jennifer Senior | The Atlantic | August 7, 2023 | 13,585 words

Fair warning, dear reader: This will be among the best stories you read this year. Prepare yourself to be wrecked. In this masterpiece of longform journalism, Jennifer Senior reports on her aunt Adele, a woman later diagnosed with Coffin-Siris syndrome 12, a genetic condition that manifests in intellectual disability and physical delays. Adele was institutionalized at 21 months old on the advice of doctors who insisted that a care placement was the best thing for her, leaving her older sister Rona bereft “as though she’d lost an arm or a leg.” At its core this story is about trauma and loss, suffered chiefly by Adele who was deprived of her family and early chances to expand her intellectual capacity, warehoused in the notorious Willowbrook State School. The shockwaves of loss extend outward to Adele’s mother, father, and sister, deprived of Adele’s presence in their lives, and to society at large, deprived of Adele and the person she could have become had she received more enlightened, loving care much earlier in life. Glimpses into Adele’s psyche, including her need for order, her penchant for needlepoint, and delight in matching her clothing, hint at the contours of Adele’s personality. Senior, in trying to name her aunt’s condition to attempt to understand the scope of loss, confronts the many ethical concerns of writing about someone who is not able to give consent. Tracing her aunt’s living conditions and likely treatment at Willowbrook makes for extremely difficult, but absolutely necessary reading, to ask and attempt to answer a vital question: How do you comprehend the cost when, despite the best of intentions, we fail to provide essential care to the most vulnerable among us? —KS

2. Remembering the Rappers We Lost

Danyel Smith | The New York Times Magazine | August 8, 2023 | 4,548 words

Things don’t always match up as neatly as this: Exactly 50 years ago tonight, a young woman named Cindy Campbell threw a back-to-school party in their Bronx apartment building’s rec room. The DJ was her older brother, known as Kool Herc; the ensuing soirée would come to be known as the night hip-hop was born. If you’ve been on the internet anytime this week, of course, you probably already know the broad outlines of this story; celebrating the culture’s golden anniversary has become the most ubiquitous editorial peg in recent memory. Every outlet imaginable has done every story imaginable—and NYT Mag’s special issue has some of my favorites, from Tom Breihan’s Too Short profile to Niela Orr’s exploration of the norm-breaking current generation of female artists. But Danyel Smith’s elegy delivers something altogether different. Death has long lurked within hip-hop, as it does within most creative pursuits; however, given this country’s systemic ills that face the culture’s overwhelmingly Black artists, the actuarial tables here tip ominously askew. Lives cut agonizingly short by violence, by health, by drugs, by flukey tragedy. Smith contends with all of these in turn, saying the names of the people who matter to many of us, but are anonymous to many others. This is a tally I’ve been keeping and a story I’ve been telling — conversationally, journalistically, eulogistically, bitterly, in novel form — since the late 1980s, she writes. Her three-plus decades as a journalist and a fan have given her a cruel proximity to these tragedies, and you feel the accrual of that pain in her writing. Yet, as Smith so often does, she manages to end the piece by embracing life; the final act is so buoyant, so transcendent, so defiant, that you’ll likely run it back just to re-experience the frisson it causes. In another piece of synchronicity, this essay was published on the death day of one of my favorite artists, Sean Price, and I’d woken up that morning with hip-hop’s mortality on my mind. Even if he and the rest of these dearly departed never get the credit they so richly deserve, pieces like Smith’s give me hope that they’ll never be forgotten. —PR

3. He’s the Son of an Anti-Trans Influencer. It’s His Turn to Speak.

Christopher Mathias | Huffington Post | June 30, 2023 | 7,864 words

This is how you write a story about a moral panic: You call it dehumanizing and terrifying, you don’t entertain even an ounce of both sides-ism, and you center the targets of the panic without stripping them of agency. Kudos to Christopher Mathias, one of the best reporters covering right-wing extremism in America, for his profile of Renton Sinclair, the trans son of a zealous anti-trans advocate. Renton’s mother, a former Miss America contestant, has used him to advance her odious agenda. Here Mathias lets Renton tell his story, on his terms. It contains chapters about his mother putting him in conversion therapy, overlooking his suicide attempt, cursing the testosterone that sustains him, and humiliating him before national audiences. But Renton’s story is also about resilience, respect, and joy. He has a message for trans people afraid to come out because they fear a loved one might abandon them. “That is 100% not on you,” he says. “It doesn’t mean you’re fucking bad. It doesn’t mean you’re wrong. It doesn’t mean there’s something broken with you. That is someone else being fucked up.” Amen. —SD

4. Notes from Grief Camp

Mitchell Consky | The Walrus | August 9, 2023 | 3,500 words

At Camp Erin, a group of boys from the same cabin name three caterpillars Gerry, Larry, and Harry. It’s one of several small details sprinkled throughout this beautiful essay that is incredibly affecting. These boys are having fun—rolling down hills, dancing on stages, naming caterpillars—despite having recently lost their dads. Camp Erin recognizes that children process grief differently from adults, that they can transition from devastation to joy in a moment, and that joy is still worth celebrating. I loved that these kids had the respite of naming caterpillars, that grief didn’t weigh them down every second, and that “grief camp” encouraged this. The boys form a close bond with Mitchell Consky, their counselor, and his first-hand account of how he steers them into realizing they all share the loss of their fathers (Consky included) is gentle and touching. I expected an essay on child grief to be gut-wrenching, and while I did wipe away the odd tear, I came away feeling that Camp Erin was a special place. The children realize they are not alone and can talk about their grief. They also just have a summer camp. —CW

5. Beirut, at Sunset

Tamara Saade | The Delacorte Review & Literary Hub | August 3, 2023 | 3,971 words

When a disaster strikes affecting thousands, the only way you can possibly begin to understand the toll is to learn the stories of survivors. On August 4th, 2020, 218 were killed and 7,000 injured in an ammonium nitrate explosion at the Port of Beirut. Through personal accounts, and as a way to confront her own trauma over the event, Tamara Saade bears witness to those that were there. “I had thought that telling the stories of other people would make writing about August fourth easier for me,” she writes. “But I came to see that it was as hard, if not harder, to do justice to these people and their stories of that day.” In this beautiful braided essay, Saade processes her own thoughts, reactions, and feelings, alongside those of the citizens she profiles in the aftermath of the explosions. Sentence by sentence, scene by scene, Saade’s measured prose makes cogent the post-blast chaos and confusion, creating order out of disorder, in a bold attempt to find peace where once was pandemonium. —KS

Audience Award

Here’s the piece our audience loved most, this week.

Grief is non-linear. One day, three years after a death, grief can return and feel as extreme as it did in the immediate aftermath of the loss. The ultimate difference between child grief and adult grief, she said, is how children will re-grieve throughout their lives.

The humanity of “low skill” workers, a child disappearance intertwined with a cult, the resident snow monkeys of Southern Texas, a multi-million dollar mail-order fraud, and the disappointing decline of fish-and-chip shops. These are our editors’ favorite stories from the week.

1. We Are All Animals at Night

Lana Hall | Hazlitt | July 12, 2023 | 3,210 words

As a sex worker in a Toronto massage parlor, Lana Hall earned her living from 2 p.m. to 2 a.m., three to six shifts per week. In preparing for a particularly repellant final customer one night, Hall is humbled, not by the man she must shower with, but by the kindness of a fellow worker who curls her hair before the dreaded appointment. Reader, this small gift cut me so deeply that I found myself stifling sobs. “I felt so much care in that moment I could barely breathe,” Hall writes, “and it occurred to me that I’d never had a woman, before or since, handle my hair so tenderly.” As Hall recounts how the powerful, and society in general, look down on people with “low skill” jobs, she deftly reminds us that those who must work the wee hours serving the “incessant hungers of others” are often the most adept at conflict deflection and resolution—ironically the skills so often highly prized by those who work in sunlit ivory towers. Hall imparts with grace and nuance that the humanity on offer from those in low vs. high skill occupations is often as stark as night and day. —KS

2. Who Walks Always Beside You?

Benjamin Hale | Harper’s | July 17, 2023 | 14,367 words

As soon as I finished this story, I sent it to two other magazine editors, both of them parents. Trigger warning for child murder, I told them, but you must read this. It’s been a long time since a piece surprised me the way this one did. Except I didn’t read it—I devoured it. Benjamin Hale’s delivery of a yarn involving a missing child, a cult, and perhaps a ghost in the wilderness of Arkansas is so adept that I didn’t get up, didn’t idly check social media, didn’t do anything while I was reading all 14,000 words of it. Hale plots a storyline that seems straight as an arrow then quietly nudges the reader to another path, then another. The twists and revelations are sublime but never showy. I don’t want to say anything else, to risk giving too much away. Suffice it to say, with that trigger warning in mind, you must read this. —SD

3. My Search for the Snow Monkeys of South Texas

Sarah Bird | Texas Monthly | July 23, 2023 | 5,493 words

In 1972, Pelka—the 10-year-old snow monkey at the heart of Sarah Bird’s story—was shunted from her sanctuary outside of Kyoto, Japan, to a ranch in Texas. Too much temple pooping had led to the banishment of Pelka’s whole troop, and 150 monkeys swapped snowy peaks for sun-parched dirt. When Sarah Bird heard of her new Texan neighbors, she rushed to meet them; after all, they shared a history—Bird also grew up in Japan before relocating to Texas. Following a bonding moment with a doped-up Pelka, the snow monkeys become an unexpected force in Bird’s life, but, over the years, she loses track of them. Setting out to find them again, Bird contemplates a clichéd reunion, but the reality is far more nuanced. Her link adds an extra layer to the already fascinating story of this bizarre relocation and subsequent decades of supporting snow monkeys in Texas. Yes, Pelka now has generations of Texan relatives. —CW

4. The Greatest Scam Ever Written

Rachel Browne | The Walrus | July 26, 2023 | 5,264 words

I’m a sucker for stories about scams and grifters. As soon as I saw it, I was powerless to resist Rachel Browne’s investigative feature on copywriting con artist Patrice Runner. As a Montréal teen, Runner was enamored with the provocative copy of mail-order ads, especially those that resembled hand-written notes. Imagine being so persuasive in print that people mailed you money for winning lottery numbers and the secrets to luck and wealth. Over the years, over a million Canadians succumbed to Runner’s charm, earning him $200 million. Reporter Rachel Browne sent a hand-written letter to Runner, asking to interview him about his work with Maria Duval, an amateur psychic who claimed to have found missing persons and predicted election and stock market results. Runner licensed Duval’s likeness in Canada and the US, sending countless hand-written direct mail come-ons for astrological readings, lottery numbers, and fortune telling. On the proceeds, Runner led a lavish lifestyle that included heli-skiing and private schools for his kids where tuition was $100,000 a year. Browne expertly unravels Runner’s shady schemes and shell companies, distilling his case into a fascinating moral question: Is deception itself a crime? If you ask Runner’s many many victims they might say they’re more vulnerable than gullible, less cautious than curious. —KS

5. A Funeral for Fish and Chips: Why are Britain’s Chippies Disappearing?

Tom Lamont | The Guardian | July 20, 2023 | 5,276 words

I first came to this piece because of my own love of fish-and-chips, but also because I knew I’d find a parade of aggressively British-sounding eatery names. In that, I wasn’t disappointed. But I also found something unexpectedly tragic, and unexpectedly resolute. Over the course of a year, Tom Lamont frequented “chippies” around the U.K., concentrating on Scotland’s East Neuk of Fife—a coastal area jutting out of the land between Edinburgh and Dundee, and by many accounts the world’s preeminent purveyor of the meal. When he began, supply-chain issues and soaring energy prices had already driven the industry to the edge of disaster. By the time his year was up, things had gotten markedly worse. Yet, Lamont’s elegy is suffused with love: his love for the “paradoxical richness without grossness” that marks a great fish and chips meal; villagers’ love for the stalwart shops and shopkeepers in their communities; even the friers’ and fishers’ love for the tradition. “Fishing is a serious matter here,” Lamont writes. “Fish and chips is a serious meal.” And as shop after shop closes, from the Lowford Fish Bar to Jack Spratt’s Superior to Jackson’s Chippie, each meal takes on even more weight. It’s a microcosm. A metaphor. And Lamont’s piece unpacks it all deftly, making sure you can take it away and digest it on your own time. Hopefully by the seaside. —PR

Audience Award

Get ready, it’s time to recognize the piece that our readers loved the most this week.

When Patrice Runner was around eleven, in the late 1970s, his mother, a writer, began looping him in on the family’s financial struggles, he recalls. Runner’s father had left a few years earlier, sending monthly sums as child support. Thoughts of a career were a long way off, but Runner says he remembers feeling that all he wanted was to “get rich” so he wouldn’t struggle like his mother. He says he once asked a friend, “Do you know a simple way to become a millionaire?” When the friend said he didn’t, Runner replied: “It’s easy. Find a way to only make $1 one million times.” At nineteen, Runner started his first mail-order business, with $80, selling weight-loss booklets and how-to books on a range of topics.

Levina Moody, whom the police refer to by her first name, Gloria, is on the list as one of the first known Indigenous women to be murdered along BC’s infamous network of highways. Levina’s family believes people are withholding the truth about her case. As with other cases of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls that I have covered, the investigation into Moody’s murder was shoddy, despite strong evidence of there being a known suspect. Understanding why her case is still cold requires untangling the strands of a messy skein of an investigation.

Despite the fact that it’s been more than fifty years, the Moody family is still holding out hope for being able to name Levina’s killer or killers within their lifetimes. As Elders in their family pass on, Vanessa says it’s a constant reminder that many are dying without having the closure they deserve. With each generation that passes, there is a reminder of the intergenerational trauma caused by the murder and the lack of care that has seemed to surround it.

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Thoughts on finding feminist inspiration in Tennessee. An analysis of a controversial therapy treatment. A report on the complicated role of the library. A reflection on the bond between a mother and daughter. And musings on the ever-evolving nature of language.

1. Lady Vols Country

Jessica Wilkerson | Oxford American | June 6, 2023 | 3,644 words

I don’t just love that Jessica Wilkerson* takes on tough topics in her work, including racism, feminism, and outdated female gender roles; I love how she does it. In her writing, she gets comfortable with being uncomfortable, which allows her to go deep, probe difficult questions, and most importantly, come to some sort of (sometimes uneasy) understanding of what it means to live in a world that’s flawed. This is one of the great gifts of powerful writing. In “Lady Vols Country,” Wilkerson examines outdated southern gender roles through portraits of two women who were very important to her: her grandmother and Pat Summitt, the former head coach of the University of Tennessee’s Lady Volunteers basketball team. In remembering two strong women and the change they stood for, Wilkerson finds the permission she didn’t know she was looking for—to be true to the life she wants for herself. —KS

*If you’d like to read more by Wilkerson, I heartily recommend her Longreads feature, “Living with Dolly Parton,” in which she turns her keen eye and strong heart to the life, legacy, and social power of the country music legend.

2. The Enigmatic Method

Meg Bernhard | VQR | June 12, 2023 | 6,923 words

Imagine for a moment a horrific trauma exists in your past, and it continues to wreak havoc on your life. In a cruel twist, talking about the issue remains so painful and triggering that multiple types of psychotherapy have brought you no relief. But then you hear about a process that doesn’t require deep excavation, yet promises near-magical results. That’s exactly what drew people to EMDR, a modality that allegedly processes traumatic memories and alleviates PTSD using rapid eye movements. Now, 30 years after EMDR first emerged, Meg Bernhard tackles its divisive and confounding legacy. Many claim it cured them, and hail its creator as a savior; others dismiss it as snake oil, pointing to its dearth of clinical validity. This is a fascinating story, one that contends with both sides of the conversation while also being informed by Bernhard’s own inconclusive experience with EMDR. “The business of healing is messy,” she writes. “People start and stop therapy, are triggered years after their traumatic event. They get better, and worse, and better. Or they don’t. Why should an eye-movement therapy work? Why should it not? Perhaps EMDR, with its loops and repetitions, its movements, its quiet, echoes this illogic. Perhaps, in doing so, it reminds us that healing doesn’t fit a single script.” Centuries of scientific progress have uncovered much, yet the human body remains unimaginably complex, especially where mind and muscle overlap. As we all stumble toward wellness, it’s helpful to remember how knotty that path can be. —PR

3. Have You Been to the Library Lately?

Nicholas Hune-Brown | The Walrus | June 12, 2023 | 5,333 words

The library in the town where I grew up was in an ugly, box-like, red brick building, starkly contrasting with the cobbled high street and medieval buildings surrounding it. But this location was key. Bang in the middle of town, it’s where my Mum would often drop me off while she did her shopping, leaving her free to peruse seventeen different types of bedsheets without a whinging child, and me to go ride dragons—in a fantasy book, tucked in a cozy nook of the children’s section. It was free babysitting. Libraries have always been about more than just the books. However, Nicholas Hune-Brown discovers in this thought-provoking essay that they are now being called upon to perform services far beyond their old remit. Spending months going from library to library across Canada, Hune-Brown finds that as “the last public space,” libraries have become a social services hub for their communities. A place to learn, apply for jobs, get warm, or use a washroom. Everyone is welcome through the doors, and librarians—who, as Hune-Brown writes, “probably chose the profession because of their passion for Victorian literature”—can now find themselves dealing with anything from a mental health crisis to opioid poisoning. The last safety net. I had not previously given much consideration to the current role of the library. Now I have. —CW

4. A Mother’s Exchange for Her Daughter’s Future

Jiayang Fan | The New Yorker | June 12, 2023 | 6,260 words

Early in the pandemic, I started going for runs through the empty streets of Brooklyn. These outings kept me sane, even as they took me past grim reminders of the crisis, including a refrigerated truck that our neighborhood hospital was using as a makeshift morgue. One day I listened to an episode of This American Life in which writer Jiayang Fan described the terror and grief she felt navigating COVID because her mother, who had advanced ALS, was in a medical facility that Jiayang couldn’t visit. Jiayang imagined what it would be like to lose her mother, her only family, at a time when the closest she could get to her physically was by standing in a park, looking up at the window of her room. The devastating segment literally stopped me in my tracks, and though I can’t say for sure, that may have been the day that I regularly started walking the last chunk of my running route so that I could call my own parents. Jiayang’s mom passed away last year, and now she’s written an essay that defies easy description. It’s about their bond, and it’s told through the lens of stories: stories Jiayang’s mother told her, stories she told her mother, stories she tells herself. I promise that it will stop you in your tracks. —SD

5. Beamer, Dressman, Bodybag

Alexander Wells | European Review of Books | April 19, 2023 | 3,551 words

Shared language is about communication, for sure, but as Alexander Wells notes in the European Review of Books, it’s also about identity and belonging. Sometimes, even understanding the latest slang makes you feel in-the-know, right!?!? (Not at all fond of how “right” has become the latest way to enthusiastically agree, but I digress.) As an editor of an English-language monthly published in Berlin, Wells is fascinated by ever-evolving common language usage in Germany, rife with combined English and German words cut like butter into flour to form something new and sometimes amusing, but always full of meaning. “German social media loves to mock awful Denglisch marketing attempts,” he writes. “But when the bilingual puns are good, they’re good—and enhanced by the thrill of belonging. I love this one billboard ad for classic indie radio that reads Everybody hörts (« everyone listens to it »), and I love it not only because I like the pun, but because I feel a surge of pride that I’m in on the joke, that maybe I do really speak German.” I came for the appreciation of evolving language and stayed for the pun of it. —KS

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Today, you’ll find a semester’s load of classes, events, and seminars at your local library: on digital photography, estate planning, quilting, audio recording, taxes for seniors, gaming for teens, and countless “circle times” in which introverts who probably chose the profession because of their passion for Victorian literature are forced to perform “The Bear Went over the Mountain” to rooms full of rioting toddlers.