Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

If you are still in the gop, you are either an extremist yourself, or in bed with those who are.

Hell hath no fury like a farmer bankrupted.

Stay strong, because they are weak.

One of our two political parties is a cult whose leader admires Vladimir Putin.

Republicans: slavery is when you own me. freedom is when I own you.

I would gladly pay you tuesday for a hamburger today.

One lie, alone, tears the fabric of reality.

If you cannot answer whether trump lost the 2020 election, you are unfit for office.

Hey Washington Post, “Democracy Dies in Darkness” was supposed to be a warning, not a mission statement.

They think we are photo bombing their nice little lives.

Red lights blinking on democracy’s dashboard

Reality always gets a vote in the end.

We can’t confuse what’s necessary to win elections with the policies that we want to implement when we do.

This country desperately needs a functioning fourth estate.

Sitting here in limbo waiting for the dice to roll

Someone should tell Republicans that violence is the last refuge of the incompetent, or possibly the first.

Teach a man to fish, and he’ll sit in a boat all day drinking beer.

We’re watching the self-immolation of the leading world power on a level unprecedented in human history.

Usually wrong but never in doubt

Conservatism: there are people the law protects but does not bind and others who the law binds but does not protect.

’Where will you hide, Roberts, the laws all being flat?’

Let there be snark.

So fucking stupid, and still doing a tremendous amount of damage.

A democracy can’t function when people can’t distinguish facts from lies.

You are here: Home / Books / Late Night ‘Should Be Always’ Open Thread: Librarians, Doing Civilization’s Work

Late Night ‘Should Be Always’ Open Thread: Librarians, Doing Civilization’s Work

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A NYC-specific initiative:

From the Guardian (h/t Ozark Hillbilly), “Tall tales but no dessert: the storyteller of Karachi and his ice-cream cart library”:

Pedalling down a narrow alleyway in Karachi’s crowded Lyari Town, Saira Bano slows as she passes a group of children sitting on the ground, listening to a man reading aloud from a book. The eight-year-old gets off her bike, slips off her sandals, and sits on the mat at the back.

She has already heard the story from Mohammad Noman, who is entertaining more than a dozen children with the tale of Noori, an insecure yellow parrot. “I don’t mind listening to it again,” says Saira. “He’s so funny.”

Noman, 23, is spending two weeks in Lyari pedalling an old ice-cream cart through its lanes, stopping to read his stories and leaving behind books for the children to borrow.

He dropped out of school himself as a teenager but has returned to education and is now studying for his high school certificate.

He is also one of two storytellers working part-time for the Kahaani Sawaari (Stories on Wheels) programme, run by GoRead.pk, which is working to improve literacy among underprivileged communities in Karachi, Pakistan’s largest city.

“I become a kid when I am around the children,” says Noman. In the past 18 months, he has visited 30 areas of Lyari, one of the most densely populated and deprived neighbourhoods of Karachi, with more than 660,000 residents, mostly from the marginalised Baloch ethnic group…

Education is free and compulsory in Pakistan yet, according to the UN, it has the world’s second-highest rate of children absent from school, at 44% of five to 16-year-olds. And 77% of 10-year-olds are unable to understand simple text, according to the World Bank.

Books and uniforms can be prohibitively expensive in Pakistan. Saira dropped out of school a year ago when her father, who worked in a toy shop, lost his job as Pakistan’s economy was hit by rocketing food and fuel prices…

It is not just children in the Lyari audience. “I have been watching this young man come in his ice-cream cart since last week,” says Rashida Ashraf, a local resident in her 60s. “He plays music, and soon the kids trickle in. There’s no ice-cream though.

“It’s nice,” she says. “It will open their minds.”

Reader Interactions

33Comments

  1. 1.

    mrmoshpotato

    Librarians, Doing Civilization’s Work

    Baseball bats to Rethuglican crotches?  Cockknockers?

  3. 3.

    sab

    Best thing we ever did for my stepdaughter and her child was finance their rent to an apartment one short block from a good public library.

  4. 4.

    eclare

    I hate that we rebuilt the library closest to me here.  It now has a huge atrium and the floors open to the atrium, so there are huge towering ledges, and I don’t like ledges.  I used to browse all the time in the old library, now I just reserve books to pick up at the check-out on the first floor.

  5. 5.

    sab

    @eclare: Yikes. That sounds awful. Same as my objection to big hospital atriums. Old people with walkers trundling across vast spaces. And somehow this is considered to be a good thing.

  6. 6.

    sab

    @sab: I am jealous. I want her apartment, but landlord only rents to families with autistic kids.

    My ScotsIrish mom would call him a good egg. In Yiddish I think that would be a mensch.

    ETA A good egg was the highest compliment my mom could give.

  7. 7.

    Mousebumples

    Also a bit fan of public libraries. I’ve seen something like that “you’ve saved all the money” message on our checkout receipts, too.

    My kids love going to play with toy bins (trains, puppets, building blocks, etc.), and I love getting a bunch of new books for bedtime storytime.

    My 4 yo is learning her letters (can’t read quite yet), and she’s still falling asleep with books in her bed. 😅 I used to do that! Well, that and sneaking a flashlight under the covers to keep reading after “Lights Out.” When I was a bit older, though.

  8. 8.

    OzarkHillbilly

    Over the years I’ve gotten to know and become friends with a few librarians. They are all very interesting people.

    @Mousebumples: I read to my boys in bed every night and then they got to “read” books for another half hour. They are both voracious readers. I wonder how that happened?

  10. 10.

    Mousebumples

    @OzarkHillbilly: ❤️

    Part of encouraging a love of books and reading is finding fun books that they love. We probably have “too many” books. But I am so glad my kids love reading and snuggling before bed.

  11. 11.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @Baud: If you got this far without reading, why you botha?

    @Mousebumples: We probably have “too many” books.

    My wife says the same thing about me. My reply is always the same: “That is not possible.”
    Tho I do have a few books I will never read again and should give away, I will just replace them with others.

  12. 12.

    Mousebumples

    @Baud: If you’re running for President, maybe it could become your campaign event.

    Baud 20XX! Storytelling at the polls!

  13. 13.

    Mousebumples

    @OzarkHillbilly: yeah, I figure I’ll end up either giving away baby books (except for favorites) when my kiddos outgrow them. Give to their school? To the library? To neighbors?… TBD…

  14. 14.

    Jeffg166

    I send the Philadelphia library money every year. I have no idea how many thousands I save a year using it.

  16. 16.

    Mousebumples

    @eclare: book nerds unite!

    I used to think I was super sneaky to get out a flashlight to read.

    In retrospect, I didn’t buy the flashlight or replace the batteries. Thanks mom and dad (who will probably never read this, haha)

  20. 20.

    EarthWindFire

    @Mousebumples: Well, that and sneaking a flashlight under the covers to keep reading after “Lights Out.” When I was a bit older, though

    My 9-year-old nephew has taken this to a whole new level. He read Harry Potter and decided he was going to sleep under the stairs like Harry. He’s had his under stairs bedroom for a few months now and openly uses his flashlight to read. We’re very proud of him.

  24. 24.

    Betty

    Washington Post headline this morning is about red state attacks on libraries. I never thought I would live see this insanity in the US.

  25. 25.

    Glidwrith

    My son found it difficult to read. I started taking both he and his younger sister to the library. They would play with the toys while I browsed but they started getting curious what mom was doing. I’d tell them to look over the books in their section and pick out anything that looked interesting. It took an entire summer but my son found books that were worth the effort. One  of my proudest moments.

    Daughter, on the other hand, demanded that I teach her to read at the age of two.

    ETA: and just to be clear, she was reading within a month.

  29. 29.

    sab

    @Mousebumples: I love your point that you did not buy the flashlight or the batteries. Both my husband and I were flashlight under the cover readers.

    Time for me to give my granddaughter a flashlight.

  32. 32.

    sab

    @sab: I saw from Lawyers Guns and Money blog’s grave tour that L Frank Baum was married to a famous and dedicated suffragette. That explains why the Oz books were so full of tough little ladies. Dorothy, and the witches and all the princesses who were actual princesses not girls married to princes.

  33. 33.

    Mousebumples

    @sab: my daughter has a bunch, but she currently is afraid of falling asleep in the dark, so her lights are on. I expect the flashlight under the covers will be more when she can actually read vs telling the stories to herself based on pictures.

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