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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   31392 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 24, 2023

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HISD to eliminate librarians and convert libraries into disciplinary centers at NES schools

Not worth a post as top level thread on it's own; but hilariously dystopic enough to post here. It's only one (admittedly large and important) SD, but this is the type of shit Margret Atwood would write about as a totally out there thought experiment.

Hopefully enough people get mad it stops there.

Libraries are obsolete. Books aren't expensive enough to justify them anymore.

Naturally institutions try to justify themselves and find reasons for their own continued existence. The proper response is to dismiss such efforts.

I still enjoy them. When getting into a topic I'm completely ignorant of, I'll just walk down the relevant stacks, grab books that catch my eye and skim a few sections or pages. I often find tangentially related books that I never would have otherwise if I had just searched 'Chinese history,' say, on Amazon. This was particularly valuable when I was a child and ended up with a cornucopia of books on the wild west, the Yukon and California gold rushes, the world wars, etc., none of which I even knew existed at such a young age. I feel much more nostalgic about public libraries than school libraries so this article doesn't evoke much of a reaction, but the thought of losing the former feels like a gut punch.

I also still use them to study or work if I'm not at the lab/between jobs. IMO, nothing beats a quiet, secluded desk buried in the middle of the stacks for focus.

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