Today in Librarian Tabs, a few things you might like to know about in the library world. Solidarity with our Nashua colleagues, a peek at the Parker Library and their annual audit, and the return of Critcatenate! 📚
https://medium.com/tilty/tilt-104-things-can-be-done-differently-4731ba0c0655
Email sign up option: https://todayinlibrariantabs.eo.page/tilt
Book 81: Best American Science and Nature Writing (2025). These books can be VERY hit or miss. The editor often picks a vibe and runs with it. Sometimes that vibe is "the earth is dying!" or "Humans ruin literally everything" but under Orlean's editorship these are essays about various things that are interesting and well told: cystic fibrosis treatments, sleeping overnight in death valley, how to track animals or determine if animals are talking to each other. Not always upbeat, but always good
Book 80: The Things We Never Say. The last book was a very Black-coded one, this one is a very White-coded one. GenX age man marries "up" and contemplates his life in the North Shore of Massachusetts and harbors one (or more than one) Big Secret. The writing is lovely, the overarching theme is "ennui" and there's an enduring sweetness as well as a poignancy to the way the story is told, against a background of the 2020 election. Author is not from MA and I could tell. 😄
Vermonters (and others): new tattoo-style cryptid stamps coming out in 2027 designed by Austin artist Nat Power, include our very own Champ!
"Today is the last day for this call for public comments on headlight standards from the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. So if you, like me, are tired of being literally dazed and dazzled by seemingly always-set-to-high-beams LED headlights at night, here's where to let someone know"
https://www.regulations.gov/commenton/NHTSA-2026-1981-0001
(this can just be you being like "it's tough for me to drive at night b/c there are no standards for this stuff!")
Via Damien Williams on BlueSky
https://bsky.app/profile/wolven.blacksky.app/post/3mzv6evkeqc2g
... but since she's not an admin on her Workspace account she can't change how it's set up (but is paying for it‽). Even doing these two minor things was a ton of emails and texts and confirmations which are complex sometimes if you're 80. Boo everyone. Hope has "homework" to get her daughter to handle this or give her the logins to handle it with me.
Fun fact: Hope used to work in Silicon Valley as a tech writer and wrote the manual, such as it is, for Yar's Revenge.
I do drop-in house calls if you are over eighty. Today's house call was Hope. Hope was paying too much for her GoDaddy domain hosting/email so her daughter switched her to "Microsoft" somehow and it was costing $80/month? That sounded wrong to me but it seems like she got set up with a Google Workplace account for one email box, quite possibly because her daughter, who set it up, doesn't know what she's doing either. I tried to sort it. Got into her GoDaddy account AND her Gmail account...
I posted this poster as my "Friday afternoon reminder" and then got curious about the guy who painted it. He was an Austro-Hungarian immigrant, came over on the RMS Carpathia, spoke Yiddish at home, worked for the Federal Art Project, made some more paintings later in life and worked as a commercial artist. Then... basically vanished. I can prove he died but have very little late in life info about him.
What does it even mean to have a "media diet" nowadays? I tried to parse it out for my pals at @www.hilobrow.com
Not to be coy about her identity, I just ran out of characters. She's been a rep, she's been very effective. I look forward to her being effective in the senate. More people should have these jobs who want to do the work.
I did not get quite everything I wanted Tuesday BUT, I did get this email from my new state senator "I spent $0 on voter data and $0 on data brokers who sell your personal information. I spent $0 supporting Meta & Google which earn billions of dollars annually off of unchecked fraud and scams, supports CSAM websites with ad placements, and seeks to addict and manipulate people of all ages. I spent $0 on targeted ads abusing your sensitive data. This campaign didn't run a single attack ad." 😍
Book 79: Ghalen. I'd read Mosley's 1st Easy Rawlins novel. It wasn't quite for me but I liked his writing so tried again. This about love and families but also generational trauma by the police and a brutal "justice" system. Ghalen has a mom who is a smart scientist and a dad who was already thought to be a bit "slow" (but an amazing cook) before a police assault gave him a head injury. Ghalen grew up having to take care of his dad and survive his own tough situations. Ultimately a love story.
Friday afternoon reminder to not empty your inbox at the expense of someone else's. I am waiting for the Age of Anxiety to drop dead, and have been spending the latter part of this week rethinking how to See America. Email is part of it, but only part. May you get to sit in hope this weekend.
Image credit: Library of Congress, on Flickr Commons
https://www.flickr.com/photos/8623220@N02/6629870749/
MY NEIGHBOR GOT ELECTED and so now the poor guy has a Wikipedia page. I don't make the rules.
It's fun to get to text your friends and tell them they've won. I stuck around until 8:45 ate pizza, sorted ballots and then headed home. Talked to my best guy. Checked statewide results and it's too soon to tell for my state senator but looking good. Working the polls is fiddly work that can seem really bullshitty from time to time but it's human scale and when you have humans who care about doing it right, it matters.
Oh and penguin beat walrus but clown and magician were a surprising tie.
Polls closed at 7. We got prelim results at 7:15. The results I cared about were my two reps got in (not surprising), the woman I wanted for state senate was ahead in my town (but would represent many towns, so too early to call but hopeful) and Janoo, the Dem who ran against our Republican governor, lost locally but only just. I stayed to empty the tabulator which, thanks to a small malfunction, mixed the write-in and no-write-in ballots so we had to eyeball each ballot (n=2400) for write-ins.
Since the US is (nominally) a democracy, many people not that into civics often think that voting is one kind of thing in the US whereas it's actually fifty weird fiefdoms of rules and regs.
In Vermont it's actually HARD to get off the voting rolls, even if you want to. We don't require ID, we don't make you vote all the items on the ballot, we mail you a ballot for the general, we don't make you declare a party, we have tabulators. not touchscreen machines. It's no wonder it's confusing.
[home for an hour before counting at 7]
Busy but not bonkers-busy today. A lot of new voters which you love to see. One thing I put to use from my community management days: people who are new to voting don't know how to vote. How would they? Here they have to check in, vote, check out and then put their ballot in the tabulator and then wait for the beep that says "Yeah you filled in the ovals correctly." The more you can help someone do that w/o making them feel dumb, the better.
My sister, who is in Massachusetts, is also working the polls but she has a specific job (a "warden") because they don't have a JP system like Vermont. Everyone there bakes snacks for poll working like it's a competitive sport. I am hoping for sun chips, seltzer and pizza at seven.
When we were kids, my mom was a SAHM and did a lot of civic stuff. We'd get dragged to town meeting, bloodmobiles, grange fairs, you name it. I didn't love it at the time, now I look forward to it like a holiday.
Today is my last day of poll working in my official capacity of elected Justice of the Peace (also the Board of Civil Authority). I'm the chair. I run the tabulator. If you have questions or concerns you go to me or the Town Clerk. It's a weird job for a cranky anarchist but needs must. I'm not running for re-election this time; I decided fourteen years was enough and I want to work on other activist praxis, go to fewer meetings. We have a few consequential elections today. Hoping for the best.
