Disaster & Children’s Books

A personal disaster, and a communal one. Also, why are children's books important?

Disaster & Children’s Books
Photo by Nikolas Noonan / Unsplash

In the Midst of Public Catastrophe, I Was in My Own Private Disaster

Electric Literature • 30 Jan 2025 • ~6150 words

In this deeply personal essay, Tessa Fontaine contrasts her mother's health crisis, a personal disaster lived in isolation, with a devastating tornado in Tuscaloosa, where she lives, a communal disaster with a shared suffering in its aftermath. A year later, she ultimately returns to the neighborhood ravaged by the tornado, maybe looking for connection and healing.

So I left. Flew home to be with my mom, days after the tornado. Probably I went because there was another emergency. I don’t remember now. But I do remember, vividly, what it felt like to take off from the Birmingham airport. Watching the trees and buildings grow smaller from the airplane window, I felt it all the way through my body. All my friends were back in Tuscaloosa, making crock pots of chili to share and sorting through donated clothes and chain-sawing downed trees, all of them there together, helping. There would be thousands of people who, like me, would leave the city while it was destroyed, those with the means to do so, but everyone else would be left to clean up the mess. I’d always thought of myself as a person who stayed to help. But here I was, leaving. The pull of my private catastrophe was greater than this public one.

Why Children’s Books?

London Review of Books • 29 Jan 2025 • ~5750 words

Katherine Rundell writes about the enduring value of children's books, highlighting their capacity to foster imagination, critical thinking, and a sense of wonder, ultimately aiding our moral development and societal understanding. What do we stand to lose as fewer and fewer children read books?

… if you cut a person off from reading, you’re a thief. You cut them off from the song that humanity has been singing for thousands of years. You cut them off from what we have laid out for the next generation, and the next. It’s in the technology of writing that we’ve preserved our boldest, most original thought, our best jokes and most generous comfort. To fail to do everything we can to help children hear that song is a cruelty – and a stupidity – for which we should not expect to be forgiven. We need to be infinitely more furious that there are children without books.

Will This 98-Year-Old Sculptor Ever Find a Home for His Gigantic Concrete Presidents?

Texas Monthly • 29 Jan 2025 • ~4850 words

David Adickes hopes to literally cement his artistic legacy by installing 43 massive busts somewhere in Texas. But he’s running out of time.

Arrayed across a gravel lot outside the studio stood another 42 massive presidential heads—the series runs from George Washington through Barack Obama—which, to motorists taking an on-ramp to Interstate 10, suddenly appear on the horizon like the moai of Easter Island. The project is the culmination of a long career that took Adickes from a modest upbringing in Huntsville to galleries in France and Japan before landing him back in Texas, where he became a pillar of the Houston art scene. His distinctive paintings, with their mysterious elongated figures, can be found in museums and private collections across the state. His monumental sculptures, such as the 67-foot-high Sam Houston statue, in Huntsville, and the similarly towering Stephen F. Austin, in Brazoria County, polarize public opinion but are impossible to ignore.

The Democratization of Information Production is Killing Democracy

The Garden of Forking Paths • 30 Jan 2025 • ~2900 words

The way we receive information about our world is unlike any previous generations of humanity. Paradoxically, it's destroying democracy—and Trump's America is the main canary in the coal mine.

Modern humans consume information in a way that is unlike any of our ancestors. Many of the political upheavals of the last two decades can be attributed to political systems breaking apart as informational channels to voters splinter.

http://www.vulture.com/article/sarah-mcnally-jackson-book-culture-nyc-bookstore.html?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=social_acct&utm_campaign=feed-part

Vulture • 29 Jan 2025 • ~4800 words

The owner of the McNally Jackson literary empire is reshaping the city’s reading life.

There was very little about the bookstore business that McNally wasn’t ready to rethink. As the years went on and more stores were built, she insisted that they have seating, not just for customers to actually read the books but chaises longues to stretch out on. They would have book groups, dozens of them: Community was the thing, more important even than sales. Contrary to prevailing wisdom, she jammed the stores with books, prioritizing shelf space over display space. Bookseller training at McNally Jackson now specifies that books should be placed on the shelves loosely enough that one can be removed as easily as “the petal of a rose.”

How a US Agency Got Tangled Up With Controversial De-extinction Groups

Atmos • 29 Jan 2025 • ~2500 words

A U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biobank could shape how biotechnology will fit into mainstream conservation for centuries to come.

The cloning of black-footed ferrets marked a watershed moment in conservation. It opened the door for biotechnology to enter the mainstream, proving the utility of freezing and preserving endangered animal cells. “Elizabeth Ann will always be an incredible ambassador of biotechnology for conservation,” Novak said. And now, she has inspired FWS to scale up their biobanking efforts.

The Future Is Too Easy

Defector • 28 Jan 2025 • ~3400 words

David Roth paints a bleak picture of the tech industry after a visit to CES, portraying them as driven by hype, greed, and a disconnection from real human needs.

They're selling, of course, but also this grandiose and mystified mixture of awe and dread—something amazing is happening very quickly just out of sight, and will be here soon despite always being exactly 18-36 months away, and you will need to be protected from it, but also it will improve your life—is as much the product as anything else. It is pitched less at the general public, to whom it might reasonably sound like The Jigsaw Killer explaining why he had placed a bear trap on their head, than at the investors and politicians whose faith keeps the industry afloat. Those dire promises will stand in for the product until such time as there is a product worth selling; the speculative stuff will continue either way.

The Last Flight of the Dog Pilot

New York Times • 27 Jan 2025 • ~3200 words

Seuk Kim left behind a finance career to chase his dream of becoming a pilot. He took off one day in November with four dogs on board, a trip that would not go according to plan.

Then he took off. It was not a long trip. He had told his wife he would be home for dinner. But the pilot and the dogs in his custody would encounter storm clouds on the flight. And not all of them would reach their destination.

The battle for the soul of Serbia

New Statesman • 25 Jan 2025 • ~3250 words

The need for lithium is driving a global race for resources – and plans for a mine 120 miles from Belgrade have triggered social and political turmoil.

Tens of thousands took to the streets of Belgrade and beyond – representing a cross section of Serbian society, including city-dwelling artists and students, agricultural labourers and farmers – in opposition to the revived plans. Placards reading “We Do Not Give Serbia Away” became a common sight across the nation over the following weeks. Chants of “Rio Tinto get out of Serbia” and “You will not dig here” were regularly heard on the streets. If the protesters’ focus on the Jadar mining project dominated headlines, the unrest also carried deeper undercurrents. “It’s all interconnected,” said Stevan Filipović, a film-maker and vocal opponent of the Vučić administration. “Every single person taking part in these protests is also against the regime. It is the channelling of two things simultaneously. They’re protesting against the regime generally, but also the mining [project] in particular.”