For the Guardian
Pick of the Week: Otherworld Barbara
SEAN: Another week, another really obvious pick. I’ve loved the other Moto Hagio volumes we’ve seen over here, and so absolutely cannot wait for the first volume of Otherworld Barbara, a story so good it won the Japan SF Grand Prize, the Japanese equivalent of a Nebula Award. It’s from Fantagraphics, so should look great too. And an omnibus to boot! ASH: Yup, no question about it. It’s Otherworld…
Detroit Institute of Arts Inside-Out Program
The Detroit Institute of Arts brings framed reproductions of its most famous works to the main streets and landmark outdoor spaces of Metro Detroit. By reimagining area cities and suburbs as a grand, open air gallery, the project aims to connect with audiences outside of traditional museum walls. For the next three months the communities of East English Village, Cornerstone Village and Morningside in Detroit will host 10 reproductions. The reproduction above is on the Alger Theater 16451 East Warren Ave, right next to the Jefferson Branch Library. The painting is called Mother and Child by Solomon Irein Wangboje, 1960. The art work and locations are listed below.
Blue Madonna-1961. Bob Thompson
16352 East Warren
The Wedding Dance-about 1566. Pieter Bruegel the Elder
The Wind Basket-16380 East Warren Ave
Head of a Woman-130-160 CE Unknown Artist
Fitness Park Cornwall St and Cadieux Rd.
Judith and Holofernes-1623/1625 Artemisia Gentileschhi
Cadieux Cafe-4300 Cadieux Rd
Seascape: Sunset-1861 Martin Johnson Heade
Messmer Park-17151 Gravier St.
Watson and the Shark-1777 John Singleton Copley
Balduck Memorial Park-5271 Canyon St.
Movement #27-2002-Kwesi Owusu-Ankomah
Balduck Memorial Park-5271 Canyon St.
Fourteenth Street at Sixth Ave-John Sloan
Bike Tech-18401 East Warren Ave.
Fire in a Haystack-1856-Jules Adolphe Aime-Louis Breton
Detroit Diner-17017 East Warren Ave.
Find them all and then visit the DIA and see the originals!
It’s always nice to see one of our profiles become out-of-date for FANTASTIC reasons: Dr. Carla D. Hayden’s nomination as LIBRARIAN OF CONGRESS has been approved today!!!
Congratulations, Dr. Hayden! (And congratulations to the Library of Congress, which will finally get to enjoy the first African American Librarian of Congress and the first woman Librarian of Congress.)
Fishfly invasion on the Eastside!!
And they want to use the library!
One thing I don’t miss about SE MI.
Out of Print Clothing had a BOGO sale last week, so I finally got a couple shirts I really wanted. It was hard to narrow it down to 2, but these are both old favorites
On Wednesday, Merriam-Webster caught up to speed with two words people have been using to describe their gender identity for at least a decade, adding “cisgender” and “genderqueer” to its unabridged dictionary. Among the 1,400 words, you’ve probably seen a few of them across Tumblr for a while now
Update: Apparently these additions were too much for some people.
But Merriam Webster was having none of that.
They know what it means to throw shade.
Mark your calendars! The hearing will be webcast live with an archived version available shortly after it concludes.
I am disappointed that tomorrow’s my offsite project so I can’t watch.
Celebrate National Library Week! (April 10 - 16, 2016)
Because libraries help young people excel. #LibrariesTransform
(H.Y.P.E. = Helping Young People Excel)
Photo: Doug Coombe
Attention audiobook fans! May 5th is the kick-off for SYNC Summer 2016! Read on to find out more about the program and to find the Sync 2016 Audiobook Listening Schedule!
For 15 weeks this summer, SYNC offers 2 FREE audiobook downloads to listeners age 13 and up. The audio selections include a current title paired with a related classic title that’s based on a weekly theme. This is a great way to try out audiobooks and I think this year’s selection may be the best yet!
Audiofile Magazine and the audiobook publishers sponsor this program to introduce the joys of listening to the YA audience. I look forward to this program all year and I know many of you have become hooked on audiobooks thanks to this program.
The audiobooks are in MP3 format so they work for both Mac and PC. Titles are available through the OverDrive App – and you can get the lowdown on the SYNC download prep here. Each download will be available for 7 days so don’t miss out on your free YA audiobooks from SYNC! After you download the audiobooks though you can listen to them at your leisure.
I recommend you text syncya to 25827 now so you are all set to receive alerts when the latest titles go live. Read more about the program at SYNC and follow their blog for updates. Some of the titles have international restrictions – go here to see availability by country.
New this year: The Audiobook Sync team is putting together discussion guides for a few of the titles. Plan an event and listen with your book club or library!
SYNC 2016 Audiobook Listening Schedule
May 5 – May 11:
Read by: Julia Whelan
Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award
Read by: Edward Asner, Bill Brochtrup, Matthew Patrick Davis, John de Lancie, James Gleason, Harry Groener, Jerry Hardin, Marnie Mosiman, Kenneth Alan Williams, Geoffrey Lower, Kyle Colerider-Krugh
Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award
May 12 – May 18
Read by: Amy Shiels
Read by: Brandon Batchelar
May 19 – May 25
Read by: Kirby Heyborne
Read by: Oliver Wyman
May 26 – June 1
Read by: Amy Rubinate
Read by: Michael Page
Winner of Audies 2015 Teen Audiobook
Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award
June 2 – June 8
Read by: Ariana Delawari
Read by: Paul Michael
Finalist of 2016 Audies Award for Inspirational/Faith-Based Nonfiction
June 9 – June 15
Read by: Kristin Condon, Nicholas Mondelli
Read by: Julia Whelan, Jesse Bernstein
Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award, 2015 Printz Award
June 16 – June 22
Read by: Cherise Boothe, Shari Peele, Kevin R. Free, Patricia R. Floyd, Avery Glymph, Korey Jackson, Hubert Point-Du Jour, Peter Jay Fernandez, Ezra Knight, Myra Lucretia Taylor, Brian Hutchinson
Finalist of 2016 Audies Award for Multi-Voiced Performance
Read by: Alan Bomar Jones
June 23 – June 29
Read by: Nicholas Robideau and a full cast
Read by: Paul Fox, Jared Harris, Siobhán Hewlett, Moira Quirk, Sophie Winkleman
June 30 – July 6
Read by: MacLeod Andrews
Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award
Read by: Philip Church
July 7 – July 13
Read by: Spencer Locke, Jose Julian
Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award
Read by: M.T. Anderson
July 14 – July 20
Read by: Angela Dawe
Read by: Rebecca Macauley
Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award
July 21 – July 27
Read by: Desmond Tutu, Nelson Mandela, Joe Richman
Winner of Audies 2015 Audiobook of the Year
Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award
Read by: Peter Francis James
Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award
July 28 – August 3
Read by: Brandon Gill
Read by: Humphrey Bower
Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award
August 4 – August 10
Read by: Yareli Arizmendi, Christine Avila, Jesse Corti, Gustavo Res, Ozzie Rodriguez, Gabriel Romero
Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award
Discussion Guide to come
Read by: Ray Porter
August 11 – August 17
Read by: Dan Bittner
Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award, 2016 Printz Award
Read by: William Roberts, Garrick Hagon, Liza Ross
Listen to audio clips of all the Sync titles:
Several of these audiobooks are on my To-be-listen list – which titles are you most excited to listen to?
Sync 2016 Audiobook Listening Schedule #sync16 #audiobookSYNC Attention audiobook fans! May 5th is the kick-off for SYNC Summer 2016! Read on to find out more about the program and to find the…
Without a mass-market option, schools will likely be forced to pay higher prices for bulk orders of the trade paperback edition—and given the perilous state of many school budgets, that could very easily lead to it being assigned in fewer schools.
Big news: President Obama just announced that he’s nominating Carla Hayden as our 14th Librarian of Congress. She’ll be the first woman and the first African-American to hold the position in its 214 year history.
A bit more on Dr. Carla Hayden, President Obama’s nominee for the next Librarian of Congress. We’re a little excited over here!
So I know the crisis with lead poisoning in Flint, MI is bad. I don’t want to downplay how bad it is- many, many children will now grow up with an incredible array of developmental issues, most notably skeletal and neurological, perpetuating cycles of poverty and white supremacy, due to the willful and malicious negligence of people in power.
But it’s not just Flint.
Back in undergrad I was an intern with the public health department in another extremely poor and (overwhelming) majority black city. Specifically I was the intern of the lead poisoning enforcement team, which, at least at the time, consisted of one nurse and me. Our job worked like this: a hospital would get a child whose bloodwork showed the child was already poisoned (lead poisoning damage is permanent and irreparable, by the way, so we were always too late) and they would call us. We would investigate the child’s living situation with a digital camera and a handheld spectrometer and determine where the lead was coming from- lead makes paint more durable so usually it would be exterior trim, doors, windowsills, and radiators. I can actually identify it by sight by the way it peels. Sometimes it would be a local playground or empty lot since the city is built on top of the crumbling remains of failed and unregulated industries. Sometimes it was the water supply of old pipes hadn’t been replaced, but systemic lead poisoning through municipal water wasn’t an issue where I was, so the city and its poisoned children never made national news. I doubt it would have anyway; white America generally ignored us as much as possible.
Anyway, I digress. We would find out where the lead came from and then legally force the owner of the house to renovate to spec. I have been personally yelled at by more than one slumlord for this part of the job.
But more often than we could feel good about, it wasn’t a slumlord who owned the property; it was the child’s grandma or uncle or mom who, if they had enough money to renovate their home, wouldn’t be living where they did anyway. We did lots of community outreach and education, and we were constantly battling the slumlords, but all too often, our job boiled down to enforcing more financial hardships on families who already had one or more poisoned children and didn’t even come close to having the financial means to do anything about it anyway.
Name a bad psychosocial outcome and lead poisoning has been linked to it. Name a non-genetic skeletal or neurological syndrome and prenatal/childhood lead poisoning can precipitate it (this is honestly not that huge of an exaggeration). Essentially, your body mistakes lead ions for calcium and iron ions (mostly), which are absolutely vital building blocks for your body, and uses them for a thousand different wrong purposes, leading to irreversible and tragic damage, especially in children. It’s really horrific in terms of what it can do to a body and to a community. And it’s NOT just in Flint. Poor towns across the U.S. are filled with lead paint, and if there’s any grant money available for homeowners to renovate, it’s usually a drop in the bucket.
So I’m really glad to see people paying attention to the atrocity in Flint, but I also want people to know that this is an epidemic, and it’s specifically an epidemic of people in poverty/people of color. The cycle of poisoning and lack of remediation is caused directly by policies cutting back legal and financial services to the poor and enabling slumlords to dominate neighborhoods and cities with high interest and variable rate mortgages (among other things), and the complicity and corruption of regulatory agencies.
So again, it’s great to see all the righteous indignation directed at Flint. But I suggest you save some of that anger for your own lawmakers and local “real estate entrepreneurs,” because I promise you that lead poisoning is closer to home than you think.
Naomi Novik - Uprooted [Julia Emelin]
This is 3 for 3 for my book match from @bklynlibrary. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed each one I’ve listened to so far. Uprooted was so engaging that I sacrificed precious writing time to continue listening to it. Yet another story where language is a focus, this time Polish, it seems.
Two coworkers who generally have similar tastes to mine picked this as their favorite 2015 release, and I was a fan of her Temeraire books (though I haven’t finished the series), so this was already high on my to-read list. You just made it sound even more awesome.