Library Posters!

Every year, my library creates posters, using the National Library Week theme and photos of the people who work here.

Last year, I went steampunk and classy:

This year, I went with zany, fun sci-fi:

See Tesla reading down there? I was running with the idea that science fiction influences science fact. If we get kids hooked on science fiction when they're young, who knows what marvels they'll develop one day? Just...be careful handing them Oryx and Crake. 

Fun times!

I hope you're all celebrating National Library Week in the best ways possible! I hope you're going to the library and checking out all the best fiction to keep you entertained, picking up some nonfiction to learn something new you've been curious about, asking your librarians about library programs or resources you weren't aware existed, taking your little ones to really cool storytimes and such. Libraries are awesome! Learn more about the Unlimited Possibilities @Your Library! 

Links!

• Libraries, Books, Writers, & Suchlike
• How Libraries Are Transforming Into Community Anchors 
• Library Science 101 It's not all about reading books. 
• The most banned and challenged books of 2014 
• From Harpies To Heroines: How Shakespeare's Women Evolved 
• Guenter Grass, German Nobel literature laureate, dies at 87 
• Eduardo Galeano, author and journalist, dies at 74 
• Garry Trudeau Punches Down "Garry Trudeau and Lydia Polgreen are the useful idiots of the brutal and the powerful. By obligingly framing the 'blasphemy debate' as an issue of West v. East and journalistic power vs. Islamic powerlessness, they support and advance the blasphemy norms used to murder and oppress the genuinely powerless.... By contrast, journalists who confront and defy blasphemy norms are helping to make the point that religious offense is no excuse for murder."
• Net & Tech
• What you don’t know about Internet algorithms is hurting you. (And you probably don’t know very much!) 
• Yale Conference Looks At Innovation “Beyond IP” "Intellectual property is not the only driver of human innovation. A two-day conference held here recently brought together a range of leading academics and others to share ideas on innovation occurring outside of, or in spite of, intellectual property rights."
• Health & Science
• NIH spending $5 million to discourage hipsters from smoking It's not the money that gets me. It's that the NIH is "discourag[ing] tobacco use among hipsters through a program that recommends 'styling your sweet mustache' and listening to music 'no one else has heard of' as good alternatives to smoke breaks....[H]ipsters need something more than scary health warnings to keep them from lighting up." I mean, if it works - great. But are hipsters really that shallow? Do they really care more about how their facial hair looks than how their lungs work? 
• This Is What Anti-Vaxxers Sound Like To Everyone Else It hurts to laugh sometimes.
• A Lot Of Bottled Water Comes From Drought-Stricken California "California's in the middle of an epic drought -- but that hasn't stopped bottled water production in the state. Even as residents face mandatory cutbacks and fields lie fallow, companies continue pumping hundreds of millions of gallons of water every year into plastic bottles -- sometimes straight from a municipal water supply." 
• Education
• The Work-College Revival 
• States Review Laws Revoking Licenses For Student Loan Defaults 
• Authority Issues
• District Attorney Steve Kunzweiler charges reserve deputy with second-degree manslaughter 
• Parents in trouble again for letting kids walk alone 
• Other (Serious Stuff)
• Ex-Blackwater Guards Sentenced to Long Prison Terms in 2007 Killings of Iraqi Civilians 
• The Big Chill: How Big Money Is Buying Off Criticism of Big Money "Our democracy is directly threatened when the rich buy off politicians.  But no less dangerous is the quieter and more insidious buy-off of institutions democracy depends on to research, investigate, expose, and mobilize action against what is occurring."
• GOP’s IRS Cuts Ticking Off Taxpayers And May Cost Over $30 Billion Per Year
• Elizabeth Warren Just Perfectly Explained the Student Loan Crisis to Conan 
• Other (Fun Stuff)
• No, Yes, Definitely: On The Rise Of 'No, Totally' As Linguistic Quirk 
• Illustrated Mythical Animal Kingdom By Matt Miller My favorite is Smudge, of course: