Another article identifies why public libraries are amazing

"The hottest love has the coldest end.”
― Socrates

“pleasant weather, elegant cherry blossoms ,the tickling sound of a cat's cry, the scent of coffee and a slightly awkward conversation maybe this is how it feels like to be in twenty”
― Yohan

       At the Los Angeles Review of Books Scott Timberg has A Conversation with Philip Ó Ceallaigh, Translator of “For Two Thousand Years” 
       The most recent addition to the complete review is a review of Imraan Coovadia's A Spy in Time, due out next month in the US from California Coldblood Books. 
       This is kind of a change for him -- honest to goodness science fiction -- but then he's repetedly tried new directions in his fiction. Good to see, in any case, that he has a US publisher for this: The Wedding got a US release and decent attention almost twenty years ago, and Green-Eyed Thieves was/is nominally available (from Seagull Books); High Low In-Between and The Institute for Taxi Poetry didn't make it to these shores, and Tales of the Metric System only after some delay (and then published by not-so-commercial Ohio University Press ...). 
       It'll be interesting to see whether the genre-embrace leads to more attention (and leads some new readers back to his backlist).. 

Fyre Festival Organizer Pleads Guilty To Second Fraudulent Ticket Scheme

Kelly Osbourne attends Amy Winehouse book launch party

Kelly Osbourne, 33, co-hosted the party celebrating the launch of Blake Wood's
new book about Amy Winehouse, in Soho, in London on Friday.

"Billy McFarland, whose efforts at running the disastrous Fyre Festival led to wire fraud charges last year, pleaded guilty on Thursday to a new set of federal charges related to a fraudulent ticket-selling scam that authorities said he operated while out on bail in the first case." … [Read More]

The Joy of Home Distilling: The Ultimate Guide to Making Your Own Vodka, Whiskey, Rum, Brandy, Moonshine, and More. 

Another article identifies why public libraries are amazing - Current Affairs: “…It’s worth appreciating just how extraordinary libraries are, why they matter, and what they can tell us about the kinds of institutions we should build. They’re spaces of absolute equality, where anyone can come, regardless of financial resources, to study, learn, and hang out. You don’t have to purchase anything in order to get to sit in them, you don’t have to be means-tested or background-checked. They give the same things to everybody, and there’s something beautiful (and increasingly rare) about that. Privatization generally involves the elimination of that kind of place. Economist Noah Smith has explained what the results of that can be: when everything costs money, life becomes far more stressful (though that stress is distributed unequally). He discusses the situation in Japan

Rebecca Solnit: They Think They Can Bully the Truth

Literary Hub: “Cousin to the noun dictator is the verb dictate. There are among us people who assume their authority is so great they can dictate what happened, that their assertions will override witnesses, videotapes, evidence, the historical record, that theirs is the only voice that matters, and it matters so much it can stand tall atop the conquered facts. Lies are aggressions. They are attempts to dictate, to trample down the facts and those who hold them, and they lay the groundwork for the dictatorships, the little ones in families, the big ones in nations. Black Lives Matter has shown us policemen who continued to insist on their version of events when there is videotaped evidence to the contrary, or when physical evidence and eyewitnesses contradicts their account of events. You realize that they had assumed they could dictate reality, because for decades they actually had, and they were having a hard time adjusting to reality dictating back. As one of the Marx Brothers quipped long ago, “Who you gonna believe, me or your own eyes?” The police assumed it was neither our eyes nor the evidence…That victims will remain voiceless was the presumption behind much of the sexual abuse that’s been uncovered in the #MeToo era. Getting away with it is the same thing as assuming that no one will know, because your victim will be intimidated or shamed into silence, or that if he or she speaks up they can be discredited or menaced back into silence, or that even if they don’t shut up no one will believe them because your credibility crushes theirs. [emphasis added] That yours is the only version that counts, even if you have to use savage means to make it so. Jane Mayer and Ronan Farrow reported of former New York attorney general Eric Schneiderman’s four victims, “All have been reluctant to speak out, fearing reprisal.” But it was he who faced reprisal in the end, because the rules changed, because a critical mass of women broke the silence and the system that perpetuated that silence, because the media that largely ignored or trivialized these stories began to take them seriously…” h/t JLS]