‘Like a Klingon prison’: inside Barack Obama’s audacious, near-windowless, $850m presidential library; The Guardian, June 2, 2026

Oliver Wainwright , The Guardian; ‘Like a Klingon prison’: inside Barack Obama’s audacious, near-windowless, $850m presidential library

"It faces on to the sledging hill, which was originally to house a subterranean archive, until it was decided that this would be the first presidential library that wasn’t actually a library. (This may be why its official title is the Obama Presidential Center.) To the concern of some historians, Obama’s is the first entirely digital presidential archive, the centre run not by the National Archives, but by his own private foundation, raising concerns over its objectivity. Where once there would have been stacks, there are now 400 parking spaces (despite Obama’s promotion of public transit, this is still the US).

The physical records might not be on site, but the professed aim to transform the presidential library from a scholarly research centre to a bustling hub of community activity is an admirable ambition. “We didn’t build [the centre] to celebrate my ability to bring about change,” Obama declares in a promotional video. “We did it to unlock yours.” It is not just a library, but a “campus dedicated to supporting future change makers”.

The transformational change, he hopes, will happen inside the enigmatic tower where, for $30 a ticket, visitors are transported through four floors of an immersive, interactive Obama experience – a vertical Obamarama. Designed by Ralph Appelbaum Associates, it is an action-packed romp through the couple’s life story, beginning with the civil rights movements that inspired them, their political campaigns, achievements in office, life in the White House, and how you too can “bring change home” (a motto printed on the gift shop bag)...

Just like his presidency, the Obama campus was no doubt conceived with the best of intentions. And, as with his time in office, the impact of this mighty stone monument to hope looks set to be equally mixed."

Meet the 1,300 librarians racing to back up Ukraine’s digital archives; The Washington Post, April 8, 2022

Pranshu Verma, The Washington Post; Meet the 1,300 librarians racing to back up Ukraine’s digital archives

"Buildings, bridges, and monuments aren’t the only cultural landmarks vulnerable to war. With the violence well into its second month, the country’s digital history — its poems, archives, and pictures — are at risk of being erased as cyberattacks and bombs erode the nation’s servers.

Over the past month, a motley group of more than 1,300 librarians, historians, teachers and young children have banded together to save Ukraine’s Internet archives, using technology to back up everything from census data to children’s poems and Ukrainian basket weaving techniques.

The efforts, dubbed Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online, have resulted in over 2,500 of the country’s museums, libraries, and archives being preserved on servers they’ve rented, eliminating the risk they’ll be lost forever. Now, an all-volunteer effort has become a lifeline for cultural officials in Ukraine, who are working with the group to digitize their collections in the event their facilities get destroyed in the war.""

Why ‘Fahrenheit 451’ Is the Book for Our Social Media Age; The New York Times, May 10, 2018

Ramin Bahrani, The New York Times;  

Why ‘Fahrenheit 451’ Is the Book for Our Social Media Age

[Kip Currier: Looking forward to seeing this May 19th-debuting HBO adaptation of Ray Bradbury's ever-timely Fahrenheit 451 cautionary intellectual freedom tale, starring Michael B. Jordan as a book-burning-fireman-turned-book-preserver.]

"Bradbury believed that we wanted the world to become this way. That we asked for the firemen to burn books. That we wanted entertainment to replace reading and thinking. That we voted for political and economic systems to keep us happy rather than thoughtfully informed. He would say that we chose to give up our privacy and freedom to tech companies. That we decided to entrust our cultural heritage and knowledge to digital archives. The greatest army of firemen will be irrelevant in the digital world. They will be as powerless as spitting babies next to whoever controls a consolidated internet. How could they stop one person, hiding in his parents’ basement with a laptop, from hacking into thousands of years of humanity’s collective history, literature and culture, and then rewriting all of it … or just hitting delete?

And who would notice?"