Being a librarian was already hard. Then came the Trump administration; The Guardian, April 7, 2025

Rainesford Stauffer, The Guardian; Being a librarian was already hard. Then came the Trump administration

"For many librarians, the stakes of the job are high – they’re facing burnout, book bans, legislation pushed by rightwing groups, and providing essential resources in an effort to fill gaps in the US’s social safety net.

Now, as Donald Trump’s administration rolls out their agenda, many librarians are describing his policies as “catastrophic” to accessing information and the libraries themselves – institutions considered fundamental to democracy...

Elon Musk’s unofficial “department of government efficiency” recently gutted the Institute of Museum and Library Services, which the American Library Association noted greatly affects the important services they offer, including high-speed internet access, summer reading programs, veterans’ telehealth spaces and more, with the most intense losses in rural communities.

While the majority of public library funding comes from city and county taxes, according to EveryLibrary, the IMLS provides grants that support these critical services in every state...

Librarians are speaking out about what communities could lose, including internet access and workforce development in Kentucky, the Talking Book and Braille Center in New Jersey, digital hotspots in North Carolina, and much more outlined in reporting from Book Riot. As librarians grappled with losses that would directly affect their work, the IMLS Instagram accountissued posts appearing to mock grantees."

List of Books Removed from USNA Library; America's Navy, April 4, 2025

America's Navy; List of Books Removed from USNA Library

[Kip Currier: The freedoms to read, speak, and think are fundamental American values enshrined by our Constitution. Libraries should and must have books and resources that represent a wide range of information, views, and lived experiences. Whether or not we as individuals or members of groups agree or disagree with every book in a library is immaterial and contrary to our freedoms. As the late Robert Croneberger, Director of Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh (1986-1998), aptly observed, a library is not doing its job if it doesn't have at least one book that offends every person.

Military service members have served, fought, and died to preserve our freedoms and core values. Enlisted persons and their families should and must have access to a broad continuum of ideas and information. Anything less is blatant censorship that is antithetical to the American way of life.]

[Excerpts from list]

     "How to be an antiracist / Ibram X. Kendi.

Uncomfortable conversations with a black man / Emmanuel Acho.

Why didn't we riot? : a Black man in Trumpland / Issac J. Bailey.

Long time coming : reckoning with race in America / Michael Eric Dyson.

State of emergency : how we win in the country we built / Tamika D. Mallory as told to Ashley A. Coleman ; [forewords, Angela Y. Davis and Cardi B].

How we can win : race, history and changing the money game that's rigged / Kimberly Jones.

My vanishing country : a memoir / Bakari Sellers.

The gangs of Zion : a Black cop's crusade in Mormon country / Ron Stallworth, with Sofia Quintero.

American hate : survivors speak out / edited by Arjun Singh Sethi.

The rage of innocence : how America criminalizes Black youth /
Kristin Henning.

Our time is now : power, purpose, and the fight for a fair America /
Stacey Abrams.

What's your pronoun? : beyond he & she / Dennis Baron.

Rainbow milk : a novel / Paul Mendez.

The genesis of misery / Neon Yang.

The last white man / Mohsin Hamid.

Light from uncommon stars / Ryka Aoki.

Everywhere you don't belong : a novel / by Gabriel Bump.

Evil eye : a novel / Etaf Rum.

Lies my teacher told me : everything your American history
textbook got wrong / James W. Loewen.

Gender queer : a memoir / by Maia Kobabe ; colors by Phoebe
Kobabe.

The third person / Emma Grove."

Joe Rogan breaks with Trump, calling Venezuelan deportations ‘horrific’; The Guardian, April 2, 2025

Dani Anguiano , The Guardian; Joe Rogan breaks with Trump, calling Venezuelan deportations ‘horrific’

"Joe Rogan, the influential podcast host and prominent supporter of Donald Trump, has criticized the president’s administration over the deportation of a professional makeup artist and hairdresser to a prison in El Salvador, calling it “horrific”.

Andry José Hernández Romero, who is gay, had sought asylum in the US, telling officials he faced persecution because of his sexual orientation and political views. But US immigration officers argued the crown tattoos on his wrists were proof he was part of Tren de Aragua, the Venezuelan gang, despite Hernández Romero telling them he was not. Last month, he was flown from Texas to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador, a facility that his lawyer said was “one of the worst places in the world”. His removal comes as the administration undertakes what Trump has pledged would be a mass deportation campaign.

In a 29 March episode of his popular podcast, Rogan, who endorsed Trump for president last year, said it was “horrific” that “people who aren’t criminals are getting lassoed up and deported”."

Trump official's stingy worldview fits American Calvinist ethics without obligations; National Catholic Reporter, April 2, 2025

MICHAEL SEAN WINTERS, National Catholic Reporter; Trump official's stingy worldview fits American Calvinist ethics without obligations

 "The political genius of Catholicism is that it insists on the dignity of the individual, the significance of rootedness in particular and familial groups, and the universal application of our ethical norms. It is a genius the country needs, but history is littered with clamant needs that no one recognized at the time. 

Ours is not an epoch that warms to Catholicism's "both/and" approach to the intellectual and moral life. The contours of both our ideological polarization and of our social media have created an "either/or" world. That fact is killing our culture."

Anticipatory Obedience at the Library of Congress; ACRLog: Blogging by and for academic and research librarians, March 28, 2025

Violet Fox,  ACRLog: Blogging by and for academic and research librarians; Anticipatory Obedience at the Library of Congress

"Editor’s note: We are pleased to welcome Violet Fox to the ACRLog team. Violet is a Cataloging & Metadata Librarian at Northwestern University’s Galter Health Sciences Library. She is the creator of the Cataloging Lab, a wiki designed to encourage collaboration in library metadata. Violet is passionate about critical cataloging, zine librarianship, and promoting the mental health of library workers. 

On February 18, the Library of Congress (LC) sent an email announcement through its regular channels about a special list of revisions in the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH). This list contained 45 proposed revisions to LCSH relating to Trump’s Executive Order 14172 “Restoring Names That Honor American Greatness.” These revisions would change the LCSH for Gulf of Mexico to America, Gulf of, and would change the LCSH for Mount Denali back to McKinley, Mount (Alaska).

Geographic names in LCSH generally follow the form of name decided on by the US Board on Geographic Names, a body under the Secretary of the Interior. (This relationship is laid out in the LC Subject Heading Manual instruction sheet H 690 Formulating Geographic Headings.) The Board on Geographic Names takes its cues from the State Department, taking into account which countries the US has recognized.

It was not surprising that LC would follow the example of the US Board of Geographic Names, as that’s standard operating procedure. What wasn’t standard was the speed at which this revision was pushed through."

EFF Urges Third Circuit to Join the Legal Chorus: No One Owns the Law; Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), March 31, 2025

  CORYNNE MCSHERRY, Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF); EFF Urges Third Circuit to Join the Legal Chorus: No One Owns the Law

"This case concerns UpCodes, a company that has created a database of building codes—like the National Electrical Code—that includes codes incorporated by reference into law. ASTM, a private organization that coordinated the development of some of those codes, insists that it retains copyright in them even after they have been adopted into law, and therefore has the right to control how the public accesses and shares them. Fortunately, neither the Constitution nor the Copyright Act support that theory. Faced with similar claims, some courts, including the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, have held that the codes lose copyright protection when they are incorporated into law. Others, like the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals in a case EFF defended on behalf of Public.Resource.Org, have held that, whether or not the legal status of the standards changes once they are incorporated into law, making them fully accessible and usable online is a lawful fair use. A federal court in Pennsylvania followed the latter path in this case, finding that UpCodes’ database was a protected fair use."

ESPN’s Pat McAfee and others amplified a false rumor. A teenager’s life was ‘destroyed’; The New York Times, April 1, 2025

Katie Strang, The New York Times ; ESPN’s Pat McAfee and others amplified a false rumor. A teenager’s life was ‘destroyed’

"Cornett engaged legal representation and said she intends to take action against McAfee and ESPN, which airs his show, and potentially others involved in spreading the rumor. “I would like people to be held accountable for what they’ve done,” she said."

Trump Administration Moves to Shutter Library Agency; The New York Times, March 31, 2025

 Jennifer Schuessler, The New York Times; Trump Administration Moves to Shutter Library Agency

"The future of grant programs was not immediately clear. But the American Federation of Government Employees, the union representing staff members, said in a statement that in the absence of staff all work processing applications for 2025 grants “has ended.”

“Without staff to administer the programs, it is likely that most grants will be terminated,” it said.

The agency, created in 1996 and reauthorized most recently in 2018 in legislation signed by Mr. Trump, has an annual budget of nearly $290 million, larger than either the National Endowment for the Arts or the National Endowment for the Humanities. It provides funding to libraries and museums in every state and territory, with the bulk going to support essential but unglamorous functions like database systems and collections management.

Its largest program, known as Grants to States, delivers roughly $160 million annually to state library agencies, which covers one-third to one-half of their budgets, according the Chief Officers of State Library Associations, an independent group representing library officials.

Mr. Trump’s executive order prompted widespread mobilization by library and museum advocates, who issued multiple statements defending the agency and questioning the legality of moves against it. A bipartisan group of senators, including the Democrats Jack Reed of Rhode Island and Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, and Republicans Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, sent a letter calling on Mr. Sonderling to continue the agency’s mission."

Trump’s Mass Purge Finally Hits Museums and Libraries; The New Republic, March 31, 2025

Malcolm Ferguson, The New Republic; Trump’s Mass Purge Finally Hits Museums and Libraries

"Elon Musk and DOGE just soft-fired everyone at the federal agency that supports local libraries and museums nationwide. 

All 70 Institute of Museum and Library Services employees were sent an email on Monday placing them on an immediate paid administrative leave, according to the American Federation of Government Employees union. 

This comes just two weeks after President Trump signed an executive order calling for IMLS to be shut down, and days after DOGE operatives infiltrated the IMLS facility while purging its leadership. 

“Earlier today, the Institute of Museum and Library Services notified the entire staff that they are being placed on administrative leave immediately. The notification followed a brief meeting between DOGE staff and IMLS leadership,” a statement from AFGE  read. “Employees were required to turn in all government property prior to exiting the building, and email accounts are being disabled today. Museums and libraries will no longer be able to contact IMLS staff for updates about the funding they rely upon.”

The IMLS has a $313 million annual budget and distributes taxpayer money to museums and libraries across the country. Its stated goal is to “advance, support, and empower America’s museums, libraries, and related organizations through grantmaking, research, and policy development.”"

The Fascism Expert at Yale Who’s Fleeing America; Vanity Fair, March 31, 2025

 KEZIAH WEIR, Vanity Fair; The Fascism Expert at Yale Who’s Fleeing America

"Jason Stanley has spent the last two decades writing about power, language, and the ways both are corruptible. He is an expert on authoritarian regimes and the author of seven books, including 2018’s How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them and last year’s Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future, and has been a member of the Yale University faculty since 2013.

Last week, in what he calls an “impulsive” decision prompted by Columbia’s capitulation to Trump administration demands, he decided to leave—not just Yale, but the country altogether. This fall he’ll decamp to the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, where he was offered the position of Bissell Hyatt Chair in American Studies.

“Educational authoritarianism is frequently accompanied by more general restrictions on knowledge,” he writes in Erasing History, “and by attempts to push mythic representations in place of that knowledge.” In the book he likens conservative activist groups seeking book bans to Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels keeping lists of books to be censored, and outlines attacks on the rights of LGBTQ+ people by various fascist regimes throughout history (among which he counts the Trump administration). When I ask whether he sees warning signs in sectors outside of education, he responds, “Are you fucking with me?”"...

[Vanity Fair] I think an anxiety for many people is, will we only really realize how bad things are once it becomes too late to do anything about it? How would you counsel people who are wondering how you know that it’s time to try to get out?

[Jason Stanley] Not my business. My business is to describe what’s happening. And you can read what I write and decide for yourself, but I’m not going to make other people’s decisions for them. I’m not into moralizing or lecturing; that’s not my thing. I’m an intellectual. What I do is I describe reality as I see it. I would love to live in the United States, but I want to live in the United States because it’s a place that is free. A lot of Americans don’t care about freedom. If you look at the polls, they say that Americans don’t value democracy at all. I have a different set of values. Democracy comes before the price of eggs. But what I think is particularly foolish and naive and stupid is to give up democracy and raise the price of eggs."

"Reading builds empathy": The case for saving America's libraries; Salon, March 30, 2025

MELANIE MCFARLAND,

Salon; "Reading builds empathy": The case for saving America's libraries

"Libraries are the nexuses of democratized access to culture, community expertise, diverse perspectives on history and the instruments that further that knowledge. They also are gathering spots and safe spaces for the vulnerable.

“People who are in library leadership, on boards, and certainly librarians even today, are not interested in limiting, shaping, prescribing how that creative and generative expression should be had,” says John Chrastka, Executive Director and founder of the non-profit advocacy organization EveryLibrary. “They're just interested in making sure that everybody's got a fair shake to get to it.”

This may be why the Trump administration is set on starving our nation’s libraries to death, or close enough to it."

Elon Musk hands out $1 million payments after Wisconsin Supreme Court declines request to stop him; AP, March 30, 2025

SCOTT BAUER AND THOMAS BEAUMONT , AP; Elon Musk hands out $1 million payments after Wisconsin Supreme Court declines request to stop him

"Elon Musk gave out $1 million checks on Sunday to two Wisconsin voters, declaring them spokespeople for his political group, ahead of a Wisconsin Supreme Court election that the tech billionaire cast as critical to President Donald Trump’s agenda and “the future of civilization.”"

America’s Future Is Hungary; The Atlantic, May 2025

Anne Applebaum, The Atlantic; America’s Future Is Hungary

MAGA conservatives love Viktor Orbán. But he’s left his country corrupt, stagnant, and impoverished.

"He rhapsodizes about family values, even though his government spends among the lowest amounts per capita on health care in the EU, controls access to IVF, and notoriously decided to pardon a man who covered up sexual abuse in children’s homes.

Orbán also talks a lot about “the people” while using his near-absolute power not to build Hungarian prosperity but to enrich a small group of wealthy businessmen, some of whom are members of his family. In Budapest, these oligarchs are sometimes called NER, or NER-people, or NERistan—nicknames that come from Nemzeti Együttműködés Rendszere or System of National Cooperation, the Orwellian name that Orbán gave to his political system—and they benefit directly from their proximity to the leader. Direkt36, one of the few remaining investigative-journalism teams in Hungary, recently made a documentary, The Dynasty, showing, for example, how competitions for state- and EU-funded contracts, starting in about 2010, were deliberately designed so that Elios Innovatív, an energy company co-owned by Orbán’s son-in-law István Tiborcz, would win them. The EU eventually looked into 35 contracts and found serious irregularities in many of them, as well as evidence of a conflict of interest. (In a 2018 statement, Elios said that it had followed legal regulations, which is no doubt true; the whole point of this system is that it is legal.)"

The power of boycotts; The Ink, March 31, 2025

 Anand Giridharadas, The Ink; The power of boycotts

"Elon Musk’s feelings are hurt. His companies are suffering.

Weird, coming from the guy who denounced empathy as Western civilization’s “fundamental weakness.” While a little needling by Tim Walz about Tesla’s plummeting share price may have set him off, the real pain point is the #teslatakedown movement, which this past Saturday put on a worldwide day of action.

Folks on the right like to complain about boycotts. They’ve called them illegal. They’ve tried to intimidate those who’d dare use their economic power. They’ve threatened to criminalize the very idea. They’ve commingled peaceful calls for investors and shoppers to withhold their hard-earned dollars with acts of vandalism, and have tried to paint the entire movement as terrorism. But, as you might expect, accusations are confessions: what far-right political figures mean when they denounce boycotts is that they want to decide who gets boycotted.

So what is it that scares the guy who wants to privatize everything? Members of the public, exercising their private power to decide, and doing it collectively (Musk famously hates that whole collective thing). Because when that power is clearly targeted and well organized, it gets results. Maybe it’s the sheer gumption of speaking truth to power in its native language — money — that pains Musk. But that’s the free market, isn’t it?"

‘It reminds you of a fascist state’: Smithsonian Institution braces for Trump rewrite of US history; The Guardian, March 30, 2025

 David Smith, The Guardian; ‘It reminds you of a fascist state’: Smithsonian Institution braces for Trump rewrite of US history

"The US president, who has sought to root out “wokeness” since returning to power in January, accused the Smithsonian of trying to rewrite history on issues of race and gender. In an executive order entitled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History”, he directed the removal of “improper, divisive or anti-American ideology” from its storied museums.

The move was met with dismay from historians who saw it as an attempt to whitewash the past and suppress discussions of systemic racism and social justice. With Trump having also taken over the John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, there are fears that, in authoritarian fashion, he is aiming to control the future by controlling the past.

“It is a five-alarm fire for public history, science and education in America,” said Samuel Redman, a history professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst."

Two more law firms targeted by Trump sue to block punishing executive orders; Politico, March 28, 2025

KYLE CHENEY and DANIEL BARNES, Politico; 

Two more law firms targeted by Trump sue to block punishing executive orders

"Two law firms targeted by President Donald Trump sued Friday to bar enforcement of his executive orders seeking to shut them out of government business and strip key lawyers of their security clearances.

In separate suits, Big Law firms Jenner & Block and WilmerHale say Trump’s effort to target them amounts to an unprecedented attack on the legal profession in retaliation for their work for past clients he doesn’t like and for past causes with which he disagrees. If carried out, they say, the orders would devastate their practices and have already begun to cause anxiety among their hundreds clients with government business."

 

L.J. Smith, Author of ‘Vampire Diaries’ Book Series, Dies at 66; The New York Times, March 26, 2025

Jeré Longman, The New York Times; L.J. Smith, Author of ‘Vampire Diaries’ Book Series, Dies at 66

"L.J. Smith, an author of young adult novels best known for “The Vampire Diaries” series, which became a hit television drama, and for repossessing her characters by writing fan fiction after she was fired and replaced by a ghostwriter, died on March 8 in Walnut Creek, Calif. She was 66...

Alloy Entertainment sought a young adult version of supernatural romance and signed Ms. Smith to write “The Vampire Diaries,” a series centered on a love triangle involving a popular high school girl named Elena Gilbert and a pair of vampire brothers, Stefan and Damon Salvatore.

The first three books, written for HarperCollins, were published in 1991, and a fourth was released in 1992. But Ms. Smith — whose first agent was her typist, who had never represented a client — told The Wall Street Journal that she had written the trilogy for an advance of only a few thousand dollars without realizing that it was work for hire, meaning she did not own the copyright or the characters...

By 2007, sales of “The Vampire Diaries” had increased, and Ms. Smith was contracted to continue the series by writing a new trilogy for Alloy Entertainment, for which she was entitled to half the royalties.

In 2009, “The Vampire Diaries” were adapted into a dramatic television series that lasted for eight seasons on the CW Network. Popular among younger audiences, the show used various musical genres to explore topics like romance and morality and helped popularize a grunge and leather-jacket fashion look."

ChatGPT's new image generator blurs copyright lines; Axios, March 28, 2025

 Ina Fried, Axios; ChatGPT's new image generator blurs copyright lines

"AI image generators aren't new, but the one OpenAI handed to ChatGPT's legions of users this week is more powerful and has fewer guardrails than its predecessors — opening up a range of uses that are both tantalizing and terrifying."