Pod Insights The Ezra Klein Show America’s Top Librarian on the Rise of Book Bans About this episode Public libraries around the country have become major battlegrounds for today’s culture wars. In 2022, the American Library Association noted a record 1,269 attempts at censorship — almost double the number recorded in 2021. Library events like drag story times and other children’s programming have also attracted protest. How should we understand these efforts to control what stories children can freely access?
Emily Drabinski is the president of the American Library Association and an associate professor at the Queens College Graduate School of Library and Information Studies. She is steering an embattled organization at a moment when libraries — and librarians themselves — are increasingly under fire.
This conversation unpacks the political and cultural anxieties fueling the attacks on libraries. The guest host Tressie McMillan Cottom discusses with Drabinski how libraries are a bulwark against the increasing class divides of American life, how the “small infrastructure” of the public library differs from big infrastructure like highways and bridges, how library classification systems can entrench the status quo, the parallels between political attacks on the library and the U. S. Postal Service, how censorship attempts fit in the broader landscape of anti-queer and anti-trans legislation and much more.
This episode was hosted by Tressie McMillan Cottom, a columnist for Times Opinion, a professor at U. N. C. Chapel Hill and the author of “Thick: And Other Essays.” Cottom also writes a newsletter for Times Opinion that offers a sociologist’s perspective on culture, politics and the economics of our everyday lives.
Mentioned:
More information about Ezra’s lecture at UC Berkeley
Book Recommendations:
The Promise of Access by Daniel Greene
Flamer by Mike Curato
How Beautiful We Were by Imbolo Mbue
Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected] .
You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.
This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Emefa Agawu. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld. Our senior editor is Annie-Rose Strasser. The show’s production team also includes Rollin Hu and Kristin Lin. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Special thanks to Sonia Herrero.
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:03 Ezra Klein? From New York Times Opinion, this is the Ezra Klein Show.
0:16 Ezra Klein? Hey, it is Ezra. I am on book leave this week, but we have the great Tracy McMillan Cotum sitting in the chair. She is a Times opinion columnist. She is the author of Lower Ed: The Troubling Rise of For-Profit Colleges in the New Economy and the National Book Award nominee, Thicke. She has been a guest on the show before, a host on the show before. Her episodes, no matter where she is sitting, in which chair, are always some of my favorite. So I'm excited to hear what she does this week, and I hope you enjoy it, too.
0:47 Ezra Klein? And before we begin, one more thing today. So I am doing the annual Jefferson Memorial Lecture for UC Berkeley, which I'm excited about. As a kid who grew up in California, idolizing and then getting repeatedly rejected by UC Berkeley when I applied there. And it's going to be the first time I try to work through the ideas of the book in public with an audience, in conversation with someone else who knows what they're talking about on these issues, Amy Lerman in this case. And if you'd like to join and hear what I've been thinking about, you can. Tickets are available at calperformances.org. We'll put the link to the event page in show notes. Again, that is October 5 at UC Berkeley.
1:30 Speaker 01 The library is as much an idea as it is a place. It promises books, yes, but also services, access, and public infrastructure in an information-based economy. For a long time, the idea that we all generally want more of what the library offers has been a taken-for-granted American value. But recently, libraries have become a political lightning rod, where even the most basic assumption of the value of this essential public good is now somehow controversial.
2:07 Speaker 01 According to the American Library Association, last year, there were 1,269 attempts to censor what materials appeared in public libraries. Across the nation, there are contentious debates raging over things like drag story hours, children's programming, and even what books and programming should be available for adults in public and school libraries. Emily Drabinski is paying very close attention to these efforts to censor libraries. She should be. Drabinski is what you might call a librarian with a capital L. In 2022, she was elected president of the American Library Association, a professional
2:52 Speaker 01 organization representing the nation's librarians. She also happens to be a queer person, a parent, a longtime librarian, and also, in her academic work, a scholar of critical librarianship. I wanted to talk to Emily about the political and cultural anxieties fueling anti-library sentiments across the United States and what it all says about the health of our body politic. As always, the show's email is ezra kline show at nytimes.com. Welcome, Emily Drabinski, to the show.
3:37 Speaker 01 How are you today? I'm good. I'm having a good day and really excited to be here. You've written that children are people who deserve private reading lives. And I think about that a lot, one, because I interact with a lot of young people, and they certainly think about their private lives. I remember being a young person and being obsessed with having a private life. And yet, when I look at how we got here and where we are now, when it comes to the fight about libraries and books and reading material, I don't hear a lot of the voice of young people in the conversation about where we are now.
4:21 Speaker 01 So I wondered if you could tell me what you mean when you say children are people who deserve private reading lives?
4:29 Speaker 02 That's a big question, and I don't know how popular it is to think of kids in that way. Since I became president of the American Library Association, I have spent so much time reading through our documents, our policies, our position papers, our analyses. And one of the things that makes me quite proud is the commitment that we have to children as people who can read. I have a child of my own, you know, and everyone's like, "Parents should be able to control what their children read." I'm like, "Do you have a child? Have you met a child?" The degree of control you have over a child is more limited than I sometimes want. You know, but I think it comes down to respect for individual people and their right to
5:12 Speaker 02 their own imagination and the sovereignty of their own minds. And attacks on libraries right now are shaped and framed as attacks on books, but I think we all know they're attacks on people and attacks on children. We hear less from the readers and the writers of these books than I think we need to.
5:28 Speaker 01 I think a lot of parents would agree, almost as an instinct or an impulse, anyway, they would agree strongly with the principle that children deserve private lives. Like, "Right, of course, my child, you know, they get their own room," for example, right? Sure, they should have their privacy, they get their inner world. But I think they struggle with what that means in everyday practice, especially when it comes to, you know, when they're looking at their own child and against the larger context of fear.
5:59 Speaker 02 Oh, yeah.
6:00 Speaker 01 Right? The world is this big, scary place, and I am their only defense, their last defense against everything. Because that's kind of how we've painted modern parenthood. So you mentioned you are a parent and you're a librarian, a kind of big librarian, the sort of like capital L sense of librarian. So do you have those competing impulses? And if so, how do you navigate them as a parent and capital L librarian?
6:29 Speaker 02 No, absolutely. Like I said, I have a teenager. You know, my life is consumed with worry about him and his future, and I worry for his... World when he grows up and the world he's living in now and the constraints on his imagination from all kinds of different directions. And I also worry about his choices, you know? Does he always make good choices? Absolutely not. Can confirm he made a bad one just today. But I made some bad ones this week also. So giving him the sort of grace to be a full person. But when it comes to the media he consumes and the books that he reads, yeah, I mean, I can't say it doesn't worry me. But that struggle around the worry, that grappling
7:14 Speaker 02 with what I want for him and who he is and who he wants to be and who I want him to be, that these are the conditions of loving other people, of having children in our worlds. And there aren't easy answers for it. I think that's one of the things that's surprising, the conviction some people have over what is right for children. I just, you know, I look at my kid and his struggles every day. And one thing I'm not as sure about a whole lot.
7:38 Speaker 01 All right. So we'll come back to the tensions, by the way, between what parents might want for their kids broadly and what they want for their own kids, because that is one of the fundamental tensions. The idea that there's what I want for my kids and that gives me a sense of certainty that I want to project out into the world. And I happen to think that's where a lot of the political and social conflict lies, as you mentioned. How can people feel so certain when you yourself, as a parent, is like, I'm riddled with uncertainty?
8:07 Speaker 02 I'm just guessing every day. Yeah.
8:09 Speaker 01 Every day. And I think a lot of parents are. But let's talk a little bit more about your current role. So you campaigned to be the head of the American Library Association at a moment of great stress and distress, I might say, for libraries and for the country more broadly. And I think those two things are related. So my first question is why? Why did you campaign at this moment to head up the ALA?
8:34 Speaker 02 I mean, why not me? Why not me?
8:36 Speaker 01 Okay.
8:38 Speaker 02 I was like, you know, let me just step in here and do this. So, you know, I ran because I care a whole lot about libraries and I care a ton about library workers. And I know what kind of stress we're under. I see it in my colleagues. I see it in the people that I talk to. You know, I've been a librarian for a long time. I know librarians all over the country. And there's not a one of them that feels secure in their ability to do the jobs that we want to do. And I thought that if I ran for president of the American Library Association, making a public argument about the importance both of libraries as public institutions that secure the public good and library workers as the people who are responsible
9:21 Speaker 02 for that and need the kind of support to expand that work, that whatever happened, it would be good to have that public argument out in the world.
9:31 Speaker 01 What does it mean, by the way, for public libraries to be a model or an example of the public good? Because I tend to agree with you. Just let me show my hand here, by the way. I think it is one of the few places where people from multiple social classes still have to interact with each other as we have retreated from each other in public life, right? People can take their personal vehicles. We don't have to interact with each other on public transportation. We don't interact with each other in the same shopping. But libraries are one of these places where we brush up against each other. But like I say that, and even I can hear it to my own ears, it's like this highfalutin
10:14 Speaker 01 idea. And I'm always trying to make it really tangible for people. What does it mean to you when you say, listen, the public library is a model, it is the public good?
10:28 Speaker 02 So I was in Des Moines, Iowa, touring a library, and they have a library of things, which many, many public libraries have these days, and they circulate book club kits and sensory kits for kids and science materials and cake pans and tools. And this library had started circulating two carpet cleaning machines. And I remember growing up in Boise, Idaho, my mother saving up for months to be able to rent that carpet cleaner at the Albertson's in Boise, Idaho, so she could clean our carpets. And this library takes that out of the equation. And it means everybody can clean their carpet. And it seems like a small thing. It's like one thing happening in Des Moines, Iowa.
11:13 Speaker 02 But you know, multiply that by the hundreds and thousands of public libraries across the country. And every single one of them has something like that, that's securing and expanding access to public resources for everyone. It doesn't matter who you are. You can be anybody. You walk in. They did say there's a line. They have two of them. And they said the hold line for those carpet cleaners is 45 people in line. So you gotta wait, which is a testament too, to how much people want access to those public resources, how high the demand is when we make public goods available. Not a small thing. No, it is not. Not a small thing at all. And one of the things I love about working in libraries is that they're, it's material. You know, those highfalutin thoughts about the public good.
11:58 Speaker 02 In the library, rubber meets the road just constantly. Every day, it's a space where using the bathroom and getting a drink of water, like those are public goods and we're the only people that offer them. I think a lot about indoor space also. Like the bigger the library, the more indoor space you have. I was in Grimes, Iowa, and the library there had served a community for decades and never gotten beyond its sort of one-room size. The library director was telling me over years of one-on-one conversations with the people who were in the city council and the people who run the businesses in this small town in Grimes, eventually after all that time, managed to secure 82% support from
12:41 Speaker 02 the community for a new library that's four times the size. And that means so much more space for people to come and meet and gather, so much more room for books, so much more room for bathrooms. It's brilliant and amazing and good, and we want more of that. Yeah.
12:59 Speaker 01 This is really small infrastructure is basically what we're talking about.
13:04 Speaker 02 Yeah, that's right.
13:05 Speaker 01 Yeah, you know, when we talk about infrastructure in this country, you know, we think bridges and roads and those things are super important. Don't get me wrong, but I gotta think the small infrastructure matters a lot, too. And it's the kind of infrastructure that people don't think about needing until somebody says, hey, could you use a carpet cleaner?
13:27 Speaker 02 That's right. Yeah.
13:30 Speaker 01 And then suddenly there are 45 people.
13:33 Speaker 02 And think about what institutions are there that circulate things? I think about that a lot, that like moving things around and sharing them. Like you've got the post office and you have the library. Those are the two kind of infrastructures that circulate goods and services among the people. And the library is like a place that does that and kind of the only one.
13:53 Speaker 01 Yeah. Not a surprise, by the way, that you just mentioned two institutions that have each faced a political uphill battle for capital and relevancy over the last 20 years. The post office facing its own set of challenges and the idea of the library facing its own. And both, as you point out, really important to circulating the things that people need.
14:49 Speaker 01 Should there be an afterlife? If I get there, I want it written in the big book that I loved libraries. But there is such a thing, I know, that, you know, you can love something and want it to be better and that that can be an act of love. And service. And you have spent a lot of your scholarly work on critical librarianship. And I think this would surprise people, first of all, that there is a robust field called critical librarianship.
15:21 Speaker 02 There is, quite robust. There are lots of us, yep.
15:25 Speaker 01 And in fact, the librarians that I have had the great fortune to hang out with over the years, almost all critical librarians.
15:33 Speaker 02 Oh, yeah, there are a bunch of us.
15:35 Speaker 01 So what is critical librarianship? Tell us what that is.
15:40 Speaker 02 You know, it's like any, anything, there are a million definitions and who you ask will tell you something different. I think of critical librarianship as taking a critical view of the systems and structures that produce the library as we know it and experience it and think about ways that that library could be different. So I've done most of that work around cataloging and classification and thinking about the languages that we use to describe things and thinking about the order in which we put things. And so you go into a library and you think the books are just arranged in Dewey Decimal Order and that's kind of annoying, but whatever. But critical librarianship takes an interest in what that knowledge organization system,
16:23 Speaker 02 what the story it tells about itself through the ordering mechanism.
16:29 Speaker 01 You have written that one of the insights of critical librarianship since the 1970s has been this acknowledgement that invisible intellectual structures actually have a relationship to the material world of knowledge construction. That something's happening in there. You go in there and like you say, you just go, oh, hey, look, this book comes before that book.
16:56 Speaker 01 So what's happening when that book goes before that book? Why does that matter?
17:01 Speaker 02 So, everything for me comes from my own experience of the world. So I got a job, my first college library job was at Sarah Lawrence College. And I came to that library as it was finishing a major shift. And like, if you're a librarian and you've worked on a major shift of the collection, shouts to you, I hope we never have to do it again. Because you gotta take all the books, you gotta put them somewhere and move them around. And so I was working on shelving the sort of last sets of those books. And we had a copy of Christine Jorgensen's autobiography, a memoir of a trans woman, published, I think, in the 1960s. And that book was downstairs in the basement in the R section, which is the section for
17:44 Speaker 02 mental illness, psychiatric diseases. We had a second copy of that book that was with a historicizing introduction. And it was on the third floor in the HQs, which is where we shelved social problems. And I was struck by the distance between those books, right? And they tell you that one of the books is that gender is a problem in your brain, and the other one is gender is a social construction that is malleable. And the distance between those says something. And the elevator was slow, and so the physical distance was really real. You know, you had to walk up all these stairs to get to the two books and put them together. And so, the context of where the book sits is consequential for the meaning we can make from it.
18:30 Speaker 01 You know, I was thinking, many of us encounter, quote unquote, "the catalog" as just the card catalog. But you're saying it's more than just this, like, accessible, lowly, practical way to find a book or a resource. Basically, what you just described, I mean, you know, the catalog is power.
18:47 Speaker 02 Mm-hmm.
18:48 Speaker 01 Like, there's a lot of power in where the books are placed and how.
18:51 Speaker 02 Absolutely. I'm working on an oral history project with a colleague right now, and we're recording oral histories of people who have developed alternate classification schemes. And we were recording with a couple of librarians who were part of developing the Chicanothesaurus for Chicanomovement materials. And the way they talk about that experience of trying to find information about themselves and their experience in the Berkeley Library, say, and just the absence of it completely, the inability to find anything, you know, they threw themselves into making this index because there was no other way for them to organize information about their experience. Like, they had to.
19:34 Speaker 02 So, like, I think if you don't see yourself in the catalog, which is like a ton of us, it's pretty clear and it's pretty problematic.
19:40 Speaker 01 I've got to talk about, though, why this may have come to a head. When you were finally elected, April 2022, other people then were surprised. They don't know what critical librarianship is.
19:53 Speaker 02 Mm-hmm.
19:54 Speaker 01 You write a tweet that says, hey, I cannot believe that a Marxist lesbian who believes that collective power is possible to build and can be wielded for a better world is the president-elect of ALA Library.
20:07 Speaker 02 Oof. You know, it was an excited utterance.
20:10 Speaker 01 Right? There was a lot of backlash. Okay, so some Republicans accuse the ALA of being suddenly a radical leftist organization. To be fair, they now accuse everything
20:22 Speaker 02 Yeah.
20:23 Speaker 01 of being a radical leftist organization. But I do think this was a new experience for the American Library Association. The Montana State Library cut ties with the ALA. Lawmakers in states like Wyoming, Georgia, and Mississippi pushed to do the same. We can get into the, like, the political mudslinging, but how unprecedented is this?
20:45 Speaker 02 This is unprecedented. And it is extraordinarily painful and...
20:55 Speaker 02 The attacks on libraries and individual librarians, to see those intensify and to see those attacks be directed at institutions that would protect them, that represent them, that they are a part of. You know, the American Library Association, we run right around 50,000 members. And each one of those people is committed totally to the project of expanding access to information for everyone. And so to have this politicization of our role get in the way of that work, for me, is the most painful part of this experience.
21:39 Speaker 02 And I just, you know, wish I could go back in time and push that tweet right back in the bottle because it wasn't, you know, it was an excited utterance for me and my friends. And to forget for a moment that I was in the public square was regrettable.
21:54 Speaker 01 Yeah.
21:55 Speaker 02 Yeah, I'm just a person, you know? I got a kid in high school. I'm worried about him. You know? Yeah, it's been tough. And, you know, I think all I want to do is make good on the promise of the ALA for American librarians and the communities we serve. And to have this stand in the way of that has been a devastation, for sure.
22:14 Speaker 01 Yeah. What do you think it is about the American Library Association and librarians in this moment that feels like an acceptable target for this political discourse? You represent something, clearly.
22:34 Speaker 02 Mm hmm.
22:34 Speaker 01 All right. What is it that makes you both vulnerable? I think we can kind of, you know, under-resourced, sure. Not much of a political defense. I think we can see maybe the vulnerabilities. But such a rich target, like what is it? That is being projected on the ALA and on librarianship in particular, you think?
22:57 Speaker 02 You know, it's very confusing to me because the vast majority of people love the library. Survey after survey, like poll after poll, nobody wants what's happening right now. Nobody wants this. The Michigan Library Association ran a poll recently that 78% of their respondents said they didn't want restrictions on reading materials and they wanted to have the right to sort of guide their children's reading rather than ceding that to a handful of people. The ALA's polls are similar. Our Unite Against Book Bans campaign surveyed the public, you know, a cross-section across
23:38 Speaker 02 the political spectrum and the vast majority of people, again, really want libraries and want libraries to be available and accessible to everyone. So I, you know, I think that's part of what's confusing to me is like, it's a small and vocal minority that somehow has the power to shape the narrative about American libraries right now. And how they got power is the thing that I find really confusing and the thing that I really puzzle over. But I think the part that we were talking about earlier, that libraries are public institutions that are about expanding access to public resources, that we are sharing institutions, that we want to take resources that are held in common and distribute them equitably among everyone.
24:23 Speaker 02 I mean, that idea is, I think, the thing that's most under threat right now.
24:30 Speaker 01 So there is a perspective that could say, we agree on one thing, right? The critics and critical librarians agree that the library is powerful.
24:42 Speaker 02 Oh, yeah.
24:43 Speaker 01 Just perhaps disagree on how the power should work. Does that seem fair?
24:49 Speaker 02 That seems fair, yeah.
24:51 Speaker 01 Okay. So let me put something really controversial before you.
24:55 Speaker 02 Okay.
24:56 Speaker 01 Can a library ever be politically neutral?
25:01 Speaker 02 Yeah, I mean,
25:05 Speaker 02 this is a question, right? So libraries, what do we do? We provide essential information and services to the public, and we are intended to be valued pillars of our community. That's what we're for. And we're not politically biased organizations. That's not what we do. This is not normal, I think, to be embroiled in this kind of a political fight. And so neutral is a thing that we, I think, many times strive for. Like, neutral meaning we want everybody to be able to come in, and we want something in our collections for everyone. But it's hard at this moment when intellectual freedom and the right to read are under siege. It's hard to imagine a modern library as a neutral bystander.
25:48 Speaker 01 Let's talk about book challenges. The American Library Association has an office that tracks reports of book challenges. In 2022, that office received a record 1,269 challenges, which is the most on record. That's nearly double the 729 challenges reported in 2021. What patterns are we seeing in these challenges?
26:16 Speaker 02 There are all the patterns that you would guess, that you probably don't need me to say. But I think it's important to say it again and again. These books are books that tell stories about certain kinds of lives and experiences, the lives and experiences of Black people, the lives and experiences of LGBTQ plus people, the lives and experiences of people of color. The attacks are on those kinds of stories, books that are about you and about me.
26:44 Speaker 01 Mm hmm.
26:45 Speaker 02 Yeah.
26:45 Speaker 01 Yeah. All right. We know not only that the books are disproportionately written by or about members of the LGBTQIA+ community or by and about Black people, Indigenous people, and people of color, but recent research is also showing that they seem to be like the same titles over and over again, showing perhaps a pattern of identifying the same sort of books and authors over and over again.
27:13 Speaker 02 There's a list.
27:14 Speaker 01 Yeah. On the ALA's list of most challenged books in 2022, four of the top five feature queer characters, and that's a pretty consistent pattern going back several years. And then we sort of start to see a shift over the last few years to stories featuring more trans characters. That coincides with a flood of bills, of course, restricting gender-affirming care for minors. So you see this intersection of the change in political narratives with books that are being targeted. So none of this is happening in isolation, obviously.
27:47 Speaker 02 Yeah, I mean, if we define the problem as simply one banned book, the solution is put that book back on the shelf. So I think it's really important to think about the problem more expansively as you're describing it.
27:57 Speaker 01 And so what would it mean to think beyond that solution of put the book back on the shelf? What is the larger, if it is larger than that, how do we need to think? Instead of just going to then saying, hey, no, not those books, you know, showing up at my local library, meaning, hey, not those books. What would it mean for me to argue more broadly?
28:22 Speaker 02 I think a couple of things, like it's not just not those books, it's not those people, right? That's the link that I see when you're describing the sort of anti-trans laws, which are about not wanting trans people in the world. There was a recent study that came out looking at the status of like queer kids and queer books and queer school libraries. And 90% of the respondents said one of the places they feel safe at school is their school library. So there's that piece. And then I think the other piece is thinking about like the ban on the book is also a ban on the library and wanting the library to disappear. So we're seeing in some of the attacks, like if the books aren't banned
29:07 Speaker 02 or they're banned in a way that we don't want or not enough or not whatever, like it's hard to even know. You know, it seems like it doesn't have a whole lot to do actually with what the library, how the library engages or reacts. But another, the next sort of next step is to defund the library altogether. And eliminate it. And we see this in Michigan. It happened in northern Idaho. It's happened in states that are withdrawing their support from ALA, right? Part of the project is to dismantle these institutions, period. And so for all the reasons that we just talked about, about how libraries are amazing, community, anchor institutions, efforts to dismantle them and disappear them are, that seems part of the end game as well.
29:47 Speaker 01 It reminds me so much, what you just described, I just had this sort of shiver because it reminds me so much of the massive resistance response to school desegregation, which is if we have to allow one black child, we'd rather there be no school at all.
30:04 Speaker 02 We'll fill the swimming pool with concrete.
30:06 Speaker 01 That's right. Which always suggests that this is about some larger idea about who is included in the political project, for whom the legal provisions will acknowledge. So not those books, not those people.
30:29 Speaker 01 You made me think about something that I think I've heard some people kind of say, not in a way, but just sort of like a shrugging off about when a library closes, what the real impact is. And that is because I think we have sometimes a latent assumption, even if we haven't thought it affirmatively, that, well, you have the internet, right?
30:50 Speaker 02 Well, maybe you do.
30:51 Speaker 01 Oh, okay.
30:53 Speaker 02 Like, maybe you have it.
30:54 Speaker 01 Right. What is the impact when a book isn't available in a library, or a library isn't available in a school, or a library isn't available in a community, when we have the presumption that especially a vulnerable minority group or person can just find their people, or find their material, or find what they need in the safety and anonymity of online communities and materials?
31:24 Speaker 02 I, it just, there's a really big difference, right? Between Googling it and having access to literature and imagination? And what other institution is there that exists that can give you both the technological infrastructure, right, like the computer and the internet, but also like the person who will help you? And so when the library disappears, it's not just the book, it's not just that. But it's like, everything that that library can do for the people in the community. And I think sometimes when people are like, well, who needs a library? You can just go on Amazon. They're not remembering that not everyone lives a life like ours,
32:06 Speaker 02 which I think is another like, sort of poverty of the imagination in this country sometimes. Which is like, we don't want to imagine that anybody lives a life where they don't have a laptop. You know, we forget. And so when people say, we don't need a library, I'm like, have you ever been to a library? Like, you know, when I worked at the public library, the line for the computers would be 20 people long before we opened the door. All day long. They're such busy places. And so I think people forget that like, the people who use the library a lot, they are also people who deserve the state to provide for some of their needs.
32:39 Speaker 01 I like to say to my very well-to-do friends sometimes about the library and one of its most basic functions, as you have so eloquently described, is that, oh, they do for people what you do for your elderly parents.
32:52 Speaker 02 Exactly.
32:54 Speaker 01 If you've ever walked your elderly parents through their technology problem, thank a librarian. They are doing that for people all day long with much higher stakes.
33:09 Speaker 02 Yeah, exactly.
33:11 Speaker 01 Yeah, it's eviction as opposed to, you know, I don't know.
33:16 Speaker 02 My mom can't get her Kindle book.
33:17 Speaker 01 You go.
33:18 Speaker 02 Which is a problem.
33:19 Speaker 01 It is a certain type of a problem.
33:22 Speaker 02 Yeah.
33:22 Speaker 01 It is. You are right. It is a category of a problem that my mother also shares. I just finally canceled the Kindle. I couldn't.
33:31 Speaker 02 We got rid of the Kindle, we got rid of the smartphone. We're like, you know, these aren't necessary things. But you know what I'll say about my mom is she goes once a week on Wednesdays to the Boise Public Library.
33:40 Speaker 01 That's right.
33:40 Speaker 02 She checks out seven books, she goes home. The following Wednesday, she goes, she returns those seven books and checks out seven more books.
33:46 Speaker 01 My mom does the same thing with her audiobooks on cassette and CD. And it's been a godsend.
33:54 Speaker 02 Yeah.
33:54 Speaker 01 Because material culture, she can still work it.
33:58 Speaker 02 Mm-hmm.
33:58 Speaker 01 She can keep track of it. The problem with the digital downloads is that she couldn't touch it.
34:05 Speaker 02 Yeah. Where is it?
34:06 Speaker 01 Where is it? That's right. And I couldn't get her over that sort of cognitive leap.
34:12 Speaker 02 You know, the best thing about being ALA president is I get to visit so many libraries. And I've visited so many libraries and they're all amazing. And some of them have phased out those collections entirely and others have... Like, I was at a ski resort with my family last Christmas. And the ski resort library has like a vast collection of DVDs, which a lot of libraries have gotten rid of because you can stream things. But the community there, they have a lot of people who work at the resort and live in their vans. And they don't have the internet in their van. And so they have a way to check out a VCR and a video. So you can watch the video. And it's like, libraries meet the needs of their communities.
35:21 Speaker 01 I'm not sure people know how libraries acquire their stuff.
35:28 Speaker 02 Yeah.
35:29 Speaker 01 I think this is really important because my sense in the debate and the fights, I should just, let me just speak just very plainly. The fights over book bans and information bans in libraries assumes that there is just this sort of, you know, materials are being selected by fiat, by some authority on high. But what you have just described, there is a lot of negotiation between community needs and the materials that circulate in a library. How are books? Like, how do books get into the library?
36:04 Speaker 02 They're born there, actually.
36:06 Speaker 01 I thought so.
36:09 Speaker 02 It's interesting because I'm really interested in the backend of things, right? Like the sort of how's the back infrastructure working? You know, like how do the books? And they are selected and acquired by professionals who have training in collection development. Can you believe that?
36:25 Speaker 01 No.
36:26 Speaker 02 It's an actual job that a human does.
36:28 Speaker 01 So you're saying this is not AI?
36:30 Speaker 02 This is not AI.
36:31 Speaker 01 Okay.
36:32 Speaker 02 That's not to say that there aren't sort of subscription plans and selection lists and sort of things that make it easier to buy books for your collection. But think about it, you know, there's so much opposition to school libraries and what they have on their collections. Like, that's really where a lot of this fight is happening, is like at the school library. And the school librarian, all they do all day is like, think about the kids in the school and look at the curriculum and select books that meet the needs of the curriculum. It's like, none of it, none of the, none of the books arrive by accident.
37:01 Speaker 01 Okay, all right.
37:02 Speaker 02 Yeah.
37:03 Speaker 01 And there exist already these mechanisms, right? For people to nominate the books or ask for books or suggest the books and...
37:12 Speaker 02 I think that's one of the things about this sort of the book challenge conversation right now. It's not as if libraries don't want community members to engage with us about what we have, make suggestions, even express concerns. It's the sort of bad faith, many, many book challenges, the challenges of books I haven't even read, kinds of things that are problematic.
37:35 Speaker 01 You pointed out something that I wanted to kind of put a finer point on, that so much of this has focused on school libraries. And school libraries and public libraries are being targeted at, we think, roughly equal rates. But is there a meaningful difference between trying to remove a book from a school library and trying to remove one from a public library?
38:01 Speaker 02 Oh, that's a good question. You know, I think school libraries function a little differently for their patrons, right? Like, we were talking about the school library is like the place, I don't know, I ate my lunch there every day in the seventh grade. Their homes for kids in a different way. My kid went to a middle school that didn't have a school library. There was a public library across the street. Guess how many times he went to the public library? Zero times. So that he didn't have that sort of center of gravity of the collection that's in a school library. And when there are efforts to remove books from the school library, that's a, you know, a direct attack on the fabric of that community. And the public library functions similarly, I think. And but the, there's something quite special about the school library
38:46 Speaker 02 as the sort of heart of a kid's life. Because it's for a kid, like the school is their whole planet.
38:52 Speaker 01 Right.
38:52 Speaker 02 You know, there's no other real world for a kid in, in a lot of ways. Like their world is at school. And so removing a book from the school library, it's like removing it from their entire world.
39:04 Speaker 01 Right, when you take a book out of a school library, you really do pull it out of a child, a young person's whole sort of ecosystem, in a way. And it gets me to thinking about what a library encompasses. So a library has this market element. It does allow certain transactions. It circulates things. And but as we've discussed, there's also this democratic element. It does this in its way that is more about sharing than it is about competition for goods and for resources. So there's a market element because it's demand for certain kinds of books. And that certainly matters. You want things that people want. But you want people's voices to be heard. You want to serve the needs of a community,
39:48 Speaker 01 even if there are only a few people in that community. You still want them to have some stuff.
39:52 Speaker 02 Absolutely.
39:53 Speaker 01 That they need. Does that sound about right?
39:55 Speaker 02 Yeah. I don't know. I, I'm a member of a book club. And we read 50 books a year in 50 categories. And we've got the categories. And then you choose a book that fits in each category. And it has really opened up my like reading. And I now read a whole lot of books in translation, which I never did before. And so I read books from all kinds of different. Parts of the world and you know, it's true what they say about a book. It opens your imagination and makes the world wider. And I'm a big reader, you know? But there are books I read now that I would never have read before. Like I read Paris Hilton's memoir this year.
40:31 Speaker 01 Oh, wow.
40:32 Speaker 02 I had to read a book that is coming out and has a lot of buzz. And so that was a category. So I read Paris Hilton's memoir.
40:38 Speaker 01 Oh.
40:38 Speaker 02 And it's not a book that I thought I would read. But I read it and it opened my mind a little bit. It made me think in new ways and it was good and I'm glad we had it. But I wonder if that's what some of the hostility is, right? That we want.
40:53 Speaker 01 Ah.
40:54 Speaker 02 Like, it's difficult to imagine supporting something that was for everybody. Like even people I really don't agree with. So as many people as like are mad at me for being who I am. Like there are lots of people that I don't agree with. But I still think that they have a right to read a book, you know? I don't know. But then you think about like, what makes a social program successful? It's that everybody's in it? Like, social security is durable because all of us use it? So when people say the library is vulnerable, I actually think it's interesting how durable it has been, how this moment is unprecedented.
41:38 Speaker 02 We haven't faced what, say, public education has faced. Because it's difficult to imagine privatizing the library, right? You couldn't do it. Like, I couldn't own every book in my house. I don't want to own Paris Hilton's memoir. I want to read it and then return it so someone else can read it, right? So it's actually surprising to me, I guess, in some ways, that this institution that does so much to provide equal access to literally everyone in a community. I think that is kind of the key to its durability as a social institution.
42:16 Speaker 01 Hmm. You said in an interview that you don't want the library to get stuck talking exclusively on the terms they have set for us, rather than the terms that I think the rest of us operate on every day. What are the terms of the debate that you wish we were using?
42:38 Speaker 02 I wish we were spending less time talking about the book banning stuff. I wish we were having a conversation about how to expand libraries, that we were talking about what good they do, that we were talking about not just the carpet cleaners in Des Moines, but the cotton candy machine they circulate at the Donnelly Public Library in Donnelly, Idaho, to make birthday parties in that rural part of the state a little more fun for kids, that we were talking about how to get more cotton candy machines. And every library I go to has something else like that. I just got back from Rotterdam, where I was at the International Federation of Library
43:17 Speaker 02 Associations, and was going through the poster sessions and saw this library in Romania, where they had a program that connected elders, who were some of the last in the community to know the sort of lost art of embroidering shirts in this particular Romanian way, with young people who learned how to do the embroidery, but then also digitized the patterns so that they can be preserved forever. And then they both made the shirt and wore it at a library program. You know, it's like, that's magic. So I wish we were talking about, like, more about what that means for a community, what
44:01 Speaker 02 it means for the history of the place, the future of the place, for just that basic human connection that we miss sometimes. What do we have to do to get more of that, rather than trying to defend what little we have left of what I would argue is the best public institution in the history of the world, the library?
44:23 Speaker 01 We ask all guests on the show for three book recommendations, and I cannot think of anyone better to ask this of. Not only are you a librarian, capital L, but you just admitted to being in the most aggressive sounding book club I have ever heard of in my life.
44:47 Speaker 02 You know what, if you win the challenge at the end of the year, you know what your prize is?
44:52 Speaker 01 What?
44:53 Speaker 02 You get to invite a new person to join the club.
44:57 Speaker 01 I was kind of hoping you were going to say a gold sticker, which-
45:00 Speaker 02 So, Chelsea, if you're interested, I'll keep you in mind. It's a big year for me, but I still think I'm going to do it.
45:06 Speaker 01 It is. It's a big year for you. All right, keep me in mind.
45:10 Speaker 02 All right, okay.
45:11 Speaker 01 Until then, do you have three books for us, Emily?
45:15 Speaker 02 The first book that I want to suggest is a book about libraries that I think is just fantastic by Dan Green called The Promise of Access. And he's got a chapter about the library that just is some of the most solid analysis of what libraries can do and how we need to talk about them. So I would recommend Dan Green's book. Second is a book that's on the list of the top 10 banned books from the ALA called Flamer by Mike Curato. It's a book about a kid at sleepaway camp. And I read it this summer when my kid was at sleepaway camp. And you know, you read it and you, and that, what we were talking about, like, do they want to ban the book or they want to ban the person?
45:57 Speaker 02 And you read this beautiful, tender story of a kid struggling with his sexual identity at a Boy Scout camp. And it's so beautiful and sweet and gorgeous. So just a perfect graphic novel, I think. Very sweet. And then the last recommendation, have you read When We Were Beautiful by Imbole Mbuye?
46:17 Speaker 01 Yes, I have.
46:18 Speaker 02 Oh, knocked my socks off. The best book I've read this year, the first chapter of that book should be required reading.
46:28 Speaker 01 Amazing recommendation.
46:29 Speaker 02 Thank you.
46:30 Speaker 01 Emily, thank you for joining me here today.
46:33 Speaker 02 I appreciate the conversation. Thank you so much.
46:39 Speaker 01 This episode of The Ezra Klein Show was produced by Emma F. Agawu, fact checking by Michelle Harris. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld. Our senior editor is Annie Rose Strasser. The show's production team also includes Roland Hu and Kristin Lynn. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Christina Samulowsky and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie Rose Strasser. And special thanks to Sonia Herrera.
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