Pod Insights Stuff You Missed in History Class Behind the Scenes Minis: Bad Science and Library Love About this episode Tracy outlines all the way RFK Jr.'s claims regarding disease history make no sense. Holly talks about the section of her career that was spent working in a university library.
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0:37 Holly Frey? A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. In season seven of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, host Martine Hackett continues the conversation with people living with MG, CIDP, and the broader rare disease community, exploring what comes after diagnosis through stories of hope, progress, and connection. Produced by Ruby Studio in partnership with Argenx. Listen on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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2:11 Holly Frey? Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeart Radio.
2:22 Tracy V. Wilson? Happy Friday. I'm Tracy V. Wilson.
2:23 Holly Frey? And I'm Holly Frey.
2:25 Tracy V. Wilson? We talked about some autoimmune diseases.
2:28 Holly Frey? Sure did. Very real ones.
2:30 Tracy V. Wilson? Real autoimmune diseases that we're talking about because I'm so mad at RFK Jr.
2:40 Tracy V. Wilson? I listened to this entire speech.
2:44 Tracy V. Wilson? Because I wanted, like, I just had seen clips of it where he was saying that he had never heard of juvenile diabetes when he was a kid. And I was like, buddy, is it because the kids that you would have known would have died because treatment was not as as available or understood when you were growing up? By that point, insulin did exist. Children with diabetes were living a lot longer by the 50s and 60s, but like, it's still, we have progressed since then. That is a thing that could have happened. But so I listened to this entire thing so that I could make note of all of the other
3:25 Tracy V. Wilson? things that he, so here are some more things that he said he had never heard of besides the ones that we mentioned in the episode, eczema.
3:33 Holly Frey? What?
3:35 Holly Frey? I mean, you're braver than me because I can't handle watching all of it. I'll read a transcript, but I can't.
3:43 Tracy V. Wilson? I did watch it on two times speed so that it would be over with faster.
3:51 Holly Frey? And I think this came out while I was in Japan and I was just like,
3:54 Tracy V. Wilson? You were in Japan.
3:54 Holly Frey? La, la, la, la, la, la, la. I'm gonna live in Japan for the moment and not, not get too wadded up in things back home.
4:02 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah. So after seeing the clip in which he mentioned juvenile diabetes, which isn't called that anymore, but I'd sought out the whole thing. So in addition to the things that we talked about, eczema, ADD and ADHD. I don't remember exactly when those were first defined. But then, speech and language delay. Okay, that's a whole category.
4:25 Holly Frey? Right.
4:27 Tracy V. Wilson? Autism, Tourette Syndrome, and then autoimmune diseases, another whole category.
4:36 Tracy V. Wilson? And I was just like, man, that's, but.
4:40 Tracy V. Wilson? Some of these things are more recently described, but then you look back in history and you see evidence of them earlier on.
4:51 Holly Frey? Mm hmm.
4:52 Tracy V. Wilson? And a lot of stuff like ADHD and autism, there is growing awareness, which means more people are being diagnosed when they may not have been diagnosed earlier on because that awareness wasn't there.
5:11 Holly Frey? Right.
5:12 Tracy V. Wilson? And if you look at charts of things over time, sometimes there will be like increases in diagnoses of things like autism and ADHD, but declines in more broad diagnoses of things like developmental delay.
5:32 Holly Frey? Right.
5:33 Tracy V. Wilson? So a child that would have been diagnosed with something like developmental delay, which is very general and broad, instead being diagnosed with something more specific like autism spectrum disorder.
5:47 Holly Frey? Yeah.
5:48 Tracy V. Wilson? A lot of stuff there. So another thing that was happening in this speech, but I just got so frustrated about it, was that he made repeated mentions of his uncle and when his uncle was president and his uncle. And he was making it sound like his uncle was evident of robust health and that his uncle's presidency also a time of better health for the American people. John F. Kennedy had multiple chronic diseases.
6:28 Holly Frey? Yeah, and also not a time of great health for people.
6:34 Tracy V. Wilson? No, no. So John F. Kennedy's various chronic diseases were not publicly discussed much in his lifetime. One would think that being a family member, RFK would have any idea of what was going on. But like, John F. Kennedy's medical records were released in 2002. He probably had some kind of genetic autoimmune disease.
7:04 Tracy V. Wilson? Also, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s Aunt Rosemary was given a lobotomy.
7:11 Holly Frey? That's exactly what I was going to mention.
7:14 Tracy V. Wilson? I, it just made me so angry. He was talking about his own family as though that they and the time they were living through was exemplary in terms of health. They lobotomized her. It seems like she did have some kind of intellectual disability, maybe also a mood disorder, but it also seems like some of this lobotomy was about people just not liking her behavior.
7:44 Holly Frey? Yeah.
7:46 Tracy V. Wilson? And that lobotomy affected her for the rest of her life in a bad way.
7:53 Holly Frey? Yeah, it was like a shameful thing that was hidden.
7:56 Tracy V. Wilson? Yes. So, um, some of my notes in this part of the thing are in all capital letters and there are swear words that we don't say on the podcast. Um, it made me just furious, though. Um, also, there's a plan to take artificial, a number of artificial food dyes out of the food system, or like, at least voluntarily do that. I, just like I said in the intro to the episode, that there's a whole can of worms about like, what these food dyes may or may not be connected to. But there's discussion of replacing them
8:35 Tracy V. Wilson? with so-called natural food dyes. Something being natural doesn't mean that it's better for you or safer.
8:45 Holly Frey? There are a lot of naturally poisonous things in the world.
8:49 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah, yeah. Also, if the government in this administration were actually concerned about pollutants that really do make people sicker, and air pollution that really does cause disease, if this was actually a concern to the administration, they would not be making big cuts to the EPA.
9:13 Holly Frey? Right.
9:14 Tracy V. Wilson? And they would not be getting rid of what they say are burdensome regulations on industries.
9:22 Holly Frey? This makes me feral.
9:24 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah. I was so angry. If you actually wanted for people to be healthier, maybe a starting point could be universal healthcare.
9:37 Holly Frey? Well, that's hippie talk, Tracy.
9:39 Tracy V. Wilson? I know, right?
9:42 Tracy V. Wilson? We also didn't put it in the, or I didn't, I wrote this, I didn't put it in the Crohn's disease discussion, but like, Dwight Eisenhower, 34th president of the United States and also a five-star general, he had surgery for a bowel issue in 1956 and his symptoms are, like, it has some consistencies with Crohn's. Again, can't really diagnose people from the past that way, but like, he does seem to have had some kind of chronic bowel issue going on.
10:14 Holly Frey? Right.
10:15 Tracy V. Wilson? Could be in this umbrella. Anyway, we're just, we're gonna lose our reputation as a podcast that doesn't often say a lot of explicitly political things, but RFK Jr. doesn't know what he's talking about and he is making dangerous decisions that are gonna harm people.
10:33 Holly Frey? Yeah, 100%.
10:35 Tracy V. Wilson? And I hate it. I hate it.
10:37 Holly Frey? Deeply.
10:37 Tracy V. Wilson? I hate it. I know people who couldn't get their meds because they were being wrongly used for COVID.
10:43 Holly Frey? Mm-hmm.
10:44 Tracy V. Wilson? Bad stuff. I also know what it's like to have a family member who has a disease so rare that when you go to a neurologist, the specialty related to their rare disease, you have to explain to them the rare disease that your parent has.
10:58 Holly Frey? Yes.
11:00 Tracy V. Wilson? I hate all of it. I hate it. I hate it.
11:03 Holly Frey? But do you like it a little?
11:05 Tracy V. Wilson? Not even a little, not even the tiniest bit. Um, I'm gonna wind up on some kind of government list, I think, my vocal criticisms of this administration's decisions. Yeah, yeah. It's totally possible that air pollution is contributing to rates of various autoimmune diseases.
11:33 Holly Frey? Yeah.
11:33 Tracy V. Wilson? The solution to that is not to roll back the air quality regulations.
11:38 Holly Frey? Right. It's also not to cut funding to research.
11:42 Tracy V. Wilson? Or to, you know, try to eviscerate Medicare and Medicaid and...
11:48 Tracy V. Wilson? Anyway, anyway, not happy with a lot of things as they're happening right now. Uh, I feel like if I went and took my blood pressure right at this moment,
12:02 Tracy V. Wilson? the machine would be like, why, what is, are you taking your medication?
12:05 Holly Frey? It would do like a Tex Avery cartoon smoke coming out before it blows up with springy bits coming out of it.
12:12 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah. Um, so, you know, uh, if you are as riled up about all of this as I am, uh, and you don't already have it and you live in the United States, there's an app called Five Calls.
12:32 Tracy V. Wilson? Will help you with contacting your reps. I also send them physical things in the mail. And sometimes go out into the street and scream in a group.
12:44 Holly Frey? Yeah.
12:47 Tracy V. Wilson? And also try to take some moments to ground myself every day.
12:55 Tracy V. Wilson? Uh, I just got back from a week of vacation in which I had minimal time of looking at the chronic fire hose of, uh, of news. I, I was not totally cut off from the news, but, um, it was like less of a continual presence all day long.
13:13 Holly Frey? Yeah.
13:14 Tracy V. Wilson? Um, and, uh, it was a nice little chance for my brain to do some other things.
13:21 Holly Frey? Yeah. Yeah. You know, um, I don't know. I, I, I vacillate. I feel like so, um, drastically between like trying to run to things to give me joy and then
13:38 Tracy V. Wilson? Oh, sure.
13:38 Holly Frey? trying to acknowledge and stay on top of all of the horrors. And I'm like, I don't know, is this constant like switching bad? I don't know. I can't tell. I don't know the right path.
13:49 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah. Uh, one of the things that I did on this vacation that I was on was that I did some volunteer work and, um,
14:00 Tracy V. Wilson? That really helped with my mind. So if you are able to spend some time with an organization that you you believe in, that's doing work that's important to you, if if your job or your schedule allows you some time to do that. I spent a couple of hours repackaging an enormous volume of black beans into two pound bags of black beans.
14:26 Holly Frey? Nice.
14:26 Tracy V. Wilson? Food bank. And honestly, it was one of the best things that I did.
14:32 Holly Frey? I I also find like when I have had in my early adult life, like jobs that were kind of like monotonous laborious jobs.
14:44 Tracy V. Wilson? Hmm.
14:44 Holly Frey? I found those oddly zen and kind of good for my brain.
14:48 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
14:49 Holly Frey? Like unfortunately, they don't pay a living wage often.
14:52 Tracy V. Wilson? Right.
14:53 Holly Frey? But like, I remember for a while when I was in college in the summers, I would work in resorts, cleaning rooms.
15:00 Tracy V. Wilson? Okay.
15:01 Holly Frey? Which is a hard job.
15:03 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
15:04 Holly Frey? But it there was something very like zen about walking in and being like, okay, I need to make order out of this chaos.
15:12 Tracy V. Wilson? Uh huh.
15:12 Holly Frey? It's low stakes. Like, I don't have any emotional attachment to any of this. I can just like, get the bedding, get the linens out to the the laundry. I can put fresh things down. I can just make this clean and get out. And it was like, very good for me. So I I often find when I have done volunteer work, that's like that. Aside from knowing that it's good and, you know, feeling good that you're doing something right, like just doing a repetitive task for a couple hours.
15:40 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
15:40 Holly Frey? Very zen.
15:41 Tracy V. Wilson? I have seen Allison from the Ask a Manager blog, talk about how doing a volunteer task that was very different from her normal work, which is, you know, writing about workplace advice.
15:59 Holly Frey? Hmm.
16:00 Tracy V. Wilson? Doing a volunteer thing that was just dramatically different from her day to day work life, like really helped with burnout.
16:09 Holly Frey? Hmm.
16:09 Tracy V. Wilson? Um, because it was a, you know, a productive task, requiring a totally different area of her brain and a totally different style of working than writing about work. I think that's probably good and I should probably find a way to do more of that in my regular life when than when I'm not on vacation.
16:34 Speaker 04 First thought is like, wow, how are we going to do all this?
16:37 Tracy V. Wilson? Hey, everybody. It's Tracy from Stuff You Missed in History Class. That's Alan Goya, a planning engineer at AT&T. He's talking about Intuit Dome, home of the Los Angeles Clippers, where every seat, screen, phone, and transaction is connected with AT&T fiber and 5G, defining the fan's experience. And Alan's master plan made it all possible.
16:57 Speaker 04 It was good arrival, anything that was already built. And that takes quite a bit of people and different teams to all be on the same page.
17:05 Tracy V. Wilson? That includes field services manager Drexel Jones. His team made sure it all came together and held up on game day.
17:12 Speaker 05 Through what Alan's whole crew designed, we connected the event visitors to the world.
17:17 Tracy V. Wilson? And after years of hard work and collaboration, it was opening night.
17:21 Speaker 05 To actually see the whole stadium light up and data is flowing is a beautiful thing.
17:25 Speaker 04 What the fans experience is incredible. It gave me a lot of pride.
17:29 Tracy V. Wilson? AT&T, connecting fans to what they love.
17:31 Speaker 06 Connecting changes everything. AT&T.
17:35 Speaker 03 In military families, service is more than a job. It's a legacy. At American Military University, that legacy can help open new doors through education. If someone in your family served in the military, you could be eligible for reduced tuition. Take the next step with flexible online programs built for real life. Learn more at amu.apus.edu/military.
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19:05 Holly Frey? A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. Tune in for season seven of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, a Ruby Studio production in partnership with Argenx. Hosted by public health and policy expert Dr. Martine Hackett, Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition pushes the conversation within the rare disease community forward. Featuring guests living with MG, CIDP, myositis, SMA, and other rare autoimmune conditions, each episode explores hope, progress, and connection. How does research create new opportunities? How do shared experiences help light the way forward? How do we best show up for each other? Tune
19:50 Holly Frey? in to find out. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
20:07 Holly Frey? We talked about the Library of Congress this week.
20:09 Tracy V. Wilson? Indeed.
20:10 Holly Frey? I sure love it.
20:11 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah, me too.
20:13 Holly Frey? There were several times where I got very choked up about it.
20:15 Tracy V. Wilson? Yep.
20:16 Holly Frey? Because I worked in a library for more than a decade.
20:19 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
20:20 Holly Frey? And I, I, I worked in a university of library that used Library of Congress cataloging. My trajectory there was weird because I got hired initially. I've had strange career shifts in my life. I had been working in a salon. I was very tired of it. And I got hired at this university library to repair old books, which they hired me just because in the interview, it was apparent that I was very crafty and I was willing to look up. Methods, the things that Library of Congress had developed in terms of preservation. And so I did that and I loved that job and I was a little too fast about it because then they were like, well, we don't have enough books needing repair to sustain a position anymore.
21:06 Holly Frey? We can either let-
21:07 Tracy V. Wilson? You fixed them all, Holly.
21:08 Holly Frey? We can eat, kind of, we can either let you go or we could teach you cataloging. And I was like, cataloging, please. So I was kind of in a paraprofessional role that probably would have benefited from a library science degree, but I did not have one, but I was cataloging a lot. And I, it's one of those things that I think people who know me were a little like, this is a very anal retentive job.
21:35 Holly Frey? That doesn't seem like your jam. I loved it. I loved cataloging. And then I ended up getting moved over and kind of managing the library's acquisitions after that. And it was just, it was a time in my life where I did not make a lot of money, but I really, really liked my job most of the time. So I have deep fondness for libraries and particularly Library of Congress cataloging.
22:00 Tracy V. Wilson? I don't clearly remember exactly how this came to be. I think it was when I was in middle school, I was in the strings class. And my middle school had way more kids doing band than doing strings. And somehow, the only way to have enough kids for the strings class was to put me, who was in the last year of middle school, into a room with kids that were only in there every other day. So every other day, I needed to be kept occupied some other way. And that some other way was helping in the middle school library.
22:42 Tracy V. Wilson? And most of what I did was tidy up and wipe down the tables and shelf books that had been returned or put on the little carts.
22:53 Tracy V. Wilson? And sometimes reading the shelves to look for things that were missing.
22:57 Holly Frey? Yeah. Oh, shelf reading is hard for me.
23:00 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah. Miss mis-shelved incorrectly shelved. And then when I was in high school and we needed to do some kind of service activity for National Honor Society, one of the things I did was the same work in the high school library.
23:16 Holly Frey? I have questions.
23:18 Tracy V. Wilson? Okay.
23:18 Holly Frey? Was your middle school library using LC or Dewey? Probably Dewey.
23:22 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah, they were both using Dewey. But then I went in college, the college library was Dewey, Library of Congress.
23:28 Holly Frey? Yeah.
23:29 Tracy V. Wilson? I've mentioned before, I am married to a librarian. I think a lot of people aren't really aware of like the scope of different things that librarians do.
23:39 Holly Frey? Mm hmm.
23:41 Tracy V. Wilson? Every once in a while, there will be discourse that starts going viral on, you know, TikTok or Instagram reels or whatever, where someone is looking for a job and doesn't understand why a librarian needs to have a master's degree because they think that what a librarian does is scan the barcode.
24:00 Holly Frey? The circulation desk.
24:02 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah. Which might be one of the tasks that a librarian does, but there's also like cataloging and curating the library's collection.
24:15 Tracy V. Wilson? You know, being a reference librarian and a resource for the people who come in. My spouse's job as a librarian does not look anything like most people might expect of a librarian because what he's doing is like curating sets of data for researchers.
24:34 Holly Frey? Yeah.
24:35 Tracy V. Wilson? And if he's going into the stacks for something, it's literally to find a book that I asked for.
24:44 Tracy V. Wilson? I don't think he ever goes into the stacks for like the core of his job.
24:49 Holly Frey? Yeah. And there are a lot of reference librarian positions in places you wouldn't expect that do things like that. Like he works at a university, but like I have had friends that have worked at like the libraries for like big media companies where like their news channel comes to them and is like, I need context for this thing going on now. And they help pull.
25:10 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
25:11 Holly Frey? Academic journals, sometimes but rarely books, but like, you know, things like newspapers, et cetera, that will help them build a story. Like, that's another thing that reference librarians do.
25:23 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
25:23 Holly Frey? In those specialty kind of libraries.
25:26 Tracy V. Wilson? It's been a while. We used to get periodically emails from folks who were asking for advice about how to research some, like, maybe a family member, and they know that their family member did something related to their local history, or maybe they were involved in a particular battle in World War I or World War II or something like that. And usually, my first recommendation to the folks that wrote in would be like, so start by talking to the reference librarian if your local library has a reference librarian.
25:59 Holly Frey? Yeah. There are some great stories from the reference desk that I have heard over the years.
26:06 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
26:06 Holly Frey? One of which I will retell in the most nebulous ways, so nobody gets in trouble. One of my friends, who was working in a university library, so an academic library, had been working with this woman who was older than like your average college-age student for a while on various projects. And she, it had come up in conversation at one point.
26:31 Holly Frey? Like, oh, you know, are you, did you decide to go back to school for, you know, work or blah, blah, blah? And that is when we found out that she was in fact doing all of the research and writing of her son's work.
26:44 Tracy V. Wilson? Oh, no.
26:45 Holly Frey? And it was like, oh, ma'am, this is not what you should be doing at the library.
26:50 Tracy V. Wilson? No.
26:53 Holly Frey? There are some, there is one particular story that I found, I don't, charming? I don't know if it's endearing. It's also like, dude, you gotta do the thing you gotta do.
27:05 Holly Frey? We mentioned that the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence had gone to Fort Knox during World War II.
27:14 Tracy V. Wilson? Yep.
27:15 Holly Frey? But even before that, there had been efforts to get them moved, and that was to the National Archives, which was founded in the mid 1930s. But at that point, Putnam was the Librarian of Congress, and he like couldn't bring himself to part with those documents. And so everyone was like, that's fine. And then he retired in 1939. So I was like, okay, now we can move those to the National Archives. But then World War II happened and everything got really busy and dangerous. And so then even like, once things were going to come back, there were protests from library staff. There was library staff that definitely thought like, we have been the caretakers of these documents and we want to retain them.
28:00 Holly Frey? And there was a little bit of push and pull over whether they would go to the National Archives, which they eventually did.
28:09 Speaker 03 In military families, service is more than a job. It's a legacy. At American Military University, that legacy can help open new doors through education. If someone in your family served in the military, you could be eligible for reduced tuition. Take the next step with flexible online programs built for real life. Learn more at amu.apus.edu/military.
28:33 Holly Frey? A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. Tune in for season seven of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, a Ruby Studio production in partnership with Argenx. Hosted by public health and policy expert Dr. Martine Hackett, Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition pushes the conversation within the rare disease community forward. Featuring guests living with MG, CIDP, myositis, SMA, and other rare autoimmune conditions, each episode explores hope, progress, and connection. How does research create new opportunities? How do shared experiences help light the way forward? How do we best show up for each other?
29:18 Holly Frey? Tune in to find out. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
29:31 Speaker 07 That sound? That's the National Squash League. Pro teams, the world's best players, and rallies so fast you'll forget to breathe. Season four is in full swing, and every match streams free on YouTube. Big hits, bigger rivalries, and a front row seat from wherever you are. Watch every match for free on YouTube. Search National Squash League and hit subscribe or follow live updates on Instagram at NSL.Sport.
29:59 Speaker 04 This mood check is brought to you by State Farm. Porque tu bienestar también merece protección. Que tal, mi gente? Honey German checking in contigo. Take a second. Literalmente, un momentico para ti. How's your corazón feeling today? If it's a little tired, a little oof, you're not alone. Have you eaten algo rico? Taken a deep breath? Maybe even turned off your phone for cinco minutitos? I promise, the memes will still be there. Sometimes self-care isn't candles and meditation. It's just saying no. It's drinking a little bit of agua. It's letting yourself rest sin pena. You don't have to prove anything today. Just be, breathe. Estas haciendo lo mejor que puedes. And yes, that's enough.
30:43 Speaker 04 Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.
30:52 Holly Frey? The Library of Congress also does a lot of very cool programming and has done a lot of very cool programming over the years. One of which is a thing that they did for a while. I don't know if they're still doing it, called their Mostly Lost Films programs, where it would be like, they would show pieces of films that are not necessarily documented in terms of attribution, who is in them, etc. And the audience could actually help. Like, a lot of cinephiles would go and they would be like, "I have seen that actor in this other movie. Can we cross-reference him and figure out his name so that we have credits for this movie?" Like, it's like a really fun way to crowdsource people who love movies
31:36 Holly Frey? into helping to create more. More robust and complete records, which I love. And it also sounded like just a super fun way to spend a night out.
31:45 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
31:46 Holly Frey? Yeah, there are so many fascinating treasures. One of the things that I love in every interview I've ever seen Dr. Carla Hayden do is she talks a lot about like the incredible treasures that are actually in the Library of Congress and in libraries in general and like finding them and making sure the public understands what those things are and how they came to be in the library and how they tell the story of us as a people, as a nation, as a global community, et cetera.
32:20 Holly Frey? Like there are just some incredibly cool things. The Bay Psalm Book, which was published in 1640, is one of the, is that the first book that was actually completely published in the North American colonies? I think, but they have a, one of the only surviving copies of it, which was bequeathed to them. It was loaned to them, I think in 1965 by Mrs. Adrian Cindron. And then when she passed, it was bequeathed. It was on loan until she died and then the library took ownership of it officially. But there are a lot of little things like that that you think about that are
33:02 Holly Frey? incredibly rare and interesting that are just lurking in libraries. Some you can't necessarily see. Some are in special collections that like you have to jump through some hoops to get access to for reasons of preservation. But it's just incredibly cool stuff, in my opinion.
33:20 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
33:21 Holly Frey? I love a library.
33:22 Tracy V. Wilson? A Library of Congress thing that we sort of alluded to in the episode, but didn't specifically talk about was the Chronicling America Historical Newspapers Collection.
33:31 Holly Frey? Yeah.
33:31 Tracy V. Wilson? That you can get to online, which is jointly done by the Library of Congress and the National Endowment for the Humanities. There've been obviously budget cut and other cut things affecting both of these. The last I saw, there were concerns about whether these cuts meant new items not being added to this collection.
33:58 Tracy V. Wilson? And like, I don't know if there's been a more recent update on that, but like the, that's something that I use for the podcast.
34:07 Holly Frey? Yeah.
34:08 Tracy V. Wilson? Continually.
34:09 Holly Frey? It kind of goes back to what you were saying earlier of, I don't think people necessarily realize how much librarians do and how many different sorts of services they offer. I mean, even, um, you know, in the case of the librarian of Congress, there are parts of that job that we might not think of, like that is who selects the poet laureate, which I'm sure to some people seems like a very, um,
34:35 Tracy V. Wilson? Esoteric.
34:36 Holly Frey? lofty, right, like removed from, from our immediate day to day doings, but like, that's an important role because it's a person that represents a moment in time of our history, our communal history, um, and our written history. And I just, these are important responsibilities in addition to all of the other administrative stuff and being like the final word on decision making and whatnot for the library. Um, I, I really encourage anyone who is interested in Carla Hayden to just do a, a search for her online because you will find story after story after story of colleagues of hers who talk about her dedication, her understanding
35:18 Holly Frey? of the importance of libraries, her just willingness to do the work, whatever that requires. When she was in Baltimore, working in a, in a library, like it needed a lot of cleanup and she did not hesitate to get in there and do cleaning shifts with the, the rest of the staff and make sure that like everything was getting done and that there were just enough people on hand and enough, you know, arms to do the labor and, and she is dedicated and that's why it really upset me when she was fired. So lest I cry some more.
35:52 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
35:54 Holly Frey? I'm trying to think of another funny library story. Other than, you know, people doing all of the research work for their kids to get a degree that they didn't earn. I still marvel at that one. I'm like, have you thought this through?
36:11 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah. I feel like that's kind of feeds into the bigger, a bigger conversation that's going on now about like the use of large language models and things like chat GPT and kids using those to basically write their papers. And it's like, the process of writing the paper is what's important here. Like, yes, that, like, that's your, that's part of the learning and the demonstration of what you have learned.
36:45 Holly Frey? Well, and it's like, I want to be like, look, I get it. We essentially write a research paper every week, some weeks too.
36:52 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
36:53 Holly Frey? Because that's our job. And it can be arduous in their days where you're like, I don't want to. And I understand the impulse to give into that.
37:01 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
37:02 Holly Frey? But like, you're, I mean, I still, in my mid 50s, having done this job for a while, I still feel like I'm learning new ways to research all the time and about new, new research resources. And all of that is both illuminating and enriching. And like, the hard parts often result in, you know, a feeling of growth in terms of even if it's just my grasp of what's available to me. So I, I hate to think of people cheating themselves out of that discovery. But that may also sound very pie in the sky. I don't know.
37:38 Tracy V. Wilson? Anyway. Yeah. I'm just looking at our production calendar and I just realized it is unplanned that Monday's episode was inspired by that RFK Junior speech. And this one is inspired by the firing of the librarian of Congress. Like that, we didn't come together and say, let's have a really political week of the show.
38:05 Holly Frey? No. And the thing is, right? Like, I know, I'm sure there are people for whom I was thinking about this while I was working on this one, that they'll be like, there are way bigger, scarier things going on than Library of Congress related stuff. And I 100% understand that.
38:22 Holly Frey? This one really hit me because of my background in working in, in university libraries and my fondest, listen, I have such fond memories of that AACR2 manual, which is not what's used anymore. That was the Anglo-American cataloging rules.
38:37 Tracy V. Wilson? Okay.
38:38 Holly Frey? Loved my AACR2 manual. Now that's,
38:43 Holly Frey? it's replaced. Is it resource? Description? I don't remember the name of the new manual. I'm sorry. That came out after I stopped cataloging. But like, I just, I think about it because I, in, in thinking about that and wondering like, are people going to think this is an unimportant aspect of the avalanche of tumult that's going on? I remember at a pretty early age, I was either a senior in high school or possibly a freshman in college. But I remember talking to my childhood best friend, and this will sound like the silliest, nerdiest conversation. But we were literally having this conversation about what a miracle a book feels like.
39:26 Holly Frey? Because you literally have at your fingertips a portal into someone else's thoughts. And how it is such a unique resource and such an amazing thing. And having those kinds of things available to us. And particularly the efforts that have gone on since Dr. Hayden's appointment to really open the doors of the Library of Congress. So everyone has access to an entire universe of, of being able to tap into the things other people have thought and believed and, and questioned and discussed. That it, that's why it sort of hits me very, very hard. It's like, don't close that door. We need that one a lot.
40:10 Holly Frey? Anyway, I'm, I'm talking very pie in the sky about my feelings and books, but I hope everybody gets to read lots of books they love. Listen, it doesn't have to be highbrow. Reading is great. It's great therapy. It's a great to make your brain happy. It can be very soothing. It can be enlightening.
40:32 Tracy V. Wilson? And if your reading is audiobooks?
40:34 Holly Frey? Amazing.
40:35 Tracy V. Wilson? Great.
40:36 Holly Frey? I'm a big audiobook fan because I don't, sometimes my eyes are just tired.
40:42 Holly Frey? We read a lot for our jobs sometimes if it's my pleasure. It's true. My pleasure reading is often audiobooks because I could just sit and I can do stuff in the sewing room or paint something or be driving or whatever, and I still get the information. It makes me very happy. In any case, if this is your weekend coming up and you have time off, I hope that you get to read for pleasure, enjoy an audiobook, whatever makes you happy. I hope that everybody's cool to you and that you can be kind to everyone you encounter and that nobody's a jerk. That may sound like a very high bar, but I'm hoping. I'm gonna hope every time. I'm gonna be optimistic about it. If it's not your time off, I still
41:27 Holly Frey? hope that everybody's cool to you and that your responsibilities do not preclude you from reading or listening to an audiobook or doing whatever it is that makes you feel refreshed, renewed, revitalized, and enriched. We will be right back here tomorrow with a classic episode, and then on Monday, we will have something brand new that may or may not be inspired by current events.
41:55 Tracy V. Wilson? Stuff You Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
42:09 Holly Frey? A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. In season seven of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, host Martine Hackett continues the conversation with people living with MG, CIDP, and the broader rare disease community, exploring what comes after diagnosis through stories of hope, progress, and connection. Produced by Ruby Studio in partnership with Argenx. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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