Archive for April 2022

I have the great pleasure of serving on the City of Lawrence leadership team. For the icebreaker at a recent meeting, everyone shared a favorite book or two. It made me so proud as a librarian, resident, and lifelong reader how important reading is to leaders in our city government. The list was wonderfully diverse…

TikTok is a strange and baffling place. Even though I’m a semi-regular user and create content for the library’s TikTik page (sidenote: go follow us, we’re super fun), I don’t understand how or why certain trends happen the way they do. Several months ago, the song “No Children” inexplicably became a TikTok trend. “No Children…

Spring is approaching! Well, it might already be here, but the ground is too wet to work and our weather has careened from sun to snow too wildly to really get started in the garden. By the time you read this, though, we’ll probably have transitioned more solidly into summer, and it’ll be the perfect…

For a certain kind of library person - those of us dedicating our time to digging through the archives of local history and scores of genealogical records - the reveal of the 1950 Census was THE event of 2022, anxiously awaited for the past decade.

In his last essay, writer Barry Lopez asked, “How can we embrace fearlessly the burning world?” If anyone knows, it may well be Terry Tempest Williams. Terry will be in Lawrence on Wednesday, April 13, though virtually via the Hall Center for Humanities, and again on the 14th for virtual coffee. She'll be talking about one…

In Jonathan Drori’s book, Around the World in 80 Plants, we’re swept away to different ends of the globe as we learn about the rich, surprising history of plants. Drori takes us from the East Mediterranean and South East Asia to the Americas and everything in between. With quick wit and gorgeous prose, even the unlikeliest…