I am a big believer in public libraries, seeing them as one of the great egalitarian institutions, enabling anyone to gain access to the world of information and entertainment even if they have no money. But for precisely that reason, the rapacious capitalists in the US dislike them, since in their view the idea that something should be offered free to everyone is anathema. It is part of their effort to undermine access to what are clearly social goods, such as universal free health care and free public education.

So defenders of libraries need to have all the arguments to combat the capitalists who use social conservatives to attack libraries because they have offerings that do not conform to their personal prejudices.

Ashlie D. Stevens writes that the Chicago Public Library system has introduced a novel idea. At the bottom of each check out receipt, it tells the user how much money they saved by using the library and not buying the items.

One afternoon I came home with “Magic Is Dead: My Journey Into the World’s Most Secretive Society of Magicians,” “Village School” and “Cold Comfort Farm,” a stack suggesting either eclectic tastes or a person throwing darts at a bookshelf. Shortly afterward, I received the standard email from the library listing my new acquisitions and their due dates.

Then, underneath the administrative business, came a little piece of information I had somehow never noticed before: You just saved $58.94 by using your library. You have saved $231.79 this past year and $1,107.24 since you began using the library!

I stared at this. My first thought was not, “What a compelling demonstration of the economic value of municipal services.”

My first thought was: I want that number higher.

I took a screenshot and sent it to my sister, who lives in another state.

“Oh, that’s satisfying,” she replied. “I wish my library did that.”

She was right. Somewhere inside me, a tiny rewards-program customer had been activated.

After that, I started browsing the library website differently: less like a catalog, more like a streaming service with unusually eccentric licensing agreements. Did I need the complete box set of “Nip/Tuck”? Maybe. A Blu-ray collection of British noir? Quite possibly. What about both movies called “The Illusionist” — the bittersweet French animated one about an aging magician and the Edward Norton one in which he is also, confusingly, a magician?

If the library adds up all the savings of all its users, the number it arrives at would be a powerful and tangible demonstration of how important libraries are to people and communities. I am going to suggest this idea to the two local libraries that I frequent.

I own a lot of books. But many of them, including the one I am currently reading, were first borrowed from the library and then, while reading them, I decided that I wanted to own them for future reference or other reasons.

Back in 2014, I had a blog post about a community of migrant workers that are not what you first think of when you use the term. I will not repeat what I said there but it is about elderly people who have reached retirement age without sufficient resources to retire. Following the recession of 207-2009, they used what little money they had to buy a van and convert it into a home and then drive around the country doing low-level temporary jobs such as stocking retailer warehouses and cleaning workplaces and parks and the like. They park in campgrounds that are often provided by the companies who are happy to obtain the services of older people who will accept temporary, minimum-wage jobs under poor conditions without complaining. There is even a name for them: workampers. (Someone who had been a workamper commented on my post.)

The post was based on a long article The end of retirement: When you can’t afford to stop working by Jessica Bruder that appeared in Harper’s magazine , which was later expanded into a 2017 book Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century. In 2020, this was made into a film Nomadland that won three Academy Awards, for best picture, best director and best actor.
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It takes very little to set the rightwing nut jobs off into starting a new front in the culture wars, usually over things that are either non-existent or highly unlikely, such as fears that immigrants are eating their pets or that a drug cartels are taking over American city streets or that it was forbidden to say “Merry Christmas” any more.

I find it particularly amusing when right wingers get up in arms when some recounting of stories in films and TV do not conform to their weird ideas of authenticity. It becomes even more ludicrous when the stories are purely fictional so that appeals to history make no sense. Remember the insistence that Santa Claus is white? Or the flap over the live action remake of the Little Mermaid because the title character was a person of color?

The latest silliness involves Christopher Nolan’s film The Odyssey that has opened to rave reviews and massive box office sales. It is the latest retelling of the Homeric poem and it features actors of color in key roles such as Helen of Troy and a transgender actor in another role. Of course, the whole epic is an obvious myth (the fact that Helen was hatched from an egg that was the product of Zeus transforming himself into a swan and mating with Leda, the queen of Sparta, should have been a clue) but that did not deter these loonies.
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