“Who built the English Channel?” and other questions posed to librarians

If we have a question about anything, however bizarre, the impulse for those of us with access to a computer would be to insert the query into a search engine and see what the internet throws up. But before that came into existence, people went to their neighborhood librarian and the January 2016 issue of Harper’s magazine has a list of some of the questions posed to the New York Public Library’s Reference and Research Services between 1940 and 1989.
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Is anyone having trouble viewing embedded charts and graphs?

I sometimes embed graphics such as charts, graphs, cartoons, and other images in my posts. They are meant to appear in the body of the post and I check that they do before posting. But one reader Steve informs me that for him the graphic sometimes appears only as a link and he has to click on the link to see it which is, of course, a nuisance.
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Democratic debate review

The fourth Democratic party debate was spirited. While the positions of the candidates were already known to me, it would have been informative to the more casual voter. It was refreshing to hear people who are science and reality-based. There was no immigrant-bashing, refugee-bashing, or Muslim-bashing, and little chest-beating and jingoism about how America is the greatest country so suck on that, world! Yeah! (You can read the transcript here.)
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Clinton’s attacks on Sanders signal worries

The Democratic party establishment and the head of the Democratic National Committee Debbie Wasserman-Schultz have been totally in the tank for Hillary Clinton and have tried as much as possible to ensure her a smooth path to her nomination by having as few debates as possible and scheduling them at times with low viewership, such as weekend evenings and during the holiday season, so that her opponents do not get much visibility. In fact today’s debate is not only on a Sunday, it is scheduled at the same time as an NFL playoff game and the popular PBS soap opera Downton Abbey.
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Christie’s pants catch fire

As I said before, facts don’t seem to matter anymore in the Republican primary race and fact-checkers must feel that they are crying in the wind because the candidates now just flat out lie, not bothering to provide even a veneer of plausibility. But even within that fog of lies, Chris Christie stands out for his brazenness, giving even Carly Fiorina, whose supreme disregard for facts was a wonder to behold, a run for her money.
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The unlikelihood of a brokered Republican convention

Given the large number of candidates for the Republican nomination and the fact that even the top candidate Donald Trump is currently only scoring around 30%, there has been considerable speculation that the convention might arrive with no candidate getting a majority of the delegates necessary to win on the first ballot. The media in particular have been salivating at this prospect of a brokered convention full of wheeling and dealing and knock-down, drag-out, slugfests because usually these conventions are boring, tightly-staged, ceremonial affairs.
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