China watches Jon Stewart, Robin Sloan likes libraries, and NPR tackles race: Bookishness for Apr. 15, 2013


Blog alert
“Remember when folks used to talk about being ‘post-racial’? Well, we’re definitely not that. We’re a team of journalists fascinated by the overlapping themes of race, ethnicity and culture, how they play out in our lives and communities, and how all of this is shifting.” NPR’s new blog, Code Switch.

Strolling through human knowledge
Penumbra

Robin Sloan on libraries: “Libraries need to always be something – there should be a place that has that feeling. The important thing is not somehow that it has all the books because they don’t actually have all the books. But it is the feeling of being able to walk down the shelves and kind of let your eyes de-focus a bit and just let something catch your eye. I heard someone talking the other day about how their kids have a favorite Dewey Decimal range. You know, man, they love zero to a hundred because it’s UFOs and yetis and aliens. How awesome is that? I don’t want to say you can’t do that on the Internet. I mean, of course there is serendipity on the Internet, but I just think being able to literally walk through human knowledge is pretty awesome.” (Image via.)

Is life but a walking shadow?
Feeling angsty? Maybe move past the 158.1s (that’s Dewey for self-help, just so you know) and head straight for 822.33 (Shakespeare). So suggest scientists at Liverpool University, where it has been found that the classics are better than other reading material at stimulating the area of your brain that controls self-reflection.

“In television terms, The Daily Show is an undocumented immigrant in China.”
How Jon Stewart blew up in China.

To do
Graphically Speaking: Dirty Comics features Charles Brownstein, head of the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, discussing censorship in comic books. Tuesday, Apr. 16, 2013, 7 – 8:30 pm, North York Central Library auditorium. Free!