Dictating All the Terms that Define Their Love

Jenny Block, "Dictating All the Terms that Define Their Love," (Vows) New York Times, Nov 21, 2021, p. ST17.

Over time, Ms. Wilson said her annoynace evolved into an appreciation for Mx. Reynolds' "big personality, humor and kindness." But months would pass before they actually "had a proper conversation," she added. On April 22, 2013, the last day of class, the both "hung out" with Ms. Edmondson t teh camps library's cafe and the two exhanged numbers.

COMMENT 

In this romantic tale, the couple self describes as "lesbian-queer, interracial, progressively Christian."  They met as students in a human behavior course, but made the personal connection within the safe space of a library, and eventually married each other. 

50 Years On, a Legacy of 'Plant -Based' Living

 Steven Kurutz, "50 Years On, a Legacy of 'Plant -Based' Living," New York Times, Nov. 21, 2021, p. ST9. 

Ms Lappé was 25 and attending graduate school at the Univesity of California, Berkeley, when she began to quetion her life's purpose.  Like many in her generation, she'd read "The Population Bomb," the 1968 book by Paul Ehrlich that predicted (wrongly, it turned out) a coming amine because of overpopulation, and she was inspired by the ecological movement that led to the first Earth Day. 

Ms Lappé was also being exposed to new and different foods, including bulgur and tofu.  She started auditing courses on soil science and poring over academic reports in the agricultural library at Berkeley, to better understand the food system and global hunger. 

She was ruprised by her findings; notably, that over half of the harvested acreage in the United States at teh time went to feeding livestock, leaving more than enough food to go around if those resources were redirected.  

COMMENT

This research led Lappé to write the bestselling "Diet for a Small Planet" published in 1971.  It is not too much to say that she discovered her life's purpose in the library.  It is remarkable that her insight about the food system was available to anyone, but the agricultural professors and students had failed to see it. 

Windswept

 Annabel Abbs, Windswept: Walking the Paths of Trailblazing Women, Tin House, 2021.

I started exploring onine, prowling around second-hand booshops, investigating library catalogues.  Women remained elusive.  As Rebecca Solnit, one of the few female writers on the subject of waling, wrote "Througout the history of walking...the principal figures...have been men." 

Every now and then, Virginia Woolf's name appeared.  I'd spent my teenage years in the shadow of the South Downs, where Woolf had lived and walked for much of her adult life.  My parents were still there, so whenever I got the chance I plotted a Woof route and began tracing her footsteps over the South Downs. [xxi] 

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COMMENT 

After noticing that her colleciton of nature book is largely by and about mean,  Abbs began to research accounts of women  walking.  She notes that the absence of literature is a self-reinforcing loop:  "Many more have disappeared, the casualties of a self-referencing male canon of walking and nature literature, of men-only hiking and climbing clubs, of publishing firms historically run by men, of miguided concerns for female safety." [xxiii] 
      

How I Became Extremely Open Minded

Ross Douthat. "How I Became Extemely Open Minded. New York Times, Nov. 7, 2021 p. SR8.

I'm bad, but not that bad, I would think while walking through a photograph exhibit on chonic Lyme in the local library, with its pictures of hollow-eyed sufferers with platoons of pill bottles -- until I foun myself with drawrs full of enough pill bottles to put those medicne cabinets to shame. 

COMMENT

The library exhibt doesn't exactly help, but it becomes part of the story for Douthat who is dealing with chronic Lyme disease.  What does help is an alternative medicien Rife machine that Douthat reads about in a New Yorker article.   He doesn't say whether or not he reads the magazine at the library, but I would guess that he probably has his own subscription