Barbara Adde > Recent Status Updates

…the story from another perspective. All of these strategies remain to be tried. For most nonprofits in the literary space, however, copyright litigation is neither on brand nor on mission. It may take a library, a law school, or a specially created nonprofit to push the legal envelope.

To stay on the right side of the law, nonprofits should be sure to demonstrate good faith by retaining the book’s copyright notice, the names of the author and illustrator, and the original publisher. Recoloring a well-known picture book’s images to ‘diversify’ its white characters would likely also be deemed fair use. So would altering the text of an outdated children’s book to retell …

A connection between reading and human rights has long been recognized in terms of liberty from censorship. In the 1960s, the global community dedicated increased attention to the entitlement of education for literacy. Today, the critical connection between reading and human rights is the need to explains the availability of reading material.

Between 500M and 1.25B children currently suffer from extreme book hunger: in their languages, children’s books are not available at any price.

First Book delivers around 20M books to 3M students each year.

“Access to Print in Lower-Income and Middle-Income Communities” - study by Profs Susan B Neuman and Donna Celano (Phila PA)

“Although children in the poor neighborhoods depended more heavily on public institutions for access to books, their libraries had shorter hours, lower-quality books, and more dilapidated facilities.”

4 challenges:
- reaching readers who can’t afford going prices
- serving a more diverse population
- developing new titles in neglected languages
- developing more cost-effective distribution methods, both in print and digitally.

Libraries also have very limited reach in most of the world, are expensive to run, and are limited to purchasing titles already in print. In the 21st century, more innovative approaches are needed.

Philanthropists founded public libraries in the 19th and 20th centuries to bring the luxury of reading within the reach of the common man. By themselves, however, libraries cannot achieve this goal. Children’s TV programming comes straight to the home, with hundreds of options available at no direct cost. Books must become similarly convenient if they are to compete effectively for children’s time.”

The book market especially fails at producing diverse books for cultural minorities, accessible books for readers with blindness or dyslexia, and books in disadvantaged languages.

Summer vacations created a gap of about 3 months between middle- and lower-class students, according to a meta-analysis by Harris Cooper and colleagues….

Simply receiving 10 books, with no further intervention, led to greater summer reading. Over 3 years, reading achievement scores among this group noticeably improved compared to a matched group of students who were not given books.

“Then the writing became so fluid that I sometimes felt as if I were writing for the sheer pleasure of telling a story, which may be the human condition that most resembles levitation.”

“…it is because the same iron rigor needed to begin the book is required to end it. But a story has no beginning, I end: Either it works or it doesn’t. And if it doesn’t, my own experience, and the experience of others, shows that most of the time it is better for one’s health to start again in another direction, or toss the story in the wastebasket.”

“The effort involved in writing a short story is as intense as beginning a novel, wheee everything must be defined in the first paragraph: structure, tone, style, rhythm, length, and sometimes even the personality of a character. All the rest is the pleasure of writing, the most intimate, solitary pleasure one can imagine, and if the rest of one’s life is not spent correcting the novel…

“And if they did just want to cause problems and noodle around all day, there’s a more efficient way to do that: become a member of Congress.”

W. Kamau Bell on DOJ

“The fact is that federal employees go to work every day with the explicit job description of making the lives of everyday Americans better. Contrary to GOPopular belief, these employees aren’t lazy or conspiring how to make Americans’ lives harder. They aren’t allowed to noodle around with ideas for too long without showing real-world progress.”

Sarah Vowell on NARA:

“But I’m no different than any other citizen searching the National Archives. I found what I was looking for: an inventive civil servant who answers to get people. I was looking for a country I want to live in.”

Sarah Vowell on NARA

“When Thomas Jefferson paid Napoleon for Louisiana, it wasn’t for the land itself, as France owned very little of it; rather, it was for the proprietary right to make binding treaties with the territory’s Native nations and pay them for their lands.”

Geraldine Brooks

“Ninety-six percent of federal revenue is raised by the IRS, to be used in everything from a veteran’s prosthetic to the rocket that recently changed the trajectory of an asteroid and might one day save the planet.”

“… terrorism we’re instead flowing right to Uncle Sam, to the Victims of State Sponsored Terrorism Fund.”

Geraldine Brooks on Jarod Koopman/IRS

“Using their tracing techniques and the powers of the know-your-customer banking regulations, Koopman’s team was able to secretly take over al-Qassam’s websites and its donation button and, later, do the same for sites funding ISIS and Al-Qaeda. For about a month, while the DOJ worked up indictments, all the funds going into the sites to support …

John Lanchester on LS/DOL

“The new enemy of the Enlightenment doesn’t believe in any kind of verities beyond personal feeling and experience. It has no use for statistics or numbers or data. It doesn’t hold any truths to be self-evident.”

“ Needs have a saying, ‘The plural of anecdote is not data.’ In other words, your story is not a general truth.”