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The Future of Libraries Is Coffee Shops, and Other News
By
Dan Piepenbring
December 18, 2014
On the Shelf
Photo: Berit, via Flickr
A new report suggests that to stay relevant, libraries must become more like coffee shops, “
vibrant and attractive community hubs
.” You know, with Wi-Fi.
And the future of roads is fewer roads, because we have too damn many of them. The
Trip Generation Manual
, a commonly consulted urban-planning guide, “may overestimate the number of trips generated from a new development by as much as 55 percent—‘phantom trips’ … The result is that
cities may build way more roads than necessary
, perpetuating sprawl and leaving less street space for non-drivers in the process.”
Our editor Lorin Stein is judging
Nowhere Magazine
’s travel-writing contest—they’re “
looking for young, old, novice and veteran voices to send us stories that possess a powerful sense of place
.” First prize is a thousand dollars and submissions are due January 1.
Secret Behavior
is a new magazine about “
what intimacy looks like
”: “The first issue, which explored anonymity, is full of emotional money shots: self-portraits of men’s feet when they climax from masturbation (paired with their responses to the artist’s wanted ad), breakup fiction by Catherine Lacey, Jesper Fabricius’s anatomical encyclopedia made from close-cropped pornography.”
A few months ago, John Paul Rollert wrote a piece for the
Daily
about
an Ayn Rand conference in Vegas
. Now he’s
reported more on it in
The Atlantic
: “Escapism is the allure of Las Vegas. The city—with its shows, its clubs, even its casinos—is ultimately incidental. You come to leave your self behind. Escapism of a different sort is also the allure of a radical philosophy. It seduces not by promising a temporary solution to the contest between the grosser passions and personal integrity … but by providing an alternative vision of what the ‘real world’ constitutes.”
With his album
Pom Pom
, Ariel Pink has delivered some of the best pop music of 2014: “
It all seems to speak to people in that world, all these aged tweens
,” he said in an interview: “Everybody still thinks they’re a tween, but they’re not. They’re former tweens. Generation tweens … the new twelve-year-olds pop up and usurp the former twelve-year-olds’ hegemony. That’s what I love about the music industry. It’s run by these kids. The children dictate what’s cool, and then everybody else just thinks that they’re a kid the rest of their lives.”
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