David Pennington

“The culture tells us two things can’t coexist. People say to me ‘I want to love my life but also pay my rent’ or ‘I want to be super mature but also child-like’, or ‘I want to travel but I’m also a homebody’ or ‘I want to be productive and also relaxed.’ Calm down... you can do both.” — Martha Beck

All this said, Dewey was racist as actual fuck.

. As author Leah Price put it in her book How to Do Things with Nooks in Victorian Britain: “Once a sign of economic power, reading is now the province of those whose time lacks market value.”

Not because machines are writing, but because we are beginning to write like them. Predictability has become a virtue. Voice is flattened into tone. Style is reduced to format.

The important tools will find you .

In this frivolous new world, everything must be pleasing and inoffensive. Everything and everybody gets marketed like an exciting new product—even old, creepy politicians, or ancient film actors, or 80-year-old rock stars.

They all get repackaged and rebranded—thank the digital gods for those apps that make old stuff look new! Everything is now... See more

Which brings us back to the question of traditionalism and dynamism, and their potential interaction: if you have had a cultural revolution that cleared too much ground, razed too many bastions and led to a kind of cultural debasement and forgetting, you probably need to go backward, or least turn that way for recollection, before you can hope to... See more

But how do you keep talented people happy and creative?

“What we can do is construct an environment that nurtures trusting and respectful relationships and unleashes everyone’s creativity. If we get that right, the result is a vibrant community where talented people are loyal to one another and their collective work, everyone feels that they are

... See more

The point Klinenberg wanted to make was this: If there was no such thing as a library, and someone proposed it today, there's a 99.9% chance they and their “radical and crazy idea” would be laughed out of the room.

But, as we know, it’s not a crazy idea.