Paula Poundstone at Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me!

AL Focus visited ALTAFF Spokesperson Paula Poundstone July 9 before a taping of National Public Radio's Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me! attended by 500 librarians. The conversation covered Poundstone's role as ALTAFF spokesperson, her kids' reading habits, The Three Stooges, the dreaded acronym game, and the horrors of math. Transcript to come.

July 27, 2009

AL Focus visited ALTAFF Spokesperson Paula Poundstone July 9 before a taping of National Public Radio’s Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me! attended by 500 librarians. The conversation covered Poundstone’s role as ALTAFF spokesperson, her kids’ reading habits, The Three Stooges, the dreaded acronym game, and the horrors of math. Transcript to come.

Before her Opening General Session speech at the 2009 ALA Annual Conference, American Libraries spoke with former Playboy Enterprises CEO Christie Hefner about her message to librarians, her memories of Judith Krug and the important First Amendment battles they fought, and what helped her to succeed in what some would call a man's job. Transcript to come.

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Little Village (Dubuque, Iowa), Dec. 4
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Casey Newton writes: “At the moment, no one knows for sure whether the large language models that are now under development will achieve superintelligence and transform the world. And in that uncertainty, two primary camps of criticism have emerged. The first camp, which I associate with the external critics, holds that artificial intelligence (AI) is fake and sucks. The second camp, which I associate more with the internal critics, believes that AI is real and dangerous. Today I want to lay out why I believe AI is real and dangerous.”

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Latia Ward writes: “One way to keep current with what students think of the library and its services is through Student Library Advisory Committee meetings. These meetings are a way to gather feedback and reinforce the library as a welcoming place. How do librarians create a welcoming environment within Student Library Advisory Committee meetings? Librarians create a welcoming environment through community, purpose, and dedicated space.” Also see part 1 of this blog post.

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Eleanor Hecks writes: “Few things are as frustrating to a user as when a site won’t respond. Unfortunately, it’s also an all-too-common scenario. Graceful degradation is a design approach that ensures the basics of a website will still function even if specific individual parts of it stop working. The approach removes single points of failure: just because one thing stops working doesn’t mean the system as a whole fails. A site following this principle fails in pieces instead of all at once, so the most important features remain available when some components encounter an error.”

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Camruinn Morgan-Rumsey and Lexi Lepof write: “On December 3, Knox County (Tenn.) schools received a list from the district of books to be removed from school libraries under Tennessee’s Age-Appropriate Materials Act. Knox County’s board of education voted in July, passing a policy to remove ‘explicit’ books from everyday student access in response to the new law. Some of the books on the list of nearly 50 titles might surprise parents. Among those to be removed are Shel Silverstein’s A Light in the Attic and Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five.”

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Joe Foley writes: “Copyright rules vary from country to country and have changed over time. In the US, works created between 1929 and 1963 that gave notice and renewed copyright have 95 years from their first publication date. That means that on January 1, 2025, a host of works from 1929 will enter the public domain. This means that copyright will expire on Buck Rogers, Captain Easy, Horace Horsecollar, Tintin, Hal Foster’s first Tarzan comic strips and, yes, Popeye.” Other notable works entering public domain in the United States include the Marx Brothers’ first film, The Cocoanuts, contralto Marian Anderson’s first record, and Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms.

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Paula Poundstone at Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me!

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Christie Hefner Interview

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