Libraries and Librarians–United States
Source: The New York Times
“Subversive Reading”
From the article, Ashcroft versus the librarians is something else — one of those spectacles that manage, like book bannings in suburban schools or the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, to glamorize reading and make it seem to be, as it sometimes and in some places actually is, a high-stakes activity. Suddenly, your unprepossessing branch library — a low-slung 60’s building, perhaps, and not in the greatest repair — looms as an epic battleground of ideas. I love my local library, with its notice board shingled with leaflets for every possible community activity, its shelving carts teeming with random piles of books I’d never discover on my own, even its faithful cadre of old men with rattling coughs reading back issues of Popular Mechanics. I am not used to thinking of it, however, as a place of vivid political drama. Truth be told, it’s a bit of a sad case, recently forced, by budget cuts, to close on Fridays.
See Also: “Ashcroft Declassifies Some Patriot Act Records”

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