#libraryofcongress — Public Fediverse posts

Library News

https://barland7.wordpress.com/2026/09/06/library-news-25/

Library News

https://barland7.wordpress.com/2026/09/06/library-news-25/

Library News

https://barland7.wordpress.com/2026/09/06/library-news-25/

Library News

https://barland7.wordpress.com/2026/09/06/library-news-25/

Library News

https://barland7.wordpress.com/2026/09/06/library-news-25/

"Soul Man" is a 1967 song written and composed by #IsaacHayes and #DavidPorter, first successful as a number 2 hit single by #AtlanticRecords #soul duo #SamAndDave, which consisted of #SamuelSamMoore and #DavidDavePrater. In 2019, "Soul Man" was selected for preservation in the #NationalRecordingRegistry as "culturally, historically, and aesthetically significant" by the #LibraryOfCongress.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FTWH1Fdkjow

"Soul Man" is a 1967 song written and composed by #IsaacHayes and #DavidPorter, first successful as a number 2 hit single by #AtlanticRecords #soul duo #SamAndDave, which consisted of #SamuelSamMoore and #DavidDavePrater. In 2019, "Soul Man" was selected for preservation in the #NationalRecordingRegistry as "culturally, historically, and aesthetically significant" by the #LibraryOfCongress.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FTWH1Fdkjow

"Soul Man" is a 1967 song written and composed by #IsaacHayes and #DavidPorter, first successful as a number 2 hit single by #AtlanticRecords #soul duo #SamAndDave, which consisted of #SamuelSamMoore and #DavidDavePrater. In 2019, "Soul Man" was selected for preservation in the #NationalRecordingRegistry as "culturally, historically, and aesthetically significant" by the #LibraryOfCongress.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FTWH1Fdkjow

"Soul Man" is a 1967 song written and composed by #IsaacHayes and #DavidPorter, first successful as a number 2 hit single by #AtlanticRecords #soul duo #SamAndDave, which consisted of #SamuelSamMoore and #DavidDavePrater. In 2019, "Soul Man" was selected for preservation in the #NationalRecordingRegistry as "culturally, historically, and aesthetically significant" by the #LibraryOfCongress.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FTWH1Fdkjow

"Soul Man" is a 1967 song written and composed by #IsaacHayes and #DavidPorter, first successful as a number 2 hit single by #AtlanticRecords #soul duo #SamAndDave, which consisted of #SamuelSamMoore and #DavidDavePrater. In 2019, "Soul Man" was selected for preservation in the #NationalRecordingRegistry as "culturally, historically, and aesthetically significant" by the #LibraryOfCongress.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FTWH1Fdkjow

Library of Congress Blogs: 2026 Designing Storage Architectures for Digital Collections. “This year’s event attracted 172 of the world’s leading experts in data storage infrastructure, best practices, innovation, and future projections of the digital preservation ecosystem. The Library’s DSA organizers arranged a robust agenda to foster open discussion of current challenges in digital […]

What To Watch On YouTube Right Now – Part 138

Welcome back my readers, YouTube viewers and all others who followed this series of articles focused on YouTube videos worth watching.

Have you been searching for something fun or interesting to watch on YouTube? Do you feel bored right now and you crave for something to see on the world’s most popular online video destination?

I recommend you check out the following videos I found.

#1 How To Get The Strongest And Most Optimized Spaceship Crew In Starfield – This year, Bethesda launched several important updates to make their 2023 science fiction role-playing game Starfield better and they also offered new DLC for those who crave for new content. One of the more defining aspects of the game is space travel and this includes setting up your own crew for your spaceship and there is impact on its functions and capabilities. If you want to learn how to get the stronger and most optimized crew for your ship, I encourage you watch the video below.

https://youtu.be/vy8iOx7eqVU?si=gn7W1mZxTOQ4SSrd

#2 Mari Iijima And The Defining Song of Macross: Do You Remember Love? – I really love watching the 1984 anime feature film Macross: Do You Remember Love? Apart from the great animation, the spectacle, the memorable characters and the solid storytelling, the movie also has a great soundtrack made to delight the long-time Macross fans. Still, the movie has its very own song performed by none other than Mari Iijima (Minmay) and it is a classic among Macross fans. In the videos below, you will see Mari Iijima perform the song live in a 1980s TV broadcast and the song playing with selected footage of Macross: Do You Remember Love? Enjoy these!

https://youtu.be/OfuW_Wbt73c?si=Q1DE8eJxo4Zk90pc

https://youtu.be/uJBMYV9e1Nc?si=veDGYU4r7s0flQ_H

#3 The Tuna City In Japan Is Changing With Tourism In Mind – If you plan to visit Japan at all, you might want to discover Miura City located in Kanagawa Prefecture. Miura City is famous for its fresh tuna and in recent times there has been a series of changes as several room-only hotels and new trends have sprouted as the locality is finding new ways to turn visitors into overnight guests. This is a place I would like to visit someday if ever I get the opportunity to return to Japan. Watch and learn from the Nippon TV video below.

https://youtu.be/fUPP30fYH78?si=MrC6Dml3IRVe7fcV

#4 Women’s Rights Activist Marries Islamist And Things Went Wrong – Did you notice that there is a gradual rising number of feminists and women’s rights activists who not embrace Islam (wicked and ugly) but also marry Islamists believing that things will be alright and they can just continue their activism. Of course, many of them activists and feminists do not fully understand Islam nor the full content of the Quran. As such, when things go very wrong, they are get into deep trouble. Watch and learn from the video below.

https://youtu.be/bx3YvoyP6cw?si=omxqhyR8CQfpfhYK

#5 Islamists Violate Hindu Women In India And Get Arrested – Let’s be very clear here. Islamists are oriented to conquer others even though they may not be numerous within a locality. Believe it or not, a group of such people who wielded power inside a business violated the Hindu women (plus at least one male employee) with regards to cultural norms and doing things that go against their faith. Even forced religious conversion happened. Watch and learn from the video below.

https://youtu.be/9xjFS-3Vuws?si=xuDIivIonrp9tQux

#6 Meatballs Reaction And Retrospective – When it comes to cinematic comedy, Bill Murray is iconic and his early work in 1979’s Meatballs already involved the late Harold Ramis and the late director Ivan Reitman. That said, there is something about Meatballs – produced for less than $2 million – that helped it achieve tremendous commercial success with ticket sales of $70 million. Remember, three of the creative minds behind the classic Ghostbusters are involved in this old movie and you will see how You, Me and The Movies react to it in the video below. Be aware that as of this writing, there are not too many movie reaction videos about Meatballs on YouTube. Also posted below is an in-depth retrospective about Meatballs by GoodBadFlicks.

https://youtu.be/nhR9xUCvpAI?si=Zh6gjAX0SdIrtSfT

https://youtu.be/D0BS-K3K_vE?si=HtyR_VThLUKv0Wj6

#7 Ashleigh Burton Reacts To The Thin Man – Have you ever heard of The Thin Man? It’s not a UFO reference. It’s the 1934 American pre-Code comedy-mystery movie that was eventually named to the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress having been deemed “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant” in 1997. Apart from its reputation in American film history, The Thin Man also resulted in five sequels. If you want to discover the 1934 movie but you don’t have the time nor resources to watch the movie, watch Ashleigh Burton’s reaction video and see how it impacts her.

https://youtu.be/IJRQXuw–20?si=mSYY7_Eb4EK6reBY

+++++

Thank you for reading. If you find this article engaging, please click the like button below, share this article to others and also please consider making a donation to support my publishing. If you are looking for a copywriter to create content for your special project or business, check out my services and my portfolio. Feel free to contact me with a private message. Also please feel free to visit my Facebook page Author Carlo Carrasco and follow me on Twitter at @CarloCarrascoPH as well as on Tumblr at https://carlocarrasco.tumblr.com/ and on Instagram athttps://www.instagram.com/authorcarlocarrasco

Yosemite 1855 and Yosemite National Park today. For more information https://newsroom.loc.gov/news/library-acquires-early-yosemite-drawing-and-rare-1855-lithograph/s/3ff9d95c-fd4c-4570-bc8e-5196289c64cb and https://www.nps.gov/yose/index.htm and https://yosemite.org/ and #interpretation #nps #nationalparks #publiclands #landscapephotography #photography Image credit (1) Thomas Almond Ayres / Library of Congress and (2) Yosemite Conservancy and National Park Service #yosemite #cawx #winter #trees #california #yosemitefalls #sun #nationalpark #geology #nature #waterfall #history #loc #library #libraryofcongress #drawing #lithograph #art

Her groundbreaking sea floor discovery was dismissed as 'girl talk.' But science proved her right.

https://web.brid.gy/r/https://www.upworthy.com/marie-tharp-tectonic-discovery

Plunder, Mystery, and Intrigue: Visiting the British Museum and the British Library

After leaving the Lake District, I traveled to London by train, for the third part of my trip. This was where I saw the most libraries during my trip. On my last day in London, August 3rd, I visited the British Museum, located in London’s West End, which was overcrowded with tourists. This made viewing the so-called “chronicle of Western collection,” which was acquired through extensive plunder and theft, as American tour guide Rick Steves describes the museum, very uncomfortable. Even so, there were two highlights. The first was the stately and round reading room. English writers Virginia Woolf and Beatrix Potter, Chinese revolutionary Sun Yat-sen, radical thinkers Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin, Black nationalist Marcus Garvey, women’s rights campaigner Sylvia Pankhurst, independence activist Mohandas K. Gandhi, and Irish author Bram Stoker all studied there.

Note: This serves as second part of my series on this blog about my library tourism last year, with the first part, about my attempted and successful library tourism in Edinburgh and Northern England, posted on this blog last week. The series begins, chronologically, with my guest post on Reel Librarians, on February 11th, in a post entitled “Edinburgh and the National Library of Scotland: Library tourism redux.” It will be reposted on here over a month later. There will be one more parts of this series, focusing on my continued library tourism in Belgium coming next week.

Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, as noted in Doyle’s “The Complete Sherlock Holmes,” studied in the reading room. In the 1893 short story “The Adventure of the Musgrave Ritual” (sometimes abbreviated as “The Musgrave Ritual”), he studied “those branches of science which might make me more efficient” in the reading room. He learned other information from the British Museum in chapter 15 of 1902 novel The Hound of the Baskervilles and “The Tiger of San Pedro” chapter, within a 1917 collection entitled His Last Bow: Some Reminiscences of Sherlock Holmes (sometimes abbreviated as “His Last Bow”). There are mentions of libraries in the short stories “The Five Orange Pips”, “The Adventure of the Engineer’s Thumb”, and “The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet” in the 1892 short story collection The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.

The same is the case for “The Musgrave Ritual,” “The ‘Gloria Scott’”, and “The Reigate Squires” all within the 1893 short story collection The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, and the stories “The Adventures of the Three Students” and “The Adventure of the Golden Pince-Nez” in the 1905 short story collection The Return of Sherlock Holmes. Apart from that, chapter 10 of The Hound of the Baskervilles, chapter 7 of the 1915 novel The Valley of Fear, and the story “The Problem of Thorn Bridge” in the 1927 set of short stories The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes feature libraries as well. Lastly, there’s a mention of a London Library in St. James’s Square and Lomax, who is said to be a “sublibrarian,” in “The Illustrious Client.” This is another short story within The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes.

In an email communication, Nathalie Belkin, an archivist who works for the London Library, told me that Doyle was a library member, joining in 1896 after his friend, and fellow writer, Arthur Griffith, nominated him. According to Belkin, Doyle was an active library user, even serving on the library’s committee. In fact, it is believed that The Illustrious Client, also entitled The Adventure of the Illustrious Client, was written in the library’s main reading room. While the borrowing history from the time has been lost, he was a “well-known fixture” of the library.

Otherwise, Karl Marx formulated ideas on communism, including within Das Kapital (also known as Capital), in the aforementioned reading room within the British Museum. Displays within the room describe it as a place for diverse thought. Many patrons left behind their mark in the visitors log. It was even one of the first places in London to have electric light (in 1879)! The room could, at maximum, hold 302 readers sitting at 38 tables, sitting across from each other, and was heated from underneath. Readers would consult a catalogue of printed books in the room’s center, then fill out a request form. In some ways, this makes this room similar to the Library of Congress’s Reading Room, since books for the British Library could be accessed there until they were moved to their current location in 1997. In fact, 62,000 people came when this reading room opened in 1857. A sign, when looking into the reading room, tells visitors to be quiet, feeding into the common conception of libraries as quiet places, which is not always the case for all libraries anymore.

What Rick Steves didn’t mention is that the historic reading room only re-opened to the public in 2024 after being closed for eleven years. The room was designed by Sydney Smirke, inspired by Rome’s domed Pantheon, and opened in 1857. It first re-opened to visitors in 2000 (after it stopped being an active reading room in 1997), then closed in 2013, when it was used for archival storage. The room, described by some as “legendary,” “stunning,” and an impressive sight for bibliophiles (protagonist and book-defender Elianna Bernstein of Bibliophile Princess would be right at home there) is not technically a library anymore. You can’t borrow any of the 25,000 books, and photography is now permitted (it wasn’t previously). Even so, it is still a marvel to see. You can even go on a twenty-minute tour there and there is currently a plan to completely transform the galleries and reading room.

The second highlight was the Enlightenment Gallery, formerly known as the King’s Library. It once held the British Library’s treasures when it was founded in 1753. Today it holds objects about the Age of Enlightenment, as Rick Steves notes. A display board, when you enter the room, says that it was developed in partnership with the House of Commons Library and the Natural History Museum. The current books on display are being loaned from the House of Commons Library. The aforementioned display notes that those who lent non-book artifacts to the gallery included the British King, the Science Museum in London, King’s College in London, Wellcome Collection, Society of Antiquities of London, Victor and Albert Museum, the Linnean Society of London, and the Royal Asiatic Society (also in London). Of these institutions, most have their own libraries. In fact, the D. Leonard Corgan Library at Kings College, the college’s main library, served as a location in Dan Brown’s controversial novel The Da Vinci Code. The building’s exterior appeared in the 2020 film Enola Holmes, a mystery film about Sherlock Holmes’ teenage sister.

The room itself was originally created, in 1823, to house King George II’s library, hence the original name. It was designed by architect Robert Smirke, known for the British Museum’s main facade and block, along with various clubs and houses within London. Of these, the Inner Temple, for which he did some work on, has a library, which continues to operate to this day, as did Bickley Hall. Smike also completed building restoration of the Bodleian Library’s Upper Reading room, which is part of the “old library.” As for the Enlightenment Gallery, it has a Greek Revival design, with neoclassical decoration. It’s said to be in keeping with the “styles of libraries in grand houses all over Britain” at the time, with claims it has echoes of “ancient wisdom and learning.” In 1998, the British Library moved to a new location across from the current St. Pancras station. The latter is not to be confused with pancreas or the Japanese anime film which centers on libraries and librarians, entitled I Want to Eat Your Pancreas. It is far too easy to call it “pancreas” by mistake, a name that almost stuck with me.

This gallery is where thousands of objects can be viewed and serves as an introduction to the British Museum’s collections. Even so, for me, I visited it at the end of my time at the overcrowded museum. I was inspired to visit this room by one particular scene in the December 2011 anime film, K-On! the Movie, a spinoff from the 2009-2010 anime series, K-On!. It features two episodes with libraries, including one about studying in the library and featuring a student librarian at an information desk. In fact, I rewatched this film before my trip to London, just for this scene. During the film, Yui Hirasawa, Ritsu Tainaka, Mio Akiyama, Azusa Nakano, and Tsumugi Kotobuki bop around London, visiting many sites, including walking through the strangely empty Great Court of the British Museum. They make their way into the gallery. During a short scene, Azusa points out that the Rosetta Stone (she put it on their itinerary) is also a replica. In fact, they used a replica in a school play as the death stone for a Romeo & Juliet play, because the fake tombstone they wanted to use had been misplaced.

The British Museum also has the actual Rosetta Stone in the Egyptian sculpture room, but like Yui, Ritsu, Mio, Azusa, and Tsumugi, I only looked at and touched the replica. The aforementioned gallery likely would have been overcrowded, as the gallery rooms I visited were extremely overcrowded and not suited for visitors. They had inadequate airflow and no overhead fans. As for the film, there were a few other short library scenes in the private all-girls school the protagonists attend, Sakuragaoka High School.

The same day I visited the British Museum, I visited the British Library. It sits across from St. Pancras station, and would be the last library I visited in the U.K. As Rick Steves put it, the British empire built its “greatest monuments out of paper.” The library holds every publication within the U.K. and Northern Ireland, with over 170 million items, such as sacred texts, maps, the Magna Carta, Leonardo Da Vinci’s notebook, plays by William Shakespeare, and lyrics of songs by the Beatles. This library, established by an act of Parliament in July 1972 and opened in July 1973, is one of the biggest in the world. It’s only rivaled by the Library of Congress, Russian State Library in Moscow, or Shanghai Library in China. Many such institutions are the legal deposit libraries for their respective countries. Anyone is open to explore the British Library reading rooms and peruse exhibits. You can get a readers registration pass if you are over 18, allowing you to enter the reading rooms.

When I visited, on August 3rd, the reading rooms for humanities, manuscripts, rare books, music, science, maps, and Asian and African studies, were not open. I even saw rooms reserved for the sole purpose of prayer, and went through the “Treasures of the British Library” exhibit in the St. John Ritblat Gallery. It contained many of the artifacts I noted in the previous paragraph. Perhaps because they have the space, the British Library holds the library collections of the British Museum. Rare books fill the middle of the library in a massive climate-controlled column, allowing the upper floors to only be accessed by stairs or elevators, and affecting the structure of each floor. There was also a fascinating collection of foreign currency, stamps, and other postage from former British colonies, called the Philatelic Collection. It could be easily overlooked, but was fun to look through, especially in the way it was displayed.

Like the British museums I visited during my travels, they asked for a donation, but they were free to enter, without payment or restriction. The number of visitors using the study area made clear that they were open to all, in line with library ethical principles, as did the books in their bookshop, some of which would likely be on banned books lists of in U.S. libraries. In the next part of this series, I’ll talk briefly about the university library I visited in Belgium.

© 2025-2026 Burkely Hermann. All rights reserved.

Sources used

• “About this Reading Room,” Library of Congress, 2025.
• “About Us,” British Library, 2025.
• “About us,” House of Commons Library, 2025.
• “About us,” Royal Asiatic Society, 2025.
• “About us,” Wellcome Collection, 2025.
• “Archives,” London Library, 2025.
• Barker, Sam. “The British Museum’s Secretive Round Reading Room Has Reopened To The Public,” Secret London, 4 Jul. 2024.
• “Bickley,” Wikishire, 13 Jul. 2025.
• “D. Leonard Corgan Library,” Kings College, 2025.
• “Dana Research Centre and Library,” Science Museum, 2025.
• “Everything you ever wanted to know about the Rosetta Stone,” British Museum, 2025.
• Fox, Caroline. “Every Enola Holmes Filming Location (And What Every Place Looks Like Now),” ScreenRant, 26 Oct. 2020.
• Funk, Alex. “The British Museum’s mysterious domed Reading Room has officially reopened to the public,” TimeOut, 3 Jul. 2024.
• Hermann, Burkely. “Librarians and libraries in anime,” Pop Culture Library Review, 2025 (orig. 25 Jul. 2020).
• Hermann, Burkely. “More than a coming-of-age drama: The value of libraries and librarians in “I Want To Eat Your Pancreas”,” Pop Culture Library Review, 8 Jan. 2024.
• Hermann, Burkely. “Recently added titles (March 2025),” Pop Culture Library Review, 2 Apr. 2025.
• Hermann, Burkely. “The fictional library and the value of studying redux,” Pop Culture Library Review, 30 Jul. 2024.
• Hickley, Catherine. “British Museum’s historic Reading Room opens to the public after 11 years,” The Art Newspaper, 3 Jul. 2024.
• “History of The London Library,” London Library, 2025.
• “Library,” Linnean Society of London, 2025.
• “Library & Collections,” Society of Antiquities of London, 2024.
• Mathur, Rhea. “The British Museum’s Reading Room: Past and Present,” gowithyamo, 2 Sept. 2024.
• Moran, Sarah. “The British Museum’s Stunning Domed Reading Room Reopens to Public,” Home Journal, 27 Sept. 2024.
• “National Art Library,” Victor and Albert Museum, 2025.
• “Philatelic Collections: Introduction,” British Library, 29 Mar. 2010.
• Hermann, Burkely. “Remembering “Bibliophile Princess” and its significant fictional depiction of libraries,” Pop Culture Library Review, 14 May 2024.
• “Spaces at the Bodleian Old Library,” Bodleian Library, 2025.
• “Spotlight: the Reading Room,” British Museum, 2025.
• Steves, Rick and Openshaw, Gene. London (24th Edition, US: Avalon Travel, Sept. 2022): 212, 214-215, 236, 238, 240, 244-247, 249.
• “Strand Campus: Self-guided tour,” King’s College, 5 Oct. 2014, p. 8.
•  “The British Library Philatelic Collection,” The Royal Philatelic Society London, Nov. 2005.
• “The Present Buildings,” Inner Temple Library, 2025.
• “Treasures of the British Library,” British Library, 2025.
• “Update on progress with the Masterplan,” British Museum, 19 Dec. 2024.

#AncientEgypt #archives #ArthurConanDoyle #artifacts #BeatrixPotter #Belgium #BibliophilePrincess #BlackPatrons #BlackPeople #BramStoker #BritishLibrary #BritishMuseum #China #ChinesePatrons #colonialism #communism #electricity #EnolaHolmes #HouseOfCommonsLibrary #JapanesePatrons #JenniferSnoekBrown #KOn #KOnTheMovie #KarlMarx #LibraryOfCongress #libraryStereotypes #libraryTourism #LondonLibrary #MarcusGarvey #MohandasKGandhi #quiet #railroads #reading #ReelLibrarians #restrictions #RickSteves #RosettaStone #royalLibraries #royalty #Russia #RussianStateLibrary #ShanghaiLibrary #SherlockHolmes #SunYatSen #SylviaPankhurst #TheBeatles #TheDaVinciCode #TheIllustriousClient #trains #VirginiaWoolf #WhiteLibrarians #WhiteMen #WhitePatrons

Plunder, Mystery, and Intrigue: Visiting the British Museum and the British Library

After leaving the Lake District, I traveled to London by train, for the third part of my trip. This was where I saw the most libraries during my trip. On my last day in London, August 3rd, I visited the British Museum, located in London’s West End, which was overcrowded with tourists. This made viewing the so-called “chronicle of Western collection,” which was acquired through extensive plunder and theft, as American tour guide Rick Steves describes the museum, very uncomfortable. Even so, there were two highlights. The first was the stately and round reading room. English writers Virginia Woolf and Beatrix Potter, Chinese revolutionary Sun Yat-sen, radical thinkers Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin, Black nationalist Marcus Garvey, women’s rights campaigner Sylvia Pankhurst, independence activist Mohandas K. Gandhi, and Irish author Bram Stoker all studied there.

Note: This serves as second part of my series on this blog about my library tourism last year, with the first part, about my attempted and successful library tourism in Edinburgh and Northern England, posted on this blog last week. The series begins, chronologically, with my guest post on Reel Librarians, on February 11th, in a post entitled “Edinburgh and the National Library of Scotland: Library tourism redux.” It will be reposted on here over a month later. There will be one more parts of this series, focusing on my continued library tourism in Belgium coming next week.

Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, as noted in Doyle’s “The Complete Sherlock Holmes,” studied in the reading room. In the 1893 short story “The Adventure of the Musgrave Ritual” (sometimes abbreviated as “The Musgrave Ritual”), he studied “those branches of science which might make me more efficient” in the reading room. He learned other information from the British Museum in chapter 15 of 1902 novel The Hound of the Baskervilles and “The Tiger of San Pedro” chapter, within a 1917 collection entitled His Last Bow: Some Reminiscences of Sherlock Holmes (sometimes abbreviated as “His Last Bow”). There are mentions of libraries in the short stories “The Five Orange Pips”, “The Adventure of the Engineer’s Thumb”, and “The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet” in the 1892 short story collection The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.

The same is the case for “The Musgrave Ritual,” “The ‘Gloria Scott’”, and “The Reigate Squires” all within the 1893 short story collection The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, and the stories “The Adventures of the Three Students” and “The Adventure of the Golden Pince-Nez” in the 1905 short story collection The Return of Sherlock Holmes. Apart from that, chapter 10 of The Hound of the Baskervilles, chapter 7 of the 1915 novel The Valley of Fear, and the story “The Problem of Thorn Bridge” in the 1927 set of short stories The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes feature libraries as well. Lastly, there’s a mention of a London Library in St. James’s Square and Lomax, who is said to be a “sublibrarian,” in “The Illustrious Client.” This is another short story within The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes.

In an email communication, Nathalie Belkin, an archivist who works for the London Library, told me that Doyle was a library member, joining in 1896 after his friend, and fellow writer, Arthur Griffith, nominated him. According to Belkin, Doyle was an active library user, even serving on the library’s committee. In fact, it is believed that The Illustrious Client, also entitled The Adventure of the Illustrious Client, was written in the library’s main reading room. While the borrowing history from the time has been lost, he was a “well-known fixture” of the library.

Otherwise, Karl Marx formulated ideas on communism, including within Das Kapital (also known as Capital), in the aforementioned reading room within the British Museum. Displays within the room describe it as a place for diverse thought. Many patrons left behind their mark in the visitors log. It was even one of the first places in London to have electric light (in 1879)! The room could, at maximum, hold 302 readers sitting at 38 tables, sitting across from each other, and was heated from underneath. Readers would consult a catalogue of printed books in the room’s center, then fill out a request form. In some ways, this makes this room similar to the Library of Congress’s Reading Room, since books for the British Library could be accessed there until they were moved to their current location in 1997. In fact, 62,000 people came when this reading room opened in 1857. A sign, when looking into the reading room, tells visitors to be quiet, feeding into the common conception of libraries as quiet places, which is not always the case for all libraries anymore.

What Rick Steves didn’t mention is that the historic reading room only re-opened to the public in 2024 after being closed for eleven years. The room was designed by Sydney Smirke, inspired by Rome’s domed Pantheon, and opened in 1857. It first re-opened to visitors in 2000 (after it stopped being an active reading room in 1997), then closed in 2013, when it was used for archival storage. The room, described by some as “legendary,” “stunning,” and an impressive sight for bibliophiles (protagonist and book-defender Elianna Bernstein of Bibliophile Princess would be right at home there) is not technically a library anymore. You can’t borrow any of the 25,000 books, and photography is now permitted (it wasn’t previously). Even so, it is still a marvel to see. You can even go on a twenty-minute tour there and there is currently a plan to completely transform the galleries and reading room.

The second highlight was the Enlightenment Gallery, formerly known as the King’s Library. It once held the British Library’s treasures when it was founded in 1753. Today it holds objects about the Age of Enlightenment, as Rick Steves notes. A display board, when you enter the room, says that it was developed in partnership with the House of Commons Library and the Natural History Museum. The current books on display are being loaned from the House of Commons Library. The aforementioned display notes that those who lent non-book artifacts to the gallery included the British King, the Science Museum in London, King’s College in London, Wellcome Collection, Society of Antiquities of London, Victor and Albert Museum, the Linnean Society of London, and the Royal Asiatic Society (also in London). Of these institutions, most have their own libraries. In fact, the D. Leonard Corgan Library at Kings College, the college’s main library, served as a location in Dan Brown’s controversial novel The Da Vinci Code. The building’s exterior appeared in the 2020 film Enola Holmes, a mystery film about Sherlock Holmes’ teenage sister.

The room itself was originally created, in 1823, to house King George II’s library, hence the original name. It was designed by architect Robert Smirke, known for the British Museum’s main facade and block, along with various clubs and houses within London. Of these, the Inner Temple, for which he did some work on, has a library, which continues to operate to this day, as did Bickley Hall. Smike also completed building restoration of the Bodleian Library’s Upper Reading room, which is part of the “old library.” As for the Enlightenment Gallery, it has a Greek Revival design, with neoclassical decoration. It’s said to be in keeping with the “styles of libraries in grand houses all over Britain” at the time, with claims it has echoes of “ancient wisdom and learning.” In 1998, the British Library moved to a new location across from the current St. Pancras station. The latter is not to be confused with pancreas or the Japanese anime film which centers on libraries and librarians, entitled I Want to Eat Your Pancreas. It is far too easy to call it “pancreas” by mistake, a name that almost stuck with me.

This gallery is where thousands of objects can be viewed and serves as an introduction to the British Museum’s collections. Even so, for me, I visited it at the end of my time at the overcrowded museum. I was inspired to visit this room by one particular scene in the December 2011 anime film, K-On! the Movie, a spinoff from the 2009-2010 anime series, K-On!. It features two episodes with libraries, including one about studying in the library and featuring a student librarian at an information desk. In fact, I rewatched this film before my trip to London, just for this scene. During the film, Yui Hirasawa, Ritsu Tainaka, Mio Akiyama, Azusa Nakano, and Tsumugi Kotobuki bop around London, visiting many sites, including walking through the strangely empty Great Court of the British Museum. They make their way into the gallery. During a short scene, Azusa points out that the Rosetta Stone (she put it on their itinerary) is also a replica. In fact, they used a replica in a school play as the death stone for a Romeo & Juliet play, because the fake tombstone they wanted to use had been misplaced.

The British Museum also has the actual Rosetta Stone in the Egyptian sculpture room, but like Yui, Ritsu, Mio, Azusa, and Tsumugi, I only looked at and touched the replica. The aforementioned gallery likely would have been overcrowded, as the gallery rooms I visited were extremely overcrowded and not suited for visitors. They had inadequate airflow and no overhead fans. As for the film, there were a few other short library scenes in the private all-girls school the protagonists attend, Sakuragaoka High School.

The same day I visited the British Museum, I visited the British Library. It sits across from St. Pancras station, and would be the last library I visited in the U.K. As Rick Steves put it, the British empire built its “greatest monuments out of paper.” The library holds every publication within the U.K. and Northern Ireland, with over 170 million items, such as sacred texts, maps, the Magna Carta, Leonardo Da Vinci’s notebook, plays by William Shakespeare, and lyrics of songs by the Beatles. This library, established by an act of Parliament in July 1972 and opened in July 1973, is one of the biggest in the world. It’s only rivaled by the Library of Congress, Russian State Library in Moscow, or Shanghai Library in China. Many such institutions are the legal deposit libraries for their respective countries. Anyone is open to explore the British Library reading rooms and peruse exhibits. You can get a readers registration pass if you are over 18, allowing you to enter the reading rooms.

When I visited, on August 3rd, the reading rooms for humanities, manuscripts, rare books, music, science, maps, and Asian and African studies, were not open. I even saw rooms reserved for the sole purpose of prayer, and went through the “Treasures of the British Library” exhibit in the St. John Ritblat Gallery. It contained many of the artifacts I noted in the previous paragraph. Perhaps because they have the space, the British Library holds the library collections of the British Museum. Rare books fill the middle of the library in a massive climate-controlled column, allowing the upper floors to only be accessed by stairs or elevators, and affecting the structure of each floor. There was also a fascinating collection of foreign currency, stamps, and other postage from former British colonies, called the Philatelic Collection. It could be easily overlooked, but was fun to look through, especially in the way it was displayed.

Like the British museums I visited during my travels, they asked for a donation, but they were free to enter, without payment or restriction. The number of visitors using the study area made clear that they were open to all, in line with library ethical principles, as did the books in their bookshop, some of which would likely be on banned books lists of in U.S. libraries. In the next part of this series, I’ll talk briefly about the university library I visited in Belgium.

© 2025-2026 Burkely Hermann. All rights reserved.

Sources used

• “About this Reading Room,” Library of Congress, 2025.
• “About Us,” British Library, 2025.
• “About us,” House of Commons Library, 2025.
• “About us,” Royal Asiatic Society, 2025.
• “About us,” Wellcome Collection, 2025.
• “Archives,” London Library, 2025.
• Barker, Sam. “The British Museum’s Secretive Round Reading Room Has Reopened To The Public,” Secret London, 4 Jul. 2024.
• “Bickley,” Wikishire, 13 Jul. 2025.
• “D. Leonard Corgan Library,” Kings College, 2025.
• “Dana Research Centre and Library,” Science Museum, 2025.
• “Everything you ever wanted to know about the Rosetta Stone,” British Museum, 2025.
• Fox, Caroline. “Every Enola Holmes Filming Location (And What Every Place Looks Like Now),” ScreenRant, 26 Oct. 2020.
• Funk, Alex. “The British Museum’s mysterious domed Reading Room has officially reopened to the public,” TimeOut, 3 Jul. 2024.
• Hermann, Burkely. “Librarians and libraries in anime,” Pop Culture Library Review, 2025 (orig. 25 Jul. 2020).
• Hermann, Burkely. “More than a coming-of-age drama: The value of libraries and librarians in “I Want To Eat Your Pancreas”,” Pop Culture Library Review, 8 Jan. 2024.
• Hermann, Burkely. “Recently added titles (March 2025),” Pop Culture Library Review, 2 Apr. 2025.
• Hermann, Burkely. “The fictional library and the value of studying redux,” Pop Culture Library Review, 30 Jul. 2024.
• Hickley, Catherine. “British Museum’s historic Reading Room opens to the public after 11 years,” The Art Newspaper, 3 Jul. 2024.
• “History of The London Library,” London Library, 2025.
• “Library,” Linnean Society of London, 2025.
• “Library & Collections,” Society of Antiquities of London, 2024.
• Mathur, Rhea. “The British Museum’s Reading Room: Past and Present,” gowithyamo, 2 Sept. 2024.
• Moran, Sarah. “The British Museum’s Stunning Domed Reading Room Reopens to Public,” Home Journal, 27 Sept. 2024.
• “National Art Library,” Victor and Albert Museum, 2025.
• “Philatelic Collections: Introduction,” British Library, 29 Mar. 2010.
• Hermann, Burkely. “Remembering “Bibliophile Princess” and its significant fictional depiction of libraries,” Pop Culture Library Review, 14 May 2024.
• “Spaces at the Bodleian Old Library,” Bodleian Library, 2025.
• “Spotlight: the Reading Room,” British Museum, 2025.
• Steves, Rick and Openshaw, Gene. London (24th Edition, US: Avalon Travel, Sept. 2022): 212, 214-215, 236, 238, 240, 244-247, 249.
• “Strand Campus: Self-guided tour,” King’s College, 5 Oct. 2014, p. 8.
•  “The British Library Philatelic Collection,” The Royal Philatelic Society London, Nov. 2005.
• “The Present Buildings,” Inner Temple Library, 2025.
• “Treasures of the British Library,” British Library, 2025.
• “Update on progress with the Masterplan,” British Museum, 19 Dec. 2024.

#AncientEgypt #archives #ArthurConanDoyle #artifacts #BeatrixPotter #Belgium #BibliophilePrincess #BlackPatrons #BlackPeople #BramStoker #BritishLibrary #BritishMuseum #China #ChinesePatrons #colonialism #communism #electricity #EnolaHolmes #HouseOfCommonsLibrary #JapanesePatrons #JenniferSnoekBrown #KOn #KOnTheMovie #KarlMarx #LibraryOfCongress #libraryStereotypes #libraryTourism #LondonLibrary #MarcusGarvey #MohandasKGandhi #quiet #railroads #reading #ReelLibrarians #restrictions #RickSteves #RosettaStone #royalLibraries #royalty #Russia #RussianStateLibrary #ShanghaiLibrary #SherlockHolmes #SunYatSen #SylviaPankhurst #TheBeatles #TheDaVinciCode #TheIllustriousClient #trains #VirginiaWoolf #WhiteLibrarians #WhiteMen #WhitePatrons

Plunder, Mystery, and Intrigue: Visiting the British Museum and the British Library

After leaving the Lake District, I traveled to London by train, for the third part of my trip. This was where I saw the most libraries during my trip. On my last day in London, August 3rd, I visited the British Museum, located in London’s West End, which was overcrowded with tourists. This made viewing the so-called “chronicle of Western collection,” which was acquired through extensive plunder and theft, as American tour guide Rick Steves describes the museum, very uncomfortable. Even so, there were two highlights. The first was the stately and round reading room. English writers Virginia Woolf and Beatrix Potter, Chinese revolutionary Sun Yat-sen, radical thinkers Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin, Black nationalist Marcus Garvey, women’s rights campaigner Sylvia Pankhurst, independence activist Mohandas K. Gandhi, and Irish author Bram Stoker all studied there.

Note: This serves as second part of my series on this blog about my library tourism last year, with the first part, about my attempted and successful library tourism in Edinburgh and Northern England, posted on this blog last week. The series begins, chronologically, with my guest post on Reel Librarians, on February 11th, in a post entitled “Edinburgh and the National Library of Scotland: Library tourism redux.” It will be reposted on here over a month later. There will be one more parts of this series, focusing on my continued library tourism in Belgium coming next week.

Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, as noted in Doyle’s “The Complete Sherlock Holmes,” studied in the reading room. In the 1893 short story “The Adventure of the Musgrave Ritual” (sometimes abbreviated as “The Musgrave Ritual”), he studied “those branches of science which might make me more efficient” in the reading room. He learned other information from the British Museum in chapter 15 of 1902 novel The Hound of the Baskervilles and “The Tiger of San Pedro” chapter, within a 1917 collection entitled His Last Bow: Some Reminiscences of Sherlock Holmes (sometimes abbreviated as “His Last Bow”). There are mentions of libraries in the short stories “The Five Orange Pips”, “The Adventure of the Engineer’s Thumb”, and “The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet” in the 1892 short story collection The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.

The same is the case for “The Musgrave Ritual,” “The ‘Gloria Scott’”, and “The Reigate Squires” all within the 1893 short story collection The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, and the stories “The Adventures of the Three Students” and “The Adventure of the Golden Pince-Nez” in the 1905 short story collection The Return of Sherlock Holmes. Apart from that, chapter 10 of The Hound of the Baskervilles, chapter 7 of the 1915 novel The Valley of Fear, and the story “The Problem of Thorn Bridge” in the 1927 set of short stories The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes feature libraries as well. Lastly, there’s a mention of a London Library in St. James’s Square and Lomax, who is said to be a “sublibrarian,” in “The Illustrious Client.” This is another short story within The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes.

In an email communication, Nathalie Belkin, an archivist who works for the London Library, told me that Doyle was a library member, joining in 1896 after his friend, and fellow writer, Arthur Griffith, nominated him. According to Belkin, Doyle was an active library user, even serving on the library’s committee. In fact, it is believed that The Illustrious Client, also entitled The Adventure of the Illustrious Client, was written in the library’s main reading room. While the borrowing history from the time has been lost, he was a “well-known fixture” of the library.

Otherwise, Karl Marx formulated ideas on communism, including within Das Kapital (also known as Capital), in the aforementioned reading room within the British Museum. Displays within the room describe it as a place for diverse thought. Many patrons left behind their mark in the visitors log. It was even one of the first places in London to have electric light (in 1879)! The room could, at maximum, hold 302 readers sitting at 38 tables, sitting across from each other, and was heated from underneath. Readers would consult a catalogue of printed books in the room’s center, then fill out a request form. In some ways, this makes this room similar to the Library of Congress’s Reading Room, since books for the British Library could be accessed there until they were moved to their current location in 1997. In fact, 62,000 people came when this reading room opened in 1857. A sign, when looking into the reading room, tells visitors to be quiet, feeding into the common conception of libraries as quiet places, which is not always the case for all libraries anymore.

What Rick Steves didn’t mention is that the historic reading room only re-opened to the public in 2024 after being closed for eleven years. The room was designed by Sydney Smirke, inspired by Rome’s domed Pantheon, and opened in 1857. It first re-opened to visitors in 2000 (after it stopped being an active reading room in 1997), then closed in 2013, when it was used for archival storage. The room, described by some as “legendary,” “stunning,” and an impressive sight for bibliophiles (protagonist and book-defender Elianna Bernstein of Bibliophile Princess would be right at home there) is not technically a library anymore. You can’t borrow any of the 25,000 books, and photography is now permitted (it wasn’t previously). Even so, it is still a marvel to see. You can even go on a twenty-minute tour there and there is currently a plan to completely transform the galleries and reading room.

The second highlight was the Enlightenment Gallery, formerly known as the King’s Library. It once held the British Library’s treasures when it was founded in 1753. Today it holds objects about the Age of Enlightenment, as Rick Steves notes. A display board, when you enter the room, says that it was developed in partnership with the House of Commons Library and the Natural History Museum. The current books on display are being loaned from the House of Commons Library. The aforementioned display notes that those who lent non-book artifacts to the gallery included the British King, the Science Museum in London, King’s College in London, Wellcome Collection, Society of Antiquities of London, Victor and Albert Museum, the Linnean Society of London, and the Royal Asiatic Society (also in London). Of these institutions, most have their own libraries. In fact, the D. Leonard Corgan Library at Kings College, the college’s main library, served as a location in Dan Brown’s controversial novel The Da Vinci Code. The building’s exterior appeared in the 2020 film Enola Holmes, a mystery film about Sherlock Holmes’ teenage sister.

The room itself was originally created, in 1823, to house King George II’s library, hence the original name. It was designed by architect Robert Smirke, known for the British Museum’s main facade and block, along with various clubs and houses within London. Of these, the Inner Temple, for which he did some work on, has a library, which continues to operate to this day, as did Bickley Hall. Smike also completed building restoration of the Bodleian Library’s Upper Reading room, which is part of the “old library.” As for the Enlightenment Gallery, it has a Greek Revival design, with neoclassical decoration. It’s said to be in keeping with the “styles of libraries in grand houses all over Britain” at the time, with claims it has echoes of “ancient wisdom and learning.” In 1998, the British Library moved to a new location across from the current St. Pancras station. The latter is not to be confused with pancreas or the Japanese anime film which centers on libraries and librarians, entitled I Want to Eat Your Pancreas. It is far too easy to call it “pancreas” by mistake, a name that almost stuck with me.

This gallery is where thousands of objects can be viewed and serves as an introduction to the British Museum’s collections. Even so, for me, I visited it at the end of my time at the overcrowded museum. I was inspired to visit this room by one particular scene in the December 2011 anime film, K-On! the Movie, a spinoff from the 2009-2010 anime series, K-On!. It features two episodes with libraries, including one about studying in the library and featuring a student librarian at an information desk. In fact, I rewatched this film before my trip to London, just for this scene. During the film, Yui Hirasawa, Ritsu Tainaka, Mio Akiyama, Azusa Nakano, and Tsumugi Kotobuki bop around London, visiting many sites, including walking through the strangely empty Great Court of the British Museum. They make their way into the gallery. During a short scene, Azusa points out that the Rosetta Stone (she put it on their itinerary) is also a replica. In fact, they used a replica in a school play as the death stone for a Romeo & Juliet play, because the fake tombstone they wanted to use had been misplaced.

The British Museum also has the actual Rosetta Stone in the Egyptian sculpture room, but like Yui, Ritsu, Mio, Azusa, and Tsumugi, I only looked at and touched the replica. The aforementioned gallery likely would have been overcrowded, as the gallery rooms I visited were extremely overcrowded and not suited for visitors. They had inadequate airflow and no overhead fans. As for the film, there were a few other short library scenes in the private all-girls school the protagonists attend, Sakuragaoka High School.

The same day I visited the British Museum, I visited the British Library. It sits across from St. Pancras station, and would be the last library I visited in the U.K. As Rick Steves put it, the British empire built its “greatest monuments out of paper.” The library holds every publication within the U.K. and Northern Ireland, with over 170 million items, such as sacred texts, maps, the Magna Carta, Leonardo Da Vinci’s notebook, plays by William Shakespeare, and lyrics of songs by the Beatles. This library, established by an act of Parliament in July 1972 and opened in July 1973, is one of the biggest in the world. It’s only rivaled by the Library of Congress, Russian State Library in Moscow, or Shanghai Library in China. Many such institutions are the legal deposit libraries for their respective countries. Anyone is open to explore the British Library reading rooms and peruse exhibits. You can get a readers registration pass if you are over 18, allowing you to enter the reading rooms.

When I visited, on August 3rd, the reading rooms for humanities, manuscripts, rare books, music, science, maps, and Asian and African studies, were not open. I even saw rooms reserved for the sole purpose of prayer, and went through the “Treasures of the British Library” exhibit in the St. John Ritblat Gallery. It contained many of the artifacts I noted in the previous paragraph. Perhaps because they have the space, the British Library holds the library collections of the British Museum. Rare books fill the middle of the library in a massive climate-controlled column, allowing the upper floors to only be accessed by stairs or elevators, and affecting the structure of each floor. There was also a fascinating collection of foreign currency, stamps, and other postage from former British colonies, called the Philatelic Collection. It could be easily overlooked, but was fun to look through, especially in the way it was displayed.

Like the British museums I visited during my travels, they asked for a donation, but they were free to enter, without payment or restriction. The number of visitors using the study area made clear that they were open to all, in line with library ethical principles, as did the books in their bookshop, some of which would likely be on banned books lists of in U.S. libraries. In the next part of this series, I’ll talk briefly about the university library I visited in Belgium.

© 2025-2026 Burkely Hermann. All rights reserved.

Sources used

• “About this Reading Room,” Library of Congress, 2025.
• “About Us,” British Library, 2025.
• “About us,” House of Commons Library, 2025.
• “About us,” Royal Asiatic Society, 2025.
• “About us,” Wellcome Collection, 2025.
• “Archives,” London Library, 2025.
• Barker, Sam. “The British Museum’s Secretive Round Reading Room Has Reopened To The Public,” Secret London, 4 Jul. 2024.
• “Bickley,” Wikishire, 13 Jul. 2025.
• “D. Leonard Corgan Library,” Kings College, 2025.
• “Dana Research Centre and Library,” Science Museum, 2025.
• “Everything you ever wanted to know about the Rosetta Stone,” British Museum, 2025.
• Fox, Caroline. “Every Enola Holmes Filming Location (And What Every Place Looks Like Now),” ScreenRant, 26 Oct. 2020.
• Funk, Alex. “The British Museum’s mysterious domed Reading Room has officially reopened to the public,” TimeOut, 3 Jul. 2024.
• Hermann, Burkely. “Librarians and libraries in anime,” Pop Culture Library Review, 2025 (orig. 25 Jul. 2020).
• Hermann, Burkely. “More than a coming-of-age drama: The value of libraries and librarians in “I Want To Eat Your Pancreas”,” Pop Culture Library Review, 8 Jan. 2024.
• Hermann, Burkely. “Recently added titles (March 2025),” Pop Culture Library Review, 2 Apr. 2025.
• Hermann, Burkely. “The fictional library and the value of studying redux,” Pop Culture Library Review, 30 Jul. 2024.
• Hickley, Catherine. “British Museum’s historic Reading Room opens to the public after 11 years,” The Art Newspaper, 3 Jul. 2024.
• “History of The London Library,” London Library, 2025.
• “Library,” Linnean Society of London, 2025.
• “Library & Collections,” Society of Antiquities of London, 2024.
• Mathur, Rhea. “The British Museum’s Reading Room: Past and Present,” gowithyamo, 2 Sept. 2024.
• Moran, Sarah. “The British Museum’s Stunning Domed Reading Room Reopens to Public,” Home Journal, 27 Sept. 2024.
• “National Art Library,” Victor and Albert Museum, 2025.
• “Philatelic Collections: Introduction,” British Library, 29 Mar. 2010.
• Hermann, Burkely. “Remembering “Bibliophile Princess” and its significant fictional depiction of libraries,” Pop Culture Library Review, 14 May 2024.
• “Spaces at the Bodleian Old Library,” Bodleian Library, 2025.
• “Spotlight: the Reading Room,” British Museum, 2025.
• Steves, Rick and Openshaw, Gene. London (24th Edition, US: Avalon Travel, Sept. 2022): 212, 214-215, 236, 238, 240, 244-247, 249.
• “Strand Campus: Self-guided tour,” King’s College, 5 Oct. 2014, p. 8.
•  “The British Library Philatelic Collection,” The Royal Philatelic Society London, Nov. 2005.
• “The Present Buildings,” Inner Temple Library, 2025.
• “Treasures of the British Library,” British Library, 2025.
• “Update on progress with the Masterplan,” British Museum, 19 Dec. 2024.

#AncientEgypt #archives #ArthurConanDoyle #artifacts #BeatrixPotter #Belgium #BibliophilePrincess #BlackPatrons #BlackPeople #BramStoker #BritishLibrary #BritishMuseum #China #ChinesePatrons #colonialism #communism #electricity #EnolaHolmes #HouseOfCommonsLibrary #JapanesePatrons #JenniferSnoekBrown #KOn #KOnTheMovie #KarlMarx #LibraryOfCongress #libraryStereotypes #libraryTourism #LondonLibrary #MarcusGarvey #MohandasKGandhi #quiet #railroads #reading #ReelLibrarians #restrictions #RickSteves #RosettaStone #royalLibraries #royalty #Russia #RussianStateLibrary #ShanghaiLibrary #SherlockHolmes #SunYatSen #SylviaPankhurst #TheBeatles #TheDaVinciCode #TheIllustriousClient #trains #VirginiaWoolf #WhiteLibrarians #WhiteMen #WhitePatrons

Plunder, Mystery, and Intrigue: Visiting the British Museum and the British Library

After leaving the Lake District, I traveled to London by train, for the third part of my trip. This was where I saw the most libraries during my trip. On my last day in London, August 3rd, I visited the British Museum, located in London’s West End, which was overcrowded with tourists. This made viewing the so-called “chronicle of Western collection,” which was acquired through extensive plunder and theft, as American tour guide Rick Steves describes the museum, very uncomfortable. Even so, there were two highlights. The first was the stately and round reading room. English writers Virginia Woolf and Beatrix Potter, Chinese revolutionary Sun Yat-sen, radical thinkers Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin, Black nationalist Marcus Garvey, women’s rights campaigner Sylvia Pankhurst, independence activist Mohandas K. Gandhi, and Irish author Bram Stoker all studied there.

Note: This serves as second part of my series on this blog about my library tourism last year, with the first part, about my attempted and successful library tourism in Edinburgh and Northern England, posted on this blog last week. The series begins, chronologically, with my guest post on Reel Librarians, on February 11th, in a post entitled “Edinburgh and the National Library of Scotland: Library tourism redux.” It will be reposted on here over a month later. There will be one more parts of this series, focusing on my continued library tourism in Belgium coming next week.

Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, as noted in Doyle’s “The Complete Sherlock Holmes,” studied in the reading room. In the 1893 short story “The Adventure of the Musgrave Ritual” (sometimes abbreviated as “The Musgrave Ritual”), he studied “those branches of science which might make me more efficient” in the reading room. He learned other information from the British Museum in chapter 15 of 1902 novel The Hound of the Baskervilles and “The Tiger of San Pedro” chapter, within a 1917 collection entitled His Last Bow: Some Reminiscences of Sherlock Holmes (sometimes abbreviated as “His Last Bow”). There are mentions of libraries in the short stories “The Five Orange Pips”, “The Adventure of the Engineer’s Thumb”, and “The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet” in the 1892 short story collection The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.

The same is the case for “The Musgrave Ritual,” “The ‘Gloria Scott’”, and “The Reigate Squires” all within the 1893 short story collection The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, and the stories “The Adventures of the Three Students” and “The Adventure of the Golden Pince-Nez” in the 1905 short story collection The Return of Sherlock Holmes. Apart from that, chapter 10 of The Hound of the Baskervilles, chapter 7 of the 1915 novel The Valley of Fear, and the story “The Problem of Thorn Bridge” in the 1927 set of short stories The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes feature libraries as well. Lastly, there’s a mention of a London Library in St. James’s Square and Lomax, who is said to be a “sublibrarian,” in “The Illustrious Client.” This is another short story within The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes.

In an email communication, Nathalie Belkin, an archivist who works for the London Library, told me that Doyle was a library member, joining in 1896 after his friend, and fellow writer, Arthur Griffith, nominated him. According to Belkin, Doyle was an active library user, even serving on the library’s committee. In fact, it is believed that The Illustrious Client, also entitled The Adventure of the Illustrious Client, was written in the library’s main reading room. While the borrowing history from the time has been lost, he was a “well-known fixture” of the library.

Otherwise, Karl Marx formulated ideas on communism, including within Das Kapital (also known as Capital), in the aforementioned reading room within the British Museum. Displays within the room describe it as a place for diverse thought. Many patrons left behind their mark in the visitors log. It was even one of the first places in London to have electric light (in 1879)! The room could, at maximum, hold 302 readers sitting at 38 tables, sitting across from each other, and was heated from underneath. Readers would consult a catalogue of printed books in the room’s center, then fill out a request form. In some ways, this makes this room similar to the Library of Congress’s Reading Room, since books for the British Library could be accessed there until they were moved to their current location in 1997. In fact, 62,000 people came when this reading room opened in 1857. A sign, when looking into the reading room, tells visitors to be quiet, feeding into the common conception of libraries as quiet places, which is not always the case for all libraries anymore.

What Rick Steves didn’t mention is that the historic reading room only re-opened to the public in 2024 after being closed for eleven years. The room was designed by Sydney Smirke, inspired by Rome’s domed Pantheon, and opened in 1857. It first re-opened to visitors in 2000 (after it stopped being an active reading room in 1997), then closed in 2013, when it was used for archival storage. The room, described by some as “legendary,” “stunning,” and an impressive sight for bibliophiles (protagonist and book-defender Elianna Bernstein of Bibliophile Princess would be right at home there) is not technically a library anymore. You can’t borrow any of the 25,000 books, and photography is now permitted (it wasn’t previously). Even so, it is still a marvel to see. You can even go on a twenty-minute tour there and there is currently a plan to completely transform the galleries and reading room.

The second highlight was the Enlightenment Gallery, formerly known as the King’s Library. It once held the British Library’s treasures when it was founded in 1753. Today it holds objects about the Age of Enlightenment, as Rick Steves notes. A display board, when you enter the room, says that it was developed in partnership with the House of Commons Library and the Natural History Museum. The current books on display are being loaned from the House of Commons Library. The aforementioned display notes that those who lent non-book artifacts to the gallery included the British King, the Science Museum in London, King’s College in London, Wellcome Collection, Society of Antiquities of London, Victor and Albert Museum, the Linnean Society of London, and the Royal Asiatic Society (also in London). Of these institutions, most have their own libraries. In fact, the D. Leonard Corgan Library at Kings College, the college’s main library, served as a location in Dan Brown’s controversial novel The Da Vinci Code. The building’s exterior appeared in the 2020 film Enola Holmes, a mystery film about Sherlock Holmes’ teenage sister.

The room itself was originally created, in 1823, to house King George II’s library, hence the original name. It was designed by architect Robert Smirke, known for the British Museum’s main facade and block, along with various clubs and houses within London. Of these, the Inner Temple, for which he did some work on, has a library, which continues to operate to this day, as did Bickley Hall. Smike also completed building restoration of the Bodleian Library’s Upper Reading room, which is part of the “old library.” As for the Enlightenment Gallery, it has a Greek Revival design, with neoclassical decoration. It’s said to be in keeping with the “styles of libraries in grand houses all over Britain” at the time, with claims it has echoes of “ancient wisdom and learning.” In 1998, the British Library moved to a new location across from the current St. Pancras station. The latter is not to be confused with pancreas or the Japanese anime film which centers on libraries and librarians, entitled I Want to Eat Your Pancreas. It is far too easy to call it “pancreas” by mistake, a name that almost stuck with me.

This gallery is where thousands of objects can be viewed and serves as an introduction to the British Museum’s collections. Even so, for me, I visited it at the end of my time at the overcrowded museum. I was inspired to visit this room by one particular scene in the December 2011 anime film, K-On! the Movie, a spinoff from the 2009-2010 anime series, K-On!. It features two episodes with libraries, including one about studying in the library and featuring a student librarian at an information desk. In fact, I rewatched this film before my trip to London, just for this scene. During the film, Yui Hirasawa, Ritsu Tainaka, Mio Akiyama, Azusa Nakano, and Tsumugi Kotobuki bop around London, visiting many sites, including walking through the strangely empty Great Court of the British Museum. They make their way into the gallery. During a short scene, Azusa points out that the Rosetta Stone (she put it on their itinerary) is also a replica. In fact, they used a replica in a school play as the death stone for a Romeo & Juliet play, because the fake tombstone they wanted to use had been misplaced.

The British Museum also has the actual Rosetta Stone in the Egyptian sculpture room, but like Yui, Ritsu, Mio, Azusa, and Tsumugi, I only looked at and touched the replica. The aforementioned gallery likely would have been overcrowded, as the gallery rooms I visited were extremely overcrowded and not suited for visitors. They had inadequate airflow and no overhead fans. As for the film, there were a few other short library scenes in the private all-girls school the protagonists attend, Sakuragaoka High School.

The same day I visited the British Museum, I visited the British Library. It sits across from St. Pancras station, and would be the last library I visited in the U.K. As Rick Steves put it, the British empire built its “greatest monuments out of paper.” The library holds every publication within the U.K. and Northern Ireland, with over 170 million items, such as sacred texts, maps, the Magna Carta, Leonardo Da Vinci’s notebook, plays by William Shakespeare, and lyrics of songs by the Beatles. This library, established by an act of Parliament in July 1972 and opened in July 1973, is one of the biggest in the world. It’s only rivaled by the Library of Congress, Russian State Library in Moscow, or Shanghai Library in China. Many such institutions are the legal deposit libraries for their respective countries. Anyone is open to explore the British Library reading rooms and peruse exhibits. You can get a readers registration pass if you are over 18, allowing you to enter the reading rooms.

When I visited, on August 3rd, the reading rooms for humanities, manuscripts, rare books, music, science, maps, and Asian and African studies, were not open. I even saw rooms reserved for the sole purpose of prayer, and went through the “Treasures of the British Library” exhibit in the St. John Ritblat Gallery. It contained many of the artifacts I noted in the previous paragraph. Perhaps because they have the space, the British Library holds the library collections of the British Museum. Rare books fill the middle of the library in a massive climate-controlled column, allowing the upper floors to only be accessed by stairs or elevators, and affecting the structure of each floor. There was also a fascinating collection of foreign currency, stamps, and other postage from former British colonies, called the Philatelic Collection. It could be easily overlooked, but was fun to look through, especially in the way it was displayed.

Like the British museums I visited during my travels, they asked for a donation, but they were free to enter, without payment or restriction. The number of visitors using the study area made clear that they were open to all, in line with library ethical principles, as did the books in their bookshop, some of which would likely be on banned books lists of in U.S. libraries. In the next part of this series, I’ll talk briefly about the university library I visited in Belgium.

© 2025-2026 Burkely Hermann. All rights reserved.

Sources used

• “About this Reading Room,” Library of Congress, 2025.
• “About Us,” British Library, 2025.
• “About us,” House of Commons Library, 2025.
• “About us,” Royal Asiatic Society, 2025.
• “About us,” Wellcome Collection, 2025.
• “Archives,” London Library, 2025.
• Barker, Sam. “The British Museum’s Secretive Round Reading Room Has Reopened To The Public,” Secret London, 4 Jul. 2024.
• “Bickley,” Wikishire, 13 Jul. 2025.
• “D. Leonard Corgan Library,” Kings College, 2025.
• “Dana Research Centre and Library,” Science Museum, 2025.
• “Everything you ever wanted to know about the Rosetta Stone,” British Museum, 2025.
• Fox, Caroline. “Every Enola Holmes Filming Location (And What Every Place Looks Like Now),” ScreenRant, 26 Oct. 2020.
• Funk, Alex. “The British Museum’s mysterious domed Reading Room has officially reopened to the public,” TimeOut, 3 Jul. 2024.
• Hermann, Burkely. “Librarians and libraries in anime,” Pop Culture Library Review, 2025 (orig. 25 Jul. 2020).
• Hermann, Burkely. “More than a coming-of-age drama: The value of libraries and librarians in “I Want To Eat Your Pancreas”,” Pop Culture Library Review, 8 Jan. 2024.
• Hermann, Burkely. “Recently added titles (March 2025),” Pop Culture Library Review, 2 Apr. 2025.
• Hermann, Burkely. “The fictional library and the value of studying redux,” Pop Culture Library Review, 30 Jul. 2024.
• Hickley, Catherine. “British Museum’s historic Reading Room opens to the public after 11 years,” The Art Newspaper, 3 Jul. 2024.
• “History of The London Library,” London Library, 2025.
• “Library,” Linnean Society of London, 2025.
• “Library & Collections,” Society of Antiquities of London, 2024.
• Mathur, Rhea. “The British Museum’s Reading Room: Past and Present,” gowithyamo, 2 Sept. 2024.
• Moran, Sarah. “The British Museum’s Stunning Domed Reading Room Reopens to Public,” Home Journal, 27 Sept. 2024.
• “National Art Library,” Victor and Albert Museum, 2025.
• “Philatelic Collections: Introduction,” British Library, 29 Mar. 2010.
• Hermann, Burkely. “Remembering “Bibliophile Princess” and its significant fictional depiction of libraries,” Pop Culture Library Review, 14 May 2024.
• “Spaces at the Bodleian Old Library,” Bodleian Library, 2025.
• “Spotlight: the Reading Room,” British Museum, 2025.
• Steves, Rick and Openshaw, Gene. London (24th Edition, US: Avalon Travel, Sept. 2022): 212, 214-215, 236, 238, 240, 244-247, 249.
• “Strand Campus: Self-guided tour,” King’s College, 5 Oct. 2014, p. 8.
•  “The British Library Philatelic Collection,” The Royal Philatelic Society London, Nov. 2005.
• “The Present Buildings,” Inner Temple Library, 2025.
• “Treasures of the British Library,” British Library, 2025.
• “Update on progress with the Masterplan,” British Museum, 19 Dec. 2024.

#AncientEgypt #archives #ArthurConanDoyle #artifacts #BeatrixPotter #Belgium #BibliophilePrincess #BlackPatrons #BlackPeople #BramStoker #BritishLibrary #BritishMuseum #China #ChinesePatrons #colonialism #communism #electricity #EnolaHolmes #HouseOfCommonsLibrary #JapanesePatrons #JenniferSnoekBrown #KOn #KOnTheMovie #KarlMarx #LibraryOfCongress #libraryStereotypes #libraryTourism #LondonLibrary #MarcusGarvey #MohandasKGandhi #quiet #railroads #reading #ReelLibrarians #restrictions #RickSteves #RosettaStone #royalLibraries #royalty #Russia #RussianStateLibrary #ShanghaiLibrary #SherlockHolmes #SunYatSen #SylviaPankhurst #TheBeatles #TheDaVinciCode #TheIllustriousClient #trains #VirginiaWoolf #WhiteLibrarians #WhiteMen #WhitePatrons

Plunder, Mystery, and Intrigue: Visiting the British Museum and the British Library

After leaving the Lake District, I traveled to London by train, for the third part of my trip. This was where I saw the most libraries during my trip. On my last day in London, August 3rd, I visited the British Museum, located in London’s West End, which was overcrowded with tourists. This made viewing the so-called “chronicle of Western collection,” which was acquired through extensive plunder and theft, as American tour guide Rick Steves describes the museum, very uncomfortable. Even so, there were two highlights. The first was the stately and round reading room. English writers Virginia Woolf and Beatrix Potter, Chinese revolutionary Sun Yat-sen, radical thinkers Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin, Black nationalist Marcus Garvey, women’s rights campaigner Sylvia Pankhurst, independence activist Mohandas K. Gandhi, and Irish author Bram Stoker all studied there.

Note: This serves as second part of my series on this blog about my library tourism last year, with the first part, about my attempted and successful library tourism in Edinburgh and Northern England, posted on this blog last week. The series begins, chronologically, with my guest post on Reel Librarians, on February 11th, in a post entitled “Edinburgh and the National Library of Scotland: Library tourism redux.” It will be reposted on here over a month later. There will be one more parts of this series, focusing on my continued library tourism in Belgium coming next week.

Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, as noted in Doyle’s “The Complete Sherlock Holmes,” studied in the reading room. In the 1893 short story “The Adventure of the Musgrave Ritual” (sometimes abbreviated as “The Musgrave Ritual”), he studied “those branches of science which might make me more efficient” in the reading room. He learned other information from the British Museum in chapter 15 of 1902 novel The Hound of the Baskervilles and “The Tiger of San Pedro” chapter, within a 1917 collection entitled His Last Bow: Some Reminiscences of Sherlock Holmes (sometimes abbreviated as “His Last Bow”). There are mentions of libraries in the short stories “The Five Orange Pips”, “The Adventure of the Engineer’s Thumb”, and “The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet” in the 1892 short story collection The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.

The same is the case for “The Musgrave Ritual,” “The ‘Gloria Scott’”, and “The Reigate Squires” all within the 1893 short story collection The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, and the stories “The Adventures of the Three Students” and “The Adventure of the Golden Pince-Nez” in the 1905 short story collection The Return of Sherlock Holmes. Apart from that, chapter 10 of The Hound of the Baskervilles, chapter 7 of the 1915 novel The Valley of Fear, and the story “The Problem of Thorn Bridge” in the 1927 set of short stories The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes feature libraries as well. Lastly, there’s a mention of a London Library in St. James’s Square and Lomax, who is said to be a “sublibrarian,” in “The Illustrious Client.” This is another short story within The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes.

In an email communication, Nathalie Belkin, an archivist who works for the London Library, told me that Doyle was a library member, joining in 1896 after his friend, and fellow writer, Arthur Griffith, nominated him. According to Belkin, Doyle was an active library user, even serving on the library’s committee. In fact, it is believed that The Illustrious Client, also entitled The Adventure of the Illustrious Client, was written in the library’s main reading room. While the borrowing history from the time has been lost, he was a “well-known fixture” of the library.

Otherwise, Karl Marx formulated ideas on communism, including within Das Kapital (also known as Capital), in the aforementioned reading room within the British Museum. Displays within the room describe it as a place for diverse thought. Many patrons left behind their mark in the visitors log. It was even one of the first places in London to have electric light (in 1879)! The room could, at maximum, hold 302 readers sitting at 38 tables, sitting across from each other, and was heated from underneath. Readers would consult a catalogue of printed books in the room’s center, then fill out a request form. In some ways, this makes this room similar to the Library of Congress’s Reading Room, since books for the British Library could be accessed there until they were moved to their current location in 1997. In fact, 62,000 people came when this reading room opened in 1857. A sign, when looking into the reading room, tells visitors to be quiet, feeding into the common conception of libraries as quiet places, which is not always the case for all libraries anymore.

What Rick Steves didn’t mention is that the historic reading room only re-opened to the public in 2024 after being closed for eleven years. The room was designed by Sydney Smirke, inspired by Rome’s domed Pantheon, and opened in 1857. It first re-opened to visitors in 2000 (after it stopped being an active reading room in 1997), then closed in 2013, when it was used for archival storage. The room, described by some as “legendary,” “stunning,” and an impressive sight for bibliophiles (protagonist and book-defender Elianna Bernstein of Bibliophile Princess would be right at home there) is not technically a library anymore. You can’t borrow any of the 25,000 books, and photography is now permitted (it wasn’t previously). Even so, it is still a marvel to see. You can even go on a twenty-minute tour there and there is currently a plan to completely transform the galleries and reading room.

The second highlight was the Enlightenment Gallery, formerly known as the King’s Library. It once held the British Library’s treasures when it was founded in 1753. Today it holds objects about the Age of Enlightenment, as Rick Steves notes. A display board, when you enter the room, says that it was developed in partnership with the House of Commons Library and the Natural History Museum. The current books on display are being loaned from the House of Commons Library. The aforementioned display notes that those who lent non-book artifacts to the gallery included the British King, the Science Museum in London, King’s College in London, Wellcome Collection, Society of Antiquities of London, Victor and Albert Museum, the Linnean Society of London, and the Royal Asiatic Society (also in London). Of these institutions, most have their own libraries. In fact, the D. Leonard Corgan Library at Kings College, the college’s main library, served as a location in Dan Brown’s controversial novel The Da Vinci Code. The building’s exterior appeared in the 2020 film Enola Holmes, a mystery film about Sherlock Holmes’ teenage sister.

The room itself was originally created, in 1823, to house King George II’s library, hence the original name. It was designed by architect Robert Smirke, known for the British Museum’s main facade and block, along with various clubs and houses within London. Of these, the Inner Temple, for which he did some work on, has a library, which continues to operate to this day, as did Bickley Hall. Smike also completed building restoration of the Bodleian Library’s Upper Reading room, which is part of the “old library.” As for the Enlightenment Gallery, it has a Greek Revival design, with neoclassical decoration. It’s said to be in keeping with the “styles of libraries in grand houses all over Britain” at the time, with claims it has echoes of “ancient wisdom and learning.” In 1998, the British Library moved to a new location across from the current St. Pancras station. The latter is not to be confused with pancreas or the Japanese anime film which centers on libraries and librarians, entitled I Want to Eat Your Pancreas. It is far too easy to call it “pancreas” by mistake, a name that almost stuck with me.

This gallery is where thousands of objects can be viewed and serves as an introduction to the British Museum’s collections. Even so, for me, I visited it at the end of my time at the overcrowded museum. I was inspired to visit this room by one particular scene in the December 2011 anime film, K-On! the Movie, a spinoff from the 2009-2010 anime series, K-On!. It features two episodes with libraries, including one about studying in the library and featuring a student librarian at an information desk. In fact, I rewatched this film before my trip to London, just for this scene. During the film, Yui Hirasawa, Ritsu Tainaka, Mio Akiyama, Azusa Nakano, and Tsumugi Kotobuki bop around London, visiting many sites, including walking through the strangely empty Great Court of the British Museum. They make their way into the gallery. During a short scene, Azusa points out that the Rosetta Stone (she put it on their itinerary) is also a replica. In fact, they used a replica in a school play as the death stone for a Romeo & Juliet play, because the fake tombstone they wanted to use had been misplaced.

The British Museum also has the actual Rosetta Stone in the Egyptian sculpture room, but like Yui, Ritsu, Mio, Azusa, and Tsumugi, I only looked at and touched the replica. The aforementioned gallery likely would have been overcrowded, as the gallery rooms I visited were extremely overcrowded and not suited for visitors. They had inadequate airflow and no overhead fans. As for the film, there were a few other short library scenes in the private all-girls school the protagonists attend, Sakuragaoka High School.

The same day I visited the British Museum, I visited the British Library. It sits across from St. Pancras station, and would be the last library I visited in the U.K. As Rick Steves put it, the British empire built its “greatest monuments out of paper.” The library holds every publication within the U.K. and Northern Ireland, with over 170 million items, such as sacred texts, maps, the Magna Carta, Leonardo Da Vinci’s notebook, plays by William Shakespeare, and lyrics of songs by the Beatles. This library, established by an act of Parliament in July 1972 and opened in July 1973, is one of the biggest in the world. It’s only rivaled by the Library of Congress, Russian State Library in Moscow, or Shanghai Library in China. Many such institutions are the legal deposit libraries for their respective countries. Anyone is open to explore the British Library reading rooms and peruse exhibits. You can get a readers registration pass if you are over 18, allowing you to enter the reading rooms.

When I visited, on August 3rd, the reading rooms for humanities, manuscripts, rare books, music, science, maps, and Asian and African studies, were not open. I even saw rooms reserved for the sole purpose of prayer, and went through the “Treasures of the British Library” exhibit in the St. John Ritblat Gallery. It contained many of the artifacts I noted in the previous paragraph. Perhaps because they have the space, the British Library holds the library collections of the British Museum. Rare books fill the middle of the library in a massive climate-controlled column, allowing the upper floors to only be accessed by stairs or elevators, and affecting the structure of each floor. There was also a fascinating collection of foreign currency, stamps, and other postage from former British colonies, called the Philatelic Collection. It could be easily overlooked, but was fun to look through, especially in the way it was displayed.

Like the British museums I visited during my travels, they asked for a donation, but they were free to enter, without payment or restriction. The number of visitors using the study area made clear that they were open to all, in line with library ethical principles, as did the books in their bookshop, some of which would likely be on banned books lists of in U.S. libraries. In the next part of this series, I’ll talk briefly about the university library I visited in Belgium.

© 2025-2026 Burkely Hermann. All rights reserved.

Sources used

• “About this Reading Room,” Library of Congress, 2025.
• “About Us,” British Library, 2025.
• “About us,” House of Commons Library, 2025.
• “About us,” Royal Asiatic Society, 2025.
• “About us,” Wellcome Collection, 2025.
• “Archives,” London Library, 2025.
• Barker, Sam. “The British Museum’s Secretive Round Reading Room Has Reopened To The Public,” Secret London, 4 Jul. 2024.
• “Bickley,” Wikishire, 13 Jul. 2025.
• “D. Leonard Corgan Library,” Kings College, 2025.
• “Dana Research Centre and Library,” Science Museum, 2025.
• “Everything you ever wanted to know about the Rosetta Stone,” British Museum, 2025.
• Fox, Caroline. “Every Enola Holmes Filming Location (And What Every Place Looks Like Now),” ScreenRant, 26 Oct. 2020.
• Funk, Alex. “The British Museum’s mysterious domed Reading Room has officially reopened to the public,” TimeOut, 3 Jul. 2024.
• Hermann, Burkely. “Librarians and libraries in anime,” Pop Culture Library Review, 2025 (orig. 25 Jul. 2020).
• Hermann, Burkely. “More than a coming-of-age drama: The value of libraries and librarians in “I Want To Eat Your Pancreas”,” Pop Culture Library Review, 8 Jan. 2024.
• Hermann, Burkely. “Recently added titles (March 2025),” Pop Culture Library Review, 2 Apr. 2025.
• Hermann, Burkely. “The fictional library and the value of studying redux,” Pop Culture Library Review, 30 Jul. 2024.
• Hickley, Catherine. “British Museum’s historic Reading Room opens to the public after 11 years,” The Art Newspaper, 3 Jul. 2024.
• “History of The London Library,” London Library, 2025.
• “Library,” Linnean Society of London, 2025.
• “Library & Collections,” Society of Antiquities of London, 2024.
• Mathur, Rhea. “The British Museum’s Reading Room: Past and Present,” gowithyamo, 2 Sept. 2024.
• Moran, Sarah. “The British Museum’s Stunning Domed Reading Room Reopens to Public,” Home Journal, 27 Sept. 2024.
• “National Art Library,” Victor and Albert Museum, 2025.
• “Philatelic Collections: Introduction,” British Library, 29 Mar. 2010.
• Hermann, Burkely. “Remembering “Bibliophile Princess” and its significant fictional depiction of libraries,” Pop Culture Library Review, 14 May 2024.
• “Spaces at the Bodleian Old Library,” Bodleian Library, 2025.
• “Spotlight: the Reading Room,” British Museum, 2025.
• Steves, Rick and Openshaw, Gene. London (24th Edition, US: Avalon Travel, Sept. 2022): 212, 214-215, 236, 238, 240, 244-247, 249.
• “Strand Campus: Self-guided tour,” King’s College, 5 Oct. 2014, p. 8.
•  “The British Library Philatelic Collection,” The Royal Philatelic Society London, Nov. 2005.
• “The Present Buildings,” Inner Temple Library, 2025.
• “Treasures of the British Library,” British Library, 2025.
• “Update on progress with the Masterplan,” British Museum, 19 Dec. 2024.

#AncientEgypt #archives #ArthurConanDoyle #artifacts #BeatrixPotter #Belgium #BibliophilePrincess #BlackPatrons #BlackPeople #BramStoker #BritishLibrary #BritishMuseum #China #ChinesePatrons #colonialism #communism #electricity #EnolaHolmes #HouseOfCommonsLibrary #JapanesePatrons #JenniferSnoekBrown #KOn #KOnTheMovie #KarlMarx #LibraryOfCongress #libraryStereotypes #libraryTourism #LondonLibrary #MarcusGarvey #MohandasKGandhi #quiet #railroads #reading #ReelLibrarians #restrictions #RickSteves #RosettaStone #royalLibraries #royalty #Russia #RussianStateLibrary #ShanghaiLibrary #SherlockHolmes #SunYatSen #SylviaPankhurst #TheBeatles #TheDaVinciCode #TheIllustriousClient #trains #VirginiaWoolf #WhiteLibrarians #WhiteMen #WhitePatrons

The Roberts court broadly expanded Trump’s power in 2025, with these key exceptions – Los Angeles Times

Politics

The Supreme Court broadly expanded Trump’s power in 2025, with key exceptions

By David G. Savage, Staff Writer Follow. Jan. 1, 2026 3 AM PT

• For much of the year, U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and the five other conservatives were in the majority ruling for Trump.
• The court has been criticized for handing down temporary unsigned orders with little or no explanation.

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court, led by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., ended the first year of President Trump’s second term with a record of rulings that gave him much broader power to control the federal government.

In a series of fast-track decisions, the justices granted emergency appeals and set aside rulings from district judges who blocked Trump’s orders from taking effect.

With the court’s approval, the administration dismissed thousands of federal employees, cut funding for education and health research grants, dismantled the agency that funds foreign aid and cleared the way for the U.S. military to reject transgender troops.

But the court also put two important checks on the president’s power.

In April, the court twice ruled — including in a post-midnight order — that the Trump administration could not secretly whisk immigrants out of the country without giving them a hearing before a judge.

Upon taking office, Trump claimed migrants who were alleged to belong to “foreign terrorist” gangs could be arrested as “enemy aliens” and flown secretly to a prison in El Salvador.

https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2025-12-23/supreme-court-trump-national-guard-chicago – See more at the above link.

Politics

Supreme Court rules against Trump, bars National Guard deployment in Chicago, Dec. 23, 2025

Roberts and the court blocked such secret deportations and said the 5th Amendment entitles immigrants, like citizens, a right to “due process of law.” Many of the arrested men had no criminal records and said they never belonged to a criminal gang.
Those who face deportation “are entitled to notice and opportunity to challenge their removal,” the justices said in Trump vs. J.G.G.

They also required the government to “facilitate” the release of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who had been wrongly deported to El Salvador. He is now back in Maryland with his wife, but may face further criminal charges or efforts to deport him.

And last week, Roberts and the court barred Trump from deploying the National Guard in Chicago to enforce the immigration laws.

Trump had claimed he had the power to defy state governors and deploy the Guard troops in Los Angeles, Portland, Ore., Chicago and other Democratic-led states and cities.

The Supreme Court disagreed over dissents from conservative Justices Samuel A. Alito, Clarence Thomas and Neil M. Gorsuch.

Editor’s Note: Read the rest of the story, at the below link.

Continue/Read Original Article Here: The Roberts court broadly expanded Trump’s power in 2025, with these key exceptions – Los Angeles Times

Opinion: Our petty, hollow, squalid ogre in chief – The New York Times

We are led by the most loathsome human being ever to occupy the White House.

By  Bret Stephens | The New York Times,  | Dec. 19, 2025, 5:00 a.m., | Updated: 8:23 a.m.

Though I tend to think it’s usually a waste of space to devote a column to President Donald Trump’s personality — what more is there to say about the character of this petty, hollow, squalid, overstuffed man? — sometimes the point bears stressing: We are led by the most loathsome human being ever to occupy the White House.

Markets will not be moved, or brigades redeployed, or history shifted, because Rob Reiner and Michele Singer Reiner were found stabbed to death Sunday in their home in Los Angeles, allegedly at the hands of their troubled son Nick.

But this is an appalling human tragedy and a terrible national loss. Reiner’s movies, including “Stand by Me,” “The Princess Bride” and “When Harry Met Sally…,” are landmarks in the inner lives of millions of people; I can still quote by heart dialogue and song lyrics from his 1984 classic, “This Is Spinal Tap.” Until last week, he and Michele remained creative forces as well as one of Hollywood’s great real-life love stories. Their liberal politics, though mostly not my own, were honorable and sincere.

To which our ogre in chief had this to say on social media:

“A very sad thing happened last night in Hollywood. Rob Reiner, a tortured and struggling, but once very talented movie director and comedy star, has passed away, together with his wife, Michele, reportedly due to the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME, sometimes referred to as TDS. He was known to have driven people CRAZY by his raging obsession of President Donald J. Trump, with his obvious paranoia reaching new heights as the Trump Administration surpassed all goals and expectations of greatness, and with the Golden Age of America upon us, perhaps like never before. May Rob and Michele rest in peace!”

I quote Trump’s post in full not only because it must be read to be believed, but also because it captures the combination of preposterous grandiosity, obsessive self-regard and gratuitous spite that “deranged” the Reiners and so many other Americans trying to hold on to a sense of national decency. Good people and good nations do not stomp on the grief of others. Politics is meant to end at the graveside. That’s not just some social nicety. It’s a foundational taboo that any civilized society must enforce to prevent transient personal differences from becoming generational blood feuds.

That is where history will record that the deepest damage by the Trump presidency was done. There is, as Adam Smith said, “a great deal of ruin in a nation,” by which he meant that there are things in almost any country that are going badly wrong but can still be mended. Foolishly imposed tariffs can be repealed. Hastily cut funding can be restored. Ill-thought-out national security strategies can be rewritten. Shaken trust can be rebuilt between Washington and our allies.

Continue/Read Original Article Here: Opinion: Our petty, hollow, squalid ogre in chief

@dinelli

Você pode gostar de navegar por esta coleção de pôsteres da WPA.

You might enjoy browsing this collection of WPA posters:

https://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/wpapos/

#Posters #GraphicArt #WPA #WorksProjectsAdministration #WorksProgressAdministration #USArt #NewDeal #LibraryOfCongress

Trump’s campaign of retribution: At least 470 targets and counting – Reuters

A REUTERS SPECIAL REPORT

Trump’s campaign of retribution:
At least 470 targets and counting

Reuters documented at least 470 targets of retribution under Trump’s leadership – from federal employees and prosecutors to universities and media outlets. The list illuminates the sweeping effort by the president and his administration to punish dissent and reshape the government.

By PETER EISLER, NED PARKER, LINDA SO and JOSEPH TANFANI

Another 224 people were caught up in broader retribution efforts – not named individually but ensnared in crackdowns on groups of perceived opponents. Nearly 100 of them were prosecutors and FBI agents fired or forced to retire for working on cases tied to Trump or his allies, or because they were deemed “woke.” This includes 16 FBI agents who kneeled at a Black Lives Matter protest in 2020. The rest were civil servants, most of them suspended for publicly opposing administration policies or resisting directives on health, environmental and science issues.

The retribution took three distinct forms.

Most common were punitive acts, such as firings, suspensions, investigations and the revocation of security clearances.

Reuters found at least 462 such cases, including the dismissal of at least 128 federal workers and officials who had probed, challenged or otherwise bucked Trump or his administration.

The second form was threats. Trump and his administration targeted at least 46 individuals, businesses and other entities with threats of investigations or penalties, including freezing federal funds for Democratic-led cities such as New York and Chicago.

Trump openly discussed firing Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell for resisting interest rate cuts, for instance. Last week, he threatened to have six Democratic members of Congress tried for sedition – a crime he said is “punishable by DEATH” – after the lawmakers reminded military personnel they can refuse “illegal orders.” This week, the Defense Department threatened to court-martial one of them, U.S. Senator Mark Kelly, a former Naval officer.

The third form was coercion. In at least a dozen cases, organizations such as law firms and universities signed agreements with the government to roll back diversity initiatives or other policies after facing administration threats of punishment, such as security clearance revocations and loss of federal funding and contracts.

It’s a campaign led from the top: Trump’s White House has issued at least 36 orders, decrees and directives, targeting at least 100 individuals and entities with punitive actions, according to the Reuters analysis.

Trump openly campaigned on a platform of revenge in his latest run for the presidency, promising to punish enemies of his Make America Great Again movement. “For those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution,” he said in a March 2023 speech. Weeks later, while campaigning in Texas, he repeated the theme. “I am your justice,” he said.

Today, the White House disputes the idea that the administration is out for revenge. It describes recent investigations and indictments of political adversaries as valid course corrections on policy, necessary probes of wrongdoing and legitimate policy initiatives.

Editor’s Note: Read the rest of the story, at the below link.

Continue/Read Original Article Here: Trump’s campaign of retribution: At least 470 targets and counting

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America’s deepening affordability crisis summed up in 5 charts – CBS News

• MoneyWatch
• Managing Your Money
• CBS News Price Tracker

MoneyWatch

America’s deepening affordability crisis summed up in 5 charts

By Aimee Picchi, Mary Cunningham

Updated on: November 19, 2025 / 5:27 PM EST / CBS News

Although inflation across the U.S. is far cooler than in the post-pandemic years, millions of Americans say they still feel the pinch of rising prices, struggle to pay the bills and express concern about their financial prospects. 

Price increases are nowhere near the level reached in June of 2022, when the Consumer Price Index hit a 40-year high of 9.1%. Yet many people feel squeezed by the cost of simple daily necessities, including the ability to afford healthy food, and by long-term increases in the cost of essentials such as housing and health care.

This affordability crisis is rooted in a combination of both longstanding economic issues dating back decades and more recent developments. For instance, housing costs have surged partly due to a lack of available homes, a result of cutbacks in construction following the Great Recession, while more recently steep new U.S. tariffs have fueled inflation.  

Inflation and the economy now rank as Americans’ top national concerns, according to an October CBS News poll. 

“Everything is going up in price very quickly,” said Jeremy Tolbert, a 47-year-old web developer in Lawrence, Kansas.

With his family’s monthly health care premiums set to rise 18% to $2,600 next year, he’s planning to cut back in other areas. “Our food budget is going to go down — we’re not talking about eating beans and rice, but going from a comfortable middle-class lifestyle to eating how we did when we first got out of college,” Tolbert said.

Here are five key categories of spending that many Americans are struggling to afford.

Food

Almost half of Americans say it’s harder to afford groceries today than it was a year ago, according to a September survey by Axios and the Harris Poll. Only 19% said food prices are cheaper than a year earlier, with roughly a third seeing no change. 

Editor’s Note: See the PRICE CHECKER in the online version only. Cannot add here.. –DrWeb

Growth in food prices has eased considerably, although it is still rising, with the latest CPI report showing grocery prices rose 2.7% in September on an annual basis, a sharp contrast to the 11.4% increase in 2022. Overall, however, food prices as of September were more than 18% higher than in January of 2022, according to the CBS News price tracker. 

Shoppers don’t assess food costs the same way economists do. They focus on their day-to-day spending — which keeps climbing — and compare their out-of-pocket spending today with what they paid several years ago, according to research from the University of Florida. 

In other words, people’s experience of inflation and how they measure it in their daily lives may not mesh with official economic measures that paint a more optimistic picture. 

Meanwhile, other recent signals underscore the difficulty many Americans have simply putting food on the table. Roughly 14% of U.S. households reported food insecurity on average between January and October, up from 12.5% in 2024, according to data from Purdue University’s Center for Food Demand Analysis and Sustainability.

In New York City, for example, 40% of local families can’t afford their weekly food costs, according to new data from charitable organization Robin Hood and Columbia University.

Editor’s Note: Read the rest of the story, at the below link.

Continue/Read Original Article Here: America’s deepening affordability crisis summed up in 5 charts – CBS News

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Donald Trump Calling Women Pigs and More -A Brief History – Vanity Fair

Editor’s Note: Thank you, Vanity Fair. Excellent report and coverage of this outrageous exchange by this poor President. Time for 25th Replacement…

Politics

Donald Trump Calling Women Pigs and More: A Brief History

The president recently revisited one of his favorite insults for women he doesn’t like, snapping, “Quiet, piggy,” at a female reporter who dared to ask a question about Jeffrey Epstein.

By Eric Lutz, November 19, 2025

He had deflected her first question, about a recently released Jeffrey Epstein email in which the late sex trafficker said Trump “knew about the girls.” Lucey was merely doing her job. But Trump, of course, doesn’t have much respect for good journalism—or, it would seem, for women, as his puerile “piggy” taunt indicates.

The exchange—which has since gone viral—is shocking in its crudeness and nastiness, even by Trump administration standards. But this is also a familiar insult for Trump. Alicia Machado, a former Miss Universe pageant winner, previously said that Trump once called her “Miss Piggy.” Trump didn’t exactly deny the incident after Hillary Clinton brought it up during a 2016 debate.

“She gained a massive amount of weight,” Trump said of Machado on Fox & Friends the next morning, apparently in defense of his insult, “and it was a real problem.” During another debate that cycle, before he became the GOP’s nominee, moderator Megyn Kelly noted that Trump had “called women you don’t like fat pigs, dogs, slobs, and disgusting animals.”

“Only Rosie O’Donnell,” Trump replied, referring to the comedian he’s been feuding with for nearly 20 years now.

Trump doesn’t only love comparing women to pigs. In 2011, The New York Times’ Gail Collins wrote that Trump once told her she had “the face of a dog.” In 2018 he described Omarosa Manigault Newman, a former Apprentice contestant and White House aide, as a “dog” and a “lying lowlife.”

Trump also dubbed Stormy Daniels—the adult-film actor who said she had a sexual encounter with him in 2006—“Horseface.” (Trump’s effort to silence Daniels about the alleged encounter—which he has denied—resulted in his conviction on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records; Trump is still trying to get the conviction thrown out.)

“The president of the United States is supposed to be the moral leader, the leader of the country, and he’s acting like some thug on the street,” the longtime White House reporter April Ryan, who was called “Miss Piggy” by a Trump official in 2018, told The Guardian Tuesday. “It’s one thing for his minions to say that, but for him to call a woman that? That also shows how upset he is about the Epstein files. It lets us know that there’s probably some fire there.”

The intensified scrutiny over his relationship with Epstein—and his administration’s handling of the case—has been a particular point of political vulnerability, testing his typically tight grip on his party. When ABC News’ Mary Bruce asked Trump about the matter on Tuesday, before lawmakers on Capitol Hill passed legislation calling on the Justice Department to release files related to the Epstein case, the president in turn attacked her and threatened to revoke the outlet’s broadcasting license.

“I think you are a terrible reporter,” he told Bruce in the Oval Office, where he was hosting Mohammed bin Salman, the Saudi crown prince who, according to US intelligence, ordered the brutal killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018. (“A lot of people didn’t like that gentleman that you’re talking about,” Trump responded when Bruce asked an earlier question about Khashoggi, who was killed and then dismembered with a bone saw. “Whether you like him or didn’t like him, things happen. But he knew nothing about it, and we can leave it at that. You don’t have to embarrass our guest by asking a question like that.”)

Continue/Read Original Article Here: Donald Trump Calling Women Pigs and More: A Brief History | Vanity Fair

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Jonathan Karl: The White House Chaos Is Worse This Time

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Jonathan Karl: The White House Chaos Is Worse This Time

By Tim Miller, and Jonathan Karl, Nov 18, 2025

The White House leaks may be more contained in Trump 2.0, but the slavish loyalists who POTUS has surrounded himself with do nothing to keep him within the bounds of the law, ethics, or decorum. So in this round, the chaos is more consequential for the country. Meanwhile, the administration may be prepping to bury the Epstein files. Plus, the bitterness and resentment that drives Trump, the war on truth is winning, and the Bidens’ animosity toward Obama.

ABC’s Jon Karl joins Tim Miller.

show notes

• Jon’s new book, “Retribution: Donald Trump and the Campaign That Changed America”

Continue/Read Original Article Here: Jonathan Karl: The White House Chaos Is Worse This Time

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The queen of vampire fiction gets her New Orleans farewell – Axios New Orleans

 Oct 31, 2025 – Culture

The queen of vampire fiction gets her New Orleans farewell

• By Carlie Kollath Wells

New Orleans pays homage this weekend to author Anne Rice in two grand events for fans of the vampire novelist and the fantastical world she created.

Why it matters: It’s a delayed celebration of life for Rice, who died in 2021 when pandemic protocols prevented large gatherings.

The big picture: The fan club for her character Lestat gets the party started Friday at a formal ball.

• The 37th annual vampire ball sold out in seven minutes, says co-host and French Quarter resident Alys Arden.
• Arden, who also writes about vampires and witches in New Orleans, has attended for years with several hundred other revelers. They often dress as Rice’s characters.
• “We’re really trying to make it feel like you walked into her world and that there’s an element of her words throughout the night,” Arden tells Axios in an exclusive interview.

The next day: Anne Rice’s son, Christopher, and her longtime friend, Eric Shaw Quinn, host the main fan event Saturday at The Orpheum.

• It will be an immersive stage spectacle with musical performances, a recreation of her gardens and interviews with her family and colleagues.
• It explores how she turned the worst thing that ever happened to her — the death of her daughter — into the best thing, Christopher Rice tells Axios in an exclusive interview.
• “The genesis of her entire success was this terrible loss that she transformed into this world and invited all of these people in,” he says.

What he’s saying: “I want them to feel inspired,” he says of Saturday’s event, while also having moments to feel their grief about the loss of the author.

State of play: Anne Rice grew up in New Orleans and lived in the Garden District for years.

• The New York Times “trashed” “Interview with the Vampire” when it came out in 1976, Christopher Rice says, but his mom kept at it.
• “The idea of taking dark fantasy seriously as a serious literary genre in which you could talk about the human condition — that was not popular when she was doing it,” he says.
• She pioneered the technique of writing about vampires — the so-called villains — from their point of view, Quinn says. She published more than 35 books and sold more than 150 million copies.

Zoom in: A new generation of fans is being introduced to her work through AMC’s “Anne Rice Immortal Universe” television series.

• “Talamasca” premiered this week and tells the story of the secret society mentioned in her books.
• “Interview with the Vampire” and “Mayfair Witches” both have two seasons available for streaming. They were filmed in New Orleans.
• Anne Rice and Christopher Rice are executive producers on the shows, the network confirmed.

The intrigue: Rice and Quinn teased new projects, including the possibility of new books. Christopher Rice wrote several books with his mother and says she left behind unfinished material.

Plus, they say they “salivate” over the idea of “Ramses the Damned” projects.

Fans often ask for more “Wolf Gift” books as well, the two business partners say.

Continue/Read Original Article Here: The queen of vampire fiction gets her New Orleans farewell – Axios New Orleans

#2025 #America #AnneRice #Axios #AxiosNewOrleans #Books #Education #Films #Libraries #Library #LibraryOfCongress #Movies #NewOrleans #NewOrleansFarewell #Opinion #Queen #Reading #UnitedStates #VampireFiction #Writing

Supreme Court has empowered Trump. How much further will it go? – The Washington Post

Supreme Court has expanded presidential powers under Trump. How far will it go?

The justices will hear arguments Wednesday on the legality of most of the president’s tariffs — the first in a series of tests of sweeping claims of authority.

November 2, 2025 at 8:36 a.m. EST, Today at 8:36 a.m. EST, 10 min

By Justin Jouvenal

For nine months, in a flood of emergency orders, the Supreme Court has allowed President Donald Trump to expand his power.

The justices have permitted Trump to slash the federal bureaucracy, fire the heads of nominally independent agencies and exercise powers traditionally ascribed to Congress.

How much further will the court go?

That will be the overriding question Wednesday when the court hears arguments on the legality of most of the president’s tariffs — the first case to reach the justices in a series of high-stakes tests of Trump’ssweeping claimsof authority.

His asserted tariff powers are uniquely dear to Trump, who has repeatedly warned of economic devastation if the court were to rule against one of his signature policies. But the other tests of presidential power could also have major impact.

In November, the court will considerwhether to strike down a 90-year-old precedent that insulates independent agencies from White House interference. In January, it will explore whether Trump can remake the Federal Reserve, with its vast powers over the economy.

Taken together, the cases will determine the extent to which the Supreme Court will embrace Trump’s view of a presidency constrained by few checks and wielding the type of authority typically only seen in times of war or national crisis. Decisions are expected in the cases by the summer.

“I think the court so far has been more deferential to President Trump than most Supreme Courts in modern times,” said Matthew Dallek, a political historian at George Washington University. “It’s very hard to point to a significant way in which the court has said ‘stop’ to the White House. It raises the pressure on the court, and it raises the stakes for the term ahead.”

White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said in a statement the high court’s rulings have corrected erroneous decisions by “far-left liberal activist judges” and thatthe president is doing what he was elected to do.

“The President will continue implementing the policy agenda that the American people voted for in November and will continue to be vindicated by higher courts when liberal activist judges attempt to intervene,” Jackson said.

Trump’s claim that he can unilaterally impose massive tariffs, a cornerstone of his economic agenda, is among his most aggressive moves to date. His assertion rests on a 1977 law that grants the president emergency powers to regulate international commerce. Trump’s argument that the law can be used for tariffs is one no other president has made in the statute’s 50-year history.

The administration has asked the justices to overturn federal court rulings that found the law did not convey authority to impose tariffs. Trump said the levies, some of which he announced at an event he dubbed “Liberation Day,” will help stem the flow of fentanyl across the border and restore America’s manufacturing base.

Small businesses and states have sued to block the levies, arguing they will cause widespread economic harm.

Arguably, no institution has set the stage for Trump’s efforts to expand his poweras much as the Supreme Court and in particular its chief justice. John G. Roberts Jr. has written decisions in recent years declaring the president a uniquely powerful figure.

In a 2020 ruling, Roberts wrote the “entire ‘executive Power’ belongs to the President alone.” He has also intimated the president should have a free hand to fire low-level government employees and made it easier for the president to remove the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Editor’s Note: Read the rest of the story, at the below link.

Continue/Read Original Article Here: Supreme Court has empowered Trump. How much further will it go? – The Washington Post

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Robert Redford, Diane Keaton and the Twilight of the Gods – The Hollywood Reporter

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Redford, Keaton and the Twilight of the Gods

The recent deaths of the icons cast a mournful light on a fading generation of actors who once redefined what movie stars could be — complex, messy, and all too human.

October 22, 2025

There was a moment, back in 2012, when Diane Keaton and Robert Redford nearly shared the screen. Both were reported to be “eyeing” the leads in a holiday-themed ensemble comedy titled The Most Wonderful Time, pitched as a Love Actually-style pastiche involving multiple interwoven tales of family and romance, all set against a backdrop of Christmas lights and yuletide meltdowns.

Alas, that movie never got made — at least not in that form — and Keaton and Redford never again came so close to working together. But in their own ways, these two very different actors — she, the eccentric spirit of New Hollywood comedy; he, the golden-boy stoic of the American pastoral — were bound by something even more powerful than onscreen chemistry: generational gravity. They belonged to the same loose orbit of 1970s-era performers who upended the rules of stardom and helped reshape what American movies could be.

Keaton died Oct. 11 at age 79 after a shockingly quick battle with pneumonia. Redford died in his sleep, at 89, a little less than a month earlier, on Sept. 16. Some from their cohort had gone before — Paul Newman in 2008, Shelley Duvall in 2024, Gene Hackman in February — while others have simply drifted from view. Warren Beatty, Jack Nicholson, Dustin Hoffman, Faye Dunaway — all now in their 80s — have largely stepped away from the spotlight.

Of course, this is nothing new. All stars, even the brightest, eventually flicker out as new generations take their place. But there’s something different — something more poignant — about watching this particular circle begin to vanish.

The stars who came before them had been shaped by the studio system — groomed, styled and slotted into types. They signed long-term contracts, wore what the wardrobe department handed them and gave interviews ghostwritten by studio publicists. Even the greats — Bogart, Hepburn, Gable, Davis — were often playing variations of a persona the system had helped construct. Their power came from polish, execution and consistency. Stardom was a product, and it was carefully managed.

By the time Redford, Keaton, Beatty and the others were coming of age as actors, the old studio scaffolding was already coming apart, with the contract system unraveling and the great moguls who once ruled the town with an iron fist fading from the scene. There was no longer a press-office puppeteer telling actors how to dress or what to say, no studio image to protect. They were free to define themselves — onscreen and off — and to let those two identities blur. Their personas could be withholding, eccentric, neurotic, ambiguous, strange. They could play characters the previous generation never got near: complicated people with unresolved feelings and messy inner lives.

At the same time, a new kind of director had taken over the asylum — such mavericks as Mike Nichols, Robert Altman, Hal Ashby, Alan J. Pakula and Martin Scorsese — filmmakers who weren’t interested in preserving the system. They wanted to blow it up. Their films — Carnal Knowledge, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Shampoo, Klute, Taxi Driver — didn’t just break the rules, they rewrote the language of cinema itself. And that reinvention gave this young, liberated generation of actors a canvas as unbound and unconventional as they were — a kind of free-spirited platform that hadn’t existed before and hasn’t really existed since.

Few actors made better use of that freedom than Redford and Keaton. In such films as The Candidate, Three Days of the Condor and The Way We Were, Redford turned the clean-cut leading man into something more introspective and morally uncertain — a figure torn between idealism and self-interest. Keaton took the same open, idiosyncratic presence that made Annie Hall so engaging and revealed its darker shades in The Godfather and Looking for Mr. Goodbar, proving she could be fearless, complex, even unsettling. Both found truth in contradiction. They made uncertainty look thrilling.

But by the early 1980s, as the counterculture spirit of the previous decade gave way to something more box office-driven and less tolerant of creative chaos, a different model of movie star started taking over. Actors weren’t seeking to challenge the system anymore; they were the system, powering tentpoles, sequels and high-concept hits that could sell in every corner of the world. This was the era of the Event Movie, when opening-weekend grosses became the new measure of stardom. The actors who began appearing on marquees — Schwarzenegger, Stallone, Willis, Gibson, Cruise — weren’t celebrated for subtlety or transformation or their onscreen bravery, but for their box office clout.

Sure, by the 1990s, there was a parallel indie movement where some of these stars could unfurl their dramatic range, ’70s-style — Cruise in Magnolia, Stallone in Cop Land — but for all the critical acclaim and Oscar attention those roles might attract, what defined success in 1980s and ’90s Hollywood were the ticket sales for such tentpoles as Top Gun, Die Hard, the Rambo movies and The Terminator. Actors had become commodities of scale, defined largely by their ability to summon $100 million grosses.

When the new millennium arrived, that equation shifted yet again, even if the focus on money hadn’t. Hollywood’s center of gravity moved from stars to franchises. The IP became the real draw — superheroes, wizards, Jedi and other branded worlds. The costume, often spandex, mattered more than the actor inside it (even Redford got in on the act, playing a Marvel villain in Captain America: The Winter Soldier). Stardom no longer was the engine of the movie business; it was just another interchangeable part of the business.

Then, in the 2010s and ’20s, stardom started moving from the big screen to a much smaller stage — the phone. Hollywood was still turning out superhero sagas, prestige dramas and cozy seasonal fare (like that Christmas movie, The Most Wonderful Time, eventually rewritten and released in 2015 as the forgettable Love the Coopers, with Keaton still starring and Redford’s role taken by, of all people, John Goodman). But the real competition for attention was moving elsewhere — to feeds and timelines, where fame was measured not by box office totals but by followers.

Continue/Read Original Article Here: Robert Redford, Diane Keaton and the Twilight of the Gods

#2025 #America #Books #DianeKeaton #Education #Film #Films #History #Libraries #LibraryOfCongress #Movies #OldHollywood #RobertRedford #Stars #TheHollywoodReporter #TwilightOfTheGods #UnitedStates

Robert Redford, Diane Keaton and the Twilight of the Gods – The Hollywood Reporter

• Home
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• Movie Features

Redford, Keaton and the Twilight of the Gods

The recent deaths of the icons cast a mournful light on a fading generation of actors who once redefined what movie stars could be — complex, messy, and all too human.

October 22, 2025

There was a moment, back in 2012, when Diane Keaton and Robert Redford nearly shared the screen. Both were reported to be “eyeing” the leads in a holiday-themed ensemble comedy titled The Most Wonderful Time, pitched as a Love Actually-style pastiche involving multiple interwoven tales of family and romance, all set against a backdrop of Christmas lights and yuletide meltdowns.

Alas, that movie never got made — at least not in that form — and Keaton and Redford never again came so close to working together. But in their own ways, these two very different actors — she, the eccentric spirit of New Hollywood comedy; he, the golden-boy stoic of the American pastoral — were bound by something even more powerful than onscreen chemistry: generational gravity. They belonged to the same loose orbit of 1970s-era performers who upended the rules of stardom and helped reshape what American movies could be.

Keaton died Oct. 11 at age 79 after a shockingly quick battle with pneumonia. Redford died in his sleep, at 89, a little less than a month earlier, on Sept. 16. Some from their cohort had gone before — Paul Newman in 2008, Shelley Duvall in 2024, Gene Hackman in February — while others have simply drifted from view. Warren Beatty, Jack Nicholson, Dustin Hoffman, Faye Dunaway — all now in their 80s — have largely stepped away from the spotlight.

Of course, this is nothing new. All stars, even the brightest, eventually flicker out as new generations take their place. But there’s something different — something more poignant — about watching this particular circle begin to vanish.

The stars who came before them had been shaped by the studio system — groomed, styled and slotted into types. They signed long-term contracts, wore what the wardrobe department handed them and gave interviews ghostwritten by studio publicists. Even the greats — Bogart, Hepburn, Gable, Davis — were often playing variations of a persona the system had helped construct. Their power came from polish, execution and consistency. Stardom was a product, and it was carefully managed.

By the time Redford, Keaton, Beatty and the others were coming of age as actors, the old studio scaffolding was already coming apart, with the contract system unraveling and the great moguls who once ruled the town with an iron fist fading from the scene. There was no longer a press-office puppeteer telling actors how to dress or what to say, no studio image to protect. They were free to define themselves — onscreen and off — and to let those two identities blur. Their personas could be withholding, eccentric, neurotic, ambiguous, strange. They could play characters the previous generation never got near: complicated people with unresolved feelings and messy inner lives.

At the same time, a new kind of director had taken over the asylum — such mavericks as Mike Nichols, Robert Altman, Hal Ashby, Alan J. Pakula and Martin Scorsese — filmmakers who weren’t interested in preserving the system. They wanted to blow it up. Their films — Carnal Knowledge, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Shampoo, Klute, Taxi Driver — didn’t just break the rules, they rewrote the language of cinema itself. And that reinvention gave this young, liberated generation of actors a canvas as unbound and unconventional as they were — a kind of free-spirited platform that hadn’t existed before and hasn’t really existed since.

Few actors made better use of that freedom than Redford and Keaton. In such films as The Candidate, Three Days of the Condor and The Way We Were, Redford turned the clean-cut leading man into something more introspective and morally uncertain — a figure torn between idealism and self-interest. Keaton took the same open, idiosyncratic presence that made Annie Hall so engaging and revealed its darker shades in The Godfather and Looking for Mr. Goodbar, proving she could be fearless, complex, even unsettling. Both found truth in contradiction. They made uncertainty look thrilling.

But by the early 1980s, as the counterculture spirit of the previous decade gave way to something more box office-driven and less tolerant of creative chaos, a different model of movie star started taking over. Actors weren’t seeking to challenge the system anymore; they were the system, powering tentpoles, sequels and high-concept hits that could sell in every corner of the world. This was the era of the Event Movie, when opening-weekend grosses became the new measure of stardom. The actors who began appearing on marquees — Schwarzenegger, Stallone, Willis, Gibson, Cruise — weren’t celebrated for subtlety or transformation or their onscreen bravery, but for their box office clout.

Sure, by the 1990s, there was a parallel indie movement where some of these stars could unfurl their dramatic range, ’70s-style — Cruise in Magnolia, Stallone in Cop Land — but for all the critical acclaim and Oscar attention those roles might attract, what defined success in 1980s and ’90s Hollywood were the ticket sales for such tentpoles as Top Gun, Die Hard, the Rambo movies and The Terminator. Actors had become commodities of scale, defined largely by their ability to summon $100 million grosses.

When the new millennium arrived, that equation shifted yet again, even if the focus on money hadn’t. Hollywood’s center of gravity moved from stars to franchises. The IP became the real draw — superheroes, wizards, Jedi and other branded worlds. The costume, often spandex, mattered more than the actor inside it (even Redford got in on the act, playing a Marvel villain in Captain America: The Winter Soldier). Stardom no longer was the engine of the movie business; it was just another interchangeable part of the business.

Then, in the 2010s and ’20s, stardom started moving from the big screen to a much smaller stage — the phone. Hollywood was still turning out superhero sagas, prestige dramas and cozy seasonal fare (like that Christmas movie, The Most Wonderful Time, eventually rewritten and released in 2015 as the forgettable Love the Coopers, with Keaton still starring and Redford’s role taken by, of all people, John Goodman). But the real competition for attention was moving elsewhere — to feeds and timelines, where fame was measured not by box office totals but by followers.

Continue/Read Original Article Here: Robert Redford, Diane Keaton and the Twilight of the Gods

#2025 #America #Books #DianeKeaton #Education #Film #Films #History #Libraries #LibraryOfCongress #Movies #OldHollywood #RobertRedford #Stars #TheHollywoodReporter #TwilightOfTheGods #UnitedStates

Robert Redford, Diane Keaton and the Twilight of the Gods – The Hollywood Reporter

• Home
• Movies
• Movie Features

Redford, Keaton and the Twilight of the Gods

The recent deaths of the icons cast a mournful light on a fading generation of actors who once redefined what movie stars could be — complex, messy, and all too human.

October 22, 2025

There was a moment, back in 2012, when Diane Keaton and Robert Redford nearly shared the screen. Both were reported to be “eyeing” the leads in a holiday-themed ensemble comedy titled The Most Wonderful Time, pitched as a Love Actually-style pastiche involving multiple interwoven tales of family and romance, all set against a backdrop of Christmas lights and yuletide meltdowns.

Alas, that movie never got made — at least not in that form — and Keaton and Redford never again came so close to working together. But in their own ways, these two very different actors — she, the eccentric spirit of New Hollywood comedy; he, the golden-boy stoic of the American pastoral — were bound by something even more powerful than onscreen chemistry: generational gravity. They belonged to the same loose orbit of 1970s-era performers who upended the rules of stardom and helped reshape what American movies could be.

Keaton died Oct. 11 at age 79 after a shockingly quick battle with pneumonia. Redford died in his sleep, at 89, a little less than a month earlier, on Sept. 16. Some from their cohort had gone before — Paul Newman in 2008, Shelley Duvall in 2024, Gene Hackman in February — while others have simply drifted from view. Warren Beatty, Jack Nicholson, Dustin Hoffman, Faye Dunaway — all now in their 80s — have largely stepped away from the spotlight.

Of course, this is nothing new. All stars, even the brightest, eventually flicker out as new generations take their place. But there’s something different — something more poignant — about watching this particular circle begin to vanish.

The stars who came before them had been shaped by the studio system — groomed, styled and slotted into types. They signed long-term contracts, wore what the wardrobe department handed them and gave interviews ghostwritten by studio publicists. Even the greats — Bogart, Hepburn, Gable, Davis — were often playing variations of a persona the system had helped construct. Their power came from polish, execution and consistency. Stardom was a product, and it was carefully managed.

By the time Redford, Keaton, Beatty and the others were coming of age as actors, the old studio scaffolding was already coming apart, with the contract system unraveling and the great moguls who once ruled the town with an iron fist fading from the scene. There was no longer a press-office puppeteer telling actors how to dress or what to say, no studio image to protect. They were free to define themselves — onscreen and off — and to let those two identities blur. Their personas could be withholding, eccentric, neurotic, ambiguous, strange. They could play characters the previous generation never got near: complicated people with unresolved feelings and messy inner lives.

At the same time, a new kind of director had taken over the asylum — such mavericks as Mike Nichols, Robert Altman, Hal Ashby, Alan J. Pakula and Martin Scorsese — filmmakers who weren’t interested in preserving the system. They wanted to blow it up. Their films — Carnal Knowledge, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Shampoo, Klute, Taxi Driver — didn’t just break the rules, they rewrote the language of cinema itself. And that reinvention gave this young, liberated generation of actors a canvas as unbound and unconventional as they were — a kind of free-spirited platform that hadn’t existed before and hasn’t really existed since.

Few actors made better use of that freedom than Redford and Keaton. In such films as The Candidate, Three Days of the Condor and The Way We Were, Redford turned the clean-cut leading man into something more introspective and morally uncertain — a figure torn between idealism and self-interest. Keaton took the same open, idiosyncratic presence that made Annie Hall so engaging and revealed its darker shades in The Godfather and Looking for Mr. Goodbar, proving she could be fearless, complex, even unsettling. Both found truth in contradiction. They made uncertainty look thrilling.

But by the early 1980s, as the counterculture spirit of the previous decade gave way to something more box office-driven and less tolerant of creative chaos, a different model of movie star started taking over. Actors weren’t seeking to challenge the system anymore; they were the system, powering tentpoles, sequels and high-concept hits that could sell in every corner of the world. This was the era of the Event Movie, when opening-weekend grosses became the new measure of stardom. The actors who began appearing on marquees — Schwarzenegger, Stallone, Willis, Gibson, Cruise — weren’t celebrated for subtlety or transformation or their onscreen bravery, but for their box office clout.

Sure, by the 1990s, there was a parallel indie movement where some of these stars could unfurl their dramatic range, ’70s-style — Cruise in Magnolia, Stallone in Cop Land — but for all the critical acclaim and Oscar attention those roles might attract, what defined success in 1980s and ’90s Hollywood were the ticket sales for such tentpoles as Top Gun, Die Hard, the Rambo movies and The Terminator. Actors had become commodities of scale, defined largely by their ability to summon $100 million grosses.

When the new millennium arrived, that equation shifted yet again, even if the focus on money hadn’t. Hollywood’s center of gravity moved from stars to franchises. The IP became the real draw — superheroes, wizards, Jedi and other branded worlds. The costume, often spandex, mattered more than the actor inside it (even Redford got in on the act, playing a Marvel villain in Captain America: The Winter Soldier). Stardom no longer was the engine of the movie business; it was just another interchangeable part of the business.

Then, in the 2010s and ’20s, stardom started moving from the big screen to a much smaller stage — the phone. Hollywood was still turning out superhero sagas, prestige dramas and cozy seasonal fare (like that Christmas movie, The Most Wonderful Time, eventually rewritten and released in 2015 as the forgettable Love the Coopers, with Keaton still starring and Redford’s role taken by, of all people, John Goodman). But the real competition for attention was moving elsewhere — to feeds and timelines, where fame was measured not by box office totals but by followers.

Continue/Read Original Article Here: Robert Redford, Diane Keaton and the Twilight of the Gods

#2025 #America #Books #DianeKeaton #Education #Film #Films #History #Libraries #LibraryOfCongress #Movies #OldHollywood #RobertRedford #Stars #TheHollywoodReporter #TwilightOfTheGods #UnitedStates

Robert Redford, Diane Keaton and the Twilight of the Gods – The Hollywood Reporter

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Redford, Keaton and the Twilight of the Gods

The recent deaths of the icons cast a mournful light on a fading generation of actors who once redefined what movie stars could be — complex, messy, and all too human.

October 22, 2025

There was a moment, back in 2012, when Diane Keaton and Robert Redford nearly shared the screen. Both were reported to be “eyeing” the leads in a holiday-themed ensemble comedy titled The Most Wonderful Time, pitched as a Love Actually-style pastiche involving multiple interwoven tales of family and romance, all set against a backdrop of Christmas lights and yuletide meltdowns.

Alas, that movie never got made — at least not in that form — and Keaton and Redford never again came so close to working together. But in their own ways, these two very different actors — she, the eccentric spirit of New Hollywood comedy; he, the golden-boy stoic of the American pastoral — were bound by something even more powerful than onscreen chemistry: generational gravity. They belonged to the same loose orbit of 1970s-era performers who upended the rules of stardom and helped reshape what American movies could be.

Keaton died Oct. 11 at age 79 after a shockingly quick battle with pneumonia. Redford died in his sleep, at 89, a little less than a month earlier, on Sept. 16. Some from their cohort had gone before — Paul Newman in 2008, Shelley Duvall in 2024, Gene Hackman in February — while others have simply drifted from view. Warren Beatty, Jack Nicholson, Dustin Hoffman, Faye Dunaway — all now in their 80s — have largely stepped away from the spotlight.

Of course, this is nothing new. All stars, even the brightest, eventually flicker out as new generations take their place. But there’s something different — something more poignant — about watching this particular circle begin to vanish.

The stars who came before them had been shaped by the studio system — groomed, styled and slotted into types. They signed long-term contracts, wore what the wardrobe department handed them and gave interviews ghostwritten by studio publicists. Even the greats — Bogart, Hepburn, Gable, Davis — were often playing variations of a persona the system had helped construct. Their power came from polish, execution and consistency. Stardom was a product, and it was carefully managed.

By the time Redford, Keaton, Beatty and the others were coming of age as actors, the old studio scaffolding was already coming apart, with the contract system unraveling and the great moguls who once ruled the town with an iron fist fading from the scene. There was no longer a press-office puppeteer telling actors how to dress or what to say, no studio image to protect. They were free to define themselves — onscreen and off — and to let those two identities blur. Their personas could be withholding, eccentric, neurotic, ambiguous, strange. They could play characters the previous generation never got near: complicated people with unresolved feelings and messy inner lives.

At the same time, a new kind of director had taken over the asylum — such mavericks as Mike Nichols, Robert Altman, Hal Ashby, Alan J. Pakula and Martin Scorsese — filmmakers who weren’t interested in preserving the system. They wanted to blow it up. Their films — Carnal Knowledge, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Shampoo, Klute, Taxi Driver — didn’t just break the rules, they rewrote the language of cinema itself. And that reinvention gave this young, liberated generation of actors a canvas as unbound and unconventional as they were — a kind of free-spirited platform that hadn’t existed before and hasn’t really existed since.

Few actors made better use of that freedom than Redford and Keaton. In such films as The Candidate, Three Days of the Condor and The Way We Were, Redford turned the clean-cut leading man into something more introspective and morally uncertain — a figure torn between idealism and self-interest. Keaton took the same open, idiosyncratic presence that made Annie Hall so engaging and revealed its darker shades in The Godfather and Looking for Mr. Goodbar, proving she could be fearless, complex, even unsettling. Both found truth in contradiction. They made uncertainty look thrilling.

But by the early 1980s, as the counterculture spirit of the previous decade gave way to something more box office-driven and less tolerant of creative chaos, a different model of movie star started taking over. Actors weren’t seeking to challenge the system anymore; they were the system, powering tentpoles, sequels and high-concept hits that could sell in every corner of the world. This was the era of the Event Movie, when opening-weekend grosses became the new measure of stardom. The actors who began appearing on marquees — Schwarzenegger, Stallone, Willis, Gibson, Cruise — weren’t celebrated for subtlety or transformation or their onscreen bravery, but for their box office clout.

Sure, by the 1990s, there was a parallel indie movement where some of these stars could unfurl their dramatic range, ’70s-style — Cruise in Magnolia, Stallone in Cop Land — but for all the critical acclaim and Oscar attention those roles might attract, what defined success in 1980s and ’90s Hollywood were the ticket sales for such tentpoles as Top Gun, Die Hard, the Rambo movies and The Terminator. Actors had become commodities of scale, defined largely by their ability to summon $100 million grosses.

When the new millennium arrived, that equation shifted yet again, even if the focus on money hadn’t. Hollywood’s center of gravity moved from stars to franchises. The IP became the real draw — superheroes, wizards, Jedi and other branded worlds. The costume, often spandex, mattered more than the actor inside it (even Redford got in on the act, playing a Marvel villain in Captain America: The Winter Soldier). Stardom no longer was the engine of the movie business; it was just another interchangeable part of the business.

Then, in the 2010s and ’20s, stardom started moving from the big screen to a much smaller stage — the phone. Hollywood was still turning out superhero sagas, prestige dramas and cozy seasonal fare (like that Christmas movie, The Most Wonderful Time, eventually rewritten and released in 2015 as the forgettable Love the Coopers, with Keaton still starring and Redford’s role taken by, of all people, John Goodman). But the real competition for attention was moving elsewhere — to feeds and timelines, where fame was measured not by box office totals but by followers.

Continue/Read Original Article Here: Robert Redford, Diane Keaton and the Twilight of the Gods

#2025 #America #Books #DianeKeaton #Education #Film #Films #History #Libraries #LibraryOfCongress #Movies #OldHollywood #RobertRedford #Stars #TheHollywoodReporter #TwilightOfTheGods #UnitedStates

Trump’s deployments of National Guard troops reignite a 200-year-old Constitutional debate – PBS News

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By — Andrea Katz, The Conversation

Trump’s deployments of National Guard troops reignite a 200-year-old Constitutional debate

Politics Oct 22, 2025 1:15 PM EDT, This article originally appeared on The Conversation.

If you’re confused about what the law does and doesn’t allow the president to do with the National Guard, that’s understandable.

As National Guard troops landed in Portland, Oregon, in late September 2025, the state’s lawyers argued that the deployment was a “direct intrusion on its sovereign police power.”

READ MORE: U.S. appeals court says Trump can take command of Oregon National Guard troops, though deployment blocked for now

Days before, President Donald Trump, calling the city “a war zone,” had invoked a federal law allowing the government to call up the Guard during national emergencies or when state authorities cannot maintain order.

The conflict throws into relief a question as old as the Constitution itself: Where does federal power end and state authority begin?

One answer seems to appear in the 10th Amendment’s straightforward language: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” This text is considered to be the constitutional “hook” for federalism in our democracy.

The founders, responding to anti-Federalist anxieties about an overbearing central government, added this language to emphasize that the new government possessed only limited powers. Everything else – including the broad “police power” to regulate health, safety, morals and general welfare – remained with the states.

Yet from the beginning, the text has generated plenty of confusion. Is the 10th Amendment merely a “truism,” as Justice Harlan Fiske Stone wrote in 1941 in United States v. Darby, restating the Constitution’s structure of limited powers? Or does it describe concrete powers held by the states?

Turns out, there’s no simple answer, not even from the nation’s highest court. Over the years, the Supreme Court has treated the 10th Amendment like the proverbial magician’s hat, sometimes pulling robust state powers from its depths, other times finding it empty.

10th Amendment’s broad range

The arguments over the 10th Amendment for almost 200 years have applied not only to the National Guard but to questions about how the federal and state governments share powers over everything from taxation to government salaries, law enforcement and regulation of the economy.

For much of the 19th century, the 10th Amendment remained dormant. The federal government’s weakness and limited ambitions, especially on the slavery question, meant that boundaries were rarely tested before the courts.

The New Deal era brought this equilibrium crashing down.

The Supreme Court initially resisted the expansion of federal power, striking down laws banning child labor in Hammer v. Dagenhart in 1918, setting a federal minimum wage in 1923 in Adkins v. Children’s Hospital, and offering farmers subsidies in U.S. v. Butler in 1937. All these decisions were based on the 10th Amendment.

WATCH: Conservative constitutional lawyer weighs in on Trump’s aggressive use of executive power

But this resistance wore down in the face of economic crisis and political pressure. By the time of the Darby case in 1941, which concerned the Fair Labor Standards Act and Congress’ power to regulate many aspects of employment, the court had relegated the 10th Amendment to “truism” status: The Amendment, wrote Stone, did nothing more than restate the relationship between the national and state governments as it had been established by the Constitution before the amendment.

The 1970s marked an unexpected revival. In the 1976 decision in National League of Cities v. Usery, a dispute over whether Congress could directly exercise control over minimum wage and overtime pay for state and local government employees, the court held that Congress could not use its commerce power to regulate state governments.

But that principle was abandoned nine years later, with the court doubling back on its position. Now, if the states wanted protection from federal overreach, they would have to seek it through the political process, not judicial intervention.

Yet less than a decade later, the court reversed course again. The modern federalism renaissance began in the ’90s with a pair of divided opinions stating that the federal government cannot force the states to enforce federal regulatory programs: this was the “anti-commandeering principle.”

The 10th Amendment’s meandering path

In recent decades, the court, led by Chief Justice John Roberts, has invoked the amendment to protect state power in varied, even surprising contexts: states’ entitlement to federal Medicaid spending; state authority over running elections, despite patterns of voter exclusion; even legalization of sports gambling.

On the other hand, in 2024, Colorado was barred by the court from excluding Trump from the presidential ballot as part of its power to administer elections.

That brings us back to the present, where Trump has deployed National Guard troops to Los Angeles to quell protests against immigration enforcement, and bids to send them to Portland and Chicago as well.

From the point of view of federalism, two factors lend this conflict some constitutional complexity.

Continue/Read Original Article: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/trumps-deployments-of-national-guard-troops-reignite-a-200-year-old-constitutional-debate

#10thAmendment #2025 #America #ConstitutionalCrisis #DemocraticCities #DonaldTrump #Education #Health #History #Libraries #Library #LibraryOfCongress #NationalGuard #OnlyBlueCities #Opinion #PBSNews #Politics #Resistance #Science #SCOTUS #StatesRights #Trump #TrumpAdministration #USConstitution #UnitedStates

Scenes From Saturday’s Nationwide ‘No Kings’ Protests – WIRED

By Brian Barrett Alyssa Walker

Politics, Oct 19, 2025 5:00 PM

Scenes From Saturday’s Nationwide ‘No Kings’ Protests

Organizers say the “No Kings” protests drew more than 7 million people across 2,700 cities. The crowds included high-profile politicians, A-list celebrities, and more than a few creative inflatables.

PHOTOGRAPH: Ethan Noah Roy

On Saturday, crowds gathered in cities across the United States to protest President Donald Trump and his administration. Organizers of the No Kings rallies claim that more than 7 million people attended in all, across 2,700 cities in the Unites States and beyond. The gatherings provided a clear picture not only of how widespread the resistance to the Trump administration has become, but also the diversity of the coalition driving it. Not to mention the signs.

“Today, millions of Americans stood together to reject authoritarianism and remind the world that our democracy belongs to the people, not to one man’s ambition,” said Ezra Levin and Leah Greenberg, cofounders of the nonprofit Indivisible—which took the lead on organizing the rallies—in a statement.

Ahead of Saturday, House speaker Mike Johnson described the planned gatherings as the “hate America rally” and warned that the crowds would be filled with “antifa types.” In reality, the protests were uniformly peaceful, with inflatable costumes appearing to outnumber conservative bogeymen by a wide margin. And Trump’s response to No Kings? An AI-generated video of himself, wearing a crown, piloting a fighter jet and dropping massive amounts of excrement on protesting US citizens below.

In the real world, the crowds walked their routes without issue. Below are snapshots of No Kings from cities across the US, a look at a protest movement that is increasingly motivated and able to mobilize.

Alaska

California

Colorado

Florida

Georgia

Idaho

Illinois

Michigan

New York

North Carolina

Oregon

Texas

Vermont

Washington, DC

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Brian Barrett is the executive editor of WIRED. Previously he was the editor in chief of the tech and culture site Gizmodo and was a business reporter for the Yomiuri Shimbun, Japan’s largest daily newspaper. … Read More

Alyssa Walker is WIRED’s Creative Director, overseeing design, photography and all things visual. Prior to working at WIRED she was the Creative Director at Willamette Week in Portland, Oregon. Her work has been recognized by the Society of Publication Designers, American Illustration Awards, Association of Alternative Media and the Society … Read More

Topics Donald Trump politics protests

WIRED is where tomorrow is realized. It is the essential source of information and ideas that make sense of a world in constant transformation. The WIRED conversation illuminates how technology is changing every aspect of our lives—from culture to business, science to design. The breakthroughs and innovations that we uncover lead to new ways of thinking, new connections, and new industries.

Continue/Read Original Article: https://www.wired.com/story/no-kings-protests-photos/

#2025 #America #DonaldTrump #Education #History #Libraries #LibraryOfCongress #NationalPhotos #NoDictators #NoKings #NoKingsDay #NoNazis #October19 #Opinion #PeacefulProtests #Politics #Resistance #Science #Technology #Trump #TrumpAdministration #UnitedStates #Wired

Opinion – Amy Coney Barrett Is Looking Beyond the Trump Era – The New York Times

Opinion Interesting Times

Amy Coney Barrett Is Looking Beyond the Trump Era

The Supreme Court justice isn’t making decisions based on public opinion.

 There’s a roster of cases before the Supreme Court that could reshape the entire Trump presidency and redefine executive power. And my guest this week, Justice Amy Coney Barrett, is likely to be the decisive vote in some of these cases.

Unfortunately but predictably, that means that she couldn’t or wouldn’t respond to my most direct questions about the Trump administration.

But my goal was to push the justice on a question that she can answer, and one that she addresses at length in her new book, “Listening to the Law.” I wanted to know whether her preferred legal theory, originalism, can bend and flex in response to prudential and political concerns.

Barrett believes strongly that it shouldn’t, that justices should rule without worrying about public opinion or who happens to be in the White House. But I tend to think real-world politics constantly tests and limits that ideal. So in our conversation, I’m trying to find those limits and the ways in which even justices devoted to the original meaning of the Constitution have to deal with the highly unusual pressures of right now.

Amy Coney Barrett Doesn’t Need You to Like Her

The Supreme Court justice isn’t making decisions based on public opinion.

Below is an edited transcript of an episode of “Interesting Times.” We recommend listening to it in its original form for the full effect. You can do so using the player above or on Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts. Editor’s Note: Embedded from Spotify below.

Ross Douthat: Justice Barrett, welcome to “Interesting Times.”

Amy Coney Barrett: Thank you for having me, Ross.

Douthat: I honestly would never have said no. [Barrett chuckles.]

Your book is mostly about — and we’re mostly going to talk about theories of jurisprudence, the place of the Supreme Court in American life, possibly some issues related to the Trump presidency and executive power — but it does start with a little window into the personal world of Amy Coney Barrett, so I’m going to start with a couple of questions about that terrain.

We looked it up, and you are the first guest we’ve had on the show who has more children than I do — which is only because we haven’t yet succeeded in booking Elon Musk, I should say.

Barrett: [Laughs.] There’s still time for you to catch up with me.

Douthat: That’s a bold statement. I appreciate your confidence in my youthful energy and vigor.

When you were being nominated, this newspaper, The New York Times, ran a story that talked about your mix of personal and professional obligations and how it made you a certain kind of trailblazer. And the story described you — and you can accept this description or not — as “a woman who is both unabashedly ambitious and deeply religious, who has excelled at the heights of a demanding profession,” even as she speaks openly about prioritizing her faith and family.

I’m curious if you actually see yourself this way at all? Do you see yourself as a particular kind of trailblazer or role model in that kind of balancing act?

Barrett: I don’t see myself as a trailblazer, nor do I love the word “ambitious,” because I feel like the word “ambition” puts a focus on success or ambition for its own sake, which isn’t how I’ve ever conceived of my career.

When I was growing up — I was born in 1972 — my mom stayed home, and the parents of most of my friends had a working dad and a stay-at-home mom. My kids have had a mix, and for them, it’s become unexceptional to have a mom that worked, whereas it felt like a big thing for me to make the choice because my own mother had a large family — I’m one of seven — which is, I say in the book, that’s what I always wanted. That was my No. 1 priority. And I wasn’t sure that I could do that and work at the same time, but I always have, since I had our first child.

So I think my life looks different than the life of my mom and my aunts and my friends’ parents at the time, but it’s one that my own daughters and sons and their friends, I hope, can just treat as unexceptional. Like, you can stay home if you want. You can work if you want. You can do both.

Douthat: Do you think of yourself as a feminist — a conservative feminist, if that is a category that you would accept?

Barrett: I don’t know, labels are so dangerous because they mean different things to different people. I mean, if being a feminist simply means having the view that women can do whatever it is they put their minds to and have opportunities open to them, then yes, I am.

But I think any stripe of feminism that you describe is going to have — labels are risky. So I’ll just say: Yes, yes, labels are risky.

Douthat: Labels are risky, especially when you are charged with the interpretation of the entire U.S. Constitution.

Barrett: [Laughs.] It’s so true.

Douthat: How do you actually do it? And I say this as someone who, obviously, works. Here I am working. My wife is a journalist and writer, and we do a lot of the same kind of balancing that you and your husband have done, and it takes some strange forms. But it’s very challenging. Any number of kids is challenging, but to have a large family and have a busy professional life — I’m just curious: As a Supreme Court justice, how do you feel like you guys make it work?

Barrett: A lot of people ask. That’s probably the question that I get asked most often.

Continue/Read Original Article Here: Opinion | Amy Coney Barrett Is Looking Beyond the Trump Era – The New York Times

#2025 #America #AmyConeyBarrett #DonaldTrump #Education #Health #History #InterestingTimes #Interview #JusticeBarrett #Libraries #Library #LibraryOfCongress #Opinion #Podcast #Politics #Resistance #Science #SCOTUS #SupremeCourtOfTheUnitedStates #Technology #TheNewYorkTimes #Trump #TrumpAdministration #TrumpEra #UnitedStates

Federal judges call SCOTUS’s shadow docket “inappropriate,” “opaque,” and a “judicial crisis” – Daily Kos

by TheCriticalMind

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Saturday, October 11, 2025 at 4:45:27p PDT

The current Supreme Court is making unprecedented use of the ‘shadow docket’. Reaction has been mixed. Liberals say the Court is a rubber stamp enabling Trump’s imperial presidency. MAGAs argue that SCOTUS’s conservative bloc is doing God’s work by thwarting anti-democratic rulings by unelected, activist, lower court judges.

However, politics aside, Supreme Court rulings impact how the Judiciary does business. To understand the practical effect of the Court’s use of the shadow docket, the New York Times polled US District and Appeals Court judges.

It reported its findings in an article titled: Federal Judges, Warning of ‘Judicial Crisis,’ Fault Supreme Court’s Emergency Orders.”

The subhead summarized the substance of the piece. To wit:

Dozens of sitting judges shared with The Times their concerns about risks to the courts’ legitimacy as the Supreme Court releases opaque orders about Trump administration policies.

The Times wrote to “hundreds of federal judges across the country” — and 65 replied. The respondents are not named. But the paper said presidents of both parties had appointed them. And that, while there was a difference in degree, Judges across the political spectrum worried about SCOTUS’s high-handedness. In the NYT’s words:  

Of the judges who responded, 28 were nominated by Republican presidents, including 10 by Mr. Trump; 37 were nominated by Democrats.

Adding: While those nominated by Democrats were more critical of the Supreme Court, judges nominated by presidents of both parties expressed concerns.

The paper asked the judges if they agreed or disagreed with the following statement: The Supreme Court has made appropriate use of the emergency docket since President Trump returned to office. Overall 72% said SCOTUS’s use was inappropriate, 9% hedged, and 18% (all Republican) said it was appropriate.

Tellingly, while almost all Democrats said SCOTUS was on the wrong side of the line, nearly half the Republicans concurred. The conclusion is inescapable. When half your team thinks your side stinks, it stinks.  

 Federal judges call SCOTUS’s shadow docket “inappropriate,” “opaque,” and a “judicial crisis”

Continue/Read Original Article Here: Federal judges call SCOTUS’s shadow docket “inappropriate,” “opaque,” and a “judicial crisis”

#2025 #America #DailyKos #DonaldTrump #Education #EmergencyOrders #FederalJudiciary #Health #History #JudicialCrisis #Libraries #Library #LibraryOfCongress #Opinion #Politics #Resistance #RuleOfLaw #SCOTUS #SupremeCourtOfTheUnitedStates #TheNewYorkTimes #Trump #TrumpAdministration #UnitedStates

Federal judges call SCOTUS’s shadow docket “inappropriate,” “opaque,” and a “judicial crisis” – Daily Kos

by TheCriticalMind

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Saturday, October 11, 2025 at 4:45:27p PDT

The current Supreme Court is making unprecedented use of the ‘shadow docket’. Reaction has been mixed. Liberals say the Court is a rubber stamp enabling Trump’s imperial presidency. MAGAs argue that SCOTUS’s conservative bloc is doing God’s work by thwarting anti-democratic rulings by unelected, activist, lower court judges.

However, politics aside, Supreme Court rulings impact how the Judiciary does business. To understand the practical effect of the Court’s use of the shadow docket, the New York Times polled US District and Appeals Court judges.

It reported its findings in an article titled: Federal Judges, Warning of ‘Judicial Crisis,’ Fault Supreme Court’s Emergency Orders.”

The subhead summarized the substance of the piece. To wit:

Dozens of sitting judges shared with The Times their concerns about risks to the courts’ legitimacy as the Supreme Court releases opaque orders about Trump administration policies.

The Times wrote to “hundreds of federal judges across the country” — and 65 replied. The respondents are not named. But the paper said presidents of both parties had appointed them. And that, while there was a difference in degree, Judges across the political spectrum worried about SCOTUS’s high-handedness. In the NYT’s words:  

Of the judges who responded, 28 were nominated by Republican presidents, including 10 by Mr. Trump; 37 were nominated by Democrats.

Adding: While those nominated by Democrats were more critical of the Supreme Court, judges nominated by presidents of both parties expressed concerns.

The paper asked the judges if they agreed or disagreed with the following statement: The Supreme Court has made appropriate use of the emergency docket since President Trump returned to office. Overall 72% said SCOTUS’s use was inappropriate, 9% hedged, and 18% (all Republican) said it was appropriate.

Tellingly, while almost all Democrats said SCOTUS was on the wrong side of the line, nearly half the Republicans concurred. The conclusion is inescapable. When half your team thinks your side stinks, it stinks.  

 Federal judges call SCOTUS’s shadow docket “inappropriate,” “opaque,” and a “judicial crisis”

Continue/Read Original Article Here: Federal judges call SCOTUS’s shadow docket “inappropriate,” “opaque,” and a “judicial crisis”

#2025 #America #DailyKos #DonaldTrump #Education #EmergencyOrders #FederalJudiciary #Health #History #JudicialCrisis #Libraries #Library #LibraryOfCongress #Opinion #Politics #Resistance #RuleOfLaw #SCOTUS #SupremeCourtOfTheUnitedStates #TheNewYorkTimes #Trump #TrumpAdministration #UnitedStates

Federal judges call SCOTUS’s shadow docket “inappropriate,” “opaque,” and a “judicial crisis” – Daily Kos

by TheCriticalMind

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Saturday, October 11, 2025 at 4:45:27p PDT

The current Supreme Court is making unprecedented use of the ‘shadow docket’. Reaction has been mixed. Liberals say the Court is a rubber stamp enabling Trump’s imperial presidency. MAGAs argue that SCOTUS’s conservative bloc is doing God’s work by thwarting anti-democratic rulings by unelected, activist, lower court judges.

However, politics aside, Supreme Court rulings impact how the Judiciary does business. To understand the practical effect of the Court’s use of the shadow docket, the New York Times polled US District and Appeals Court judges.

It reported its findings in an article titled: Federal Judges, Warning of ‘Judicial Crisis,’ Fault Supreme Court’s Emergency Orders.”

The subhead summarized the substance of the piece. To wit:

Dozens of sitting judges shared with The Times their concerns about risks to the courts’ legitimacy as the Supreme Court releases opaque orders about Trump administration policies.

The Times wrote to “hundreds of federal judges across the country” — and 65 replied. The respondents are not named. But the paper said presidents of both parties had appointed them. And that, while there was a difference in degree, Judges across the political spectrum worried about SCOTUS’s high-handedness. In the NYT’s words:  

Of the judges who responded, 28 were nominated by Republican presidents, including 10 by Mr. Trump; 37 were nominated by Democrats.

Adding: While those nominated by Democrats were more critical of the Supreme Court, judges nominated by presidents of both parties expressed concerns.

The paper asked the judges if they agreed or disagreed with the following statement: The Supreme Court has made appropriate use of the emergency docket since President Trump returned to office. Overall 72% said SCOTUS’s use was inappropriate, 9% hedged, and 18% (all Republican) said it was appropriate.

Tellingly, while almost all Democrats said SCOTUS was on the wrong side of the line, nearly half the Republicans concurred. The conclusion is inescapable. When half your team thinks your side stinks, it stinks.  

 Federal judges call SCOTUS’s shadow docket “inappropriate,” “opaque,” and a “judicial crisis”

Continue/Read Original Article Here: Federal judges call SCOTUS’s shadow docket “inappropriate,” “opaque,” and a “judicial crisis”

#2025 #America #DailyKos #DonaldTrump #Education #EmergencyOrders #FederalJudiciary #Health #History #JudicialCrisis #Libraries #Library #LibraryOfCongress #Opinion #Politics #Resistance #RuleOfLaw #SCOTUS #SupremeCourtOfTheUnitedStates #TheNewYorkTimes #Trump #TrumpAdministration #UnitedStates

Federal judges call SCOTUS’s shadow docket “inappropriate,” “opaque,” and a “judicial crisis” – Daily Kos

by TheCriticalMind

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Saturday, October 11, 2025 at 4:45:27p PDT

The current Supreme Court is making unprecedented use of the ‘shadow docket’. Reaction has been mixed. Liberals say the Court is a rubber stamp enabling Trump’s imperial presidency. MAGAs argue that SCOTUS’s conservative bloc is doing God’s work by thwarting anti-democratic rulings by unelected, activist, lower court judges.

However, politics aside, Supreme Court rulings impact how the Judiciary does business. To understand the practical effect of the Court’s use of the shadow docket, the New York Times polled US District and Appeals Court judges.

It reported its findings in an article titled: Federal Judges, Warning of ‘Judicial Crisis,’ Fault Supreme Court’s Emergency Orders.”

The subhead summarized the substance of the piece. To wit:

Dozens of sitting judges shared with The Times their concerns about risks to the courts’ legitimacy as the Supreme Court releases opaque orders about Trump administration policies.

The Times wrote to “hundreds of federal judges across the country” — and 65 replied. The respondents are not named. But the paper said presidents of both parties had appointed them. And that, while there was a difference in degree, Judges across the political spectrum worried about SCOTUS’s high-handedness. In the NYT’s words:  

Of the judges who responded, 28 were nominated by Republican presidents, including 10 by Mr. Trump; 37 were nominated by Democrats.

Adding: While those nominated by Democrats were more critical of the Supreme Court, judges nominated by presidents of both parties expressed concerns.

The paper asked the judges if they agreed or disagreed with the following statement: The Supreme Court has made appropriate use of the emergency docket since President Trump returned to office. Overall 72% said SCOTUS’s use was inappropriate, 9% hedged, and 18% (all Republican) said it was appropriate.

Tellingly, while almost all Democrats said SCOTUS was on the wrong side of the line, nearly half the Republicans concurred. The conclusion is inescapable. When half your team thinks your side stinks, it stinks.  

 Federal judges call SCOTUS’s shadow docket “inappropriate,” “opaque,” and a “judicial crisis”

Continue/Read Original Article Here: Federal judges call SCOTUS’s shadow docket “inappropriate,” “opaque,” and a “judicial crisis”

#2025 #America #DailyKos #DonaldTrump #Education #EmergencyOrders #FederalJudiciary #Health #History #JudicialCrisis #Libraries #Library #LibraryOfCongress #Opinion #Politics #Resistance #RuleOfLaw #SCOTUS #SupremeCourtOfTheUnitedStates #TheNewYorkTimes #Trump #TrumpAdministration #UnitedStates

Federal judges call SCOTUS’s shadow docket “inappropriate,” “opaque,” and a “judicial crisis” – Daily Kos

by TheCriticalMind

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Saturday, October 11, 2025 at 4:45:27p PDT

The current Supreme Court is making unprecedented use of the ‘shadow docket’. Reaction has been mixed. Liberals say the Court is a rubber stamp enabling Trump’s imperial presidency. MAGAs argue that SCOTUS’s conservative bloc is doing God’s work by thwarting anti-democratic rulings by unelected, activist, lower court judges.

However, politics aside, Supreme Court rulings impact how the Judiciary does business. To understand the practical effect of the Court’s use of the shadow docket, the New York Times polled US District and Appeals Court judges.

It reported its findings in an article titled: Federal Judges, Warning of ‘Judicial Crisis,’ Fault Supreme Court’s Emergency Orders.”

The subhead summarized the substance of the piece. To wit:

Dozens of sitting judges shared with The Times their concerns about risks to the courts’ legitimacy as the Supreme Court releases opaque orders about Trump administration policies.

The Times wrote to “hundreds of federal judges across the country” — and 65 replied. The respondents are not named. But the paper said presidents of both parties had appointed them. And that, while there was a difference in degree, Judges across the political spectrum worried about SCOTUS’s high-handedness. In the NYT’s words:  

Of the judges who responded, 28 were nominated by Republican presidents, including 10 by Mr. Trump; 37 were nominated by Democrats.

Adding: While those nominated by Democrats were more critical of the Supreme Court, judges nominated by presidents of both parties expressed concerns.

The paper asked the judges if they agreed or disagreed with the following statement: The Supreme Court has made appropriate use of the emergency docket since President Trump returned to office. Overall 72% said SCOTUS’s use was inappropriate, 9% hedged, and 18% (all Republican) said it was appropriate.

Tellingly, while almost all Democrats said SCOTUS was on the wrong side of the line, nearly half the Republicans concurred. The conclusion is inescapable. When half your team thinks your side stinks, it stinks.  

 Federal judges call SCOTUS’s shadow docket “inappropriate,” “opaque,” and a “judicial crisis”

Continue/Read Original Article Here: Federal judges call SCOTUS’s shadow docket “inappropriate,” “opaque,” and a “judicial crisis”

#2025 #America #DailyKos #DonaldTrump #Education #EmergencyOrders #FederalJudiciary #Health #History #JudicialCrisis #Libraries #Library #LibraryOfCongress #Opinion #Politics #Resistance #RuleOfLaw #SCOTUS #SupremeCourtOfTheUnitedStates #TheNewYorkTimes #Trump #TrumpAdministration #UnitedStates

September 25, 2025 – by Heather Cox Richardson

https://substack.com/session-attribution-frame

Letters from an American

September 25, 2025

Heather Cox Richardson

Sep 25, 2025

Today, with the popularity of President Donald J. Trump and his administration dropping, Trump’s disastrous performance at the United Nations, the return of comedian Jimmy Kimmel to the airwaves, and the Tuesday’s election in Arizona of Democratic representative Adelita Grijalva, who will provide the final signature on a discharge petition to demand a floor vote in the House over releasing all the government files on convicted child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, the administration appears to be making a dramatic push to seize complete control of the government.

Last night, Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought tried to jam the Democrats into passing the Republicans’ continuing resolution to fund the government. Officials leaked a memo to Politico, Punchbowl News, and Axios—publications that focus on events concerning Capitol Hill—saying that if the Democrats refuse to pass the Republicans’ measure, the administration will try to fire, rather than furlough, large numbers of federal employees.

Such a move would be challenged in the courts, and the government has been forced to rehire many of the people it forced out earlier this year after those firings left agencies badly understaffed. But the threat is not idle; Vought is a Christian nationalist who has called for a “radical Constitutionalism” that demolishes the modern American state and replaces it with a powerful executive.

House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) responded: “Listen Russ, you are a malignant political hack. We will not be intimidated by your threat to engage in mass firings. Get lost.” Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said in a statement: “Donald Trump has been firing federal workers since day one—not to govern, but to scare. This is nothing new and has nothing to do with funding the government. These unnecessary firings will either be overturned in court or the administration will end up hiring the workers back, just like they did as recently as today.”

Trump appears focused on September 30, when the government funding crisis will hit, and the days after it. Although courts have ruled that he does not have the power to impose tariffs willy-nilly, today Trump announced new tariffs of 100% on pharmaceuticals, 50% on kitchen and bathroom cabinets, 30% on upholstered furniture, and 25% on “Heavy (Big!) Trucks” beginning on October 1. On social media, he claimed such tariffs were necessary “for National Security and other reasons.”

Today, James LaPorta of CBS News reported that the National Archives and Records Administration improperly released Democratic representative Mikie Sherrill’s full military records to an ally of her Republican opponent, Jack Ciattarelli, in the New Jersey governor’s race. The two candidates are tied, and Ciattarelli appears to be trying to link Sherrill to the 1994 Naval Academy cheating scandal involving more than 100 midshipmen.

Sherrill had an unblemished career in the Navy and as a midshipman, LaPorta notes. She did not turn in her cheating classmates, but she was never accused of cheating herself. The unredacted release of Sherrill’s records appears to violate the 1974 Privacy Act. Sherrill said: “That Jack Ciattarelli and the Trump administration are illegally weaponizing my records for political gain is a violation of anyone who has ever served our country. No veteran’s record is safe.”

While the National Archives maintained the release was a mistake and apologized for it, the administration’s influence in the Department of Justice tonight could not be explained away.

Days after Trump demanded that the Department of Justice move “now” to prosecute those he perceives to be his enemies, a federal grand jury has indicted former FBI director James Comey for allegedly lying to Congress and obstructing an investigation. Comey was an early casualty of Trump’s first administration, fired after he refused to kill the FBI investigation of the ties between Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russian operatives.

Over last weekend, Trump exploded at then–acting U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia Erik Siebert, a career prosecutor, after Siebert concluded there was not enough evidence of a crime to charge Comey for allegedly lying to Congress or New York attorney general Letitia James for alleged mortgage fraud.

On Monday Trump replaced Siebert with White House aide and Trump’s former personal lawyer Lindsey Halligan, and yesterday three sources told Ken Dilanian and Carol Leonnig of MSNBC that they expected Halligan to try to get a grand jury to indict Comey before the five-year statute of limitations on lying to Congress runs out next Tuesday.

Editor’s Note: My emphasis below… –DrWeb

Tonight the DOJ delivered an indictment against Comey.

“My family and I have known for years that there are costs to standing up to Donald Trump,” Comey said tonight in a video. “But we…will not live on our knees, and you shouldn’t either. Somebody that I love dearly recently said that fear is the tool of a tyrant, and she’s right, but I’m not afraid, and I hope you’re not either. I hope instead you are engaged, you are paying attention, and you will vote like your beloved country depends upon it, which it does. My heart is broken for the Department of Justice, but I have great confidence in the federal judicial system. I’m innocent. So let’s have a trial and keep the faith.”

Editor’s Note: Read the rest of the story, at the below link.

Continue/Read Original Article Here: September 25, 2025 – by Heather Cox Richardson

#2025 #America #DonaldTrump #Education #EnemiesList #FBIDirector #FormerFBI #Health #HeatherCoxRichardson #History #Indiced #JamesComey #LettersFromAnAmerican #Libraries #LibraryOfCongress #Opinion #Politics #Resistance #Science #Substack #Trump #TrumpAdministration #TrumpEnemies #UnitedStates

Former FBI Director James Comey indicted amid Trump push to prosecute foes – The Washington Post

National Security Foreign Policy Intelligence Justice Military

Former FBI director James Comey indicted amid Trump push to prosecute foes

Comey, who has denied wrongdoing, is charged in connection with allegations he lied to Congress.

Updated, September 25, 2025 at 8:50 p.m. EDT, 10 minutes ago, 5 min

By Salvador Rizzo, Jeremy Roebuck and Perry Stein

Former FBI director James B. Comey was indicted Thursday on allegations he lied to Congress following an extraordinary demand from President Donald Trump for the Justice Department to prosecute a man he has long considered a political foe.

The indictment [ see below ] by a federal grand jury in Alexandria charges Comey with one count of making false statements and one count of obstruction of Congress, charges punishable by up to five years in prison.

Editor’s Note: The PDF is embedded here, and a download link.

Grand jurors rejected a third false statement count sought by prosecutors, the panel’s foreperson said during a brief court proceeding following their decision.

The White House recently forced out the previous top prosecutor on the case and replaced him with one of Trump’s former personal attorneys. The indictment makes Comey the first of several Trump targets to face charges following the president’s extraordinary demand last weekend that Attorney General Pam Bondi move swiftly to bring cases against several of his perceived political adversaries.

The case also means Comey is the first former senior government official to face prosecution in connection with an investigation that has become a central grievance for Trump since his first term — the FBI’s probe of Russian interference in his 2016 election victory.

Comey declared his innocence in a video statement posted to social media and vowed to take his case to trial.

“My family and I have known for years that there are costs to standing up to Donald Trump, but we couldn’t imagine ourselves living any other way,” he said. “We will not live on our knees and you shouldn’t either.”

Trump derided Comey as “the former Corrupt Head of the FBI” in a social media post Thursday evening after the indictment was returned.

“JUSTICE IN AMERICA!” Trump wrote, adding later of Comey: “He has been so bad for our Country, for so long, and is now at the beginning of being held responsible for his crimes against our Nation”

Bondi, in a statement Thursday, said “no one is above the law.”

“Today’s indictment reflects this Department of Justice’s commitment to holding those who abuse positions of power accountable for misleading the American people,” she said. “We will follow the facts in this case.”

Comey was originally appointed as FBI director in 2013 by President Barack Obama. He was fired by Trump in 2017 amid acrimony largely stemming from the FBI’s handling of the Russia investigation.

The case against him centers on testimony he gave before the Senate Judiciary Committee in September 2020 during a hearing on the FBI’s Russian interference investigation. Under questioning from Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), Comey testified he’d never authorized leaks to the media about the Russia investigation or a separate probe into then-Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server.

Prosecutors now contend that answer was untrue, forming the basis for the first charge against him. The second count, obstruction of a congressional proceeding, relates to the same September 2020 testimony but does not specify the “false and misleading statements” Comey is alleged to have made that forms the basis for the charge.

Editor’s Note: Read the rest of the story, at the below link.

Continue/Read Original Article Here: Former FBI Director James Comey indicted amid Trump push to prosecute foes – The Washington Post

#2025 #America #BidenAdministration #DonaldTrump #Education #FBIDirector #Health #History #JamesComey #Libraries #Library #LibraryOfCongress #Opinion #Politics #Reading #Resistance #Science #Television #TheWashingtonPost #Trump #TrumpAdministration #UnitedStates

The US veers toward Christian nationalism – CNN What Matters

The First Amendment, after all, in addition to guaranteeing free speech, says that Congress shall “make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…”

US leaders talk about Jesus Christ at Kirk’s funeral

Never in recent memory have Americans seen more top government officials speak so openly about Jesus Christ as they did at Charlie Kirk’s memorial, which Trump described as “an old-time revival” rather than a funeral.  It makes sense that Kirk’s funeral would feature religious overtones: Conversion was at the core of Kirk’s conservatism, something praised by the country’s assembled top political leaders who attended his funeral, including the president, the vice president, the speaker of the House of Representatives and much of the president’s Cabinet.

Saying God is on their side

The podcaster Benny Johnson talked about the idea of “Godly government” and pointed down at Trump’s assembled Cabinet secretaries.  “God has given them power over our nation and our land,” he said, adding it was God who saved Trump from a different assassin’s bullet “for this moment.” Trump officials said God is on their side as they go after their political enemies.

“We are on the side of goodness. We are on the side of God,” White House adviser Stephen Miller said in a speech that, like Trump’s, promised retribution against an unnamed evil, though evidence release so far suggests Kirk’s alleged killer acted alone.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio delivered a sermon that concluded with discussion of the Second Coming.  Vice President JD Vance, who referred to Kirk as a “warrior for country, a warrior for Christ,” counseled Americans to “live worthy of Charlie’s sacrifice and put Christ at the center of your life.”
Where does religious belief veer into Christian nationalism?

Christian nationalism is the concept — rejected by many scholars — that the US was formed as a Christian nation and that Christianity should imbue its laws.  Many Trump administration actions have blurred the lines between church and state.

In the days before Kirk was assassinated at Utah Valley University, Trump delivered a speech at the privately funded Museum of the Bible in Washington, DC, where he promised to protect prayer in public schools through forthcoming guidance from the Department of Education. “To have a great nation, you have to have religion,” Trump said.

“I believe that so strongly. There has to be something after we go through all of this — and that something is God.”

Religion at the Department of Justice
After that September 8 speech, Trump met with the Religious Liberty Commission he created by executive action at the Department of Justice. Among the commission’s charges is “Exploring the foundations of religious liberty in America,” and “identifying current threats to domestic religious liberty.” Trump labeled previous Justice Department prosecutions of anti-abortion rights protesters outside clinics as a form of anti-Christian bias.

A pastor with pull on Christian nationalism

Last month, CNN’s Pamela Brown profiled self-described Christian nationalist pastor Douglas Wilson, who has ties to Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. Wilson is based in Idaho, but his organization has opened an outpost in the nation’s capital. Wilson, who appeared at Kirk’s “The Believer’s Summit” in 2024, told Brown he would like the US to be a Christian theocracy.

He would also like to make homosexuality illegal.

New IRS rules for pastors in politics

In July, Trump’s IRS declared that pastors who endorse political candidates should not lose their tax-exempt status.

Proselytizing in the federal workplace

That same month, the Office of Management and Budget said that federal workers can now bring religion into the federal workplace, including promoting their religious beliefs to colleagues. Hegseth has hosted working-hours prayer services at the Pentagon. One in May featured the pastor of his Tennessee church, which is affiliated with Wilson’s Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches. 

Many Americans wouldn’t agree

The Public Religion Research Institute has tried in recent years to gauge Christian nationalism and how it is spreading in the US. In 2024, it estimated that about 30% of Americans would qualify as either adherents of or sympathizers to Christian nationalism, according to their definition, including a majority of Republicans.  But the portions vary widely across the US.

About half of the people in some Southern states like Mississippi, Louisiana, Oklahoma and Alabama are either adherents or sympathizers, compared to only about a third in red states like Florida and Texas. In many blue states, less than a quarter of residents either adhere to or sympathize with Christian nationalism, according to PRRI, which means a large portion of the country also does not share their philosophy about the role of Christianity in the government.

Continue/Read Original Article: https://view.newsletters.cnn.com/messages/1758579883240693bb2790a23/

#2025 #America #CharlieKirk #ChristianGovernment #ChristianNationalism #CNN #DonaldTrump #FederalGovernment #Health #History #Libraries #LibraryOfCongress #MemorialService #Opinion #Politics #Religion #Resistance #Science #Trump #TrumpAdministration #UnitedStates #WhatMatters

Opinion | Tariffs are the Supreme Court’s biggest test yet – The Washington Post

Democracy Dies in Darkness

Opinion | Jason Willick

The fate of Trump’s tariffs hinges on this Supreme Court doctrine

Will justices rein in presidential power or entrench suspicions of partisan bias?

September 12, 2025 at 7:45 a.m. EDT, Today at 7:45 a.m. EDT, 5 min

There will be plenty of legal clashes in the next three-plus years of Donald Trump’s term in office, but it’s hard to imagine that any will be more significant — for the presidency or the Supreme Court — than the tariff case the justices agreed to hear this week.

For the presidency the case is crucial because, even though executive power has swelled in the 21st century, one key constraint remains: Congress’s exclusive power to fund the government. The president might control “the sword,” as the Founding Fathers put it, but the people’s elected representatives can always withhold the money he needs to use it. If the president can spontaneously impose tariffs at any level, at any time, to raise hundreds of billions of dollars a year without congressional approval, that fundamental constraint is not holding.

For the Supreme Court the case is crucial because Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. has vigorously applied a doctrine against the last two Democratic administrations aimed at limiting precisely this kind of executive adventurism. The “major questions doctrine” basically says that executive actions with a huge political and economic impact are legally suspect if they are not clearly authorized by Congress or the Constitution.

Editor’s Note: Read the rest of the story, at the below link.

Continue/Read Original Article Here: Opinion | Tariffs are the Supreme Court’s biggest test yet – The Washington Post

#2025 #America #DonaldTrump #Health #History #Libraries #Library #LibraryOfCongress #Opinion #Politics #Resistance #Science #SCOTUS #SupremeCourtOfTheUnitedStates #Tariffs #TheWashingtonPost #Trump #TrumpAdministration #TrumpSTariffs #UnitedStates

Letters from an American – September 11, 2025 – Heather Cox Richardson

Letters from an American, September 11, 2025

By Heather Cox Richardson, Sep 11, 2025

Twenty-four years ago today, terrorists from the al-Qaeda network used four civilian airplanes as weapons against the United States, crashing two of them into the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers in New York City and a third into the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia.

Four years ago, George W. Bush, who was president on that horrific day, spoke in Pennsylvania at a memorial for the passengers of the fourth flight, United Airlines Flight 93, who on September 11, 2001, stormed the cockpit and brought their airplane down in a field, killing everyone on board but denying the terrorists a fourth American trophy.

Former president Bush said: “Twenty years ago, terrorists chose a random group of Americans, on a routine flight, to be collateral damage in a spectacular act of terror. The 33 passengers and 7 crew of Flight 93 could have been any group of citizens selected by fate. In a sense, they stood in for us all.” And, Bush continued, “The terrorists soon discovered that a random group of Americans is an exceptional group of people. Facing an impossible circumstance, they comforted their loved ones by phone, braced each other for action, and defeated the designs of evil.”

Recalling his experience that day, Bush talked of “the America I know.”

“On America’s day of trial and grief, I saw millions of people instinctively grab for a neighbor’s hand and rally to the cause of one another…. At a time when religious bigotry might have flowed freely, I saw Americans reject prejudice and embrace people of Muslim faith…. At a time when nativism could have stirred hatred and violence against people perceived as outsiders, I saw Americans reaffirm their welcome to immigrants and refugees…. At a time when some viewed the rising generation as individualistic and decadent, I saw young people embrace an ethic of service and rise to selfless action.”

Bush celebrated the selfless heroism and care for others shown by those like Welles Crowther, the man in the red bandana, who helped others out of danger before succumbing himself; the airplane passengers who called their loved ones to say goodbye; neighbors; firefighters; law enforcement officers; the men and women who volunteered for military service after the attack.

That day, and our memories of it, show American democracy at its best: ordinary Americans putting in the work, even at its dirtiest and most dangerous, to take care of each other.

Editor’s Note: Read the rest of the story, at the below link.

Continue/Read Original Article Here: (1) September 11, 2025 – by Heather Cox Richardson

#2025 #911 #America #DonaldTrump #Health #HeatherCoxRichardson #History #LettersFromAnAmerican #Libraries #Library #LibraryOfCongress #Politics #PresidentBush #Resistance #Science #September112001 #Substack #Television #Trump #TrumpAdministration #TwinTowers #UnitedStates #WorldTradeCenter

A Really Well Insulated Attic

Civil Discourse with Joyce Vance

A Really Well Insulated Attic

By Joyce Vance, Sep 04, 2025

“If the entire foundation falls out from under your house, it does no good to have a really well-insulated attic,” the judge said. “It sure would be nice if someone had our backs.” An anonymous federal judge made that comment to NBC News in a remarkable piece that published this morning.

The attic they are referring to is the U.S. Supreme Court. A Court that is increasingly viewed in some corners as having abandoned the role Article III of the Constitution assigns to it, to act as a check and balance on the executive branch. But the concerns the judges expressed were about the process the Supreme Court is using to make decisions. The reporting was not an inquiry into either the substance of the high court’s rulings or the politics behind it all.

It’s all about the shadow docket, a term you’re familiar with if you read Civil Discourse. It’s a slightly snarky term coined by legal academics to refer to the Court’s emergency docket, which is used for time-sensitive issues, like last-minute requests to stay executions in death penalty cases. The Court also hears appeals involving emergency civil relief on this docket. That means that cases where pro-democracy lawyers seek injunctions to block some of the most egregious steps this administration is taking land, with increasing frequency, on the shadow docket, and that’s where they get decided.

But these cases aren’t like the cases on the Supreme Court’s regular docket, the ones that get fully briefed, orally argued, and then decided on the merits in carefully crafted, lengthy opinions that fully set out the decision and the legal basis for it. This kind of shadow docket ruling happens early in a case, and the decision, as in the birthright citizenship cases where the Court rejected the use of nationwide injunctions to obtain relief but didn’t weigh in on whether Trump could erase birthright citizenship from the Constitution, are on procedural issues, not the substantive merits of a case. The decisions are typically unexplained and unsigned. There’s usually no opinion. Maybe you get a couple of paragraphs. Sometimes a stinging dissent. But there is very little basis for understanding why the court ruled the way it did and applying it in the lower courts.

This is frustrating for us. We’ve had this experience in a number of cases. It happened when the Supreme Court signed off on letting the Trump administration deport noncitizens to third countries (countries other than their country of origin), desperately unsafe places like South Sudan. It happened when the Court okayed DOGE’s foray into Americans’ confidential data held by Social Security. The Court let Trump fire members of independent agencies.

Apparently, it’s frustrating for judges in lower courts as well. After all, they are being called upon to apply the Supreme Court’s decisions. Shadow docket rulings are precedent that lower courts must follow. But how do you apply something when there is no explanation for why it happened? That’s the position the lower courts are in and it’s what led 12 federal judges to take the unprecedented step of speaking anonymously to an NBC reporter about what’s going on at the Supreme Court.

The reporting characterized it like this:

“Lower court judges are handed contentious cases involving the Trump administration. They painstakingly research the law to reach their rulings. When they go against Trump, administration officials and allies criticize the judges in harsh terms. The government appeals to the Supreme Court, with its 6-3 conservative majority.

And then the Supreme Court, in emergency rulings, swiftly rejects the judges’ decisions with little to no explanation.”

The judges had a deeper criticism too. One that is unique to the time of the Trump administration, where the president and his cronies have attacked judges who rule against the president’s policies or against him on personal matters, often placing those judges in the crosshairs of his supporters. As one judge put it, “A short rebuttal from the Supreme Court, they argue, makes it seem like they did shoddy work and are biased against Trump.” Trump cronies like Stephen Miller have accused judges who rule against the administration of engaging in a judicial coup and there have been calls for their impeachment. One judge said that the Supreme Court “is effectively endorsing Miller’s claims that the judiciary is trying to subvert the presidency.”

This unique criticism of the Supreme Court from lower court judges comes as the Court has granted 17 of 23 emergency requests made by the administration, asking it to undo lower court decisions on an emergency basis. The NBC report concluded that five of the 17 cases were decided without any substantive reasoning to back them up and seven of the others had less than three pages of explanation. And we’re talking here about highly important decisions about the scope of presidential power. Supreme Court decisions routinely exceed 100 pages.

Continue/Read Original Article: https://joycevance.substack.com/p/a-really-well-insulated-attic

#12Members #2025 #America #AuthoritarianRulings #BadDecisions #BalancedCourt #Books #DonaldTrump #Education #ExpandSCOTUS #History #ImmunityForTRUMP #Libraries #Library #LibraryOfCongress #Politics #Resistance #RightWing #RightWingJustices #Science #SCOTUS #SupremeCourt #Trump #TrumpAdministration #TrumpCourt #UnitedStates

Top 7 Sources: US Elections 2025–2026 News Summary – DrWeb’s Domain

Top 7 Sources: US Elections 2025–2026 News Summary

1. 2026 United States elections overview
   Comprehensive Wikipedia summary: federal, statewide, local races; generic ballot polling; mayoral/county races; opinion polling tables.
   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_United_States_elections
2. August 2025 Harvard CAPS / Harris Poll results
   Trump approval rating, top voter issues, polarization, inflation vs. immigration priorities, policy support splits.
   https://harvardharrispoll.com/press-release-august-2025/
3. Sabato’s Crystal Ball: Ballot model: Democrats favored
   Conditional forecasts for House/Senate seat change; regression analysis; impact of seat exposure and generic ballot.
   https://centerforpolitics.org/crystalball/generic-ballot-model-gives-democrats-strong-chance-to-take-back-house-in-2026/
4. Nate Silver Bulletin: Trump approval rating aggregator
   Daily composite Trump approval/disapproval; historical net approval vs. previous presidents at same point; reliability notes.
   https://www.natesilver.net/p/trump-approval-ratings-nate-silver-bulletin
5. USAPP Blog: LSE ‘The road to the 2026 midterms’ series
   Calendar of 2025–2026 elections; special/primary/off-year races; Senate seat analysis and party control implications.
   https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/usappblog/2025/06/04/the-road-to-the-2026-midterm-elections/
6. Ballotpedia: Special Elections to the 119th Congress (archival)
   Dates, districts, results, implications for House/Senate control. Note: direct fetch unsuccessful; refer to Ballotpedia main page.
   https://ballotpedia.org/Special_elections_to_the_119th_United_States_Congress_(2025-2026)
7. Generic ballot poll aggregation – RCP/DDHQ, opinion data
   RealClearPolitics, Decision Desk HQ, poll aggregators cited via Wikipedia and Crystal Ball articles for current generic ballot, party lead.

   See references/links inside Wikipedia and Sabato’s Crystal Ball cited above.

Prepared for DrWeb’s Domain and updated by ChatGPT.

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Letters from an American – July 15, 2025 – by Heather Cox Richardson

By Heather Cox Richardson, July 15, 2025

Without any explanation, the right-wing majority on the Supreme Court yesterday granted a stay on a lower court’s order that the Trump administration could not gut the Department of Education while the issue is in the courts. The majority thus throws the weight of the Supreme Court behind the ability of the Trump administration to get rid of departments established by Congress—a power the Supreme Court denied when President Richard M. Nixon tried it in 1973.

This is a major expansion of presidential power, permitting the president to disregard laws Congress has passed, despite the Constitution’s clear assignment of lawmaking power to Congress alone.

President Donald J. Trump has vowed to eliminate the Department of Education because he claims it pushes “woke” ideology on America’s schoolchildren and that its employees “hate our children.” Running for office, he promised to “return” education to the states. In fact, the Education Department has never set curriculum; it disburses funds for high-poverty schools and educating students with disabilities. It’s also in charge of prohibiting discrimination on the basis of race and sex in schools that get federal funding.

Trump’s secretary of education, professional wrestling promoter Linda McMahon, supports Trump’s plan to dismantle the department. In March the department announced it would lay off 1,378 employees—about half the department. Nineteen states and the District of Columbia sued to stop the layoffs, and Massachusetts federal judge Myong Joun ordered the department to reinstate the fired workers. The Supreme Court has now put that order on hold, permitting the layoffs to go forward.

Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Elena Kagan concurred in a dissent written by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, noting that Trump has claimed power to destroy the congressionally established department “by executive fiat” and chastising the right-wing majority for enabling him. “When the Executive publicly announces its intent to break the law, and then executes on that promise, it is the Judiciary’s duty to check that lawlessness, not expedite it,” they say.

“The President must take care that the laws are faithfully executed, not set out to dismantle them. That basic rule undergirds our Constitution’s separation of powers. Yet today, the majority rewards clear defiance of that core principle with emergency relief.”

Editor’s Note: Read the rest of the story, at the below link.

Continue/Read Original Article Here: July 15, 2025 – by Heather Cox Richardson

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Le renvoi brutal d'une icône sans explication. Carla Hayden, 1ère femme et personne afro-américaine à occuper le poste de #bibliothécaire du Congrès aux US a été la cible d’un groupe conservateur militant l’accusant de promouvoir des contenus radicaux #CarlaHayden #LibraryOfCongress #Diversité‍ #LibertéIntellectuelle #LeadershipFéminin #Bibliothèques

Le renvoi brutal d'une icône sans explication. Carla Hayden, 1ère femme et personne afro-américaine à occuper le poste de #bibliothécaire du Congrès aux US a été la cible d’un groupe conservateur militant l’accusant de promouvoir des contenus radicaux #CarlaHayden #LibraryOfCongress #Diversité‍ #LibertéIntellectuelle #LeadershipFéminin #Bibliothèques