BURN PILE: Curing the Election Blues

Well, the election happened, and Donald J. Trump is going to be our next president. That is a sentence I never thought I’d write, and it is a sentence, so many of us fear, in more than one sense of the word.

The L.A. Times argues one way to weather the Trump presidency is to head to your nearest public library. Why? Because it is the one institution most Americans still champion. In the meantime, you can read a collection of post-election-results tweets from famous authors—everyone from Stephen King to Joyce Carol Oates (who in turn quotes Samuel Beckett)—compiled by the Times.

Garnette Cadogan, a Jamaican immigrant and Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia, speaks about the importance of “staying and fighting” despite Trump’s well documented stance on immigration, as well as the importance of “finding strength in poetry.”

But maybe it would be better to just slip into cushy escapism. This week the New York Times listed its top illustrated children’s books of 2016, along with a review of two new nonfiction publications, Following the Dog into the World of Smell by Alexandra Horowitz and How House Cats Tamed Us and Took over the World by Abigail Tucker.  

Dogs v. cats? Now that’s a debate I can always get into.