* Heart * Heart * Heart * (You'll Have to Picture it in Your Head, Because I Can't Put Pictures in the Title)

My Guilty Secret . . .

Bookshelf 

Porn

Well-run libraries are filled with people because what a good library offers cannot be easily found elsewhere: an indoor public space in which you do not have to buy anything in order to stay. In the modern state there are very few sites where this is possible. The only others that come readily to my mind require belief in an omnipotent creator as a condition for membership. 

It would seem the most obvious thing in the world to say that the reason why the market is not an efficient solution to libraries is because the market has no use for a library. But it seems we need, right now, to keep re-stating the obvious. 

There aren’t many institutions left that fit so precisely Keynes’ definition of things that no one else but the state is willing to take on. Nor can the experience of library life be recreated online. It’s not just a matter of free books. 

A library is a different kind of social reality (of the three dimensional kind), which by its very existence teaches a system of values beyond the fiscal.

- Zadie Smith,

 in the New York Review of Books.

As independent bookstores crash and burn in the United States and Britain, the book market in France is doing just fine. France boasts 2,500 bookstores, and for every neighborhood bookstore that closes, another seems to open. From 2003 to 2011 book sales in France increased by 6.5 percent.

- The French Still Flock to Bookstores

Good Advice!

Another Variation on a Theme . . .

Happy Valentine's Day, Love.

DO Animals Have Feelings?

As someone who has lived with animals all her life,
(no, not wolves)
I would have to say that the answer to that
question is a resounding yes!

"The onus of proof to show otherwise should be on those who deny that animals have these capacities," says scholar and animal advocate Jonathan Balcombe, author of The Exultant Ark: A Pictorial Tour of Animal Pleasure. 

In the book, published in May by the University of California Press, Balcombe surveys a new generation of studies into animal feelings, especially animal pleasure. Accompanying the scholarship are photographs of animals seeming to enjoy themselves: hippos and flying foxes, zebrafish and sharks, parrots and polar bears, a whole animal kingdom of pleasure. 

- from a Brandon Keim Interview with Jonathan Balcombe, 

Image: Jonathan Lhoir

Konrad Lorenz, a Nobel Prize-winning zoologist who studied geese "was convinced, not by any repeated scientific study, but by anecdotes based on living among geese for decades, that they fell in love with each other,"

"We know that many geese do mate for life, and have a single partner. Evolution should guarantee that they have strong bonds."

 - How to Have Fun Like Monkeys, Whales and Foxes,

By Brandon Keim.