A Virginia public library is fighting off a takeover by private equity.

By James Folta

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July 9, 2025, 12:53pm

Photo from The Samuels Public Library

After being targeted by anti-LGBTQ book banners and having their funding pulled, a local library in Virginia successfully stopped a threatened takeover by a private equity group. The local community rallied around The Samuels Public Library in Front Royal, Virginia, to push back against attacks and the private equity owned Library Systems & Services withdrew their bid to run operations. But with their funding cut for the fiscal year that began this July, the library is now left in uncertain territory.

The Samuels Public Library has thrived for nearly all of American history; it was founded in 1799, making it the second oldest library in Virginia. The library was renamed Samuels in the ‘50s and has more recently operated as a nonprofit that partners with the local government. Its service record is impressive: it won the 2024 Virginia Library of the Year award and according to the local Royal Examiner, in the last year it added 2,204 new cardholders, hosted 542 programs, and had 401,859 checkouts.

The library’s recent trouble started a few years ago, when Samuels became the target of a group wanting to remove childrens books from its stacks. In 2023, “Clean Up Samuels” filed hundreds of complaints over books they didn’t like, which were predictably mostly books with LGBTQ themes. One of the group’s members told the AP that their complaints were rooted in taxpayer concerns over “self rule”, which is ironic given that the fight ended with an attempt to outsource the library’s management to a private, for-profit company.

Siding with the book banners, local Warren County officials voted to withhold funding from the library. Samuels stood firm against censorship, and their funding was eventually restored. But this March, the Warren County Board of Supervisors voted against renewing annual funding, citing poor management and announcing their intention to bring in the out-of-state LS&S to run the library.

LS&S is no stranger to provoking these community fights. Googling the company turns up a lot of articles and op-eds protesting local library takeovers, reports of lawsuits, and Reddit threads warning librarians to be wary of working for them. LS&S started in the ‘80s building software to manage catalogues, and won government contracts at federal agencies when Reagan pushed to privatize much of the federal government’s operations.Today, they’re owned by Evergreen Services Group, a private equity firm with a vast array of subsidiaries, many in government outsourcing and defense.

The Times wrote about the company back in 2010, when it was brought in to manage a California Library and had grown to the “fifth-largest library system” in America. In the article, Frank A. Pezzanite, the former CEO of LS&S, describes his job in terms of efficiency and streamlining, which means a lot of cuts:

“There’s this American flag, apple pie thing about libraries,” said Frank A. Pezzanite, the outsourcing company’s chief executive. He has pledged to save $1 million a year in Santa Clarita, mainly by cutting overhead and replacing unionized employees. “Somehow they have been put in the category of a sacred organization.”
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“A lot of libraries are atrocious,” Mr. Pezzanite said. “Their policies are all about job security. That’s why the profession is nervous about us. You can go to a library for 35 years and never have to do anything and then have your retirement. We’re not running our company that way. You come to us, you’re going to have to work.”

Finally, a company brave enough to stand up to librarians.

I’m glad that Samuels has been able to beat back LS&S, but this episode is another example of how the totalizing market logic of business can work hand in hand with punitive actors within government. When you can’t get people to support a plan to alter public services, a private company can come in streamline them to death.

In their defense, I think some of these businesses think they’re doing the right thing. But the valorization of profit has blinded them to seeing the advantages of the public good as a worthy bottom line. Providing for a community might not be profitable, but that doesn’t make it wrong.

I’m reminded of an NPR interview with a disillusioned DOGE staffer who didn’t discover a den of corruption and laziness in the federal government. “The government is really not wasteful,” he said.

The government commits to doing a lot of things for its citizens, but generally, it executes on them decently well, full of amazing, hard-working, educated people. Is it too nice to those people? Maybe. Is it too nice to citizens? Maybe. Is it—could it be run more efficiently? Probably. But is efficiency always the goal? No, I don’t know.

Efficiency shouldn’t always be the goal, especially when used as a narrowly defined metonym for profitability. The Samuels Public Library, like so many public institutions around the country, works because it serves something other than money.

If you want to support Samuels as they fight to get their funding back, you can donate on their website.

An incomplete list of things Jane Austen disliked.

By Emily Temple

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July 9, 2025, 10:50am

Famously, Jane Austen disliked Bath, both when she visited it in 1799 and when she moved there with her family in 1801. But Bath loves Jane Austen: the city is now home to the Jane Austen Center, an annual Jane Austen Festival, and many other touristy delights. For Austen’s 250th birthday this year, the city is presenting, among other things, an exhibition about Austen’s distaste for it, entitled “The Most Tiresome Place in the World: Jane Austen & Bath.” Know thyself! Anyway, it made me wonder what else Jane Austen found tiresome, and it turns out, quite a bit. (Same.) Here are a few things your favorite writer did not prefer:

Bath

Apparently she even fainted when informed that she was going to have to move there. Not only did she dislike Bath, describing it as “all vapor, shadow, smoke & confusion,” but she didn’t get any writing done there, a devastating blow for any city.

The name “Richard”

Famously, in the opening lines of Northanger Abbey, Austen takes a little dig at the name “Richard,” writing “[Catherine’s] father was a clergyman, without being neglected, or poor, and a very respectable man, though his name was Richard—and he had never been handsome.” In the annotated edition, David M. Shapard notes that Austen echoes her dislike of the name in a 1796 letter, writing “Mr. Richard Harvey’s match is put off, till he has got a Better Christian name, of which he has great Hopes.” Shapard adds that she “never uses the name for a speaking character in her novels,” but there is no obvious reason for her aversion. “It may have been an inside joke among her family, or at least with her sister (the recipient of the letter), though that cannot fully explain why she should include the joke in a work intended for publication. One commentator [F. B. Pinion] speculates that the popularity during this period of Shakespeare’s Richard III, whose title character is a monster of iniquity, may have created a general animosity toward the name.”

The Prince Regent

Austen disliked the Prince Regent (who would later be crowned George IV) intensely, despite the fact that he was not only a fan of her work, but possibly her very first buyer. In an 1813 letter, Austen wrote of the prince’s wife, Princess Caroline of Brunswick, “Poor woman, I shall support her as long as I can, because she is a Woman, & because I hate her Husband.” She was “invited” by the prince to dedicate one of her books to him, and she did, though the result is “famously unenthusiastic,” as Alison Flood writes: “To his Royal Highness, the Prince Regent, this work is, by His Royal Highness’s Permission, most Respectfully Dedicated by his Royal Highness’s Dutiful and Obedient Humble Servant.” Ouch.

Ramsgate

The seaside town of Ramsgate features unfavorably in both Pride and Prejudice and Mansfield Park, and Austen dinged it in a 1813 letter to her sister-in-law, writing “Ed Hussey talks of fixing at Ramsgate—Bad Taste!” Local historian Norman Thomas has hypothesized that her dislike had something to do with her brother Francis, who was stationed there as a Navy officer, and married a local woman. “We know Jane loved her brother very much,” Thomas said. “It could be that she sort of blamed Ramsgate and its women for stealing him away from the family. She actually wrote a poem called ‘Post Haste from Thanet’ to celebrate the marriage of her brother Frank to this Ramsgate woman. And then you start to think, well maybe consciously or unconsciously, she identified Ramsgate as the place where she lost her brother.” (It also might have meant nothing at all.)

The dentist

Who “must be a Lover of Teeth & Money & Mischief.” (Though in the 19th century, who wouldn’t dread the dentist?)

Evangelicals

In a 1809 letter to her sister Cassandra, Austen wrote “I do not like the Evangelicals.” (But by 1814, she had changed her mind, writing to her niece Fanny Knight that “I am by no means convinced that we ought not all to be Evangelicals, & am at least persuaded that they who are so from Reason & Feeling, must be happiest & safest.”)

People who pretend to like music too much

“She seems to have had, besides a dislike for much expression of religious enthusiasm, a dislike for anything bordering on an affectation of enthusiasm for music,” writes Elizabeth Jenkins in her 1948 biography of Austen. “Today such an affectation is almost unknown; the majority of people who do not care for music do not imagine that they make themselves more interesting by pretending that they do, but when diversions were relatively few, and, while general information was scanty, the standard of accomplishments was high, there was a temptation to pretend to musical fervor which is quite outside our experience.” (She did like music herself, though was never extra about it.)

Practical marriages

“Anything is to be preferred or endured rather than marrying without Affection,” Austen wrote to her niece Fanny Knight in 1814.

Walter Scott (sort of)

“Walter Scott has no business to write novels, especially good ones,” she wrote to her niece Anna. “It is not fair. He has fame and profit enough as a poet, and should not be taking the bread out of the mouths of other people. I do not like him, and do not mean to like Waverley if I can help it, but fear I must.”

Surprisingly, the Supreme Court did a good thing for libraries this term.

By James Folta

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July 8, 2025, 2:25pm

Amongst all of the terrible and regressive decisions and shadow docket orders the Supreme Court spewed forth this term, there was a rare, small win for libraries and schools.

The story got a little buried, but the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 to uphold the Universal Service Fund, a bundle of FCC-overseen subsidies including the E-Rate program, which provides billions for broadband access to schools and libraries. The Fund was challenged by conservatives as an unconstitutional overreach by giving control of the fund to the FCC, but the Court ruled that Congress was within its bounds. It seems obvious that Congress should be allowed to assign control of programs to agencies, but these days, who knows. I’m just glad to see that SCOTUS is letting the government improve peoples’ lives and granting power to something other than the Executive.

E-Rate has been very successful since it was implemented in 1996. Over half of all American public libraries apply for this subsidy every year, and over 100,000 schools had participated by 2005. The discounts for broadband can be as high as 90%, so the fact that it’s survived is a big win, especially for underserved communities.

Pro-library groups like the American Library Association are celebrating the decision. The ALA has long advocated for the program, and its President Cindy Hohl described E-Rate as “a lifeline for public libraries and millions of Americans, especially in rural and underserved communities.”

Around 20% of American households don’t have broadband internet at home, so the access that libraries provide is essential, especially as so much of work, social, and civic life has moved online, for better and for worse.

It’s a rare win for libraries, especially from this ultra-conservative Supreme court. I wonder if the lack of a culture war angle to this case kept it from being a target for the Court’s majority. It’s a small comfort, but I’m glad that allowing schools and libraries to maintain a high level of service for their communities fits into the Court’s vision for America.

Fed up with big legacy news? Here are 13 independent, worker-owned outlets to support.

By Brittany Allen

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July 8, 2025, 12:26pm

It’s been a weird time for the papers of record. The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, and The Washington Post have all made compromising to catastrophic judgment errors. Most recently, the former hyped a eugenicist to smear an elected candidate in the New York mayoral race. If you’re anything like me, you may have been seeking a new news source or two to diversify the palate. But it can be hard to wade through the thicket, in this restless attention economy.

For big updates, there’s NPR (for now…). I also favor The Guardian. Democracy Now. But with the disappearance of national Metro sections, it’s the juicy feature that’s feeling imperiled.

Some great minds on Bluesky recently put together this useful starter pack of independent, worker-owned and reader-funded media, to scratch this itch. But I figure intros are in order. If you’re looking to read some hard-hitting national news, look no further than the list below.

1. Talking Points Memo condenses news of the day into highly readable briefings. The indie site’s jurisdiction is national politics. They’ve recently done a nice job breaking down the practical effects of the GOP’s horrific budget bill. Daily morning and evening “memos” can be delivered straight to your inbox, with one juicy long read thrown in the mix every so often.

2. For $3/month, you can support Flaming Hydra, a worker-owned news/commentary/criticism hub. Contributors include commentator heavies like Osita Nwanevu, Kim Kelly, and Anna Merlan. And subjects span the phenom of socialist Twitch, the Canadian health care system, and the DIY “data market.”

3. Assigned Media “publishes factual, up to date, responsible coverage of trans issues.” While a sister site, the Trans Data Library, collects and monitors information about anti-trans activism around the country. Other Assigned coverage includes practical updates (like this piece on passports) and legal analysis (like this look at the effects of the Skrmetti ruling).

4. Bolts Magazine covers “the nuts and bolts of political change” by taking a local-up approach to the news. This site is singular in its scattered particularity. The current homepage includes missives from Alabama, Oklahoma, and California. And certain features—like this guide to every single state Supreme Court—make these many states feel actually united.

5. Grist covers climate news. Think looming bills and latest science. This piece from Matt Simon digging into the science behind the catastrophic Texas floods makes the abstract plain, while this disaster preparedness kit offers practical advice.

6. Prism is an independent newsroom run by people of color. Their coverage of the ongoing genocide in Gaza and evolving U.S. immigration policies has been especially sharp-nosed. In-depth national reporting “centers the humanity and experiences of immigrants, people who are undocumented, and refugees.”

7. Rest of the World is a nonprofit news org that looks at our rapidly evolving digital world—mostly from an outside-America vantage. If you want to know what Meta’s been up to in India, or how the EV rush is affecting Zimbabwe, this is your one-stop-shop.

8. Speaking of non-Western news, I recommend taking a gander at Africa is a Country. This growing podcast/newsletter/print pub “offers a critical perspective on various social, political, and cultural issues affecting Africa that push back on continental legacies of colonialism and exploitation.” The latest letter covers Africa’s last neoliberals and the Women’s Africa Cup of Nations. A great resource for the diaspora.

9. The Appeal is a nonprofit news org that focuses on criminal justice (and its lack) across the States. For those of us who’ve daydreamed about blowing up our art lives to become public defenders, the nitty-gritty coverage in pieces like this one covering Minnesota’s pre-trial system is most welcome.

10. You may already know ProPublica, for its deep investigative dives and scoops in the public interest. If not, they’re really worth supporting. I especially applaud this indie news org’s commitment to demystifying methodology behind the reporting, as they did in this recent piece on miscarriages in Texas.

11. For feminist news, we have The Flytrap. This newer hub aims to be “unf*ck your algorithm” with a lot of intersectional analysis for and by femme and queer people. This great piece on the “first LGBTQ co-housing community” in the country is a great proof of concept.

12. And 404 Media is a journalist-funded digital media company that aims to explore how tech is reshaping the world. Critically minded and occasionally spicy, I’ve come to love this site for its unusual scientific angles. Like this piece on a possibly feminist ancient proto-city.

13. There are many great local indies to shout out, from Current Affairs to the Chicago Reader. But I’ll leave you with some hometown pride. New Yorkers have a friend in Hell Gate, a happily cheeky yet extremely rigorous city news outlet. In the few years since its start, the site’s tuned a nice mix of fun coverage (like this map that points you to to the best $20 dinner in any neighborhood) and hard-hitting analysis.

Their coverage of the mayoral race has been especially strong. And welcome, all things considered.

Image via

Is winter finally coming for A Song of Ice and Fire fans?

By Brittany Allen

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July 8, 2025, 9:11am

George R.R. Martin has been famously stuck on his follow-up to A Song of Ice and Fire for…ever.

The Winds of Winter was meant to be the sixth in a seven book series. But Martin has been working on the novel for thirteen years, as fans seethe and spin-offs accrue.

In an interview last week with his publishers, GRRM finally teased meaningful progress. He’s apparently now written about 1,200 pages(!), “with another 400 to 500 still to go.”

Should this prove true and the editor lenient, that would make WoW longer than all previous installments in this epic fantasy series. As well as most other books.

As writer’s block goes, this is a pretty notorious case. But Martin has peers in the trenches. Ralph Ellison, Truman Capote, and Harper Lee all took their sweet time drafting follow-ups to seismic early work. In all cases, pressure seems to have played a factor.

I can sympathize, to a point. It must be hard to get back to the desk knowing that millions of readers are hoping you’ll recreate lightning in a bottle. Especially when you’ve got a Meerenese Knot to untangle.

But many writers, like the late Toni Morrison, Min Jin Lee, and Alexander McCall Smith, dismiss “the block” wholesale. Though they account for the possibility that the work is harder to get down if you are depressed, distracted, or don’t know what you’re trying to say yet. Martin’s got a pretty good excuse for distraction in the series that made Game of Thrones a household name. But despite regular tantalizing pronouncements, there have been times in the past dozen years when it seems like he’s been deliberately lost in Westeros.

He’s also been taking side projects. Last year, Collider reported that Martin picked up a gig executive producing another television show. An AMC thriller called Dark Winds, adapted from Tony Hillerman’s Leaphorn & Chee series—i.e., some other books he hasn’t written.

Your belief in the writer’s latest announcement makes a nice personality litmus test. Are you a starry-eyed optimist, reaching for that winter coat? Or a steely rationalist, girding for continuous summer? Are you a dragon mother with magic at your fingertips? Or a mercenary merchant, with two feet clapped tight to the ground?

Either way, you’ll always have HBO. A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is still meant to premiere there later this year. While the third season of House of the Dragon is scheduled to arrive “sometime” in 2026.