Springfield celebrates National Library Week despite budget challenges
The theme for National Library Week 2025 is 'Drawn to the Library!' But it's getting hard to observe locally as libraries throughout Massachusetts are facing a budget challenge this year.
Hundreds of students attend Skilled Trades Fair in Springfield
Massachusetts gets $3.6 million in federal funding for library services, then the Massachusetts Board of Library Commissioners gives that money to local libraries. That funding was disrupted this week when President Trump ordered the entire staff of the Institute of Museums and Library Services to be placed on paid leave for 90 days, which stopped the processing of grant dollars.
Now, libraries across the state are waiting on updates from the library board about potential funding cuts or delays. But staff at the Sixteen Acres Library Branch encourages the public to use their voices to make a difference.
'Think about what's important to you and reach out to your elected officials to let them know that funding that comes to the state has an impact on you,' said Jean Canosa Albano, Assistant Director for Public Services at Springfield City Library.
Despite the uncertainty, Springfield libraries will continue celebrating National Library Week with special events. For a list of events, visit springfieldlibrary.org.
WWLP-22News, an NBC affiliate, began broadcasting in March 1953 to provide local news, network, syndicated, and local programming to western Massachusetts. Watch the 22News Digital Edition weekdays at 4 p.m. on WWLP.com.
Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
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Boston Globe
a day ago
- Boston Globe
The world outside is a lot to take in right now. The ones inside books are much better.
Actually, thanks to my wiseguy wife, I will be doing something more than goofing off on vacation. I'll be reading. Books. One day, earlier this year, out of the blue, she declared with somber seriousness that we had fallen into a malign rut: We'd wake up, put on some coffee, empty the dishwasher, then click on the TV. We would watch the morning news, and it's all weather disasters, airline near-misses, and Trump being Trump, pictures of kids dying in Gaza, civilians bombed in Ukraine. Advertisement It is, without a doubt, a lousy way to start the day, worse than reading those same stories in the newspaper, because the televised images are so visceral. We'd finish our coffee, get up off the couch, sigh heavily and think, 'Well, this day is going to be terrible.' So my wife's idea was to introduce a new morning routine, in which we get up, put on coffee, empty the dishwasher, grab a cup of coffee, climb back into bed, prop up the pillows, and then open and read actual books. Ideally, they're novels, but they can be whatever strikes our fancy, as long as they're books. We have to read for at least an hour. Audio books don't count. When she suggested this, it occurred to me that I hadn't read a novel or a good nonfiction book for a long time. Instead, I was reading newspapers, magazines, newsletters, Substack. Instead of watching reality TV, I was reading reality. Advertisement Here's the deal: If Dan Shaughnessy can run a mile every day, I can read a book for an hour every day. It has been liberating and exhilarating. It's like doing 10,000 steps, but for your brain. Since the new routine began, everything I've read is worth being on a summer reading list. 'I See You've Called in Dead,' a laugh-out-loud novel by John Kenney about an obituary writer who gets fired for posting his own obit when he was still very much alive; 'Women And Children First,' a brilliant debut novel by Alina Grabowski, who grew up in Massachusetts, that depicts a tragedy from the perspective of women in a fictional North Shore town with the voice of someone who actually grew up in such a place. Jacqueline Sullivan Wyco's 'Fear Knocked: It Was Alzheimer's,' a memoir about her Boston firefighter dad's journey through that terrible disease, and the financial exploitation that often destroys the finances of families trying to navigate it, hit close to home. Best book on Alzheimer's since Charlie Pierce's 'Hard to Forget' was published, gulp, 25 years ago. I didn't think I'd like Graydon Carter's memoir, 'When The Going Was Good,' given his editorship of Vanity Fair seemed so obsessed with shallow celebrity, despite also publishing the brilliant journalism of, among others, Marie Brenner, Christopher Hitchens, David Halberstam, Maureen Orth, and Dominick Dunne. But never judge a book by its cover. It's a great read. Carter, with an assist from ghostwriter James Fox, gives a rousing tour of the golden age of magazines, not just Vanity Fair, but Time and Life and some hilarious takes on Spy magazine, which Carter edited with Kurt Andersen. The takedowns of Big Apple big egos pulled off by Spy more than make up for all the celebrity name-dropping. Besides, Carter grew up in Canada playing hockey as a kid. How can you not like a hockey guy? Advertisement Years ago, I read a couple of Zadie Smith's books. The new routine gave me the excuse to read one I missed when it was first published 13 years ago: 'NW.' She captures as only she can a Northwest London near where I lived with my family in the late 1990s and early 2000s. And while I will goof off on vacation, I will also read books, or more precisely re-read books — including classics from as far back as high school — that were so good I want to read them again: 'To Kill a Mockingbird,' by Harper Lee, 'Slaughterhouse-Five,' by Kurt Vonnegut Jr., 'Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,' by Mark Twain, 'Native Son,' by Richard Wright, 'Catch-22,' by Joseph Heller, Toni Morrison's 'Beloved.' I will not try and fail to get through 'Ulysses' for a fourth time, but I will make it up to Mr. Joyce by re-reading 'Dubliners' for probably the fifth time. All of this life-affirming, new, old routine, thanks to my wife, who doesn't get nearly enough credit for putting up with me all these years. She could write a book about it. Kevin Cullen is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at
Los Angeles Times
10-08-2025
- Los Angeles Times
When the going gets tough for L.A., our city rallies like no other
Los Angeles has portals to its future sprinkled across the city: Silicon Beach. Hollywood. Public schools. The ruins of Pacific Palisades. What goes on inside at City Hall and the Hall of Administration. But why go to those obvious choices when trying to figure out which way L.A. is going when the best answer is right in front of Platinum Showgirls LA? I parked next to the downtown gentleman's club on a recent weekday morning to do just that. A hulking security guard stood outside the entrance, the 101 Freeway buzzing nearby. So were the street vendors setting up for another day of business, damn the migra agents driving in and out of the Metropolitan Detention Center just up Commercial Street. But I wasn't there for the sights or sounds — or what was going on inside Platinum Showgirls. I was there to scour the sidewalk for a plaque dedicated to a tree. For centuries, a six-story-tall sycamore stood near this slice of land and saw empires come and go. Indigenous people from across Southern California and beyond gathered under its shade for special councils and to meet with its caretakers, the residents of the village of Yaanga. It was an awe-inspiring sight for the pobladores who came from Mexico in 1789 and set up El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles in the name of the Spanish crown. The sycamore — now bearing the name El Aliso — appears as a towering black splotch in the first known photo of Los Angeles, shot in the early 1860s when the city was in the process of turning from a Mexican village into an American town. When El Aliso was finally chopped down in 1895, felled by brewery owners who inadvertently killed the giant after cutting off too many limbs and paving over its roots, residents took chips from it as a memento mori of sorts. But El Aliso never truly died. It lived on in the history books but especially in the memory of the descendants of the people who had seen the sycamore grow from a seed to a giant. In 2019, members of the Kizh-Gabrieleño Band of Mission Indians were present as representatives from the city of Los Angeles laid a bronze plaque on the sidewalk at the northeast corner of Commercial and Vignes streets — in the shadow of what was then a different strip club — to commemorate El Aliso. 'While its physical presence is gone,' the plaque stated, 'the oral history handed down through the generations has kept its beauty and story alive in the Kizh people.' I was looking to read those words for myself, to touch them and the etching of El Aliso that hovered above the dedication. To take inspiration from this fundamental part of L.A.'s past in hopes of divining its future. But when I finally figured out where the plaque was supposed to be, I found a shallow slot strewn with trash and the remnants of the adhesive that once kept the plaque in its place. Leave it to 2025 for thieves to make off with a memorial to L.A.'s mother tree. The fires. The raids. Housing inequality. Homelessness. Cost of living. Trump's never-ending war against L.A. anything. Is the Big One around the corner? Probably. Nothing seems to be going right in Lost Angeles right now. Trump says it. Too many residents feel it. Too many former Angelenos scream it. How can one possibly even think about a better future when the present is so bad? How can one even think about any future when the current outlook seems so bleak? But as I walked back to my car, an answer occurred to me that I wasn't expecting to be so hopeful. Before I joined The Times in 2019, I never had any real interest or investment in L.A. Oh, I visited family and friends and paid some attention to the political scene from my native Anaheim. Went to UCLA for graduate school, haunted the Sunset Strip and Thai Town for rock en español shows in my cub reporter days. But L.A. was just … L.A. Huge. Cool. Really diverse. But special? No more so than any other great world city. I never felt the metropolis up the 5 to be a den of grossness like too many of my fellow Orange Countians still think it is. It also never called to me as a promised land like it did to my creative O.C. friends, either. I generally rooted for L.A., but its future meant nothing to me. My opinion obviously changed as I began to cover it as a columnist starting in 2020 and tried to commit the layout and vibe of the city to my mind. One of the first things that struck me in a way I never anticipated was how precarious everyone felt their lives to be. Oh, I had read enough Joan Didion, Mike Davis, Nathaneal West and other writers to not be too surprised by this. But seeing it manifested was something else, and it made a lot of things about the city finally click. From the Westside to the Eastside, from Wilmington through South L.A. and all the way to the San Fernando Valley, I met person after person who acted and lived as if what they had scraped for themselves was at risk of disappearing in an instant, in the most disastrous fashion imaginable. I initially thought this betrayed an insecurity in the Angeleno soul, but then I realized it was something worse. If anyone's L.A. dream could crumble at any moment, that meant you had to defend it at any cost — and especially at the expense of everyone else. The more I talked to people and studied L.A. history, the more this outsider felt that the idea of fighting for the dream was what created a famously segregated city that too often erupts, whether electorally or otherwise. In an era where stratification is worse than ever and the federal government has declared war on various fronts — legal, psychological, financial — the L.A. of the past can't be the guiding light for the L.A. of the future. The city might have grown and operated as 19 suburbs in search of a metropolis — as Aldous Huxley infamously wrote — through most of the 20th century, but it's time to act like a united front if we're going to successfully navigate the rest of the 21st. And the rallying cry should be what we're going through right now, what L.A. has weathered again and again: Disaster. Because when the going gets tough for L.A., the city rallies like only it can. Americans should see this resilience and the subsequent spur of creativity and hope as a blueprint on how to fight back and not just survive, but thrive better than ever. Nothing has proved this more than our current year, with two catastrophes that would have buckled, if not outright destroyed, other cities. The Palisades and Eaton fires in January were infernos of biblical dimensions. People died, houses were incinerated, neighborhoods were eradicated. The suffering will continue for years, if not decades. Residents know their past can never be recaptured — and yet they continue to rebuild for whatever's next. Angelenos could've stayed to themselves in the aftermath, but they chose not to. They choose not to. The rest of L.A. has stood up to help survivors through financial donations and clothing and food drives and benefits that continue and whatever folks in the Palisades and Altadena need. At one of the city's darkest hours, Los Angeles shone brighter than ever. I write this columna during a long deportation summer unleashed on L.A. and beyond by a native son of Santa Monica in what amounts to a racist revanchist snit. Even a generation ago, large swaths of L.A. would have been cheering on the raids. But today's L.A. isn't having it. As with the fires, fundraisers and mutual aid societies and neighborhood watch groups have sprouted. The city, from Mayor Karen Bass to street vendors, knows that it's up against an Orwellian apparatus that wants us to collapse — and that L.A. will win. Because L.A. always wins. We might not know how the victory will look, but we know it'll happen. See how I use 'we'? Because while I plan to forever live in Orange County, I want to be a part of this future L.A. — an area, a people that teaches the rest of the United States how we'll triumph as calamities of all types seem to crash down on this country with increasing regularity. All of the stories and columns in this package are about that, from housing to fires, disasters to palm trees, transportation to climate change and beyond. No one thinks it's going to be easy — if anything, it's probably going to be harder than ever. But everyone expects victory. The miracle of L.A. has gone too far for it to fail. Which takes me back to El Aliso. I haven't read anything about the theft of its plaque, so I'm not sure when it happened. But people will read this and be upset. People will do something to mark El Aliso's existence in front of a gentleman's club near the 101 Freeway once more. That means El Aliso will continue to live — maybe as a plaque, maybe as a hologram, maybe as something even grander. It can't die, because that means we will. It must live, because that means so will the rest of us. L.A. is frequently seen as a place of destruction, where the past is bulldozed and forgotten and then trivialized and romanticized. But the Native American tribes that the Spaniards tried to eradicate are still here. The Latinos that Manifest Destiny tried to vanquish are now nearly half of the population of this most American of cities. L.A. will survive whatever happens next. We will figure it out. We always do. There's no other way. There's no other option.
CNN
05-08-2025
- CNN
Despair in Gaza as hunger crisis continues
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