What Gen Z is finding at the library
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. In the smartphone era, libraries might seem less central. But it turns out that young people actually use them. First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic: A Third Place Spending time at my local library branch in elementary school, I felt like a little grown-up. I’d march up to the desk and tell the librarian all about the chapter books I would be reading that summer. (“Absolutely Normal Chows,” I told her once, holding up a copy of the Sharon Creech novel Absolutely Normal Chaos.) I value public libraries for the resources they offer but also because of how these spaces have always felt to me: like a community of people who care about learning new things, and who simply want to spend time in public. Libraries, and the people who keep them running, have had a …
