The 6 Best Borrowed Podcast Episodes
1) Goodbye to All Fines
On October 5th, 2021, all three public library systems in New York City eliminated late fines. The change was 125 years in the making, and it made us think: why did public libraries start charging lat...Show More
2) Getting Home
It’s not an uncommon experience to be unstably housed in this country. From Brooklyn to San Francisco, communities often turn to public libraries for valuable information, social services and for a sa...Show More
3) Decolonizing Dewey
A lot had changed since Melvil Dewey came up with a classification system to organize all known and not-yet-known knowledge into a string of numbers and search terms. And yet, hundreds of thousands of...Show More
4) New Libraries, Old Places
Libraries weren't always located in their own stately buildings. Many of our branches used to operate out of pharmacies, laundry rooms, storefronts, and more! In celebration of our first new branch in...Show More
5) Free Brooklyn
Four hundred years later, this country has yet to reckon with the legacy of slavery. And that is no less true for Brooklyn. This episode, we’re taking a cue from The 1619 Project and telling important...Show More
6) New Americans
Immigration is a pressing topic in our political landscape right now, with concerns about ICE raids and immigration bans. In this episode, we listen to inspiring stories of recent asylees, the case fo...Show More
7) Matt de la Peña on Small Stories and the Power of Perspective
Matt de la Peña is the Newbery Medal-winning author of seven Young Adult novels and five picture books. We talked with him about writing small stories and what it means to write a book that is, as he ...Show More
8) Meg Medina on Latine Stories and Reading as a Family
Meg Medina is an award-winning author of books for kids and young adults, and she was the 2023-2024 National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature. We talked to her about what it meant to be the fi...Show More
9) How The Snowy Day Changed Children’s Books
The Snowy Day wasn’t the first picture book to feature a Black child as its beloved protagonist, but it might be the most visible. When it came out in 1962, it challenged the publishing industry to ch...Show More
10) The Legacy of Howard Zinn's Radical History
When Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States came out in 1980, it literally rocked the boat. Instead of starting where most histories of the Americas start — on the deck of Columbus’s sh...Show More