Industrial magic

Philip Oltermann at the Guardian has a very nice little piece at the Guardian about the Quaker Homeless Action's mobile library--it will warm the cockles of your heart--really I need to embark on some massive and reading-related service-type project, it's at the back of my head but of course there are always more pressing things--however once my new novel comes out I am determined to get going on that, find a really good way of doing it (something to do with teenagers and libraries I suppose--maybe teenage felons--the other thing I read this week that made me feel absolutely ashamed was Jason DeParle's absolutely devastating NYRB piece about the American prison system, I always have this in the back of my head as the lurking thing that really I will be permanently ashamed of myself later for never having done anything about, I know people feel like this about animal rights & I take the point but surely we are going to look back from the middle of the 21st century--if the world has not started to fall apart in Mad Max-style post-apocalyptic chaos, which really I believe it will, although for some reason this does not stop me putting all my spare dollars in a retirement account, it's like going to the dentist even when you are skeptical about your own future!--and find our most devastating moral failure of these decades to have been the growth of an abusive and inhumane home-grown prison system that erodes the humanity of prisoners and guards and has destroyed the future of millions--DeParle calmly shows the scope of the fallout, it is pretty much what you suspected but still horrifying to see it on the page like this--very effective piece of writing, I must say...).