You get all sorts of people in the library, and the librarian gets it all.

Terry Pratchett

Knowledge equals power…

The string was important. After a while the Librarian stopped. He concentrated all his powers of librarianship.

Power equals energy…

People were stupid, sometimes. They thought the Library was a dangerous place because of all the magical books, which was true enough, but what made it really one of the most dangerous places there could ever be was the simple fact that it was a library.

Energy equals matter…

He swung into an avenue of shelving that was apparently a few feet long and walked along it briskly for half an hour.

Matter equals mass.

And mass distorts space. It distorts it into polyfractal L-space.

So, while the Dewey system has its fine points, when you’re setting out to look something up in the multidimensional folds of L-space what you really need is a ball of string.

Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards!

Oook.

The Librarian

At Stimpunks, we’re building a knowledge commons and a space of openness, at the edges.

For me this space of radical openness is a margin a profound edge. Locating oneself there is difficult yet necessary. It is not a “safe” place. One is always at risk. One needs a community of resistance.

Living as we did on the edge we developed a particular way of seeing reality. We looked both from the outside in and from the inside out. We focused our attention on the centre as well as on the margin. We understood both.

 Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness, bell hooks 

We’re contributing to a library economy.

A library economy would require a vast reorientation of our priorities from the centrality of capital and competition to the centrality of humanity and cooperation, which brings us to the final core concept for a library economy: complementarity.

We Need A Library Economy – YouTube

Revolutionaries can engage in building full-fledged library economies based on the commons.

This can take the form of tool libraries, vehicle libraries, clothing libraries, furniture libraries, and more in an effort curb overproduction, end planned obsolescence, and provide access to an irreducible minimum to all.

How We Can Change The World – YouTube

Here are some books of the edges we recommend. We provide WorldCat links and embed Amazon previews. The Librarian, visiting us from Discworld via L-space, will guide your journey with the alacrity offered by prehensile hands and feet.

We’d like to grow our library into something like The Bi Pan Library with synopses, selected quotes, contextualization, and more. Interested in helping?

I’m a writer at least partly because I had access to public libraries.

I am also a product of librarians who read stories to groups of avid little kids.

Octavia Butler

Books bend space and time.

Guards! Guards!: A Novel of Discworld

NeuroTribes

Our community recommends NeuroTribes to everyone. NeuroTribes changed the conversation about what it is to be human. It is a history of the 20th Century through the lens of the dispossessed and misunderstood. It is a trip through anguish and horror and a celebration of the minds that survived to make modernity.

Take a trip through the pages of NeuroTribes with this talk from author Steve Silberman.

• Follow Steve Silberman

New Releases in Our Own Voices

I cannot get on board with approaches to disability that do not understand it as inherently, inextricably tied to racism and other oppressions. I cannot and will not promote a disability-first or disability-pride-only analysis—and the research that undergirds this book has only solidified and clarified for me these beliefs that I once held more quietly and tentatively. In claiming this Black disability identity, I often use we, ours, and us when referring to disabled people, Black people, and Black disabled people. I refuse to use they as if I am separate from the communities I write about, live within, and learn from every day.

Black Disability Politics

My first day of school was full of tears and utter terror as I desperately tried to cry out for my mum to return and take me home. But I had no words. While the teachers would say I refused to talk, even at the age of four I knew this wasn’t true. My words were stuck and I couldn’t talk.

Taking off the Mask: Practical Exercises to Help Understand and Minimise the Effects of Autistic Camouflaging

Yet a major way ableism works is to erase us from ideas of the future. The science fiction future, sure, but also the everyday future of having any idea of what a disabled adulthood or elderhood could look like. Ableism isolates and keeps disabled, Deaf, and neurodivergent people from finding disabled, Deaf, and neurodivergent communities. It’s common for parents or teachers to tell some disabled children they’re “not like the others,” for parents of autistic, Deaf, or disabled kids to deny our identities. Sometimes, especially for BIPOC people, this can be the best survival strategy we know, but being kept from each other also kills. Most people still draw a blank when you say the words “disabled community”—like, what is that? Autistic and disabled special-ed student Cole Sorensen writes, “Until I started college, I had never met an adult who was like me. I had other disabled friends, sure, but with no model of what my life could look like after graduation, I couldn’t imagine much of a future for myself at all.”6 This is why I believe some of disability justice’s most important work lies in how we’ve created space for BIPOC people (and, secondarily, Others) to identify as disabled, chronically ill, Deaf, or neurodivergent, through our creation of Black-and brown-centered disabled, sick, Deaf, and neurodivergent communities and politics. Community building isn’t always seen as “real activism” (whatever) but the work we do to create disabled Black and brown community spaces, online forums, hashtags, and artwork is lifesaving because it creates space for disabled BIPOC to come out as disabled. I mean big organized spaces, parties, and cultural events, and I also mean the disabled BIPOC version of “Hey, do you want some of my fries?”: one disabled BIPOC person being friendly and Initiating Hangout Space with another, who might not be ready to be out yet. It’s very difficult to organize for survival, power, and pleasure when people can’t even admit they go to this school, you know?

The Future Is Disabled : Prophecies, Love Notes and Mourning Songs

Autistic Collaboration Trust

All books featured by the Autistic Collaboration Trust are written by members of the Autistic community and contribute to the co-creation of Autistic culture.

1. The Beauty of Collaboration at Human Scale (2021)
2. Neuroqueer Heresies (2021)
3. Autistic Community and the Neurodiversity Movement (2019)
4. Being Autistic (2019)
5. A Field Guide to Earthlings (2010)
6. Through the Eyes of Aliens (1998)
7. NeuroDiversity: The Birth of an Idea (1998)
8. Don’t Mourn for Us (1993)

Source: Books | Autistic Collaboration

Fundamental Texts of Progressive Pedagogy

Our friends at Human Restoration Project suggest that their community read these four “fundamental texts of progressive pedagogy” to understand their philosophy. These are great recommendations that also help understand our philosophy at Stimpunks.

• Teaching to Transgress by bell hooks
• Timeless Learning: How Imagination, Observation, and Zero-Based Thinking Change Schools by Ira Socol, Pam Moran, and Chad Ratliff
• The Schools Our Children Deserve: Moving Beyond Traditional Classrooms and “Tougher Standards” by Alfie Kohn
• On Critical Pedagogy by Henry Giroux

Critical pedagogy takes as one of its central projects an attempt to be discerning and attentive to those places and practices in which social agency has been denied and produced.

On Critical Pedagogy

Books Every Progressive Educator Should Read

Nick and Chris of Human Restoration Project list some of their favorite books for progressive educators.

I think a cornerstone of progressive education is understanding the connections between happiness and contentment and learning.

Schooling should be about creating a better world not preparing people for the world that exists.

Chris McNutt of Human Restoration Project

Hope is a platform for action.

What about our education is an inoculation against white supremacy and against white nationalism?

Good digital pedagogy is accessible to everyone.

Nick Covington of Human Restoration Project

Nick

• Troublemakers : Lessons in Freedom From Young Children at School
• Radical Hope: A Teaching Manifesto
• The Book of Learning and Forgetting
• The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America
• 17,000 Classroom Visits Can’t Be Wrong: Strategies That Engage Students, Promote Active Learning, and Boost Achievement
• What’s the Big Idea?: Question-Driven Units to Motivate Reading, Writing, and Thinking
• The Schools Our Children Deserve: Moving Beyond Traditional Classrooms and “Tougher Standards”
• Teaching as a Subversive Activity
• Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong
• Hacking Assessment: 10 Ways to Go Gradeless in a Traditional Grades School
• We Got This : Equity, Access, and the Quest to Be Who Our Students Need Us to Be
• The Fire Next Time
• Democracy and Education

Chris

• Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom
• Pedagogy of Hope: Reliving Pedagogy of the Oppressed
• The End of the Rainbow: How Educating for Happiness-Not Money-Would Transform Our Schools
• Culture and Power in the Classroom: Educational Foundations for the Schooling of Bicultural Students
• Schooling as a Ritual Performance: Toward a Political Economy of Educational Symbols and Gestures
• On Critical Pedagogy
• The Schools Our Children Deserve: Moving Beyond Traditional Classrooms and “Tougher Standards”
• Equity-Centered Trauma-Informed Education
• Timeless Learning: How Imagination, Observation, and Zero-Based Thinking Change Schools
• The Labor of Lunch: Why We Need Real Food and Real Jobs in American Public Schools
• Manufacturing Happy Citizens: How the Science and Industry of Happiness Control Our Lives
• Designing Games: A Guide to Engineering Experiences
• Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life
• The Path to Purpose: Helping Our Children Find Their Calling in Life
• Where You Go Is Not Who You’ll Be: An Antidote to the College Admissions Mania
• We Do This ‘Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice
• We Want to Do More Than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational Freedom
• Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking

Source: MINDFOOD I: Top 10 Books Every Progressive Educator Should Read – YouTube

Autism Books For Parents and Clinicians

Steve Silberman offers a great list of autism books for parents and clinicians.

• Uniquely Human: A Different Way of Seeing Autism
  by Barry Prizant and Tom Fields-Meyer
• Thinking Person’s Guide to Autism
  edited by Shannon Des Roches Rosa, Jennifer Byde Myers, Liz Ditz, Emily Willingham, and Carol Greenburg
• Raising Cubby: A Father and Son’s Adventures with Asperger’s, Trains, Tractors, and High Explosives
  by John Elder Robison
• Parenting Without Panic: A Pocket Support Group for Parents of Children and Teens on the Autism Spectrum
  by Brenda Dater
• Nerdy, Shy, and Socially Inappropriate: A User Guide to an Asperger Life
  by Cynthia Kim
• My Baby Rides the Short Bus: The Unabashedly Human Experience of Raising Kids with Disabilities
  edited by Yanta Bertelli, Jennifer Silverman, and Sarah Talbot
• Asperkids: An Insider’s Guide to Loving, Understanding, and Teaching Children with Asperger’s Syndrome
  by Jennifer Cook O’Toole
• The Reason I Jump: The Inner Voice of a Thirteen-Year-Old Boy with Autism
  by Naoki Hidashida
• Neurodiversity.com: Honoring the Varieties of Human Wiring by Kathleen Seidel
• The Anti-Romantic Child: A Memoir of Unexpected Joy
  by Priscilla Gilman

Source for this list: Resources – Steve Silberman

For Autistic People, by Autistic People

• Pretending to Be Normal
  by Liane Holliday Willey
• I Think I Might Be Autistic: A Guide to Autism Spectrum Disorder Diagnosis and Self-Discovery for Adults
  by Cynthia Kim
• Living Independently on the Autism Spectrum: What You Need to Know to Move into a Place of Your Own, Succeed at Work, Start a Relationship, Stay Safe, and Enjoy Life as an Adult on the Autism Spectrum
  by Lynne Soraya
• Look Me in the Eye: My Life with Asperger’s
  by John Elder Robison
• Ask and Tell: Self Advocacy for People on the Autism Spectrum
  edited by Stephen Shore, Liane Holliday Willey, Phil Schwarz, Roger Meyer, Kassiane Sibley, and Ruth Elaine Joyner Hane
• Loud Hands: Autistic People, Speaking
  edited by Julia Bascom
• Typed Words, Loud Voices
  edited by Amy Sequenzia, Elizabeth Grace, and Melanie Yergeau
• Nerdy, Shy, and Socially Inappropriate: A User Guide to an Asperger Life
  by Cynthia Kim
• No You Don’t: Essays from an Unstrange Mind
  by Sparrow Rose Jones
• Blazing My Trail: Living and Thriving with Autism
  by Rachel Cohen-Rottenberg
• The Independent Woman’s Handbook for Super Safe Living on the Autism Spectrum
  by Robyn Steward
• Navigating College: A Handbook on Self Advocacy Written for Autistic Students from Autistic Adults
  edited by the Autistic Self-Advocacy Network
• Developing Talents: Careers For Individuals With Asperger Syndrome and High-functioning Autism
  by Temple Grandin and Kate Duffy
• And Straight on Till Morning: Essays on Autism Acceptance
  edited by Julia Bascom
• A Field Guide to Earthlings: An Autistic/Asperger View of Neurotypical Behavior
  by Ian Ford
• A Helpful Compilation of Blogs and Online Resources by Autistic People
  by Kit Mead
• A Comprehensive List of Blogs by Autistic People

Source for this list: Resources – Steve Silberman

By Our Community

Kristina Daniele

Kristina Brooke Daniele is a Black, queer, neurodivergent homeschooling mom, educator, wife, and author of two books, (Civil Rights Then and Now and i wandered, lost: poems). Kristina has worked as an educator in some capacity for over 15 years- first as a classroom teacher, then as a homeschooling teacher, and currently, as an education consultant. She is passionate about collaborative projects centering on creating and maintaining safe-spaces for those who have for too long been pushed aside. During her time at Automattic, Kristina spearheaded the creation of the Employee Resource Group, Cocoamattic for Black employees at the company.

Have you really read all these?

A good library is comprised in large part by books you haven’t read, making it something you can turn to when you don’t know something. He calls it: the Anti-Library.

The 5-Step Research Method I Used For Tim Ferriss, Robert Greene, and Tucker Max

Someone walks into your house and sees your many books on your many bookshelves. Have you really read all these? they ask. This person does not understand knowledge. A good library is comprised in large part by books you haven’t read, making it something you can turn to when you don’t know something. He calls it: the Anti-Library.

I remember once in college, the pride I felt about being able to write an entire research paper with stuff from my own anti-library. We all have books and papers that we haven’t read yet. Instead of feeling guilty, you should see them as an opportunity: know they’re available to you if you ever need them.

This is the mark you must aim for as a researcher, to not only have enough material - and to know where the rest of what you haven’t read will be located - on hand to do your work. You must build a library and an anti-library now… before you have an emergency presentation or a shot at a popular guest post.

The 5-Step Research Method I Used For Tim Ferriss, Robert Greene, and Tucker Max

We Need a Library Economy: Usufruct, the Irreducible Minimum, and Complementarity

In The Ecology of Freedom, social ecologist Murray Bookchin spends a lot of time exploring three key concepts: usufruct, the irreducible minimum, and complementarity.

These concepts are foundational to any cooperative, caring, and egalitarian society, but particularly to what Bookchin called ‘organic society,’ which consist of the egalitarian tribal societies that can be found in much of human history.

Beginning with the first essential concept for a library economy, usufruct refers to the freedom of individuals or groups in a community to access and use, but not destroy, common resources to supply their needs.

The second essential concept for a library economy is the irreducible minimum, which is the guaranteed provision of the means necessary to sustain life, the level of living that no one should ever fall below, regardless of the size of their individual contribution to the community.

Complementarity is a way of looking at non-hierarchical differences within a society as something generative, where each person contributes a small part to an outcome greater than the sum of its parts.

We Need A Library Economy – YouTube

We are participating in the library economy with our “Things Library“.

Things Library

A library economy would require a vast reorientation of our priorities from the centrality of capital and competition to the centrality of humanity and cooperation, which brings us to the final core concept for a library economy: complementarity.

We Need A Library Economy – YouTube

…engage in building full-fledged library economies based on the commons.

This can take the form of tool libraries, vehicle libraries, clothing libraries, furniture libraries, and more in an effort curb overproduction, end planned obsolescence, and provide access to an irreducible minimum to all.

How We Can Change The World – YouTube

Libraries are Punk AF

1. Books are for use.
2. Every person his or her book.
3. Every book its reader.
4. Save the time of the reader.
5. A library is a growing organism.

Five laws of library science – Wikipedia

Librarians Rock

Libraries are the last place in America where you are valued for your personhood, rather than the contents of your wallet. At the library, you are a patron, not a customer.

As the public sphere has shrunk, libraries have expanded to pick up the slack. Librarians liase with social workers for their patrons, help them apply for emergency rental assistance, give them broadband onsite and to take home with them (the New York Public Library calls its wifi hospot program “lending out the entire internet”). Your library will loan you a suit for a job interview, tools to fix your home, or toys for your kid.

Librarians are kind of upside-down cops: public employees who are stepping in wherever the rest of our services have failed.

They Want to Kill Libraries. The Last Place in America Where You Are… | by Cory Doctorow | Nov, 2022 | Medium

While on the subject of burning books, I want to congratulate librarians, not famous for their physical strength, their powerful political connections or great wealth, who, all over this country, have staunchly resisted anti-democratic bullies who have tried to remove certain books from their shelves, and destroyed records rather than have to reveal to thought police the names of persons who have checked out those titles.

So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House, the Supreme Court, the Senate, the House of Representatives, or the media. The America I loved still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.

Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country

Further explorations in L-space,

I leaned closer and whispered, “A librarian’s gotta do what a librarian’s gotta do.”

Libriomancer