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Last Sunday I spent hours at the Brooklyn Book Festival, a too rare occasion for me to pull myself away from the internet for an entire afternoon. As I looked around at the crowd on their way to panels or checking out indie press booths, I was reminded that, even if it doesn’t always seem apparent from looking at news headlines, there are many, many of us out there: people who care about books and culture and their community in general.

The previous weekend I had gone to Cleveland to give a talk about literary citizenship. It’s an amorphous kind of concept, often changing with the moment, but needed more than ever today when corporate interests have a stranglehold on the arts, literary institutions are being devastated by the cancellation of NEA grants, and the freedom to read is under attack. As people who care, and if you’ve read this far I suspect you care, I figured we could all use a refresher on how to be a good literary citizen. Below you’ll find my top seven tips on how you can help make a difference.

A terror charge against Kneecap rapper Liam Og O hAnnaidh has been thrown out by a court.

The Irish rapper, who performs under the name Mo Chara, appeared at Woolwich Crown Court on a single terror charge.

Giving his ruling, chief magistrate Paul Goldspring said: "These proceedings against the defendant were instituted unlawfully and are null."

The 27-year-old had been accused of displaying a flag in support of Hezbollah at a gig at the O2 Forum in Kentish Town, north London, in November last year.

Assata Shakur, a famed political activist who was found guilty of shooting a New Jersey state trooper in 1973 and later granted political asylum in Cuba, has died. She was 78.

On Thursday, Shakur “died in Havana, Cuba, as a result of health conditions and her advanced age,” according to Cuba’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

“At approximately 1:15 PM on September 25th, my mother, Assata Shakur, took her last earthly breath. Words cannot describe the depth of loss that I am feeling at this time,” Kakuya Shakur, her daughter, wrote on Facebook.

“I want to thank you for your loving prayers that continue to anchor me in the strength that I need in this moment. My spirit is overflowing in unison with all of you who are grieving with me at this time.”

Microsoft has terminated the Israeli military's access to technology it used to operate a powerful surveillance system that collected millions of Palestinian civilian phone calls made each day in Gaza and the West Bank, the Guardian can reveal.

Microsoft told Israeli officials late last week that Unit 8200, the military's elite spy agency, had violated the company's terms of service by storing the vast trove of surveillance data in its Azure cloud platform, sources familiar with the situation said.

The decision to cut off Unit 8200's ability to use some of its technology results directly from an investigation published by the Guardian last month. It revealed how Azure was being used to store and process the trove of Palestinian communications in a mass surveillance programme.

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Uefa is set to make a decision next week on whether to suspend Israel, with most members of its executive committee understood to be in favour of a ban.

A panel of United Nations advisers has called on Fifa and Uefa to suspend Israel after a UN Commission of Inquiry concluded that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.

Sources have told The Times that Uefa plans to call an emergency executive committee next week to vote on the issue and that a large majority of committee members and federations are in favour of suspension — pointing out that Russia has been banned from European competition since its invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

Uefa, of which Israel has been a member since 1994, has held serious discussions at the highest level this week over Israel’s actions in Gaza and how it should respond. In August, Uefa organised a banner at the Super Cup final between Paris Saint-Germain and Tottenham Hotspur, which read, “Stop Killing Children, Stop Killing Civilians”

The Times revealed last month that several European clubs had asked Uefa if there was any way they could avoid playing Israeli opponents.

A suspension of Israel by Uefa would increase the pressure on Fifa to follow suit, but football’s world governing body is in a difficult position because of the close relationship between its president, Gianni Infantino, and Donald Trump.

One day a week, at around 6am, Eric Leland drives from his home in Petaluma to a certain gas station on a central corner across town. He and four to eight other volunteers load up a folding table with Spanish-language materials, like cheat sheets about civil rights in interactions with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers. Alongside these pamphlets are equipment like face masks, gloves, and earplugs for protecting workers at loud worksites. It’s a one-stop shop for the day laborers who congregate here each morning, hoping to be hired for a day’s work.

Those who speak Spanish stick around at the table, chatting with the day laborers who are gathering on the corner. The rest of the volunteers peel off to covertly observe key intersections on the main road, especially near the highway, as “legal observers.” They’re looking for federal government vehicles, whether from ICE or the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

That’s the primary function of the new Adopt a Corner program, which was launched nationwide this summer by the National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON). The organization has asked that anyone not at risk of deportation take action by becoming a consistent presence anywhere that day laborers gather, to build relationships and to offer protection. Here in Petaluma, volunteers usually stay until around 8am, after most of the laborers have either found work or given up for the day.

In 2004, political campaigns spent 9 cents of every dollar raised on fundraising operations. By 2024, that number had reached 30 cents. American political campaigns are raising more and more money less and less efficiently. I’ve analyzed data from FEC disbursement records, using an algorithm I developed to classify expenditures by spending category. It reveals that campaigns are now spending 38 cents of every dollar raised just to raise more money—a fourfold increase from the 9 cents spent in 2004. In raw terms, campaigns burned through $3 billion on fundraising operations in 2024 alone.

This represents a fundamental shift in how political money flows through our democracy. Twenty years ago, fundraising operations were a necessary but modest expense, like renting office space or printing yard signs. Today, it has metastasized into the primary activity of most campaigns. In 2022, 31% of total expenditures were for fundraising expenses. This came close to exceeding the 33% of total expenditures going towards advertising. If current trends hold in 2026, it’s likely that fundraising costs will for the first time exceed what is spent on advertising, thus becoming the biggest spending category.

[...]Since 2022, Odessa had been governed by a group of far-right hard-liners led by Mayor Javier Joven, the owner of a local roofing company who had run for office to help Odessa “publicly repent” for its sins. Political opponents nicknamed the Joven faction “the Squad” and argued that it showed little interest in infrastructure, public safety, or business development, the traditional priorities of municipal government.

The Joven wing of the city council passed an ordinance declaring Odessa a “sanctuary city for the unborn” and banned transgender people from using public restrooms that didn’t match their sex at birth. They fired top city staff, leading to an avalanche of resignations. They packed city commissions with political loyalists and hired a former executive director of the Republican Party of Texas as the city manager. Last year, Odessa lost its bond ratings from Moody’s and Standard and Poor’s after it failed to complete two audits on time—perhaps because the leaders of the finance department had quit.

After two years of chaos, charges of favoritism, and culture wars, Odessa voters had finally had enough. In the November 2024 election, Joven and his allies were trounced by a slate of moderate candidates led by Hendrick, a trial lawyer whose family has lived in Odessa since the 1880s.

In 2021 one of the team had been reading an article about the concept of doughnut economics – a circular way of thinking about the way we use resources – and he brought it up. “I just mentioned it casually at a meeting, as a tool to evaluate our new quality of life programme, and it grew from there,” says Stefan Persson, Tomelilla’s organisational development manager.

The concept, developed by British economist Kate Raworth is fairly straightforward. The outer ring or ecological ceiling of the doughnut consists of the nine planetary boundaries. These are the environmental limits that humans are at risk of passing – we’ve already crossed the safety thresholds on climate change, ocean acidification and biogeochemical flows, for example, but remain within safe limits on our atmospheric aerosol loading. The inner ring forms a social foundation of life’s essentials, and the “dough” in between corresponds to a safe and just space for humanity, which meets the needs of people and planet. The model also includes principles such as systems thinking and seeing the economy as a tool, not a goal in itself.

“Doughnut economics is like running a farm. Using an excess of resources, like nutrients, on your crops is a mistake. Not using enough is a mistake too,” says Persson’s colleague Per-Martin Svensson, who is a farmer when he is not doing council work.

Putting the schema into action is challenging, but doughnut economics is being used in Tomelilla, in Sweden’s southern Skåne region, in several ways. It has been integrated into financial planning and decision support, so that rather than building a new ice rink, the plan is now to revamp an existing building.

The local government produces an annual portrait of how well it is doing at meeting doughnut economics targets. The best results in the latest diagram were on air quality, housing and social equality. Air quality in the area was good to begin with, but in order to keep improving it, young people at lower and upper secondary school have been given a free travel card for public transport. It is hoped the measure will also improve social equality in terms of access to education and health. Overcrowding and income disparities have both decreased, but it’s hard to link that directly to any of the council’s work.

On Oct. 8, 2010, the New York Times ran a story on its front page: “Picture Books No Longer a Staple for Children.” As we interviewed children’s publishing professionals while compiling this list, several told us they remembered exactly where they were when they read this death knell for their industry. The Times wasn’t wrong: Sales were down, especially of new books. Once upon a time, an adult shopping for a child might have bought a classic they remembered from their own childhood, and also a new book, recommended by a bookseller. More and more, buyers just went for the classic—almost always Seuss or Sendak—and new books languished on the shelves.

But, feared a number of ambitious authors and illustrators, the art form’s struggles couldn’t simply be blamed (as the Times suggested) on achievement-obsessed adults pushing chapter books too early. Picture books were struggling artistically too. The next year, a group of 21 creators issued a picture-book manifesto. “WE BELIEVE,” the manifesto read, “we must cease writing the same book again and again.” Books for children should be “fresh, honest, piquant, and beautiful,” and unafraid to be odd: “Even books meant to put kids to sleep should give them strange dreams.” And, added the document, “WE CONDEMN … the amnesiacs who treasure unruly classics while praising the bland today.”

This call to arms had a ring of truth to it. When we became parents, we too initially gravitated toward the unruly classics we loved as children, while shying away from new picture books. There were just so many of them! The ones we saw on the front tables in bookstores all seemed to be authored by celebrities—or, worse, were branded tie-ins promoting movies and TV shows. How could any of them be as good as the books of our youth, let alone better?

But picture books have undergone a revolution in the past 25 years—one that was already underway before that Times obit, but which that manifesto helped spur along. The art form is now remarkably different from what it was when we were little.

To start with, a dramatically more varied cast of characters both stars in picture books and makes them. The industry, encouraged by activist organizations like We Need Diverse Books, has belatedly come to understand the value of making books that, in the words of the influential academic Rudine Sims Bishop, offer young readers not only “mirrors” of their own experience but “windows” into the lives of others. Stories by and about nonwhite, nonstraight people are now much more likely to appear in libraries and bookstores, become bestsellers, and win awards.

But other, less obvious changes have swept the art form as well. A turn-of-the-millennium boom in animation, led by Pixar, gave rise to more illustrators making a living as storytellers—and, frustrated by the machinations of Hollywood studios, telling their own stories in a simpler, more personal form. Creators, including many signatories to the 2011 manifesto, have become more interested in innovating within, and subverting, the picture-book form: shortening the text, breaking the fourth wall, and fostering reader interaction—encouraged, perhaps, by the success of a certain argumentative pigeon. Picture-book nonfiction has grown in popularity, becoming especially useful in classrooms—where older elementary and middle school students, often fans of now-commonplace graphic novels, find it crucial in accessing difficult historical topics. And, of course, celebrities have flocked to the picture book—with mostly lukewarm results, although at least one TV star has published an unalloyed work of ridiculous genius. You’ll find it on our list.

To make this guide, we surveyed more than a hundred authors, illustrators, librarians, booksellers, academics, and publishing pros. We ended up reading more than 200 books, for which we must fulsomely thank our local libraries. Our goal: to find the books that represent the best of these transformations, and to tell the story of an art form that responded to a front-page crisis with a new wave of inventive stories that respect the intelligence, playfulness, and widely differing experiences of young readers.

The ABC late-night host is returning to broadcast on Tuesday following a brief-but-monumental suspension that sparked a national debate over the Trump Administration’s pressure tactics and the modern limits and consequences of free speech.

“Last Wednesday, we made the decision to suspend production on the show to avoid further inflaming a tense situation at an emotional moment for our country,” ABC parent The Walt Disney Company said in a statement Monday. “It is a decision we made because we felt some of the comments were ill-timed and thus insensitive. We have spent the last days having thoughtful conversations with Jimmy, and after those conversations, we reached the decision to return the show on Tuesday.”

Behind the scenes, sources says Kimmel wasn’t planning to apologize on that night’s show and instead was going to defend his original comments as being taken out of context and “grossly mischaracterized” by MAGA, which Disney brass thought would only inflame the situation. Disney/ABC then announced Jimmy Kimmel Live! was “suspended indefinitely.” On Thursday, a follow-up meeting between Kimmel and Disney execs reportedly ended in a stalemate with Kimmel sticking to his stated plan of unapologetically defending himself.

Despite Kimmel’s return, it is not immediately clear if his show will be available across the entire country. Sinclair, for its part, had said that it would not go back to running Kimmel’s show on its stations until the late night host apologized for his comments, met with Sinclair representatives, and made a donation to Turning Point, the organization that Kirk founded. Sinclair, it should be noted, owns the ABC station in the Washington D.C. metro area, among other markets.

Nexstar, similarly, could also choose to continue to preempt the show, though of course it wiould still be accessible online across the country after it runs on ABC.

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For most of her life, Disneyland was Stephanie Cuevas’s happy place. But the news on Wednesday, September 17, about Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night show being suspended “indefinitely” was her breaking point with Disney.

The next day, Cuevas made an announcement: She is going to dump the mouse. Her Instagram and TikTok accounts, which had grown to tens of thousands of followers based on her Disneyland-themed content, would be pivoting. As a queer and Latina woman, she could not abide by the company’s decision to suspend the late-night host for comments he made about Donald Trump’s reaction to Charlie Kirk’s death.

To Cuevas, it seems clear that the company to which she’d spent so much time, energy, and money supporting does not “care about their community or the people who visit their parks.”

“By silencing someone for expressing an opinion he has every right to voice, Disney showed just how far this administration will go to censor people,” she tells me. “If a wealthy, white, male celebrity can be forced into silence, what does that mean for the rest of us? That’s absolutely terrifying.”

Jimmy Kimmel and Disney’s battle over what many have deemed as undemocratic censorship has not only taken over the news cycle, but it’s also sent the Disney internet into shambles.

Shortly after the news of Kimmel’s suspension was announced, people online began calling for those against the move to cancel their Disney +, Hulu, and ESPN streaming services in protest. For a lot of people, even those who don’t identify as Disney superfans, doing so has been a tough pill to swallow. After all, what are the nation’s children going to do without easy access to Bluey or Frozen?

But while parents practice their script for how to explain to a three-year-old that Elsa no longer aligns with the moral values of their family, Disney creators and proudly self-identified Disney adults have a much stickier moral quagmire to unravel.