Two days after the 2016 US presidential election, the Los Angeles Times ran a column titled “How to Weather the Trump Administration: Head to the Library.” Penned by David Kipen, the former literature director of the National Endowment for the Arts, it read, in part: “Even now, in this riven country, after this whole entropically hideous year, most Americans still agree on at least one institution. Mercifully, it’s the one that may just save us: the public library.”
