Sarah Kester

Democracy isn’t a Spectator Sport

“Are you on?” she asked? On what? It was 4:30PT and I was deep in a TikTok about J.D. Vance. I had no idea what she was talking about. “I’m on the zoom with Heather Cox Richardson!” Oh, right! I’d forgotten it was happening. Too bad—I’d hoped to attend. But I was...

Recent Posts

Do This: Participate in Banned Books Week

Unite Against Book Bans, an initiative of the American Library Association (ALA), hosts Banned Books Week every year. This year’s Banned Books Week starts in just a few days and runs from October 4 to 10. More than 4,200 books were challenged in 2025, and we need to...

Watch This: How book banners are threatening librarians

If you were asked to list dangerous jobs in America, you might think of firefighters, power line workers, or maybe people in construction. But librarians? In a recent survey, U.S. library workers reported more than 8,200 traumatic incidents in their jobs, ranging from...

Read This: Book banners are coming for librarians

A federal judge just ruled that librarians can now be arrested and criminally charged in Arkansas for providing access to certain books. This is the latest phase in the nationwide book banning movement that our friends at PEN America have been tracking since 2021....

Do This: Look up data centers where you live

Data centers are popping up all over the country, but the majority of Americans don’t want them in our community. That’s because we know that data centers pollute our air, use up our water supply, and increase our electricity bills — all without adding anything to the...

Watch This: Living Next to a Data Center

There are more than 4,000 data centers in the U.S. That’s a lot, and the more we use the internet and AI, the more that number will grow. Still, many of us don’t know much about the impact of data centers if we haven’t personally experienced them in our own community....