Coming soon to the library: tacos! via Facebook

Food trucks are a new way of life around here. Well, maybe not that new, but they’ve certainly been an inescapable part of life in Brooklyn for awhile. And that’s great, because food should come to you. And with the weather warming up, the library knows just how to take advantage of the food truck craze: hosting one a week at their central location for a month, starting tomorrow. Welcome, to Lunchapalooza! (more…)

It was DC, but we really want to know this dude’s story

Hurricane Sandy was, as you know, a devastating storm, a (hopefully, sadly probably not) once-in-a-lifetime weather event. Everyone who  was here for it has some kind of story from the storm, be it fleeing rushing storm waters, coming back to a trashed business or volunteering to help out neighbors and strangers. In an effort to collect all that history, the Brooklyn Public Library is now inviting people to sit down and talk about the ways they lived through the storm. (more…)

The secret to her happiness? Full of vim and vigor from fundraising for the library. Photo by Dimitry Gudkov

Staying on the bike beat for a second, let’s talk about something that’s less contentious than not hitting people with cars or whether bike share stations are imperialistic. The Brooklyn Public Library is of course never on the firmest ground funding-wise. Despite the fact that libraries are a great resource that can potentially benefit everyone, the city council and mayor would rather spend money on drones that shoot 17 oz. sodas out of your hand and taz breaks for luxury condo builders. So that leaves it up to us to fund the damn things, despite the fact that we can’t levy taxes. We can however, raise money by riding bikes from branch to branch, thanks to the library’s Bike the Branches event next month. (more…)

Your new portal to the Brooklyn Public Library

Sometimes we hit the streets to rap to the kids about how important reading is. And they tell us that while they agree reading is as hip and radical as a pile of One Direction pogs, they just can’t get into something as boring and clearly meant for old people as books. “Can’t you put them on a computer or something?” they ask us in between doing tricks with their devil sticks. The Brooklyn Public Library knows what’s up with the kids, so they’ve signed up for a pilot program with Simon & Schuster to provide the library with their whole e-book catalog, starting April 30, according to a tip that landed in our inbox. (more…)

You can borrow a laptop at the Bushwick BPL branch. So much for the “My laptop died” excuse (via flickr user utopianbranchlibrary)

Did you know you can borrow a free laptop from the Brooklyn Public Library? Yeah, we didn’t either. But it turns out select BPL branches in Bushwick, Bed-Stuy and Brownsville have been blessed with a collection of laptops and charging carts thanks to a government program aiming to bring broadband technology to low-income areas, and now these complimentary computers are coming to the Kings Bay and Kings Highway branches, too. (more…)

Your doorway to business success? via Facebook

This is America, which supposedly means that if you’ve got enough time, dedication, and cutthroat business practices, you can be anything you want to be. This is also Brooklyn, which means that if you’ve got enough ingenuity, promise, and luck, you can probably win a competition where someone will give you enough money to be anything you want to be. This time around, it’s the Brooklyn Public Library’s PowerUP! competition that wants to pull you up by your bootstraps and launch you into commercial success. (more…)

No no, the other kind of mobile. Spacephone mobile

The Brooklyn Public Library is doing an admirable job of keeping up with the times. They re-branded themselves (although people weren’t too into it), they’ve got a huge co-working space, with a recording studio, and now they’re getting into the mobile app game. (more…)

Aside from losing homes, fraying community bonds and just getting cast into a miserable situation, communities that got hit by Sandy also lost their libraries. Which, yeah, in the grand scheme doesn’t sound like much, but reading kills time even better than watching panda videos on YouTube, and it doesn’t require power. Now there’s a group of librarians helping out Coney Island, Red Hook and Gerritsen Beach with free books from newspaper box-sized libraries. (more…)

Nicer than any office we’ve ever worked in

People clowning on the Brooklyn Public Library’s new logo are missing the bigger library news going on: they’ve introduced a badass new co-working space to the Central Library (10 Grand Army Plaza). It joins an impressive number of co-working spaces that make life easier for start ups and make me feel really bad about spending half the day doing posts in my underwear. (more…)

Although it’s easy to focus on Brooklyn and the problems we’re facing in the aftermath of Sandy, other terrible injustices and tragedies are still happening all around the world. And while you should absolutely volunteer to help those affected by the hurricane this weekend, there are other good causes that need our attention too. This Saturday, a group of 4th grade girls from PS 107 have organized a Read-a-Thon to raise money in support of Malala Yousafzai, a 15-year old girl who was targeted for assassination by the Taliban for her activism in advocating rights of girls in Pakistan to go to school. (more…)