I'm in New York City this weekend. (Because HAMILTON!) Yesterday I walked by the New York Public Library, which made me remember Ronald Clark.

Ronald Clark's father worked as a custodian of a New York City library branch in an era when library caretakers and their families lived on site—in his case, on the top floor of the Washington Heights branch.

The 24/7 access to books in a pre-Kindle age changed Ronald’s life: He grew up to become not only the first person in his family to graduate from high school but also a college professor.

As part of its celebration of how libraries change lives, StoryCorps a few weeks ago produced Ronald’s story as a three-minute film.

There’s so much I love about this sweet little film:

(1) The message of the life-altering power of libraries;

(2) the animation that brings Ronald’s gravelly narration to life; and

(3) the choice to use video to celebrate text, which subtly underscores the premise: Books are a starting point. (For what? For so many things.)

I’m going to drop a link to the video in a second so you can love it, too.

Ronald’s story made me think about the role of libraries in our lives. (Which is the 4th reason I love this film: It’s a beautiful bit of library marketing, even if unintentionally so.)

My love of reading comes from my mother. I never remember her without a book—on her lap; next to her side of the bed; left on the lawn chair by the pool, under a leather cigarette case-pouch that held her pack of Kent and a Bic lighter.

My mother read historical fiction almost exclusively, prompting me—a peevish teenager—to ask her whether she ever considered reading “anything good.” My mother died just after I graduated from college, so I feel extra bad remembering my captiousness now. Kids can be such jerks.

Anyway, she fed her habit at the town public library.

We went there together every Friday—my mother swapping out her stack of historical fiction and me swapping out my stack of picture and (later) chapter books—with big print and illustrations every few pages instead of every page. (Later-me felt smug about that milestone.)

I remember the day that I first grokked the idea that you could take books out of the library for free. We were standing at the checkout desk—I could barely see over it—when I realized that my mother wasn’t taking out her wallet. The woman at the desk chitchatted with my mother and then let us walk our books out the door.

Even then I remember worrying that the library business model couldn’t possibly be sustainable. I fretted about it all the way home.

The library changed my world. The stories it gave me became the axis on which my childhood turned: Charlotte’s Web. From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. Little House on the Prairie.

I think my mother read historical fiction because it offered a handy escape from the humdrum that was the housewife suburban life. I never had a chance to ask her, but that’s my guess.

Maybe that explanation is too pat, but maybe not: Isn’t that the role books play in our lives, more broadly?

We read to change our circumstances, in one way or another.

Books give us a new world we could live in, if we wanted to. (Even for a time.)

Books can point us toward a path—sometimes overtly, sometimes not.

The public library played an outsized role in my life. I’m grateful to it. For my mom. For me. And maybe for you?

And certainly for Ronald Clark.

I started writing this entry thinking it was going to be a line item in this newsletter—I had another intro planned for this morning.

But that’s the power of words: You start in one place and they carry you to another world entirely.

And oh yes, that video link. Here you go. Watch it. It’s a good one.

Now here are 12-ish things I thought were worth sharing this fortnight.

How to write funnier, told through the lens of the greatest email that ever dropped into my inbox. Also, check out the pudgy pug I call Supermodel Carl.

“Dumpster fire” is now officially in the dictionary—at least, the Merriam-Webster one. It joins 849 other entries this month, including chiweenie, glamping, cryptocurrency, kombucha, bitcoin, and a new definition for unicorn: a startup valued at 1 billion bitcoins dollars or more.

How do new words and definitions make it into the dictionary? Why dumpster fire and not, say, fetch (a la Mean Girls?)

It turns out that writers have a lot to do with it: Dictionary makers read, read, read, and watch for moments when a writer doesn’t explain what a word means because he or she presumes that a reader knows what a word means, M-W Editor at Large Peter Sokolowski told the Washington Post.

Merriam-Webster didn’t release the full list of words (I don’t know why). But you can see a bunch of them here.

I started my writing career in journalism, eventually winding up at the Boston Globe. A newsroom is a serious place. Which is why I can’t get over the playfulness of this emoticon headline in the New York Times.

Note to NYT copy chiefs: There’s so much absurdity in the news... why stop at a snowstorm?

Follow-up note to content marketers and writers, you might want to bookmark this emoticon resource. Emoticons render in text far better than emojis do. You never know when you’ll need the perfect aside of a shrug, comment, side-eye, and nondescript animal face like this. (ᵔᴥᵔ) Which could be a bear. Or a cow from Westworld. Or a chiweenie.

Plagium is a tool that lets you check whether and where text might appear on the Web. (I mentioned this in Part 6 of Everybody Writes.)

Here’s a new one that just came on my radar this week (though apparently it's been around a while): The Copyscape plagiarism checker lets you check who might be copying you. (And you can do it without registering or setting up an account.) Enter your website’s URL, and you’ll see a list of websites that have filched your stuff.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) will write a bestseller by 2049, says the experts at the World Economic Forum. I have two questions about that:

1. If AI is so smart... why will writing a bestseller take 30 years+? ;)

AI already has published 100% more poems than most of us have and its novella almost won a Japanese literary prize. Still, I wrote a bestseller in little less than a year. Step up, AI, or get over yourself.

2. Why are we teaching humans how to code and machines how to learn, anyway?

Instead, why aren’t we teaching ourselves how to think? Why aren’t we honing our own critical-reasoning skills? These questions are actually not mine: They are posed by researcher Andres Colmenares.

Prioritizing technical proficiency over problem-solving is wrong-headed, particularly for our kids, Andres says: “The perils of kids (and adults) learning how to use technology before learning how to use their own brains are largely ignored.”

His questions have no simple answers. But they’re worth considering, aren’t they? (Hat tip to Scott Monty for the link.)

The articulate and wonderfully weird Frances McDormand won big at the Oscars a week ago for her portrayal of Mildred Hayes, who shook her community into action through her... uh... content strategy on three forgotten billboards.

My friends at M+R Consulting—no strangers to risk-taking or shaking things up—have been using activist billboards all year to earn press attention, apply pressure on decision-makers, and spark conversations.

I talk a lot about being a bigger, braver, bolder brand. M+R nails it for its clients.

How does this dark magic called Content Marketing lead to sales? My friend Chris Marr of the UK’s Content Marketing Academy answers this question in one of the more accessible ways I’ve seen recently.

Chris writes as a teacher, not as a consultant trying to sell you something, and produces a great 101 to share with clients, doubting bosses, or anyone giving you a salty attitude about Content Marketing’s value.

The best part comes at the end: Chris bunts a few real business examples into midfield. Then he drives Marcus Sheridan’s “big five” deep into the outfield, rounding third and bringing it home.

(Also, Chris and his partner, Cara, just brought home a brand-new baby girl this week. So if you like his post, give him some extra love!)

Pre-2017, BuzzFeed’s 26 Reasons Kids Are Pretty Much Just Tiny Drunk Adults got 2.2 million social shares. Late last year, its 85 People Who Are Sexier Than Blake Shelton earned a paltry 0.2 million shares, says BuzzSumo.

What lesson can we possibly take from this development? Social sharing is on the decline. It’s been cut in half since 2015. The sharing of content on social networks has been slipping because of (1) increased competition; (2) a rise in private sharing; and (3) Facebook algorithm changes.

What else can we possibly take away from this? I’ve been thrumping this bongo for a while: Quality bests quantity.

Evidence: You know who’s bucking the everything-sucks-in-social-sharing-and-we’re-doomed trend? The New York Times, Financial Times, and more recent Harvard Business Review and Economist stories.

In other words: the people who actually create content in service to a specific audience they feel privileged to have, and who don’t take that responsibility lightly. <-- That's the real takeaway.

An important part of the As SLOW As Possible framework I’m working on (more on this later) is knowing when to say NO. Saying NO is as important as delivering a HELL YES. And when you say "no" strategically, you’ll get more done.

Want to produce your best work? Do less. But obsess over it.

Berkley Professor Morten Hansen studied 5,000 employees of top companies to tease out what makes top performers top performers. It turns out that they do less—not more.

“Top performers...carefully selected which priorities, tasks, meetings, customers, ideas or steps to undertake and which to let go," Hansen says. "They then applied intense, targeted effort on those few priorities in order to excel."

They do less and they obsess about doing fewer things ridiculously well.

For two months, NYT columnist Farhad Manjoo got all of his news at a slower pace: from print newspapers. Here’s what he learned.

I love this approach, because it prizes quality information over speedy information. My As SLOW As Possible approach isn’t technophobic—it’s about slowing down at the right moments, not every moment—but Manjoo makes a compelling case for, among other things, seeking out slower, more informed sources of information that take more time to uncover the full story (not just a story).

(Spoiler: Don’t get your news from Facebook or Twitter.)

The best kinds of tools are like the best relationships: At some point you can’t imagine your life without them. My friend Clare McDermott clued me into the Auto Text Expander, a free Chrome extension that is one of those tools I’ve developed a dependency on.

Use it to match your own abbreviations to auto-populate text you write repeatedly: Dial-in instructions. Your boilerplate. Thank-yous or pitches or anything you write over and over again. So now when I type “#MP,” it auto-populates a message to those asking how they can write for MarketingProfs. Cool.

Go straight to the Chrome extension. Or see the other 15 insanely productive tools Clare recommends.

March 13: SXSW, Austin, TX: Why the Best Content Marketers Use Empathy panel and book signing.

March 21: ePharma, NYC

May 3, 4: Content Marketing Conference (WriterAccess), Boston (use code CMC18HANDLEY to save 20% off any ticket)

May 9: Next10x Conference, Boston (use code AnnNext10x for $100 off)

Nov 13-16: MarketingProfs B2B Marketing Forum (mpb2b.marketingprofs.com) And because friends don’t let friends pay full price, code ANNLOVESME gets you $200 off.

Ann