That said, I would still prioritize variety over pure popularity. For example, I can see a library having 2 or 3 copies of all the Harry Potter books because people keep checking them out, but I don't think they need 10 copies.

https://www.reddit.com/r/antiai/comments/1rnjx1e/i_found_thi...

https://www.governing.com/artificial-intelligence/how-local-...

As a library-funding taxpayer myself, I find it very depressing that the selection in my local libraries is so lacking. Hence my remark about the vast superiority of second-hand bookstores for just about any topic.

Anyway, a quick look at https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/6028... indicates that all 4 sponsors of the bill are Republicans. The Actions tab seems to indicated that the bill got only 12 minutes of debate before being passed,; I hope this is an artifact of how the page is updated rather than the actual time spent on considering it.

Alas, this video appears not have been linked to the text that describes it. Perhaps I should ask an AI to generate an artistic rendering of the author's description.

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=%E2%80%93&year...

It's also notable that the em-dash is approved in American Manuals of Style, while discouraged in British ones. I was unable to find longitudinal data for the em-dash's use in magazines, blogs etc., but AI summaries suggest it's 3-4 times more used in those contexts than in news reports.

Like strawberry ice cream or apple pie, nuance is certainly a fine thing; but a surfeit of it becomes cloying, and the antipathy toward the omnipresence of the em-dash in LLM-generated prose, along with other kinds of literary expression like contrast and comparison, suggests to me that people have had more than enough of it.

The most egregious example I came across recently was where a friend enthused about some manga he was reading and I agreed to read a few chapters, only to discover that the translator has decided to render the countryside accents of western Japan (engaging with a protagonist visiting from Tokyo) by having them say 'y'all' and 'bless your heart' and other Southern USA tropes. I get the aspiration of the translator, but it was excruciatingly unpleasant to read. At that point, why not just say the protagonist was from New York and on vacation in Florida, or draw in some meshback caps on some of the characters and add alligators here and there in the background?

To me they come off as faddish, with many writers using them where commas and semicolons would have done just as well. I think their popularity stems from teh fact that provide the sense of a personal aside from the writer, allowing them to be more expressive while clearly delineating the personal or contextual remark from the main flow of the prose. No doubt this works for a lot of readers, but I find it tedious.

My local Half-Price Books (a second-hand bookstore chain) has a vastly better selection than my local library.

This is hardly comparable to difficult philosophy books as mentioned in the article, though. To my mind, the poin of libraries is to house and make accessible difficult or challenging books that might not necessarily be popular. I was shocked when I first visited an American library and found large numbers of mass-market paperbacks and magazines. When I say 'large numbers' I mean 10 or 20 copies of books by Oprah or other celebrity authors. Librarians would have it that they're serving the community by making these books available in the library around the same time they're available in bookstores, ignoring the fact that once the publisher's marketing drive is over all those extra copies are going to be surplus. I do not understand why you would buy 20 copies of one book when you could have it and 19 other books.