Welcome to Today in Books, our daily round-up of literary headlines at the intersection of politics, culture, media, and more.

Trump Abruptly Fires First African American Librarian of Congress

With seemingly no warning, the first woman and the first African American to be Librarian of Congress received an email from the White House’s Presidential Personnel Office notifying Carla Hayden that she was fired. AP News reported that Hayden had recently come under fire from conservative advocacy group American Accountability Foundation for “promoting children’s books with ‘radical’ content and literary material authored by Trump opponents.” AAF took to X to celebrate the termination hours before the news was made public. Democratic leaders have condemned the move and praised Hayden’s leadership, with New Mexico Senator Martin Heinrich saying Donald Trump was “taking his assault on America’s libraries to a new level.” It is exhausting to be this horrified by the callous takeouts of good people doing good work, and I cannot begin to imagine how Hayden felt receiving such a blithe and dismissive email ending her historic career at the Library of Congress, “effective immediately.”

A New Judy Blume Adaptation is Now Streaming

If you have Netflix and you’re a Judy Blume fan, you might want to check out this eight-episode series adapting Forever. “It is gratifying to know that, 50 years after its release, the love story at the core of Forever is still resonating with audiences,” Blume said of showrunner Mara Brock Akil’s adaptation starring Lovie Simone as Keisha and Michael Cooper Jr. as Justin. Published in 1975, Forever arguably became Blume’s most controversial YA novel, oft the target of censorship, because of explicit sex scenes–the book centers a teen couple’s first time. Learn more about how Brock Akil tells Blume’s classic story through a Black lens from Nadira Goffe writing for Slate.

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1919 Author and Friends Collab on Bookstore Coffee Shop

Well this is a lovely story of friendship, coffee, and books. 1919 author Eve L. Ewing, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Trina Reynolds-Tyler, and award-winning media-based organizer Andrea Faye Hart–longtime friends–are teaming up to run a socially conscious bookstore and cafe in Chicago. Build Coffee opened in 2017, co-founded by Hannah Nyhart who sold the shop to the trio, and the team plans to build on the community space rather than overhaul it. One update brings especially good news to book lovers: Ewing says there are plans to expand the bookstore. Happy reading and caffeinating to Chicago’s South Side!

The Most Read Books on Goodreads This Week

Stack your TBR with some of the most read books on Goodreads this week, and the top five most read books in countries across the world.

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The post Trump Abruptly Fires First African American Librarian of Congress appeared first on Our Story Insight.

Tesla became the latest part of Elon Musk’s business empire to make it clear that criticism of the chief executive is unacceptable by firing a manager last month after he objected to a post on social media by Mr. Musk that referred to Nazi leaders.

Jared Ottmann, a manager and engineer who worked with Tesla’s battery suppliers, said he had been fired because he criticized Mr. Musk for a post on X that used the names of Nazis like Heinrich Himmler and Hermann Göring in a series of wordplay.

“Stop Göring your enemies,” Mr. Musk wrote on Jan. 23, adding, “Bet you did Nazi that coming.” He punctuated the post with a laughing-while-crying emoji.

Mr. Ottmann said on LinkedIn in late January that he was offended that Mr. Musk had referred “as a joke” to Nazis who were responsible for genocide.

“Starting in 2022 and especially the last week I’ve raised the issue internally multiple times, with managers, HR, legal compliance, investor relations,” Mr. Ottmann wrote, referring to behavior by Mr. Musk that he found objectionable. “And while overwhelmingly people offer personal support, Tesla as a company has remained silent.”

Tesla did not reply to a request for comment.

Mr. Musk’s companies, which include SpaceX and X, have a history of punishing dissent. In 2022, SpaceX, which makes rockets, fired nine employees who had called on the company to distance itself from social media comments by Mr. Musk, including one in which he mocked sexual harassment accusations against him. Some of those employees later filed unfair-labor-practice charges with the National Labor Relations Board.

Mr. Ottmann’s critical remarks, and Tesla’s reaction, are the latest indication of the disruption caused by Mr. Musk’s right-wing politics. He has supported a far-right party in Germany whose members have been fined by the government for using Nazi slogans. Mr. Musk’s role in the Trump administration as leader of the Department of Government Efficiency has also made him a polarizing figure.

Signs of dissent at Tesla have not been isolated to Mr. Ottmann. Last month during a meeting at Tesla’s offices in Palo Alto, Calif., employees vented their frustrations about Mr. Musk’s political activities, leading a manager to say he was also discouraged by the chief executive’s behavior.

Mr. Ottmann confirmed Thursday that he had been fired. He declined to comment further, referring questions to Jana Moser, a lawyer in Santa Monica, Calif. Ms. Moser did not reply to a request for comment.

This fall, a SpaceX employee was fired after writing on an internal message board that he hoped Mr. Musk would stop wearing company apparel during his campaign appearances for Mr. Trump, three people familiar with incident said. During an October rally in Butler, Pa., for example, Mr. Musk wore an “Occupy Mars” T-shirt — which SpaceX sells in its company store — as he jumped up and down onstage.

The employee wrote that it wouldn’t be appropriate for workers to wear political clothing to the office and, therefore, that company apparel should not be worn at campaign events. A few days after his post, the company revoked the employee’s access to internal systems, though it later reinstated the employee after determining there was no violation of company policies, the people said.

The employee resigned weeks later. SpaceX did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Mr. Musk has also fired workers at X who criticized him. In the wake of his $44 billion takeover of the company, then called Twitter, in 2022, several employees posted critiques of the billionaire on the platform. Mr. Musk argued with some of them online, and they were later fired.

The firings are at odds with Mr. Musk’s often-stated goal to defend free speech. He has offered to fund lawsuits against employers who fire workers because of things they posted on X. In 2024, he funded a suit for a former worker at the payments company Block after she was fired for inflammatory posts she made on a pseudonymous X account.

Investors in Tesla, the only publicly traded company that Mr. Musk runs, are also worried that his political activities are alienating some buyers and that he is spending too much time in Washington and not enough time addressing slumping car sales. Shares of the company have declined about 40 percent from a high set on Dec. 17.

The post Tesla Fires a Manager Who Criticized Elon Musk on Social Media appeared first on Our Story Insight.

During a news conference four day after the fires began, Kathryn Barger, the chair of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, said she had been forced to pay a $95 fee to the company to make a $500 donation to a friend whose home had been lost in the fire. “I was shocked,” she said, adding, of the company, that “they deserve to be able to pay for their overhead, but at the same time, we are in a crisis.”

In fact, Ms. Barger had confused the option to leave a tip on donations with a mandatory fee. Those tips are GoFundMe’s primary source of revenue and what allows it to be profitable, company officials say. But the tips, which can be adjusted from 0 to as high as 28 percent, are voluntary. The company also charges a 2.9 percent fee on all donations, as well as 30 cents for every transaction, which it says covers credit card and bank transaction fees. It also draws revenue from Classy, a subscription-based software company that helps clients including the World Central Kitchen and Salvation Army raise money. GoFundMe officials rushed to contact Ms. Barger’s office and straighten out the confusion, although not before multiple outlets published critical articles.

As it happened, Mr. Cadogan had been volunteering on a search and rescue team looking for dead bodies in Altadena when the controversy broke out, and he was oblivious to the public relations disaster. But the next day, he ran into Ms. Barger at a community meeting. “She gave me a massive hug,” he said, noting that since then Ms. Barger had been promoting the fund-raising site.

It was hardly the first time the site faced pushback. Over the years, it has been attacked for hosting campaigns by anti-vaccine activists as well as a fund-raiser by the men behind We Build the Wall, a charity that raised $25 million to build a border wall with Mexico but was later accused by prosecutors of illegally diverting that money for personal use. One of the founders of that group, Stephen K. Bannon, Mr. Trump’s former adviser, is set to face trial for fraud in New York next month.

Although the Los Angeles wildfire fund-raisers have not generated that kind of political controversy, they have been closely scrutinized after numerous people reported discovering copycat fund-raisers using images of their homes and designed to profit off the rush of public largess.

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