I guess it makes sense that if you spend enough time studying someone's real correspondence and signature, you could fake them. Heard of forged paintings and fake money? How about forged correspondence from prominent literary figures in history? This book tells the story of how one author fell on hard times and decided to try her hand at selling valuable correspondence from prominent authors. It turned out to be a lucrative business for her. 

Finding the right note paper, typewriters and getting the hang of people's handwriting are the key to success for this crime. Developing a relationship with dealers also helps the process along. However, can Israel fool close associates of the people whose work is being forged? The author combed libraries for actual letters so that she could become familiar with the authors' personalities and lives whom she imitated.

Can You Ever Forgive Me? Memoirs of a Literary Forger by Lee Israel, 2008

I love the cover, on which she crossed out the authors' names whose letters she forgers. Israel did research on the authors' letters at the Library for the Performing Arts and in the Berg Collection of the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building.

The Other 4-Year Degree is the Department of Labor blog post, authored by Tom Perez, Secretary of Labor.   In this post, he notes that DOL will award $100 million in grants to promote apprenticeship in high growth industries.  He writes "Let's think of apprenticeship as the other 4-year degree-minus the tuition sticker shock and the student loan payments... 21st century apprenticeship, is in fact, essential to a prosperous American future."

Note: The following article originally ran as part of Silicon Valley Leadership Group’s 2015 Game Changers. Read the original post here.

Apprenticeship – training by doing (and getting paid for it) – is a tried-and-true approach to preparing people for work and transferring skills to a new generation.

In the 18th century, to meet the economic needs of the time, young people apprenticed as silversmiths, blacksmiths and cobblers. More recently, apprenticeship gave us the iron workers and welders who built the infrastructure that powered the economic boom of the mid-20th century.

And despite the conventional wisdom, apprenticeship is just as relevant for a more complex 21st century economy, with the potential to make a game-changing impact on workforce development in the years to come.

Some of my most inspiring visits as Labor Secretary have been to apprenticeship facilities. At Philadelphia’s Finishing Trades Institute, inner-city youth can become painters and drywall finishers earning upward of $20 per hour. In San Francisco, a young journeyman told me excitedly that his electrical apprenticeship program had given him his “golden ticket.” (He must be a Willy Wonka fan).

But let’s not pigeonhole apprenticeships. They’re not just for so-called blue collar professions like construction. This learn-while-you-earn model works in information technology, health care, energy and cybersecurity as well. That plumber or HVAC technician you trust –she may have apprenticed, but so too may the woman who uses her hands to write code instead of to fix sinks or inspect air ducts.

BlueCross BlueShield has an apprenticeship program in IT. The Service Employees International Union has one in home care – a high-demand field given our rapidly aging population. I toured a community college in San Antonio where a Labor Department grant is helping apprentices acquire competencies in mechatronics.

New innovations like pre-apprenticeship and competency-based apprenticeship could provide a fast track to many of today’s in-demand IT occupations. Apprenticeships can also provide a foot in the door for women, minorities and veterans who are underrepresented in IT.

Apprenticeships offer an impressive return on investment for everyone with skin in the game. Workers get higher earnings and a springboard into the middle class. Employers build a pipeline of skilled workers to stay on the competitive cutting edge. And for taxpayers, every dollar spent on apprenticeship provides $27 in benefits.

So, the Obama Administration is making apprenticeship a linchpin of its job-driven approach to workforce programs. This fall, we will award $100 million in grants to promote apprenticeship in high-growth industries. President Obama has called on Congress to create a $2 billion training fund, with the goal of doubling the number of apprentices over the next five years. And we’re committed to doing our part within the government, working across federal agencies to take to scale successful apprenticeship programs at the military, the Labor Department and the U.S. Mint.

This is a policy challenge and an outreach challenge. We need to change budget priorities, but also mindsets. So many families and educators believe a bachelor’s degree is the only road to economic security, but apprenticeship offers acareer pathway just as promising. Let’s think of apprenticeship as the other 4-year degree – minus the tuition sticker shock and the student loan payments.

Apprenticeship is a common-sense, time-tested idea in wide practice globally. As long as we’ve needed good workers, we’ve had apprenticeships – why stop now? It has its roots in medieval guilds, but apprenticeship is anything but anachronistic. 21st century apprenticeship is, in fact, essential to a prosperous American future.

Follow Secretary Perez on Twitter, @LaborSec.

Americare Inc. will present a recruitment for Home Health Aide (10 openings) on Monday, November 17, 2014, 10 am - 2 pm,  at  Flushing Workforce 1 Career Center, 138-60 Barclay Avenue, 2nd Floor,  Flushing, NY 11355.

FDNY Military/Veteran Outreach will present an information session on  career opportunities for Military and Veterans as Firefighter, EMT/Paramedic, Fire Safety Inspector, on Tuesday, November 18, 2014, 10 am - 3 pm, at Queens Career Center, 168-25 Jamaica Avenue,  2nd Floor, Jamaica, NY 11432. 

ADM Security Services LLC will present a recruitment for Security Guard (12 Temporary openings) on Tuesday. November 18, 2014, 10 am - 2 pm at the Bronx Workforce 1 Career Center, 400 E. Fordham Road, 7th Floor, Bronx, NY 10458.

Labor Ready will present a recruitment for Dining Room Attendant (85 Temp openings), on Wednesday, November 19, 2014,  10 am - 2 pm, at New York State Department of Labor, 9 Bond Street, 4th Floor,Brooklyn, NY 11201.

Sprint will present a recruitment for Retail Consultant (15 openings) on Thursday, November 20,  2014, 10 am - 2 pm, at the Bronx Workforce 1 Career Center, 400 E. Fordham Road, 7th Floor, Bronx, NY 10458.

Macy's will present a recruitment for Star Selling Ambassador (5  Assistant Manager openings) on Thursday, November 20, 2014, 12 - 4 pm, at The Bronx Workforce 1 Career Center, 400 E. Fordham Road, 8th Floor, Bronx, NY 10458.

St. Nicks Alliance Workforce Development  provides Free Job Training and Educational Programs in Environmental Response and Remediation Tech (ERRT), Commercial Driver's License , Pest Control Technician Training (PCT), Employment Search and Prep Training and Job Placement, Earn Benefits and Career Path Center.  For  information and assistance,  please visit St. Nicks Alliance Workforce Development, 790 Broadway, 2nd Fl., Brooklyn, NY 11206.   718-302-2057 ext. 202.

Brooklyn Workforce Innovations helps jobless and working poor New Yorkers establish careers in sectors that offer good wages and opportunities for advancement. Currently BWI offers free job training programs in four industries: commercial driving, telecommunications cable installation, TV and film production, and skilled woodworking.  BWI is at 621 Degraw Street, Brooklyn, NY 11217.  718-237-5366.

CMP (formerly Chinatown Manpower Project) in lower Manhattan is now recruiting for a free training in Quickbooks,  Basic Accounting, and Excel.   This training is open to anyone who is receiving food stamps but no cash assistance.  Class runs for 8 weeks, followed by one-on-one meetings with a job developer.  For more information : Email:info@cmpny.org , call 212-571-1690 or visit 70 Mulberry Street, 3rd Floor, NY, NY 10013.   CMP also provides tuition-based healthcare and business trainings for free to students who are entitled to ACCESS funding.  Please call CMP for information.

Nontraditional Employment for Women (NEW) trains women and places them in careers in the skilled construction, utility, and maintenance trades. It helps women achieve economic independence and a secure future.  For information call 212-627-6252 or register online.

Grace Institute provides tuition-free, practical job training in a supportive learning community for underserved New York area women of all ages and from many different background.  For information call 212-832-7605.

Please note this blog post will be revised when more recruitment events for the week of November 16 are available.

The Weimar Republic brought a period of prolific creativity to Germany in the years between World Wars I and II, with art, theater, music, and literature all experiencing a golden age.  Fine press printing—which began during the Arts and Crafts movement of the late nineteenth century—was no exception, and perhaps the pinnacle of Weimar fine press achievement is the Cranach Press.  Headed by Count Harry Graf Kessler, an aristocratic patron of the arts, the Cranach Press enlisted the help of an international stable of artists and scholars to produce hand-made books that doubled as works of art.  My favorite book from the Cranach Press is an edition of Hamlet based on the text of Shakespeare’s Second Quarto.  NYPL’s Rare Book Division holds both the original German edition of 1928 and the English edition of 1930.

Hamlet’s elegance comes from all aspects of its design working together to make something aesthetically beautiful, substantively evocative, and functionally readable.  In order to achieve this, Kessler knew that the play’s illustrations needed to work with the text to both complement and supplement it.  He asked Edward Gordon Craig, an English wood engraver and, importantly, actor and theater set designer, to design and carve the woodblock illustrations.

"Why echo [the author's] words—how can there be anything in that?  But then if you don't do that, how illustrate the book?" —Edward Gordon Craig, Franklin, p. 84.

Craig was no stranger to Hamlet —he had recently worked as the set designer on a production of the play for the Moscow Art Theatre and had considered producing his own edition of the text.  Craig wanted to address the lack of stage directions in Shakespeare’s original text by providing illustrations of scene designs, costumes, lighting, and actor movements.  This mindset shaped his intentions for the Cranach Press’ Hamlet, and the tiny wooden figures he created to model the Moscow Art Theatre’s sets became the basis for the form these intentions would take.

Like many private presses of the time, Kessler sought to honor the early printing era with Hamlet’s gothic font, columned layout, and black-and-white color scheme accompanied by a single accent color—orange in this case, plus one striking use of blue.  The illustrations, however, are distinctly modern, and this disconnect put me off-kilter—giving me the feeling that something was indeed rotten in the state of Denmark.  Of course words, images, and design affect everyone differently, but I found my time with Hamlet to be an immersive experience that transported the atmosphere of Elsinore, full of doubt and foreboding, to my own desk at NYPL.

To learn more about the Cranach Press, Kessler, and Craig, try:

Image credits, unless otherwise noted: Rare Book Division. New York Public Library. Astor, Lenox, Tilden Foundations.

I've read of a recurring dream in which New Yorkers open a previously unseen door to find additional square footage in their apartments. In these dreams, this is decidedly a good thing. I've never had this dream, but it made me think about how place or setting is often treated like another character in novels and how real estate often plays into horror novels and movies. This often occurs with ghost stories because the ghost in the story needs someplace to haunt, but real estate can come into play in the horror genre in other interesting ways as well.

Amity by Micol Ostow Clearly inspired by the Amityville Horror and by Stephen King, Ostow infuses the narration of this spooky tale with nuances of psychological terror, rather than outright gore, and the house is a character too. As the author's website says, "Amity isn’t just a house. She is a living force, bent on manipulating her inhabitants to her twisted will. She will use Connor and Gwen to bring about a bloody end as she’s done before. As she’ll do again." It's surprising to think that this is the same YA author who brought us the S.A.S.S.: Student Across the Seven Seas series.

Help for the Haunted by John Searles In this novel, Sylvie and Rose Mason are the daughters of paranormal investigators. "Help for the Haunted" is part coming of age story, part contemporary gothic, and the writing style really pulls the reader along. There's a possessed doll that may be based on Annabelle, a doll owned by Lorraine Warren. Lorraine Warren is an exorcist who was the inspiration for the Amityville Horror and The Conjuring (and has a cameo in the film).

Horrorstör: A Novel by Grady Hendrix Quirk Books does it again with a tale of the supernatural that's not quite like anything we've seen before. Orsk is an IKEA knock-off store, and when strange goings-on start happening, the general manager enlists the help of Amy, a generally competent person who's grown disenchanted with retail, and a cadre of her fellow employees to help investigate after store hours. When the display cabinets that are hinged to the wall open to reveal previously unknown square footage, it is decidedly a bad thing. It turns out that this Orsk location, like the house in Steven Spielberg's Poltergeist is built on land with a checkered history.

In the first season of American Horror Story, the house is definitely "the star of the show" as Dylan McDermott, who plays Ben Harmon, said in an interview. This fan's website explores the listing for the real house where the show was filmed, side-by-side with screenshots from the show.

The Suburban Gothic in American Popular Culture and The Rural Gothic in American Popular Culture by Bernice M. Murphy, who also wrote It Came From the1950s! Popular Culture, Popular Anxieties, just go to show that there's no where one can live that isn't able to elicit some sort of domestic anxiety.

Download: Audio (73.9 MB MP3, 1 hour 9 min 11 sec)

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Download: Audio (83 MB MP3, 1 hour 9 min 12 sec)

Download: Video (11.2 MB MP4, 3 min 41 sec)

1st Inning: Manhattan, 1845

Felix Schneider loves baseball. An immigrant from Germany, he finds himself amidst a huge urban fire; flames engulf entire street blocks.

2nd Inning: Northern Virginia, 1864

Louis Schneider, a baseball lovel, ends up as a soldier in the Civil War.

3rd Inning: Brooklyn, 1894

Arnold Schneider meets up with King Kelly, a New York Giants player.

4th Inning: Coney Island, 1908

Walter's father changes their name to Snider to make it more Americanized. Walter does not agree with the change.

5th Inning: Brooklyn, 1926

Frances (aka "Frankie") notices that all the talk is about playing the numbers and winning at gambling,

6th Inning: Fort Wayne, IN, 1945

Kat (Katherine) is a player on the Grand Rapids Chick softball team. To her, this is the best thing since sliced bread.

7th Inning: Brooklyn, 1957

Jimmy Flint and his classmates are taught how to hide under their desks in case atomic bombs are dropped on them.

8th Inning: Brooklyn, 1981

Michael Flint learns to throw a curveball with a family baseball that has passed through the generations.

9th Inning: Brooklyn, 2002

Snider Flint uses the internet to research the value of certain baseballs.

The Brooklyn Nine: A Novel in Nine Innings by Alan Gratz, 2009

I thought it was interesting that the novel spans the years of 1845 to 2002, but some of the adventures of the baseball-loving kids are a bit unrealistic.

 Memoirs with recipes: two great book categories that taste great together!

Buttermilk and Bible Burgers by Fred William Sauceman A trip down the foodways of the Appalachian region.

A Homemade Life by Molly Wizenberg From the creator of the popular blog Orangette, the story of a life with a kitchen at its center. Delancy, also by Molly Wizenberg, recounts the trials of a opening a new restaurant and her new husband.

White Jacket Required by Jenna Weber A coming-of-age story set in a culinary academy.

Cooking for Gracie by Keith Dixon A passionate cook recounts the year he spent adapting to life as a new parent.

Burnt Toast Makes You Sing Good by Kathleen Flinn Colorful characters spanning three generations make up this entertaining family history with recipes.

Cake Walk by Kate Moses Coming of age tales punctuated with recipes from a lifetime of confectionary obsession.

66 Square Feet by Marie Viljoen Each chapter chronicles a month in the author’s life as urban dweller, gardener and cook.

Daughter of Heaven by Leslie Li The author’s grandmother comes to live with her from China and quickly takes control of the kitchen.

The Call of the Farm by Rochelle Billow A young foodie spends a year falling in love with life on the farm—complete with a mysterious young soulful farmer.

Relish by Lucy Kinsley Kinsley recalls pivotal moments in her life so far and what she was eating at the time.

Dinner: A Love Story by Jenny Rosenstrach I cannot decide which I like more, the author’s cheerful approach to family and cooking or the practical recipes.

This is the Department of Labor blog  post, authored by Heidi Shierholz, Chief Economist at the Labor Department.  In her blog, Heidi delivers the good news that in September, 2.8 million workers voluntarily quit their job, the highest number since early 2008.  This is a sign of a strong labor market and workers are confident that they will be able to find a new job that pays better and more closely matches their skills and interest.

Hiring is up, according to the September Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, or JOLTS. This monthly survey measures labor market strength by providing information on hires, fires, and quits.  During the height of the recession, we saw nearly seven job seekers for every one job opening.  As the economy’s improved, that number has dropped substantially to just under two job seekers for every one job opening.

Five million people also got a new job in September, the highest number since 2007. Hiring still has some distance to cover to get back to its pre-recession peak but is making steady progress toward a full recovery.

Stronger hiring helps explain the good news in another key labor market indicator, voluntary quits.  A large number of workers voluntarily quitting their job is a sign of a strong labor market, one where workers who want to move on from the job they are in are confident they will be able to find a new job that pays better and more closely matches their skills and interests. In this recovery, the number of voluntary quits has been steadily rising; in Sept., 2.8 million workers voluntarily quit their job, the highest number since early 2008.  While we have more work to do, this is a big step in the right direction.

Quits show a substantial jump in September

Heidi Shierholz is the current chief economist at the Department of Labor.

Some say writing can't be taught, but writers aren't natural born killers of darlings. One way to become a writer is to absorb the small canon of books written about writing. Sound a little meta? Well, it is. But whether you're looking to ease into creative writing, think about literature in greater depth, or simply discover what it is writers think about writing, these books offer the pleasure of writers thinking about and doing what they do best.

Burning Down the House by Charles Baxter Charles Baxter's Burning Down the House has become a holy text for those who write, think about writing, and want writing texts to offer more than a "You go, girl!" ethos. One of the finest American authors alive today, Baxter is especially eloquent in his essay on the author's responsibility to defamiliarize the familiar.The Curtain: An Essay in Seven Parts by Milan Kundera The author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being argues that if our ideas about the world form a curtain, the novelist's job is to rip the curtain down so that we can see what's behind our preconceptions. It's a tall order and one that he points out has been accomplished by the likes of Tolstoy, Kafka, and Gombrowicz.

The Elements of Style by William Strunk and E.B. White Yes, that E.B. White. As in the E.B. White of Charlotte's Web fame. With William Strunk, White wrote perhaps the most doted upon style guide in American history, including famously brisk advice like, “Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell. ”How Fiction Works by James Wood Although best known for his criticism, James Wood is a novelist in his own right. In How Fiction Works, he nails down craft with a mechanic's eye for the engineering of literature, providing illustrative examples that form something like a greatest hits of the canon.The Art of Syntax: Rhythm of Thought, Rhythm of Song by Ellen Bryant Voigt When it comes to writing guides, poets are often woefully overlooked. Ellen Bryan Voigt's contribution to The Art of Series provides a masterful analysis of the technical fireworks that occur when one word follows the next. The Novels and Tales of Henry James by Henry James If you're the sort of person who enjoys watching making-of documentaries, then you'll find Henry James's novels to be a treasure trove. Before there were special features on DVDs, there were James's prefaces. Each provides something like the story behind the story or what he often refers to as "the germ." For more great writing advice, check out the best writing tips authors have shared with NYPL.

B for Brikenau Concentration Camp, 3087 for prisoner number. This is how the Nazis define Yanek.

"You're 18 years old, and you have a trade," veteran prisoners desperately advise newcomers to declare in order for them to be chosen as workers. Yanek watches his family be sent to the gas chambers, friends be hanged for sickness, fellow passengers die on long cattle car rides and random inmates be shot for the kapos' sheer amusement.

This should be the stuff of horror films. This is real. This is the holocaust. 

Moshe admonished his nephew:

"Survive at all costs, Yanek. We cannot let these monsters tear us from the pages of the world."

Wieliczka, Birkenau, Auschwitz, Krakow, Trzebinia, Sashsenhausen, Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald, Gross-Rosen, and Dachau. 10 concentration camps. 4 years.

Prisoner B-3087 by Alan Gratz, 2013

November is National Career Development Month, and Maria Town, policy advisor in the Office of Disability Employment Policy, wrote “Laying the Path for Career Success,” about the importance of Individualized Learning Plans (ILPs) in helping students explore the possibilities for life after high school. 

Planning for life after high school can be both exciting and overwhelming. Should you get a job? Register for training? Go to college? For youth with disabilities, there may be additional things to consider, such as whether to disclose their disability or how to manage personal assistance services.

These decisions are a lot easier when youth have opportunities for career exploration, something that National Career Development Month helps reinforce each November. They certainly were for Carla, a recent high school graduate whom the National Collaborative on Workforce and Disability for Youth, one of the Office of Disability Employment Policy’s technical assistance centers, met while  researching best practices related toIndividualized Learning Plans, or ILPs.

ILPs are tools that help students choose and prepare for a career, and Carla’s school in South Carolina uses them for all students, including those with disabilities like her. As a result, she entered her senior year with a clear goal: to work for the Department of Natural Resources as a fish and game warden, an occupation that she discovered matched her skills and interests. Many states require students to have ILPs.

As part of her ILP, Carla took a career assessment that identified both law enforcement and agriculture as potential fields. She then took courses in both and learned that fish and game wardens protect natural resources, something she cares about deeply.

For her senior project, Carla also participated in work-based learning experiences, including job shadowing a captain from the Department of Natural Resources. She also decided to pursue further education after learning that a post-secondary training program or degree would help her succeed in this career.

Today, Carla is confident about her future. Much of this confidence stems from the support she had from her family who, along with school counselors and teachers, play an important role in the development of ILPs. “My mom has always been there helping me try to figure out what I need to do,” she said.

But families can’t do it alone. A recent review of transition-related literature by ODEP revealed that families need support to understand post-secondary education opportunities and challenges. Through her ILP, Carla’s teachers helped her and her parents discover her interests, set goals and identify what she needs to do to achieve them, whether with the help of others or on her own.

Yogi Berra once said: “You’ve got to be very careful if you don’t know where you are going, because you might not get there.” Thanks to her ILP, Carla knows where she is headed. And that’s a path all students, both with and without disabilities, deserve.

Maria Town is a policy adviser in the Office of Disability Employment Policy, where she focuses on youth issues.

This is a Department of Labor blog  post, authored by Deborah Hersman, CEO and president of the National Safety Council.  In this post, Deborah presents an online campaign, Journey to Safety Excellence, which can be accessed through the National Safety Council  website.  With promotional support from OSHA,  this campaign provides organizations and individual employees with safety resources which include Journey Tools, Journey Guides, Safety Talk and Journey News.

People are an employer’s most important asset. Sadly, in recent years, nearly 11 workers died on the job each day, and 5 million were injured annually. Even more difficult to bear are the estimates that 50,000 people die and another 400,000 are sickened each year because of illnesses contracted in the workplace. These numbers are unacceptable to all of us, because as a nation we no longer accept the premise that injuries and fatalities are just part of the cost of doing business.[[{"fid":"276537","view_mode":"default","fields":{"format":"default","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":"OSHA","field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":""},"type":"media","attributes":{"alt":"OSHA","style":"float:right","class":"media-element file-default"}}]]

Safe companies have better financial results, they attract better workers and keep them for longer periods of time. These organizations know that a positive safety culture can boost employee morale, increase productivity and lower costs.

The National Safety Council, believes every employer can benefit from investing in safety, and with promotional support from OSHA, we have launched the Journey to Safety Excellence campaign.  The largest advocacy effort of its kind, this online campaign serves as a roadmap to help organizations and even individual employees – from the new safety leader to the seasoned professional – keep workers free from harm. Simply put, the Journey to Safety Excellence is a way to work on continuously improving – the best organizations never accept “good” as “good enough.”

Accessing the Journey to Safety Excellence through the NSC website will provide you with:

Think of the Journey, and all of the free, practical tools collected from the Council’s 100 years of experience, as your adjunct safety team – your partner – because every worker should go home each day in the same condition as they arrived.

Deborah Hersman is the CEO and president of the National Safety Council.

That said, what I recognized and appreciated in this novel that I haven’t found in crime novels by other Scandinavian authors was a sense of humor. I found myself laughing aloud at Morck’s opinions of his boss and authority in general, as well as his reactions to Assad’s unquenchable energy and undrinkable mint tea, his estranged wife Vigga and her procession of young starving artist lovers, and the department secretary, the lovely and unattainable Lis. I was reminded of the old television sit-com Barney Miller, with Hal Linden and Abe Vigoda. It also reminds me of David Baldacci’sCamel Club series with its cast of quirky characters. Perhaps the juxtaposition of Morck’s humor with the grisly details of Merete’s fate and the malice behind it provides a welcome respite.

I hope you have an opportunity to begin reading The Keeper of Lost Causes soon. In Part 2, I’ll talk more about the author and the remaining Department Q novels; number six is supposed to be published next month,  December 2014. Plus I will  give you a list of other Scandinavian authors so you can compare and contrast in future reading.  

It has been claimed  that there is nothing that 'Sesame Street' can't teach you, if you let it. Therefore it is not a surprise that Seasame Workshop, just like SIBL (see our Money Matters @ Financial Literacy Central), is involved in financial education. In 2002, as reported in Euromoney (October 2003) Merrill Lynch joined forces with Sesame Street to develop a "financial fitness" curriculum aimed at children between the ages of two and six. In 2009 Merrill Lynch  announced a commitment of $5 million to Sesame Workshop to launch a global financial literacy program for children. Another timely project was announced in 2013 when a $2 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation was given to Sesame Workshop to promote hygiene and sanitation among children and families in high-need areas of Bangladesh, India, and Nigeria.

This is the Department of Labor blog post, authored by Tom Perez, Secretary  of the Labor Department.  In his post, he states that a minimum wage job barely covers one person's basic needs.  Over 88 % of minimum wage workers are adults, many supporting a family.  He affirms that  it’s time for Congress to follow the lead of the people they’re elected to represent. It’s time to keep up. It’s time to pass $10.10 for workers across the country.

It’s been almost two years since President Obama first called for an increase in the national minimum wage. He believes more strongly than ever that no one who works full-time should have to raise a family in poverty. He believes that the current rate of $7.25 per hour undermines our basic bargain, failing to reward hard work with a fair wage.

But Congress hasn’t exactly seen it that way. Members have blocked a raise to $10.10, in defiance of strong public support that continues to grow. Bottom line: they’re not keeping up with the views of people around the country. In Tuesday’s election, a higher minimum wage went five-for-five. By convincing margins, voters in Alaska (69 percent), Arkansas (65 percent), Nebraska (59 percent), South Dakota (53 percent) and Illinois (67 percent) said loud and clear that they want to give hardworking people a raise.

Alaska, Arkansas, Nebraska and South Dakota (all reliably red states, by the way) will implement changes in their state law, with a total of about 325,000 people set to get a raise. (The Illinois ballot measure was a non-binding resolution urging the state legislature to act).

These results come on top of coast-to-coast grassroots progress in recent months. Since the beginning of 2013, 13 other states, plus the District of Columbia and several localities, raised their minimum wages, either through referendum or legislative action — with 7 million Americans set to get a raise from these actions.  And the president — as part of his year of action — signed an Executive Order raising the minimum wage to $10.10 per hour for federal contract workers.

Also, the U.S. minimum wage isn’t keeping up with the rest of the world – we rank third-to-last among OECD nations (when you measure minimum wage as a percentage of median wage).

And the value of the minimum wage isn’t keeping up with the rising cost of living – it’s lost 20 percent of its value since the 1980s.  Let’s take a look at what this means for a family of three: In 1968, a full-time minimum wage worker could support a family of three. Today, a minimum wage job barely covers one person’s basic needs. Over 88% of minimum wage workers are adults, many supporting a family.

To Americans, this isn’t a question of partisanship, but of common sense. They see their neighbors struggling – choosing between buying a gallon of gas or a gallon of milk. They see their local businesses losing sales because of lagging consumer demand. They know that putting a few more hard-earned dollars in people’s pockets is the right thing and the smart thing to do.

They want everyone to enjoy the benefits of our growing, recovering economy. They want broadly-shared prosperity. They’ve demonstrated it with their votes. Now it’s time for Congress to follow the lead of the people they’re elected to represent. It’s time to keep up. It’s time to pass $10.10 for workers across the country.

Follow Secretary Tom Perez on Twitter, @LaborSec.

All of our print collections can be identified through searching our catalog or through consulting our old-school hard copy catalog that we keep at the reference desk in our reading room. Searching by subject is the best way to find material in our collections. Most subject headings will reflect the geographic area of interest along with a particular topic relating to that place. Below are a few suggested subject headings to use for an initial search of our collections in the NYPL catalog. Keep in mind that there are plenty of permutations of this search, depending on what location or subject you are interested in:

If you’d like to search for all maps of a particular location, you can search for a place name, i.e. a neighborhood, town, city, county or state, along with the word Maps:

Of course, a researcher runs into two problems here: the sheer number of maps of places like New York City, coupled with the fact that the nondescriptive, utilitarian titles of most maps, e.g. “Map of New York,” doesn’t provide many clues as to what’s actually on the map. Whenever the need arises to narrow down a list of resources, a few quick steps can be taken.  One step would be to try a narrower search, such as:

Another recommended step would be to use the advanced search feature in the catalog and select a date range of interest in order to limit the resources to sort through.

Since a sizeable portion of our collection, particularly those items from the mid-twentieth century are not included in our online catalog, we highly advise and greatly encourage researchers to get the most out of our collections by to reaching out to our librarians either by visiting the division or sending us an email: maps@nypl.org.  Tell us about your projects and research and we’ll help you navigate through the collections; it’s what we do best!

Of course, there are other divisions in the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building that provide strong documentation of the city’s past, their collections too numerous to mention in any meaningful detail here. The two divisions that should already be familiar to lovers of New York City history are the Manuscripts and Archives Division and, as noted above, The Irma and Paul Milstein Division of United States History, Local History & Genealogy. For example, the Milstein Division has a wonderful collection of uncataloged 20th century real estate brochures (similar to those in the Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library), which includes land auction pamphlets from Mr. Whiton’s collection that were not digitized along with those held by the Map Division.

In addition to providing assistance in the use of their historical collections, the Milstein Division staff regularly teach classes on researching aspects of New York City’s history and publish guides on using the library’s collections in your research. Here are a few of their more recent posts on researching real estate and the changing face of the city:

The librarians in the Milstein Division would also like to hear about your research questions. Feel free to drop them a line anytime at history@nypl.org.

One of Nichols’ great innovations in The Graduate was to cast Dustin Hoffman—short, nondescript, obviously Jewish—in a role written as a WASPy Robert Redford type (“a walking surfboard,” in Hoffman’s words). Nichols himself was something of an inversion of that contrast—tall, blonde, and legendarily articulate and urbane, he was nonetheless a refugee from Hitler, a German-born Jew who came to the United States at the age of 8. His hair fell out due to a whooping cough shot, his father died when he was 12, and the only English phrases Nichols (then known as Mikhail Igor Peschkowsky—Igor to his schoolmates) knew upon arriving in America were “I do not speak English” and “Please, do not kiss me.” Often approaching his early work as a sardonic outsider-observer, Nichols matured into a role as the ultimate Broadway insider, a reluctant interviewee but a legendary raconteur for lucky initimates. “Sometimes I feel I should be paying admission,” said Diane Sawyer, his wife.

“What is it really like?” is the one idea Nichols returned to again and again when he could be coaxed into interviews. In 2004, he expanded on how that basic notion informed all his work:

Rare recordings of many of Nichols’ theatrical productions can be viewed on-site at the Library for the Performing Arts’ Theatre on Film and Tape Archive, including The Gin Game, Annie, Waiting For Godot (with Robin Williams), The Seagull, Monty Python's Spamalot, Death of a Salesman, and Betrayal.

The New York Public Library Podcast brings you the best of the Library's author talks, live events, and other bookish curiosities. In our most recent episode, we were lucky to be visited by Richard Ford, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author, who is perhaps best known for his Frank Bascombe books.  At Books at Noon, the novelist and short story writer discussed Raymond Carver, voice in fiction, and becoming a reader.

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Although he has written eight novels, Richard Ford told us that he was a bit of a late bloomer when it came to reading. He explained:

"I went to high school in Jackson, Mississippi, where you could graduate in the middle of your class and never have read a book, and so really I didn't read a book until I was about eighteen... Teachers were always saying to me (you know how teachers do things), 'You need to apply yourself. You need to apply yourself.' We've all been told that. So when I got to be about eighteen, I thought, 'If I don't start applying myself, I'm going to be doomed.' And that fear of failure really was what it was that made me read. It wasn't anything high-minded."

Once Ford established himself as a writer, however, he became known for the integrity of his sentences and his voice. Of the latter, which is notoriously difficult to define, Ford said:

"I think voice is the music of the story's intelligence, that the voice of a novel, the voice of a story, is not the speaking voice of Frank Bascombe but it is something a good bit more complex. It is how a novel sounds when it is doing its most important business on you, when it is, as novels do, as poems do,. Novels lean on us. They are artifice. They are rhetorical. They are trying to effect us and change us. And that's what I hear, what I understand, when I use the word 'voice.'"

Shortly after publishing his first novel, A Piece of My Heart, Ford met the legendary minimalist writer Raymond Carver. The two became fast friends:

"I met Carver in 1977 in Dallas. Universities still had money for literary festivals, and they brought me and Ray and Ed Doctorow, who'd been my teacher, and Phil Levine, your old friend, a bunch of us down to do that thing. And Carver was there and he was not long off of the booze, and he was very shaky, and I don't mean literally shaky, but his grip on his life was very uncertain. And when he met me, it was kind of love at first sight between him and me because I wasn't a drunk and I owned a house. I was still married to my original wife, and I was solvent. And I think he looked at me, and he thought, 'These are the kinds of friends I need to have.'"

You can subscribe to the New York Public Library Podcast to hear more conversations with wonderful artists, writers, and intellectuals. Join the conversation today!