http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/03/the-library-card/426888/

The Library Card

• Deborah Fallows
• March 2016 Issue

This article appears in the March print edition alongside the cover story, “Can America Put Itself Back Together?”—a summation of James and Deb Fallows’s 54,000-mile journey around America in a single-engine plane. More dispatches from their ongoing reporting trip can be found here.

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As we traveled around the U.S. reporting on the revival of towns and cities, we always made the local library an early stop. We’d hit the newspaper offices, the chamber of commerce, city hall, and Main Street for an introduction to the economics, politics, and stresses of a town. The visit to the public library revealed its heart and soul. http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/03/the-library-card/426888/