May 30, 2025 • 33 mins
Tracy outlines all the way RFK Jr.'s claims regarding disease history make no sense. Holly talks about the section of her career that was spent working in a university library.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class, A production
of iHeartRadio Happy Friday. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm
Holly Frye. We talked about some autoimmune diseases. Sure did,
very real one real autoimmune diseases that we're talking about.
(00:24):
Because I'm so mad at RFK Junior. I listened to
this entire speech because I wanted, like I just had
seen clips of it where he was saying that he
had never heard of juvenile diabetes when he was a kid,
And I was like, Buddy, is it because the kids
(00:46):
that you would have known would have died because treatment
was not as as available or understood when you were
growing up. By that point, insulin did exist, children with
diabetes were living a lot longer by the fifties and sixties.
But like, it's still we have progressed since then. That
(01:08):
is a thing that could have happened. But so I
listened to this entire thing so that I could make
note of all of the other things. So here are
some more things that he said he had never heard
of besides the ones that we mentioned in the episode. Ezema,
what I mean, You're braver than me because I can't
handle watching all of it. I'll read a transcript, but
(01:32):
I can't. I did watch it on two time speed
so that it would be over with faster. And I
think this came out while I was in Japan and
I was here, you were in jama La la la,
la la la. I'm gonna live in Japan for the
moment and not yeah, not get too watted up in
things back home. Yeah, uh so, I after seeing the
(01:54):
clip in which he mentioned juvenile diabetes, which isn't call
that anymore. Out the whole thing. So in addition to
the things that we talked about, ezema and ADHD, I
don't remember exactly when those were first defined. But then
speech and language delay, Okay, that's a whole category, right, Autism,
(02:19):
Tourette syndrome, and then autoimmune diseases another whole category. And
I was just like, man, this but some of these
things are more recently described, But then you look back
in history and you see evidence of them earlier on,
(02:42):
and a lot of stuff like ADHD and autism, there
is growing awareness, which means more people are being diagnosed
when they may not have been diagnosed earlier on because
that awareness wasn't there, right, And if you look at
(03:04):
charts of things over time, sometimes there will be like
increases in diagnoses of things like autism and ADHD, but
declines in more broad diagnoses diagnoses of things like developmental delay. Right,
So a child that would have been diagnosed with something
(03:26):
like developmental delay, which is very general and broad, instead
being diagnosed with something more specific like autism spectrum disorder. Yeah,
a lot of stuff there. So. Another thing that was
happening in this speech that I just got so frustrated
(03:48):
about it was that he made repeated mentions of his
uncle and when his uncle was president and his uncle,
and he was making it sound like his uncle was
evident of robust health and that his uncle's presidency also
(04:09):
a time of better health for the American people. John F.
Kennedy had multiple chronic diseases, Yeah, and also not a
time of great health for people. No, No, So John F.
Kennedy's various chronic diseases were not publicly discussed much in
(04:34):
his lifetime. One would think that being a family member,
RFK would have any idea of what was going on.
But like John F. Kennedy's medical records were released in
two thousand and two, he probably had some kind of
genetic autoimmune disease. Also, Robert F. Kennedy Junior's aunt Rosemary
(04:58):
was given a lie bottomy because exactly what I was
going to mention, I it just made me so angry.
He was talking about his own family as though they
and the time they were living through was exemplary in
terms of health. They lobottomized her. It seems like she
(05:22):
did have some kind of intellectual disability, maybe also a
mood disorder, but it also seems like some of this
lobotomy was about people just not liking her behavior. Yeah,
and that lobotomy affected her for the rest of her
life in a bad way. Yeah. It was like a
(05:44):
shameful thing that was hidden. Yes, so some of my
notes in this part of the thing are in all
capital letters, and there are swear words that we don't
say on the podcast. It made me just furious though. Also,
(06:06):
there's a plan to take artificial a number of artificial
food dies out of the food system, or like at
least voluntarily do that by there's a like I said
in the intro to the episode, there's a whole can
of worms about like what these food dies may or
may not be connected to. But there's discussion of replacing
them with so called natural food dies. Something being natural
(06:30):
doesn't mean that it's better for you or safer, or
there are a lot of naturally poisonous things in the world. Yeah. Yeah. Also,
if the government in this administration were actually concerned about
pollutants that really do make people sicker and air pollution
(06:54):
that really does cause disease, if this was actually a
concern to the administration, they would not be making big
cuts to the EPA, and they would not be getting
rid of what they say are burdensome regulations on industries.
This makes me feral. Yeah, so angry. If you actually
(07:20):
wanted for people to be healthier, maybe a starting point
could be universal healthcare. Well that's hippie tuck trade. I know.
We also didn't put it in the I didn't I
wrote this. I didn't put it in the Crohn's disease discussion.
But like uh Dwight Eisenhower, thirty fourth President of the
(07:44):
United States and also a five star general. He had
surgery for a bowel issue in nineteen fifty six and
his symptoms are like it has some consistencies with Crohnes. Again,
can't really diagnose people from the past that way, But
he does seem to have had some kind of chronic
bowel issue going on, right, could be in this umbrella anyway.
(08:08):
We're just we're gonna lose our reputation as a podcast
that doesn't often say a lot of explicitly political things.
But RFK Junior doesn't know what he's talking about, and
he is making dangerous decisions that are gonna harm people. Yeah,
and I hate it. I hate it deeply. I hate it.
I know people who couldn't get their meds because they
(08:31):
were being wrongly used for COVID bad stuff. I also
know what it's like to have a family member who
has a disease so rare that when you go to
a neurologist the specialty related to their rare disease, you
have to explain to them the rare disease that your
parent has. Yes, I hate all of it. I hate it.
(08:51):
I hate it. But do you like it a little?
Not even a little, not even the tiniest bit. I'm
going to wind up on some kind of government list.
I think my vocal criticisms me this administration's decisions. Uh yeah, yeah, Uh,
(09:14):
It's totally possible that air pollution is contributing to rates
of various autoimmune diseases. Yeah. The solution to that is
not to roll back the air quality regulations, right. It's
also not to cut funding to research or to you know,
try to eviscerate medicare and medicaid and anyway. Anyway, not
(09:41):
happy with a lot of things as they're happening right now.
I feel like if I went and took my blood
pressure right at this moment, the machine would be like,
why what is are you taking it? But do like
a tech avery cartoon, smoke coming out before it blows
up with springy bits coming out of it. Yeah. So
(10:05):
you know, if you are as riled up about all
of this as I am, and you don't already have it,
and you live in the United States, there's an app
called five Calls will help you with contacting your reps.
I also send them physical things in the mail. Yeah.
(10:30):
Sometimes go out into the street and scream in a group. Yeah,
And also try to take some moments to ground myself
every day. I just got back from a week of
vacation in which I had minimal time of looking at
(10:52):
the chronic fire hose of news. I was not totally
cut off from the news, but it was like less
of a continual presence all day long. Yeah, and it
was a nice little chance for my brain to do
some other things. Yeah. Yeah, you know, I don't know.
(11:17):
I vacillate. I feel like so drastically between like trying
to run to things to give me joy and then
trying to acknowledge and stay on top of all of
the horrors. And I'm like, I don't know, is this
constant like switching bad? I don't know. I can't tell.
(11:38):
I don't know the right path. Yeah. One of the
things that I did on this vacation that I was
on was that I did some volunteer work, and that
really helped with my mind. So, if you are able
to spend some time with an organization that you you
(12:00):
believe in, it's doing work that's important to you. If
your job or your schedule allows you some time to
do that. I spent a couple of hours repackaging an
enormous volume of black beans into two pound bags of
black beans in a feedbank, and honestly, it was one
of the best things that I also find, like when
(12:24):
I have had in my early adult life, like jobs
that were kind of like monotonous, laborious jobs. I found
those oddly zen and kind of good for my brain. Yeah, Like,
unfortunately they don't pay a living wage often, right, But
like I remember for a while when I was in
(12:45):
college in the summers, I would work in resorts cleaning rooms. Okay,
which is a hard job, yeah, but there was something
very like zen about walking in and being like, Okay,
I need make order out of this chaos. It's low stakes,
Like I don't have any emotional attachment to any of this.
(13:06):
I can just like get the betting, get the linens
out to the laundry, I can put fresh things down,
I can just make this clean and get out. And
it was like very good for me. So I often
find when I have done volunteer work that's like that,
aside from knowing that it's good and you know, feeling
good that you're doing something right, like just doing a
(13:27):
repetitive task for a couple hours. Yeah, I feel like
I have seen Alison from the Aska Manager blog talk
about how doing a volunteer task that was very different
from her normal work, which is, you know, writing about
(13:47):
workplace advice. Doing a volunteer thing that was just dramatically
different from her day to day work life, like really
helped with burnout because it was a a productive task,
requiring a totally different area of her brain and a
totally different style of working than writing about work. I
(14:12):
think that's probably good and I should probably find a
way to do more of that in my regular life
than when I'm not on vacation. We talked about the
Library of Congress this week. Indeed, I sure love it. Yeah,
(14:35):
me too. There were several times where I got very
choked up about it, yep, because I worked in a
library for more than a decade. Yeah, and I worked
in a university of library that used Library of Congress cataloging.
My trajectory there was weird because I got hired initially,
I've had strange career shifts in my life. I had
(14:57):
been working in a salon. I was very tired of it,
and I got hired at this university library to repair
old books, which they hired me just because in the
interview it was a parent that I was very crafty
and I was willing to look up methods the things
that Library of Congress had developed in terms of presentation,
(15:18):
and so I did that and I loved that job,
and I was a little too fast about it, because
then they were like, well, we don't have enough books
needing repair to sustain a position anymore. We can either
we can eat kind of we can either let you go,
or we could teach you cataloging. And I was like, cataloging, please.
So I was kind of in a paraprofessional role that
(15:41):
probably would have benefited from a library science degree, but
I did not have one. But I was cataloging a lot,
and I it's one of those things that I think
people who know me were a little like, this is
a very anal retentive job that doesn't seem like you're
j I loved it. I loved cataloging. And then I
(16:04):
ended up getting moved over and kind of managing the
library's acquisitions after that, and it was just it was
a time in my life where I did not make
a lot of money, but I really really liked my
job most of the time. So I have deep fondness
for libraries, in particular Library of Congress cataloging. I don't
(16:26):
clearly remember exactly how this came to be. It I
think it was when I was in middle school. I
was in the strings class, and my middle school had
way more kids doing band than doing strings, and somehow
the only way to have enough kids for the strings
(16:48):
class was to put me, who was in the last
year of middle school, into a room with kids that
were only in there every other day. So every other
day I needed to be kept occupied some other way,
and that some other way was helping in the middle
school library, and most of what I did was tidy
up and wipe down the tables and shelf books that
(17:11):
had been returned or put on the little carts, and
sometimes reading the shelves to look for things that were missing. Yeah. Oh,
shelf reading is hard for me. Yeah, missshelved incorrectly shelved.
And then when I was in high school and we
needed to do some kind of service activity for National
(17:34):
Honor Society, one of the things I did was the
same work in the high school library. I have questions, Okay,
was your middle school library using LC or Dewey? Probably Dewey. Yeah,
they were both using Dewey. But then I in college,
the college library was doing Library of Congress. I've mentioned before,
I am married to a librarian. I think a lot
(17:56):
of people aren't really aware of like the scope of
different things that librarians do. Every once in a while,
there will be discourse that starts going viral on you know,
TikTok or Instagram reels or whatever where someone is looking
for a job and doesn't understand why a librarian needs
(18:17):
to have a master's degree because they think that what
a librarian does is scan the bar, Yeah, which might
be one of the tasks that a librarian does, but
there's also like cataloging and curating the library's collection. Uh,
(18:38):
you know, being a reference librarian and a resource for
the people who come in. My spouse's job as a
librarian does not look anything like most people might expect
of a librarian because what he's doing is like curating
sets of data for researchers yea. And if he's going
(19:00):
into the stacks for something, it's literally defined a book
that I asked for. I don't think he ever goes
into the stacks for like the core of his job. Yeah,
And there are a lot of reference librarian positions in
places you wouldn't expect that do things like that, like
he wass at a university, But like I have had
(19:22):
friends that have worked at like the libraries for like
big media companies where like their news channel comes to
them and is like, I need context for this thing
going on now, and they help pull. Yeah, academic journals sometimes,
but rarely books, but like, you know, things like newspapers,
et cetera that will help them build a story. Like
(19:43):
that's another thing that reference librarians do. Yeah, in those
specialty kind of libraries. It's been a while. We used
to get periodically emails from folks who were asking for
advice about how to research some like maybe a family
member and they know that their family member did something
(20:03):
related to their local history, or maybe they were involved
in a particular battle in World War One or World
War two or something like that. And usually my first
recommendation to the folks that wrote in would would be like,
so start by talking to the reference librarian, if your
local library has a reference librarian. Yeah, there are some
(20:24):
great stories from the reference desk that I have heard
over the years. Yeah, one of which I will retell
in the most nebulous ways so nobody comes in trouble.
One of my friends, who was working in a university
libraries from an academic library, had been working with this
woman who was older than like your average college age
(20:45):
student for a while on various projects, and she it
had come up in conversation at one point like, oh,
you know, are you did you decide to go back
to school for you know, blah blah blah. And that
is when we found out that she was in fact
doing all of the research and writing of her son's work.
(21:08):
Oh no, And it was like, oh, ma'am, this is
not what you should be doing at the library. Now
there are some there is one particular story that I found.
I don't charming. I don't know if it's endearing. It's
also like, dude, you gotta do the thing you gotta do.
(21:29):
We mentioned that the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence
had gone to Fort Knox during World War two. Yep.
But even before that there had been efforts to get
them moved, and that was to the National Archives, which
was founded in the mid nineteen thirties. But at that point,
Putnam was the Librarian of Congress and he couldn't bring
(21:53):
himself to part with those documents, and so everyone was like,
that's fine. And then he retired in nineteen thirty nine,
so I'm like, okay, now we can move those to
the National Archives. But then World War two happened, and
everything got really busy and dangerous, and so then even
like once things were going to come back, there were
(22:14):
protests from library staff. There was library staff that definitely
thought like, we have been the caretakers of these documents
and we want to retain them, And there was a
little bit of push and pull over whether they would
go to the National Archives, which they, yeah, eventually did.
(22:38):
The Library of Congress also does a lot of very
cool programming and has done a lot of very cool
programming over the years, one of which is a thing
that they did for a while I don't know if
they're still doing it called their mostly Lost Films programs,
where it would be like they would show pieces of
(23:00):
films that are not necessarily documented in terms of attribution,
who is in them, et cetera, and the audience could
actually help. Like a lot of Cinophiles would go and
they would be like, I have seen that actor in
this other movie. Can we cross reference him and figure
out his name so that we have credits for this movie.
Like it's like a really fun way to crowdsource people
(23:21):
who love movies into helping to create more robust and
complete records, which I love. And it also sounded like
just a super fun way to spend a night out. Yeah,
there are so many fascinating treasures. One of the things
that I love in every interview I've ever seen doctor
(23:41):
Carla Hayden do is she talks a lot about like
the incredible treasures that are actually in the Library of
Congress and in libraries in general, and like finding them
and making sure the public understands what those things are
and how they came to be in the library, and
how they tell the story of us as a people,
(24:01):
as a nation, as a global community, et cetera. Like,
there are just some incredibly cool things. The Bay Psalm Book,
which was published in sixteen forty is one of the
is that the first book that was actually completely published
in the North American colonies, I think, But they have
(24:26):
a one of the only surviving copies of it which
was bequeathed to them. It was loan to them, I
think in nineteen sixty five by missus Adrian Man Sindron,
and then when she passed it was bequeathed. It was
on loan until she died, and then the library took
ownership of it officially. But there are a lot of
little things like that that you think about that are
(24:49):
incredibly rare and interesting that are just lurking in libraries.
Some you can't necessarily see. Some are in special collections
that like you have to jump through some hoops to
get access to for reasons and preservation. But it's just
incredibly cool stuff in my opinion. Yeah, I love a
Library of Congress. Thing that we sort of alluded to
(25:11):
in the episode but didn't specifically talk about, was the
Chronicling America Historical Newspapers collection. Yeah, that you can get
to online, which is jointly done by the Library Library
of Congress and the National Endowment for the Humanities. There
have been obviously budget cut and other cut things affecting
(25:33):
both of these. The last I saw, there were concerns
about whether these cuts meant new items not being added
to this collection, and like, I don't know if there's
been a more recent update on that, but like the
that's something that I use for the podcast just continually.
(25:55):
It kind of goes back to what you were saying earlier.
I don't think people necessarily realized how much librarians do
and how many different sorts of services they offer. I mean,
even you know, in the case of the Librarian of Congress.
There are parts of that job that we might not
think of, Like that is who selects the poet Laureate,
(26:16):
which I'm sure to some people seems like a very estheteric,
lofty right, like removed from our immedia day to day doings,
But like that's an important role because that's a person
that represents a moment in time of our history, our
communal history, and our written history. And I just these
(26:39):
are important responsibilities in addition to all of the other
administrative stuff and being like the final word on decision
making and whatnot for the library. I really encourage anyone
who is interested in Carla Hayden to just do a
search for her online because you will find story after
story after story of colleagues of hers who talk about
(27:02):
her dedication, her understanding of the importance of libraries, her
just willingness to do the work whatever that requires. When
she was in Baltimore working in a library like it
needed a lot of cleanup, and she did not hesitate
to get in there and do cleaning shifts with the
rest of the staff and make sure that like everything
was getting done and that there were just enough people
(27:26):
on hand and enough you know, arms to do the labor,
and she is dedicated and that's why it really upset
me when she was fired. So lest I cry some more. Yeah,
I'm trying to think of another funny library story other
(27:47):
than you know, people doing all of the research work
for their kids to get a degree that they didn't earn.
I still marvel at that one. I'm like, have you
thought this through? Yeah? I feel like that kind of
feeds into the bigger, a bigger conversation that's going on
now about like the use of large language models and
(28:09):
things like chat GPT and kids using those to basically
write their papers. And it's like the process of writing
the paper is what's important here, Like, yes, it's the
that Like that's you're that's part of the learning and
the demonstration of what you have learned well, And it's
(28:32):
like I want to be like, look, I get it.
We essentially write a research paper every week some weeks too, yeah,
because that's our job and it can be arduous in
their days where you're like I don't want to and
I understand the impulse to give into that. Yeah, but
like you're I mean, I still in my mid fifties
(28:53):
having done this job for a while. I still feel
like I'm learning new ways to research all the time,
and about the new research resources, and all of that
is both illuminating and enriching, and like the hard parts
often result in, you know, a feeling of growth in
(29:13):
terms of even if it's just my grasp of what's
available to me. So I hate to think of people
cheating themselves out of that discovery, but that may also
sound very pie in the sky. I don't know anyway, Yeah,
I'm just looking at our production calendar and I just
realized it is unplanned that Monday's episode was inspired by
(29:38):
that RFK junior speech, and this one is inspired by
the firing of the Librarian of Congress. Like that we
didn't come together and say let's have a really political
week of the show. No, And the thing is right, Like,
I know, I'm sure there are people for whom I
was thinking about this while I was working on this one,
(29:59):
that they'll be like, there are way bigger, scarier things
going on than the Library of Congress related stuff. And
I understand that this one really hit me because of
my background in working in university libraries and my fondness. Listen,
I have such fond memories of that AACR two manual,
(30:19):
which is not what's used anymore. That was the Anglo
American Cataloging Rules. I loved my AACR two manual. Now
that's it's replaced, is it resource description? I don't remember
the name of the new manual. I'm sorry that came
out after I stopped cataloging, but like I just I
(30:42):
think about it because I in thinking about that and wondering, like,
are people going to think this is an unimportant aspect
of the avalanche of tumult that's going on. I remember,
at a pretty early age, I was either a senior
in high school or possibly a freshman in college, but
I remember talking to my childhood best friend. And this
(31:04):
will sound like the silliest nerdiest conversation, but we were
literally having this conversation about what a miracle a book
feels like because you literally have at your fingertips a
portal into someone else's thoughts, and how it is such
a unique resource and such an amazing thing, and having
(31:26):
those kinds of things available to us, and particularly the
efforts that have gone on since doctor Hayden's appointment to
really open the doors of the Library of Congress, So
everyone has access to an entire universe of being able
to tap into the things other people have thought and
believed and questioned and discussed. That it That's why it
(31:50):
sort of hits me very very hard. It's like, don't
close that door. We need that one a lot. Anyway,
I'm talking very high in the sky about my feelings
and books. But I hope everybody gets to read lots
of books they love. Listen. It doesn't have to be highbrow.
Reading is great. It's great therapy. It's great to make
(32:12):
your brain happy. It can be very soothing, it can
be enlightening. And if you're reading as audio books amazing great.
I'm a big audiobook fan because I don't sometimes my
eyes are just tired. We read a lot for our jobs.
Sometimes if it's my pleasure, true my pleasure, reading is
(32:33):
off in audiobooks because I could just sit and I
can do stuff in the sewing room or paint something,
or be driving or whatever, and I still get the information.
It makes me very happy. In any case, if this
is your weekend coming up and you have time off,
I hope that you get to read for pleasure, enjoy
an audiobook, whatever makes you happy. I hope that everybody's
(32:59):
cool to you, and that you can be kind to
everyone you encounter, and that nobody's a jerk. That may
sound like a very high bar, but I'm hoping. I'm
gonna hope every time. I'm gonna be optimistic about it.
If it's not your time off, I still hope that
everybody's cool to you, and that your responsibilities do not
preclude you from reading or listening to an audiobook or
(33:21):
doing whatever it is that makes you feel refreshed, renewed, revitalized,
and enriched. We will be right back here tomorrow with
a classic episode, and then on Monday we will have
something brand new. It may or may not be inspired
by current events. Stuff you missed in History Class is
(33:42):
a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit
the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class, A production
of iHeartRadio Happy Friday. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm
Holly Frye. We talked about some autoimmune diseases. Sure did,
very real one real autoimmune diseases that we're talking about.
(00:24):
Because I'm so mad at RFK Junior. I listened to
this entire speech because I wanted, like I just had
seen clips of it where he was saying that he
had never heard of juvenile diabetes when he was a kid,
And I was like, Buddy, is it because the kids
(00:46):
that you would have known would have died because treatment
was not as as available or understood when you were
growing up. By that point, insulin did exist, children with
diabetes were living a lot longer by the fifties and sixties.
But like, it's still we have progressed since then. That
(01:08):
is a thing that could have happened. But so I
listened to this entire thing so that I could make
note of all of the other things. So here are
some more things that he said he had never heard
of besides the ones that we mentioned in the episode. Ezema,
what I mean, You're braver than me because I can't
handle watching all of it. I'll read a transcript, but
(01:32):
I can't. I did watch it on two time speed
so that it would be over with faster. And I
think this came out while I was in Japan and
I was here, you were in jama La la la,
la la la. I'm gonna live in Japan for the
moment and not yeah, not get too watted up in
things back home. Yeah, uh so, I after seeing the
(01:54):
clip in which he mentioned juvenile diabetes, which isn't call
that anymore. Out the whole thing. So in addition to
the things that we talked about, ezema and ADHD, I
don't remember exactly when those were first defined. But then
speech and language delay, Okay, that's a whole category, right, Autism,
(02:19):
Tourette syndrome, and then autoimmune diseases another whole category. And
I was just like, man, this but some of these
things are more recently described, But then you look back
in history and you see evidence of them earlier on,
(02:42):
and a lot of stuff like ADHD and autism, there
is growing awareness, which means more people are being diagnosed
when they may not have been diagnosed earlier on because
that awareness wasn't there, right, And if you look at
(03:04):
charts of things over time, sometimes there will be like
increases in diagnoses of things like autism and ADHD, but
declines in more broad diagnoses diagnoses of things like developmental delay. Right,
So a child that would have been diagnosed with something
(03:26):
like developmental delay, which is very general and broad, instead
being diagnosed with something more specific like autism spectrum disorder. Yeah,
a lot of stuff there. So. Another thing that was
happening in this speech that I just got so frustrated
(03:48):
about it was that he made repeated mentions of his
uncle and when his uncle was president and his uncle,
and he was making it sound like his uncle was
evident of robust health and that his uncle's presidency also
(04:09):
a time of better health for the American people. John F.
Kennedy had multiple chronic diseases, Yeah, and also not a
time of great health for people. No, No, So John F.
Kennedy's various chronic diseases were not publicly discussed much in
(04:34):
his lifetime. One would think that being a family member,
RFK would have any idea of what was going on.
But like John F. Kennedy's medical records were released in
two thousand and two, he probably had some kind of
genetic autoimmune disease. Also, Robert F. Kennedy Junior's aunt Rosemary
(04:58):
was given a lie bottomy because exactly what I was
going to mention, I it just made me so angry.
He was talking about his own family as though they
and the time they were living through was exemplary in
terms of health. They lobottomized her. It seems like she
(05:22):
did have some kind of intellectual disability, maybe also a
mood disorder, but it also seems like some of this
lobotomy was about people just not liking her behavior. Yeah,
and that lobotomy affected her for the rest of her
life in a bad way. Yeah. It was like a
(05:44):
shameful thing that was hidden. Yes, so some of my
notes in this part of the thing are in all
capital letters, and there are swear words that we don't
say on the podcast. It made me just furious though. Also,
(06:06):
there's a plan to take artificial a number of artificial
food dies out of the food system, or like at
least voluntarily do that by there's a like I said
in the intro to the episode, there's a whole can
of worms about like what these food dies may or
may not be connected to. But there's discussion of replacing
them with so called natural food dies. Something being natural
(06:30):
doesn't mean that it's better for you or safer, or
there are a lot of naturally poisonous things in the world. Yeah. Yeah. Also,
if the government in this administration were actually concerned about
pollutants that really do make people sicker and air pollution
(06:54):
that really does cause disease, if this was actually a
concern to the administration, they would not be making big
cuts to the EPA, and they would not be getting
rid of what they say are burdensome regulations on industries.
This makes me feral. Yeah, so angry. If you actually
(07:20):
wanted for people to be healthier, maybe a starting point
could be universal healthcare. Well that's hippie tuck trade. I know.
We also didn't put it in the I didn't I
wrote this. I didn't put it in the Crohn's disease discussion.
But like uh Dwight Eisenhower, thirty fourth President of the
(07:44):
United States and also a five star general. He had
surgery for a bowel issue in nineteen fifty six and
his symptoms are like it has some consistencies with Crohnes. Again,
can't really diagnose people from the past that way, But
he does seem to have had some kind of chronic
bowel issue going on, right, could be in this umbrella anyway.
(08:08):
We're just we're gonna lose our reputation as a podcast
that doesn't often say a lot of explicitly political things.
But RFK Junior doesn't know what he's talking about, and
he is making dangerous decisions that are gonna harm people. Yeah,
and I hate it. I hate it deeply. I hate it.
I know people who couldn't get their meds because they
(08:31):
were being wrongly used for COVID bad stuff. I also
know what it's like to have a family member who
has a disease so rare that when you go to
a neurologist the specialty related to their rare disease, you
have to explain to them the rare disease that your
parent has. Yes, I hate all of it. I hate it.
(08:51):
I hate it. But do you like it a little?
Not even a little, not even the tiniest bit. I'm
going to wind up on some kind of government list.
I think my vocal criticisms me this administration's decisions. Uh yeah, yeah, Uh,
(09:14):
It's totally possible that air pollution is contributing to rates
of various autoimmune diseases. Yeah. The solution to that is
not to roll back the air quality regulations, right. It's
also not to cut funding to research or to you know,
try to eviscerate medicare and medicaid and anyway. Anyway, not
(09:41):
happy with a lot of things as they're happening right now.
I feel like if I went and took my blood
pressure right at this moment, the machine would be like,
why what is are you taking it? But do like
a tech avery cartoon, smoke coming out before it blows
up with springy bits coming out of it. Yeah. So
(10:05):
you know, if you are as riled up about all
of this as I am, and you don't already have it,
and you live in the United States, there's an app
called five Calls will help you with contacting your reps.
I also send them physical things in the mail. Yeah.
(10:30):
Sometimes go out into the street and scream in a group. Yeah,
And also try to take some moments to ground myself
every day. I just got back from a week of
vacation in which I had minimal time of looking at
(10:52):
the chronic fire hose of news. I was not totally
cut off from the news, but it was like less
of a continual presence all day long. Yeah, and it
was a nice little chance for my brain to do
some other things. Yeah. Yeah, you know, I don't know.
(11:17):
I vacillate. I feel like so drastically between like trying
to run to things to give me joy and then
trying to acknowledge and stay on top of all of
the horrors. And I'm like, I don't know, is this
constant like switching bad? I don't know. I can't tell.
(11:38):
I don't know the right path. Yeah. One of the
things that I did on this vacation that I was
on was that I did some volunteer work, and that
really helped with my mind. So, if you are able
to spend some time with an organization that you you
(12:00):
believe in, it's doing work that's important to you. If
your job or your schedule allows you some time to
do that. I spent a couple of hours repackaging an
enormous volume of black beans into two pound bags of
black beans in a feedbank, and honestly, it was one
of the best things that I also find, like when
(12:24):
I have had in my early adult life, like jobs
that were kind of like monotonous, laborious jobs. I found
those oddly zen and kind of good for my brain. Yeah, Like,
unfortunately they don't pay a living wage often, right, But
like I remember for a while when I was in
(12:45):
college in the summers, I would work in resorts cleaning rooms. Okay,
which is a hard job, yeah, but there was something
very like zen about walking in and being like, Okay,
I need make order out of this chaos. It's low stakes,
Like I don't have any emotional attachment to any of this.
(13:06):
I can just like get the betting, get the linens
out to the laundry, I can put fresh things down,
I can just make this clean and get out. And
it was like very good for me. So I often
find when I have done volunteer work that's like that,
aside from knowing that it's good and you know, feeling
good that you're doing something right, like just doing a
(13:27):
repetitive task for a couple hours. Yeah, I feel like
I have seen Alison from the Aska Manager blog talk
about how doing a volunteer task that was very different
from her normal work, which is, you know, writing about
(13:47):
workplace advice. Doing a volunteer thing that was just dramatically
different from her day to day work life, like really
helped with burnout because it was a a productive task,
requiring a totally different area of her brain and a
totally different style of working than writing about work. I
(14:12):
think that's probably good and I should probably find a
way to do more of that in my regular life
than when I'm not on vacation. We talked about the
Library of Congress this week. Indeed, I sure love it. Yeah,
(14:35):
me too. There were several times where I got very
choked up about it, yep, because I worked in a
library for more than a decade. Yeah, and I worked
in a university of library that used Library of Congress cataloging.
My trajectory there was weird because I got hired initially,
I've had strange career shifts in my life. I had
(14:57):
been working in a salon. I was very tired of it,
and I got hired at this university library to repair
old books, which they hired me just because in the
interview it was a parent that I was very crafty
and I was willing to look up methods the things
that Library of Congress had developed in terms of presentation,
(15:18):
and so I did that and I loved that job,
and I was a little too fast about it, because
then they were like, well, we don't have enough books
needing repair to sustain a position anymore. We can either
we can eat kind of we can either let you go,
or we could teach you cataloging. And I was like, cataloging, please.
So I was kind of in a paraprofessional role that
(15:41):
probably would have benefited from a library science degree, but
I did not have one. But I was cataloging a lot,
and I it's one of those things that I think
people who know me were a little like, this is
a very anal retentive job that doesn't seem like you're
j I loved it. I loved cataloging. And then I
(16:04):
ended up getting moved over and kind of managing the
library's acquisitions after that, and it was just it was
a time in my life where I did not make
a lot of money, but I really really liked my
job most of the time. So I have deep fondness
for libraries, in particular Library of Congress cataloging. I don't
(16:26):
clearly remember exactly how this came to be. It I
think it was when I was in middle school. I
was in the strings class, and my middle school had
way more kids doing band than doing strings, and somehow
the only way to have enough kids for the strings
(16:48):
class was to put me, who was in the last
year of middle school, into a room with kids that
were only in there every other day. So every other
day I needed to be kept occupied some other way,
and that some other way was helping in the middle
school library, and most of what I did was tidy
up and wipe down the tables and shelf books that
(17:11):
had been returned or put on the little carts, and
sometimes reading the shelves to look for things that were missing. Yeah. Oh,
shelf reading is hard for me. Yeah, missshelved incorrectly shelved.
And then when I was in high school and we
needed to do some kind of service activity for National
(17:34):
Honor Society, one of the things I did was the
same work in the high school library. I have questions, Okay,
was your middle school library using LC or Dewey? Probably Dewey. Yeah,
they were both using Dewey. But then I in college,
the college library was doing Library of Congress. I've mentioned before,
I am married to a librarian. I think a lot
(17:56):
of people aren't really aware of like the scope of
different things that librarians do. Every once in a while,
there will be discourse that starts going viral on you know,
TikTok or Instagram reels or whatever where someone is looking
for a job and doesn't understand why a librarian needs
(18:17):
to have a master's degree because they think that what
a librarian does is scan the bar, Yeah, which might
be one of the tasks that a librarian does, but
there's also like cataloging and curating the library's collection. Uh,
(18:38):
you know, being a reference librarian and a resource for
the people who come in. My spouse's job as a
librarian does not look anything like most people might expect
of a librarian because what he's doing is like curating
sets of data for researchers yea. And if he's going
(19:00):
into the stacks for something, it's literally defined a book
that I asked for. I don't think he ever goes
into the stacks for like the core of his job. Yeah,
And there are a lot of reference librarian positions in
places you wouldn't expect that do things like that, like
he wass at a university, But like I have had
(19:22):
friends that have worked at like the libraries for like
big media companies where like their news channel comes to
them and is like, I need context for this thing
going on now, and they help pull. Yeah, academic journals sometimes,
but rarely books, but like, you know, things like newspapers,
et cetera that will help them build a story. Like
(19:43):
that's another thing that reference librarians do. Yeah, in those
specialty kind of libraries. It's been a while. We used
to get periodically emails from folks who were asking for
advice about how to research some like maybe a family
member and they know that their family member did something
(20:03):
related to their local history, or maybe they were involved
in a particular battle in World War One or World
War two or something like that. And usually my first
recommendation to the folks that wrote in would would be like,
so start by talking to the reference librarian, if your
local library has a reference librarian. Yeah, there are some
(20:24):
great stories from the reference desk that I have heard
over the years. Yeah, one of which I will retell
in the most nebulous ways so nobody comes in trouble.
One of my friends, who was working in a university
libraries from an academic library, had been working with this
woman who was older than like your average college age
(20:45):
student for a while on various projects, and she it
had come up in conversation at one point like, oh,
you know, are you did you decide to go back
to school for you know, blah blah blah. And that
is when we found out that she was in fact
doing all of the research and writing of her son's work.
(21:08):
Oh no, And it was like, oh, ma'am, this is
not what you should be doing at the library. Now
there are some there is one particular story that I found.
I don't charming. I don't know if it's endearing. It's
also like, dude, you gotta do the thing you gotta do.
(21:29):
We mentioned that the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence
had gone to Fort Knox during World War two. Yep.
But even before that there had been efforts to get
them moved, and that was to the National Archives, which
was founded in the mid nineteen thirties. But at that point,
Putnam was the Librarian of Congress and he couldn't bring
(21:53):
himself to part with those documents, and so everyone was like,
that's fine. And then he retired in nineteen thirty nine,
so I'm like, okay, now we can move those to
the National Archives. But then World War two happened, and
everything got really busy and dangerous, and so then even
like once things were going to come back, there were
(22:14):
protests from library staff. There was library staff that definitely
thought like, we have been the caretakers of these documents
and we want to retain them, And there was a
little bit of push and pull over whether they would
go to the National Archives, which they, yeah, eventually did.
(22:38):
The Library of Congress also does a lot of very
cool programming and has done a lot of very cool
programming over the years, one of which is a thing
that they did for a while I don't know if
they're still doing it called their mostly Lost Films programs,
where it would be like they would show pieces of
(23:00):
films that are not necessarily documented in terms of attribution,
who is in them, et cetera, and the audience could
actually help. Like a lot of Cinophiles would go and
they would be like, I have seen that actor in
this other movie. Can we cross reference him and figure
out his name so that we have credits for this movie.
Like it's like a really fun way to crowdsource people
(23:21):
who love movies into helping to create more robust and
complete records, which I love. And it also sounded like
just a super fun way to spend a night out. Yeah,
there are so many fascinating treasures. One of the things
that I love in every interview I've ever seen doctor
(23:41):
Carla Hayden do is she talks a lot about like
the incredible treasures that are actually in the Library of
Congress and in libraries in general, and like finding them
and making sure the public understands what those things are
and how they came to be in the library, and
how they tell the story of us as a people,
(24:01):
as a nation, as a global community, et cetera. Like,
there are just some incredibly cool things. The Bay Psalm Book,
which was published in sixteen forty is one of the
is that the first book that was actually completely published
in the North American colonies, I think, But they have
(24:26):
a one of the only surviving copies of it which
was bequeathed to them. It was loan to them, I
think in nineteen sixty five by missus Adrian Man Sindron,
and then when she passed it was bequeathed. It was
on loan until she died, and then the library took
ownership of it officially. But there are a lot of
little things like that that you think about that are
(24:49):
incredibly rare and interesting that are just lurking in libraries.
Some you can't necessarily see. Some are in special collections
that like you have to jump through some hoops to
get access to for reasons and preservation. But it's just
incredibly cool stuff in my opinion. Yeah, I love a
Library of Congress. Thing that we sort of alluded to
(25:11):
in the episode but didn't specifically talk about, was the
Chronicling America Historical Newspapers collection. Yeah, that you can get
to online, which is jointly done by the Library Library
of Congress and the National Endowment for the Humanities. There
have been obviously budget cut and other cut things affecting
(25:33):
both of these. The last I saw, there were concerns
about whether these cuts meant new items not being added
to this collection, and like, I don't know if there's
been a more recent update on that, but like the
that's something that I use for the podcast just continually.
(25:55):
It kind of goes back to what you were saying earlier.
I don't think people necessarily realized how much librarians do
and how many different sorts of services they offer. I mean,
even you know, in the case of the Librarian of Congress.
There are parts of that job that we might not
think of, Like that is who selects the poet Laureate,
(26:16):
which I'm sure to some people seems like a very estheteric,
lofty right, like removed from our immedia day to day doings,
But like that's an important role because that's a person
that represents a moment in time of our history, our
communal history, and our written history. And I just these
(26:39):
are important responsibilities in addition to all of the other
administrative stuff and being like the final word on decision
making and whatnot for the library. I really encourage anyone
who is interested in Carla Hayden to just do a
search for her online because you will find story after
story after story of colleagues of hers who talk about
(27:02):
her dedication, her understanding of the importance of libraries, her
just willingness to do the work whatever that requires. When
she was in Baltimore working in a library like it
needed a lot of cleanup, and she did not hesitate
to get in there and do cleaning shifts with the
rest of the staff and make sure that like everything
was getting done and that there were just enough people
(27:26):
on hand and enough you know, arms to do the labor,
and she is dedicated and that's why it really upset
me when she was fired. So lest I cry some more. Yeah,
I'm trying to think of another funny library story other
(27:47):
than you know, people doing all of the research work
for their kids to get a degree that they didn't earn.
I still marvel at that one. I'm like, have you
thought this through? Yeah? I feel like that kind of
feeds into the bigger, a bigger conversation that's going on
now about like the use of large language models and
(28:09):
things like chat GPT and kids using those to basically
write their papers. And it's like the process of writing
the paper is what's important here, Like, yes, it's the
that Like that's you're that's part of the learning and
the demonstration of what you have learned well, And it's
(28:32):
like I want to be like, look, I get it.
We essentially write a research paper every week some weeks too, yeah,
because that's our job and it can be arduous in
their days where you're like I don't want to and
I understand the impulse to give into that. Yeah, but
like you're I mean, I still in my mid fifties
(28:53):
having done this job for a while. I still feel
like I'm learning new ways to research all the time,
and about the new research resources, and all of that
is both illuminating and enriching, and like the hard parts
often result in, you know, a feeling of growth in
(29:13):
terms of even if it's just my grasp of what's
available to me. So I hate to think of people
cheating themselves out of that discovery, but that may also
sound very pie in the sky. I don't know anyway, Yeah,
I'm just looking at our production calendar and I just
realized it is unplanned that Monday's episode was inspired by
(29:38):
that RFK junior speech, and this one is inspired by
the firing of the Librarian of Congress. Like that we
didn't come together and say let's have a really political
week of the show. No, And the thing is right, Like,
I know, I'm sure there are people for whom I
was thinking about this while I was working on this one,
(29:59):
that they'll be like, there are way bigger, scarier things
going on than the Library of Congress related stuff. And
I understand that this one really hit me because of
my background in working in university libraries and my fondness. Listen,
I have such fond memories of that AACR two manual,
(30:19):
which is not what's used anymore. That was the Anglo
American Cataloging Rules. I loved my AACR two manual. Now
that's it's replaced, is it resource description? I don't remember
the name of the new manual. I'm sorry that came
out after I stopped cataloging, but like I just I
(30:42):
think about it because I in thinking about that and wondering, like,
are people going to think this is an unimportant aspect
of the avalanche of tumult that's going on. I remember,
at a pretty early age, I was either a senior
in high school or possibly a freshman in college, but
I remember talking to my childhood best friend. And this
(31:04):
will sound like the silliest nerdiest conversation, but we were
literally having this conversation about what a miracle a book
feels like because you literally have at your fingertips a
portal into someone else's thoughts, and how it is such
a unique resource and such an amazing thing, and having
(31:26):
those kinds of things available to us, and particularly the
efforts that have gone on since doctor Hayden's appointment to
really open the doors of the Library of Congress, So
everyone has access to an entire universe of being able
to tap into the things other people have thought and
believed and questioned and discussed. That it That's why it
(31:50):
sort of hits me very very hard. It's like, don't
close that door. We need that one a lot. Anyway,
I'm talking very high in the sky about my feelings
and books. But I hope everybody gets to read lots
of books they love. Listen. It doesn't have to be highbrow.
Reading is great. It's great therapy. It's great to make
(32:12):
your brain happy. It can be very soothing, it can
be enlightening. And if you're reading as audio books amazing great.
I'm a big audiobook fan because I don't sometimes my
eyes are just tired. We read a lot for our jobs.
Sometimes if it's my pleasure, true my pleasure, reading is
(32:33):
off in audiobooks because I could just sit and I
can do stuff in the sewing room or paint something,
or be driving or whatever, and I still get the information.
It makes me very happy. In any case, if this
is your weekend coming up and you have time off,
I hope that you get to read for pleasure, enjoy
an audiobook, whatever makes you happy. I hope that everybody's
(32:59):
cool to you, and that you can be kind to
everyone you encounter, and that nobody's a jerk. That may
sound like a very high bar, but I'm hoping. I'm
gonna hope every time. I'm gonna be optimistic about it.
If it's not your time off, I still hope that
everybody's cool to you, and that your responsibilities do not
preclude you from reading or listening to an audiobook or
(33:21):
doing whatever it is that makes you feel refreshed, renewed, revitalized,
and enriched. We will be right back here tomorrow with
a classic episode, and then on Monday we will have
something brand new. It may or may not be inspired
by current events. Stuff you missed in History Class is
(33:42):
a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit
the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows.
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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