Gwen's back. I'm back. Hi, everyone. She's back and better than ever.

I'm welcome to The Librarian is in the New York Public Libraries podcast about books, culture, and what to read next. I'm Gwen. I'm Frank.

Okay. We're joined by Christopher Famigetti, who is a PhD candidate. Yes, at the new school?

Yep. And I should know, I interviewed him because he's teaching a class at Jefferson Market

Library on voting and democracy, a contested history, right?

Interesting. We're also vague now on what we're doing here.

Right, because I think we're a little bit off because I was out last week.

Thank you for the concern messages asking where I was.

It was very sweet of all of you.

And you guys made it sound very mysterious last week, but really where I was is my son was sick.

And my husband was out of town and I had to stay home with him.

So it wasn't mysterious.

And I do think that I kind of wanted to bring it up today because I think that we sometimes don't give working parents the kind of props they deserve for like trying to be in 12

places at one time and having eight million different things that we feel indebted to do and excited to do.

And we want to be in all those places, but we actually can't.

So that's where I was.

I also was sick.

My voice is a little weird.

Sorry.

It sounds more like one of those current novels with unreliable narrators. You're setting yourself up to either witness a murder or commit one. You're right. You're like, I couldn't come in because my son was sick and my husband was out of town. And I was all by myself. And then suddenly I looked out the window and I saw a girl on the train and the woman in the window.

You're right. It's not a great alibi. But it is a good set. You're an unreliable now.

extremely unreliable. Okay, so that's out of the way. One other thing we wanted to get out of the way is to just say that today we're going to be talking about a lot of political stuff. We're going to be talking about voting in particular.

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