Monday through Friday, Today in Books highlights news from around the world of books and reading. In this weekend edition, enjoy a look at the stories we covered in-house.

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The Most Read Books on Goodreads This Week

Innovative Study Finds That Public Libraries Positively Impact Community Health and Wellbeing

Poet, Writer, and Activist Nikki Giovanni Dies at 81

Annoyed with time changes in the fall and spring? So is President-elect Donald Trump. On Friday, Trump posted on Truth Social that the “Republican Party will use its best efforts to eliminate Daylight Saving Time” because it is “inconvenient, and very costly to our Nation.”

Ending daylight saving time would also not be that original—two thirds of countries do not have it. Americans do seem to be split on the issue. In a 2019 poll, 7 out of 10 Americans said they did not like the biannual switches, but 4 in 10 wanted a fixed standard time and 3 in 10 wanted daylight saving time.

Even putting aside the economic argument for ending daylight saving time, some research suggests that the practice of putting the clock one hour ahead in the spring can negatively impact peoples’ mental health. When our internal clock is thrown off and we get less sleep, our mood can be impacted, leading us to feel less focused and potentially more depressed. This lack of focus can also be deadly—a February 2020 study that looked at two decades’ worth of traffic accidents found that there was a 6 percent increase in the risk of fatal traffic accidents in the week following daylight saving time in the United States.

In October 2020, the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, a professional society that represents medical specialists who focus on sleep medicine, even issued a statement in support of ending daylight saving time in favor of a fixed year-round schedule:

Every summer, 50 of the nation’s best and brightest teenage girls gather in Mobile, Alabama, to embark on two of the most intense weeks of their lives. Everybody wants the same thing: to walk away with a $40,000 college scholarship and the title of Distinguished Young Woman of America.

Reporter Shima Oliaee competed for Nevada when she was a teenager, and was invited back as a judge more than 20 years later. Oliaee accepted, and recorded the experience for a six-part audio series called The Competition.

In the final days of the competition, there was news from Washington that had big implications for women across the nation: Roe v. Wade had fallen. 

The girls are faced with a tough decision: Do they speak up for their political beliefs or stay focused on winning the money? And what might this mean for their futures—and their friendships?

Today, I have another installment of “The Best Queer Books of 2024, According to…” Previously, I sifted through The New York Times, Amazon, Publishers Weekly, and Barnes & Noble lists for the queer titles included. This time, I’m highlighting the NPR picks.

The year-end NPR list is a little different from most. They put out a list of hundreds of “Books We Love” from the year, which you can sort by category, like “Book Club Ideas” or “Seriously Great Writing” or “Historical Fiction” or “It’s All Geek to Me” or “Rather Short” or a combination of different aspects. There isn’t an LGBTQ filter, but that’s where I come in!

There are 351 books on the 2024 NPR list, so there’s a very good chance I missed some, but I spotted 30 queer titles included in a range of genres. It’s nice that they included queer books I haven’t seen mentioned in other lists, like Cuckoo by Gretchen Felker-Martin and A Thousand Times Before by Asha Thanki. Then again, they also included the new Abigail Shrier on this list—the author who wrote the incredibly transphobic and harmful book Irreversible Damage. So, that’s a real dent in how seriously I can take their recommendations.

Regardless of the source, these are some fantastic queer books of 2024 you might not have heard about elsewhere, so without further ado, here are the 30 best queer books of 2024, according to NPR.

Exclusive content for All Access members continues below.

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

In the landscape of international finance for fossil fuels, some of the most important players are obscure government bodies known as “export credit agencies.” These agencies provide funding to companies seeking to build large and risky infrastructure projects, often in developing countries. In return, the developers of those projects purchase construction materials or other goods from the country of the agency. For instance, an oil pipeline company might take a loan from a German export credit agency in exchange for using German steel in the pipeline.

Export credit agencies have become some of the world’s largest public funding sources for energy infrastructure, providing far more money than multilateral institutions like the World Bank, while avoiding much public scrutiny. 

Now, as Joe Biden’s administration winds to a close, officials are working with international partners to push forward an agreement that would see export credit agencies pull back almost all funding for oil and gas projects, a measure the administration had balked on supporting before Donald Trump’s reelection.

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Shortly after he was reelected last month, Donald Trump announced an economic gambit that was aggressive even by his standards. He vowed that, on the first day of his second term, he would slap 25 percent tariffs on imports from Canada and Mexico, and boost those already placed on Chinese products by another 10 percent. 

The move set off a frenzy of pushback. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau even flew to the president-elect’s Florida resort to make his case. Economists say the potential levies threaten to upend global trade—including green technologies, many of which are manufactured in China. The moves would cause price spikes for everything from electric vehicles and heat pumps to solar panels. 

“Typically with tariffs, we’ve seen [companies] pass them along to the consumer,” said Corey Cantor, electric vehicles analyst at Bloomberg NEF. Ansgar Baums, a senior fellow at the nonpartisan foreign policy think tank Stimson Center, said retaliatory moves from the three targeted countries would only make things worse. “It will drive up consumer costs and hurt those who cannot afford it.”

There’s no gallery show this year with a more eyebrow-raising title than “The Bitch,” and it would be hard to think of a more singular setting for a duo presentation of art by Matthew Barney and Alex Katz than the decrepit and at least a little bit creepy former restaurant space that currently plays home to O’Flaherty’s in New York.

Followers of the enigmatic gallery founded by the painter Jamian Juliano-Villani have been treated to a wild assortment of exhibitions over the past three years, from shows of sculptures of psycho toddlers to performers rubbing themselves with Vaseline, and “The Bitch”—on view through December 19 and very likely never to be duplicated again—is another one for the annals.

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At the entryway is a centerpiece of a sort: a video for which Barney, continuing his long-running series of “Drawing Restraint” works, filmed the 97-year-old Katz climbing up and down a ladder to make a painting. Katz is more agile than might be expected, and the mix of his movements with the contemplativeness of his gaze is transfixing over the course of close to an hour. Also confounding—especially given the three-screen display split between TVs hanging from the ceiling in an arrangement that evokes a sort of ghostly sports bar.

“I wanted to approach it like an athletic event and focus on Alex’s movement and his physicality, particularly his moves up and down the ladder,” Barney said in an interview at O’Flaherty’s last week. “He has a rigorous and consistent exercise regime. As I understand the way his painting works into his day, it’s a very physical thing for him. It’s a physical practice, and he trains for his physical practice. It’s one of the reasons why it felt like a ‘Drawing Restraint’ could be made with Alex as the subject.”

Amplifying the sporting atmosphere are brief interludes during which the screens turn to squint-inducing flashes of orange and blue soundtracked by moody disruptions of electronic sound. “We were thinking about those as commercial breaks in the context of a sports broadcast, how you’re in one situation and then you’re suddenly thrown aggressively into another,” Barney said. “It’s loud and has a different energy to what you’ve been seeing.”

Lorraine O’Grady, an artist who bravely used her conceptual pieces and performance art to critique systems of power, incisively underlining the ways that class, race, and gender influence one another, died at her home in New York on Friday.

Her death was announced by a trust in her name; its announcement did not specify a cause.

O’Grady developed a loyal following for artworks that often proved unclassifiable. She produced photographs, collages, and performances, and wrote frequently, on topics ranging from her own work to Édouard Manet’s Olympia, from feminism to Surrealism, from rock music to her own biography. Across much of her work, she dedicated herself to prioritizing the perspectives of Black women.

Her art critiqued racism, misogyny, and privilege, but it did so using methods that were ambiguous and occasionally even tough to interpret. She spoke frequently of wanting to use what she called “both/and thinking” that stood against Western systems, which she wrote are “continuously birthing supremacies from the intimate to the political, of which white supremacy may be only the most all-inclusive.”

O’Grady’s defining artworks are the performances she did during the early ’80s in which she took up a character called Mlle Bourgeoise Noire, a vampy pageant queen who wore a sash bearing her name and brought with her a cat-o’-nine-tails. Without invitation and performing in character, O’Grady arrived at New York gallery openings, where she whipped herself and read aloud a brief statement. It culminated in an abrasive diagnosis of the cultural scene: “Black Art Must Take More Risks!” Few could accuse O’Grady of failing to fulfill her own directive.