Tana Elias has more than three decades of experience at the Madison Public Library. After one year in the role, she’s “just settling in” to the position as Director of the MPL.

Elias sits down with Madison Book Beat host David Ahrens for a conversation about the history, funding, services and evolution of the Madison Public Library system, which has nine libraries in the city, operates the mobile Dreambus service, and is now building an “Imagination Center” on the north side.

Elias and Ahrens also take up the changing role of libraries in the digital age. Contrary to the notion of a library dealing in books only, today’s Madison Public Libraries function as a community hub and resource — giving everything from seeds to art to yes, digital and physical books to the community.

They also discuss the threat of losing federal funding, and the significant milestone for MPL coming up this year: 150 years of service.

On this edition of Madison BookBeat, host Sara Batkie chats with author Christine Wenc about her new book Funny Because It’s True: How The Onion Created Modern American News Satire.

In 1988, a band of University of Wisconsin–Madison undergrads and dropouts began publishing a free weekly newspaper with no editorial stance other than “You Are Dumb.” Just wanting to make a few bucks, they wound up becoming the bedrock of modern satire over the course of twenty years, changing the way we consume both our comedy and our news. The Onion served as a hilarious and brutally perceptive satire of the absurdity and horrors of late twentieth-century American life and grew into a global phenomenon. Now, for the first time, the full history of the publication is told by one of its original staffers, author and historian Christine Wenc. Through dozens of interviews, Wenc charts The Onion’s rise, its position as one of the first online humor sites, and the way it influenced television programs like The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. Funny Because It’s True reveals how a group of young misfits from flyover country unintentionally created a cultural phenomenon.

Christine Wenc was a member of The Onion’s original staff from 1988 to 1990 as a UW–Madison undergrad. She has played central roles in highly regarded public history projects for Harvard University Libraries, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and the National Library of Medicine, and has received writing grants from the Awesome Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. She is also trained in midwestern prairie ecosystem restoration and likes to spend time helping to revitalize one of the rarest, most diverse, most beautiful, and most ecologically beneficial landscapes on the planet. She grew up in rural Spring Green, Wisconsin.

In this edition of Madison Book Beat, host Andrew Thomas speaks with Steven Duong on his debut poetry collection At the End of the World There is A Pond (Norton 2025).

"Tell all the truth but tell it slant." Taking Emily Dickinson's dictum as a guiding principle, poet Steven Duong delivers a collection startlingly clear, formally innovative, and consistently funny. At the End of the World There is a Pond is divided into four sections–The Jumpers, The Swimmers, The Sinkers, The Floaters--and throughout each Duong explores themes of addiction, mental health, climate change, diaspora, and popular culture.

from "Anatomy":

“there’s no / point in writing nature poems anymore, / not unless you drown the verses in smoke / & oil & organophosphates–the Anthropocene / demands a new syntax”

Steven Duong is a writer from San Diego. His poems have appeared in the American Poetry Review, Guernica, and the Yale Review, among other publications, and his short fiction is featured in Catapult, The Drift, and The Best American Short Stories 2024.The recipient of fellowships and awards from the Academy of American Poets and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he is currently a creative writing fellow in poetry at Emory University. He lives in Atlanta, Georgia.