The Friday before last, I stopped into the Virgin Megastore at Union Square for its final day of business. The shelves were mostly bare, but there were still scads of people combing their contents for great deals on music and movies. I was too depressed to stick around, having already witnessed the closures of my two favorite music stores this year: Kim's Video, on St. Mark's, and Etherea, on Avenue A.

Of course, Kim's didn't close completely -- it reopened a few blocks away -- but in a fraction of the space it had on St. Mark's, and with a fraction of the selection. I suspect it won't be long before it shutters its new doors, too.

With the digitization of music, movies and now books, I fear the worst: a Fahrenheit 451-type scenario, in which future generations may not live without those things, per se, but will never develop a sense of context.

In Ray Bradbury's novel, all books have been destroyed, so a group of elders have each memorized a specific book, and they pass that book on to the next generation in the oral tradition. Thus each person is a repository of one text, but nothing more.

The author himself, now 87 years old, is speaking out to save the public library in Ventura, California, which is in a massive deficit and is likely to follow its for-profit counterparts if something isn't done to save it. But what is the likelihood of that happening? The problems faced by the Ventura library are not unique to that city. Will libraries become the sole province of private universities? And if so, how long will that sustain itself, if the entire book publishing industry falls apart?

There can't be anything to shelve if no one's printing the books.

I began thinking about this months ago, when it became obvious that music and movie collections were fast becoming obsolete. With innovations like the Amazon Kindle, will collections of books -- personal, academic, public -- be next?

[Image: The Bookworm, by Carl Spitzweg]

This month marks the fifth anniversary of Save Darfur's founding. The organization's goal has been to pressure the U.S. Government to work to end the conflict in Darfur. And while the present administration is much better on policy regarding Africa's longest running civil war, things could always be better. As rain reason approaches and malarial mosquitoes breed in stagnant water, more than a million refugees are in a dire predicament.

Want to do something? Hunger strikes aren't the only way to get involved. You can sign this petition to keep the pressure on President Obama to stay on top of the situation in Darfur.

You can also send an e-postcard to the President here.

At tonight's Kenneth Cole Summer Charity Shopping Night event, which takes place from 6:00pm to 9:00pm EST at Grand Central Station in New York City, Kenneth Cole will be helping to raise money and awareness for the S.A.F.E. (Shelter, Arts, Families and Education) program of Making Books Sing.

In the Q&A below, Debra Sue Lorenzen, the co-founder and executive director of Making Books Sing, discusses the organization's successes over the past 13 years and shares a preview of tonight's event. Founded in 1996, Making Books Sing has as its primary mission to empower children to experience theater as a vehicle for artistic expression and learning. To date, Making Books Sing's theater productions and educational programs have reached more than 70,000 children and adults and have been implemented in more than 55 New York City public schools.

AWEARNESS: For readers who may not be familiar with Making Books Sing, would you be able to describe your core programs and offerings?

Debra Sue Lorenzen: Making Books Sing is an organization dedicated to using the performing arts to engage children in literature. As an entry point to becoming more engaged with literature, we enable children to create full-scale musical productions or site-specific works that are adaptations of books that deal with important social and historical issues. Children can then participate in in-depth professional programming, with trained artists guiding them through the writing and interpretation process.

AWEARNESS: You've had tremendous success working with at-risk children. Can you talk about the motivation and inspiration behind S.A.F.E. (Shelter, Arts, Families and Education)?

Debra Sue Lorenzen: S.A.F.E. serves transient children in the school system, children who are essentially living in poverty. The homeless population is very distinctive in its needs - so we create a highly-tailored program that provides them a daily respite from their daily lives, due to the self-expressive, therapeutic nature of the arts. These are people living in extreme crisis. The shelter system provides them safety from domestic violence and access to social services, such as access to food stamps. Families need creative time together, as well as a new way into the educational process. Their daily lives are highly interrupted. The vast majority of these children could wind up in the foster care system, or even drop out of the educational system entirely.

One shelter director described the reason for this very succinctly, "When people are running for their lives, they don't think to grab their libraries." The children from these backgrounds have limited literary skills. Our role, then, is to re-introduce children to books, and the theater as an avenue to acquire knowledge and allow their imagination to run free. S.A.F.E. is an ongoing series of workshops in the Bronx, giving children access to week-in, week-out exposure to literature and the arts. It's hard for them to integrate this into their daily lives. It's even hard for them to come down for the first workshop -- they need to have the right incentives to come whenever they can.

I still remember looking forward to Officer Friendly days at school. Knowing that some tall police man would come to our classroom to give us some time off from whatever was on the agenda. We'd all sit there and learn about how the police were here to protect us. Later we would learn about the court system and how judges brought us justice.

Were we sold a fairy tale?

In the last two days two sentencings have made me revisit what I feel is justice. The first is the sentencing of Chris Brown for his beating of Rhianna.

Part of me thinks he should have gotten some jail time. Another part looked at the video of him in the court and saw a scared lil boy who saw his own mama beat too many times. Does he need jail time or help? Does his "light sentence" of probation and community service serve as the proper message to his young fans? Especially the young women who thought that Rhianna was at fault?

The other story is Chicago Police Officer Anthony Abbate's sentencing:

An off-duty Chicago police officer convicted of pummeling a female bartender half his size was sentenced Tuesday to two years probation and anger management classes for the videotaped attack that appeared worldwide on the Internet and cable news channels.

This isn't the first time Chicago has had a high-profile case against a police officer, but the video plus the sentencing has touched a nerve to many Chicagoans. CBS 2 Chicago talked to law experts who thought that the sentence fit within the law.

So what defines justice?

Is it justice that Chris Brown completed the circle of violence begun with his step-father?

Is it justice that Abbate will most likely be fired from his job?

What is it that we want? And why do we feel judges aren't doing their job?

[Image: KPA/Zuma/Rex Features via The Guardian]

Here's what happens when you put Eric Schlosser, author of Fast Food Nation, in a room with Ronald McDonald, Grimace (a closeted intellectual, apparently), and the Hamburglar (who's got a chip on his shoulder about Twitter):