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For much of the twentieth century, public libraries were defined by the size of their printed collections. A successful library was one that could offer residents long shelves of novels, reference works, newspapers, and specialist magazines. In recent decades, however, the measure of success has begun to change. Many library systems now judge their value less by the number of books they store and more by the range of services they provide: internet access, language classes, homework support, job-search workshops, and community events.

This expansion has partly been driven by inequality in digital access. Although smartphones are widespread, many people still lack a reliable computer, a quiet workspace, or a stable broadband connection at home. For job applications, online government forms, remote interviews, and school assignments, a phone is often insufficient. Libraries have therefore become essential digital entry points, especially for older residents, recent migrants, students from crowded households, and people seeking work.

The changing role of libraries has also altered the skills expected of library staff. Traditional cataloguing knowledge remains useful, but staff are now frequently asked to troubleshoot printers, guide users through unfamiliar websites, support early literacy programmes, and manage public events. Some librarians describe their work as closer to social navigation than book management, because visitors often arrive with complex practical problems rather than simple requests for a title or author.

Not everyone welcomes this broader mission. Critics argue that libraries risk becoming underfunded substitutes for schools, employment agencies, and social services. When a library is asked to solve every local problem, they say, its original educational purpose can become blurred. Supporters reply that access to information has always been the library's core mission, and that helping people use digital systems is simply the modern version of that responsibility.

A further challenge is that library use is often measured in outdated ways. Counting book loans alone can make a busy library appear to be declining, even when study spaces are full and computer sessions are heavily booked. Some cities have started recording attendance at classes, use of meeting rooms, Wi-Fi sessions, and staff assistance with online forms. These broader indicators may offer a more accurate picture of how libraries serve communities today.

In the opening decades of the twentieth century, the electric tram was the unrivalled king of urban transport. Networks of steel rails threaded through the centres of cities from Melbourne to Manchester, and for millions of commuters the tram was the cheapest and most reliable way to reach work, shops, and theatres. At their peak, some large cities ran several hundred kilometres of track, and the clang of the tram bell was as much a part of the urban soundscape as the noise of the markets.

Within a few decades, however, the tram had all but vanished from many of these same streets. After the Second World War, rising car ownership and the flexibility of the motor bus made fixed rail lines seem old-fashioned and obstructive. Planners, eager to make room for private vehicles, tore up tracks and sold off depots, often presenting the removal of trams as a sign of progress. By the 1960s, only a handful of cities had resisted the trend, and the tram was widely regarded as a relic of a bygone age.

The wheel has since turned full circle. From the 1990s onward, the very problems that cars were meant to solve — congestion, air pollution, and sprawling, hard-to-serve suburbs — drove a wave of new tram construction. Cities that had once dismantled their networks began, at considerable expense, to lay fresh track. What had been condemned as outdated was now promoted as clean, quiet, and modern, and politicians who had grown up without trams competed to open new lines.

Curiously, the benefits of these new systems often extended well beyond the movement of passengers. Studies in several cities found that a new tram line could lift the value of nearby property, attract cafés and shops to previously neglected streets, and encourage developers to build on land that buses had never made attractive. A tram stop, it seemed, signalled a long-term municipal commitment that a bus route — which could be cancelled overnight — never could, and investment followed accordingly.

Not everyone is convinced that the revival is money well spent. Sceptics point out that a tram line can cost many times more than an equivalent bus route, that the rails cannot be diverted around an obstacle, and that years of disruptive roadworks are needed before the first passenger climbs aboard. For the same money, they argue, a city could buy a far larger fleet of buses and adjust its routes as the population shifts. The romance of the tram, in their view, too often overrides hard financial sense.

Most transport researchers now agree that neither blanket enthusiasm nor blanket scepticism is warranted. Whether a tram earns its high price depends less on the vehicle itself than on the planning around it: whether lines connect to trains and buses, whether tickets are integrated, and whether housing is built along the route. A tram dropped into a poorly coordinated network will disappoint, while the same tram, woven into a coherent transport plan, can transform a city. The lesson, in other words, lies not in the technology but in the thinking behind it.

Forgetting has an almost universally bad reputation. We apologise for it, we devise tricks to defeat it, and we treat each lapse — a mislaid name, a forgotten appointment — as a small failure of the machinery of the mind. The implicit ideal, rarely stated but widely assumed, is a memory that retains everything: a perfect, searchable archive of every experience. On this view, forgetting is simply the gap between that ideal and our flawed reality, an enemy to be defeated by discipline or technology.

A growing number of researchers argue that this picture is almost exactly wrong. Forgetting, on their account, is not a failure of memory but one of its most important functions — an active process by which the brain discards information that is no longer useful so that what remains can be reached quickly and combined freely. A mind that retained every detail with equal vividness would not be richer; it would be paralysed, unable to distinguish the trivial from the significant. Far from being a defect, the ability to let go is part of what makes thought possible.

The mechanism, as it is currently understood, favours meaning over detail. Over time the brain tends to preserve the gist of an experience while shedding its particulars, and this selective loss is precisely what allows us to generalise. A child who remembered every individual dog she had ever seen, in full sensory detail, might struggle to form the simple, flexible concept 'dog'. By letting the specifics fade, the mind extracts the pattern they share — and it is patterns, not raw records, that allow us to predict and adapt to a changing world.

A handful of documented individuals can recall almost every day of their adult lives with extraordinary precision, summoning the weather, the conversations, and the meals of a random date decades past. It is tempting to envy them. Yet those who have studied such cases report something unexpected: many describe their unstoppable recall as exhausting and intrusive, a continual flood of the past that crowds out the present and makes old griefs impossible to lay to rest. What looks from outside like a gift can feel from within like an inability to move on.

None of this means that all forgetting is benign. The same word covers both the healthy pruning described above and the corrosive losses of disease, in which memories that a person urgently wishes to keep are stripped away. The difficulty, which researchers freely admit, is that the boundary between the two is far from sharp. The processes that usefully clear away clutter and those that erode the memories at the core of a life may not be entirely separate, and telling ordinary age-related forgetting from its first pathological signs remains an inexact science.

If forgetting is indeed a feature rather than a fault, our growing enthusiasm for recording everything deserves a second look. Every conversation transcribed, every location logged, every photograph stored forever may quietly work against a system that evolved to be selective. The point is not to abandon such tools, which are plainly useful, but to recognise that a perfect external archive is not obviously a kindness to a mind built to let go. We may need to choose, deliberately, what to allow ourselves to forget.