Cow Neck in the Revolution

The area we now call Port Washington was occupied by the British for seven years during the Revolutionary War. Local families suffered immense hardship: they were forced to quarter enemy troops, had their children pressed into service, and even endured pirate attacks. Some Cow Neck Patriots bravely fought for American freedom while others assisted the revolutionary cause in secret – and some yet remained loyal to the Crown. These stories are explored in Cow Neck in the Revolution, presented in collaboration with the Cow Neck Peninsula Historical Society in celebration of 250 years of American independence. On display in the History Center Annex June through December 2026.

12:00am - 12:00am View Details

Nonfiction Book Club

Join fellow readers at the library for an engaging discussion of Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s Open AI by Karen Hao on Thursday September 10th at 1p.m.

When AI expert and investigative journalist Karen Hao first began covering OpenAI she thought they were the good guys. Founded as a nonprofit with safety enshrined as its core mission, the organization was meant, its leader Sam Altman told us, to act as a check against more purely mercantile, and potentially dangerous, forces. What could go wrong?

Over time, Hao began to wrestle ever more deeply with that question. Increasingly, she realized that the core truth of this massively disruptive sector is that its vision of success requires an almost unprecedented amount of resources:  high-end chips, the processing capacity to create massive large language models, the sheer volume of data that needs to be amassed at scale, the humans “cleaning up” that data for sweatshop wages, and a truly alarming spike in the usage of energy and water underlying it all. At the head of the pack with its ChatGPT breakthrough, how would OpenAI resist such temptations?

Spoiler alert: it didn’t. The behind-the-scenes story of what happened, told here in full for the first time, is revelatory of who the people controlling this technology really are. Naked power finds the ideology to cloak itself; no one thinks they’re the bad guy. But in the meantime, as Hao shows through intrepid reporting on the ground around the world, the enormous wheels of extraction grind on. An astonishing eyewitness view from both up in the command capsule of the new economy and down where the real suffering happens, Empire of AI pierces the veil of the industry defining our era.

Copies of the book are available on Libby and may also be picked up at the Information Desk.

1:00pm - 2:30pm View Details

1:30 Chair Yoga

Chair Yoga classes with certified instructor Beth Lipset. Classes start September 10 and run through December 17.  

Registration is on a first-come, first-served basis and is required. 

This class is for Port Washington residents only. 

*EXERCISE WAIVER 

Sponsored by the Health Advisory Council

Kindly register for either the 1:30 PM or the 2:30 PM class, not both, so we can ensure space for as many patrons as possible. Thank you for your consideration!

1:30pm - 2:15pm View Details

2:30 Chair Yoga

Chair Yoga classes with certified instructor Beth Lipset. Classes start September 10 and run through December 17.  

Registration is on a first-come, first-served basis and is required. 

This class is for Port Washington residents only. 

*EXERCISE WAIVER 

Sponsored by the Health Advisory Council

Kindly register for either the 1:30 PM or the 2:30 PM class, not both, so we can ensure space for as many patrons as possible. Thank you for your consideration!

2:30pm - 3:15pm View Details