Not happenstance

From Frank Rich’s spot-on op-ed in yesterday’s New York Times, “The Rage is Not About Health Care”: If Obama’s first legislative priority had been immigration or financial reform or climate change, we would have seen the same trajectory. The conjunction of a black president and a female speaker of the House — topped off by [...]

Child’s play

David Elkind, professor emeritus of child development at Tufts University, has an op-ed in today’s New York Times prompted by the decision of many American schools to hire “recess coaches” to oversee schoolchildren’s time on the playground.  As “someone whose scholarly work has consistently reinforced the idea that young people need unstructured imagination time,” he [...]

Fast and loose with sticks and stones and rocks and sticks

After Ann Coulter cancelled her speech in Ottawa, and before her travelling circus headed west thisaway, she told Maclean’s news magazine that the police had been warning my bodyguard all day that they were putting up [messages] on Facebook: “Bring rocks, bring sticks, you gotta hurt Ann Coulter tonight, don’t let her speak.” And the cops [...]

The magic of reading aloud

Michael Winerip writes about a remarkable nine-year-plus readaloud streak in “A Father-Daughter Bond, Page by Page” in this week’s New York Times: Their shared reading provided a shared language. When Mr. Brozina asks if Kristen’s absolutely sure, she’ll answer, “Certain there’s a jertain in the curtain” (Dr. Seuss). If Mr. Brozina orders a hamburger, Kristen [...]

For Canadiana fans

To be published in May, Picturing Canada: A History of Canadian Children’s Illustrated Books and Publishing by Gail Edwards and Judith Saltman (University of Toronto Press, May 29, 2010); $25.04 in paperback, $59.57 in hardcover. I’ve already placed my order. According to this press release for a grant the authors received in 2008, the book [...]

Sunday surprise

We’re off tomorrow to see Stuart McLean and the Vinyl Cafe, the CBC radio show which is on its spring tour through western Canada.  The surprise is that five tickets, together, were still available when I decided to call on Tuesday evening (having determined that the kids’ theater rehearsal had been canceled).  I had bought [...]

National Poetry Month 2010

April, as always, brings May showers and… National Poetry Month brought to you as always by the Academy of American Poets.  You can request your own poster, designed by Canadian artist (and recent TEDTalk 2010 speaker) Marian Bantjes. Here are some bits and pieces from some of my previous posts on National Poetry Month, with a few updates, [...]

Messing about in boats

I posted the following, part of the very famous first chapter of The Wind in the Willows, at one of my homeschool groups the other day, in response to a mother who’s been having so much trouble getting her young son to stay on course with their Well-Trained Mind studies that, as she wrote, she [...]

Lust for lit

Micah McCrary on “A Lust for Lit: On the Romance and Appeal of the Used Book” in the March 2010 online journal Bookslut, Why do people, especially in these times, like to buy used books over new ones? Is it price? People do tend to pinch pennies when in the middle of a recession. Fred [...]

“The King Canute playbook”

Environmentalist Bill McKibben, who is also scholar in residence at my old college and co-founder of 350.org writes in the February 25 issue of The Nation, Twenty-one years ago, in 1989, I wrote what many have called the first book for a general audience on global warming. One of the more interesting reviews came from [...]

The Book of Life

This has long been on my wish list at Amazon.com for the kids — The Book of Life: An Illustrated History of the Evolution of Life on Earth, edited by Stephen Jay Gould.  A few times a year, it goes back and forth between my wish list and shopping cart, and it was in my [...]