Harry Potter, Seriously

Children’s literature is literature. Intelligent adults already know this. However, as those of you who study or write or teach children’s literature are well aware, the world is full of alleged grown-ups who insist on spreading the myth that children’s literature is not literature, and (thus) cannot be studied as such. A week or so

The Chronicle of the Highly Uneducated; or, The Riley Fallacy

The main problem with Chronicle of Higher Education blogger Naomi Schaefer Riley is not racism.  The main problem is her intellectually lazy, sloppy “journalism” that cherry-picks examples in order to “support” uninformed opinions.  In her recent piece, “The Most Persuasive Case for Eliminating Black Studies? Just Read the Dissertations,” she reads the descriptions of dissertations by five recent

The People’s Library

“Nazis destroyed books to ‘purify’ German culture. Bigots do it in the name of God, or Allah. What’s Bloomberg’s excuse? ‘Hygiene’?” – Salman Rushdie, via his Twitter account, 16 Nov. 2011 “If corporations are people, tents are definitely speech.” – Ben Chappell, prof. of American Studies, University of Kansas (via Eric Michael Johnson [@ericmjohnson on Twitter],

Senseless Violence: The NYPD Destroys Library. UPDATE #3

Occupy Wall Street Library (before) Occupy Wall Street Library (after) “I cannot live without books; but fewer will suffice where amusement, and not use, is the only future object.” — Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, 10 June 1815 “Knowledge is power.” — Thomas Jefferson to to Joseph Cabell, 22 January 1820 “Let me conclude by thanking the

Why Meghan Can’t Read

In an op-ed piece that the Wall Street Journal published as an article, Meghan Cox Gurdon criticizes contemporary young adult fiction for its darkness. As she writes, “it is … possible–indeed, likely–that books focusing on pathologies help normalize them and, in the case of self-harm, may even spread their plausibility and likelihood to young people