Issues

Librarians feature prominently in my two most “controversial” books for children. In Not My Idea: A Book About Whiteness, a white child visits the library with their mom and learns from a library book about the history of systemic racism in the United States and the legacy of white people who aligned with black leaders and liberation all along. Not My Idea encourages white children to tune into their instincts about racial justice and step

Convinced that the vast volume of murder podcasts I was listening to was making me both dumber and more paranoid, I recently made a major intellectual upgrade and tried out . . . murder audiobooks. The kind of terrible women’s psychological thrillers that usually feature secret pasts, betrayals, specious plots, spouses who are not who they seem to be, etc. So some miscellaneous Lisa Unger was the soundtrack to my dish washing and laundry folding

In 1969, while a grad student at Yale, the renowned poet and nonfiction author Honor Moore became unexpectedly pregnant. Today, she teaches poetry at the New School and is the author of several award-winning books, as well as the co-editor of Library of America’s 2021 volume collecting the greatest hits of the second wave. At the time of the pregnancy, though, she was not really aware of the burgeoning feminist movement and was by her

Bloomsbury, February 2024, 320 pp. Like all first signs, it was easy to dismiss. Even more so since it came from an English teenage model. I was hanging out with her godmother during Paris fashion week about five years ago. As we left an event and passed a scrum on the streets, the girl stopped in her tracks. She’d seen a member of BTS. I was barely aware of what that was. A Korean boy