For the New York Times Book Review, I wrote about two new middle-grade novels that confront the growing threats to kids' right to read (and think). Read More at The New York Times »
Journalism
A paler shade of white: HAVING AND BEING HAD by Eula Biss
Given my interest in consumer culture and what it does to people, I was glad the TLS asked me to write about Eula Biss's new book about her own vexed relationship to things:
Having and Being Had dwells on Biss’s unease about her participation in a system whose values she does not embrace, even as she savours its rewards. No pleasure can be simple. She evokes the never-satisfied hunger that characterizes life as a consumer under late-stage capitalism: "In the furniture stores we visit, I’m filled with a strange unspecific desire. I want everything and nothing."Read More at The Times Literary Supplement »
Do We Have Victorians to Thank for Consumerism?
Kinda yes, as I argue in this CLUTTER excerpt that ran in LitHub:
“Victorian” has persisted as a convenient if imprecise shorthand for a style that’s heavy in every sense. “Victorian decor” invokes curtains-drawn houses where light goes to die and where rooms are filled with furniture dark, heavy, and overstuffed. Victorian rooms, as we imagine them, were temples (or mausoleums) of things, with every surface— mantels, tabletops, shelves, sideboards—obscured by ceramic figurines and keepsakes, and every inch of wall covered with paintings and portraits.Read the full essay. Read More at LitHub »
The Complicated Role of the Modern Public Library
Public libraries do a lot more than lend books. I wrote about their expanding portfolio of services and challanges for Humanities magazine's Fall 2019 issue:
In a country riven by racial, ethnic, political, and socioeconomic divides, libraries still welcome everyone. “We are open spaces,” says Susan Benton, the president and CEO of the Urban Libraries Council, whose members include public-library systems serving cities large and small across the United States. “We certainly are without judgment about anybody’s characteristics.” That commitment to inclusivity, along with a persistent ability to adapt to changing times, has kept public libraries vital in an era of divisive politics and disruptive technological change. But it has also put pressure on them to be all things to all people, and to meet a vast range of social needs without correspondingly vast budgets. These days, a branch librarian might run story hour in the morning, assist with a research project at lunchtime, and in the afternoon administer life-saving medical aid to a patron who’s overdosed on the premises.Read More at Humanities magazine »
“Books have become the new ‘it’ fashion accessory. Is that such a bad thing?”
Supermodels Bella and Gigi Hadid made a splash recently when they were photographed toting their current reads. They're hardly the first beautiful people to use books as attention-getters. Think of Eve Arnold's iconic 1955 photo of Marilyn Monroe reading Ulysses. I say we should celebrate, not snark. Read More at The Washington Post »
