“Participatory listenership (i.e., interrupting)” has killed me stone dead. Have some sociolinguistic analysis about why some people think New Yorkers are rude. (link)

ASTROLOGY BOOK CLUB. I really enjoy astrology book club. (link)

NPR has worked hard to bring together this list of the 100 best books for young readers. Yay! (link)

“Living in the now is a constant negotiation of how to put the things that I value—humane and safe working conditions, diversity in storytelling, anti-racism and justice—into active practice in an imperfect world.” On the revival of West Side Story. (link)

Lauren Markham appreciates the magic of the postal service even more in these quarantimes than she did before. (link) (This is true of me, Jenny, also — I am sending out one lovely note per day to friends!)

Slate dot com has done the important journalism of charting all the murmurs murmured by anyone in the Twilight saga. (link)

“Black people will defend your right to Blackness… That’s how these deceptions are born.” Evette Dionne on Jessica Krug. (link)

The country can change. It’s done it before. (link)

“Instead of solving social problems, the U.S. uses techno-fixes to bypass them, plastering the wounds instead of removing the source of injury—and that’s if people even accept the solution on offer.” On the American failure to address the pandemic. (link)

Eula Biss is so consistently good and smart. (link)

Here’s what’s going on with Storygraph, the burgeoning successor to Goodreads. (link)

This article on the Nancy Meyers kitchen is a few months old but it is very, very good. (link)

That’s all, folks! Have an absolutely stupendous weekend! I will be shut up in a dark room whispering “participatory listenership (i.e., interrupting)” over and over again until I have come to terms with it. Which will never happen. So that is just what I will be doing with my life from this point onward. Be blessed.

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I love Annie Sullivan.  Every time I think about Annie Sullivan it blows my mind.  She was twenty when she went to go teach Helen Keller, and she’d had no proper parenting, and she was twenty, and she must have been just about the most brilliant and inventive person of all time.  Annie Sullivan.  WOW.  There was a woman who knew how to parent.

Anyway, I was excited to read this book about her.  I like young adult books, even though I have now become a real adult and can no longer feel smug, as I did when I was seven and eight and nine, about reading way above my grade level. So I checked out Miss Spitfire to read.

And it was, you know, fine.  Nothing wrong with it at all.  It’s just – we all know this story already.  I guess I was hoping for a fresh look at the story, and this really wasn’t it.  It went down just about the way you’d expect: Annie comes, there are big fights, she feels anxious, she makes Helen behave, there’s a breakthrough, things improve, the end.  Of course Ms. Miller has given us a good story, but the story of Helen and Annie is a good story, and it would be some trick to make it boring.  But she hasn’t brought anything new to it.  For me.

However, there was a picture of Helen’s house when she was a kid, and I was really surprised about it.  Look.  In my mind I always pictured something more airy and grand and plantation-like, but this could very easily be a house in the Garden District or something.  It’s cute!  It’s the kind of house everyone is tearing down now to build their McMansions.  Learn something new every day.

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