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Popular Posts

Academia & Education:

• What Do Professors Do All Week?, a week-long series in which I chronicled just how a professor spends his or her workday… by chronicling exactly how I spent each day of February 19-25, 2011.  You’ll even find an entry for each day of the week.  The sequel to this experiment (which chronicled a summer work week, May 12-18, 2012) wasn’t as popular.
• Professors Work Harder Than You Do, David C. Levy, a brief rebuttal to an “expert” who lacks any knowledge of his subject.
• Tenure Isn’t The Point, my response to Kathryn D. Blanchard’s “I’ve Got Tenure. How Depressing.”
• Humanities Majors Learn More, the good news that’s usually omitted in reports on Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa’s Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses.  Students majoring in the Liberal Arts learn much more than students in Business, Education, Social Work, or other fields.
• Those Who Can, Teach. Those Who Cannot, Pass Laws About Teaching. It’s time to end the war on education.
• Chronicle of the Highly Uneducated; or, The Riley Fallacy, my response to the intellectually lazy blogger Naomi Schaefer Riley.
• Meritocracy in Academia: A Useful Myth?

Advice (much of it related to academia & publishing):

• 10 Tips for Writing a Biography
• How to Publish Your Article.  Probably the most popular post on this blog, though many people neglect to read the caveat that the advice applies to people in the Humanities….
• How to Publish Your Book
• How to Write a Book
• Prograstigrading.  One way of managing the time-hungry monster.
• Click on the “Advice” tag for more advice.

Academic Autobiography (usually containing some advice):

• How Did I Get Here? Part I: Up from Adjuncthood.  Despite its unfortunate name (I should have chosen something different, I realize), this tracks my journey from ajunct prof to tenure-track prof.
• How Did I Get Here? Part II: Into Professorland.  This continues that narrative.
• Professional Autodidact; or, How I Became a Children’s Literature Professor.
• Introvert Impersonates Extrovert.  As Morrissey sings in the Smiths’ “Ask,” ”Shyness is nice, but shyness can stop you / from doing all the things in life you’d like to.”
• My Book About Me.  There’s not much “academic” in this one, but it does offer a glimpse of my 7-year-old self.

How to Find Good Children’s Books

• How to Find Good Children’s Books
• Emily’s Library: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, and more parts to come! Books given to my niece, Emily.
• Click on the “Reviews” tag to find my (few) reviews on this blog.

Short Essays on Children’s Literature

• Larger subjects:
  • Can Censoring a Children’s Book Remove Its Prejudices?  This is one of the most popular posts on tis site.
  • Little Rebels, Little Conservatives, and Occupy Wall Street.  See also Radical Children’s Literature Now! (handout from Julia Mickenberg’s and my Francelia Butler Lecture at the 2011 Children’s Literature Association conference).
  • More Metafiction for Children.  Includes video of me & list of recommended titles.
  • Ignorance Is Not a Virtue
  • Why Meghan Can’t Read. A response to Meghan Cox Gurdon’s concerns about darkness in YA literature.
  • Martin Amis, Brain Damage, and Children’s Literature. A response to Mr. Amis’s ill-informed remarks about writing for children.
  • The Picture Book Is Dead. Long Live the Picture Book. A response to that New York Times piece that alleged (sans anything but purely anecdotal evidence) that the picture book sales were declining & thus the genre was in trouble.
• On individual books or authors:
  • The Book of Everything.  A few words on Guus Kuijer’s novel, which is one of the greatest books ever written.
  • Bow-Wow!  A brief analysis of Mark Newgarden and Megan Montague Cash’s wonderful Bow-Wow books.
  • “Too Bad His Duck Is So Crazy”: Tim Egan, Seriously Funny
  • Ferdinand at 75.  Reflections on the classic book by Munro Leaf & Robert Lawson.
  • Harry Potter, Seriously
  • Kadir Nelson Is the Best; or, When the Caldecott Committee Strikes Out. On Nelson’s brilliant We Are the Ship.
  • The Most Wild Thing of All: Maurice Sendak, 1928-2012. Remembering Mr. Sendak, and featuring a brief extract from my first telephone interview with him.
  • Tributes to Maurice Sendak: Visual Artists Respond.
  • Click on the “Reviews” tag to find reviews of children’s books.  See also “Recurring Subjects,” below.

Short Essays on Other Subjects

• Let’s Talk About Taste. On Nickelback, Celine Dion, and the subjectivity of musical taste.  And a recommendation that you read Carl Wilson’s Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste.
• That’s Life. This has nothing to do with the Frank Sinatra song. It’s actually about death, occasioned by a month (May 2012) in which many children’s authors and artists died.
• If I Were a Middle-Class White Kid, my response to Gene Marks’ well-intentioned but poorly reasoned “If I Were a Poor Black Kid.”
• Telemarketing Kills Charity. Why should one’s reward for donating to a charitable organization be telephone harassment from this same organization?

Occasional Mixes

• Summertime: The Box Set.  Four mixes for the summer.
• This One’s for the Workers: Labor Songs, 1929-2010.  For Labor Day.
• Back-to-School
  • Dark Sarcasm in the Classroom: A Back-to-School Mix
  • Wordplay: A Mix About Language
• Halloween Box Set: Part I (I Put a Spell on You), Part II (That Old Black Magic), Part III (Zombie Jamboree), Part IV (Living After Midnight), Part V (Wicked & Sweet), Part VI (Season of the Witch), Part VII (People Are Strange), Part VIII (A Shot in the Dark).
• Christmas:
  • Blue Christmas.  A collection of downbeat holiday songs.
  • Essential Holiday Tunes.  A wide variety of upbeat numbers, mostly for Christmas
  • You’re a Mean One, Mr. Grinch. 15 versions of one song.  Really.
• Rapture Party Mix.  Songs for the end of the world.
• Click on the “Mixes” tag to find other mixes.

Recurring Subjects

• Harry Potter: all posts tagged “Harry Potter”
• Syd Hoff: all posts tagged “Syd Hoff”
• Crockett Johnson: all posts tagged “Crockett Johnson”
• Ruth Krauss: all posts tagged “Ruth Krauss”
• Radical Children’s Literature: all posts tagged “Radical Children’s Literature”
• Maurice Sendak: all posts tagged “Maurice Sendak”
• Dr. Seuss: all posts tagged “Seuss”

Anything else I should add here?  Anything I should subtract?  Let me know.  Thanks!