Spend any time scanning a list of banned books and you’ll find some head-scratchers: picture books challenged for including seemingly gay characters in the background, or describing a difficult moment in history, or revealing a naked goblin butt. Among the most banned picture books of the last school year, one title in particular seemed puzzling: Eric Carle’s Draw Me a Star.

Carle is best known for The Very Hungry Caterpillar, the first book I read to my son when he was a baby. I’m surely not alone in that; more than fifty years after its publication, it was the third-bestselling children’s book of 2023, trailing only the latest Dog Man and Diary of a Wimpy Kid.

What scandal could Carle, one of America’s most beloved picture book creators, have perpetrated in this banned board book?

​Read on LitHub

Art Spiegelman was shocked last year to hear that Maus, his Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel about the Holocaust, had been banned in a school district in Tennessee.

Even more surprising was the rationale — not the violent history of his parents’ journey to Auschwitz chronicled in the memoir, but a single illustration of a “nude woman.” The picture depicted his dead mother in the bathtub after she committed suicide.

​Spiegelman joked, darkly, that schools wanted “a kinder, gentler, fuzzier Holocaust” to teach to children.

Read at PEN America

Ta-Nehisi Coates says the current attack on books in the United States is one battle in a very long war.

“I think it’s really, really, really important that while we highlight what is going on right now, we do not paint America as though there was some golden age of literacy and freedom of speech. I don’t believe that has ever existed,” Coates told PEN America ahead of his Arthur Miller Freedom to Write Lecture.

“I would say the enemies of equality, the enemies of freedom, have always recognized that the first thing you attack when you want to strip people of their rights is the imagination, the ability to imagine those rights in the first place. And books are just an excellent, exceptional, maybe our best technology for conveying that.”

Read at PEN America

At 66, Elizabeth Strout is turning out books faster than ever, and no global pandemic could slow her down.

Her latest novel, Lucy by the Sea, is fast on the heels of her Booker Prize-shortlisted Oh William! and follows the characters first introduced in My Name Is Lucy Barton through the pandemic.

Strout says she honestly doesn’t know how she’s become so productive at an age when many people might consider retiring.

“I think that there’s just a sense of having prepared for a marathon for so many years, and now I’m running it, you know?” she says.

Read at PEN America

Before coronavirus, 5-year-old Willa Carmenini wasn’t worried about monsters under her bed. Now she’s asking about them every night at bedtime, and she doesn’t like going outside her New York apartment.

“She says it's the mask,” says her mother, Andrea Saraffian, though Saraffian suspects it’s more than that. It’s the rules about touching elevator buttons or avoiding friendly neighbors in the lobby. It’s the stress that her parents try so hard to hide.

Before coronavirus, 4-year-old twins Lilybelle and Adam Mrabet would run to hug their father when he walked in the door after working at the family restaurant in Harlem. Now, they must wait until he strips off his clothes and showers to avoid exposing them to the virus.

“It’s a bit sad to see them learn to be so patient at such a young age,” says their mother, Gloribelle Perez.

Six-year-old Walt Grahlman got sick with COVID-19 and had a fever of 102 degrees for a week. His parents got sick, too, and lost work in his physical therapy practice and her work as a creative director. Now that they have recovered, Walt calls having Mom as a teacher “silly.”
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He never used the word “hate” before, but he hates coronavirus.

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My son is in a bit of a mommy phase. You might think being locked at home together 24 hours a day would satisfy his need to be with me, but you would be wrong.
The coronavirus crisis has only intensified his clinginess. He wants mommy for school activities, lies beneath mommy when she does yoga, accompanies mommy to the bathroom.
And while I love the love, it’s a strain when he crashes my Zoom meetings in his underwear and I'm like a latter-day BBC Dad.
Child development experts say it’s to be expected that in a time of crisis or anxiety, a young child might show a preference for one parent. They’re “hunkering down in their comfort zone,” said Tovah Klein, director of the Barnard College Center for Toddler Development.

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Around the time school was canceled because of coronavirus, my 5-year-old started climbing in bed with me every night. His excuses got increasingly baroque: bad dreams, a spider, hundreds of spiders, a black hole.
He started playing “baby." He sucked on comfort blankets he had previously abandoned. Finally, he said he wanted to climb back into my tummy.
What I was witnessing was a slow-motion regression, all the way back to the womb.
Stress and anxiety can show up in all kinds of ways in children: irritability, defiance, clinginess. But one of the most common responses is regression. Sleep regression and toddler potty training regressions are common, but psychologists say all children (and adults) may regress in times of stress.
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The story of the rise of wellness has to a large degree focused on Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop, in part because of an undeniable, if alarming, trend: Wellness is the new wealth. The very word “wellness” can conjure images of wealthy women in yoga pants trying the latest sweetgrass-kale cleanse after a session at SoulCycle.

To hear that version of the story, it can sound as though affluent women have created their own health care system – one focused on detoxes and supplements and forest bathing and non-inflammatory diets and jade eggs.

In truth, Goop is on the fringe of a much larger trend, a $4.2 trillion wellness industry that includes fitness classes, supplements, essential oils and a wide range of alternative therapies – some potentially helpful and others, like homeopathy, thoroughly discredited.

Many women find themselves navigating these waters alone in an attempt to feel better. But it’s usually not the first place they turn.

​For many, wellness is filling a gap that medicine left behind.