Maria Tatar's Blog, page 35

Are Children Getting Older Younger?

Are kids tethered to electronic devices? Tarmar Lewin writes in the New York Times that the "average young American now spends practically every waking minute — except for the time in school — using a smart phone, computer, television or other electronic device. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/20/educat…

Here's my question: are adults tethered to electronic devices? And why is there a sudden moral panic about children texting and talking on their cellphones when adults spend so much of their ...

The Velveteen Rabbit Gets Cameo in Up in the Air

Why on earth is the runaway groom reading The Velveteen Rabbit in Up in the Air? "Very powerful," George Clooney comments sardonically, paying little attention to the picture book that is evidently proving supremely comforting to the fellow whose impending wedding has just provoked a mortality crisis. As the groom points out, once you get married, you also have kids and then they grow up—and you die.
Why The Velveteen Rabbit? Margery Williams used the subtitle: How Toys Become Real for the ...

Cleaning Up The Lovely Bones

Before he made the film M, Fritz Lang thought long and hard about the worst crime imaginable. He came up with the murder of a child, an answer so obvious that you wonder what took him so long. The Lovely Bones, directed by Peter Jackson and based on Alice Sebold's novel, tips its hat on two occasions to Lang's film, first with shots of the crime victim's never-to-be-used place setting at the family dinner table, next when a rolling ball stands in for the murder of another child. As in M...

Dangerous Wands

 http://www.collegehumor.com/video:192555…

Colleges may be comparing themselves to Hogwarts (see post below), but here's a high school that is the real thing.

Taking the Magic out of College and Putting It Back In

Lauren Edelson worried last week about how college tour guides deliver condescending pitches about how their schools resemble Hogwarts. Not a bad thing in my book, especially when you have seen schools that bear no resemblance at all to Hogwarts. Still, she makes a good point about how high school students are longing to grow up and out of Hogwarts: Leaving home and beginning life in a new place is a nerve-racking experience, and nothing seems more reassuring than imagining that college...

Children's Literature at Princeton

Pat Buchanan was already annoyed that Sonia Sotomayor had the temerity to read the classics of children's literature while a student at Princeton.  He will have smoke coming out of his ears now that William Gleason is offering ENG 335: Children's Literature.  The Daily Princetonian reports that the course was capped at 450, making it the largest offered in the spring term of 2010.  Anyone have a course syllabus?

Lois Lowry Collaborates with Bagram Ibatoulline

Lois Lowry's picture book Crow Call may be set in November, but it makes a perfect Christmas gift. Illustrated by the Russian artist Bagram Ibatoulline (The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane and Thumbelina, among others), it follows father and daughter on a hunting expedition that takes them from home, through the woods, and back again. In the middle of those woods (and in the precise middle of the book), Lowry describes, with characteristic understatement, an encounter that transforms...

Hansel and Gretel Make It into Vogue

http://www.style.com/vogue/feature/2009_December_Hansel_And_Gretel/

Click to see the slide show of Annie Leibovitz's photographs of a fashion fairy tale.

"The Red Shoes" on Screen

Here's Maureen Dowd on the stunning film version of Andersen's "The Red Shoes." Pressburger and Powell's brilliant film brings Andersen's story into the twentieth century, with a doomed heroine torn between love and ballet. Here's Dowd on the Andersen story:

"The Red Shoes" is based on a Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale of the same name about a little girl who becomes vain about her red shoes and gets confused about her priorities. As in the movie, the shoes force the girl to dance day...

Reading Faces and Minds

The image is unsettling, but more disturbing is the first paragraph, which tells us about "one ancillary benefit" of research carried out by Charles A. Nelson III at Harvard. Nelson evidently outfoxed a Boston car salesman by reading his facial expressions and discovering that he was bluffing. (When was the last time you figured out that a car salesman was "bluffing"? Did you have to watch his eye movements and facial features to figure it out?)
I suppose that research of this kind might...