Do Boys Need Explosions in Their Books?

Nicholas Kristof has an interesting column on the gender gap in verbal skills. Boys may still be ahead when it comes to math skills, but girls are well ahead of their male counterparts in verbal skills. Kristof writes:

Many theories have been proposed. Some people think that boys are hard-wired so that they learn more slowly, perhaps because they evolved to fight off wolves more than to raise their hands in classrooms. But that doesn't explain why boys have been sinking in recent decades.

I'm...