Parenthetical.net

One last piece of dystopiana: Research Reveals That Apocalyptic Stories Changed Dramatically 20 Years Ago.
Chanda Phelan wrote this article based on her thesis, for which she looked at a ton of apocalyptic literature from 1826 to 2007 and charted the nature of the apocalypse. Click the image at the top of the article for a [...]

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Post-apocalyptic and/or dystopian fiction! It’s: a) pretty much all I read as an adolescent, b) what made the hippie I am today, c) ridiculously popular all of a sudden in YA lit, or d) all of the above?
D, obviously. The YA lit world is exploding with talk of dystopias. This article from [...]

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1. No Brownies at Bake Sales, but Doritos May Be O.K. raised my blood pressure way more than a whole plate of brownies (mmm… brownies):

Nine months after effectively banning most fund-raising food sales in city schools, a city panel will vote Wednesday on an amended regulation that will allow student groups to sell items [...]

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Snowfall in America brings with it, inevitably, a blizzard of “jokes” about the alleged absurdity of global warming. All of these jokes have two things in common: 1) they mention Al Gore, and 2) they’re not actually funny.

So begins the ever-brilliant Slacktivist’s recent post about the emphasis on blame in the climate change debate: if [...]

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Following up on last week’s post about books in libraries… the NYTimes Room for Debate blog posted some of the comments from students. Most didn’t say much new, but here are a couple of thoughts I liked:
One signed just “a thought”:

Also, books (or any other printed material) cannot be changed by any means without [...]

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For the last month I’ve been reading middle grade fantasy & science fiction and discussing it with my fellow panelists, but I couldn’t blog about any of it. Now the winners are official! Yay!
Our Middle Grade F & SF winner is a sequel, Dreamdark: Silksinger by Laini Taylor. I don’t really do [...]

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That’s right, Parenthetical.net has been synonymous with me for eleven years. That makes internet-me the same age as LiveJournal and the word “blog.”
I started my “web journal” as a perpetually single 20-year-old on the day before Valentine’s Day. I was really, really bitter about it.
Dear 20-Year-Old Me, this video is for you:

(It’s from [...]

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Note: Even more than usual, note the disclaimer. I am speaking my own mind, not that of my Library Director (quoted in this article) or my school.
Today’s New York Times includes an online Room for Debate feature: Do School Libraries Need Books? The debaters include James Tracy, Head of the now infamous in [...]

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This recent xkcd makes an excellent point. This is why I always loved the end of Labyrinth when all the critters tell Sarah that they’ll come “should you need us” — and then she cries that she needs them and they come rock out in her bedroom! Because they didn’t just mean the [...]

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I got myself up at 7:45 to watch the ALA Youth Media Awards webcast. (Why do they do this so early, again?) I lost video at the announcement of the Printz winner, but fortunately I could still hear all of it. Congratulations to the middle grade & YA winners! (Here’s the [...]

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