Let's write about the fun of reading children's books again!

I have read "Charlotte's Web" by .E.B. White at least three times. 

I read it aloud to my two sons when we were in transit living in my sister's apartment in Winnetka, Illinois, and they had not yet been enrolled in the elementary school. One time, I read an excerpt when it was my turn to give an inspirational moment at our weekly Rotary meeting. I started to cry when I read Charlotte's goodbye to Wilber.

Why adults should read more children’s books an essay published in the Boston Globe by Zach Przystup.

You’re never too old to believe in magic. Zach Przystup is the author of the Substack newsletter "Ask Your Father", where he writes about parenting, family life, sports, and technology.

C.S. Lewis wrote, “Someday you’ll be old enough to read fairy tales again.” It looks like I’ve reached that day.

I just turned 40, and over the past couple of years I’ve read some 20 children’s novels by the likes of Daniel Nayeri, Roald Dahl, Dave Eggers, Katherine Rundell, J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and Louis Sachar.

The binge wasn’t intentional. It started with introducing my old favorites to my first- and third-grade boys.

I got curious about what’s out there for kids today, and then I was enjoying myself so much that I got around to some of the classics I had never read, like “The Hobbit” and “The Chronicles of Narnia.” Some of these books were among the best I had read in recent memory, or ever, really. 

And it sure is nice to be able to finish something in a few days.

That’s rarely the case with adult fiction. With its penchant for weighty drama — murder, betrayals, affairs — it all can get, well, a little depressing.

The thing is, children’s literature also ponders the big questions — how to deal with unfairness, what makes a good life, and what happens after we die — but usually in a way that’s inspiring and less long-winded. As my favorite writing professor would charge: “Get to the pith!” (IOW, get inside the issues.)

Children’s novels excel at getting to the pith. Just consider: You’re wrongly thrown into a juvenile detention center and ordered to dig holes in the scorching sun alongside a ragtag group of youth vandals. What’s your next move? — “Holes,” Louis Sachar. A strange girl parachutes in from a magical portal and says she needs your help to save her world. Do you go? — “Impossible Creatures,” Katherine Rundell. You’re a valued member of an island’s animal community (you’re a wild dog), but one day that community changes forever. Do you stick it out or leave behind everything you’ve ever known? — “The Eyes and the Impossible,” Dave Eggers.

Children’s books also remind us of an essential truth: The magic, adventure, and boundless possibilities that we naturally grasped as kids are all still out there.

We badly need this reminder because as we get jobs, start paying mortgages, and get bulldozed by domestic responsibilities, the magic tends to die.

That’s why we need “James and the Giant Peach.” A good children’s yarn chips away at our jaded exteriors by helping us to look at the world the way we used to as kids, with a sense of wonder, awe, discovery, and playfulness that are all worthy of the life we’ve been given. They remind us of who we were and ask whether we still believe in the things we used to.

We’re a grown and grizzled Peter Pan; these books take us back to Neverland.

After reading “Holes,” I visited my parents at my childhood home. As I sat playing with my boys in the front yard, I suddenly thought to show them the dirt patch under the great oak tree where I used to dig for gems as a little boy. They eagerly fetched a spade, started digging, and found all kinds of treasure. It was a full-circle moment of play and discovery inspired by an excellent children’s novel — an excellent novel, period.

The morning commute, the endless dishes and laundry and schedule shuffling — they aren’t going anywhere. But, if we remember how to look, we can recognize that our daily lives are still shot through with plenty of magic. Can anyone who has visited a national park deny that fantastical realms exist❓ 

Can anyone who has a child deny that wondrous creatures exist❓ 

I think that’s what C.S. Lewis was getting at.

Here’s some parting advice from Roald Dahl: “And above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don’t believe in magic will never find it.” Children’s books invite us to read and believe again. Who knows what we’ll find❓

Let's Write about antisemitism history and the Jews of New Orleans

This essay describes Jewish experiences I am unfamiliar with.

Although I am Roman Catholic, I have followed the evils of antisemitism and Holocaust denialism for decades. The Pittsburg Platform of 1885* is new information to me.

Nicholas Lemann is a professor of journalism at Columbia University, a staff writer at The New Yorker, and the author of “Returning: A Search for Home Across Three Centuries.”

Echo essay published in the Boston Globe:

In a golden age for many American Jews, my family was uncertain about its identity. How our story resonates in this difficult moment.

I grew up in a highly particular corner of the American Jewish world in New Orleans: among the descendants of Jewish immigrants from Alsace and southwestern Germany who had come here in the early 19th century, usually alone, and had started out as backpack peddlers in the rural Deep South. 

By the time I was born, just past the midpoint of the 20th century, we were established and prosperous. We belonged to one of two grand, vaguely Moorish sand-colored Reform temples on St. Charles Avenue. We were brokers and owners of medium-scale department stores, intergenerationally headed out of business into the professions.

But there was something distinctly provisional about our place in the world. We were cautiously liberal, more so than most native-born white people in the South, but we knew the location of the political boundaries that we would be unwise to cross. We were barred from full membership in the local social elite. Mainstream American Jews — descended from Eastern European immigrants who had come here later than us, and who were more proudly ethnic and tribal — made us nervous. They wouldn’t have fit in as Southerners, and their visibility, we thought, made it harder for us to fit in.

When I left the South, I encountered a version of American Jewishness that was far less cautious. Many of my new friends in New York and Boston felt they had achieved full acceptance. 

In New Orleans, we followed the precepts of the Pittsburgh Platform of 1885, the founding document of American Reform Judaism, which was meant to scrub the separateness and strangeness from Judaism: no bar mitzvahs, no dietary laws, no Zionism. But now, at least on the East Coast, Jews could be proudly Jewish without sacrificing either their status as real Americans or their identity as Jews.

In the long sweep of Jewish history, this was quite an unfamiliar place for Jews to be. The 19th-century Germany that we left was full of debates about “the Jewish question”: How much of the completely separate and self-contained world we inhabited would we have to renounce in order to be fully emancipated from the many restrictions that others had always imposed on us❓✡️

It’s worth remembering, for example, that as the 19th century began most of us, including my own family, didn’t have last names.

Non-Jews battled over these questions — “the Jewish question” wound up being resolved by the Nazis — and so did Jews. 

In pre-Nazi Germany and then in the United States, we split into subtribes defined by how observant to be and how strongly to embrace or resist assimilation. Had it now become possible that these quandaries no longer presented themselves❓ That Jews ✡️could live anywhere, work anywhere, and not have to think about the need to dial down the way they presented themselves, lest it be too culturally Jewish, and therefore limiting❓

I was raised to believe the answers to those questions would never be yes, and I now see many of my friends who had more mainstream Jewish upbringings wrestling with them, painfully, in ways they never expected. What set this off was Hamas’s attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and Israel’s brutal military retaliation in Gaza. The psychological package of confident and untroubled American Jewish identity included the idea that Israel was broadly admired, for being a liberal, democratic, remarkably successful new nation built with miraculous speed by refugees from oppression. Believing this always required a degree of willed unawareness of the attitude toward Israel in the overlapping Arab, Muslim, and post-colonial worlds. Now, unawareness is impossible. The Gaza war, and now the Iran war, have brought into view a fierce hatred of Israel, first on the left and then on the right. Around the world, the Jewish state is despised — not, it has become clear, just for its behavior and its policies but for the basic terms of its existence.

This is a painful time for American Jews. In many places, it’s officially OK to be Jewish, but it is definitely not OK to be “Zionist.” What had seemed like a comfortable fit between Jewishness and Zionism isn’t comfortable any longer. Many congregations, many individual families, are in a state of deep internal, often intergenerational, conflict over Israel, between defenders, reformers, and renouncers. And because outside the Jewish world it has become difficult to avoid being asked whether you’re a Zionist, in a way that makes clear what the acceptable answer is, it’s no longer even theoretically unproblematic to be Jewish.

The distinctly German-Jewish world I grew up in is gone now — assimilated out of existence. One of our core precepts, essential to our anti-Zionist stance, was that we were Americans who happened to have a lightly held ethno-religious identity; we were most definitely not members of a Jewish people who collectively longed for and deserved a homeland. I see a resurgence of this attitude all around me, as identification with Israel has gone from being something easy to something highly charged for American Jews.

In my own life, I have embraced peoplehood**. Nearly half of us Jews live in Israel — a proportion that is likely to increase. Saying that Israel has nothing to do with me isn’t an option. Israel’s challenges, internal and external, are my challenges, too.

* Pittsburg Platform of 1885:  a pivotal 1885 document in the history of the American Jewish Reform Movement that called for Jews to adopt a modern approach to the practice of their faith. While it was never formally adopted by the Union of American Hebrew Congregations (UAHC) or the Central Conference of American Rabbis founded four years after its release, and several rabbis who remained associated with Reform in its wake attempted to distance themselves from it, the platform exerted great influence over the movement in the next fifty years, and still influences some Reform Jews who hold classicist views to this day.

** Peoplehood: Used to describe the feeling of belonging to a specific group, such as "Jewish peoplehood" which connects diverse individuals through shared history and destiny.

Let's Write about how evil Donald Trump is erasing history with executive orders

Franco-American History is being erased in Lowell, Massachusetts

Statue in Lowell MA, honors women who staffed the early mills.
On the Road author Jack Kerouac's mother was a Lowell mill worker. 

Videos about exploited 19th-century mill workers- most of them were French-Canadian immigrants, have been removed from Lowell National Historical Park following President Trump’s executive order. By Renée Loth Contributor, Updated March 6, 2026

The following things happened in Lowell in the 19th century: Girls as young as 10 worked 12-hour days, six days a week, in hot, unhealthy textile mills with little ventilation. The harsh conditions led the mill workers to organize the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association, which pushed for a 10-hour work day. Its newspaper, The Voice of Industry, took strong stands against war and slavery, and many workers stood in solidarity with the enslaved Africans who harvested the cotton spun in those very mills.

Apparently Donald Trump doesn’t want you to know about all of this, because in accordance with his executive order “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” two videos about the mill workers shown at the Lowell National Historical Park have been removed.

“Lowell: The Continuing Revolution” is one of the two missing films (still available online if not on the park website). It’s a standard overview of the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, mostly supporting the narrative of benevolent mill owners and young women happy to be liberated from farm drudgery to earn their own money. But the film does describe the air in the mills as “swarming with lint, leaving the workers susceptible to lung disease,” and says that owners looking to optimize profits regularly cut wages, leading to strikes. 

Since the US Interior Department’s directives enforcing Trump’s order compel the National Park Service to “flag for removal” any materials that “inappropriately disparage Americans past or living,” the educational videos had to go.

“Every American should be alarmed that this is happening,” said Kristin Sykes, Northeast regional director of the National Parks Conservation Association, an independent guardian of the parks. “We’re just starting to see this whitewashing, and we could see much more.”

The association is among the plaintiffs in a recent lawsuit filed by the group Democracy Forward in federal district court in Boston, challenging Trump’s authority to alter American history by executive fiat. Advocates worry that cultural institutions will begin to self-censor in order to stay out of the administration’s crosshairs. 

In a recent visit to the park, Sykes said a guide told her the films were being “updated.”  The expunged videos in Lowell are just part of a sweeping attack on the country’s cultural heritage, targeting stories about slavery, civil rights, climate change, and anything else disliked by this president. The range of threatened material is breathtaking, including 80 items at the Selma to Montgomery National Historic Trail in Alabama. A rainbow flag was removed from the Stonewall National Monument in New York City, which commemorates the struggle for LGBTQ rights. In Maine, signs about climate change and Native American rights were removed from Acadia National Park. Not even gift shop items are exempt.

A separate order required that QR codes be installed at national historic sites, encouraging visitors to report any “negative” material they might perceive. The idea was to unleash an army of cultural vigilantes seeking out divisive topics to erase from the national memory. But, oops, ❗ most of the initial comments received through the QR code criticized park funding cuts and the administration’s efforts to rewrite history.

The courts have tried to put a stop to some of the more egregious revisionism; in addition to the Democracy Forward suit, last month a federal judge ruled that a dismantled panel discussing the nine enslaved people at George Washington’s home at the Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia must be restored. The judge, appointed by Republican president George W. Bush, quoted George Orwell’s dystopian “1984” and said Trump did not have the right to “disassemble historical truths.”

Why does it matter if a couple of videos about 200-year-old industrial history are removed from the Lowell national park❓

For Robert Forrant, a professor of labor history at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, the stories are searingly relevant today. “We’re diminishing the history of working people,” he said. And without a shared understanding of labor’s hard-fought rights, he said, “it’s easier to ride roughshod over them.”

Indeed, in his second term Trump has slashed funding for occupational health and safety and equal employment agencies, forced labor department workers into early retirement, and, under the guise of national security, stripped collective bargaining rights from hundreds of thousands of federal workers. For this administration, the less Americans know about the organized struggle for workers’ rights — including government workers — the better.

Because one thing the evil Trump administration does understand: Knowledge is power.