Classic Children’s Lit Can Be Surprisingly Racist

Malcolm Jones, co-author of a volume of retold Brer Rabbit stories (minus the tar baby and Uncle Remus): “The book got good reviews and sold well enough to justify two sequels. If there was any protest, it never got back to me. Still I always felt like we’d gotten away with something, even if I wasn’t sure what. Because when you take a stroll through the territory of children’s literature, you’d better know where the land mines are buried.”

Yes, We Are All Critics, And That’s Just Fine (Says A Professional Critic)

“The making of art — popular or fine, abstruse or accessible, sacred or profane — is one of the glories of our species. We are uniquely endowed with the capacity to fashion representations of the world and our experience in it, to tell stories and draw pictures, to organize sound into music and movement into dance. Just as miraculously, we have the ability, even the obligation, to judge what we have made.”

Disney Animated Movies Taught An Autistic Boy To Speak, And Now There’s A Movie About Him

“We ask parents all the time: What is your child’s passion? And they come up with all sorts of things: dinosaurs, maps, Harry Potter, Thomas the Tank Engine, Star Wars. We’ve surveyed thousands of people with these challenges and most have some video-related affinity. The passion is almost always one of a video nature. They can stop and rewind the images, slow it down and use them like the Dead Sea Scrolls to figure out social interactions; to hold a mirror up to the themselves.”

Carol Burnett Takes On Gender Discrimination In Comedy (Again)

“I had a terrific and unheard-of contract that said that all I had to do was push the button, and the network would have to give me 30 one-hour variety shows. Yeah. And I told them that that’s what I wanted to do. But they said ‘Carol, no no no no, look. All the comedy variety shows are hosted by men. Sid Caesar, Jackie Gleason, Milton Berle, now Dean; comedy variety is a man’s game.’ Mm-mm. No.”