Andrea Long Chu writes about the children’s book The Velveteen Rabbit as it reaches the one-hundredth anniversary of its publication. Writing that the author, Margery Williams Bianco, had something more philosophical in mind than standard children’s fare, Long Chu writes, “The philosophical character of The Velveteen Rabbit, whose subtitle is How Toys Become Real, reflected Bianco’s abiding interest in the relationship between reality and the imagination.”
The week’s New Yorker has a newly translated story by 2022 Nobel winner Annie Ernaux.
In her Substack newsletter, Not the Fun Kind, Moira Donegan considers the history of sex positivity in feminism and reviews a new book by Louise Perry, Against the Sexual Revolution. Donegan writes that Perry “believes that the untethering of women’s sexual life from marriage, monogamy, and procreation has been a disastrous mistake, an ultimately doomed project that was undertaken by naïve feminists under the delusional premise that women, contrary to their nature, could ‘have sex like men.’”
For Columbia Journalism Review, Robert P. Baird profiles American Prospect magazine and its executive editor, David Dayen: “The sorts of ideas the Prospect has long advocated are now getting a mainstream hearing—and the magazine has, at last, found itself in step with the times.”
For Parapraxis magazine, Max Fox considers the panic over trans people and children. Fox observes, “The phobic objects of the panic, as is often the case, appear somewhat threadbare under the apocalyptic light in which they’re cast: children’s books with queer or trans characters, drag queens hosting library readings, schools issuing guidance to call children by their self-affirmed names.”