"All Id and No Superego"

"Sociologists and political scientists have long been aware of the effects of ressentiment on entire nations, not least because it is often a red flag: a marker of a society ripe for decay into authoritarianism. And that is where the danger lies in the juvenility and coarseness among both the Trump elite and its most loyal supporters, some of whom treat grave issues of national and even global importance as little more than raw material for mean-spirited jokes and obscene memes. This shallow behavior leads to a deadening of the moral and civic spirit that undergirds democracy." 

Tom Nichols at The Atlantic calls the Trump administration "A Confederacy of Toddlers."

And Ed Kilgore at New York writes about "5 excuses MAGA makes for its toddler president."

Get the Lead Out

"Put all this together and you have an astonishing body of evidence. We now have studies at the international level, the national level, the state level, the city level, and even the individual level. Groups of children have been followed from the womb to adulthood, and higher childhood blood lead levels are consistently associated with higher adult arrest rates for violent crimes. All of these studies tell the same story: Gasoline lead is responsible for a good share of the rise and fall of violent crime over the past half century."

In a 2013 Mother Jones article, Kevin Drum lays out the lead-crime hypothesis.

"Boo Berry Is the Only Breakfast Cereal Mascot with Nipple Rings"

"For 50 years, these spooky cereals have haunted your breakfast aisle, creating a fanbase unlike any other. This is the story of where they came from, how they took off and what they meant to the world"

Brian VanHooker at Mel presents "An Oral History of Monster Cereals."

"Precocious 5-Year-Old Already Holding Long, Pointless Business Meeting With Stuffed Animals"

"Sources further confirmed that on multiple occasions, the boy modulated his voice to ask a question as one of the female elephant attending the meeting before cutting her off and repeating a less coherent version of the same idea as though he himself had just thought of it, showing off his preternatural gifts for micromanagement and wasting his subordinates' time as he distributed crayon-drawn pictures of his vague future expectations for playtime that he had already voiced numerous times before."

From The Onion.

"We Need Some Help From You, Now"

"Towards the end of a decade marked by chaotic cultural shifts, mounting tensions, and mass violence, Scooby Doo insists that there is always an underlying solution that may be achieved through calm investigation. They are all automatically united, against their archetypal differences, in pursuit of sanity and normalcy, debunking the extreme situations that have disturbed local everyday life, through patience and pragmatism. In this way, Scooby Doo suggests to the youth of America an alternative path for resistance against a greedy grown-up world, one achieved by outsmarting the enemy, rather than either fighting it or protesting it."

Olivia Rutigliano at CrimeReads marks fifty years of Scooby-Doo.

"All Children Are Worthy of Their Consideration"

"This idea that your own child is the most important thing—that's something we could try to rethink. When affluent white parents are making these decisions about parenting, they could consider in some way at least how their decisions will affect not only their kid, but other kids. This might mean a parent votes for policies that would lead to the best possible outcome for as many kids as possible, but might be less advantageous for their own child. My overall point is that in this moment when being a good citizen conflicts with being a good parent, I think that most white parents choose to be good parents, when, sometimes at the very least, they should choose to be good citizens."

Joe Pinsker at The Atlantic interviews Margaret Hagerman, author of White Kids: Growing Up With Privilege in a Racially Divided America.

"Go There, All This Is Waiting for You"

"For 15 years Šašek wandered the globe on the mission of making his This Is books, turning out a volume, and sometimes two, almost annually. (How a stateless man managed such an ambitious program of travel—he chose not to apply for citizenship anywhere after leaving Czechoslovakia—is yet another mystery.) By the time he published his final book, This Is Historic Britain, in 1974, the international consciousness he sought to cultivate among his young readers was becoming ever more prevalent. That development was a product of increasing travel (Frommer's Europe on 5 Dollars a Day debuted in 1957), the influence of photojournalism and television, and enterprises such as his own. 'Children today know everything—the world is so much smaller,' he told an interviewer in the late '60s. At the same time, the homogenizing forces of global capitalism were rubbing away the everyday differences among Hong Kong, Greece, and San Francisco, diminishing the distinctiveness he had so ardently chronicled."

Deborah Cohen at The Atlantic reviews Olga Černá, Pavel Ryška, and Martin Salisbury's This Is M. Šašek: The Extraordinary Life and Travels of the Beloved Children's Book Illustrator.

"The Adoption of Any German Customs Stateside Would Require Nothing Less Than a Full Armed Revolution"

"While well-intentioned liberal parents (aka this book's audience) will find numerous aspects of the German style superior—and many of our own trends duly worrying—most of the substantial change Achtung Baby suggests requires a large-scale shift in both prevailing attitude and state funding, neither of which will be forthcoming in this country for the foreseeable future. There's only so much one American parent can do—I and my sad little bike commute can certainly attest to that. And what's more, there's only so much one American parent, slammed with work and barely hanging on, will want to do. Achtung Baby is a great read, but it may leave the American reader feeling helpless rather than inspired—a sentiment all too common in, if you'll pardon the expression, the current Zeitgeist."

Sara Zaske at Slate reviews Achtung Baby: An American Mom on the German Art of Raising Self-Reliant Children.

"Urban Suburbia"

"'The first wave of suburbanites were people attracted to urban environments, like artists, who had cultural capital but needed affordable housing and liked racially and culturally diverse environments,' said Christopher Niedt, a sociologist at Hofstra University and the academic director of its National Center for Suburban Studies. 'The art they create attracts people who are less tolerant of diversity and want to create a more homogeneous environment.'
"Ride-hailing apps are also popular with this cohort, which largely grew up in places without much public transportation. Uber and Lyft remind some customers of rides home with their parents or their parents' friends because the driver always knows where to go and little communication is needed.
"'You can depend on the car being there, kind of like depending on mom or dad,' said Eden Sutley, a 28-year-old TV producer from Lafayette, La., who lives in the East Village."

Aaron Elstein at Crain's New York Business discusses the suburbanization of New York City.

"The Window Into the Past That These Children Provide Is Priceless"

"By analyzing the older infant's genome, Potter and his colleagues, including José Víctor Moreno Mayar and Lasse Vinner, have shown that she belonged to a previously unknown group of ancient people, who are distinct from all known Native Americans, past and present. The team have dubbed them the Ancient Beringians.
"'We'd always suspected that these early genomes would have important stories to tell us about the past, and they certainly didn't disappoint,' says Jennifer Raff from the University of Kansas, who was not involved in the study.'"

Ed Yong at The Atlantic writes about new "clues about when and how the first peoples came to the Americas."

"Soldier Excited To Take Over Father's Old Afghanistan Patrol Route"

"At press time, a tear fell from Corcoran's eye as he hugged his dad goodbye in the very same manner he remembered his father doing to him when he was a toddler."

From The Onion.

"System of Play"

"Psychically, the Lego brick is also distinctly calibrated; it operates in a space shared by childhood imagination and parental ambition. For children, Legos allow them to build whole universes to their idiosyncratic specifications. For parents, Legos seem like the vegetable your kid actually requests and then eats in heaping mounds—a toy that's also a building block for future creativity, a mechanics lesson that doesn't feel like schoolwork, a wholesome embodiment of Scandinavian craftsmanship, something tactile in a world that is increasingly pixelated. It is the plastic plaything that even the parent most committed to natural, wooden toys will gladly buy. It is also more popular today than it has ever been, which is a surprise even to some at the company, since roughly a decade ago it was nearly bankrupt."

Genevieve Smith in New York calls Lego "the perfect toy."

"Not Only a Disease, but as a Historical Aberration"

"So, if it's not vaccines, it's Wi-Fi or it's pesticides or it's antidepressants in the water supply. It's some factor in the toxic modern world. But once we realize that autism and autistic people have always been part of the human community, that there were always autistic people there, but they were hidden away, either behind the walls of institutions or behind other diagnostic labels, not getting the help that they need, we understand that autism is a very, very common disability, as Hans Asperger believed.
"It's not some rare form of childhood psychosis caused by parenting, as Leo Kanner believed. Because we have thought of it as the toxic byproduct of our modern world, we haven't thought about making accommodations for, for instance, the many autistic adults that are out there."

William Brangham on the PBS Newshour interviews Steve Silberman, author of NeuroTribes.

"A Holiday for City Planners"

"The idea is simple: Kids, and the parents who chaperone them, have a way of sussing out good urban design. On Halloween, they'll flock to places where cars drive slowly, streets are well-lit, houses are close together, and front doors are close to the street. If there's a holiday for city planners, the planner Brent Toderian has argued, Halloween is it."

Henry Grabar at Slate discusses the "trick-or-treat test" for walkable neighborhoods.

"Third-Grader Clearly Biting Off More Than He Can Chew At Elementary School Book Fair"

"'Jesus Christ, now he's grabbing Bridge To Terabithia! That’s way too advanced for him—he'll never make it past the second chapter. Who does he think he is?'"

From The Onion.

"Opponents Cast National Child Care in Cold War Terms"

"In the end, the bill allowed the poorest children to attend for free with a sliding scale for others. After sorting through such tensions, the legislation had strong bipartisan support. To many, including in the Whitehouse, child care seemed a winning issue heading into the 1972 elections."

Jennifer Ludden on NPR's All Things Considered investigates what happened to 1971's Comprehensive Child Development Act.

"The Thing No One Tells You When You Become A Parent Is That NASA Is Conspiring To Overthrow The U.S. Government"

"I remember my parents trying to tell me how much having kids changed them, and how former NASA administrator Daniel Goldin had staged the 9/11 attacks as a dry run to test the agency's ability to execute a complex false flag operation. I laughed it off at the time, but when I became a mom myself, I had to admit they were right: I never really knew what true devotion was until I saw how far the nefarious global cabal was willing to go to establish an all-powerful pan-national government and a worldwide New Age religion headed by the Antichrist. Now that I've come around to the reality of it all, my parents just get to chuckle and say, 'We told you so!'"

From The Onion.

"Truck!"

"Today, more quality children's books are published every month than any one child can read, and if kids occasionally take a ride with Nancy Drew in her blue roadster, most adults see nothing to complain about. But Moore articulated her Four Respects for a reason; in her day, children were regarded by publishers as indiscriminate readers easily satisfied by mass-produced pablum. Good kids' books were hard to come by. Worst of all, in Moore's eyes, was the 'poverty' of decent books for girls. Raised in a small town in Maine where she spent much of her time outdoors and aspired to follow in the professional footsteps of her attorney father, Moore had no patience for the 'moralizing and didactic.' A girl, she wrote, 'cannot afford to waste her emotions nor her time. She has need of every resource that may fortify her spirit, sharpen her native wit and challenge the full powers of mind and heart.'"

Laura Miller in Slate discusses pioneering children's librarian Anne Carroll Moore.

"Gooey, Drippy, Oozy, Cold 'n Clammy"

"It didn't go away completely—one still finds oozy, yucky toys on sale and green goop on certain shows for kids. (Kobe Bryant got slimed on Nickelodeon last week.) But I'd submit that 21^st-century slime is just a trickle of its former self. The marketers for the Ghostbusters remake will try to sell us slime again: in slime-filled Twinkies, for example, or rebooted ecto-flavored green Hi-C. But slime may simply be too slow and viscous for the modern world."

Daniel Engber in Slate offers a cultural history of slime.

"But, Practically, It Was a Documentary-Adventure Show"

"The show taught me that trying to understand how things work is unequivocally thrilling. It was, in this way, a celebration of curiosity above all. Finding an answer can be satisfying, but asking questions often brings greater joy than the certainty of knowing."

Adrienne Lafrance at The Atlantic remembers 3-2-1 Contact.