Noah Berlatsky

english lit academic. wish fulfiller. thwarted world-changer.

As a parent, you tend to assume that you have some say in forming your child's mental landscape. Then Santa comes along.

Is it insulting to ask about the greatest female comics creator?

At first, this looks like sexism. And then you realize, hey, this is sexism. Hope isn't allowed to do the dangerous job because Pym has put her on a pedestal, and won't let her off it.

The history of pop music, and of black pop music in particular, has always been gay history.

Can a popular author also be celebrated for literary quality? Not if that author is a woman like Austen.

Katniss is the voice of conscience and morality in the film, and in The Hunger Games series as a whole. In the just released last film in the series, she tries repeatedly to avoid unnecessary deaths. She insists that refugees from an attacked base be given an escape route, for example, and exposes herself in an effort to help them.

Iin a passionate Facebook thread last week, children's author Meg Rosoff rejected the idea that there are "too few books for marginalized young people," as librarian Edith Edi Campbell had suggested.

Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Edith Piaf: they're all still practically household names.

It's worth questioning some of our assumptions about adolescent inferiority.