Tag: children’s books
What a Sixty-Five-Year-Old Book Teaches Us About A.I.
Neural networks have become shockingly good at generating natural-sounding text, on almost any subject. If I were a student, I’d be thrilled—let a chatbot write that five-page paper on Hamlet’s indecision!—but if I were a teacher I’d have mixed feelings. On the one hand, the quality of student essays is about to go through the roof. On the other, what’s the point of asking anyone to write anything anymore? Luckily for us, thoughtful people long ago anticipated the rise of
Orhan Pamuk’s Literature of Paranoia
Orhan Pamuk’s new novel, Nights of Plague, is set mainly on Mingheria, a “fairy-tale,” “otherworldly,” and fictional Ottoman island—a “pearl of the Eastern Mediterranean Sea,” or so say the painters and tourists enchanted by its rugged mountains and its pink-stone capital, which glows when seen from afar. But behind the Orientalist fantasia lies a microcosm of empire at the point of collapse. In 1901, a bubonic plague breaks out. Pamuk will use it to expose the infirmities of
The British Socialist Who Rewrote the World for Children
There was a time, not so long ago, when things were perfect for the children up at the bright-faced house, at the edge of London. Heaps of toys in the nursery, an enchanted garden that rolled on for ages, and there were always buns for tea. Mother forever merry, forever there. But then Father died, or was imprisoned for treason, or his business partner absconded to Spain with their money, and the family had to abandon all the best
What Should a Queer Children’s Book Do?
Recently, my five-year-old son brought home a picture book from our local library called “Uncle Bobby’s Wedding,” and, when he asked me to read it at bedtime that evening, I felt a profound resignation. The book’s cover features two smiling grooms in skinny-fit suits standing beneath an arbor, and a tiny flower girl, about my son’s age, wearing a bright yellow dress. The girl is Chloe, and one of the men, Bobby, is her favorite uncle: “He took her rowing
The Tragic Misfit Behind “Harriet the Spy”
There is a certain alchemy by which canonical characters, especially the figures of children’s literature, come to exist outside of history. Stripped of their initial contexts, and cleansed of any outdated particularities, they seem to endure in an eternal present tense. Take, for instance, the nineteen-sixties’ most iconic underage sleuth, Harriet M. Welsch, a.k.a. Harriet the Spy. In 1996, Nickelodeon transported her out of the mid-century, with a goofy live-action film starring Michelle Trachtenberg. Animation lends itself more readily to
Edward Gorey’s Toys | The New Yorker
Killing children is generally frowned upon, but Edward Gorey did it all the time. He squashed them with trains, fed them to bears, poisoned them with lye, forced them to swallow tacks, watched them waste away, and burned them in fires; on his watch, they died of everything from fits to flying into bits. In perhaps the most popular of Gorey’s eight abecedarian books, “The Gashlycrumb Tinies,” twenty-six children, beginning with Amy “who fell down the stairs” and ending with