You have exceeded your limit for simultaneous device logins.
Your current subscription allows you to be actively logged in on up to three (3) devices simultaneously. Click on continue below to log out of other sessions and log in on this device.
Why do some words have more power than others? Today we look at two very different ways of looking at that crucial question. The first, Melissa Mohr’s Holy Shit, is an earnest, well-researched history of the most powerful words in the English language: curse words. Some people (for example, me) have tried to claim that [...]
And speaking of Alex Award winners, today we have two more reviews of novels by previous winners. Neil Gaiman is one of those magical writers who seems to be able to write for any age level, with a Newbery Award under his belt, popular graphic novels for teens and adults, and two Alex Award winning [...]
In just two weeks, Manchester, UK will be hosting the 11th annual International Linguistics Olympiad (IOL), an international competition for high school students to show off their skills in linguistic puzzles. The puzzles require no knowledge of specific languages, and sometimes use invented languages. Instead, the teens use logic and their general linguistic knowledge. Here’s [...]
As I sat at home last weekend, not going to ALA and the Alex Awards Program, I started thinking about how many books by former Alex Award winners we’ve looked at this year. In my head, it seemed like a lot, but I thought I should actually crunch the numbers. So, here they are, for [...]
Before I began writing this post, I always believed that the famous retort to the question of why one would climb Mount Everest–”Because it’s there”–had been spoken by Edmund Hillary, the first Westerner to ascend to the peak. But in fact, they were the words of George Mallory, the first of three real life figures [...]
Back in January, we had a conversation (in reference to Derf Backderf’s Alex Award-winning My Friend Dahmer) about what makes a graphic novel “nonfiction” and the rigidity of categories like “fiction” and “nonfiction.” A couple of new comments have been added to that thread, so please head over to the above link to read the whole chain, but [...]
Today we have three very different graphic novels. Matt Kindt’s Red Handed, a gorgeous, full-color novel with an intricately structured plot has been the source of a bit of debate. Kimberly over on Stacked.com, while granting the novel’s interest, found its experimental structure ultimately frustrating. And when I gave the book to one of my [...]
For fans of James Daily and Ryan Davidson’s The Law of Superheroes (which we reviewed here), or for anyone who is interested in the idea but doesn’t want to invest in reading the whole book, Daily and Davidson have been guest-blogging on the very influential legal blog, The Volokh Conspiracy. They’ve been addressing such pressing [...]
Last month, we looked at four stories too unbelievable not to be true, and I thought those would be the strangest stories I heard this year. That was before I heard about Marina Chapman, for whom being raised by monkeys is only the beginning of her troubles–and not even the most trying. She was also [...]