What We’re Reading, June 19, 2015

This post originally appeared September 29, 2015. In Part One of this two-part post on the moral importance of providing children with diverse books, I concluded that white authors need to write about non-white characters, or else they gravely falsify the “reality” presented in their stories. We don’t live in an all-white world. We don’t … Continue reading "Diversity in Children’s Books: A White Author’s Quandary (Part II)"

This post originally appeared September 22, 2015. For the first time in census history, the majority of children living in the United States are now children of color. But the vast majority of children living within the pages of American children’s books are white. According to the Cooperative Children’s Book Center of the University of … Continue reading "Diversity in Children’s Books: A White Author’s Quandary (Part I)"

Recently in the United States, bathroom usage rights for transgender people have come to the political fore. As a part of Title IX protections against gender discrimination in federally funded educational institutions, the Obama administration has recently ordered public schools to allow students to use whichever bathrooms they please. This should free transgender students from … Continue reading "A Libertarian Perspective On Gendered Bathroom Segregation"

This is the fourth in a series about American History and the Ethics of Memory. This post originally appeared on February 9, 2016. It was a hotly contested presidential election, and the mudslinging was fierce. There were allegations of fiscal corruption, sexual impropriety, and—perhaps most damning of all—bad writing.  The Democratic candidate, it was rumored, spelled Congress … Continue reading "Campaigning on Literacy"