In the 1970s and 1980s, as preventing nuclear war gained urgency and momentum, several illustrated books were published that gave American young people here a startlingly close view into the destructive power of the bomb. Decades later, living memory is fading, and some of those ambitious works have fallen out of print. One of these is Maruki’s Hiroshima no Pika (1980), a masterpiece that allows parents to invite children to bear witness to sorrow together—and grow into the adults who will have the courage to be afraid and empathetic enough to work for peace.

The late Toshi Maruki, who wrote and illustrated the book, is known in Japan primarily as a painter, including of the Hiroshima Panels, murals depicting the unthinkable destruction of the atomic bomb. In 1945, she and her husband Iri Maruki, also an artist, had rushed to Iri’s hometown of Hiroshima to help with relief efforts after the bombing. In the decades following the war, the Marukis created large scale murals documenting the devastation wrought by the bombs. They toured with the panels to raise awareness and counter the limitation of information available to the public on the extent of the tragedy. The couple also came to depict other atrocities, including the Nanjing Massacre and Auschwitz, and victims of environmental poisoning in Japan.

We are lucky that Maruki saw her art making as compatible with creating books for young people, because the Hiroshima no Pika makes clear what a unique calling she had for children’s literature. Perhaps part of the reason she could do both is that in Japan picture books have historically been held in higher regard.

In the American edition, Hiroshima no Pika carries its Japanese title, rather than a translation, such as Hiroshima’s Flash. It’s a title that holds the reader at a distance. But once inside the book’s covers, the experience of surviving an atomic bomb is presented with intense intimacy. The story—part composite, part based on a survivor Maruki met—follows a young girl, Mii, whose family lives through the bombing. We first meet Mii and her parents at breakfast, the skies clear. Mii’s father compliments the delicious sweet potatoes her mother has prepared. Then, at 8:15 a.m., a sudden flash—and their world is an inferno. Through the rest of the book, we follow Mii as her mother guides the family as far away as she can from the flames.

Along their flight to safety, Mii witnesses a world in chaos. In Maruki’s expressive illustrations, the fleeing survivors form great waves of agony. But through Mii’s eyes, we also see individual tragedies: A sparrow that can only hop, because its wings are singed. A mother holding her lifeless baby, who walks deeper and deeper into a river until Mii can no longer see her.

After their long flight through wreckage and across rivers, Mii and her parents fall asleep at the coastline they’ve finally reached, thinking safety is at hand. Time stops making sense. They wake up four days later as help arrives, shocked so many days have passed.

Hiroshima no pika book was very influential on me when I was young, perhaps most because of the two final spreads, which cover what happened after the chaos subsided. A child reading about disasters might be accustomed to finding their protagonist has been saved in the end. Here, the false ending at the beach gives way to new forms of suffering.

Mii never grew after that day. Many years have passed, and she is still the same size she was when she was seven years old. “It is because of the Flash from the bomb,” her mother says. Sometimes Mii complains that her head itches, and her mother parts her hair, sees something shiny, and pulls it out of her scalp with a pair of tweezers. It’s a sliver of glass, imbedded when the bomb went off years ago, that has worked its way to the surface.

Mii’s father had seven wounds in his body, but they healed and for a while he thought he was getting well. Then one day in autumn after the Flash, his hair fell out and he began coughing blood. Purple spots appeared all over his body, and he died.

Many of the people who had said, “Thank God, our lives were spared,” later became ill with radiation sickness. Though this happened in 1945, some of these people are still in hospitals. There is no cure for their disease.”

Maruki had a gift for portraying the monumental scale of devastation. But she also understood the power of the detail to wake us up. A grand scale can shock, but it can also be numbing; a sliver of truth can be fine enough to enter your heart. After reading the book as a child, I never forgot the image of a forever-small Mii, glass erupting from her scalp.

Now, rereading as a mother, I think I’ll never forget the passage when Mii’s mother realizes her daughter has been gripping her chopsticks for four days. Mii is not so many years removed from a time when she would have grasped strongly if her mother pressed a finger into her palm.

“Mii-chan! You’re still holding your chopsticks!” her mother exclaimed. “Here, let me have them.” But Mii’s hand wouldn’t open. Her mother pried her fingers open one by one. Four days after the bomb, Mii let go of her chopsticks.

Not every sliver of truth is a painful one. Mii is witness in her journey to frenzy and death, but also to heroism and generosity. Mii’s mother carries Mii’s injured father on her back. An old woman uses what is left of her strength to offer Mii a ball of rice.

The book ends on an anniversary of the bombing, showing Mii lighting lanterns in remembrance of her father and the dying swallow she saw. Maruki closes with a simple message that is hopeful, but without the false reassurance that we are so often tempted to give as parents. “It can’t happen again,” Mii’s mother says, “if no one drops the bomb.”

This Thursday is the day of remembrance. Buy the book! But also: read a scanned copy of the book online free at the Internet Archive’s invaluable library.

What we like in this genre: direct and informative, but not so dense you can’t read it aloud. Accurate, but not clinical. There’s room for humor, but it can’t overpower the subject, and the jokes need to offer us some craft, not mere relief. (My kids do not agree with this last criterion. They revel in pretty much any taboo-violation joke.)

And the illustrations must be central to the work! If you’re going to teach me something, particularly if you’re going to show me an unsung body part, a maligned byproduct of digestion, or a taboo-shrouded bodily function, do it with verve.

So it’s fitting to start with Taro Gomi, the prolific Japanese picture book author—an author-illustrator who leads with the visuals. (Check out his recent career retrospective.) Gomi, whose background was in graphic design before he moved into children’s books, ran at perhaps the lowest-status bodily function of all—and did so with primarily the illustrations in mind. Then, through a somewhat improbable route, became a key figure in the small universe of memorable body books for American children.

Its popularity as an adult gag gift notwithstanding, Gomi’s Everyone Poops began as a high-minded project, with not merely respect for its subject but an appreciation of its visual poetry. Here’s how Gomi tells the story of his inspiration:

“I happened to have a meeting with the head of Tokyo’s Tama Zoo. He’d asked me to get there early in the morning before the place was open, as he was busy, so around six I came in the back gate and strolled across the zoo to his office. Just then, the morning sun struck some animal droppings with steam rising from them, and I thought it was a beautiful sight. I took a lot of pictures.

“On the way back, I had the idea to draw a book about poop. There were books about food, but none with vivid pictures of the end product, after it had passed through the body and come out again. People only see the zoo after it’s been cleaned up. I’d been lucky.

At first, according to Gomi, the publishers hesitated, but eventually the publishing house Fukuinkan Shoten published it in Kagaku no Tomo (Children’s Science Companion), its influential science-based picture book magazine. Fukuinkan credits Everybody Poops with opening the door for more frank discussions of anatomical topics previously thought unfit for children’s books.

Over time, the publisher released a number of stories about the human body and its functions through Kaguku no Tomo. Many became standalone books in Japan, including Everyone Poops, published in 1977. The series spotlit, among other things, elements of anatomy that were not simply overlooked, but kept out of books due to adults’ discomfort or lack of curiosity.

Genichiro Yagyu’s oddball body books

One of the more prolific creators in the Fukuinkan Shoten body science series was Genichiru Yagyu, an author-illustrator who deserves more attention here. (Here’s his self-deprecating bio.) The Yagyu approach was less about highlighting the beauty of a disfavored bodily function, as Taro Gomi had done, than about bringing detailed anatomical information to children in an energetic and playful style.

But perhaps the real raison d’être of Yagyu’s books is the joy of looking at something in a new way. Sometimes literally—as with his illustrations showing nostrils and feet from a non-canonical perspective.

The Holes in Your Nose

Yagyu is responsible for the majority of the books in Fukuinkan’s human body science series that wound up in English translation, including The Holes in Your Nose, my favorite. This ode is his most personal installment: He has said the unusual prominence of his nostrils embarrassed him as a child.

The standout of the book is a two-page spread on the fascinating shapes that nostrils make from below. Yagyu also finds a number of ways to incorporate design elements that recall the black, flat circles that make up the nostrils of his protagonist. (And those of the author’s self-insert, seen below in his coke-bottle glasses!) Here are some of the highlights:

All About Scabs

Though The Holes in Your Nose has become my favorite, but All About Scabs was the installment we first bought and loved. We were on the hunt for a preschooler-friendly book on the subject and found exactly one book, and luckily it served its public health purpose quite well. That said, I would say the visuals are a bit less inventive than some of Yagyu’s other books; perhaps because All About Scabs is the most goal-oriented of the series (don’t pick your scab!). Relevant if it’s relevant.

The Soles of Your Feet

Another of Yagyu’s unexpected topics is The Soles of Your Feet, our kids’ favorite of the series. Our children most appreciated the book’s suggestion to dip your feet in paint and stamp a sheet of paper to determine whether one has high or low arches. Luckily for me water on concrete also works.

Breasts

Rounding out the list of the English-translated books from Yagyu’s body science books in the Kaguku no Tomo series is Breasts. This is the only of the books that is neither available at my library nor scanned into my family’s go-to database for digitally borrowing out-of-print books, Archive.org. (It is, however, available for purchase second hand.)

So I am indebted to book maven Kate Humphreys of the online children’s bookshop Oly Oly Oxen Free Books to be able to share these images of the Breasts with the English text. If you see a copy, grab it! Humphreys recently sold the copy she had, sadly.

Incidentally the Oly Oly Oxen Free vintage and used books collection is full of treasures! A propos of anatomy picture books with charm: You can pick up from the shop right now 1966’s Straight Hair, Curly Hair—illustrated exuberantly by Ed Emberly, famous in our house for his instructional drawing books.

Here are some spreads from Breasts that give some clues to why this book might not be straightforward to shelve in the States, where there is no consensus on what body parts may be shown in children’s books, and how. Still, in my experience it covers many topics that children frequently comment or ask about.

Other translations of Breasts are circulating. The Spanish translation, Tetas, is currently available in the U.S. Or buy it directly from the independent Spanish publishing house Media Vaca!

Nanao and Hasegawa’s Contemplating Your Bellybutton

Written by Jun Nanao, illustrated by Tomoko Hasegawa (Kane/Miller, 1995)

The other body part books that made it to the U.S. from the Fukuinkan Shoten series were The Gas We Pass, written and illustrated by Shinta Cho, and Contemplating Your Bellybutton, written by Jun Nanao and illustrated by Tomoko Hasegawa. The Gas We Pass is still popular, but Contemplating Your Bellybutton is now out of print in English, though available second hand.

The bellybutton book is culturally perhaps the one in the series least in sync with American conventions in the directness with which it represents some unclothed children’s and parents’ bodies, including childbirth. Most English language bellybutton books are quite shy of showing much unclothed anatomy at all—many don’t even use humans, favoring cartoon animals.

Perhaps that is why the Children’s Library reviewer in 1995 called Nanao and Hasegawa’s work “crude and unsettling.” But to my eyes, the illustrations combine a fairly frank presentation of the bodily experiences of newborns and their parents with the warm feelings for babies one wishes to convey when explaining such a topic to one’s child.

There’s also a notably exuberant spread of the young child protagonist running and jumping around without clothes, which well captures the gleeful chaos of a certain era of childhood.

How the books got to the U.S.

Despite the commercial success of Everybody Poops from its publication in Japan in 1977, it was far from a foregone conclusion that the work would make it to the United States. For Gomi’s book to make it to American shelves, it had to wait until the 1990s, when it was taken up by a brother-sister team who were looking to foreign markets for picture books that could meaningfully expand American children’s cultural horizons.

Those siblings were Sandy Miller, coming off of founding Film Forum, and Madeleine Kane, a math teacher. They had started their publishing house, Kane/Miller, in 1984, with the goal of bringing the exceptional picture books from other countries to U.S. children. Not a totally dissimilar mission from Film Forum.

Everyone Poops became the pair’s unexpected bestseller and gave them financial security. Miller bought and renovated a church in Cobble Hill to move into (wonder which one?). Here’s an article about the book’s success from The New York Times in 1997 with a bit more on Kane/Miller’s story—including how they faced both dismissal and anger from some quarters for bringing Gomi’s book to the American market.

Kane/Miller went on to bring more books from Fukuinkan Shoten’s Kaguku no Tomo series into the United States, including The Gas We Pass, The Holes in Your Nose, Contemplating Your Bellybutton, The Soles of Your Feet, All About Scabs, and Breasts.1 The period of publication lasted from 1993 until 1999. Eventually Kane/Miller was purchased by a larger publisher and distributor, EDC, in 2008. Of the human body science books, only Everybody Poops and The Gas We Pass are still in print.

A new breastfeeding book to import?

Several decades on from when these Japanese books first landed stateside, Americans are still struggling to add to the corpus of stylish human body science picture books available for young children. As part of the remedy, it would be lovely to see someone translate for today’s kids a more recent Japanese entry in the genre, Oppai no Hanashi (roughly, The Story of Breasts). Despite its broad title, the book is primarily about the role of breasts in breastfeeding, as well as the breastfeeding relationship between the mother and child.

Published in 2009, the book has the advantage of illustrator Yuki Ainoya, whose dreamy, cheerful illustrations won her recognition in the U.S. for the Sato the Rabbit series. I wrote about Ainoya’s particular genius last week. Here’s the cover art; one imagines an American publisher might have to change it.

The book’s other most striking illustration shows a mother’s-eye-view shot of a chubby, red-cheeked baby as it nurses. The baby is partially obscured from view by the expansive orb of the mother’s breast—a breast that looks more like a planet. Perhaps a planet where only creatures as enchanted as Sato the Rabbit might live.

If you require convincing, please sample the most undeniable argument in their favor: they brought to U.S. readers the Japanese genius Yuki Ainoya, author-illustrator of the Sato the Rabbit series. Pick up the four-book bundle on sale!

What can I say about Ainoya. Her books remind me of the first time I stepped entirely inside the dome of a weeping willow.

The question the Sato the Rabbit series asks is: What if all you had to do to change the world was to see it differently. Sato sees the rain as glimmering ribbons, and so he can tie them together into lovely curtains for his party. He sees the reflection of the crescent moon in water as a fish, so he can pluck it out and eat it. And so on, and so on—Sato’s life into a series of fortunate events.

Sato follows in the footsteps of his spiritual cousin, Harold (with the purple crayon). But Harold makes something from nothing in a spare world. Sato makes the already-riotous world into something even more magical. (Incidentally, did you know Harold’s author Crockett Johnson turned to painting mathematically inflected visions later in life?)

Here’s a vignette from Sato the Rabbit and the Moon with Ainoya’s signature visual puns and joyfully tactile transformations.

When Sato plays with the world, the world plays along, as on this rainy day:

Recently I went on vacation and read a pile of books by women with very active imaginations, Eve Babitz among them. I see a spiritual affinity between Eve and Sato—two independent spirits committed to both costume1 and self-enchantment.

I did contact Ainoya to ask if the IRL Sato—a dreamy doll who stars in her Instagram—was available for sale. The answer is no. (For now; I hope someone like Manon Balberg partners with her.)

On another note: Ambiguity has been out of fashion for some time in the children’s section. Have we reached maximum displacement of the pendulum in the swing away from 1970s authorial absentee parenting? Not sure, but when you long to quiet today’s careful editorial voice, Japanese artist and author-illustrator Komako Sakai is one of the authors to turn to.

The grievances the little bunny airs in Sakai’s little dagger of a book, Mad at Mommy—which of those allegations mean Mommy should take a hard look in the mirror, and which suggest she needs to better articulate her own case?

The titular character in the atmospheric Hannah’s Night who commits a series of forbidden acts while her family sleeps—should her behavior change? Should the rules?

Sakai limits her role to the crafting of the rich but economical portraits of young children’s experiences. The interpretation she leaves to the readers.

Sakai’s illustrations have peaceful, saturated tones and inviting textures well-suited for the calm reflection the books invite about the tensions between kids’ and adults’ perspectives they portray.

(Hannah’s Night is also an excellent way for long-suffering parents of early risers to take a moment to empathize with their own night wanderers. Who wouldn’t want to creep undetected in the blue splendor of that house, copping cherries and nicking big sister’s toys?)

Here is little Hannah sneaking downstairs pre-dawn, in a familiar act of rebellion:

Hannah’s Night is still available new on Amazon but the English-language publisher does not seem to be offering it for sale.

I first found Sakai because I was looking through the “S” section in the picture book shelves, and the title Mad at Mommy caught my eye. You know how I feel “spine out”—rather than “cover out”—as a display choice for picture books—but this book certainly makes that structure work to its advantage. And what do you know… Sakai had titles published in the U.S. with Yuki Ainoki’s publisher, Enchanted Lion.2 I would prefer if I could end such a sentence with the Sato-shaped punctuation Ainoya invented, but since I can’t I’ll leave you with this:

Kevin Bankston is a tech policy lawyer and non-profit leader. We met in DC when I was working at the U.S. Treasury Department and he was running a think tank called the Open Technology Institute at New America. He’s advocated for privacy and free expression at a raft of other tech nonprofits over the past two decades and also spent several years at Meta where he founded their AI policy team. Now he’s back again in the nonprofit world as the senior advisor on AI governance at a place called the Center for Democracy & Technology.

He’s also a later-in-life dad to two little girls: a three-and-half year old and an eight-month old.

And, it turns out, between work and kids and his new Substack newsletter about AI and media, Converger, he has been learning how to make comic books.

So I talked to him about kids and comics, his navigating AI as a parent, and about how to “engineer wonder” for yourself and for your kids.

How did you start making comics?

I’ve loved comics since I was about ten years old. I was a big Marvel kid and in college I devoured DC’s mature readers line, Vertigo. And although there have been stretches of years where I’m not regularly reading them I’ve always eventually come back to the medium.

My last return to the comics world was a year ago, after my then two-and-a-half year-old daughter fell in love with Spider-Man, and Spider-Woman aka Ghost Spider, when I let her watch the Spiderverse movies at far too young an age.

I discovered there was actually a comic store just a quick bike ride from our house and so I brought her in May to the annual Free Comic Book Day, which, well, is what it says. There’s lots of free preview comics to try to get folks in the door and into the habit.

My kid was ecstatic to get all these free comics, while I was ecstatic to find all kinds of new work on the shelves that jived with my tastes in storytelling. In particular, in the years I’d been away, elevated horror comics had become a big thing–and I just happened to have been knocking around a few big horror ideas in my creative writing at the time, one of which has actually gotten me a development meeting during the pandemic with master of horror John Carpenter of Halloween and Escape from New York fame. But that’s a story for another time.

Anyway, I started devouring books about making comics and writing for comics, and learned how writing pitches works in that world–you actually need to partner with an artist to make the first few pages of your comic book to show it around. And I was reading an interview in one of these writing books, Words for Pictures, with this legendary editor, Diana Schutz. If you’ve seen 300 or the Hellboy or Sin City movies then you’ve seen adaptations of classic comics that she edited back in the day.

Diana now teaches making comics at Portland State, and in the interview she was talking about how it’s important for editors to see that you can complete a self-contained comics project which is why one of the three major projects for the semester is the completion of a stand-alone eight-page minicomic. And I just suddenly had this brain spark of: I’m gonna do that! I’m gonna take myself to comics school. I’m gonna budget time and money like I’m taking a semester of college and put together three professional level pitches using the story ideas I’ve already developed and I’m gonna do it before Comic-Con in New York in October!

And I didn’t come close to meeting that goal! But I did follow through, and I did finish one of them before New York so I could shop it around to editors there, and I’m now finishing the third and final one this month.

So you’ve made three comics now?

Yes! I built three different teams with artists, colorists, letterers and the all-important editor for three different comic ideas–an action-horror, a supernatural horror, and a swashbuckling action-adventure–and made three different “ashcans” [prototypes of a comic] with covers and logos and the first five to ten pages of each story, and with making-of materials at the back explaining the overall story and characters and world. And now I’ve learned how to write for this medium, how to project manage a comic production, how to network in the comic convention space, how to pitch to editors at the comic publishers, how to deal with comic printers, and more.

No publisher has bought a pitch yet and I may end up Kickstarting the first issue of one of them myself, but that was never really the point. The point was to invest in myself and follow my joy and learn something new and at the end of it have these physical manifestations of story ideas I’d been chewing on for years. And although I’m making a real go of it–I want to actually publish, and make back the money I spent, and then publish again–I think the money will have been well spent even if I don’t, because of how much I enjoyed and learned from the process.

Particularly as a new dad with two young girls and an intellectually demanding job and in the midst of crazy turbulent times in our country, I really just needed a project that was only for me, to stay sane, rather than just doomscrolling or watching Netflix.

And Sophie, I gotta say: other than getting married and having kids, it’s literally been the most fun I’ve had in my entire life.

So for the adults, I would just say: Figure out what makes you feel like you’re twelve years old again and do it. Invest in your joy and it’ll be the best money you ever spent. And the generative creativity that you spark will spill over into the rest of your life.

I later read an article by tech and productivity writer Cal Newport who described this kind of project as “engineered wonder” and it really captured what I was trying to do: pursue something I was intellectually and creatively curious about, just for the childlike play of it, without expectation of some career or capital return. And I cannot recommend it enough. For me, the wonder was in comics–and it sounds like it might be in comics for your daughter too!–but I’m sure every one of your readers has at least one specific wondrous thing they’d love to play at doing.

So–go do it.

So where should my daughter start, if she wants to make comics? She’s interested in doing both writing and art.

Ah, then she is a cartoonist! For your daughter, she absolutely must read The Cartoonist’s Club. It’s a little graphic novel for younger readers by Raina Telgemeier, who, other than Dog Man, is like the hottest thing in the Scholastic Book Fair.

So Telgemeier teamed up with Scott McCloud, who is the preeminent theorist of cartooning. He wrote the book on comics, Understanding Comics–actually a comic about how comics work. They recently did a graphic novel together about some middle school kids starting a cartoonist club and learning how to make mini comics, which basically involves just making a small eight-page comic book by folding two sheets of regular paper. It teaches all the basics of comics theory and comics production in the context of a story about kids actually doing it themselves. It’s super-inspirational and I wish I’d had it when I was your daughter’s age.

I’d also recommend for young people Lynda Barry’s Making Comics, a funny little workbook of exercises meant to help both kids and adults unlock their cartooning creativity in a playful way. For children of all ages, as they say. And for children of just plain children-age, I’d recommend the somewhat more practical but age-appropriate Let’s Make Comics! by Jess Smart Smiley.

For the older or more advanced comics-curious writers or artists–or your daughter after she’s read Cartoonist’s Club and wants more–I actually have a big Google doc of books and resources on creating comics that I’m happy to share.

Did you see the Substack newsletter in the past weeks about how Dog Man is “stupid” and we should just say so to the kids? In your world, do you have the equivalent of the “poptimists” versus the “rockists”–internecine fighting among music enthusiasts about hierarchies of cultural value.

Any nerddom has that. Speaking generally, the comics direct market, which is the market where publishers ship directly to this network of comic book stores, it’s its own weird market. There are 2,500 comic stores in the country. At this point, it’s mostly supported by older people like me–but that means that the community is so excited by things like Dog Man, the explosion of manga, and the fact that graphic novels are replacing middle grade books in terms of what kids are actually reading. Because that’s bringing kids into this other world. There’s all this talk in industry circles of “the Dog Man generation” that’s going to save the direct market as kids come in and look for new stuff.

There’s concern about the idea that the rise of the graphic novel is merely a symptom of children’s inability to read at a sophisticated level or pay attention to complex, long stories. What do you make of that?

My brother, what finally motivated him to read was the X-Men, you know? That sort of dismissive attitude toward comics goes back to the 1950s and the idea that comics promoted juvenile delinquency, and I think it’s just moral panic nonsense.

Is it also important for children to develop skills to read complex straight prose products? Yes. Am I worried that comics are encouraging people not to do that rather than giving them the tools that can help them do that? No.

My observation then is that the publishing industry had discovered the visual language and storytelling structure of comics as an “early reader” genre. And that was incredibly fruitful and beneficial to that genre.

Have you seen the Toon Books series? The art director of The New Yorker has created this early reader series with high-end creators from the adult comics world that is designed to be these staged entries into literacy for young people.

[Kevin looks up Toon books on his laptop] So I’m going to be buying a lot of these! I’ve been struggling with the fact that my daughter’s gotten interested in superheroes–but superheroes are so fascist! And all about resolving problems through physical violence. It’s been a real challenge finding sequential art content for her that has heroic themes, but is not, “Now Spider-Man is going to punch Hobgoblin.”

One of my beliefs is that we’re just lucky that as an accident, comics got popular enough that they took off for “early reader” publishing.

I don’t think there was a top down idea that the actual dialogue-based, realistic phrases approach of comics was a better way to teach people than the stilted sentences of the early reader books.

My hypothesis is that some creators, like Mo Willem, had the sequential art style and proved that it could be very popular among young people.

Simply the adoption in children’s books of the speech balloon?

That’s what I’m saying! The speech balloon inadvertently caused the publishing industry to fix a mistaken belief in early readers: That what’s hard for children is sentence variety. They can handle sentence variety, because they talk! Real people use sentences without a subject, or say just one word.

Switching gears: You are uniquely positioned to hold forth and make personal decisions as a parent about how you let children interact with AI. So my first question is, what would you not be caught dead letting your kids do with AI now?

One thing that’s overemphasized is AI literacy. “We need to teach these young kids AI literacy” is often the excuse for putting this stuff in kids hands–but the tools are pretty easy to use and they’ll be able to learn them when they need them.

It’s much more about what is necessary or helpful to children’s development. I just don’t see how a little kid with much less self-regulatory control than I have would deal with some of the more habit-forming elements of this technology and the cognitive offloading that can happen, which all of us with much better developed forebrains are continually struggling with ourselves.

The thing that really alarms me is how much we’re seeing hallucinated mistakes entering what previously were high reliability areas, like academic publishing or legal filings.

One that really struck me: there was a study last year showing a significant non-trivial percentage of papers that were submitted to the NeurIPS AI conference–i.e, the academic community most familiar with the risks of AI, including this risk. They found one hundred hallucinated sources between all the submitted papers.

If even that community, which is as sensitized as any community can be to this risk, succumbs to that, then you know there are some pretty deep cognitive biases behind that. I’m not sure any of us can meaningfully combat that kind of mistake creeping in through our AI use without better and more architectural backstops in the products themselves.

Can I switch you to the sort of the optimist side of the realist-optimist in you. With AI, what works in developing their intellectual and creative lives alongside these technologies? Could you give people a syllabus of a few things to read or watch that can open our imaginations to how a relationship with AI for a child or teenager might work in a positive way?

The one that leaps to mind also has a caution at the heart of it: Neil Stephenson’s Diamond Age. About an AI-driven technology tablet that tailors itself to the young user to teach them everything.

But the thing is, in the book there was a human performer that was a part of the educational loop of that device. And so it was more of a technology-enabled foster parenting or or teaching relationship, rather than a wholly artificial one. I think that was important in the story.

The equivalent would be you want to use these technologies with the children rather than having the children use them alone–or, more to the point, rather than having the technologies use them.

A lot of it simply comes down to not parental supervision, but parental interaction with the child and the tool. So that it’s always parent and child together working on something, so that you can give feedback about where the tool makes sense or not. And ensuring they’re not going down the AI equivalent of a YouTube rat hole.

Traditional media did not have as many risks as digital technology. My kid might read a book that has edgy ideas or sexual or violent content in it that I don’t love, and I’m okay with that. I read some pretty risqué and radical stuff when I was too young and I’m fine—but I did not have every creepy weird screwed up thing possible at my fingertips.

This is a hard one for me as well as a civil libertarian. Most schemes to try to protect children online turn into “and, therefore, adults are going to have to prove who they are to be able to look at anything.” And then we’re going to by default have a sort of non-anonymous internet where you can’t interact with a risky idea without your name on a log somewhere. And I think the negative externalities from that are pretty profound, especially in a political climate and under a political regime like the one we’re enduring now.

But at the same time, as a parent, I understand the concern about untrammeled access by very young children to every weird thing that adults can come up with online. I don’t have great answers here, other than: Do it with them. Spend as much time with them as you can.

There are so many fun things you can do with kids and AI. I sat with my daughter and we made a coloring book that stars our family. It was not only fun, but it also resulted in something off the computer that we could play with as well. And it was something that sort of expanded her horizons and used her imagination rather than just being something she watched or that watched her.

So speaking of being a civil libertarian: Non-state actors, like the family or companies have a huge role to play in ensuring AI is a positive force for children. Are there companies you look at now and can say “These people are taking the high road with respect to AI and kids.”

I have yet to see an AI product well designed for child consumption.

I’m less worried about kids talking to in-home assistants right now because they’re still pretty rudimentary. We basically just ask our Siri homepod to tell us the weather and play NPR, and my daughter doesn’t think there’s a magical person inside it; she gets it’s just a machine. But that is going to change as they all become LLM-driven. So you should look at what settings might exist to limit who can talk to your assistant, or to review the logs, so the kids can’t start having unsupervised interactions with it.

How about the digital footprint that the kids are creating interacting with AI. What do you do personally to prevent child surveillance? Or do you imagine doing in the next few years?

I mean, the main thing is we don’t post about our kids. We’re not making choices about their online footprint without them.

To the extent we occasionally use a tablet with our child, it’s media that we have vetted on devices where we can very easily restrict her movement around the device. And we’re always there when she’s doing it, which is basically just in the car or on airplanes.

Will you tell us about your Substack newsletter?

Ah yes, this is another example of me trying to engineer some joy, and get closer to the things that fascinate me the most. The newsletter is called Converger, which is a reference to how we used to talk about media convergence. The idea that digital technology is, not flattening, but combining into one digital substrate.

The internet has made the cost distribution for any and all types of content other than live performance approach zero.

And now with AI, the cost of production is approaching zero as well.

So the newsletter is focused on the often contested borderlands between old media and new technology in that new, infinite-content world.

That includes covering fights over copyright, which are particularly valent around AI. But also debates and developments around the role of AI in human creative processes, whether we’re talking about writing or making movies or creating images.

I’m especially interested in the video generation field and how that’s going to transform how we both create and consume video content.

Some representative topics: The one I just published today, the top story was about how YouTube is drawing (or failing to draw) the line around what is inauthentic content on YouTube that should be demonetized or kicked off the platform, versus what is authentic content that merely uses AI as part of its generation.

We are seeing a lot of people who I would characterize as legitimate creators who are spending a great deal of human creativity working with AI tools to generate content for YouTube that the automated censors on YouTube are demonetizing.

And I think that’s a problem. It’s a bit hypocritical as well, considering Google provides one of the best video generation models available from a U.S. lab right now.

So they’re basically promoting using this technology on the one hand, and yet in a very poorly targeted way are right now discriminating against people who use that technology on their video platform.

This is especially notable because Youtube, as I talk about in this issue’s second story, has proven to be a really crucial pipeline for new creators moving from the internet into traditional creative lanes like feature films. I talk about how there are like a dozen people who started by making short horror films and comedy content on Youtube that now have moved into the realm of making feature films, primarily horror films, because that’s a low budget entry point for new directors. So Youtube has become a key pathway for creative people to move from being viral content makers to moving into traditional culture industries. If we now start systematically disadvantaging the people who are using the newest technology to try to embody their ideas, then we might be breaking that pipeline and wouldn’t that be sad?

I go from that sort of digital Hollywood stuff to more wonky things, like the law and policy around Internet scraping for the training of AI models, and to what extent is that legal or copyright-infringing? What are the impacts on the information ecosystem when you start having the websites that used to rely on an implicit bargain with Google that they were going to get a bunch of referral traffic suddenly are getting swamped by bot traffic and losing their human traffic to AI? How do we resolve that issue without basically ending up in a world where all the best information is locked behind a paywall and all the free information is disinfo, misinfo, and AI slop?

What do you do with your kids to make their lives more interesting?

Spending a lot of time outside. We’ve been going on long bike rides through the park. Feeding the ducks, looking at different flowers, learning the names of all the animals.

And crafts–whenever you can make something with them that turns mundane into something kind of magical. This week my wife and child were painting rocks and leaving them around the neighborhood. It sprinkles a little magic where it would otherwise just be… rocks.

One other thing that I do is I make up songs for the kids. And then I record them on the Tonie so they can listen to me sing their personalized songs any time, whether it’s the new baby’s favorite lullaby, or our older kid’s going-to-school song that I sing in the mornings, or whatever.

Did you have a person who was a mentor to you when you were a child or a teen, professionally or artistically, that stands out?

I was lucky that my grandmother was a watercolorist. It was always like, “Yay, I get to go paint with Grandma.”

For the more restrained among us, but only in a relative sense, Kevin Durant will help you scratch that floral “my first diary” itch. Matching youth sizes in this upholstery-forward series are available, but at the moment only secondhand for older styles.

Not that the players are directly citing girl culture—more like showing love to the the aunties (KD) and grandmas (Lebron). Can it be long before some nostalgic single-mom-having WNBA player releases the A Chair for My Mother x Nike limited editions? (I wrote about my love for that book and that indelible rose print previously.)

Alas, perhaps having finally had a lifetime supply of all that’s pink and glittery, my kids rejected the Melos in favor of the Sabrina 3 SE What The??? 90s neon mismatch situation. But who could be mad at this Trapper Keeper dissonance?

The Sabrinas are also available in a Molly-McIntire-at-Camp-Gowonagin colorway.

A few weeks ago I wrote to you about James L. Mathewuse, the Norman Rockwell-inspired painter who did the covers for the Sweet Valley High books—and the unforgettable Michelle Pfeiffer-jawed model who posed in reference photographs as the twins. (A nice place to gaze at all covers is here.)

I got curious about why The Babysitters Club, which came only a few years later and also used paintings as their cover art, did not burn any memorable faces into my mind.

One site claims it’s because the models who posed for individual babysitters were not the same over time. But there’s also a prioritizing of the situational and organizational over the individual and expressive in those covers. There is also an abstracting away of the facial specificity of the models, beyond what is attributable to the wide-shot vs. close up formula.1 Suitable to the differences between the two series. But ultimately the Babysitters covers are less compelling images than historical artifacts to me.

That said, I am interested in them very much as historical artifacts, including to share with my children! Megan Conley wrote a while back on here about the original cover artwork being for sale on her Substack Excerpts from the Pocket Observatory, a newsletter about “intersection of capitalism, culture and care work.” Some of the full-group compositions would make a lovely gift to a little reader, especially that first perfect cover.

Ok, and I’m still a bit confused by this New Yorker article from 2010 on the Sweet Valley cover art. To start, the author refers to the fifteen or sixteen year old twins as “nymphettes.” A curious choice given that the adult male gaze is hardly a central part of the project of the series. Not to mention that the appeal of the twins to girls was in large part their womanliness, in keeping with the girl-approved Hollywood fantasy of world-weary thirty-three-year-old high school seniors.

But the oddest part of the New Yorker article is the point at which it states that book #7 (Dear Sister2) contains “heavy petting” between two characters. In fact, the distinctive element of the book is a scene of attempted sexual assault of one of the twins by a guy in their friend group (for those from other generation, think Toots or Chuck Bass). This article was written by a woman in 2010, hmm.

Speaking of ever-morphing illustrations of characters! Nancy Drew was described with different hair colors over the years. Born a blonde; later various shades of blonde to red—most memorably, titian. One account I read claims the change was due to a printing error. The excellent archives series book art collector Jim McNamara’s website allows you to peruse the hues of the locks in question across years and cultures. Perhaps some inspiration for summer haircut season.

And it’s not hard to implement driving opportunities for children! For those with profound aversion to the indoor amusement centers: rest assured that you can find open air racetracks. If you’re in the U.S., you may well have “kid karting” near you for little ones as young as five or so!

For those in New York tristate area, Monticello karting camp for grade-school-age kids could be paired with a pleasant excursion for the adults this summer. Your bambinos must be six years old and 46" tall to get behind the wheel.

Greater Bay Area parents can take advantage of the Sonoma Raceway. You have to be at least thirteen to participate in their karting instruction, where they can develop their instincts on California’s longest track. $595 gets you a full day of learning “racing lines, braking methods, acceleration, cornering forces and vehicle balance.” It’s explicitly for both budding racers as well as those looking to better their driving skills. As with Monticello, the setting is easy on the eyes for the chaffeur-parents.

Or perhaps you are parent to an actual licensed young adult and you are unimpressed with the rigor of their American driving instruction. You can readily tack-on sessions of “skid pad” training. (I found this out in a search I was doing for myself—I have started chasing conditions to ski in, and didn’t want my first experience losing traction to be on a cliff with my children in the back seat.)

Skid pads are surfaces in a driver training area that cause slipping, similar to rain, snow, and ice. SpeedSF regularly holds skid pad education days at the Sonoma Raceway, where licensed drivers can learn on an obstacle course. The next one is June 10; must be eighteen, but no special skill prerequisites. Maybe I’ll see you or your kid there this summer?

If you want to spend more money for a prepackaged summer camp-style experience with advanced instruction, places like BMW and Porsche have affiliated high-performance driver ed. (Spartanburg, SC, looks like the better BMW school site; it would take a special person to pay thousands to spend a day or two in the direct sun of Thermal, CA!)

Wouldn’t it be convenient if kids could learn through simulators? Sadly, a recent literature review of the impact of simulated driving education is not particularly promising.

On another note: I’ve only recently apprehended that ice skating does not have to be dreadfully indoors or loop within a diameter no broader than that of a Swedish maypole.

My research was inspired by the fact that despite cajoling and lessons, my kids won’t let me tempt them to drop in on weekends to skate the loud, windowless downtown Oakland Sharks Ice Rink. And though I love it there, it’s not like I entirely relish the noise and trapped-pretzel-warmer fumes that bring me back to summer days on the Port Jefferson—Bridgeport ferry. And of course all my best memories are skating outside!

So, I don’t know why it took me so long to realize I should Google “longest continuous trails to ice skate outdoors.” Here are some of the destinations that I have marked down for my family:

The dream North American destination is Lake Windermere in British Colombia (south of Banff and three-plus hours from the Calgary airport). The “Whiteway” is the groomed ice skating terrain—a world record holder at thirty-four kilometers (twenty-one miles)!1 If your family doesn’t all swoon for ice skating, there are also groomed trails for cross country and skate skiing. This video of skating on the lake sold me.

For New Englanders, there is the 4.5 mile groomed skating trail in Fairlee, Vermont. The lodge there, Lake Morey Resort, offers adjoining rooms and lakeside cottages, at prices that reflect the location’s remoteness.

If you are thrill-seeking and have older, athletic kids: There are way more dramatic ice skating landscapes available in the ungroomed—or “wild ice”—world. I wonder if my friends who bought a helmet for their infant to do light rock-climbing in the Dolomites will be tempted reading this. (When I texted them about my qualms about my kids skiing on glaciers this summer they sent me a recent photo of their own small children navigating a southern hemisphere glacier tied with ropes.) The Internet has many lists of entry-level “wild ice” opportunities, many of which have some kind of institution that monitors safe ice conditions. And here are backcountry skating backcountry skating tips for the hearty explorers among you!

What would make it worth traveling with kids to wild ice? To me, it would be the small subset of places where you have a chance of seeing something truly astonishing below you. Under the right conditions—clear waters, fast freezing—you can skate on a lake frozen to smooth glass and enjoy the glass-bottom boat view. Speaking of chasing conditions! You’ll have to set a Google alert for the just-right conditions (“ice window”) and jump on a plane. Here’s a once-in a decade video taken at Rabbit Lake in Alaska to illustrate.

If you’ve been keeping your kids away from search engines, you may wish to plan on observing the first genre search that comes to their mind on their new Kobo. Our eight year old daughter’s first search? For “drama.”

Can the book industry please get it together to make picture books actually work on e-readers? Nothing e-ink yet comes very close to paper for rendering a book’s colors and detail, but broadened access to digital picture books would make the world a lovelier place. And wouldn’t we all be better off with access to out of print picture books! (Many of which are already digitized in some form, including by the angels at Archive.org, which I highly recommend making a regular reading destination if you love vintage picture books.)

Or maybe you let kids read ebooks on apps on tablets instead of e-ink devices? I have seen better results when children use the quiet, slow Kobos of the world—but maybe low reward-seeking kids will not be so easily zombified as some I’ve observed.

How does society support children at the upper extremes of cognitive potential—say, the 0.1%? Not a question often central in education debates—but when it’s relevant, it’s highly relevant. If you’re a parent far away from schools or friends who can help you carry this burden, you may want to evaluate kid-to-kid or kid-to-mentor connectors like the Davidson Institute or CTY (the former with more demanding admission criteria). Some Davidson programs are free for kids who test as “profoundly gifted.” If your kid already has a thing that overlaps with one of the few domains where early childhood talent is more observable and scouting exists (such as in chess, math, piano), support systems are more readily available—but still, I would imagine engaging with a generalist program like Davidson could help mitigate the risks of early specialization. Anecdotally, I hear of these weekend and summer programs as places where gentle souls meet their future spouses.

One of the Math Dads who were my original inspiration for starting this newsletter recommends Desmos, which he describes as a versatile math learning resource that helps build intuition. To get a feel for how they take more thoughtful advantage of digital interactivity than typical online math resources, you can create a free account and check out the unit called “Function Carnival.”

Nothing like winding down the one full-day outdoor activity my whole family is willing to do to remind us we’re all being courted 24/7 by skilled participants in the attention economy. If you’re trying to do digital harm reduction for your offspring here are some of the things we’ve found useful recently:

I think I already mentioned the American alpha moms have been gathering grade-wide parent pledges on not giving kids smartphones or social media until a certain age for a while now. If your grade doesn’t have one, find the mom people are scared to say no to and ask her to do it? (My friend who recently founded a mom organizing group suggested this heuristic.) Our daughter’s grade uses this bare-bones pledge platform.

My son’s K-8 school is nudging families of big kids to set up landlines, bless them! Landlines have a bit of an involved buy-in now, so while I am homesick for the handfeel of my wall-mounted rotary phone, we went with the simple version. It’s called Tin Can, it uses your WiFi to mimic a landline. Free to call someone else with the Tin Can—or 911! $9.99 a month gets you the ability to call any phone number. So they can ring you when they’re home alone and run out of ideas? Or have set the house on fire. I only wish it weren’t pushy to give as a party favor for a group of your middle-grade child’s friends!

Kids take great candids! But that total cost of ownership on film is at odds with their additional interests, such as taking seventeen shots in a row of their younger sibling mooning the camera, followed by an in-depth study of the warp and weft of the rug. Also at odds with my interest in never running errands! So historically I’ve been wishy-washy, often letting it go when the kids grab the iPads to take pictures, but shutting it down now and then when I see them zombie-like scrolling through their own photos. A lovely little piece of tech is now our solution: The Camp Snap digital camera. Works like an old disposable camera, no screen. Stores digital photos that you can transfer to your laptop the way you would pull files from a thumb drive.

In elementary school two of my best girlfriends got videocameras starting around fifth grade. Did at least one of these go on to host a cult public access show on public access for the half decade spanning our most vulnerable years? Naturally. What I am saying is that if you’re open to their raw girl/boyhood being preserved forever, but you also don’t want your kids to auto-hypnotize with their own camera roll, there’s a camcorder without playback. (Like the camera above, it transfers files like a thumb drive.)

Still, isn’t the very best thing simply for the little ones to be outside all day?Lots of spring skiing is still to be enjoyed, and there are certain upsides in slow-snow for your dear daredevils. We did spring break in Whistler and our high expectations were exceeded. I couldn’t recommend it more for a near-term long weekend. The sea-and-mountain drive from currently-in-bloom Vancouver is a pleasure in itself; stop in Squamish halfway to eat inter-generationally appealing food at The Broken Seal; stay at Nita Lake Lodge in one of their two- or three-bedrooms (call directly for better pricing). Ask for Kim for private lessons if you someone who won’t let anyone get away with anything.

For the thermal journey junkies who want to go beyond with the barrel sauna, pool, and hot tub at the Lodge, the outdoor circuit at Scandinave Whistler will more than do—but may spoil you for future lower 48 options. Children aren’t admitted, and staff may remind you of their quiet soaking policy.

And then there’s summer skiing. I feel mournful that I waited to take up sports de glisse until after North American summer skiing became inaccessible for civilians. I am hoping to not let the same thing happen with Western Europe’s glaciers. Perhaps the ticking clock will convince you? We’ll be in the French alps this summer and I’m narrowed in on Zermatt as the best situation left for families who aren’t competition-training. What’s giving me pause on the excursion is the developmental maturity it will take to do long gondola commutes with gear, high temperature variability, and the need for rigorous adherence with sun safety for our very fair children who tend to strip down on the mountain even in winter. Good for older kids or the especially rule-following.

On the West Coast the plane ride calculation for summer skiing makes South America competitive with Europe. Let’s face it, no option is a light lift, but the Santiago-adjacent resorts avoid demanding inhuman plane-to-car-ride patience from your children. (LAX people can fly direct.) This could pair well with a week or two in a local winter-holiday camp for your school-age hispanohablantes (or would-bes). Our friends just did the reverse in Argentina to great results, summer break camp during North American winter.

Nomadic seasonal hobbies do make piano practice hard. But getting a travel piano alternative was easier than we thought. Here’s what I learned: People warn against checking a fully-weighted digital piano due to damage risk, though it is doable. Renting a piano on site or renting studio time is sometimes possible, but hard to square with kid ski and bedtime schedules. Foldable 88-key pianos are a market, but overkill for us. We landed happily with a five-pound 37-key MIDI controller; this way you’re getting reasonably close to supporting real piano technique and not paying for (or carrying!) nice to haves like speakers. Make sure to buy something with standard key width. You’ll play the music via hooking up to another device with speakers and a piano app that translates the MIDI output into sound. Our nine year old was more than capable of carrying the controller on the plane in this MIDI-shaped backpack.

Ski all day, play piano all night!

The goal was to make shopping easy for people who don’t have an inner yarn wall with nontoxic kids brands like I do.

I’ve not written outside Substack before, so it was fun to begin with a magazine I have been reading since childhood. Some of those covers…

While we’re here: a few last-minute children’s book gifts of the sort On the Calculation of Volume’s Tara Selter could use to conjure ultrawinter. Some will actually be in your bookstore!

1. Chirri and Chirra, The Snowy Day. A certain thing that happens with enchanted ice marbles that will change you.

2. Windows, Julia Denos. I have a thing for the glow of a window viewed from afar on a cold night. This book is an elaboration on that pleasure. See also the oeuvre of paper artist Su Blackwell.

3. The Year on Maple Hill Farm, by Alice and Martin Provensen. This work covers the whole year in the life of a farm, but you’ll see why the correct time for reading it is the winter solstice

After I wrote about the enchanting photobooks for children by Jill Krementz (A Very Young Dancer and its sequels) I became curious why the children’s photobook or photo-illustrated book is so rare nowadays. I’m talking books where entire photographs are the stars of the show—not books where photographs are chopped and remixed, such as in the busy layouts of a typical children’s visual encyclopedia.

Turns out that type of photo-illustrated book never really was a true genre for children in the U.S.; more like a method that was employed from time to time due to unusual circumstances. Like, say, your father is a famous photographer (The First Picture Book for Children (1930)); you are an artist who has been photographing dolls and someone suggests putting a kid’s book together (The Lonely Doll (1957)); or you are adapting your own film (The Red Balloon (1967)).

If you’re interested in more on the topic of photo-illustrated books for children, the writer and photography curator David Campany discussed this type of book in Source in 2008. And here is an interview with the photographer Alex Soth, who collects such books.

In the case of Jill Krementz, the reason the photo-illustrated picture books came together was that Krementz, already an accomplished photojournalist, was interested in the world of children. And it so happens there is a Swedish series with a similar origin, well-known abroad but not in the States. It is called Children’s Everywhere, or Children of the World, and was illustrated with photographs by the Russian-born Swedish photojournalist Anna Riwkin-Brick.

As with Krementz’s books, each book in Children’s Everywhere follows an individual child and illuminates daily life. But where Krementz’s books featured real, “as told to” style first-person narration, the Children’s Everywhere series used fictionalized stories designed to educate children on daily life in other cultures. And where Krementz spotlighted talented children working on careers in the arts or sports, Children’s Everywhere focused on more typical experiences.

There was one point of notable overlap, though: Both series feature a child born into a circus family. Jill Krementz’s A Very Young Circus Flyer (1979); Anna Riwkin-Brick’s Circus Child (1960), with a story by Astrid Lindgren, the Swedish colossus of children’s literature. (You can read by Flyer and Circus Child free on the Internet Archive.) Of all the photo-illustrated books I discovered in my search after discovering Jill Krementz, Circus Child is my favorite.

Vintage copies of both books (now out of print) would make wonderful gifts for a young circus enthusiast. A Very Young Circus Flyer is aimed at a middle grades reader, dense with behind-the-scenes detail about the daily rhythms of the life of a circus performers. Their house is on a train! The book emphasizes the long preparation and training that goes into the circus acts, like fact that the lions must be fed with bottles when they are babies, to make them easier to handle. In case you were wondering: “It takes forever to teach a dog how to ride a motorcycle.”

Armando (“Tato”) Farfan, Jr., the boy who was the very young circus flyer, grew up, and stayed connected to the circus world. Now he is an artist and costume designer based in Las Vegas, with specialty in wings for Victoria’s Secret angels, Gaga, and other showgirls. His company is Living Art of Armando. They do custom work, should the Claire Danes Romeo + Juliet / Jules from Euphoria angel wings be a dream of you or a tween you know.

Speaking of showgirls, here is a down moment captured in A Very Young Circus Flyer that makes me curious about what didn’t make it into the book.

For the littler ones with big-top fever and the budding horse girls, Lindgren and Riwkin-Brick’s Circus Child is a charming option. The book has Lindgren’s trademark empathetic, realist perspective on children. It’s an underdog tale—five year old Lilibet (Sonja) dreams of becoming an circus equestrienne, but has a bossy playmate, Leo, who won’t quit telling her she’ll never be a rider. Will she overcome his put-downs? In her final, triumphant words: “Of course I can ride.”

If you’re looking to pair the books with another circus gift, you’ll have an embarrassment of riches these days. Our favorite maximalist dress-up shop is Tutu du Monde is doing a range of circus and harlequin options. The plastic-free, eco-conscious brands are also in on the game: German natural doll-makers Nanchen have an all-natural sweet clown doll and clown rattle; Grimm’s has a classic wooden elephant pull-toy in a striking blue; and Sarah’s Silks is selling a sweet circus gift set with a rattan circus-tent basket and solid wooden animal performers.

.

• Of course there is the problem of how do you get those high books, especially when you’re little. What if the entire wall of shelves were climbable? This would suit middle grades kids so well. (In this case the architect created an oblique wall to oblige.)

• Still, at some point spine out is going to be necessary. It is hard to find shelves that are not overpowering, a tip risk, or made from fake wood—or all three! These Blu Dot solid wood and metal shelves let light through but can still actually hold books securely—thanks to the small rear shelf lip and the central placement of the slim wooden uprights. They are both attached to the wall and distribute weight through the floor via their uprights.

• In the librarian debates on spine out vs. cover out book display, you don’t see much discussion about the dearth of “cover up” displays that allow reading in place. But large, heavy books will live much longer in this way—particularly for very young kids. (My toddlers destroyed so many oversize visual encyclopedias and atlases.) The custom octagonal shelf and the slanted display table in Lisbon’s Good Company are lovely.

• Here’s a piece that could accommodate cover out display and double as a reading surface for a heavy book.

• On the opposite end, warmth-wise, is the rotating wooden book stand that Thomas Jefferson made famous. Modern examples are named after him. This woodworker will talk you through the construction.

• Finally: Jefferson five books on rotation not enough for you? Consider the Renaissance bookwheel. My new obsession!

Jólabókaflóð is a fancy way of saying that Icelanders exchange books as presents on Christmas eve, in time to feast upon the books in their warm beds through the dark winter nights. The tradition is said to be rooted in restrictions on imports during WWII which covered many consumer goods but not paper.

These days, the Icelandic Publishing Association sends the entire country a holiday book catalog each year, like a national version of the Scholastic Book Order. (Most titles in Iceland are released in the Christmas season.) The print copies for the Christmas 2025 catalog are being distributed now; here is a digital download of the catalog for 2024 for my Icelandic-speaking readers.

Our family makes the tradition into a daytime affair to accommodate our morning lark offspring: We dress festively, hit our local hot chocolate and candy shop, then the library and the book store, then head home to snuggle under blankets with stacks of books beside us.

• Speaking of excuses to enjoy Scandinavian sweets! The Lakrids by Bülow licorice and chocolate advent calendar is a justifiable late-purchase for a family with two kids who like licorice. The advent calendar industry doesn’t often meet the demand for a gift two or more children can enjoy; this one has two pieces of candy for each day.

• How to stay warm during all this reading? There’s Icelandic eiderdown—not only wonderfully light and warm, but also collected without harming birds. (What happens to the birds’ would-be predators is another story.) The process is this: Icelandic eider farmers create seaside sanctuaries for eider ducks to nest. Mother ducks insulate their eggs with down they pluck from their own breasts. When the fledglings have hatched, the farmers gather the down. Here’s a $5,900 eiderdown twin duvet with cashmere-cotton casing from Icelandic brand Hraun á Skaga; organic GOTS certified cotton casing is available on request. Icelandic Down has a baby duvet starting at $2,744; available with silk casing.

• It’s not so simple to locate Icelandic children’s books for your book flood if you’re an English speaker. One exception is the middle grades eco-fable The Story of the Blue Planet, written by Andri Snaer Magnason and illustrated by Áslaug Jónsdóttir. It tops many Icelandic children’s literature recommendation lists. For littler ones, I like Áslaug Jónsdóttir’s character illustrations in Jónsdóttir’s Little and Big Monsters series, but translations only exist in languages other than English.

• Readers looking for romantic fairy tale illustration of Scandinavian (not just Icelandic) folktales are spoiled for choice. In Iceland, Guðmundur Thorsteinsson (1891-1924), called Muggur, is known for his paintings and illustrations of Icelandic folklore, but those are not collected in a child-oriented edition. Muggur did write and illustrate The Story of Dimmalimm, a classic with a blunt message about good things coming to a girl who is sweet and well-behaved. It’s out of print in English but available for purchase second-hand. Read for free on the Internet Archive.

• Here are some English-language nonfiction or “informative fiction” picture books about Iceland my kids have enjoyed: Betsy and Ted Lewin’s Puffling Patrol follows Icelandic children as they participate in a rescue mission for recently hatched puffins who have strayed into the town instead of finding their way to the sea. Ted Lewin’s dramatic, detailed paintings are well beyond what children are normally treated to in the science section. In Stranded!, ÆVar þÓr Benediktsson recounts the “mostly true” story of a time his grandfather almost perished when stuck on a newborn volcanic island. (Both bird rescues and volcanos were big in our house last year.)

• At some point one will have to get the blood moving. How about falconry, one of the only ways to give a small child an intimate encounter with a bird of prey. (You only have to be six or seven!) This one at West Coast Falconry can go with a trip to Tahoe, but I imagine googling your area will yield something within a moderate distance.

Buying children’s classics is more laborious than buying new releases or vintage books that exist in only a couple of editions. One is tired out by the number of decisions to make about book design, vintage, craftsmanship—not to mention which translation or illustrator to select.

Perhaps that’s why ones shelves often contain a fair number of random, unsatisfactory copies of classics. Copies that do nothing to convince a child to give the less than completely fashionable a chance. The silver lining is that these hurdles are why something from the children’s canon can be such an excellent gift.

I’ll start with The Little Prince, because I dote on a boy whose hair reminds me of a wheat field.

If the child doesn’t read French, then the first consideration is which translation.

The main circulating English version of The Little Prince now is by the late poet Richard Howard. His version unseated the original by Katherine Woods. Howard’s work is considered by some more faithful to Saint-Exupéry’s simple, accessible prose, and is viewed by admirers as less stiff. (Also, Woods’s translation has one of the most famous translation errors.) By others, Howard’s translation is viewed as a failed assassination attempt. Howard foresaw this:

Katherine Woods’s translation is particularly dear to many as it came out alongside the original French text in 1943. Saint-Exupéry (Saint-Ex) had written the work in New York while in exile from occupied France. Both French and English editions were published in New York. (They were not published in France until after the war, by Gallimard.) The Woods translation remained the standard for half a century in the English-speaking world. Her reign was coextensive with the book’s exuberant reception by anglophone audiences and its eventual canonization among English-language classics.

How you feel about the Woods vs. Howard controversy may turn in part on how you feel about the following comparison, made by another Francophone American writer, Matt Kim:

Woods’s version includes French-to-English translations like “spring of fresh water”, “primeval forest”, and “tippler”. Howard translates the same words as, “water fountain”, “jungle”, and “drunkard”.

But the story of Woods’s romantic flourishes vs. Howard’s straightforward choices is not the only one that can be told (even in this example, we have drunkard, rather than drinker). If you’d like more raw material to understand how the two versions sit on your palate, here is how Woods and Howard interpreted the closing paragraph of the book’s first chapter:

The French original:

Quand j’en rencontrais une [une grande personne] qui me paraissait un peu lucide, je faisais l’expérience sur elle de mon dessin numéro 1 j’ai toujours conservé. Je voulais savoir se elle était vraiment compréhensive. Mais toujours elle me répondait : «c’est un chapeau». Alors je ne lui parlais ni de serpents boas, ni de forêts vierges, ni d’étoiles. Je me mettais à sa portée. Je luis parlais de bridge, de gold, de politique et de cravates. Et la grande personne était bien contente de connaître un homme aussi raisonnable.

Woods (1943)

Whenever I met one of them [a grown-up] who seemed to me at all clear-sighted, I tried the experiment of showing him my Drawing Number One, which I have always kept. I would try to find out, so, if this was a person of true understanding. But, whoever it was, he, or she, would always say: “That is a hat.” Then I would never talk to that person about boa constrictors, or primeval forests, or stars. I would bring myself down to his level. I would talk to him about bridge, and golf, and politics, and neckties. And the grown-up would be greatly pleased to have met such a sensible man.

Howard (2000)

Whenever I encountered a grown-up who seemed to me at all enlightened, I would experiment on him with my drawing Number One, which I have always kept. I wanted to see if he really understood anything. But he would always answer, “That’s a hat.” Then I wouldn’t talk about boa constrictors or jungles or stars. I would put myself on his level and talk about bridge and golf and politics and neckties. And my grown-up was glad to know such a reasonable person.

Primeval forest vs. jungle (for forêt vierge)? Clear-sighted vs. enlightened (for lucide)? Should one raise Woodists or Howardists?

My own nostalgia for Woods’s translation notwithstanding, my recommendation would be “both,” because The Little Prince is an excellent candidate to be a child’s introduction to translation itself. You might begin with a discussion of how to translate fauve, the poor creature staring into the jaws of death in the book’s memorable opening page. Fauve has no direct analog in English; it is rendered as “animal" for Woods, “wild beast” for Howard, and even “wildcat” from the default Kindle Edition we downloaded.1) « Le langage est source de malentendus », as the fox counsels the little prince.

Then there’s the question of how best to enjoy the author’s illustrations. For a copy with strong reproductions, I recommend the Folio Society release, which aimed to restore faithfulness to the original colors. The Folio Society release also includes a commentary volume from former Morgan Library curator Christine Nelson, who took care of the Little Prince manuscripts for several decades. This companion volume includes reproductions of parts of Saint-Ex’s handwritten drafts and preliminary sketches.

The Folio Society used the Richard Howard translation. So it pairs well as a gift with a vintage copy of Katherine Woods’s now out-of-print translation. Here’s a guide to collecting first editions from the fabulously thorough Little Prince Swiss collector and general allumeur de réverbère Jean Marc Probst (his detailed collection site is worth perusing). Thanks to Probst, I now know that the first 1943 French editions, unlike the English, bear “the mark of the raven.”

Here’s a handsome early edition of The Little Prince for sale—lacking dust cover—at $1,250:

Less extravagant would be to buy a vintage copy from the later Harcourt era (Harcourt absorbed the original publisher, Reynal and Hitchock). Finding the Harcourt-era Katherine Woods translation is easier if you restrict the time period to before 2000, when Howard’s version was published (here’s a search).

Some further items to sweeten your gift or peruse at your leisure:

• Gallimard sells a facsimile edition of the original manuscript (59€).

• Over the years The Little Prince has been illustrated many times by new interpreters. Very few tempt me as a collector, but Probst created a nice gallery that will allow you to see if any “third party” illustrators catch your eye. I am an admirer of the Italian-born, France-based illustrator Beatrice Alemagna, and am partial to her edition.

• A book is best given with a doll; and that doll in turn is best given with its own miniature book. Thanks to the cottage industry around The Little Prince, you have a lot of mini options for both a large companion like the Nanchen doll above, dollhouse scale, or in between. This miniature one looks to be the full-text Katherine Woods translation. This one is for recreating in the dollhouse your child’s grandparents’ mustiest shelves. I am against the ones with blank pages, as I’m sure will be the borrowers who live under your floorboards.

***

From Gift Guide: Nontoxic tableware and food storage (yes, seriously!)

I like speciality knowledge, whether it’s geared toward me or not. Actually, especially if it’s not. Sophie Raseman—who I met in the DMs of this blog—writes a Substack called American Childhood, “a syllabus for making childhood more interesting.” A great proposition. She’s a one woman knowledge clearing house.

If you are raising children or like arcane stuff, I can’t recommend her Substack enough.

• “What math curriculum should our tutor use?” Also, the best math picture books and math puzzles for toddlers and iPad math games.

• Read about her quest to find “tiny items that can cast an enduring spell for my little ones.”

• What was the American Girl doll company?

• Books for newborns.

• She also alerted me to this article, “The Behavioral Economics of Christmas.”

For us, she’s written about a crossover adult-child topic: solutions to the danger of plastics!! May we all be inspired…

Nontoxic Tableware and Food Storage

If you’re naturally inclined to purity per se, it becomes necessary to reality-test concerns with people who are both better informed and less prone to going overboard. That’s what I did when I was a new mom whose nervous system was aroused by the “nontoxic” parenting whisper network. I wrote to my practically-minded friend D., a microeconomist married to a biologist, to see what they’d done for their son. They told me that based on the existing scientific literature, it was unfortunately worth getting rid of the plastic. Especially anything that would be heated and touch food. At the time, finding non-plastic options for kids was a chore. And despite the crossover of antiplastic ambitions—from hippies and paranoids to civilians—it remains a chore! So here’s the list of things that have worked best over the years.

Eating at School

1. Lunchbox. In this PlanetBox “Rover” bento-style lunchbox, only stainless steel touches the food. In my kid’s East Bay transitional kindergarten class last year, nearly all of the kids had these. (It used to be that all the fancy bento boxes you’d see on the Bay Area playgrounds were plastic, and my kids were the lone toddlers sagging under the weight of all that steel.)

1. Water bottle. Wouldn’t it be nice if all kids went to those progressive schools where two year-olds are taught to serve each other water in glass cups? Not the world we live in! So, these PlanetBox foldaway-straw water bottles are it. Of water bottles that can actually be operated by small fingers, these are the least likely to leak. Still, no non-plastic water bottle will ever be as miraculous as a plastic one, and certainly not as good as teaching your kid to be patient.

2. Portable Tupperware-style food storage. You need such a thing for yogurt or anything with similar viscoelastic properties. We’ve landed on the PlanetBox round and sandwich-shaped containers with metal bases and silicone lids. (These also are the exact height to fit inside the Rover lunchbox I mentioned above.) They work, but they don’t feel like end-game. I’d like to see more places try small latch-style all-stainless versions of portable Tupperware.

3. Insulated container. You’ll need this for lunches that need to stay hot or cold or things less viscous than yogurt. (At a certain age, a kid learns to exert pressure to ban room temp leftovers.) LunchBots makes one that only has stainless steel touching the food. Outer parts and elements of the screw-top of the LunchBots thermos are plastic, however. PlanetBox makes a stainless and silicone thermos, but I’ve found it unpleasant to use the metal-on-metal threaded fastener.

4. Tupperware-style food storage for fridge or freezer. Almost all “glass” food storage has some other material in the lid; it’s usually plastic but sometimes it’s plastic-coated metal. The agita as one watches the water vapor condense on the plastic ceiling above a cooling marinara! This Pyrex Ultimate no-plastic set from Costco was for a while the only functional glass-lid set I could find; it also has an impressively secure seal. PlanetBox has a dupe as of this year. (Ikea has some options that open a bit too easily to be freezer-capable.)

5. Latch-lid food storage. Latch-lid food containers often have glass bases and lids (gaskets are silicone). Ikea carries them for cheap (some under the Korken series). Maybe you can use them for things that would otherwise call for a Tupperware; I find their taller, smaller-based shapes less useful.

1. Utensils. Munchkin makes an all-stainless steel fork, knife, and spoon set engraved with your kid’s name. Either that or slowly lose all your teaspoons and salad forks packed in their lunches.

Eating-at-Home Babies

1. Baby bottles. Glass bottoms and silicone tops are now widely available. We used the Life Factory ones with the silicone sleeve.

2. Sippy Cups. I really, really didn’t want to give up that Munchkin Miracle sippy cup design that was everywhere over a decade ago. The best option I could find was the Pura system, which makes plastic-free sippy cups that mostly work. (You can change out the tops and use them for big kids or adults later, which we still use.)

3. Dinnerware. It seems too much like tempting fate to throw out plastic plates and bowls just to adopt so-called food grade silicone, particularly in a world where labeling, advertising claims, manufacturing, and supply chain are not closely regulated and supervised. Beaba now makes tempered glass bowls that suction onto the table or high chair tray that are entirely manufactured in France. I wish these had existed in our baby days! (We used the popular bamboo plate suction brand.)

Eating-at-Home Toddlers (and Up)

1. Cups. Duralex’s tempered glass Picardie tumblers will break less easily than regular glass cups and create less dangerous pieces when they do. (Think shimmering nuggets of a shattered car window.) They come in a range of small sizes so you can tailor to toddlers and later school age kids.

2. Dinnerware. Corelle makes dinnerware in Corning, New York (check if the line you want is made domestically). My favorite are this plain glass type I associate with houses that had their last kitchen upgrade in the 1970s. The durable glass allows them to be thin and light, but also strong and cheap. Their thinness also makes them efficient for cabinets and dishwashers. I recommend Winter Frost White because it scatters blue light like skimmed milk. Corelle also makes many different sizes and shapes so you can exert fine-grained control over your food service schemes.

If you’re not about to jump on Reddit and build your own yarn wall for this stuff, there are some reasonable heuristics. Buy better-understood materials like tempered glass, stainless steel, or cast iron. And buy things from sellers who have something to lose and long track records. A shortcut for that would be larger companies headquartered and manufacturing in jurisdictions known for stringent regulations by global standards, like the nordics.

Our kids require some cajoling to ensure they get 30 minutes of human-instructor-designed piano practice every day. But they lobby to practice using the app Simply Piano all the time, and can easily spend an hour or more at it a day.

The app breaks down songs into small bits they can master, and the app is able to provide immediate feedback on note and timing accuracy. On timing, it seems to evaluate the timing of the start of the note, but not the duration. Accuracy is best if you have a digital piano and use a midi cable. (Such a cable is about $10; here’s one, but check which connection types you need.)

The highlight for our kids is the Simple Piano library of songs they can train on—from Für Elise to the kids’ favorite Shakira song.

There are some other fun single-purpose music apps to play around with out there, thought we find it hard to make any daily commitments to multiple small tools. The kids like Tone for pitch recognition practice. And Chet is an ear training app where you identify notes from iconic moments of popular songs.

When printing out sheet music became tiresome, I got MuseScore, which has a nicely designed iPad sheet music library. It also makes it easy for kids search on their own for artists and titles. They have a LOT of K-Pop Demon Hunters options, from simplified versions to full-on. By the way, if your home has also been taken over by K-Pop Demon Hunters, your children may enjoy the episode The music theory behind K Pop Demon Hunters’ chart dominance from the podcast Switched on Pop. Our kids are one their fifth or sixth re-listen.

As an aside, if you like things to be beautiful in more than one way, you may enjoy acquiring the vintage Piano Promenade series from the Yamaha Foundation for your piano beginner. One of our piano teachers just gave us one and we fell in love with the rich illustrations. The books come with recordings on vinyl for children to hear as well as read.

Changes afoot at DuoLingo math

I’ve written a number of times about math education resources on this site. If you search the word “math” on the American Childhood main page you will find them all.

But it’s been a few years since some of those posts were written, and I thought I’d give you an update on DuoLingo, which, along with the Beast Academy curriculum, is the math tool we’ve most used in the past year.

One thing that happened in the last six months or so is that my kids had finished all the curriculum there was to do on the DuoLingo math course. (They still benefited from the feature called “Daily Refresh,” which cycled through topics each day to prevent skills from evaporating.)

Up until this fall, there was only vague information about the way the DuoLingo math curriculum related to typical school math. It had some elements of middle school math, such as working with exponents and algebraic expressions.

Starting last month, however, DuoLingo started rolling out changes, unaccompanied by any detailed communication to users. Up until this point, the course divided into vague “beginner”1 and “intermediate”2 tracks. (This also made it hard to explain to teachers what subject matter our kids had already covered at home.) Now the content is structured by grade levels, up through 9th grade.

They also added more advanced content, such as graphing quadratic functions and geometric sequences. They also continue to find clever ways to use the touch interface to allow the user to explore mathematical concepts, which is why I fell in love with the app originally.

As I’ve written, I think UX innovation is a overlooked area for reducing barriers to making highly accelerated math accessible to young children (at least, neglected by mainstream educators). For example, in the graph below, the user is invited to move the points where y = 0 to match the expression, and observe how the shape of the curve changes.

DuoLingo has said publicly they will be adding calculus as well. We’re getting closer to a world where calculus in kindergarten can be accessible for those who are ready!

I find doing Halloween without inviting more plastic into your home is easier if you convince your child to be a character from a book with a low-fantasy, post-WWII setting. For example: Our daughter’s years dressing up as the heroines of Matilda, The Worst Witch, and Kiki’s Delivery Service have all involved clothing we already owned. (A 100% organic cotton, Canadian-made Mini Mioche play dress in solid navy or black will suit many characters.)

If you have to buy something, it’s nice to buy something that will be in the dress-up basket for a long time. Sebastopol-based Sarah’s Silks specializes in organic Waldorf toys, notably “play silks”—light-as-air squares of color that allow kids to use their imaginations.

I think of play silks as the quintessential open-ended Waldorf toy; but in researching this piece I found it was in fact Sarah’s Silks founder Sarah Lee who formalized the category and her husband Mike Lee who coined the term. A former peace corps nurse-midwife, Sarah started the company over 30 years ago as a side business during her stay-at-home mom years, and still runs it. She has said her product team is made up of Waldorf-educated or homeschooled kids.

Both Sarah’s grown sons and their fiancés/wives are now in the family business, somewhat miraculously. And, based on their Instagram presences, both sons Josh (marketing) and Morgan (CFO) are also talented acrobats… perhaps a natural consequence of the NorCal Waldorf terroir.

Every dress-up basket needs a crown and wings—and many Halloween concepts can be built on those props alone. (Our son dressed up multiple times as a “King Dragonfly.”) Sarah’s Silks will cover you for, too. We have the starry night crown and the rainbow fairy wings.

I have a soft spot for children’s clothing lines that blur the line between fashion and costumes. Tutu du Monde is such a company, founded in 2009 Australia by Andrea Rembeck, a mom so let down by the world’s tutu offerings for her daughter that she was forced to start her own beaded tulle empire.

Rembeck explicitly makes Halloween costumes, but really her entire take on ethereal femininity has a gothic quality to it. Not to mention that the styling of their child models in their best collections shares more than a little in common with Kirsten Dunst at age eleven playing a 100-year old vampire. (The celebrities who put their kids in these clothes don’t seem to lean into the dark edge.)

I cannot tell you that these clothes are made of organic, natural fibers. What I can tell you is to me, that they are a go-to for sparkle-forward capes, as well as skull caps and head wraps (like this one). Skull caps are truly a neglected category in childrenswear.

Mini Rodini is our favorite for big kid clothes made with organic, natural fibers. If you’re a parent of big kids, you probably already known that after toddler sizes, organic clothes are very hard to come by. Essentially post-5T, kids walk the plank into a sea of pesticides and petrochemicals.

Luckily, Mini Rodini also embraces the idea that every day is dress-up when you’re a kid. Their collections run to the playful but not cutesie. The brand has a thing for hand-drawn animal illustrations and left-field sources of inspiration.

After perusing their site, It may not surprise you to learn that founder Cassandra Rhodin began her career as a fashion illustrator and was born into a important Swedish circus family. (Don’t worry, that circus no longer employs animals.)

To give you a sense of just how niche their inspiration can be: We have a half dozen items we love from the Agatha Christie collection. I now have my eye on the Björn Borg collection. I love that no corporate overlords are there to kill an idea like kid-parent matching shirts repping Françoise Sagan’s Bonjour Tristesse.

I asked American Childhood’s official Swedish-mom-at-large O. about Mini Rodini. She said they are the “it” brand on playground. Incidentally, she also reminded me that Swedish outerwear experts Polarn O. Pyret actually sells their own items secondhand in their stores to reduce waste, which helps Swedes accept the idea of buying potentially showy clothing. (We love these warm, waterproof coats for NorCal winter rainy season.)

And no dress-up-every-day discussion could be complete with a discussion with the Danish surrealists at Wauw Kapow. I’ve mentioned the Danish brand in the plastic-free soft toy tips I gave to Kaitlin Phillip’s Gift Guide, in the context of seeking out a child’s Björk swan dress costume. (Etsy swan dress option here.) Swans are a perennial favorite here at American Childhood, where both E. B. White and Björk reign eternal; so it was Wauw Kapow’s two-piece swan harness that got us hooked on the brand initially.

But also, what about Alice in Wonderland and her flamingo croquet mallet as a group costume for siblings who are bound to devolve into a wrestling match anyway?

And, finally, Björk and Marlene.

This installment is on stuffed animals and dolls made with all-natural, organic materials. I contributed another piece on plastic-free foodware for kids that I’ll repost later.

Gift Guide is run by the renaissance woman Kaitlin Phillips, who—besides running the best Substack—is a writer, publicist, and friendship expert. I would also call her a leading American humorist and the premier pop-ethnographer of a certain sphere of New York (and now Connecticut!) life.

I think of Gift Guide as akin to the original, context-rich 1980s American Girl catalog, but centered on millennial women who respect material culture. Here is how Kaitlin describes the blog:

Now I write gift guides. It’s my hobby. I published my first gift guide on November 24th, 2020, for Spike (a German art magazine). I didn’t like being edited, so I started to publish them on Google docs. You can read an old Google doc gift guide here. Emily Sundberg interviewed me about it here. Air Mail published excerpts from my Gift Guides here & here. Past contributors to my Gift Guides include Lorde, Cecily Brown, Ina Garten, George Condo, Daphne Merkin, Merve Emre, Jamaica Kinkaid, Lauren Oyler, Francine Prose, Alison Roman, Susan Orlean, Emma Cline, Susan Miller, Olivia Nuzzi, Nell Zink, David Rimanelli, Jane Adams (the great American actress), Moira Hodgson, Richard Hell’s lover, etc. A typical recommendation from me: the best real estate agent in Litchfield County, plastic tick removers (stocking stuffers!), and the artwork of the elusive Contessa di Alicudi Schifanoja i.e. Roberto Longo. Not to be confused with Robert Longo.

That being said, I think Gift Guide, the publication, isn’t a series of trendy holiday-oriented gift guides. I’ll leave that to the magazines. It’s something a bit more discursive and fun. How better to put this? I’m not writing think pieces, I’m linking to things.

Gift Guide is paywalled, so you can check out some of Kaitlin’s writing through her links here. If you want to try it, I’ll give the first ten people who ask a free month. (It won’t be my first time giving this Substack as a gift!)

Gift Guide also runs book clubs both online and IRL. Without Gift Guide I wouldn’t have read Fanny Howe’s novels, which made excellent, mind-bending summer break counter programming. Join now to read Vita Sackville-West, who certainly deserves being considered properly after being used so often merely to spice up Virginia Woolf scholarship! (Start with the secret memoirs that Vita’s son later published with annotations.)

***

From Gift Guide: The only safe all-natural soft toy brands that are also CHARMING!

Swan costumes.

Sophie Raseman is my favorite “parenting” Substacker, and a genius-woman who has worn many hats. (She “spent seven years in the U.S. Treasury Department under Obama and served on the advisory board of the U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.”) Here at Gift Guide, she is our anti-plastic correspondent. You may remember her extremely popular guide to non-toxic tableware.

I’ve asked her to write us a Gift Guide to Safe Toys. There’s nothing like giving child a stuffed giraffe or owl or octopus—but have you ever wondered if it was stuffed with plastic?? I’m going to be honest: No. I have not. I don’t think about things like that. But this is why it’s so much fun being friends with Sophie. (As a general aside, my favorite gift for children who can speak are finger puppets. It’s so fun to “put on a play.” I have no idea if these have plastic in them and I’m afraid to read the fine print. She recommends some hand puppets below. Best to buy those.)

There are domains where giving up plastic is a sacrifice. Soft toys should not be one of them. Here are some toymakers trying to help out parents on an antiplastic program.

First, a note: Some brands market their natural outer materials but fill the toys with synthetics. Unless a brand tells me exactly what their filling is on the website, I assume it’s plastic. Also: Cost isn’t a good indicator of natural materials for toys, as it is with say, sheets. (Sort of like how brands will flog a $500 girl’s “occasion” dress that’s 100% polyester.) I can only guess that when Pepa says their $315 (lovely) alpaca sheep stuffie is filled with “part-pellet,” they mean plastic?

Some examples of brands whose soft toys are made of plastic or filled with plastic: Jellycat, Maileg, Blabla, Steiff, Hansa. We have things from these brands we won’t be giving up for sentimental reasons, but I wish they’d move to fully organic, natural fibers. Maileg I will continue to buy for things the little ones won’t sleep with (the mouse dollhouse line).

My favorite all-natural soft toys brand at the moment is Senger, founded forty years ago by the German couple Volker and Sabine Senger. Everything is sourced, hand-woven, and tailored in Germany or other European countries. Senger’s cuddly and floppy lines and hand puppets stand out.

Before the Sengers started the toy business, Volker Senger published a comic magazine and Sabine Senger sold children’s books. Perhaps that explains why the copy on their website is so memorable:

Not only on the outside but also on the inside, [Volker Senger’s] animals are completely “green.” The floppy and cuddly toys, for example, which nestle softly into the hands of older children, have their round bellies stuffed with sheep’s wool. “We buy it from roaming shepherds whose flocks graze on the Eifel meadows and keep the Rhine dikes trimmed as neatly as a golf course.” The pink plush pig, for example, lazily sprawled on its belly, has its tummy padded with rustling spelt chaff. Its little brother, on the other hand, has a belly full of cherry stones. Both can be warmed up and placed on children’s tummies for comfort.

A belly full of cherry stones! I had given up hope that warming-pad toys could be anything but toxic; I shouldn’t have counted out German forest-lovers who inherited a small scale textile workshop.

I appreciate in particular how Senger obsesses over the weight and drape of the toys. How disappointing when a stuffie refuses to melt into one’s embrace. Among the most huggable friends from Senger is the giant white goose (organic cotton with lambswool fill). It comes in a large and small size to play mama and baby.

Senger also makes a goose-shaped beanbag chair in soft organic cotton, filled with wool and spelt. It’s $349. Not so far outside the range of “luxury” baby loungers that are simply sacks of plastic.

One wonders how much longer the Senger brand will be around with the current standards. The Sengers said publicly that they are retired but still hands-on. The brand is now owned by Toynamics, whose other brands mostly use plastic. I’d say buy the legacy Senger pieces while the founders are still involved.

I found my other favorite natural toys when searching for a nontoxic stuffed swan for a Björk swan dress costume. Swans are not as popular as they should be in the stuffie world. (Here’s a child’s swan dress costume on Etsy if you’re interested.) The Dutch brand, Kaplum, is run by Anna van Gerve and Alper Demir, who are designers and parents.

Incidentally, if you love swans for dressing up toddlers, as I do, Wauw Capow (FKA Bang Bang Copenhagen) is a Danish children’s clothing line with a thing for these elegant birds. The brand isn’t non-plastic, but I have made exceptions for them over the years after this swan harness two-piece whispered to me in Icelandic. Incidentally, the Marjan Pejoski Fall 2001 ready-to-wear collection from which Björk selected her swan dress was inspired by carousel animals.

For the classic baby-doll-without-plastic, we can head back over to Germany, the birthplace of the Waldorf school. (It was for the children of cigarette factory workers.) Bella Freud recently complained to The New Yorker about rigid Waldorf rules—it sounds like she’s joking but they really do prefer no corners! Still, we do have Waldorf militancy to thank for keeping the market alive for dolls in all-natural materials. Thus the company Nanchen has been able to keep its handmade, hand-painted doll wholesale business alive and independent in Germany since 1983. Nanchen was also started by a couple, though for over a decade they have been owned by two women who describe themselves as school friends, designers, and moms.

Nanchen doesn’t sell direct. In the U.S., I’d recommend buying Nanchen through The Wooden Wagon, because the site was founded by an obsessive stay-at-home-dad with excellent taste in toys. (Here are the other online retailers Nanchen works with.) I wrote on my Substack American Childhood about beautiful wooden math toys from The Wooden Wagon in case you’re interested. Something to know about Waldorf dolls is their minimalist, neutral faces are a part of the Waldorf attempt to give children more scope the imagination, which may help you if you find them overly precious at first glance.

You can browse Nanchen’s catalog to find what you like and then Google to find which retailer shipping to you carries that item. For older kids I recommend the dress-up dolls with mohair-yarn “wigs.” (Consider this flame-haired maiden for your Anne Shirley doll.) Nanchen offers a wide variety of outfits to give as future gifts, including gear to protect your new doll-grandchild from the inevitable North German “coastal wind.” For newborn gifts, I recommend this tiny charmer who can be tucked into his own music-box bed. It plays Mozart, natürlich.

Don’t forget Nanchen also offers a doll doctor service!

It’s always nice when small children put on a musical actually suited for them, rather than struggling through the likes of I Can Show You the World as their parents shift in their folding chairs.1

Maurice Sendak partnered with Carole King to bring us just such a musical: Really Rosie, a show about bored Brooklyn children staging a show under the (mostly) benign dictatorship of the most charismatic girl on the block.

Key numbers the children perform are drawn directly from the four stories in Sendak’s miniature Nutshell Library collection. The standout is the fable Pierre: A Cautionary Tale, in which the titular character is stuck in a kind of rebellion verging on nihilism (he can only say “I don’t care”). Eventually he chooses what could be termed suicide by lion.

Luckily, Pierre can be shaken free of the lion’s stomach. Unlike in the case of the biblical Jonah, who learns the lesson of obedience after surviving the whale, Pierre learns to care.

Pierre, detached and defiant to the point of being “pathologic” (Sendak’s words) is a foil to the character of Rosie, who cares a lot. Rosie, “the enchanted one,” is on a mission to bring wonder into this world of suffering. And it doesn’t hurt that this wonder will prove she is as glorious as she knows she was born to be.

Sendak himself thought quite a bit about brilliance, the power to “create a passion in other people,” and whether he had what it took.2 The show is a realist, but loving, portrait of a diva who had it.

Sendak has said Rosie was based on a girl living across the street whom he observed from his window as a teenager in the 1940s in his Brooklyn apartment. Recalling the tale to the Today Show’s Gene Shalit, he called the proto-Rosie the local “Fellini,” someone who had enough pizzazz to go around for everyone on her block, corralling them into performing. Sendak first brought the magnetic Rosie to life in a book, in The Sign on Rosie’s Door (1960). In the book, Rosie both performs and orchestrates the fun for the whole block.

The dedication to The sign on Rosie’s Door read:

Remembering Pearl Karchawer

All the Rosies

And Brooklyn

Sendak made friends with Pearl Parchawer as a child on a family vacation at a kosher Catskills hotel, of the mold made famous to girls in later generations by the movie Dirty Dancing (1987).3 The next year, Sendak received a letter that Parchawer had died at age 12.4 He called the event his initiation into the comprehension that children die; his personal “Anne Frank”—another exceptional mind.

Partnering with songwriting genius King, riding on post-Tapestry glory, was not only a coup—it also had a meta quality. King, like Sendak and the girl he based Rosie on, had been raised in the war years in Jewish Brooklyn, though a little later. Like Rosie, she’d also had her eye on stardom from a young age.

Sendak tended to describe himself as a child as plagued by anxiety; King, a former teen star, has described her younger self as “fearless.” She signed a record contract at age 16 (releasing “The Right Girl” as her first single in 1958) and began her career making other people giant hits as a teen. The first number #1 she wrote was The Shirelle’s “Will You Love Me Tomorrow,” when she was 19.

Rosie is also another of Sendak’s protagonists who are wild and transformed, like the wolf-suited Max of Where the Wild Things Are. In this case, Rosie dreams of her own thrilling escape (the number “Avenue P” conjures up Brooklyn as a jungle). But it’s not enough just to dream it; Rosie needs to make others feel it too—and she does.

The first version of the show (and best, in my opinion) is how it was born: As a short animated musical Sendak wrote and directed for CBS. The animation follows the templates set by Sendak’s charming illustrations. No suitable child singer could be found, so the story goes, so King wound up singing the full soundtrack—stroke of luck for us!

The only version that I can find of the tv special is the grainy recording from the TV on YouTube below.5 Children deserve a proper release of this work.

Later Sendak expanded the special into a stage musical that played off-Broadway. And is now available for Rosies-in-training at musical theater camps and impromptu front-stoop productions the world over.

A nice Hanukkah or any type of gift would be this deluxe homemade Really Rosie set:

• Screen the Really Rosie musical animated tv special

• Point them to the Really Rosie animated musical soundtrack on Spotify (or buy them physical media if you roll like that; this post has my CD and cassette player recommendations. The Really Rosie soundtrack vinyl album, all performed by Carole King, was reissued for the 50th Anniversary of the TV special this year. It did well impressively well on the Billboard charts on its initial release.)

• Buy these books:

  • The Sign on Rosie’s Door (1960).

  • The Nutshell Library (1962) containing the books Alligators All Around, Chicken Soup With Rice, One Was Johnny, and Pierre.

  • Maurice Sendak’s Really Rosie Starring the Nutshell Kids (a picture book version of the animated musical).

  • And if the gift recipient is a true theater kid, also get them the Really Rosie musical acting edition (I did).

Finally, Halloween season is here. Steal your mom’s red dress, grab a floppy straw hat, and don’t forget your boa!

//

Dedicated to our little divas

the unforgettable S.B., the “Rosie” of the 1990s Children’s Aid Society located at 219 Sullivan St. (fittingly, she directed us in rousing reenactments of crossing in steerage to the new world. She taught me the word “schmatta.”)

and all the Rosies, Anne Shirleys, Jo Marches, and other creative instigators.

Children lived in pre-history a few thousand years longer than adults—their fingerprints more apt to linger on the whitewash walls than the historical record.

So it was pleasing to recently discover the child-focused work of photojournalist Jill Krementz, who set herself to documenting children’s experiences in a series of books starting in the 1960s. I am writing about these books because now are mostly out of print, and in danger of fading even further into obscurity as the Gen X girls who grew up with the cult-classics among Krementz’s oeuvre age out of writing nostalgic posts online.

Krementz’s books can be divided into a few projects:

• Drawing the public’s attention the beauty and details of day to day life in overlooked cultural spaces, as she does Sweet Pea: A Black Girl Growing Up in the Rural South (1969).

• Providing insight into the everyday experience of children on the fast track in arts and athletics (A Very Young Dancer, which was followed by more “Very Young” books, including Rider, Gymnast, Circus Flyer, Skater, Skier, Musician, Gardener, and Actress).

• Giving the floor to children who have experienced difficulties from which society often averts its eyes (How It Feels When a Parent Dies, How It Feels to Be Adopted, How it Feels When Parents Divorce, How It Feels to Fight for Your Life).

Though I could not find detailed statements on her process, in each case of these books it seems Krementz embedded herself alongside her subject, for weeks or as long as a year. The narratives are written in the first person, giving the impression that they are condensed transcripts of ongoing interviews of the child subjects. I couldn’t find any statements from Krementz on what editing, or possible creative license, she allowed herself.

In other words, these books read nearly like raw interviews for ethnographic case studies. This might be why you hate them—or why you love them.

The same kind of child that adored the early The American Girl catalog’s crypto-scholarly discussion of girlhood culture may fall into the latter bucket. (I could not find evidence that Pleasant Rowland, born a year after Krementz, publicly stated having been influenced by Krementz’s books, but you one can see a connection—not least in the “Christmas” as unifying American cultural experience theme.)

Perhaps Krementz’s children’s work with the largest cultural footprint is A Very Young Dancer. Ballet was after all the hobby for girls in the late 20th century, inspiring more intensity than piano and Girl Scouts. Also, this book had a trump card: The ten year old it follows gets chosen to play Clara in the Nutcracker at Lincoln Center… by the gentleman she calls “Mr. Balanchine.”

Clive Barnes, a New York Times dance critic, raved about the book in his review of Dancer on December 26, 1976, pointing the book’s chief appeal to adults—the voice of its protagonist:

It is quite the best ballet book ever written for children, partly because it is not really a ballet book but a book daringly written in the first person about enchanting girl called Stephanie.

The Stephanie in question was lucky in ways that are apparent (though not in others, more on that below). And she is seen working harder at her hobby than most children ever do. But she is not what you would call… preternaturally focused.1

It’s the tension between Stephanie’s excitement and boredom, love of ballet and perhaps stronger love of ponies, dedication and minor acts of rebellion that give the book its juice. Not to mention that Krementz, like many artists, is invigorated by the visual opportunities backstage.

The book confronts the reader in its opening lines with Stephanie’s ambivalence:

I also appreciate that Krementz lets the sometimes-awkward content of the child mind simply sit on the page. Narrating what it was like to dance the scene in the Nutcracker where the Christmas tree grows huge, Stephanie recalls:

Tina [Stephanie’s best friend and fellow dancer in the scene] told me that she would smile at me if I was doing good and if I was bad she would frown. That afternoon she forgot to do anything, but I smiled at her.

Just the sort of plan two girls of that age would make (half-baked). And a typical amount of follow through (none).

Krementz’s children’s books are now nearly all out of print but widely available secondhand. A starter collection I’d recommend as a gift to a nine-year-old girl would be: Sweet Pea: A Black Girl Growing Up in the Rural South (1969); A Very Young Dancer (1976), A Very Young Rider (1977), and A Very Young Gymnast (1978). I also think children should read the How It Feels series with their parents, such as How It Feels to Fight for Your Life.

Some further context on these books

• Something to consider discussing with your child before they read the book if they have access to Google: Stephanie Selby, the subject of A Very Young Dancer, had depression and died at 56, due to complications from an attempt to take her own life. She has also spoken about struggling under the shadow cast by her early fame, fueled by the book. Stephanie was profiled in The New York Times in 2011. The Times also ran her obituary.

• (The Times writer of the Stephanie Selby profile had a daughter also went to SAB like Selby. That daughter, Paulina Jamieson took behind the scenes photographs of ballet dancers as a teen and continues to make art.)

• The Very Young books inspired both love and hate at the time, as flattering stories of lucky people or high-achieving children often do. As for the love side: The internet is thick with post of women reminiscing about their attachment to these real life idols from the Very Young as children. “Where is the girl from A Very Young _”-style searches will yield ample reading. The gymnast (Torrance York) grew up to a be photographer and speaks out about living and making art with Parkinson’s. The rider, Vivi, grew up, too; her mother, Vivien, is still in the horse world.

• And then there’s the hate side for the Very Young books. The hostility centered on certain elements of the girls’ luck (physical, financial) making for unhealthy idols, or questioning the wisdom of saddling young children with fame. Eden Ross Lipson wrote a doozy of a pan of A Very Young Gymnast in The New York Times that felt personal enough on its attack of the subject that her girlfriends from the gymnast’s private school (Spence?) wrote a letter, noting: “Miss Lipson pretends to be writing this review out of consideration for the feelings of children, but the review itself is cruel to one particular child who is a good friend and a nice person.” It’s worth reading both the review and the letter, along with Lipson’s response.

• In 1969, Charlayne Hunter of The New York Times reviewed Sweet Pea: A Black Girl Growing Up in the Rural South. Hunter objected to the book vigorously on the grounds that the girl seemed too happy, leading to potential misinterpretation that would undermine the case for improving conditions in the rural black south. “[O]ne never really gets a feeling of just how horrid the whole existence is,” wrote the reviewer. I wonder if Sweet Pea then, or Sweet Pea once grown, would agree with the reviewer? I couldn’t find articles about how Sweet Pea’s life unfolded, though it’s been written she stayed friends with Jill Krementz and she did visit NYC with her family on the book’s publication. She calls NYC “wonderful” (one gets the sense in Krementz’s book that Sweet Pea may be a born diplomat). But the reporter catches Sweet Pea with what they take as a “wistful” glance to her mother while stating she doesn’t mind sleeping in her own bed (instead of sharing like she does back home).

• Another New York Christmas connection: The late Stephanie Selby, who played Clara in the Nutcracker in Dancer, was granddaughter to the heiress and artist Lina Hines Howard, who donated her collection of 18th century Neapolitan crèche figures to Metropolitan Museum of Art. Decorating that tree at the Met was a family tradition. In 2014 the Met discontinued the practice of letting the family have a family’s hands-on role in arranging the display, over the family’s protests. Linn Selby collaborated on a lovely book on Christmas display, presenting the scenes alongside biblical passages, as well as a discussion of the art history context. It which would make a nice Christmas present. (It’s out of print; find The Angel Tree used here.)

• Stephanie Selby’s elder sister Andrea (also pictured in Dancer, and a fellow student at the School of American Ballet) does live sketches of events. You can hire her to sketch your event.

Further reading by and about Jill Krementz.

• Krementz’s output as a photojournalist and portrait photographer was extensive. I especially enjoy her writer’s portraits, collected in the now out-of-print books The Writer’s Image: Literary Portraits and The Writer’s Desk, among other places.

• Now in her mid-eighties, Jill Krementz is contributing content to the The York Social Diary. Some of her pieces are annotated discussions of her extensive photo archives. I love this one, portraits of notable 20th century figures in their kitchens: Jill Krementz Photo Journal: Kitchens — The Room Where It Happens.

• Jill has been subject of writers and photographers as well. The New York Times Style section ran a piece on her in 1982, Jill Krementz Carves a Niche. The reporter accuses her being part of the city’s most glamorous literary couple. Krementz mentions wanting children and having had a miscarriage—a taboo-breaking, very Krementz insertion in what could otherwise be a pretty cookie-cutter piece.

• Krementz and Vonnegut adopted a daughter around that time, Lily Vonnegut. Lily’s younger son was in treatment for years for childhood leukemia. Recently, Vonnegut posted a quite remarkable short memoir written by her 11 year old son Jack about the wrenching experience of having a chronically ill younger sibling. Read it somewhere you can cry. One feels the resonance with Krementz’s dedication to spotlighting experiences that society often shies away from in books like How It Feels to Fight for Your Life. Lily Vonnegut celebrated her younger son’s end of cancer treatment in 2024. Jill Krementz documented her grandchildren’s trip last year to New York on The New York Social diary. (Containing the caption: “Kids love posing and the grownups love taking photographs.”)

• Finally, in 1985 Jill shared with The New York Times an eccentric approach tofashion that I associate with Jeff Goldblum’s character in The Fly (as a child with horror, and later with admiration). Some of us live this way:

Its true that some people consider them strange, even eccentric. But they don’t care. Their position is that if other people want to run around constantly searching and shopping, let them. They know better. When they see something they like, they not only grab it, they grab them. They are the men and women who buy in quantity when they find a style they like.

…. “You’re talking to Miss Multiple,’‘ said Jill Krementz, the photographer and author, who is married to another writer, Kurt Vonnegut.

‘“When it’s comfortable, and it suits me, why not?” she said. ‘’It saves a lot of time.’‘

Miss Krementz’s working uniform is loose coveralls, which she wears with a blouse and tie shoes. The coveralls are made by Laura Ashley and she has 14 [Ed. ] pairs in the same style, in different colors and varying fabrics from corduroy and cotton to chintz. The five blouses she wears with them are identical, as are her four pairs of working shoes. Other duplicates in her wardrobe include a Norma Kamali turtleneck dress, in white, green, olive and black.

“I buy everything in quantity,” she said. “When I find a lipstick color I like, I buy six of them, for the bathroom, my handbag, the summer house, my camera case and I can’t remember where else, but I use them all.” (emphasis added).

And, finally, keep the summer energy going a little longer with Krementz’s annotated photo archives of Long Island summers past.

My go-to recommendation is always hanging prints from favorite children’s books or adding ledges for front-facing books, but those would be personal and come over time.

Beyond that, I consider art made with paper particularly compelling to little ones. (As a child I was bewitched by a set of impossibly delicate paper cut fish my mother picked up in Chinatown. I was allowed to take them out for inspection only rarely.)

• The Ukrainian artist Daria Alyoshkina takes custom orders for her folk-inspired paper cuts, which can be used as window treatments. (Examples of her custom work here.)

• Paper art traditions are found in many cultures, but I like the over the top look favored in certain parts of Poland. An entry point to this could be a pajak (pa-yonk), a paper-and-straw chandelier named after their spidery look.

  

  

• Back when I wrote the miniatures post I found the British artist Su Blackwell, who carves tiny, magical scenes out of the pages of books. You can buy prints of her work. She also illustrates books with her scenes: The Fairy-Tale Princess (retelling classic tales) and Into the Dark Woods (same idea, but more of an art book). I especially like her book that transforms into a working puppet theater. In case you’re looking, Blackwell does set design, installations in private residences, and Christmas windows.

• The San Francisco artist Tiffanie Turner makes oversized flowers for that Alice in Wonderland inverted-world feeling. Alternatively, for less than tens of thousands of dollars, you can make your own rather large flowers. (Buying online is tough, as one flower artist’s Icelandic poppy tends to look very much like another’s; but here’s a thoughtful South African paper artist that looks promising. My favorite American paper florist Kate Croghan Alarcón has gone on what seems to be a long hiatus but has a how-to book.) For our DIYers: At a certain level of accomplishment in the floral arts you get to collaborate on your own color line with a high end Italian crepe paper manufacturer. Cartotecnica Rossi (est. 1878) has Alarcón’s color palette in lovely pinks and greens.

• And, finally, Hans Christian Anderson had a lifelong sideline in freehand papercutting. One move he had was to work the paper with giant scissors while he told a story to an audience, and then to unveil the finished paper cut at the end as a sort of magic trick. His paper cuts occasionally come up at auction; while we wait, there’s also a quite thorough 1994 book.