The Genius of Judy: How Judy Blume Rewrote Childhood for All of Us

Weeding is about unshelving titles that have been rendered irrelevant by the culture. Banning is about cutting off access to books that are contributing to current cultural conversations in the hopes that these conversations will stop.)

Lois Lenski,

Critical Race Theory,

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“Margo would never voluntarily live with such an angry, critical person. Never. But when it was your own child you had no choice.”

(This is still a thing! Librarian Lauren Harrison said when elementary schoolers check Superfudge out of the library, she taps out a quick email to the parents warning them that “there’s a whole chapter that blows up Santa Claus.”)

Unlike Blume, Klein mostly found the whole thing amusing. In the summer of 1982, Publishers Weekly came out with a list of the most banned writers in America, which included Solzhenitsyn, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, and D. H. Lawrence. “Judy Blume and I were the only women writers on the list, as well as the only authors of books for childr

If Judy Blume was the Pied Piper, as the Christian Science Monitor wrote, then the Reagan administration and its champions were trying to barricade the gates to Hamelin. But they didn’t account for the fact that making a big show of locking her out only amplified her music.

Dating back to the nineteenth century, Secular Humanism hinged on the notion that humans are capable of behaving morally without the scaffold of religious or theistic dogma.