I’m a big fan of Larry Gonick’s Cartoon guides for this. His Cartoon History of the Universe books are really entertaining (probably too simplified for people who have deep knowledge, but their aimed at a History Channel audience, which is fine). His Cartoon Guide to Statistics really helped me when I had a stats…

I’ve just started my 8-year-old on the Asterix comics. Not super historically accurate, but really funny, and he loves them. I’m thinking in a year or two he may be ready for some more fact-based cartoon histories.

Reminds me of Sarah Dunant’s novel Sacred Hearts: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6060130-sacred-hearts

This sounds like what Obama tried to do (albeit imperfectly) with the Affordable Care Act. The corporate right convinced the ignorant right that it was a terrible, terrible thing, and they fell for it. Reagan sold them the same schtick with his “welfare queens” myth. Low-information right-wing voters often vote…

I think it’s fair to say that Anne’s sexuality (and L.M. Montgomery’s) is a little ambiguous. If you read the biography by Mary Rubio, there’s some messed-up Victorian stuff going on here. Of course there was compulsory heterosexuality - it was early 20th-century English Canada, for Pete’s sake. But the whole notion…

“The new president’s allies say he has been surprised that government can’t be run like his business.” Leaving aside the question of whether Trump is really a successful businessman, this is the logical endpoint to the right-wing mantra that governments should be run like business. They aren’t businesses, and they…

You must be thinking of the wall we’re planning to build here in Canada.

As a librarian, I have to say that’s the best use of a book truck I’ve seen in some time.

As I Canadian, I would like to criticize Tilda Swinton’s participation in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe movie - in real life, getting lost in the wilderness in winter while wearing only your indoor clothes tends to be fatal, and there are documented cases of children dying of hypothermia in just these…

My boys have Rosie and talking Emily among their Thomas trains. My oldest son asked me why his Thomas sheet set had Percy and James, but not Emily. As a librarian mom, I make sure to include story books with female protagonists in their reading repertoire, so they grow up with the idea that girls are “main characters”…

As a Canadian, all I can say is that Trump’s wall idea has real merit, he’s just putting on the wrong border. We need to keep American guns out of this country.

White males are always the ones fulminating against affirmative action quotas because, y’know, people should be chosen based on MERIT. So I’m sure they would totally vote for a ticket with two meritorious, non-white-male candidates - amirite?

Maybe parents became more aware that Saturday morning cartoons had become a vehicle for marketing not only toys and crappy cereal to kids, but more problematic things as well. That Sea World one is an epic example. Sea World is a horrible organization and I would literally rather traumatize my 6-year-old with a…

Just rewatched the original Ghostbusters for the first time in decades, and had a similar feeling watching Bill Murray get all smarmy with his research subject in the early part of the movie. He tells her he’d like to run some more tests on her, and that she should come back to his creepy basement lab at 8:00 that…