Truly, the person who compared this to Larry Nassar’s systematic abuse of girls and women needs to get a hold of themselves. That they thought one very successful woman’s bruised ego was equivalent to the pain caused to tens of women who were sexually assaulted multiple times is incredibly insulting to his victims. 

It’s not about censoring one book, it’s about choosing a *better* book for a program with very limited spots and resources. If you’re choosing one book for the entire incoming student body to read, you want it to be a good one, right? If you’re selecting a book to win the Turner Prize, you want it to be a good one.

“in order to defend the idea that teenage girls don’t have to respect the canon, i must brutalise any teenage girl who respects the canon” is an infuriatingly familiar formulation. The problem is adults shitting on teenage girls, not what any given set of teenage girls are doing - but it has happened in feminism…

She didn’t join the committee to prevent anyone from being exposed to it, she joined the committee because she didn’t think that Dessen’s work, which was apparently under consideration, was up to the standards of what the program was supposed to be. How is that an issue that she had a particularly strong opinion about…

“The issue here is that what she did went well beyond “not liking the book””

I was particularly disturbed by Dessen’s tweets about how this one young woman’s opinion was ‘mean and cruel’ and had ruined her day. It seems this 50 year old woman has less emotional maturity than the 15 year old kids she writes about.

The problem with this is the power difference. Bestselling, millionaire authors with large fan bases are attacking an unknown college student and pretending the criticism actually hurts them in any real way. It doesn’t.

That’s much more likely to happen if the policies being put forth be Warren DON’T happen. If they won’t play fair, the rules of the game will change and it won’t end well for them. And that is not a threat, just a statement of a historical truth.

Oh these comments (and Picoult’s tweets) are comedy gold. The over-the-top mental gymnastics required to turn criticism of one female author into MISOGYNY is downright comedic. It requires the same level of intellectual dishonesty I’d expect of Breitbart commenters.

It’s both the carrot and the stick that drives capitalism. I’m not a believer in absolute evil, but if you were to try and isolate the common root causes of global warming, wealth inequality, political partisanship, the concept that money now must be more money later is at the top of the list. 

Yep. Seems like there is a lot of drama surrounded YA and a lot of extremely tedious people involved in writing it, critiquing it, promoting it, making embarrassing-to-witness apologies when they do it wrong. I just wish the whole YA thing would go away a little bit. 

You’d think that people who are good enough at making money to become billionaires would understand that. But instead they’re all pissing their pants. I think they’re not so much afraid of Warren as they’re afraid of what it’ll mean if Warren wins the nomination. Maybe they’re afraid the crowds of dirty poor people…

Please keep posting this comment. I found it informative the first time (not understanding money stuff well), and it just keeps being relevant. I mean, rich white guys are gonna rich white guy no matter what the effects of Warren’s tax, but breaking down just HOW ridiculous their tears are is important.

Once again, it needs to be pointed out that in the real world, there is one and only one superpower: compound interest.

If the argument is that she (and they) thought it was important because it’s a pervasive issue that women’s writing isn’t taken seriously enough (which might be a fair point), surely there’s a bigger example of that discrimination than a common read book at a college smaller than many high schools in one of the least…

But is it cinema?

Saying that you don’t like a female writers work does not equal misogyny. It just means you don’t like that writers work. 

Well I for one am shocked that Jennifer Weiner would overreact and then play the victim rather than actually defending the substance of something. 

I’m with the student. YA books are fine, and I don’t care if other adults like them, but I applaud college students seeking more challenging material. Caveat: I have never read (or heard of) Dessen before this, so I don’t know if she’s actually YA.

Why would anyone care which books Northern State University choose for Common Read? Undergraduate enrollment is 1500 and it’s in freaking South Dakota. I get that it sucks when someone hates on your shit, but this seems like a dumb thing to make a stand on.