What we’re reading today:
1. Dave Eggers interviews legendary children’s author and illustrator Maurice Sendak in August’s Vanity Fair. Why is he writing again, now that he’s 83? Giuseppe Verdi. “His glory was in his 80s,” Sendak says. “A new librettist, Arrigo Boito, came into his life, and he said, ‘Look, Verdi, you can compose better than you’ve done.’”
2. Thomas the Tank Engine is nostalgia for British Imperialism. Says Slate’s Jessica Roake, “The exhausted parent critic sits with a train-obsessed child and the TV. I’m overeducated and understimulated, with shelves full of long-ignored critical-theory books, trained in the reading of “texts” through Marxist, feminist, and postmodern perspectives. It’s no wonder that the dormant critical theorist within me awakens when faced with the coded wonderland of children’s programming.”
3. Had/having any trouble breastfeeding? Commiserate here.
