KJ: I want to second your point about the problem with creating “rating systems” for teen and preteen books. I was never a fan of TV ratings (though recent episodes of Gossip Girl may have led me to reverse my position!), but I’m really not a fan of book rating. As you astutely point out, reading graphic language is not the same thing as seeing graphic footage. For one thing, books are far more subjective a medium, I would argue: To me, sexual language is more subjective than sexual images are.

By way of the NYT's book blog comes this question from January magazine: Should kids' books be rated? Novelist Tony Buchsbaum was reading a review copy of a new YA novel, Will Dutton, Will Dutton, containing this riveting IM exchange:

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A New Year's gift from Scholastic! The publisher is bringing back The Babysitters Club, the series about a gang of entrepreneurial young girls that more or less taught me how to read. Scholastic is re-issuing the first two books in the 213-title series—you read that right: 213—as well as a prequel.

Product shot of playground pimp onesie from Zazzle.com.

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For their 2006 book Packaging Girlhood: Rescuing Our Daughters From Marketers' Schemes, Lyn Mikel Brown and Sharon Lamb, both professors, waded through the pink muck of girl culture.

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Hi folks! Long time no blog—remember me? I knew I'd really dropped the ball when I read this from a friend:

"Honey, your Dream House is turning into a recurring nightmare; one where I keep checking for updates and keep getting disappointed."

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In the latest edition of the DoubleX Gabfest, Emily Bazelon, Hanna Rosin, and The New Yorker's Margaret Talbot discuss A.S. Byatt's The Children's Book.

Headshot of Louisa May Alcott, American novelist, at age 20 by an unknown photographer/ Wikipedia.

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"I will do something by and by," Louisa May Alcott wrote as an adult in the voice of her youthful self. "I'll be rich and famous and happy before I die, see if I won't."

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I have not yet read the work of Herta Mueller, this year’s Nobel Prize winner for literature. As of this morning, I hadn’t even heard of her. But after seeing this image on Jezebel (and promptly making it my desktop—I suggest “stretch,” but “tile” is a powerful alternative) and conferring with other DoubleXers, I feel confident that Herta is on the road to fashion icon status.

Photograph of Judy Blume by Evan Agostini/Getty Images.

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Over her 40-year career, Judy Blume may have done more for sex education than the last 10 surgeons general. Though Blume wrote her best-loved novels in the 1970s, they endure today because they deal frankly and compassionately with the fears, relationships, and sexuality of young people.

This is Part 4 of a dialogue between Caitlin Macy, author of Spoiled; Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus, authors of The Nanny Diaries; and DoubleX associate editor Samantha Henig.