Free Republic

A teacher at a public high school in Alabama sent his students home with a summer reading list chock full of conservative authors from which to choose, including Ann Coulter, Ronald Reagan, Walter Williams, Thomas Sowell, and libertarian John Stossel. But parents became concerned that it leaned too far right and so now, the kids don’t have to read anything over the summer.

What used to come in the mail in a brown paper wrapper now pales in comparison to what might show up on a high school student’s assigned reading list. The former usually contained magazines, one in particular springs to mind, that gave adult readers the opportunity to see up-an-coming starlets like Marilyn Monroe naked, whether their loved ones appreciated it or not. The latter gives young adults, sometimes really young youngsters, crash courses in subjects that they probably may never want to master. “As school was ending last year, Sue Ann Johnson came across a copy of a short story...

When I was in Scandinavia last spring promoting "Nickel and Dimed," interviewers kept asking me to tell them about the "debate" my book had provoked in the United States. I had to confess that it had provoked no debate at all, at least none that I had heard of. In fact, when my book was adopted by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as a reading for all incoming students in 2003, the administration expressed its conviction that it was a "relatively tame selection," at least compared to last year's choice – a collection of readings from the...