May 11, 2026
Last week the internet went crazy
Last week, the internet went crazy. And I was so interested in the way that the internet went crazy, because instead of being in the crazy fray (where I use to hang out all the time!), I was looking on from the sidelines, in more than one sense. The most obvious sense being that this was a fracas among the children’s lit internet, of which I am not a part, so I had no skin in the game, the game being a comment by children’s writer Mac Barnett (from his recently released book on writing for children) in which he reports that “maybe more like 94.7 percent of kids’ books are crud.”
The thing I found most fascinating about this comment was how 94.7% of children’s authors in my feed seemed to believe without hesitation that their books were the books that he was talking about. I mean, the odds are high that they were, 94.7% being a sizable piece of the pie, but still. No doubt there is a gendered element to this. I’m not a children’s writer, BUT I was once a student in a university department of English, and I think the dynamics are the same, which is that 94.7% of the students are women and it’s the 5.3% of students who are not who are lauded as geniuses, dominate in-class conversations, and receive post-doctoral fellowships. So I suspect I understand why the community finds itself with a chip on its collective shoulder.
But still. I find myself thinking, “Can you get a little bit of male entitlement, people?” We could all do well sometimes (but not all the time) to channel the spirit of that guy who’s released an obscure book with a small press nobody has ever heard of that sells six copies and who is wide awake the morning of the announcement of the Giller Prize longlist waiting for his moment, and who’s indignant when they fail to call. As a writer of commercial fiction, I understand parts of what it must be like to be a kidlit writer (not being taken seriously, your poetry colleagues from your MFA have never published anything but still think they’re better than you, male writer colleagues with literally no interest in ever reading anything you’ve written), but we’ve got to hoist our spirits high above these petty grievances and/or get our heads out of our asses.
I know all this because of the years of my life that I wasted being triggered by things Jennifer Weiner was saying on the internet. It was my PRIME, people, and I spent it in the comments of Blogspots, either being really mad at Jennifer Weiner, or defending Weiner from her naysayers, and I don’t really remember why my views on Weiner were so all over the place, but also she was a lightning rod so it almost didn’t matter, and now I think about all the things I could have been spending my energy on instead.
The greatest revelation I’ve had in recent years is that so much of the frustration across the entire political spectrum (and also in my nervous system) is the result of fury that we cannot, in fact, control the things that other people think or the ways they behave. And this revelation lives alongside another fact that is just as true, that is we must keep working for a better, fairer world, not merely accepting the status quo. That we must change the world, but also there are parts of the world that are not ours for changing. That other people are going to think things, and say things, and I’m not going to like the things they think or say, and this is—in fact—part of the schema.
And yes, I’m talking about cancel culture, but I’m also talking about the people who were so opposed to cancel culture that they became their own cancel culture (which was a thousand times worse than campaigns removing men from positions of power for being sexual predators, no?).
It’s a mess, it’s a muddle, and I don’t really know a way out of it, except to shut down your browser when those synapses are flying and you find yourself in an internet pile-on, and go for a walk outside.
