The Boondocks comic strip is REALLY unlike anything else on comics pages - the politics of Doonesbury or Bloom County, the weird-kid's perspective of Calvin and Hobbes are about as close as it's gotten in recent years. And no art like that has been seen on newspaper comics pages... well, in a really long time. I'm not sure that the new TV show is as much unlike other animated TV shows as the strip was unlike other strips - animation on TV is one of the few truly anarchic areas left in broadcasting. But still, Boondocks (TV) is definitely its own thing. And that's a good thing.

I agree that it may not be the best fit with the rest of the Cartoon Network's wacky weird-o latenight lineup. Just as the comic strip, there's a real serious message in there. Also, it moved pretty slowly. Hoping things pick up a bit in future episodes.

The animation struck me as kinda clunky but I love the still art. The colors, the expressions on Huey and Riley's faces. The unique look of the Boondocks translates well onscreen.

What I really couldn't get over is the fact that Huey and Riley are clearly voiced by a grown woman, and it's the same woman for both of them. Augh! They couldn't find any kids to do voiceover work? Or an adult voiceover actor who can do two separate voices? Or even, at least, one _believeable_ boy's voice for both brothers to share??? It got better when Huey got mad, but almost all the times Huey opened his mouth, and _all_ the times Riley opened his mouth, the voice that came out seemed _so_ off.

This is a great article - beautifully written, and on a really interesting topic. I feel like I just spent a few minutes on a dive myself.

Ayelet Waldman's writing is NOT the kind of cool stuff for which I subscribe to Salon. It's self-congratulatory, particularly about characteristics that seem, to me, to be pretty dysfunctional, such as her super-attachment parenting style. It's navel-gazing in the worst way - assuming that all her readers live in the exact same upper-class and literarily-oriented world that she does. It's often exploitative of her children (and yes, I did read the piece a while back that she wrote in response to accusations of her exploiting her children, and that did _not_ make me feel any better about it.)

Today's article being the lead story - what the heck is up with that? I didn't even know who JT Leroy was, and I'm a librarian with an interest in kids literature. The headline piqued my interest just because I didn't know what it was actually talking about, and I clicked without noticing the Waldman byline. But within the first couple of paragraphs I recognized the weirdly self-congratulatory tone - I kept reading in hopes that the article might actually explain who Leroy was and why we should care that Waldman was sorta-maybe-kinda-but-not-really fooled by him. But it didn't. It just talked, as usual, about Waldman. Doesn't she have a blog somewhere where she can put this stuff???

I really miss your old "Mothers Who Think" feature, which had a variety of _different_ writers talking about _interesting_ features of their daily lives. I even miss Anne Lamott, who while also somewhat exploitative of her kid and also navel-gazing, at least usually managed to have some awareness of a larger sphere of lifestyles, and to relate her own thoughts to concepts of larger import.

So anyway, I'm going to go with something that some other user posted in the comments, and make "don't click on Waldman" one of my resolutions for 2006.

It's tremendously frustrating to me that (as with SO many other public policy issues) discussion of education polarizes on a less-than-100%-relevant facet of what could be a much larger discussion. I can't believe that people can spend this much time worrying about "does the system serve _boys_ well" or "does the system serve _girls_ well" when what we clearly need to be asking is "does the system serve _kids_ well". And when you compare us to other industrialized countries, the answer is, pretty much, no!

Gender essentialism helps to fan an uproar because people can "feel" from their "personal experience" how things "obviously" are, or should be. Every adult has at some time been a child, whether s/he is a parent or not, and so feels that s/he has something to add to the discussion. And of course personal experiences are great, and should inform the discussion, but so many people seem to think that their own personal experiences are universal! "My boyhood was like this!" Well, okay - but didn't you know some boys who weren't much like you? And some girls who were a lot like you?

Reducing all boys to one set of needs and behaviors, and all girls to another does a disservice to all children by distracting us from their universal needs. And it does a disservice to all our widely varied individual children by suggesting that all girls can be served with one reductionist model and all boys with another. Children, overall, have needs, and children, as individuals, have needs. Education must be focused on serving all kids as well as possible, and on serving _each_ kid as well as possible.