Because Real Men’s tears are too big and strong for regular tissues.

Because how embarrassed would poor little Rover be if you got him that girlie stuff?

Hey, I like pumpkin seeds too…

I’m assuming the actual eggs are traditional egg-colored on the inside, but, honestly, who knows.

And here I thought the wrist was possibly the most androgynous body part.

There are an estimated 400,000 untested rape kits in the US. (Photo credit: Lonnie Timmons III, Plain Dealer)

Sampling and remixing is an art form. This version of Brian Williams rapping "Rapper's Delight" from The Tonight Show starring Jimmy Fallon is brilliant and inspirational. Watch it just because we guarantee it will put a smile on your face.

Years Past

February 20, 2013

February 20, 2012

February 20, 2011

February 20, 2010

February 20, 2009

February 20, 2008

February 20, 2007

February 20, 2006

February 20, 2006 (2)

February 20, 2005

Mean Girls Online: Can We Draw A Line In Social Media?

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Feminists criticizing feminists online: How does it impact the movement?

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Last week, an article about online feminist activism set off a heated debate. The Nation's Michelle Goldberg examined criticism aimed at feminists by other feminists. "Is it good for the movement? And whose movement is it?" Goldberg asked.

She wrote:

"Yet even as online feminism has proved itself a real force for change, many of the most avid digital feminists will tell you that it's become toxic. Indeed, there's a nascent genre of essays by people who feel emotionally savaged by their involvement in it — not because of sexist trolls, but because of the slashing righteousness of other feminists."

Michel Martin of NPR's Tell Me More hosted a conversation with Goldberg and some of the writers involved in the debate: Mikki Kendall, a writer and media critic with HoodFeminism.com; Anna Holmes, founder of Jezebel.com; and Brittney Cooper, a professor at Rutgers University and co-founder of the Crunk Feminist Collective.

Below are some highlights from the interview; click on "Transcript" above for the full text or listen to the conversation.

Interview Highlights

On what compelled Michelle Goldberg to write the piece

Michelle Goldberg: I think it's something that I had heard people talking about privately for a long, long time and nobody wanted to talk about publicly. But I constantly was hearing feminists — including feminists who've been involved in online activism for a long time — saying that there was nowhere that they felt more intimidated, more afraid to speak, than online. And at first, I thought, you know, if this is just a problem of kind of white middle-class women, maybe it's not even worth writing about.

Maybe it really is just about people feeling threatened that their place in the hierarchy is being challenged. But as I started to hear about it also from women of color — there's a woman I cite in my piece who's a trans Puerto Rican woman activist who has written widely about the hatred that she receives from ... various racists and misogynists but [who] wrote that she actually feels in a lot of ways most threatened and most intimidated by people in her own community who she knows are going to come down on her if she steps over one of these invisible ideological tripwires. ... And so that's what convinced me that it was something worth delving into.

On the line between examining ongoing privilege and bullying

Michelle Goldberg: To be honest, I don't know that I can — I don't know that I or anyone else can really draw that line. I do think that, you know, when you kind of — when people tweet explicitly, you know, let's make this person cry, that is, I would think, crossing the line. And I also think there's a kind of consistent twisting of people's words and people's intentions. One of the examples I give in the piece is when the actress Martha Plimpton was organizing or tweeting about a fundraiser that had the title "vaginas" in the name. It was a fundraiser for a group of abortion funds. And people really came down on her for using the word vagina and saying that this excludes trans men who may have vaginas and need abortions but don't want their genitals referred to by female words.

It was this sort of very rigid and sort of recondite form of political correctness that is very difficult not to step into because I think a lot of people don't know where the rules are. But people automatically assumed, not just that she had defended them, but that she was this terrible transphobe, that she was somebody who could no longer be taken seriously as an ally. That's the sort of thing that I'm talking about.

On whether Mikki Kendall considers herself a bully

Mikki Kendall: I think that I am someone whose anger can be intimidating. Do I think that I can be someone's bully in their mind? Yes. I can't control how people feel about what I have to say. Do I think that it is as cut and dry as, well, I don't like the way you speak to me? Everyone's coming into this big umbrella from different cultural contexts. Do I think from the standards of my community that I'm a bully? No. But I'm not doxing anyone. I'm not calling up trans women's employers. I'm not leaving comments to undermine their businesses, calling their doctors to interfere with their health care. And these are things that are actually happening to people. I am not saying in large articles and national syndicated columns that, oh, well, we're going to talk about toxic culture, but we're not going to talk about all aspects of that culture. ... And we're certainly not going to talk about how people who are feminists and in power can upset, anger and bully someone, and then say, well, I am a victim, when the people they have said something to respond.

Michel Martin: Well, you know, people can be both.

Kendall: People don't have to like everything...

Martin: People can be both.

Kendall: Yeah.

On whether bullies and victims are sometimes the same

Brittney Cooper: I'm in this as a person who is very concerned about the way that we're having this conversation online. So I want to be clear that, as I said in the piece, I think that there has been real injury on the part of white feminists, particularly dealing with black feminists online. But I am also a person that cares about what kind of world we're building, and that means that there have to be some ethics of engagement and also a sort of concession that we deal with people giving them the benefit of the doubt. And that doesn't mean from my vantage point that we have to put up with things that we know are unjust, are racist, are sexist, are problematic. I think we can call them out, but I don't want the history of this moment, particularly in black and women of color feminisms, to be written as a history in which — where black feminists, particularly online feminists of which I'm a part, spent their time doing was primarily calling out white women for racism. I want this to be a moment where we're talking about the kinds of worlds that black women are building online through our progressive social justice activism. ...

On whether Anna Holmes would have started a women's blog today

Anna Holmes: I don't know that I would start a women's blog or a women's blog that focused on feminism, but — and there are a lot of reasons for that. I mean, I think I already did, and I wouldn't want to repeat myself. But I think that the discourse has become, as I said to Michelle, somewhat brittle and myopic and not particularly constructive, at least what I'm seeing on Twitter. And, I mean, listen, that's really the only social media platform that I'm on. I can only handle one at a time, so I'm not really on Facebook. I'm not really on Tumblr, I don't tend to read websites and blogs the way I used to. I tend to come to things from Twitter. So that's where I'm seeing the majority of this sort of behavior play out. And I found it pretty troubling. I mean, I'd say probably for the — probably about a year ago is when I started noticing that there were these call-outs going on.

And I really couldn't wrap my head around what the point of them was because if you want to build bridges between communities, like-minded communities, who have similar or — I won't say the same goals, but have similar goals — I don't see what is productive about an assumption or a starting point where you assume bad faith or equate disagreement with enemy-making. And that's what I've been seeing — again, I'm talking only about Twitter. I cannot speak about other social media platforms. You know, some people might argue that Twitter isn't that important. It isn't as widely used as Facebook. But there are a lot of journalists and activists and commentators and thinkers who are on Twitter, and that's why I have a particular criticism of the way the discourse is going on.

What Sami Discovered On The Way To Becoming A Man Of Color

Not many people can say they've experienced the world both as an Arab-Latino woman and as an Arab-Latino man. Sami Younes can.

Younes, 26, was once Mariam, a Lebanese and Puerto Rican woman. When he began his physical transition three years ago to become a man, the way people reacted to his change surprised him.

"This never happened to me before my transition," Younes said. "I'll be walking down the street and I'll see someone coming toward me. And if they're alone, they'll just change to the other side of the street. They look at me and they get afraid, and I see the fear in their eyes.

"I'm not going to hurt anybody ... but people walk away from me now."

Younes said he had experienced racial remarks in the past, ranging from someone complimenting his spoken English to a stranger telling him that he was evil because of his race. But as a man, he's gained a new awareness of the stereotypes that people might associate with him, many based on race and sex.

"While I would not regret my transition for a second, I've stepped into a position now where I'm perceived as a terrorist or an Islamic extremist," he said. "I didn't deal with that when I was a woman and now I'm dealing with it."

"People don't outright say anything to me but it's the fear that speaks the loudest. People are suddenly afraid of me and they weren't before."

Transitioning for him is an ongoing process.

"I think everybody loses something when they transition. ... [It can be] their sense of security, their family ... and I think everybody gains something too, or they wouldn't do it," said Mara Keisling, founding executive director of the National Center for Transgender Equality. Keisling is a transgender woman who transitioned when she was 40 years old. After transitioning, she said, she experienced a new sense of vulnerability that she never felt before as an athletic, 6-foot-2-inch white male.

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Younes' sister gives him a kiss during his birthday party.

Erica Yoon/NPR

For Younes, however, that vulnerability was compounded by being a transgender man of color.

Transgender and gender nonconforming people of color experience higher levels of employment discrimination, economic insecurity, homelessness and housing discrimination in comparison with their white counterparts, according to a nationwide survey of 6,450 people conducted in 2011 by the National Center for Transgender Equality and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. (Respondents of Asian descent were the exception to these findings. They reported slightly lower levels of discrimination, except in regard to housing discrimination and homelessness.)

Younes has yet to meet another individual who shares his unique cultural and personal background — a half-Lebanese, half-Puerto Rican transgender man. He has attempted to form social groups for transgender men of color, but they never successfully materialized. Instead, most of the trans spaces he navigates are predominantly white.

Culture At Home

Celebrating his birthday one evening, Younes was surrounded by friends; his roommate, Angelica Martinez; and his sister, Leila. Even his friend from California, Emily Karram, traveled all the way to Maryland to celebrate her birthday with him. The festivities turned to several rounds of the game Cards Against Humanity, along with spontaneous lip syncing from Younes. He balled his fist into an imaginary microphone, mouthing soundlessly while music played in the background.

The second oldest of four children, Younes was born in Silver Spring, Md., to a Puerto Rican/Spanish mother and a Lebanese father. He remembers being surrounded by a culture where femininity was respected and praised. He was encouraged to be beautiful, to grow his hair long and wear dresses.

"Goodness and being an obedient daughter was intrinsically linked to being beautiful," Younes recalled. Younes was nurtured to pursue what he calls traditionally feminine interests — learning how to cook instead of playing sports. While attempting to fit in and be a good daughter, Younes felt the beginnings of a tension within himself.

"All I knew was that I was a girl and I had to be a girl," he said, "and inside, I didn't feel that way."

He primped his hair, did his makeup and took care of his appearance. "I started to fit in more, and it didn't make me any happier with myself. I just didn't like myself ... I never felt like I belonged," he said. "It was really difficult."

The tension continued to build. Younes said he was bullied and picked on when he was a child. He said he tried to kill himself when he was in the sixth grade. Although he began expressing these feelings at a very young age, he said, therapists had reassured him that he was "going through a phase and that medication could help correct [him]."

While attending DePaul University in 2005, Younes began to meet gay people who were "out and happy," as well as transgender people for the first time. He mixed with the drag king crowd, people who identify as female but perform in male character.

"I never fully blended with that ... because it was very ingrained with the lesbian subculture there. And I am not a lesbian so I didn't really fit in," he said. He realized he didn't have to be "ultra-feminine," and that it would be fine to present his gender in a different way.

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Younes with his mother, Lina, and father, Badri. "At certain moments, we thought, 'Why us? Why us? You know, God, we didn't need this,' " his father said. "But I say it now, thank God it was us."

Erica Yoon/NPR

It was at this point, he said, that he realized that he was, in fact, transgender.

Younes revealed this to his girlfriend at the time, he said, and the relationship turned abusive. Out of money and wanting to exit the relationship after two years, he decided to go back home.

He then started his physical transition to become a transgender man. His parents were not happy.

"At certain moments, we thought, 'Why us? Why us? You know, God, we didn't need this,' " said Younes' father, Badri. Badri is a practicing Muslim who comes from a religious family. "But I say it now, thank God it was us."

Sami's sisters — Nadia, Leila and Alia — were supportive from the beginning. It was this support that eventually led to Badri's change.

Leila, 27, said that Sami was fluid in his gender expression before transitioning. "He didn't conform to our idea of 'feminine,' nor did he conform to our idea of 'masculine,' " she said. "He was somewhere in the middle."

Sami revealed to Leila his attraction to women several years before he finally told her that he was transgender, she said. She immediately accepted him and helped him to figure out a way to come out to his parents.

Sami's parents eventually began to come around. But as a man in his Arab-Puerto Rican family, there was now a different set of expectations for Sami to uphold.

Sami knew that his father had finally accepted him when he asked for help with stuff like rebuilding the deck. "He wanted me to do all this manual labor that a man is typically expected to do. And I'm not a very big guy. It's not sort of my forte ... but he wanted me to do it," he said.

But one of the things that didn't change for Sami was a wish from his father for him to keep up his appearance and eventually marry.

"We feel so bad that he had to go through it for so long, alone. ... At the end we had to assess, what's more important? Our son or others? You have to put things into perspective," Badri said.

Family acceptance of an individual's transgender identity diminishes the risk of homelessness, incarceration, suicide, smoking, drugs or alcohol, doing sex work or underground work for income, and all sorts of adverse outcomes, according to the 2011 survey. Overall, 43 percent of the individuals surveyed had "maintained most of their family bonds, while 57 percent experienced significant family rejection."

It took a little bit longer for Sami's mother, Lina, a Roman Catholic, to accept him and fully lend her support with Badri. "You know in Spanish there's a common expression," Lina said, " 'El qué dirán?' What will people say? What will people think?"

For a while, Lina just thought Sami was a tomboy. She thought it was a phase. She recalls knowing that he never seemed completely happy when he was younger, wanting to forgo dresses or flowery prints and that he kept wanting to cut his hair. There might have been signs of his gender identity, but she says she was blind to them. But once Badri was encouraged by their daughter Nadia to read more about being transgender, he was slowly able to persuade Lina to accept Sami.

Just as the daughters persuaded Badri, Badri was slowly able to persuade his wife.

"I think as a parent you want to be protective," Lina said. "Sometimes you've been overly protective. By keeping him like he was ... we would have been harming him more."

And just as Sami was surprised to discover the new ways people interacted with him in the world, Lina encountered some surprises, too.

She recalls a conversation that her son had with a Puerto Rican neighbor at the grocery store — a neighbor who'd seen Sami grow up female. Younes had just gone through surgery to remove his breasts and was in the store with his sister when the neighbor recognized him. After the initial small talk, she asked quite openly, without missing a beat, when he started hormones.

Several transgender people I spoke with said this kind of questioning would be unwelcome. It's the type of personal detail many would not want to discuss with an acquaintance. But for Sami, the neighbor's reaction was a welcome one.

"I just sort of looked at her," Sami says, smiling, "and she's like, 'Honey, I'm not blind.' And ever since then, she's just been, like, awesome."

Erica Yoon is a staff photographer at the Roanoke Times.

photo by Cate Hellman http://www.catehellman.com

Eight Reasons Why The Rent Is Too Damn High

In the comments section of a recent Code Switch post, a reader named Aboubacar Ndiaye gave a long but thoughtful explanation for the many reasons why housing costs are rising, and why there's no easy solution to the problem. He was gracious enough to expand on his thoughts in this commentary.

A report released last month by the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard found that in an environment of increasing rent and home prices, low- and middle-income Americans were seeing a larger portion of their take-home pay going to cover the cost of rent, making their dreams of homeownership seem like a mirage.

Many commentators used the findings to highlight the need for relief and to offer explanations for the increasing cost of housing in American metro areas.

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Housing costs keep climbing, and outpacing many people's ability to afford them. But the reasons why are complex and interrelated, which means it's a problem with no simple solution.

Kevin Dooley/Flickr

But while the problem of both rental and buying prices squeezing middle- to low- income earners is complicated, there's one issue in particular that is the main driver of unaffordable housing.

But first, here's a list of some of the other factors that contribute to this problem.

Government Regulation

Many well-intentioned policies like housing-choice vouchers, affordable housing mandates, rent control, height regulations, historic designations, and protective zoning laws contribute to the creation of a bifurcated, distorted market — one in which a $500 apartment can exist next door to a $3,000 one. Though housing choice vouchers — also known as Section 8 vouchers — allow millions of low-income people to stay out of poverty and stave off homelessness, they also gobble up a huge portion of a city's affordable housing stock. Most perniciously, Section 8 users are likely to be concentrated in a city's most marginalized neighborhoods, contributing to economic and racial disparities between white and minority residents of a city.

Affordable housing mandates, which usually require a developer to set aside a small percentage of new units for affordable housing, sound good in theory. But developers simply pass on the cost of the affordable units to other residents, driving up the cost of market-rate rents. And in cities like San Francisco and Washington, D.C., height regulations — which forbid buildings from surpassing certain thresholds in height — make it tougher to create more housing through denser development.

All of these raise the costs for renters in the open market, but rent control, at least as it is practiced in New York, Washington, and San Francisco, is the most inefficient. In San Francisco, it's leading to a wave of evictions as landlords convert their rental units into condominiums to get around rent-control legislation. In Washington, the system is so dysfunctional that an Urban Institute study could not find the total number of units subject to rent control. In New York, a lottery-based system, as well as a large contingent of legacy residents, leads to "housing misallocation" — that is, where one person lives in a three-bedroom apartment and pays little for it. Instead of instituting city-wide rent stabilization, cities now have a patchwork rental market: The very poor live in public housing, the rich pay exorbitant rents and middle-income earners vie for the few affordable apartments left over.

New Mortgage Rules

After the last financial crash, new tighter lending standards made it next-to-impossible for people with middle incomes to afford to buy homes. Even for government-backed loans from the Federal Housing Administration that sometimes only require small down payments, the new rules make it harder for people with recession-battered credit scores to obtain mortgages. Even if their post-crisis incomes could support a mortgage.

In a report released last year, Shaun Donovan, the secretary for HUD, emphasized that "only those with stronger credit scores are eligible for FHA-insured mortgages with the minimum 3.5 percent down payment." Ironically, because of historically low interest rates and lower home prices, buying is much more attractive than renting in many places. But because of the newly raised barrier of entry for homeownership, cities are full of relatively high-income renters who might have otherwise owned a home. That's another reason there's so much demand for rental units.

Less Crime

As crime rates have plummeted, more people are willing to live within cities. Even in cities and neighborhoods where the poverty rate stayed the same, where every other factor stayed constant, the crime rate dropped. Crime rates have been dropping internationally at rates consistent with the decreases in the United States.

That decrease in crime, coupled with a cultural move away from suburbanization, reversed the wealth/population flight that marked the second half of the 20th century. (Many cities are now close to, or exceeding, their 1950 population highs.) You can see a positive correlation between rising rents and house prices and falling crime rates in places like Atlanta, Washington, New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago. (Some researchers have suggested that the influx of higher income individuals helped push crime down in cities, but as is shown here, here, and here, there is no consensus on just why crime rates have dropped so much.) It's likelier that the end of the burning cities of the 1960s and '70s and the violent crime epidemics of the '80s and early '90s provoked younger generations to move to newly safe central areas. A Brookings Institution study from 2005 showed that the revitalization of downtown areas coincided almost exactly with the end of the crime spikes of the Reagan-Bush era.

Social Stratification

Along with high unemployment, and stagnant and falling wages for bottom- and middle-income earners, the hollowing out of the middle class brought with it a geographic realignment. As the economy required higher levels of education, a lot of cities, especially on the coasts, became hubs for a lot of well-paid people who could afford higher rents and higher house prices. As was reported in The New York Times, hyper-gentrification in New York and San Francisco driven by the financial and tech industries have pushed average rents to astronomical levels. Cities like Washington, Chicago, Los Angeles and Boston are now magnets for young, childless, often-cohabitating college-educated professionals whose economic clout has pushed rents higher. The reason why someone in those places can afford a $750,000 house or $3,000 a month in rent is because they get paid enough to afford it. That's more of an issue of structural income inequality than simply a housing policy problem.

Hipsters

Many studies show that one of the crucial steps to gentrification — Disneyfication, some might say — is the presence or creation of artist/creative communities. In Phillip Clay's four-step model of gentrification, a form of economic succession occurs as first starving artists, "marginals," and "urban pioneers" move into low-cost communities. The first generation of artists help make the neighborhood attractive for more well-off "parent scholarship" students and creative types. Those people then attract more established professionals whose quality-of-life demands, like renovated buildings and higher-end retail and dining, drive up housing prices. That was the trajectory for places such as New York City's SoHo, Atlanta's Midtown section, Montrose, Houston; Silver Lake, Los Angeles; the Mission District in San Francisco, Chicago's Wicker Park and Columbia Heights, Adams Morgan, and Logan Circle, in Washington, D.C.

Market Speculation

According to a piece in The New York Times back in November, an Australian real estate investment firm basically now owns the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn. This is one of the most hidden factors to high housing costs: mega-landlords and investors who can afford to buy up huge swaths of the available housing stock, reducing the natural elasticity of the market. Investor-driven developments are catalysts, speeding up the pace at which neighborhoods change. Ingrid Gould Ellen, a professor of urban policy at New York University, said in The Wall Street Journal that while "it can take generations for neighborhoods to change," big investors have the means "to purchase lots of homes at once, even in tight credit markets."

Race

On a recent episode of This American Life and in an investigative series for ProPublica, Nikole Hannah-Jones outlined in meticulous detail the way the federal government essentially created and codified racial segregation in the aftermath of the Great Depression. The result of that hyper-segregation is still with us today. As Hannah-Jones said, while all-white communities are now largely non-existent, all-black neighborhoods still exist. As more well-to-do African-Americans have moved out of these all-black neighborhoods because of crime, worsening schools, or simply for the warmth of suburban suns, the populations left behind became poorer and poorer. Neighborhoods like East New York in Brooklyn, College Park in Atlanta, and Houston's Fifth Ward are full of housing projects, large percentages of people on public assistance, and higher crime rates than the rest of their cities.

So what does this have to do with rent prices? The result of all this concentrated poverty is that housing in mostly-white neighborhoods now comes at a premium. Decades of benefiting from better city services, infrastructure, better transportation, better access to financial services, better policing, better school-funding, better health services and better retail options have created a situation in which "good neighborhoods" cost much more to live in than if services had been more equally distributed.

Some might read this and think that this is the result of economic and not racial segregation. But a Brown University study from 2011 and a 2012 report from the Pew Research Center, showed that even if you control for income, communities will remain racially homogeneous. The Brown study showed that in all but two communities in the United States, black households with incomes of $75,000 lived in poorer neighborhoods than white families who earned $40,000 a year.

Another popular argument is that African-Americans might prefer to live in black communities and that this is just a case of self-segregation, but investigation after investigation has proved that Realtors show fewer homes and apartments to black prospective renters/buyers than to white people with the same income and credit scores, steering them into poorer neighborhoods. Banks and other lenders routinely charged African-Americans and Latino households higher interest rates and fees than white borrowers with the same credit profiles, making buying in more expensive, white areas harder. I can't overstate the extent to which this contributes to high rents and home prices.

But the Number One reason why the rent is too damn high and why more folks can't afford to buy a house:

People with money want to live there.

It really doesn't matter what the other factors are. We can talk all day about how San Francisco is only 50 square miles and yet every residential building is only 3 stories high. We can say that if more people were willing to move to Southeast D.C., maybe Dupont Circle wouldn't be as expensive. I can talk about the dirt cheap rent in Brownsville, Brooklyn and Englewood, Chicago or the mansions available in South Atlanta. But if you did away with every housing regulation and every rent-controlled apartment from San Diego to Sag Harbor, people with money will segregate themselves and drive up housing prices in the best parts of their cities. And as a result, they'll drive up everyone else's rents, too.

There's a reason people don't complain about the rising rents in Omaha or Pittsburgh or Buffalo. People with money don't live there. Rents will match people's ability to pay them, no matter where you are. We saw this happen in the oil and natural gas communities in North Dakota. One-bedroom apartments went for $2,100 a month in Williston, N.D. This is not an American thing. The residents of London, Paris, Moscow and Sydney can tell you about their rising rents too.

There's very little you can do about that. To paraphrase the researcher Robert Beauregard, the chaos and complexity of cities do not lend themselves to easy answers.

Aboubacar Ndiaye is a writer based in Houston, Texas. His work has appeared in McSweeney's, The Atlantic, and The Billfold.

Seeking Wonderful Young Adult Novels That Deal With Race

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What books about race or culture would you recommend to a not-so-bookish teen?

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At Code Switch, we receive a whole bunch of emails and messages from readers and listeners. And many times, folks ask questions that get us buzzing during our editorial discussions.

One Code Switch reader sent us a note seeking book recommendations for a multiracial teen. The emailer described the teen as not very "bookish" but still a good reader.

What books do you recommend that feature race in a way that a teen would find compelling? Nothing preachy or earnest or heavy. Shout us out in the comments, or holler at us on Twitter at @NPRCodeSwitch using #codeswitchbooks.

We turned to NPR's books team and contributors to the Backseat Book Club series for suggestions. Here's our list:

American Born Chinese

by Gene Luen Yang

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Paperback, 233 pages, Feiwel & Friends, $9.99, published December 23 2008 | purchase

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Graphic novelist Gene Luen Yang's funny and sensitive drawings weave together the stories of Jin Wang, a Chinese-American kid who just wants to fit in at his new school; basketball player Danny, whose life is bedeviled by his stereotypical cousin Chin-Kee; and the mythical Monkey King, whose desire to become a god gets him in rather a lot of trouble.

News and Reviews

'Boxers & Saints' & Compassion: Questions For Gene Luen Yang

• Children's Books
• Young Adult
• Fiction

Cuba 15

by Nancy Osa

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Paperback, 16 pages, Random House Childrens Books, $8.99, published March 8 2005 | purchase

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Violet is about to turn 15 and is unsure what to make of the looming quinceañera party planned by her Cuban grandma. Half Polish and half Cuban, Violet feels more American than anything else.

• Young Adult
• Fiction

Maniac Magee

by Jerry Spinelli

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Paperback, 184 pages, Little Brown & Co, $8, published November 1 1999 | purchase

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Jeffrey Lionel Magee, also known as "Maniac Magee," is an orphan and a runaway. He ends up in a small Pennsylvania town torn apart by racial strife, and astounds everyone with his extraordinary athletic feats as he works to heal the painful divide between the town's black and white citizens.

News and Reviews

Kids Rule In The Land Of 'Hokey Pokey'

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Mexican Whiteboy

by Matt De La Pena

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Paperback, 249 pages, Random House Childrens Books, $8.99, published January 12 2010 | purchase

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As the child of a Mexican father and blond, blue-eyed mother, Danny finds it difficult that everyone thinks they know who and what he is just by the color of his skin. So goes to spend time with his father in Mexico in the hopes of getting in touch with his roots, and the person he believes himself to be.

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Even On The Water, Class Remains In Session

Sometimes The 'Tough Teen' Is Quietly Writing Stories

• Young Adult
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The Absolutely True Diary Of A Part-Time Indian

by Sherman Alexie

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Paperback, 229 pages, Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, $12.99, published April 1 2009 | purchase

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Sherman Alexie's humorous, semiautobiographical novel, illustrated by Ellen Forney, follows 14-year-old Junior — poor, skinny and with a freakishly big head — as he leaves his school on the Spokane Indian Reservation for a mostly white school in a nearby town. Alexie captures the pain and awkwardness of adolescence while also meditating on the devastation that poverty, racism and alcoholism have wreaked on Native American communities.

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Watch This: Native American Author Sherman Alexie

• Children's Books
• Young Adult
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The Girl Who Fell From The Sky

by Heidi W. Durrow

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Paperback, 264 pages, Workman Pub Co, $13.95, published January 11 2011 | purchase

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After a family tragedy orphans her, Rachel, the daughter of a Danish mother and a black G.I., moves into her grandmother's mostly black community in the 1980s, where she must swallow her grief and confront her identity as a biracial woman.

News and Reviews

Reimagining The 'Tragic Mulatto'

• Fiction

The Latte Rebellion

by Sarah Jamila Stevenson

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Paperback, 328 pages, Llewellyn Worldwide, $9.95, published January 8 2011 | purchase

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When high school senior Asha Jamison is called a "towel head" at a pool party, she and her best friend, Carey, start a club to raise awareness of mixed-race students that soon sweeps the country. But the hubbub puts her Ivy League dreams, friendship and beliefs to the test.

News and Reviews

Multiracial Teens Launch A 'Latte Rebellion'

• Young Adult
• Fiction

The Red Pyramid

by Rick Riordan

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Paperback, 516 pages, Disney Press, $9.99, published August 16 2011 | purchase

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Egyptologist Dr. Julius Kane accidentally unleashes the Egyptian god Set, who banishes the doctor to oblivion and forces his two children to embark on a dangerous journey to save him.

News and Reviews

December Kids' Book Club Pick: 'The Red Pyramid'

• Children's Books
• Fiction

Wonder

by R.J. Palacio

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Hardcover, 315 pages, Knopf Books for Young Readers, $15.99, published February 14 2012 | purchase

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Born with a facial deformity that initially prevented his attendance at public school, August "Auggie" Pullman enters the fifth grade at Beecher Prep and struggles with the dynamics of being both new and different in this tale about acceptance, self-esteem and the transformative power of human kindness.

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How One Unkind Moment Gave Way To 'Wonder'

• Children's Books
• Fiction

*Some of the language in the summaries above has been provided by publishers.

P.S. If you're looking for book suggestions in general, our friends over at NPR Books came up with this really neat, lovely, awesome tool that's essentially a genius book recommender of all the great work from 2013.