Links for 2010-05-04

"Just as nature abhors a vacuum, the blogosphere abhors a neutral and nonpartisan blog. For whatever reasons, cultural or historical, participants expect partisanship. They want to know if you're with them or against them; the dedicated communities at various blogs can be pretty defensive of their space, and sometimes stream like lemmings through the aether to attack a blogger that they perceive as threatening. It's human nature: when our friends get attacked, we get mad. The problem is, we're not always so good at figuring out what's a legitimate attack - and it makes it really hard to have a calm conversation with our adversaries. "

"Late, early, on time: In our what-to-expect era, when baby Web sites offer weekly, birthdate-timed developmental newsletters, parents can hardly avoid knowing where their child falls on the developmental spectrum. As Isaiah has stumbled through his first years, he's been accompanied, via childrearing guides and Web sites, by the phantom presence of a typical child, whose textbook development sometimes has made Isaiah seem like Leo the Late Bloomer.

But when parents today worry about their child not meeting developmental norms, especially for motor skills, they're too often worrying needlessly. The typical child, it turns out, is a myth. But someone forgot to tell the parents."

"A week or so ago, Timeslingers asked me a question on Twitter. "How do you decide what book(s) you're going to review?" Knowing that there was no way I could answer that question in 140 characters, I decided to write a post explaining the process I go through every time I pick out a book to read for review."