Mary Griffith's Blog

It may be two decades or more since I’ve talked formally about my books. Not that this new chat was formal at all, but it was definitely a lot of fun, despite my temporarily scratchy and hoarse voice.

The occasion was for Cecilie and Jesper Conrad’s podcast, “Self Directed.” They’re the parents in a Danish family who’ve been traveling for the past ten years or so, and they’re working their way through interviewing lots of interesting people, including, but by no means limited to well-known (...

(Nostalgia for those preparing for yet another SN)

These days I usually don’t think much about fencing tournament logistics, having been out of that business now for the better part of a decade, but my husband just had his second total knee replacement early this week, and I’m cognitively in a weird place, somewhat reminiscent of working long BC hours at Summer Nationals, back when tournament operations left much to be desired.

This morning I woke up thinking about the worst SN I ever ...

Except for the campaigning part—that’s not over until Election Day. But the voting? In the mail back to the county.

I did this in 2020–one of the more fun demonstrations I’ve done. We’re doing it again on October 8, and pushing it nationally.

For the past few years (decades, even? I’m too lazy to go look it up), I’ve made it a point to celebrate Banned Books Week, the American Library Association’s effort to call attention to efforts to control which books citizens are allow to read. Like most avid readers and writers (and I hang out with more than a few), I’m aghast at the increasing attempts to ban books in schools and libraries, and even book stores where the banners want to even control what customers are allowed to buy.

Give...

I’ve been pondering—and cringing at—a high school memory provoked by the online chatter over the past few days about the imminent publication of “The 1619 Project” in this week’s New York Times Magazine.

I think it happened during my junior year, 1970–71, when an exchange student visited my English class. I don’t remember his name, but he was from South Africa, and our teacher asked him to explain a little about apartheid and how it worked.

“Apartheid”? We-—good (white) college prep students...

Back when I wrote more often about education, I occasionally posted what I called “DUH research”—usually, reports of academic or clinical findings in education or cognitive psychology that seem so obvious to those of us who’ve spent any time at all paying attention to how our kids learn that it’s hard to believe anybody ever bothered with formal studies. Of course maniacal LEGO kids get to be good at visual geometry. Or those who play games like Yahtsee and poker get better at arithmetic and...

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People* say—at least so I’ve heard-—that the nation is infested with angry mobs.

Must be true, I guess. After all, I’ve been hanging out with an angry mob for a couple of years now.

Let me tell you about my angry mob.

We’ll talk about the “mob” aspect first, and tackle the “angry” part later.

Technically, we’re not a mob.

We’re a pack.

We’re the RATT Pack.

That’s Resistance Action Tuesdays & Thursdays, an informal gathering twice a week in front of the Roseville field office of Representativ...

(Cleaning up miscellaneous files today and came upon this, which I wrote early last year but never published, for reasons I no longer remember. Self-indulgent, definitely, but just a tiny bit comforting, too, in the way that pure fantasy can sometimes be.)

Once upon a time, in a faraway place (or maybe not so faraway), there was a very rich man. This very rich man owned many properties and made many deals all over the world, and came to believe that his vast wealth and properties proved he wa...