I’m giving myself 15 minutes to write this blog post. If I’m not done in 15 minutes, then it’s not posting. Because, you know, I’m on a blog break here.

Here’s the thing about being on a blog break: what am I to do when people around me keep doing super-cool things that I want to blog about? Now, you may or may not have heard about the brouhaha over at Bitch Magazine when the magazine did what was, um, kind of a shoddy job of assembling a list of “100 Young Adult Books for the Feminist Reader.” Here’s the good news: Amy Stern has decided to use Bitch’s list as a starting point and has created a new forum for talking about intersectionality in YA novels. It’s called The YA Subscription and here’s what it’s all about. I think this’ll be a very cool place for discussion; check it out! Amy has already posted her thoughts on A Wrinkle in Time as a feminist text.

(Yikes, 8 minutes left!)

I’ve found the news from Egypt to be so stirring that I just can’t not acknowledge it somehow on my blog. I decided to do this with something easy: I would link you to a picture slideshow, because there are so many amazing pictures going around right now. But the more I tried to find the right slideshow, the more annoyed I became at how the slideshows presented by the American media show hundreds and hundreds and sometimes THOUSANDS of men protesting, and maybe two women. If I really believed there were only two women protesting in Egypt, then these slideshows would be fine, but I don’t believe that. So, I asked some friends for help. Thank you, Michelle, for pointing me to the slideshow at the Big Picture, which shows more women than most of the others. And thank you, Lance, for pointing me to this article about the lack of visibility of women in the media coverage of Egypt’s protests, because it’s nice to get some affirmation when you’re getting the eerie feeling that something isn’t quiet right. FWIW, I found the comments in that article to be more substantive than the article itself.

With 30 seconds to go: happy Interplanetary Be Who You Are Day, everyone!