Caitlin Flanagan Returns

The lifeblood of blogs appears to be a steady stream of stuff to get really, really worked up about. Everyone has their own favorite source: O'Reilly sets off the liberals, Hillary sets off the conservatives, Google (of late) sets off the geeks. And for a long time, Caitlin Flanagan was the go-to writer to get me steamed. But about a year and a half ago, she moved to the New Yorker, penned a pretty mild piece, wrote a couple of other articles and then pretty much disappeared. (Yeah, I know she wrote a review of the Raising Boys Without Men book a couple of months ago for the Atlantic, but she didn't really cut loose.)

So she returned this week in the New Yorker with an altogether interesting history of Mary Poppins, which seems to be surprisingly free of the working-mother-bashing that so infused her last stab at writing about nannies. In short, there's not much in there to raise my blood pressure.

But good news is afoot, at least when it comes to future blogging. Flanagan will soon give us plenty to chew over (from the "Contributors" section):

Caitlin Flanagan ("Becoming Mary Poppins," p. 40) will publish a book about modern motherhood, "To Hell with All That: Loving and Loathing Our Inner Housewife," next spring.

Should be one hell of a book.