To prove that I (occasionally) think about something other than Josh Groban:

Recently, a professor of creative writing wrote an article about the state of young adult literature today.  In it, she condemned the solemnity and morbidity of some of the plots of these books (She didn’t even mention the scourge of Gossip Girl or the fact that mothers die with alarming frequency in other YA novels.  What does this tell us?  Have all the promiscuous relations you want, young girls, but motherhood will one day kill you). 

However, she really lost me when she described, among this “new crop of young adult fiction,”

“A town holds a lottery. At first it seems like an innocent exercise, but the author slowly reveals that the winner of the lottery will be sacrificed.”

Wasn’t this first written in 1948?  By Shirley Jackson?  Wasn’t it a short story called “The Lottery?” Wasn’t it in The New Yorker, the same publication referenced in this YA article?  I didn’t know The New Yorker printed YA.

Um, ma’am, nice article and all, but perhaps you need not comment on the state of young adult fiction today.  Though you could instead criticize Gossip Girl.  To that, I could relate.