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Stuart Brown, M.D. is our guest blogger during the week of March 2nd. If you have any questions for Stuart Brown, M.D., add a comment to any of his posts.

Here is some more information about Play: How It Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul by Stuart Brown, M.D. and Christopher Vaughan:

From a leading expert, a groundbreaking book on the science of play, and its essential role in fueling our intelligence and happiness throughout our lives.

We’ve all seen the happiness in the face of a child while playing in the school yard. Or the blissful abandon of a golden retriever racing with glee across a lawn. This is the joy of play. By definition, play is purposeless and all-consuming. And, most important, it’s fun.

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I'm not writing. Just a few years ago, four or five if I want to be near exact, in what I like to call my Jesus freak phase, I told myself that procrastination was a sin. This didn't make me stop procrastinating or even curtailing it much, but it did create a tremendous guilt complex, which among other things made me procrastinate even more.

Until last November's election I often wrote about how I was still waiting for the 21st century to start. That so much of what we were going through; far right politics, homophobia and sexism, basic ignorance and prejudice were such twentieth century problems that I was depressed that we had dragged them into the 21st. I kept waiting for new politics, new thinking, hell a new cut of jeans, anything that said categorically that we had set off a new explosion, and were not coasting on the last century's fallout.

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Recently our extended family, which included several of my grand children, took a trip together.  I delighted in spending time with all the children, and got to know five-year-old Antonio, one of the cousins, much better over the two weeks we were together. 

One evening when we were getting ready for a big family party, Antonio's mom told him it was time to take a shower.  Antonio dove under my bed and would not come out.  He got himself into the center of the floor under the queen-sized bed where no one could reach him, and he kept saying, "I want to take a bath."  Antonio's mom explained that there was no bathtub in the house we were staying in, just a shower.  Antonio refused to come out and kept repeating, "I want a bath." We all coaxed and cajoled Antonio for quite some time.  I tried to put things in concrete, sequential terms to help him understand:  "The party is starting, people are going to come to the door and we aren't ready to open it.  First you need to take a shower and put clothes on."  After some time, Antonio emerged from under the bed and headed toward the shower with his understandably exasperated mom.

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Many of the parents I talk with these days are upset about the nasty, disrespectful way their kids sometimes talk to them.  "Where do they learn to talk like this?" some ask.  "We don't talk that way to them!" 

If you take a bit of time to tune into some of the popular TV shows for kids today, you will quickly see that sarcastic, disrespectful ways of talking to adults run rampant.  Cute kids like Zach and Cody on The Suite Life of Zach and Cody show viewers how to use sassy, talk-back language with parents. And even if your children don't watch shows like this, they learn how to talk this way from their friends who practice with their peers what they've seen on TV.

Recently I noticed that my 10-year old grand daughter Alexia was talking to me and other adults with a sassy, back-talk tone of voice a lot of the time.  This bothered me.  I decided I wanted to deal with it directly.  After dinner one night, when Alexia and I were cleaning up, I said to her "We can sweep the crumbs off the table this way," and in a curt and nasty, put-down voice with real attitude, she said, "I know."   I quickly said, "Alexia, I feel hurt when you talk to me in that voice.  You can just say, ‘I know' (I said this in a neutral tone of voice) and that would feel a lot better to me."

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Lots of parents tell me they rely on screen activities such as GameBoys, DVD players, and computers to entertain their kids when they are traveling, waiting for appointments, or sitting in restaurants.  "It's so easy," they tell me, "it really keeps them quiet." Yes, the screens do engage kids, for sure.  But are there ways to occupy kids that are more beneficial to them?

Over the years, I've gone to restaurants now and then with my grandsons Jackson and Miles.  Before we head out, I always stick some open-ended toy or material in my bag-a handful of legos or small blocks, a few sheets of paper and some markers, or a hunk of playdoh.  What I find really amazing is that once we're seated and waiting for our food, the boys become deeply engrossed in these activities without fail.  They seem really happy and peaceful as they sit with their grandparents and create.  And we have some really nice conversations about what they're making-buildings with lots of windows, or how you can draw really big muscles.  Have you ever tried to talk to a kid who's on a GameBoy?  You can shout quite loud and still not be noticed.

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I don't always agree with Michiko Kakutani, but I think she nails exactly what goes wrong when writers tackle the unthinkable, in today's review of Jonathan Littel's The Kindly Ones, the Nazi novel that was a sensation in France, given its first person narrative of an unrepentant Officer:

Indeed, the nearly 1,000-page-long novel reads as if the memoirs of the Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss had been rewritten by a bad imitator of Genet and de Sade, or by the warped narrator of Bret Easton Ellis's "American Psycho," after repeated viewings of "The Night Porter" and "The Damned."

Whereas the philosopher Theodor Adorno warned, not long after the war, of the dangers of making art out of the Holocaust ("through aesthetic principles or stylization," he contended, "the unimaginable ordeal" is "transfigured and stripped of some of its horror and with this, injustice is already done to the victims"), whereas George Steiner once wrote of Auschwitz that "in the presence of certain realities art is trivial or impertinent," we have now reached the point where a 900-plus page portrait of a psychopathic Nazi, dwelling in histrionic detail on the barbarities of the camps, should be acclaimed by Le Monde as "a staggering triumph."

» Simon LeVay shares some stories of scientific experiments gone awry and discusses whether scientific regulation is necessary.

» Listen to other Penguin Podcasts.

» Read more about When Science Goes Wrong

Simon LeVay, When Science Goes Wrong, Podcast

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Nancy Carlsson-Paige is our guest blogger during the week of February 23th. If you have any questions for Nancy Carlsson-Paige, add a comment to any of her posts.

Here is some more information about Taking Back Childhood:

Based on early-childhood development expert Nancy Carlsson-Paige's thirty years of researching young children, this groundbreaking book helps parents navigate the cultural currents shaping, and too often harming, kids today-and restore childhood to the best of what it can be. As Carlsson-Paige explains, there are three attributes critical to kids' healthy development: time and space for creative play, a feeling of safety in today's often frightening world, and strong, meaningful relationships with both adults and other children-attributes that we, as a society, are failing to protect and nurture. From advising parents on which toys foster creativity (and which stifle it) to guiding them in how to use "power-sharing" techniques to resolve conflicts and generate empathy, Carlsson-Paige offers hands-on steps parents can take to create a safe, open, and imaginative environment in which kids can relish childhood and flourish as human beings.

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The Penguin employee book club read The Book of Night Women by Marlon James and submitted these questions to the author. The resulting Q&A is here:

1. You bring these characters and this time period to such vivid life. What kind of research did this novel involve? What resources did you have available?

I was already familiar with quite a bit about slavery, having studied it from high school days. It's the defining event in Caribbean history so you can't escape it even if you want to. Whether you're in history, cultural studies, music or economics, Slavery is the diaspora's Genesis chapter. So much of the history of slavery I already knew, but I still did a ton of research. History can be good at the what, when, where and even how, but not so much with the why. So I read slave narratives, master narratives, ship logs, tax records, pretty much everything. Histories of Fashion, costume archives, even weather patterns in the eighteenth century. The trick with research though is to not get so consumed with it that it becomes another form of procrastination. I had the first draft done before I did most of the research. As for resources, Jamaica does have an abundance of it, especially about slavery, but thank God for the internet or this novel would have taken twice as long.

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I'm thinking about getting into some trouble tonight. The fate of all authors might hang in the balance. I'm reading "Revenge of the Nerds" a funny and bittersweet article in the March/April Issue of Poets and Writers; about how today's (meaning my) generation of writers can be such wusses sometimes. How we lack the sturm und drang of the mighty men and women of the past; writers that doth bestride the world like colossuses or Colossi, if we want to get technical. Or at least get trashed and laid an awful lot. Writers seemed even more fascinating since they were rarely as Dorian grey hot as rock stars but were even more drunken and disorderly.

But Amy Shearn, who wrote the article, has a point. I think. Most of the writers interviewed said that they were simply too busy writing to get on with any debauchery. Others said that unlike their forebears, they couldn't depend on writing alone for a living so had to teach in places where scandals weren't looked upon with "you remember when" nostalgia (No this doesn't mean you, Bennington). Are we just wimpier? When Norman Mailer traded barbs with Gore Vidal, you knew that sooner or later somebody was going to punch somebody. Compare that to our own recent feuds, like Dale Peck Vs Rick Moody, which came across like two nerds trying to pull out their battered copy of Hitchhiker's Guide to slap each other with it.