A lot of people are writing about Caitlin Flanagan’s To Hell With All That, but my favorite piece so far is the smart, wide-ranging, and fair-minded review by Ann Hulbert in Slate. All of it is this good:

But the Flanagan who dispenses the provocative diagnoses also seems, a la Poppins, to have taken a swig of rum-punch potion herself. What is fascinating—if also infuriating—to watch is Flanagan parading as almost a parody of the spoiled-child-parent she scolds her contemporaries for being and lauds her own mother for not being. The minimemoir that emerges from these essays betrays more adolescent Sturm und Drang than she seems to realize. The mother Flanagan idolizes as the acme of accomplished housewifery in fact got fed up at home and went to work, defying a husband (writer and historical novelist Thomas Flanagan) who told her to drop dead—and leaving a daughter feeling abandoned and, years later, obviously still very ambivalent about her role models. How else to explain a worshipper of domestic expertise who has never changed a sheet or sewed on a button, and who boasts about it in print? Flanagan also airily confesses to being “far too educated and uppity to have knuckled down and learned anything about stain removal or knitting or stretching recipes.” In a scene I suspect few readers will forget, the Flanagan who insists on her at-home-mother status describes summoning the nanny, Paloma, to clean up one boy’s vomit. Meanwhile Flanagan, the writer with the clout to leave the mucky work to others, stands “in the doorway, concerned, making funny faces at Patrick to cheer him up—the way my father did when I was sick and my mother was taking care of me.”

Hulbert observes, “It’s telling that this book leaves out the one article in which Flanagan ventured [in The Atlantic] to speak up in the larger liberal cause of economic justice, “How Serfdom Saved the Women’s Movement.” Also in Slate, posted the same day: Melonyce McAfee’s “I Hate Secretaries Day.”

Lee Siegel’s TNR blog (“an anti-blog blog that consists not of byte-sized thoughts and links, but of arguments, insights, and literary style,” says the email promo) just debuted, and I’m sorry to note that for a man purportedly obsessed with accuracy, he’s got a bad case of the typos.