The 45 Greatest Teen Titles You Have Never Heard of From the Era When They All Mentioned “I,” “Me,” “You” or Some Other Key Person That Are Not ‘Are You There God? It’s Me Margaret’

by Lizzie Skurnick

45. Where Has Deedie Wooster Been All These Years?

44. Trying Hard to Hear You

43. To All My Fans, With Love, From Sylvie

42. The War Between The Pitiful Teachers and the Splendid Kids

41. The Son of Someone Famous

40. The Late Great Me

39. The Kidnapping of Courtney Van Allen and What’s-Her-Name

38. The Dreadful Future of Blossom Culp

37. The Best Little Girl in the World

36. Stranger With My Face

35. Starring Sally J. Freeman, As Herself

34. Soup and Me

33. Soup

32. Pardon Me, You’re Stepping on My Eyeball

31. Ned Kelly and the Kingdom of Bees

30. My Life as a Body

29. Mom, The Wolf Man and Me

28. Me Me Me Me Me Me

27. Me and Fat Glenda

26. Ludell’s New York Time

25. Jane-Emily

24. Jacob Have I Loved

23. It’s Okay if You Don’t Love Me

22. Invisible Lissa

21. In Summertime, It’s Tuffy

20. I’ll Love You When You’re More Like Me

19. If I Love You, Am I Trapped Forever?

18. I Never Loved Your Mind

17. I Am The Cheese

16. Good Night, Willie Lee, I’ll See You in the Morning

15. Give Me One Good Reason

14. Ghosts I Have Been

13. From The Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler

12. Don’t You Dare Read This, Mrs. Dunphy

11. Don’t Hurt Laurie!

10. Dinky Hocker Shoots Smack

9. Diary of a Frantic Kid Sister

8. Dear Lovey Hart, I Am Desperate

7. Dear Lola, Or How to Build Your Own Family

6. Confessions of a Teenage Baboon

5. Call Me Heller, That’s My Name

4. Are You in the House Alone?

3. Anna to the Infinite Power

2. And You Give Me a Pain, Elaine

1. And This is Laura

Lizzie Skurnick is the author of Shelf Discovery, a memoir of teen reading. She lives in Jersey City.

Sad news from New Zealand today, as it seems that Moko the friendly dolphin has died. A lone bottle-nosed dolphin that had taken to swimming with humans in Mahia Bay south of the city of Gisborne, Moko became a popular tourist attraction and made headlines worldwide two years ago by guiding a pair of distressed pygmy sperm whales out of dangerous shallow water. His life was not without controversy, however. Over the past year, as Moko entered his adolescence, reports of increasingly aggressive behavior spread. Due to the sensitive nature of the following video, and since this is an obituary and all, we’ll bury it below.

Ah, summer-the glorious, lazy days when we elderly folk try to find glorious, lazy millennials to do our bidding. (Late summer is when we old people complain when they go missing on drug benders and/or paid work.) This year, we took the most passive approach to summer interns: we took everyone who randomly applied! Completely self-selecting! And yet, a great crew. I asked each of these four young people to introduce themselves to you fine readers and to send in their most summery photo. [N.B. None of their presumably helicoptering parents even wrote their bios for them! Maybe the kids are alright?]

Nathan Freeman, Editor, Dept. of Metropolitan Observances

Nate Freeman is a 22-year-old recent graduate of Duke University. In college, Nate found enough sober hours to co-create and blog for The ##, write a column for the Duke Chronicle and dash off a bunch of short fiction and a novel. He once spent a summer interning for New York magazine and is moving back up to the city in a few days’ time. When away from the keyboard, Nate will spend his time searching for a benefactress wealthy enough to cover his bar tabs. You can follow him on Twitter, or email him at nate@theawl.com.

Jane Hu, Editor, Dept. of Random Very Recent Historical Research and Library-Based Ephemera

Jane is finishing her BA in English Lit in Montreal where lives with her cat, Henry James. In her spare time, she edits for The McGill Daily and skips all the boring parts of movies. Obviously she has a Tumblr.

Ryan Broderick, Editor, Dept. of LOL Videos and Stoopid News

Ryan Broderick lives in New York and is currently trying to master the Internet, which mostly involves looking at gross porn and pictures of animals dressed in cute pictures. He also runs Student Loans for Beer Money (and is the editor-in-chief of the Hofstra Chronicle).

Jordan Carr, Editor, Dept. of Things That Are Happening

Jordan has lived his whole life in the Bay Area in California and is spending the summer in New York City. He’s an undergrad at Stanford University, studying Political Science and History. He’s written for the Stanford Review, Stanford Daily and was formerly the editor of the Stanford Review blog. He spent this past spring in Washington, D.C., working for this spin-off of the Strand Bookstore. He loves all things related to books, movies, pop culture and competitions of any kind. He also enjoys email and the Internets, and is happy to receive and respond to your thoughts, comments or suggestions at jordan@theawl.com.

It would be very easy to mock this, but I’ve got to say I can see the appeal: “Us British love a traditional public house, propping up the bar with a pint of English ale, but you’ve probably never had a drink in a pub like this. The Hogshead Inflatable Pub is the first pub in the world to get the inflatable treatment, in ‘ye olde worlde’ style. Standing at 8 meters tall, and 15 foot wide, this drinking den can be set up almost anywhere. With excellent attention to detail, this pub includes an artistic tiled roof, brick stone wall, two chimney pots and even a welcoming fire place feature.” Internal artwork also includes a dartboard, which just seems like a bad idea, particularly when you consider that the thing will run you more than $40,000. I mean, one errant glassing and you’re screwed. [Via]

Today in modest proposals: “The punishment of stoning needs to be updated to fit with the times. Having a frothing mob hurl rocks at a woman half-buried and yelling until her eyes fall out is a process of law which means well, obviously, but it needs to be given a modern gloss. There should still be a place for mob violence, for the semi-burial, for the hurling of rocks, and for stoning to stay on the statute books where it belongs.”

The Observer asks: “How do you write an article about what happened on Twitter during Lebron James’ ‘Decision’ without using the word tweet as a verb. The New York Times has some ideas”! Thank you! (As we said.)

Quite so:
“Drew Carey: Gloria Estefan
Chicago: Havana
Empty factories: Empty condos
Crippling unemployment: Crippling unemployment”

“Every day, 400 unemployed New York City residents exhaust their unemployment benefits.”

Paul the octopus, the Nostradamus of international soccer match forecasting, has made his prediction for Sunday’s World Cup final: he likes Spain.

When people say “there’s no such thing as a fair trial,” they’re right and they’re wrong. Those of us who don’t work in courtrooms sometimes forget that the law is an extremely complicated series of if/then operators. So while emotionally and intellectually it’s perfectly reasonable to be astounded that a (white) police officer can be convicted of involuntary manslaughter (by an all-white jury) for having shot (in the back) an unarmed (black) person (who was face-down on the ground), there is at least some logic to it in a legal sense. This is a good short primer on California law and voluntary and involuntary manslaughter-the “voluntary” charge involves provocation and passion. The conclusion being that, in this case and others like it, the law is not made for these situations: “Any result from a criminal justice proceeding will fall far short of the consequences that would truly constitute justice. Inherently. Intentionally.” In Oakland last night, after the verdict, a largely peaceful planned protest was only somewhat marred by a conflict of agendas between different groups. A smaller anti-capitalist splinter group was interested in the tactic of violence against property-while a much larger group was interested in a peaceful opposition to a verdict that literally could not do justice to the crime. One of those groups received more attention from the media, which as an entity could not quite bring itself to make any differentiation between the two.