The above image was created by Eduardo Bertone of AGoodson Management.

So how will your kids spend this summer? Building sand castles at the beach? Swimming at summer camp? Shedding I.Q. points?

In educating myself this spring about education, I was aghast to learn that American children drop in I.Q. each summer vacation — because they aren’t in school or exercising their brains.

This is less true of middle-class students whose parents drag them off to summer classes or make them read books. But poor kids fall two months behind in reading level each summer break, and that accounts for much of the difference in learning trajectory between rich and poor students.

A mountain of research points to a central lesson: Pry your kids away from the keyboard and the television this summer, and get them reading. Let me help by offering my list of the Best Children’s Books — Ever!

So here they are, in ascending order of difficulty, and I can vouch that these are also great to read aloud.

1. “Charlotte’s Web.” The story of the spider who saves her friend, the pig, is the kindest representation of an arthropod in literary history.

2. The Hardy Boys series. Yes, I hear the snickers. But I devoured them myself and have known so many kids for whom these were the books that got them excited about reading. The first in the series is weak, but “House on the Cliff” is a good opener. (As for Nancy Drew, I yawned over her, but she seems to turn girls into Supreme Court justices. Among her fans as kids were Sandra Day O’Connor, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor.)

3. “Wind in the Willows.” My mother read this 101-year-old English classic to me, and I’m still in love with the characters. Most memorable of all is Toad — rich, vain, childish and prone to wrecking cars.

4. The Freddy the Pig series. Published between 1927 and 1958, these 26 books are funny, beautifully written gems. They concern a talking pig, Freddy, who is lazy, messy and sometimes fearful, yet a loyal friend, a first-rate detective and an impressive poet. These were my very favorite books when I was in elementary school. A good one to start with is “Freddy the Detective” or “Freddy Plays Football.” (Avoid the first and weakest, “Freddy Goes to Florida.”)

5. The Alex Rider series. These are modern British spy thrillers in which things keep exploding in a very satisfying way. Alex amounts to a teenage James Bond for the 21st century.

6. The Harry Potter series. Look, the chance to read these books aloud is by itself a great reason to have kids.

7. “Gentle Ben.” The coming-of-age story of a sickly, introspective Alaskan boy who makes friends with an Alaskan brown bear, to the horror of his tough, domineering father.

8. “Anne of Green Gables.” At a time when young ladies were supposed to be demure and decorative, Anne emerged to become one of the strongest and most memorable girls in literature.

9. “The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be.” This is a hilarious, poignant and exceptionally well-written memoir of childhood on the Canadian prairies. (Note, if you prefer sweet to funny, try “Rascal” instead.)

10. “Little Lord Fauntleroy.” This classic spawned the Fauntleroy suit and named a duck (Donald Duck’s middle name is Fauntleroy). An American boy from a struggling family turns out to be heir to an irritable and fabulously wealthy old English lord, whom the boy proceeds to tame and civilize.

11. “On to Oregon.” This outdoor saga, written almost 90 years ago, is loosely based on the true story of the Sager family journeying by covered wagon in 1848, in the early days of the Oregon Trail. The parents die on route, and the seven children — the youngest just an infant — continue on their own. They are led by 13-year-old John: spoiled, surly, often mean, yet determined and even heroic in keeping his siblings alive.

12. “The Prince and the Pauper.” Most kids encounter Mark Twain through “Tom Sawyer,” but this work is at least as funny and offers unforgettable images of English history.

13. “Lad, a Dog” is simply the best book ever about a pet, a collie. This is to “Lassie” what Shakespeare is to CliffsNotes. The book was published 90 years ago, and readers are still visiting Lad’s real grave in New Jersey — plus, this is a book so full of SAT words it could put Stanley Kaplan out of business.

You can post your own suggestions for best children’s books on my blog, www.nytimes.com/ontheground. My own kids have the temerity to think they know better than I which books they’ve enjoyed, so I’ve deigned to post their recommendations there. But listening to one’s children is dangerous: I advocate reading to them instead.

Below is an article about the deal in today's NY Times. Worth a read.

What Would Mao Drive? A Little Red ... Hummer

Even in a world mostly done being amazed by the ironies of globalization, last week managed to produce something fresh and previously unfathomable: General Motors, newly bankrupt and struggling to raise cash, agreed to sell its Hummer division to a company from China.

Yes, that Hummer, maker of the famously gas-guzzling behemoths whose menacing width and armor trace their provenance to the American military, is now set to become the property of Sichuan Tengzhong Heavy Industrial Machinery Company, in a land officially still called the People’s Republic of China.

It might seem incongruous, this plaything for the unabashed American road warrior shifting to a country where the bicycle once ruled and collectivism was an organizing principle. (What next? Harley-Davidson snapped up by the Vietnamese?) But that’s just until you contemplate the realities of modern China, and the nouveau riche in the growing suburbs, setting down lawn furniture inside gated complexes of villas, shopping at big-box stores and driving luxury cars. China seems intent on nurturing the very sorts of landscapes and consumer attitudes that produced the Hummer.

More than a merely economic event — the latest sign of China’s rise and American struggles — the deal is a cultural moment. It seems no accident that a Chinese company is taking possession of Hummer. China has come to embrace many of the attributes and modes of consumption that Americans may reflexively consider their own, complete with the sprawl and tangle of highways familiar to any resident of Los Angeles or Atlanta.

As China has cast off its ideological past and aggressively modernized its cities, it might reasonably have been expected to look to Europe or Japan for models of urban planning. Like Japan — home to one of the most sophisticated rail networks on earth — China is densely populated and dependent on imported oil. As is true in Europe, China’s major cities are surrounded by productive agricultural lands, making tightly clustered growth seem prudent.

Instead, in a choice familiar to Americans, China has put the automobile at the center of contemporary life. China has torn down older buildings in every major city to make way for more vehicles. It has erected an impressive network of highways crisscrossing the vast country. Air quality and energy efficiency have been outweighed by reverence for the car.

This has not happened randomly. In recent times, China’s leaders have unleashed enormous quantities of state finance to seed auto ventures in every province, spurring industries that have grown along with the ubiquity of the car. Petrochemicals, steel, glass-making and rubber have all expanded to feed auto-making. Tourism and retail shopping have increased as more Chinese take possession of steering wheels.

Along the way, many Chinese aspirations have come to focus on car ownership. In a country where so many people look back with bitterness on the regimented days of Maoism, and where public transportation still involves packing into belching buses and gruesomely crowded trains, the car has become a vessel for Chinese dreams.

“Why do you want a car?” I asked a young professional couple shopping at a car lot outside Beijing in 2002. The question elicited an irritated glare from the woman, as if I were condescending. “Same reason you want a car,” she said. “We want what you want.”

She did not mean merely the ability to go where she pleased, but also the geography the car enables — the villas with their backyards and modern conveniences; the superstores selling microwave-ready food; the new golf courses.

Asked about the atrocious smog blanketing Beijing and the traffic jams that made driving there a threat to mental health, she shrugged. Anyway, the car takes a growing slice of wealthy urbanites into the countryside for the pure pleasure of it — this, too, once unthinkable in a nation that remembers how city dwellers were forcibly dispatched to the hinterlands to slop pigs during the Cultural Revolution.

As driving has evolved from a mere way to get around to a mode of life, sales of passenger cars in China have grown by 20 percent to 30 percent per year since 2005. In January, for the first time ever, China’s monthly vehicle sales exceeded those in the United States.

Still, it would be wrong, if tempting, to view China as some sort of time capsule of 1950s American suburbia, that age before the vernacular came to include “climate change” and “non-renewable resource.” China is moving to impose fuel efficiency standards tougher than those in the United States while developing hybrid cars. Most car owners favor cheaper, smaller models.

But much as everywhere else, the auto has become a status symbol in China, and in ways that collide with the country’s history as a paragon of anti-imperialism: Cadillacs, that icon of American capitalist success, are now made on Chinese soil along with Audis and Buicks. In the new Chinese social divide, the middle class hews to economical vehicles with tiny engines, while the wealthy fuss with automatic climate control in their luxury sedans.

So it actually seems fitting that Hummer will be a Chinese brand. A vehicle that makes sense only as a pastime, with its miserable gas mileage, the Hummer has become an object increasingly shunned in the United States as a sign of wasteful decadence (not to mention something that most Americans can no longer afford). China, primed to consume and long since shorn of its collectively imposed thrift, will take a crack at extracting profit by selling the hulking beasts.

"The one thing you can say for certain about Twitter is that it makes a terrible first impression. You hear about this new service that lets you send 140-character updates to your "followers," and you think, Why does the world need this, exactly? It's not as if we were all sitting around four years ago scratching our heads and saying, "If only there were a technology that would allow me to send a message to my 50 friends, alerting them in real time about my choice of breakfast cereal."

The article strives to make a point that Twitter has moved from being a tendency or trend to becoming a new national habit among Americans. And that this habit is something new and better and different than what people had before Twitter was born.

I am a little skeptical about the long-term viability of this habit however as technology crazed people like you and me like the 'new' new, and are always looking for interesting new ways to connect and spread ideas.

It might very well grow deep roots and be the media of choice of my children. But based on the fickleness of tech users I think this might well turn out to be another fashion.

The discussion around social media reminds me of the discussions around digital that surfaced back in early 2000 as agencies grappled with the impact and spread of the internet. Gareth's point about the focus on Social Media ideas is bang on. This is the way we at StrawberryFrog, have been working with social media before it became "social media". For example our campaign for Scion - called ScionSpeak is an example of this. It enabled Scion owners and fans to create badges about their lifestyles and use them on social media to express their own individual lifestyles.

Here is Gareth's well-written article:

"I absolutely believe that communication needs to be a two-way conversation not a narcissistic monologue, and that people aren't passive consumers waiting to be penetrated by marketing messages. Social media has helped prove the power of human conversation, and our innate social nature for anyone who had forgotten or doubted it.

But all this talk of social media got me thinking that perhaps, yet again, we are looking at this from the wrong end of the telescope, focusing on the delivery mechanism not the underlying issue.

Rather than focusing on social media shouldn't we be focusing on social ideas? This may sound a little trite, but I think it's important. Rather than (again) using communications as a sticking plaster to cover real fundamental issues a business faces, it forces us to confront what it is that we need to do at a more fundamental level."

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The article in the New Yorker describes how graduate student Karen Lips observed the mysterious disappearance of large numbers of local golden frogs, in the nineteen-nineties, at several locations in Panama and Costa Rica. Whatever was killing Lips’s frogs moved east, like a wave, across Panama.

More here >>>

From the New Yorker:

Last month, the PIMCO bond and economy guru Bill Gross wrote, “The future of the global economy will likely be dominated by de-leveraging, de-globalization, and re-regulation.” De-leveraging and re-regulation are easy to grasp. American households, for example, are shifting rapidly from borrowing to saving; this change in the United States during the last nine months has been particularly dramatic, and not exactly helpful to our consumer-dependent economy. Banks have already de-leveraged and shifted large chunks of their bad debt to taxpayers. Re-regulation is in the newspaper headlines every day—one of its goals, presumably, will be to prevent Wall Street’s wizards from re-leveraging. But de-globalization? What might that actually mean? The economic crisis has not abolished Moore’s law (which observes that computing power, and thus the power of electronic devices, has doubled about every two years since the invention of the computer chip, in 1958.) Whatever their states of mind, more and more people are plugging into the grid, and will continue to do so; even in hard times, the cost of electronic integration will not pose a serious obstacle. At the same time, cell phone and computer users are also expanding the depth and reach of their online activity. So that form of globalization will certainly accelerate.

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Liz Fallon, 30, a visual artist in Portland, Me., started selling her paintings and drawings to private collectors about 10 years ago, when she was still in college. She has not sold an original work in almost a year. But in the Portland area, Ms. Fallon said, there seems to be a kind of artistic renaissance under way as various groups, like photography cooperatives and drawing collectives, form to connect creative professionals with one another.

“As for myself, freed from the constraints of creating for a specific buyer,” Ms. Fallon wrote, “I’ve experienced my own surge in creativity and have been producing a great deal more than I used to. While it would be nice to still be getting paid for my work, the need to be more resourceful is having a beneficial effect on the arts community around me.”

Cadine Navarro, an artist in New York says: “I feel that artists are well equipped to deal creatively with such situations and with a bit of persistence and optimism, can turn this recession into a point of strength.”

Read the full piece here >>>