Cracker Jack announced last week the 126-year-old company will be packaging special-edition Cracker Jill snacks to support American female athletes through the Women’s Sports Foundation — and reworked the old song “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” to include lyrics about female athletes.

Girls love sports as much as boys — softball, soccer, basketball, volleyball, wrestling, swimming, tennis, golf, etc. And they probably like to nibble on the all-American treat of caramel popcorn and peanuts — and find the prize inside.

But it took more than a century for them to earn a spot in the world of athletics, a struggle outlined in vivid detail during an excellent St. Helens Club presentation Wednesday in Chehalis by Corene Jones-Litteer titled “Overcoming Hurdles: Women in Sports.”

Gender Queer is the graphic (comic-style) memoir of Maia Kobabe, published by Oni-Lion Forge Publishing Group and released in 2022. We are told that the 256-page book was originally written for adults but it seems to this reader that it is aimed directly at middle-grade students. The book won the American Library Association Alex Award for its “special appeal” to teenagers, but is it appropriate for school libraries and children? That is the question I want to answer for parents as I review the book.

Most people have heard the folktale of the Emperor’s New Clothes. What is a Woman is the darker side of the ideological blindness that drives the older tale. Part of the intensity of this Daily Wire documentary is watching Matt Walsh travel all over North America and beyond to find the modern answer to a question that has had a universally accepted definition since the dawn of time. In the film, Matt Walsh strives to get a simple answer to the question “What is a woman.” We might be amused by all the fumbling attempts at answers but, that hides an evil directed at our children.