Community Read - Defeating the Culture of Bullying (Virtual)

The Scarsdale Public Library and the Scarsdale Edgemont Family Counseling Service invite you to participate in a Community Read. The 2024 selection is Sticks and Stones, and author Emily Bazelon will be discussing her research with journalist, Valerie Abrahams, as moderator.

This program will be held online, and a Zoom link will be sent one hour before the event to all who register.

Copies of the book are available to borrow from the Library and the Libby app, and it is available for purchase from Bronx River Books.

Being a teenager has never been easy, but in recent years, with the rise of the Internet and social media, it has become exponentially more challenging. Bullying, once thought of as the province of queen bees and goons, has taken on new, complex, and insidious forms, as parents and educators know all too well.

Blending keen journalistic and narrative skills, Bazelon explores different facets of bullying through the stories of three young people who found themselves caught in the thick of it. With grace and authority, Bazelon chronicles how these kids’ predicaments escalated, to no one’s benefit, into community-wide wars. Cutting through the noise, misinformation, and sensationalism, she takes us into schools that have succeeded in reducing bullying and examines their successful strategies. The result is a groundbreaking book that will help parents, educators, and teens themselves better understand what kids are going through today and what can be done to help them through it. (www.emilybazelon.com)

Emily Bazelon is a staff writer at the New York Times Magazine, the Truman Capote Fellow for Creative Writing and Law at Yale Law School, and a co-host of Slate’s Political Gabfest, a popular weekly podcast. She is the author of two national bestsellers published by Penguin Random House: Charged, about the power of prosecutors, and Sticks and Stones, about how to prevent bullying. In 2020, Charged won a Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Emily was also a finalist for a National Magazine Award in the public interest category in 2023.

Before joining the Times Magazine in 2014, Emily was a writer and editor for nine years at Slate. She is a graduate of Yale College and Yale Law School.