Learning is a world that we enter: The Phantom Tollbooth at 50

Here I make a plea:  Buy the October 17 issue of The New Yorker.  Turn to page 30, the piece titled "Broken Kingdom:  Fifty years of The Phantom Tollbooth," by Adam Gopnik. Find a nice chair. Sit. Read.

I love this story.  I love the idea of it, the execution of it, the knowing that one gains from it.  Who were these two men—Norton Juster and Jules Feiffer—who gave us this classic?  What was in their minds and hearts as they wrote and drew?  How did the book not end up on the remainder table?  What does it all mean?

You'll get answers to those questions.  You'll get Adam Gopnik himself, whom I love to read.  And in between you'll let lines like these, which should set you up in fine, fine style for this autumnal weekend:

What Milo discovers is that math and literature, Dictionopolis and Digitopolis, should assume their places not under the pentagon of Purpose and Power but under the presidency of Rhyme and Reason.  Learning isn't a set of things that we know but a world that we enter.