1. I started a new job as the children’s books editor at The New York Times Book Review. This, in fact, takes time. A lot of it. And it’s the first time I’ve worked outside my home and pajamas since 2003. It’s been a big adjustment.

2. I am still writing my Studied column for the Times Sunday Styles section.

3. I’ve been writing elsewhere at the Times for Education Life, The Week in Review, and this weekend, my first Arts & Leisure story.

4. I’ve been writing for the Times’ own ArtsBeats blog.

5. And finally, I’ve joined that great time suck, Twitter.

So please, forgive me if I don’t update here often but do follow me on Twitter where I can be found at @PamelaPaulNYT.

It’s heartening to see a book store, especially a children’s book store, enlarge rather than shrink in these trying times. And this is a very good one. Though short on books (one could call it “heavily curated” as the marketing-speak tendency goes these days), the books are well-chosen and include some underappreciated authors, most particularly, Bill Peet. I almost purchased (and will likely do so soon) a lovely print of Bill Peet’s work from the charming tale-in-rhyme, The Caboose that Got Loose. There were also some glorious prints by the incredibly gifted David Wiesner.

My immediate purchases, however, included two Peets (Huge Harold and Cowardly Clyde), a beautiful hardcover edition or Rapunzel, and the pleasingly silly, There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Bat. Imagine that!

I was also delighted to note that Mo Willems himself seemed to appreciate the review and wrote so on his entertaining Doodles blog here.

And just today, I got an email from a reader who added this interesting Millennial, social-networking twist: Apparently, Facebook peer pressure adds to the urge to marry young and big. As the reader wrote me in her note:

I am really happy that a friend of mine recommended your book Starter Marriage to me. Websites like Facebook add to that frenzy of engagements you described. Since I am 27, I guess I am caught in that frenzy – where if you are getting engaged you are a superstar with people lavishing your wall with attention and where if you are single, you feel barren, not part of a whole.

However, I refuse to let fear drive my decisions and I am really glad you wrote your book and I read it. It made me see that I did make the right decision. And the stories of the people you interviewed who went into a marriage thinking ‘what if i don’t find someone else better’ – that type of thinking – haunted me the same way for months before we broke up.

And in other Starter Marriage headlines, apparently there’s a story up on the new Divorce section of the Huffington Post called “Second Time’s the Charm: the Case for the Starter Marriage”

The second story, a bit more lighthearted, explores whether there’s any upside to gossip. The story, for my Studied column, asks Can Gossip Be Good for You? According to two new British studies, it may not be exactly beneficial but talking about other people in a positive way certainly doesn’t have the negative impact that badmouthing others does. At the same time, research indicates that one’s sense of social support is bolstered by gossiping, whether it’s mean-spirited or harmless. Though perhaps people just think others like them more when they’re catty.

I think I’ll write about something happy next…

I worked on this story for almost a year, trying to show both sides — really, ALL sides because it’s such a complicated issue — of the story. Some readers may say, off the bat, that it’s impossible for young children to have a mental disorder. That the problem is parents or overreaching professionals or the pharmaceutical industry. Others will be appalled that the question of early onset depression can even be in doubt. Many of those readers will probably have experienced or witnessed familial depression in their own lives. I hoped to fairly represent both points of views, and the many nuanced views that lie in between.

So far, the story seems to be generating a good response, and their are lots of comments on Facebook as well as on Tara Parker-Pope’s Well blog. I’d love to hear from other readers here about what you think of the story and of the issue in general.

This is a phenomenon that I encounter frequently when I write, whether it’s an article or a book. Let’s take some of my writing about sexuality: If I write an article about a particular study, readers will ask, Why didn’t you write about this other study? If I write a book about heterosexual pornography, people ask, why didn’t you write about homosexual pornography? If I write an article about a lesbian couple’s struggle to adopt a child in West Virginia, people ask, why didn’t you write about the difficulties of gay adoption in Florida?

These are all valid questions, but the limitation of any story or book is that you can only write so much — that as journalists and authors, we have to draw the line somewhere, or we’d end up with 10,000 word articles all the time (which we, as writers, would love but readers probably wouldn’t) and with 500-page books (which we, as writers, would hate and readers would too — not that there’s anything wrong with 500 page books, but I’ll leave that to Robert Caro and Robert K. Massie).

In this case, I wrote about Ms. Dolgoff’s interest in the implications of aging (but not aging that much) on what you wear and how you look. It’s an interesting issue, and one I think Ms. Dolgoff addresses interestingly — and hilariously — in her book.

I truly had so much good material and got to learn so much about the wonderful kids’ books that people like that it was one of the hardest times I’ve had keeping a story to one page. One of the interesting discussions that didn’t make it into the final piece, but I’ll bring up here, is what makes a book YA to begin with?