Our end-of-the- fiscal-year campaign was a great success!  We achieved our goal of raising $15,000 by June 31. Thanks so much to everyone who contributed.  Your generosity makes it possible for us to continue our important work reclaiming childhood from corporate marketers.

Click here if you'd still like to make a donation to CCFC

The Healthy Media Choices Hour is a great resource for parents and teachers concerned about media’s influence on young children. It streams live at www.wvew.org on Tuesdays at 1 PM EST and is hosted by Mary Rothschild, founder and director of CCFC member organization, Healthy Media Choices. You can hear podcasts of past shows – including many featuring members of the CCFC staff and Steering Committee – at www.healthymediachoices.org.

Many of you know activist and writer Carrie McLaren from her great magazine Stay Free!, which provided a sharp, contemporary, and often hilarious critique of commercialism in the twenty-first century. In 2006, Stay Free! went paperless, morphing into blog.stayfreemagazine.org. Now she and Jason Torchnisky, a writer for The Onion News, have collaborated on editing a new, substantive and highly entertaining book, Ad Nauseam: A Survivor’s Guide to American Consumer Culture.

Ad Nauseam features a pithy collection of essays that manage to capture the utter absurdity and holy terror of commercialized culture while offering ideas for protest and resistance that move way beyond the staid and traditional. In addition to discussions of how and why advertising works are suggestions for resisting and subverting commercial culture, including an interview with Sir Jon Hargrave, a master of pointed pranksterism. An essay called Grave Revisionism: Advertising Resurrects the Dead, lists examples of great social thinkers who are now posthumously pushing products—like Ghandi (Apple) and Martin Luther King (Coca Cola). There’s even an interview with an adult Little Mermaid fanatic—the Disney version, of course.  

Ad Nauseam is a great read for anyone, and it’s also a terrific textbook for educating teenagers and young adults about commercialism. Each section concludes with a “Key Questions” page to help organize classroom discussions.

Follow CCFC on Twitter for new ways to communicate with us. We’ll be tweeting all the news related to the commercialization of childhood, as well as CCFC actions, events, facts, and activities. Join us on Twitter @commercialfree  to be part of the conversation and help spread the word.

Visit CCFC on twitter at http://www.twitter.com/commercialfree