Like Brave New World, Only With More Earth Tones: Reston: The Baby Book to Be Distributed to All Newborns

Good news for lovers of literacy and dated design regulations: There's a new book called Reston Baby, which is about... a baby in Reston. What, you were expecting a spy novel filled with sultry double agents and Turkish assassins? It's the brainchild of former Sunrise Valley Elementary School principal Elizabeth English and illustrator Molly Bergin, was sponsored by a whole slew of Reston organizations, and it's full of bilingual descriptions of living, working, and playing in our plastic fantastic earth-toned community.

Check it, as the kids no longer say, in this video (assuming you can hear the narration over the drone of the rapidly departing cicadas.)

Like the dearly departed Reston: The Magazine before it, Reston Baby will be be part of a mandatory distribution scheme carried out by uniformed personnel—not van-driving federal agents in this case, but the staff at Reston Hospital Center who will hand copies to the parents of every baby born there, all in the spirit of indoctrination into the planned community ethos early literacy! No truth to the rumor that parents (and babies) will have to correctly recite the "live, work, play" mantra before being discharged, however. 

And there's more good news: If "committing to have a child to get one is too far a stretch” to obtain a copy of the book, as former RA President Andy Sigle says in the video, you can order a copy from the Reston Museum. Or if you haven't found the time to learn to read, you can listen to a reading of Reston: The Baby Book in this video (skip to about 5 minutes), perhaps while lounging on your Reston: The Sofa, the end.