Wait, Brand's Writing a Children's Book?

In what looks to not be an April Fools' Joke — and thank god because good lord do I hate April Fools' Day — Russell Brand announced that he's writing a children's book series via a video (below) which he posted on Twitter. That's right: kids' stuff, titled Russell Brand's Trickster Tales. The comedian and activist (and former Mr. Katy Perry) is hoping to use these retellings of fairy stories and various folk legends to serve as "the code to unlock aspects of our consciousness and to affect and impact the way that we see the world." Heady stuff for a buncha toddlers, eh?

"Once we start changing the way children see the world, oh, we can do all sorts of stuff," the comedian went on — looking incredibly serious and impassioned, we might add. In the video, Brand reads from his re-imagined take on The Pied Piper of Hamelin , a popular story about the man who marched all the rats right out of an infested town.

In Brand's take — featuring the illustrative work of award-winning political illustrator and children's book author, Chris Riddell — the story is less about the fancy flutework that whisks the rats (and, spoiler alert: children) out of town and the general metaphorical struggle that implies, and more about the interconnectedness of life and the importance of living beyond the grasp of material objects and external validation. "The glint-eyed piper knew that each breath we took was borrowed ... knew that all things were connected," Brand continued in the clip. "The clouds, the people, the rats, the pipe, the music — all things connected by invisible threads." Sounds like the perfect companion to Baby's First Sartre, a children's book that I'm going to start writing immediately after I finish this story.