"I don't like them. I wouldn't read them. I'll be honest I've read the reviews on some of them…" With these words at a public meeting, Tennessee's Rutherford County School Board member Stan Vaught admitted to banning books he hadn't read — a revelation that kicked off a federal lawsuit.
According to the complaint, board members relied primarily on BookLooks.org, a website connected to the Hitler-quoting group Moms for Liberty, instead of reading the books themselves or considering their literary merit. The board repeatedly overruled their own librarians' recommendations to keep books like Toni Morrison's Beloved and Margaret Atwood's The Testaments, and Ernest Cline' Ready Player One because it has "characters discussing beliefs that heaven and god are not
real."
books, censorship, extremism, free speech, libraries, US politics
More broadly, fiction can act as an antidote to authoritarianism. If authoritarianism thrives when people are isolated, fiction brings people together, she says. “In the most basic way, writing is about opening yourself to another person’s mind. The most intimate thing I do on a daily basis is pick up a book and open myself to another person.” And, while the Trump administration may be forcing one way of life on the world, fiction’s job is, as always, to remind people that there are “other ways of being”.
"So horrifying and so heartbreaking": Öztürk's close friend provides an intimate look into one of the hundreds of foreign students who have had their visas revoked — and in dozens of instances have been detained without criminal charges.
Twitter and its imitators have adopted a structural design that is fundamentally bad for people. This isn't just a matter of who's in charge; it's a problem with the thing itself. Forcing users to adhere to a tight character limit, discouraging link culture, preventing people from editing their own posts, steering people into sharing things they hate, incentivizing rage bait with trending feeds, subjecting people to decontextualized encounters, encouraging conflict by discouraging tags, and leaving users powerless to clean up the resulting mess—all of this is bad shape.
With every personal website made, every web page published, every story told, every experiment embarked on, we can expand the aperture of the web. We can introduce people to its potential. We can expand the potential of the web, too.
The lawsuit, filed yesterday in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, argues that the administration’s recent actions—which include firing most IMLS staff, terminating grant programs, and effectively shutting down the organization’s operations—are both illegal and, separately, unconstitutional.