Tag: censorship
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Bye bye, book bans
My adopted home state of Illinois has got 99 problems but now book bans ain’t one: Illinois has become the first state to legislate against the banning of books in public libraries, a practice that has been on the rise across the United States as conservatives look to suppress some books dealing with race, history…
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Holy book bans
Perhaps unsurprisingly, I’m against book bans of all kinds. They’re the literary version of the Streisand Effect, not to mention small-minded and fascistic. And yet, I also can’t get enough of people petitioning to ban the Bible based on the same criteria used for other books, most recently in Utah for example. It’s both A+…
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The Book Thieves
As I read Anders Rydell’s The Book Thieves: The Nazi Looting of Europe’s Libraries and the Race to Return a Literary Inheritance, I kept thinking of Sean Connery’s line from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: All this book burning by the Nazis entailed looting a continent’s worth of libraries and archives, specifically to root out so-called…
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Every Book Its Clean Reader
I was ready to scoff at the makers of Clean Reader, an app that blocks swear words from being seen on ebooks. Jared and Kirsten Maughan offered rationale for their app in the FAQ: The number one argument against Clean Reader is essentially that an author is an artist and they put specific words in…