On James Baldwin’s Go Tell it on the Mountain
Whatever fear strikes any reader of Baldwin’s book awaits right in that opening paragraph: an unseemly portrait of faith. It is not literary sex, or violence, or the conflation… More
Animal Farm: Banned by the Soviets, Promoted by the CIA
Though the book cannot and should not be divorced from the Russian Revolution, Orwell sees beyond the specifics of that revolution, and even beyond revolution itself, to tell what… More
Reservation Sunsets and ‘Salem’s Lot
Maybe the banning advocate truly is the 13 year old, terrified that his secret life is out, that some novelist had looked into his private world and reported from… More
On Beauty: Banning Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye
The narrative that Pecola absorbs from the world around her is simple. It tells her that to be beautiful is to be white. It shapes her identity at the… More
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PEN America On 
a joy to serve as one of the @PENamerica judges this year, along with @TereseMarieM & @davidulin https://pen.org/meet-the-2020-literary-awards-judges
Allowing law enforcement to commit “authorized privacy violations” will ensure investigations are not hindered, a senior government official told @Reuters on Wednesday, amid worries that India’s new privacy law will increase state surveillance: https://bit.ly/38uiSQd.
A group of artists have presented the president of Kyrgyzstan with an open letter decrying the censorship of an exhibition at the Kyrgyz National Museum of Fine Arts and calling for the resignation of the minister of culture: https://bit.ly/38udLiO via @TheArtNewspaper.