November 24, 2014

Texas State Board of Education approves social studies textbooks, doesn’t really know what’s in them (but it’s probably stuff about how Moses was awesome)

Mark Krotov

Let’s begin with a short quiz: Do you like power? Do you also like ignorance? Do you enjoy imposing your arbitrary wishes and paranoid half-opinions on the population of the… Read more »

Censorship

Chinese translation of Indian poet draws criticism from state and scholars alike — Chad Felix
Egypt continues crackdown on novelist Alaa Al Aswany — Ena Brdjanovic
Has anyone in the White House read the Senate Torture Report? — Mark Krotov
Tea Party chair calls for UN fund-raising book by Kermit the Frog to be banned — Taylor Sperry

The National Archivist gets superpowers

Sal Robinson

David Ferriero, 10th Archivist of the United States, is on the verge of getting a crucial new power. And it’s not the power to say snarky things about Bigfoot to… Read more »

Ladybird Books promises an end to gender-specific children’s books

British publisher Ladybird Books has had success in the past with children’s books Favourite Fairy Tales for Girls and Favourite Stories for Boys. But according to an announcement from the… Read more »

John Updike’s trash, re-revisited

Liam O'Brien

John Updike, whose prolificity once memorably led a reader to inquire if he’d “ever had an unpublished thought”, wrote about a lot of things. Which is why it’s easy to… Read more »

Burroughs the Scientologist

Jacob Karpathian

What is is that we all want to know? The future, of course. And Williams Burroughs came up with a way of reading the future: the “cut-up” method. The cut-up… Read more »

Melville House Books