flowing skirt blowing in a transcendental wind

One recent example: My novel Turtles All the Way Down was banned from being taught in English classes because one school board member claimed it "romanticizes mental illness."

(It does no such thing, of course. TAtWD makes mental illness seem really unpleasant and not at all either lowercase-r or capital-r romantic. To acknowledge something's existence is not to romanticize that thing. But part of co-opting this language is misusing it for the end of removing books thematically centered on mental illness, or physical illness, or sex, or anything else that might be deemed insufficiently inocuous for Educational Literature.)

But the question of when writing about something veers into romanticizing it IS actually a very important question for contemporary literary criticism, and one that's been explored a lot (sometimes with generosity and care, sometimes not) in book discourse online. So the Christian Nationalist Right is using the language of analysis that we are using in ways that are at best misguided and at worst disingenuous.

It's really discouraging--I mean, on a personal level obviously but also just as an American who believes teachers should be allowed to teach--to see such widespread book bans in American high schools and libraries. But it's not surprising, really. Books retain a lot of power--to deepen our empathy with those who are suffering, to connect us to ourselves and to others, and to see the full humanity of those who might be dehumanized or marginalized by the social order.

RSS = “Really Simple Syndication”

(Replace “post” in the explanation below with “article”, “comic page”, “recipe of the day”, etc. as appropriate to the sites you read.)

Basically, from a computer’s perspective, your typical HTML page these days looks something like…

heres the title of the page heres metadata about the page heres a cool script that puts a music player on the page heres a cool script that makes snow fall on the page heres a cool script that plays videos all pretty like though there aren’t actually videos on this particular page its just part of the site theme heres the background image for the page and a bunch of other styles to make the text pretty heres the sidebar of the page heres the post you are actually reading heres the navigation buttons heres the comments on the post heres the page footer

Imagine you were a computer trying to tell the difference between the actual post and all that boilerplate noise. It’s confusing and unreliable.

RSS is a way to format content so that computers can tell what’s going on.

Something like:

Here is the latest post

Here is another post from this site

Here is a third post.

And a fourth post. We believe in robot-accessibility.

Why is this useful?

Besides the fact that it’s hypothetically easier for screenreaders, there are programs called “RSS aggregators” which can read the RSS versions of websites and present the posts to you all in one place.

Sorta like a Tumblr dashboard, but it works for websites besides Tumblr, and you have choices if you don’t like one interface.

A lot of email clients support subscribing to RSS feeds, so you can read them like email folders.

Many blogging and webcomic sites provide RSS feeds.

Firefox

If you use Firefox, you can add an RSS feed as a toolbar bookmark folder that auto-updates with the latest posts from a site.

For example, go to a Tumblr blog you follow a lot, and change the url to /rss. Say, http://animalssittingoncapybaras.tumblr.com/rss

You should see a list of the recent posts, and a Subscribe button. The button will add a nifty link to your bookmark bar. Click it, and you can check for updates without ever opening a new tab!