*Insert Inspirational Song Lyrics Here*

Basically they think they've found a gas that is produced solely by organisms on earth, but need to confirm that they did actually find this gas and THEN confirm that it is produced by life and not some other wacky process on this extremely far away place.

“This book should be taken off of shelves for featuring–” you are an anti-intellectual and functionally a conservative

“Schools shouldn’t teach this book in class because–” you are an anti-intellectual and functionally a conservative

“Nobody actually likes or wants to read classics because they’re–” you are an anti-intellectual and an idiot

Literally right after I saw this post, I saw another post in a discord chat for BOOK EDITORS in which an outspokenly liberal editor talked about how Nabokov should have never been published because he wrote about p*dophiles and described women's bodies in ways that made her uncomfortable. She described his writing as "objectively terrible" and said she wanted to burn his books. And other editors were bringing up classics they didn't like and talking about how they wanted to throw them in the trash. This wasn't like a light "unpopular opinion!" conversation. This was actual book editors talking about how books should be destroyed and censored.

There is something so scary and toxic in global culture right now. The revival of fascism is influencing everyone's mindset and approach to art, regardless of where they fall on the political spectrum.

I see far more books being censored today than when I was a kid. Librarians handed me The Catcher in the Rye, The Sexual Politics of Meat, and Animal Farm when I was literally 8-11. My mom would never have taken a book away from me. I read everything from the Tao Te Ching to the Qur'an to atheist texts under my desk at school. Teachers thought nothing of it or encouraged it. Books seemed universally acknowledged as sacrosanct to me.

Now I can't find any adults who don't hesitate or want to make exceptions when it comes to censorship. Even the most liberal social activist librarians I know go, "well except for book X..."

Actually, I did reports on book banning three separate times with three separate teachers, with three separate sets of parameters so I was able to write about the same topic in different ways, but this is specifically about the report I did in university. The actual specs for the report included that we were supposed to complete some kind of study or poll (this was not a science class). I put the questions out on a couple of forums I belonged to at the time and asked a few IRL friends as well. A lot of the questions were standard for this sort of thing, I think - were you ever assigned to read a banned book, did you ever read banned books on your own, did you read/were you assigned them BECAUSE they were banned or did you find out about them being banned later, what's your opinion on banning books, etc.

But there was one question I asked that ended up reshaping the entire thrust of my presentation: "Are there any books that you think SHOULD be banned, and if so, why?"

Here's the thing. Most of the forums I was posting on were fan spaces for a book series that, at the time, was one of the most banned/challenged books out there. It's a fandom that I have since entirely distanced myself from, that I one hundred percent do not recommend to anyone, that I will actively attempt to dissuade people from reading or talking about, and that I would like to not be popular anymore. I'm sure most of you reading this can guess which one I'm talking about (I won't name it or go into specifics because I don't want to trip any filters unnecessarily). But it was KNOWN that these books were banned in a lot of places. A lot of people wore the "I read banned books" badge with pride. I fully expected that the answer to that question would be a resounding "no" from the forums, and that I'd maybe get a few affirmative answers from one of the other spaces.

I was shocked. Not only did a lot of people come back with either "not exactly but I think we should keep [author] or [book] out of the hands of children" or "yes, [book]/anything by [author] should be banned because XYZPDQ", but not a single person who responded gave me the same answer. The only one I remember - keep in mind it's been almost twenty years - was that one person specifically said The Bone Collector, and for the "why do you think it should be banned" question, they only said, "No. I'm not explaining it. It's too horrible to even think about. Just believe me when I say nobody should ever be allowed to read this book."

I highlighted that last comment in my presentation, along with several other of my "favorite" official reasons for banning books - the Alabama school board that banned The Diary of Anne Frank in 1984 because it was "a real downer", the district that removed A Raisin in the Sun because it was "pornographic", the library that took Charlie and the Chocolate Factory out of circulation because it "might be hurtful to children without parents", and things of that nature - and pointed out that all of these were the same thing. This was somebody saying "I don't like this, therefore nobody should read it, and I shouldn't have to explain why." I also pointed out that if you can't give a good reason, the whole thing falls apart, and then I quoted "Smut" by Tom Lehrer:

All books can be indecent books, Though recent books are bolder, For filth, I'm glad to say, Is in the mind of the beholder. When correctly viewed, Everything is lewd. I can tell you things about Peter Pan And the Wizard of Oz - THERE'S a dirty old man...

Go back to that paragraph I mentioned earlier, about those books that I no longer recommend to anyone. Notice how I phrased that. I don't recommend them. I will tell you all the reasons why I don't think you should buy them. I will tell you all the problems with the author, with the franchise, with the writing. I wish they were out of print, I wish they were deeply unpopular, I wish nobody would ever read them again.

But I still won't advocate for banning them.

It's so easy to twist a justification. Look at what I quoted up there! A Raisin in the Sun was banned for being "pornographic". One of the websites I used as a source responded to that accusation with "Did they read the same play I did?" At the time, I thought the comment was funny. Now, twenty years later, I realize: It was a buzzword. It was a convenient label. At the time of the challenge, just saying "it's pornographic" was enough. Obviously you're not some kind of sicko who wants to hear about all the pornographic details, are you? Freak! That's pornography! And they're teaching it in schools! We should get rid of it!

A Raisin in the Sun, for anyone who didn't study it at any point or read it (or watch the movie, which was very good), is a play/movie about a black family in Chicago in the 1960s. The family matriarch has been in domestic service for years, but she's just received a very large insurance payment from her husband's death and is retiring. Wanting to give her family, especially her young grandson, a better life, she goes out and buys a house...in an otherwise exclusively white neighborhood. The head of the homeowner's association (essentially) comes to visit them and offers to pay them a substantial amount of money to not move into the neighborhood, because segregation isn't officially a thing and they can't legally stop them from moving in, but they don't want them there. There's a lot more that goes on in the play, and I highly recommend you go and read it, but the point is that there is nothing sexual or titillating in the entire thing. The closest we get is a scene where the daughter (Beneatha, a college student) is gifted a traditional African dress from her boyfriend, who's Nigerian, and he shows her how to put it on over the clothes she's already wearing, and maybe the scene where the daughter-in-law (Ruth, a laundress) accidentally reveals that, having found out she's pregnant, she's planning to have an abortion rather than bring another child into the world/have another mouth to feed.

It's not pornographic. But someone didn't want it taught in schools, so they called it that to get it banned.

It's so easy to twist labels. If you, a liberal, agree that books with X trait are okay to ban, the people who don't want books to exist will find a way to say they have X trait, and then what are you going to do, admit that you like that sort of thing? Sicko! Freak! Pervert!

Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor-in-chief of the Atlantic, has been at the center of a national story after he was “inadvertently” included in a group Signal chat with administration officials as they planned a deadly bombing in Yemen. Much of the coverage has focused on the mishandling of military secrets, rather than the impact of the bombings themselves, targeting the poorest country in the Middle East, which the United States has helped bomb and blockade for over a decade. Goldberg is not just an observer: He is contributing to this disregard for Yemeni lives, and his dismissiveness sheds light on why he was an administration media contact to begin with.

In an interview that aired on March 26, Deepa Fernandes, one of the hosts of NPR's “Here and Now,” interviewed Goldberg about the “group chat heard 'round the world” that included Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, National Security Adviser Mike Waltz, and Vice President JD Vance. During one portion of the interview, Fernandes did something few other journalists are doing. She asked Goldberg about the Yemeni people who were killed in the bombing, which took place on March 15.

Deepa Fernandes: There's little talk of the fact that this attack killed 53 people, as we mentioned, including women and children. The civilian toll of these American strikes. Are we burying the lede here?

Jeffrey Goldberg: Well, those, unfortunately, those aren't confirmed numbers. Those are provided by the Houthis and the Houthi health ministry, I guess. So we don't know that for sure. Yeah, I mean, obviously we're, well, I don't know if we're burying the lede, because obviously huge breaches in national security and safety of information, that's a very, very important story, obviously. And one of the reasons, you know, it's a very important story is that the Republicans themselves consider that to be an important story, when it's Hillary Clinton doing the deed, right? So that's obviously hugely important.

But yeah, I think that covering what's going on in Yemen, the Arab and Iran backed terrorist organization, the Houthis, that are that are firing missiles at Israel and disrupting global shipping and occupy half of Yemen, and all kinds of other things in the US, you know, and the Trump administration criticizing the Biden's response and Europe wants Trump to do more. I mean, yeah, there's, there's a huge story in Yemen. But Yemen is, as you know, is one of the more inaccessible places for Western journalists. So maybe this becomes like a substitute for a discussion of Yemen. I don't know.

Goldberg not only seems unconcerned about the death toll and eager to cast doubt on its veracity, but he also appears unprepared for the question. It’s as though it didn’t occur to him that the substance of the Signal exchange itself—the bombing—might be a legitimate topic of conversation, and he seems eager to move on.

This is despite the fact that there is evidence in the exchange itself that the United States hit a civilian site in the bombing. Waltz wrote in the Signal chat that the US military had bombed a residential building. “The first target—their top missile guy—we had positive ID of him walking into his girlfriend’s building and it’s now collapsed,” Waltz wrote in the chat, to which JD Vance replied: “Excellent.”

Yet, as Nick Turse noted for The Intercept, “So far, however, there has been little focus on the specifics of the attack, much less discussion of the fact that one of the targets of the March 15 strike was a civilian residence.”

The story of US belligerence in Yemen should be a huge one. Since 2015, the US-Saudi coalition has used American manufactured bombs to hit wedding parties, factories, a school bus, and a center for the blind. It’s difficult to know the exact death toll, but around three years ago, the death toll from direct and indirect consequence of war surpassed 377,000. Direct bombings by both the Biden and Trump administrations threaten a wider war, and have occurred in lockstep with US support for Israel as it has ruthlessly bombed and attacked Gaza since October 7.

Goldberg, of course, was included in that group chat because he was a contact of someone on the administration’s thread, and his history of laundering the US military’s mass atrocities is a good indicator of why. In the lead-up to the US-led war on Iraq, Goldberg was central to peddling the disproven conspiracy theory that Iraq had ties to al-Qaeda, a key lie of the George W. Bush administration, used to justify the invasion. One month before the US started the war, he went on NPR to discuss “Possible Links Between Iraq and al Qaeda and Evidence That the Iraqis May be Trying to Evade Weapons Inspectors.”

Goldberg has a long career of uplifting the media narratives of the United States and its allies, including a big piece in 2010 where he floated justifications for a possible Israeli war on Iran. Like many of the Iraq War pushers, Goldberg’s lies about Iraq did not harm his career, but marked its ascent. Under his tenure, the Atlantic has shut out Palestinian voices and stories, as the US has helped Israel wage genocide in Gaza.

Goldberg’s dismissal of Yemeni deaths is not a small detail of this blockbuster story, but a central component. One way to get on the speed dials of high-level officials is to have a proven career of doing their bidding.