As the new school year kicks off — or is already in progress in many places — it’s worth taking a look at the states which have enacted laws that ban books. This guide is not comprehensive, but gives an overview of the legislation currently on the books that will impact how teachers and librarians select and share reading material in classrooms and libraries.

Before diving it, it is worth noting these are all “red” states. It is a popular and unhelpful narrative to simply write off these laws because of where they are being enacted. In many of these states, there is significant disenfranchisement of voters in addition to laws which make voting harder than it needs to be; this ensures a certain political persuasion remains in power. These systemic barriers to voting are the same ones which need to be considered in arguments that the people who can’t get these books from libraries thanks to these laws can “just get them at the bookstore.” We are in the business of dismantling hurdles, not leaving them where they are.

Further, as we’ve seen through these censorship roundups over the past year+, it does not matter where or how book bans begin. They trickle through each and every state in varying degrees, and what you see here could become models for future legislation elsewhere. Finally, writing off certain states does not help in ending book bans. Everyone, regardless of political affiliation or state of residence, deserves the right to access books, reading material, and information they want to. Fighting fire with fire helps no one.

Note that this list is not comprehensive. I’ve pulled out some of the biggest laws in several states that are having an immediate impact and that will likely influence further legislation within and beyond their jurisdictions.

Book Ban Bills Currently Enacted Across the US

Florida

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June 5, 2001

When I wrote this, I was living full-time in an idyllic southwest German university town where I had been a familiar figure since the eighties, spending money saved up from fifteen years of menial work elsewhere while sharing a small apartment with two other women. My last job had involved documenting C++, so people were leaning on me to learn to code.

My diaries are rife with shorthand made up of proper names. People stand in for their lifestyles, values, and even for chance remarks. For example, the Christe doctrine refers to a principle casually formulated by the heavy metal critic Ian Christe circa 1994. He felt that people should move where they want to live and look for work there, instead of the other way around, because people always give the really plum jobs to their friends. At the time he was making a living beta-testing video games.

The words in this entry are also abbreviations. Settle means to abjure free love and live with a partner again, likely tripling my household income. Computers means a full-time tech job. Tü, of course, is Universitätsstadt Tübingen, the notoriously livable earthly paradise where I was working my way through a friend’s list of sexual recommendations. Having slept with basically every man she knew, she had informed opinions as to which ones I’d enjoy. During the day, I wrote letters and blog entries (e.g. https://shats.com/AR/Previous/NellNovember2000.htm#Bruno). I was having a good time. Did I really want to “settle?”

I first met Patrizia Cavalli in 2018, in her apartment near Campo de’ Fiori, where we drank tea with honey and talked from early afternoon until sunset. Every surface was covered with books, papers, notebooks, scissors, and scarves, and each bore the same handwritten note, a warning to visitors: “Do not move! If you move anything, I’ll kill you.” Over the course of two years, we had three more conversations, speaking for five hours at a stretch. The apartment had been her home for decades: in the late sixties, as a twenty-year-old philosophy student, she rented a single room there; she had just left Todi, the town in Umbria where she grew up, and in Rome she felt unmoored and lonely. In 1969, through a mutual friend, she met the writer Elsa Morante, who was then working on her novel History. Morante was the first person to look at Cavalli’s poems, and after reading them, she called to say, “Patrizia, I’m happy to tell you that you are a poet.”

More than fifty years later, Cavalli’s poems are translated and loved across Europe and the United States. Her first collection, My Poems Won’t Change the World (1974), signaled the forthrightness and disregard for authority that would characterize all her work. Cavalli examines the causes and conditions of pleasure and pain, and the moments in life, often imperceptible at the time, that herald change. Her work explores infatuation, boredom, deception, conflict, grief—all in a poetic voice whose nonchalance belies its artistry.

When Cavalli died in June, it felt as though all of Rome wanted to pay tribute. A beautiful ceremony took place at the Campidoglio, where flowers were piled upon flowers. Her admirers and friends crowded the stairwell, and the room where her body lay in state. Cavalli might have criticized the extravagant floral arrangements, but she would have been moved by the words her loved ones chose to speak—some of them her own.

 

The seventies and eighties were a high point in American dance, and consequently, dance on television. As video technologies advanced, one-off performances inaccessible to most could be seamlessly captured and broadcast to the masses. Like all art forms, dance at this time was also influenced aesthetically by this new medium, as cinematic techniques permeated the choreographic (and vice versa). Today, many of these dance films are archived on YouTube. My favorite is a recording of avant-garde choreographer Blondell Cummings’s Chicken Soup, a one-woman monologue in dance that aired in 1988 on a TV program called Alive from Off Center. The piece is set to a minimalist score Cummings composed with Brian Eno and Meredith Monk. Over the music, a soft feminine voice narrates: “Coming through the open-window kitchen, all summer they drank iced coffee. With milk in it.” Cummings repeats a series of gestures: sipping coffee, threading a needle, and rocking a child. She glances with an exaggerated tilt of the head at an imaginary companion and mouths small talk—what Glenn Phillips of the Getty Museum calls her signature “facial choreography.” Her movements are sharp and distinct, creating the illusion that she is under a strobe light, or caught on slowly projected 35 mm film. She sways back and forth like a metronome, keeping time with her gestures.

This particular performance placed Cummings in a detailed set evocative of a fifties household. But when she performed Chicken Soup onstage, accompanied solely by piano music, there was no set at all aside from a wooden chair. In this recording, for example, of a 1989 live performance at Jacob’s Pillow, her movements themselves seem endowed with greater importance, and the barrier between storyteller and audience feels gauze thin. Chicken Soup is an invitation inside, into a conversation that is both private and familiar. “They sat in their flower-print housedresses at the white enameled kitchen table,” the voiceover continues, “endlessly talking about childhood friends. Operations. And abortions.” The work premiered in 1973, the year the Supreme Court ruled on Roe vs. Wade, but Cummings’s kitchen could be any woman’s—anytime, anywhere.

—Elinor Hitt, reader

July 24, 2022

I live in LA, but I’ve just flown in from New York after a month away, so I wake up early, too early, at 4 A.M., and read a book called Healing Back Pain. The author, John Sarno, is a doctor who argues that most back pain is psychological—the result of tension, which arises from repressed emotion. He makes his perspective sound like the most obvious thing in the world, and makes the common explanations, like sitting too much, sound completely idiotic. Most people have been taught to think of chronic back pain as arising out of an inciting incident and to think of the spine, especially the lower spine, as very fragile—even though, he explains, bodies are resilient and spines exceptionally strong. I want to believe him, because if I do believe him I’ll never feel back pain again, or if I do, I’ll have my delicate psychology to blame, as opposed to an innocent object like my chair. Sarno has a cult following; I google him, careful to read only the testimonials about how the book has changed people’s lives. Then I fall back to sleep.

I wake up again, at 7 A.M., make tea, and open all the mail I got while I was away—health insurance bill; traffic ticket; copies of Dogs of Summer by Andrea Abreu and A Woman’s Battles and Transformations by Édouard Louis; the new Paris Review; and a couple of issues of the London Review of Books. I read a review of Either/Or by Elif Batuman, a book that made me very angry. I was nevertheless gripped by it, as I was by The Idiot, probably because both present a problem that I’m still working out and which I’ve encountered in many novels that I might otherwise be inclined to say I enjoyed. I always feel betrayed by characters with whom I begin to identify—not necessarily because my life or psychology is like theirs, but because I can understand the contours of their journeys and want to follow them through—who then, in brief and passing moments, reveal the limits of their worldview, ushering in black people or poor people or people who speak in halting English as props to signal the boundaries of their otherwise astounding capacities for empathy. I have no interest in reading about characters who are likeable, or about characters who are inclined to like people like me, but I have a hard time not seeing it as a failure of a book’s attention to detail when people are turned into metonyms for cultures and ideologies with which the novel is unwilling to engage; it feels almost like the opposite of virtue signaling: a brief and passing confession that the protagonist is (of course!) burdened by the ugliness of her social class. Almost every review I’ve read of Either/Or mentions Selin’s naive and enthusiastic embrace of great works of literature, which she reads as instruction manuals for how to construct a life; none mentions her stated difficulty in appreciating hip-hop, which she summarizes as an altogether alienating genre of music defined by a man “saying ‘Uh, uh’ in the background.” (“Killing Me Softly” by the Fugees proves, for Selin, to be the exception to the rule, because “the man, despite several false alarms, never did start rapping, and instead a girl sang an old song with beautiful harmonies.”) But I don’t know—obviously Either/Or wasn’t going to be entirely about Selin’s problematic relationship to hip-hop. That would be a horrible book.

Edits on my novel are due next week, so I’ve vowed to do nothing and see no one until I finish. I spend the rest of the morning line editing, and then do a YouTube exercise video that involves flailing my limbs around as if I were lifting and then dropping a series of heavy objects. The couple in the video tries to be motivational and in the process takes a very derogatory stance on exercise, emphasizing how difficult it is and how happy we’ll all be once it’s finally over. Every time they demonstrate something especially excruciating, they repeat that “there are thousands, maybe millions” of other people suffering alongside me, which seems like a gross overestimation of their audience.

In 1967, the Jornal do Brasil asked Clarice Lispector to write a Saturday newspaper column on any topic she wished. For nearly seven years she wrote weekly, covering a wide range of topics—humans and animals, bad dinner parties, the daily activities of her two sons—but the subject matter was often besides the point. These genre-defying missives are defined by a lyricism and strangeness that readers of her fiction will recognize, though they are a thing apart in their brevity and interiority. Too Much of Life: The Complete Crônicas, which collects these columns and others Lispector wrote throughout her career, will be published in English by New Directions this September. As Lispector’s son Paulo Gurgel Valente has written, “Enjoy the columns, I know of nothing quite like them.” Today, the Review is publishing a selection of these crônicas, the second in a series.

October 26, 1968

Bravado

Z.M. felt life was slipping through her fingers. In her humility, she forgot that she herself was a source of life and creation. She went out very little, turned down any invitations. She wasn’t the kind of woman to notice when a man was interested in her unless he actually said so — ​then she would be surprised and welcome his interest.

After hearing the horrifying news about the attack on Salman Rushdie earlier today, I turned to the first book of his I’d read—or rather, the book he read, on audiocassette, to my family on long car journeys.

“Just do one thing for me,” Haroun called to his father. “Just this one thing. Think of the happiest times you can remember. Think of the view of the Valley of Κ we saw when we came through the Tunnel of I. Think about your wedding day. Please.”

—Emily Stokes, editor

I met the novelist Anuradha Roy in Delhi in the mid-nineties, when she was an editor at Oxford University Press and I had just published my first book. Not long after that, she moved to a Himalayan town to set up Permanent Black, now India’s premier intellectual publisher, with her husband, Rukun Advani. She also began to write fiction. Her fifth novel, The Earthspinner, which was released in the United States this summer, is about the war on reason and on imagination in a world consumed by political fanaticism.

Though I don’t remember what was said in our first meeting, I can recall a certain hopefulness in the air—there was a lot of that about, among publishers and writers, in India in the nineties. Writing in English was ceasing to be the furtive and poorly paid endeavor it long had been. There were greater opportunities to publish; new literary periodicals and networks of promotion seemed to be creating the infrastructure for more vigorous intellectual and artistic life. Indeed, the conventional wisdom of that decade, helped by the prominence of Salman Rushdie, Vikram Seth, and Arundhati Roy abroad, was that Indian writing in English was “arriving,” no less resoundingly than was India’s embrace of consumer capitalism at the end of history. One measure of this apparent progress was the respectful international attention such work elicited. Granta and The New Yorker devoted issues to Indian writing in 1997, the fiftieth year of India’s independence from British colonialism.

In 2022, there is something very forlorn about the seventy-fifth anniversary of India’s independence. Murderous Hindu supremacists rule the country, and lynch mobs—physical and digital—police its cultural and intellectual life. Educated Indians spend much of their time and energy trying to emigrate. Literature remains, for a tiny minority, the means to cognition in the darkness, and literary festivals project, briefly, the illusion of a community. But every writer seems terribly alone with herself. The sense of a meaningful shared space and a common language, the possibility of a broad literary flourishing—many of those fragile shoots of the nineties have been trampled into the ground by the ferocious invaders of private as well as public spheres.

Over twenty-five years of radical transformations, Anuradha and I have kept intermittently in touch. While emailing in recent months, I began to wonder if other readers should be invited to reflect on the fate of writers in India today. What follows is a conversation that explores some of the historical uniqueness of this fate.

In French the word merle means blackbird, a dark bird of the thrush family. A blackbird’s song marks its territory. The male has black feathers and a yellow beak. It is in the same genus as the meadowlark. Forty years after first meeting James Merrill at my teacher David Kalstone’s Chelsea apartment, I am sitting at his desk in Stonington, Connecticut, with his large Petit Larousse open before me. Searching for the meanings of our names in French, I am distracted by a blackbird perched on the windowsill, drinking a little dew and then swaying on a nearby branch. It speaks in polished, rudimentary tones with a slow tempo.

Merrill’s big desk is in a small room—in an apartment of small rooms—behind a hinged bookcase that creates a very private space. Still, I can hear a train whistle, a foghorn, halyard lines clinking against the masts of sloops anchored in the harbor, church chimes, and bits of conversation from villagers below on Water Street. These must be the sounds Merrill heard, too, while working. He was an early riser and liked to give the first hours of the day to his poems, which reflect, mirrorlike, so many of my own feelings. Mirrors are also a motif in his poems—mirrors that remember us across the years, reflecting our beauty and dissolution alike. It has taken me some days to sit at his desk.

In French, my name means collar, and I think immediately of the metaphysical poet George Herbert’s poem “The Collar,” published in 1633, a poem in which the fervid speaker seeks more freedom in his life. It is a poem of strong feeling, almost like a rant. Like his friend Elizabeth Bishop, Merrill loved Herbert’s poems and could quote them by heart. During my twenties and thirties, perhaps there was no living poet I admired more than Merrill, and I am drawn still to this American poet, who was said to be writing even while needing oxygen on the night before his death more than twenty-five years ago.

June 10

I wake up to three missed calls and matching voice mails from a blocked number that turns out to be FedEx Express Heavyweight informing me that since I was not around to receive my thousand-pound skid, it’s on its way to JFK. The delivery in question is Issue Seven of The Drift, the magazine I cofounded and co-run, and it was supposed to arrive next Monday or Tuesday in time for our launch party Thursday at the Public Hotel. Evidently it’s early … and sleeping in was a potentially multithousand-dollar mistake.

Kicking myself for how late I stayed out last night—there was a party at Russian Samovar for Joshua Cohen, whose novel The Netanyahus won this year’s Pulitzer in fiction—I dial FedEx and shoot an email to our printer. I got through most of The Netanyahus in a single sitting last summer, before I’d met its author. It’s mostly a satire based on an anecdote told to Cohen by the late literary critic Harold Bloom, but it’s also pointedly presentist, a self-conscious parable for liberalism in the Trump years. Early on it draws a dichotomy between history and theology that I’ve been mulling over since I encountered it.

While I’m on hold with FedEx I receive an email asking me to write a culture diary for this website, and I decide to start right away—no cherry-picking. Not that what I’m doing now is particularly “cultural”: I’m telling the automated system I’d like to “speak to a representative … speak to a representative,” getting transferred to incorrect extensions, hanging up, and dialing the line again. I haven’t even gotten out of bed. 

In August, I become regretful about everything that I haven’t squeezed into my summer and probably won’t. Here is an incomplete list of books I have started and not finished: First Love by Gwendoline Riley, At Freddie’s by Penelope Fitzgerald, The Palace Papers by Tina Brown, Sex in the Archives by Barry Reay, and—many times—Swann’s Way (the first few pages). I abandoned all these books at different points and for the usual reasons; I was busy, bored, or left my copy at the beach. It seems like they are no longer going to be my summer reading—maybe in September.

—Sophie Haigney, web editor

This week, I returned to one of my favorite explorations of the strange geometries of syntax: “Way down the deserted street, I thought I saw a bus which, with luck, might get me out of this sentence which might go on forever, knotting phrase onto phrase with fire hydrants and parking meters, and still not take me to my language waiting, surely, around some corner.” In Curves to the Apple, Rosmarie Waldrop’s sentences accelerate and swerve, reconfiguring the modern discourse on embodiment and subjectivity; there’s a spectacular volta lying in wait in each of these prose poems. “I learned about communication by twisting my legs around yours,” she writes, “as, in spinning a thought, we twist fiber on fiber.”

If I wasn’t reading as a kid, I was playing with dolls. I still find dolls fascinating and beautiful. I love the variety of dolls, from baby dolls to fashion dolls to artist’s mannequins. I love the rich history of dolls and how entwined doll history is with culture. One of the world’s first and most popular dolls, the paper doll, continues to thrive in new ways with doll enthusiasts of all ages. Since paper is such a delicate art form, not many whole pieces have survived history. However, paper art and paper dolls can be traced back thousands of years.

The first paper dolls of Europe appeared in Slavic countries, where paper crafts continue to thrive. Paper cutting folk art, or wycinaki in Polish, began to appear around the 15th century. As popularity rose, more figures began to appear in the art. Wycinaki is and was part of home decor, toys, furniture, and gifts.

French jointed puppets, called pantins, were first fashioned after famous 17th century figures. This satirical figures were among the first mechanical toys in the west. Other common pantin figures were Commedia dell ‘arte characters, like Harlequin, Pulcinella, and Pierrot, the clowns. The early hand painted pantins were simplistic, but as printing technology progressed, more detail could be added to mass production pantins. Printed pantins and paper dolls had the advantage of intricate detail over their manufactured porcelain cousins. Mass produced pantins were printed on a sheet, much like current paper dolls, with limbs separate from the bodies. Each piece was to be cut out separately, then strings, brads, or other fastenings attached to limbs to make the dolls jump and dance. Early paper toys share a similar look to contemporary paper dolls, but even pantins, dressed up like their contemporary counterparts did not come with an assortment of paper fashions and accessories.

Michelle Yeoh, who turned 60 last week, is a Malaysian Chinese actress, former Miss Malaysia, martial artist, and so much more — she’s lived a very bookish life and is set to continue on that path. She has recently been in the public eye as the star of Everything Everywhere All At Once, which is not based on a book but has the multiverse vibes of Sal and Gabi Break The Universe, The Ten Thousand Doors of January, and The Space Between Worlds.

Yeoh was born on August 6, 1962, in Ioph, Perak, Malaysia. She took ballet lessons beginning at age 4 and continued after her family moved to the UK when she was 15. A spinal injury while she was at the Royal Academy of Dance led her to switch majors to choreography, with a minor in drama. After a few years of beauty pageants, she appeared in a TV commercial with Jackie Chan, and began working in cinema, where she performed her own stunts.

She got her cinematic start in Hong Kong action movies, including Heroic Trio (one of my personal favorites) in 1993; the same year, she starred in Butterfly and Sword opposite Tony Leung, based on the novel Liuxing Hudie Jian by Gu Long. In 1997 she began making Hollywood movies, beginning with a starring role in the James Bond film Tomorrow Never Dies, the 18th in the series based on Ian Fleming’s novels and the second starring Pierce Brosnan.

In 2000, she starred opposite Chow Yun-fat in the internationally acclaimed, Mandarin-language film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, an American-Chinese co-production based on Wang Dulu’s Iron Crane series. A native Malay speaker who also speaks Cantonese, Yeoh learned her Mandarin lines phonetically. The movie has since been adapted as a comic book, among other things. She continued to work in both Chinese and American cinema, and in 2004 starred in the titular role in Silver Hawk, based on the character from Huang Ying by Xiao Ping.

In 2005, Yeoh starred in the adaptation of Memoirs of a Geisha, based on the best-selling novel by Arthur Golden. The film’s casting was controversial, as Yeoh is Malaysian and star Zhang Ziyi and co-star Gong Li are both Chinese, while the characters are Japanese. The film’s western box office was middling after a high opening week, and reviews were mixed; China banned the film entirely and the reception in Japan was mostly negative. It was nevertheless nominated for several awards.

Audiobooks aren’t quite my favorite way of approaching the classics (that honor falls to print books, the older and more worn the better), but they’re a close second. For stories that are more often than not over a hundred years old, sometimes it can be easy to miss the nuance and humor in the old-fashioned language. There is a reason why the younger people are, the less likely it is that they’ll enjoy the classics at first read. A good audiobook narrator can change all that.

Think about it: the best audiobook narrators bring the classics’ nuance and humor right back to the forefront. Their tonal shifts and shows of emotion can make an older story more accessible, and even relatable, to readers today. If you have trouble getting into the classics, or if you’d like to experience your favorites in a new way, audiobooks are a fantastic choice.

Speaking of fantastic choices? The eight audiobooks below knock it out of the park, both in terms of content and performance. From audiobooks narrated by actors (Charles Dickens’ words in Richard Armitage’s voice? Yes please) to those narrated by the authors themselves (fair warning, Maya Angelou’s reading of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings will wreck you), you can’t go wrong with these eight classics audiobooks. You’re welcome.

How can you find like-minded people in your community to work with in ending censorship? It can certainly feel overwhelming and, in some instances, impossible, but now is the perfect time to find your allies and work together toward ensuring access to books and information for all.

The Florida Freedom to Read Project, helmed by Jen Cousins and Stephana Ferrell, began as two like-minded parents coming together after the Orange County Public School system removed Gender Queer. From there, they’ve grown their activism work in pushing back against book censorship across the state. Their work has been instrumental in Florida and is a model for how concerned citizens can build similar networks to protect intellectual freedom and the right to access books and information for all. Here’s how to do it (kudos to Cousins and Ferrell for sharing their tips with me).

How To Find People Who Care About Book Censorship

Connect with someone you know who cares deeply about access to books. This could be a best friend or someone you met by chance at a book club. Make a pact and hold one another accountable to one action that week, be it showing up to a board meeting or contacting the local library to let them know how much having queer books available means to you and your family. Find local parent groups on Facebook that align with your beliefs. You may find them labeled as “progressive” parent groups or you may find them via issues they champion. Much of the book banning movement emerged from anti-mask movements, so you may find like-minded people in pro-masking groups. Use these groups to see what topics are being discussed, and connect with those working on censorship issues. If no one is, that’s where you begin to solicit those eager to do that work. You may create a special project or a separate group (Moms For Liberty puts captains in charge of their projects within their chapters). Twitter and Instagram can be extremely useful. Use Twitter to follow anti-censorship groups and individuals, and then engage so you can wrap your head around the issues. You’ll be surprised how quick you connect with folks locally — and remember local might mean your town, your county, your region, or your state more broadly. Watch and read the previous recorded board meetings. You’ll know the names of everyone who shows up to speak at these meetings, and from there, you might find allies you can connect with immediately. In an era where most people are on social media, looking someone up locally is not hard, and sending them a private message of support can get the ball rolling. Wear something that highlights your values. A shirt or tote or pin against censorship will attract attention in the carpool line at school, when you walk with your kids to school, or a school board/library board meeting. This is your chance to connect with fellow like-minded individuals who are eager to do something about book bans. A FReadom shirt like this one, which supports the work of Texas Library Association’s Intellectual Freedom Fund, can start a great conversation. Tap your networks. Maybe you are involved in a local animal shelter or drama group that feels removed from anti-censorship work. Wear your passion when you attend those things, and talk about them before/during/after meetings. This will get people curious.

Building Your Anti-Censorship Work

Your group does not need to be big to be effective, and the more work you do, the more people will want to get involved. Here’s how to do work:

Get niche. You may be part of a big group, but getting specific in your issues will help you tackle them well. You are passionate about intellectual freedom, for example, but your group is focused on overturning book bans in schools and libraries. Ferrell likens it to being a business: you find your people and strengthen your work when you focus. You care about big issues, but your focus is on something more granular and measurable.Be yourself. Use your voice and speak up at meetings, in person, and online about the issues. You don’t need to be an expert. You need to be passionate and willing to try. Activism is an action, and the more you model that, the more people find comfort in joining you (it’s likely new to them — and you! — or something that creates anxiety since they’ve never done it before). Your words have value and power because you are a citizen in a democracy, but for parents, you have an especially vital voice in the decisions that affect your students. Identify yourself as that stakeholder. Speak at school and library board meetings. You will be seen by others as someone who is doing the work and who they can connect with to build their bravery muscles to do the same thing. Remember: even if you’re too nervous to talk at a board meeting, you can write a letter to them and send a copy to your local newspaper. This will get your name out there with stakeholders and people in your area. Research local teacher and librarian groups and get to know them. For Cousins, this meant getting to know FAME, Florida Association for Media in Education, a professional organization for school media specialists. She was able to connect with educators and learn what issues and challenges they were dealing with. You likely have a state or more local group similar to FAME. Talk with your local school library workers and get to know what their needs are. Introduce yourself as a citizen who is eager to support them and advocate on their behalf. You can build a parent network through championing their needs. Get to know your local school board and, if you have a specific individual representing your district, learn as much as you can about them. The more you get to know them, the more involved you’re able to get, and the more articulately you can speak on behalf of their needs and the needs of the broader community. Ask to talk with your board members one-on-one if talking in front of the whole board at a meeting is intimidating. They can do this, and it is an opportunity for you to voice concerns and/or ask what you can do to support their efforts against censorship. (On a personal note, I’ve sent more than one “heads up” email to a board member or administration member when I saw things happening in a community that they may not have — the gratitude is real, since they can’t have their eyes or ears on everything). When you speak, whether at a board meeting, individually with librarians or educators, or within your anti-censorship groups, emphasize that you support teachers and librarians and are their allies. Reiterate that you know their work is tough and that their passion and the pressures they face are real. Ferrell calls this knowing when to lay or pull the punch on their behalf. Befriend the teachers’ union. Teachers’ union members are often parents themselves. Support public education? You support their unions, too. As soon as educators know you have their backs, they will spread the word about your work and mission, which continues to grow your network. Bring two friends with you to the next board meeting. At the following meeting, ask them to each bring two friends. Now there are seven of you.

Now What?

Resist the temptation to believe that once you’ve created a group or have shown up to a board meeting once or written a letter that you’re done. Activism is on-going work, and in an era of dismantling public education and libraries through actions such as book banning, it’s going to be a long, hard, ever-curving road. What began as complaints about a few books has blossomed out to now be a blatant attack on LGBTQ+ and BIPOC communities, and it is a coordinated effort to defund and destroy public education and services.

This moment requires a lot more than a post or two. It requires doing that, plus getting five friends to do it, and then getting five more of their friends to do it. It’s something to put on the calendar and make time for regularly, even if it’s a monthly reminder to send that letter to the board or show up to a board meeting and support those talking in favor of book access for all (wear a shirt or tote with your beliefs on it, whether you speak or not!).

Boy, Warner Bros. has had a week, haven’t they?

First, they canceled Batgirl, the $90 million movie starring Leslie Grace, their first headlining Latina superhero. This decision, spurred by their merger with Discovery+, appears to be part of a strategy to eliminate mid-budget projects in favor of big budget theatrical blockbusters and cheaper streaming projects. You might wonder what the point is in wasting the $90 million already spent, but don’t worry! They’re taking a tax write-down instead. I hated typing that sentence.

Then, in a presentation to investors, CEO David Zaslav included a slide revealing that HBO Max and Discovery+ have genders now, apparently – HBO Max, home of superheroes, is “lean in” “appointment viewing” with a “male skew,” while Discovery+ has a “female skew” for their “lean back” “comfort” viewing of *checks notes* People Magazine Investigates.

Then, for some baffling reason, they changed the title of Season 3 of Pennyworth to Pennyworth: The Origin of Alfred’s Butler. I loved typing that sentence. I would type that sentence in every article I write if I could. I will never write a better joke.

Meanwhile, the merger has led to the rumored cancellations of the Strange Adventures series and a Supergirl movie set to spin off from the Flash movie (starring Sasha Calle, another Latina actress), and the confirmed axing of a Wonder Twins movie that had apparently already cast Riverdale’s KJ Apa as Zan, which is almost better than typing “The Origin of Batman’s Butler.” (“Form of…the highs and lows of high school football!”) Outlook is unclear for other announced projects such as a Ta-Nehisi Coates-scripted Superman movie and the Green Lantern TV show. The wretched-looking Gotham Knights seems to be moving forward unimpeded at the CW, though, so…yay? Plus the second Joker movie, with Lady Gaga as Harley, which is honestly pretty good casting but also kind of sounds like MadLibs.