Students in Williamson County, Tennessee, have experienced near non-stop changes to the books and resources available to them this school year. Thanks to Moms for Liberty’s relentless campaigns locally, books continue to be challenged and removed throughout the district.

This week, the district took even more draconian censorship measures. In response to a couple of complaints from parents about books available in the digital library app Epic!, the district removed access to the app for review. Epic! is used at elementary schools throughout the US and provides over 40,000 age-appropriate titles to readers.

Williamson County schools serve 42,000 households. A small number of complaints from right-wing affiliated individuals removed an entire library of material for the school to “review.”

The book that launched the removal of an entire app, disrupting lesson plans and making an entire collection of materials inaccessible to an entire district? An ABC of Equality. This 52-page book offers an alphabet with terms such as B for Belief, G for Gender, and N for No and it’s meant for 4-8 year olds.

Emily West shares a breakdown of the history of Williamson County censorship, and within those comments are responses from a “parent’s rights” group upset that some of the alphabet choices include L for LGBTQ, S for Sex, and T for Transgender. P for Privilege is also, apparently, worthy of removing an entire library collection from students, teachers, and parents so the district can review. The local Moms for Liberty group has shared their thoughts on Twitter in this thread from the advocacy group Williamson Strong.

We're all fuelled up on Europa juice as we take a look back at a bumper night of European action on today's Preview Show, sponsored by Betway. 

Marcus, Pete and Andy reflect on a frustrating night for West Ham and rejoice at Dimitri Payet who may well have just scored the greatest goal of all time. Domestically we look ahead to a HUGE fixture in this season’s edition of the Barclays as Man City take on Liverpool, which will definitely decide the title. Maybe.

Tweet us @FootballRamble and email us here: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. Plus, you can now find us on TikTok! Just search 'Football Ramble'.

***Please take the time to rate and review us on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your pods. It means a great deal to the show and will make it easier for other potential listeners to find us. Thanks!***

See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Today’s Featured Deals

In Case You Missed Yesterday’s Most Popular Deals

Previous Daily Deals

The Cafe by the Sea by Jenny Colgan for $1.99

Jackaby by William Ritter for $1.99

Son of the Storm by Suyi Davies Okungbowa for $1.99

The Collected Poetry of Nikki Giovanni by Nikki Giovanni for $1.99

It’s National Library Week, and as is tradition, the American Library Association (ALA) highlighted the top ten books challenged in the U.S. over the last year. The list, which includes the reasons for those book challenges, shows what has been clear for over a decade: books with queer characters, characters of color, or book written by queer or authors of color are most challenged.

In addition to rolling out the official list, ALA also launched a new landing page called Unite Against Book Bans. This “national initiative to empower readers everywhere to stand together in the fight against censorship” offers some of the statistics collected by the organization’s Office for Intellectual Freedom.

But what’s missing on this new website is any call to action. There are no steps or tools anyone can take to combat censorship in their own community. Instead, visitors are invited to sign up for a mailing list for updates from United Against Book Bans. What those updates might be remains a mystery. It is hard to “raise your voice” by signing up for news updates without any indication of what those news updates might be, and it’s certainly not a tool for speaking up — no letters go to legislators in defense of the freedom to read.

More troubling, though, is that the only other action available on the website is the donate. Donations look like they will go toward the campaign against book challenges, but in fact go to ALA’s 21st Century Fund: a fund without restrictions that can be used for anything within the organization’s purview. Will it go to creating educational resources for fighting book bans? Maybe. It could also go toward creating graphics used to market the sale of banned books swag from their store or toward scholarships that are unrelated to book challenges. None of these are bad, per se, but it’s deceptive to the average “reader” who is begging for some kind of direction to take.

In the 1990s, a tremendous wave of book challenges and bans were under way across the country. Focus on the Family and associated arms of that organization coordinated broad censorship, and in response the ALA offered robust, freely available information to readers about not only the challenges, but where they were coming from and what library workers could do to stand up for themselves and their organizations.

The squeal that I released when I heard that Deanna Raybourn — who writes one of my favorite historical mysteries series (so funny + grump and sunshine pairing!) — was writing a crime book about assassins, could be heard on the moon. I was so excited that the day I was able to get my greedy little hands on an advanced copy I dropped everything and read it. Now you know the danger of consuming a thing you’re so excited about has a higher chance of being disappointing the higher your anticipation is. And mine was high. But I never had any doubts that Raybourn was going to kill this book, because she’s just so funny. I am not only super excited to reveal the cover but to also say that the book met all my expectations and is fun, smart, hilarious, has girl gang vibes (assassin team), and a great dose of revenge.

Check out the awesome cover below by Colleen Reinhart, a synopsis beyond my “omg I loved this to pieces everyone read it” excitement, and read an excerpt introducing you to Billie, Mary Alice, Helen, and Natalie on their first assignment.

Killers of a Certain Age is a witty, action-packed thriller about four elite assassins — Billie, Mary Alice, Helen, and Natalie — who also happen to be middle-aged women. After forty years on the job, the ladies are jet-setting on a retirement cruise…until they realize that, this time, they are the targets. But while older women often feel invisible, sometimes that’s their secret weapon. Watch as Billie, Mary Alice, Helen, and Natalie go on their first assignment (you won’t be able to put the book down!), learn how they got recruited, the organization they work for, and why now they’re the ones on the hit list! These women didn’t spend 40 years training and killing to just sit back; they’re going to come up with a plan and fight back, menopause and backaches and all, they are not going down easy.

Deanna Raybourn is the author of the award-winning, New York Times bestselling Lady Julia Grey series as well as the USA Today bestselling and Edgar Award–nominated Veronica Speedwell mysteries and several standalone works. Her novels blends mystery, history, romance, and have been nominated for myriad awards, including the illustrious Edgar Award.

Visit her online at www.deannaraybourn.com, and on Twitter at @deannaraybourn.

Music can be used to convey just about any thought, theme, message, or emotion you can possibly imagine. For some reason, most people choose to sing about love, which is fine, I guess. But then there are the musicians who decide to write about superheroes instead, which I can personally really appreciate.

I appreciate it so much, in fact, that I decided to outline some of the most common tropes that superhero-themed songs (as opposed to superhero theme songs, which is what we’ll talk about first) fall into. This isn’t meant to be a comprehensive list, but rather a brief introduction to the topic based on my personal observations.

Like with many superhero-related things, this topic is pretty homogeneous: most of the artists and the heroes they choose to sing about are white men. I didn’t take a survey of every superhero-related song ever recorded (though I did ask my fellow Rioters for suggestions, some of which made it into this post), so I don’t know for sure if this is due to my musical tastes or if it’s a general trend. In any case, let’s put our headphones on and hit the Play button on this whirlwind tour of superhero music references!

Themes

While modern cartoons seem to eschew theme songs, older shows inevitably needed a fast, punchy anthem to get viewers excited. A lot of these are instrumentals (Justice League Unlimited is still the gold standard, and I will fight you on this), but others have lyrics about the greatness of the character you are about to witness, including Spectacular Spider-Man and Teen Titans.

Movies occasionally get a good superhero theme in there, like Queen’s “Flash” (from Flash Gordon) and Vanilla Ice’s “Ninja Rap” (from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II), which is somehow not the worst song I have ever heard.

When I was a kid, I thought my grandma was old. She wore clothes I associated with older ladies and she made cinnamon sugar toast for us when we went over there. She used mothballs! When my grandfather died, it turned out she didn’t know how to pump gas or write a check. And she was in her early 70s! That’s not even old! Why did I think she was old?

Is it just that the times were different and nobody was out there writing think pieces about how moms and grandmothers needed to flaunt their sexuality? Is it because I’m getting closer to my grandmother in age, and when I was a wee, tween, and teen I just lumped “older” into one category? Or is this due to advances in healthcare and quality of living? I mean, my father-in-law is 72 and he’s perfectly capable of climbing a mountain if he wanted to (he doesn’t want to). But then again he’s about 40% robot at this point, having had so many joint replacements.

I might not find the answers I want to those questions, but one thing I do know is that reading keeps the brain young in many ways. Research is still being conducted, but early signs show that reading could even help prevent or reduce the severity of various forms of dementia, which is of particular interest to me because I have the APOE e4 gene, which increases my chance of developing Alzheimer’s.

So allow me to present to you some of the best books for seniors. Experts agree that the earlier a person gets started preparing their brain for senior-ness, the better off they’ll be, so I’ve got my work cut out for me, too.

Self-Help Books

The thing about aging is that you don’t really need a book to tell you how to do it. All you really have to do is continue to not die and you will age, magically! But there are some great books for seniors on how to age healthfully and happily.

The news of “challenging” books has been sweeping the country lately. It has also been covered across most, if not all, media outlets. The main reasoning behind this has been the idea of “thinking about the children and what’s best for them.”

To that I say, with my loudest voice and every inch of my chest, the following:

If you’re a person who’s actively trying to ban books, you’re probably a not-great parent. At the very least, you’re inattentive as hell.

And I can back that statement up. 

But first, a little background as to how I first became aware of the act of trying to ban books.