There will be no deus ex machina from the federal government when the Supreme Court strikes down Roe v. Wade, as it is now virtually guaranteed to do since Justice Samuel Alito’s draft opinion in a Mississippi abortion case was leaked on Monday. President Joe Biden won’t be able to stop the 22 states that are certain to ban abortion immediately—many of them using laws still on the books from before Roe was decided in 1973. Four more states will likely move fast to pass their own bans, according to the Guttmacher Institute. In total, about half of Americans are expected to live in places without legal access to the extremely common, life–saving, liberty-ensuring medical procedure.

Congress, too, looks like a dead end for attempts to undo the Supreme Court decision. Passing a federal law guaranteeing the right to abortion would require overcoming a Senate filibuster (Democrats don’t have the votes) or eliminating the filibuster entirely (Democrats don’t have the votes—thanks, Senators Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin). 

But that doesn’t mean the White House can do nothing. This week, Biden directed his team to protect abortion rights “at every aspect, in every creative way, every aspect of federal law, to try to do all that’s possible,” an anonymous senior administration official told the New York Times. So what are their options? I called up reproductive rights legal experts and advocates to brainstorm.

Use FDA powers to ease abortion pill access

The Food and Drug Administration allows the use of two medications, taken in combination, to end pregnancies in the first 10 weeks. One, misoprostol, is a common anti-ulcer drug. The other, mifepristone, has been approved for use in the United States for 22 years and has an excellent safety record. Yet “the FDA has over-regulated mifepristone from day one,” says Elisa Wells, a veteran public health expert and the co-director of Plan C, an online information clearinghouse about abortion pills. “When they did approve it, they attached special restrictions only used for a handful of drugs thought to be dangerous.”

Bucha was known as Ukraine’s Switzerland. Now it is synonymous with unimaginable horror.

I first traveled to the town five years ago to film a documentary about the country’s struggle to build a democracy enshrined in human rights after the 2013–2014 Maidan revolution swept a Russian proxy from the presidency. My protagonist had fled war in the embattled east to rebuild her life in Bucha, a comfortable commuter exurb on the northwest perimeter of the capital, Kyiv. With its coffeehouses, organic cheese stores, and villas adjoining leafy parks, Bucha reminded me of the neighborhood where I grew up in Sydney, Australia. 

When I returned recently, it was torn to pieces, the contents of plush homes splayed on sidewalks. There were survivors on nearly every corner, waiting to tell me something that would haunt me for weeks.

Bucha is normally less than an hour from Kyiv. Now, my journey took nearly three, past checkpoints, wrecked tanks, and shot-up civilian cars, some with signs on them reading “children” and bullet holes where a driver once sat. In town, body parts still littered the streets a week after the Ukrainian army liberated its remaining residents, as I joined a macabre, government-organized tour of atrocities for mobs of reporters; I watched as several journalists took selfies with a boot containing a severed foot, rumored to be booby-trapped. “In Bucha,” an American journalist said into his mobile phone’s camera, “life is cheap.”

Destroyed tanks piled up in a main street of Bucha.

Last week, the Eanes Independent School District, which encompasses part of Austin, Texas, and communities west of the city, opened up information about the status of book challenges in the district. Since March 20, 2022, over 120 books have been submitted for formal reconsideration to the district, which has a single high school, two middle schools, and six elementary schools. Every single book challenge comes from the continually-circulating Moms For Liberty hit list.

All of the challenges come from fewer than ten individuals and the collective Eanes chapter of Moms For Liberty/Eanes Kids First. They come in the weeks prior to school board elections across the state of Texas, including Eanes, where more than one board seat will be determined on Saturday, May 7 (tomorrow). Only Granbury Independent School District and North East Independent School District have seen more challenges this school year.

Eanes Kids First is a “parents rights” group that has developed a thorough collection of books deemed inappropriate, noting not only where those books are in the district but the “issues” within them. Among the reasons the books are a problem? LGBTQ topics, race and diversity topics, and stories tackling mental health. For groups like this claiming that these book challenges are simply about obscenity and vulgarity, the transparency in these lists for why the books are problematic says otherwise. It’s a blatant attack on marginalized people and stories.

Eanes ISD published the slate of book challenges on their website in late April, including the titles, challenger, date, and status of each title, affording transparency to the entire process. Book challengers, who have demanded transparency about the materials being used and available in schools, were appalled by the district’s decision to give them just that.

At the most recent school board meeting, Aaron Silva, partner of one of the book challengers named, used his three minutes during the open comment (beginning at 1:57) to bash the board’s decision to do this. He called it a failure of the board to make such a decision “at the worst possible time.” In the next breath, Silva emphasizes how he and others have demanded clear, transparent communication. He claims parents with good reputations have been strung up and fed to social media over this decision–apparently ignoring the same behaviors advocated for and promoted within the Eanes Kids First/Moms For Liberty groups. Silva is the founder and spearheads the Eanes Parents United podcast, which, according to Franklin Strong’s documentation, “while Eanes Kids First sponsors the podcast, “EKF has absolutely no editorial input into my podcast.  It is me and me only.  The podcast is not an organ for their views and if there are similarities it is only coincidental.”

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The only known Black British man to have fought against fascism in the Spanish Civil War

“I am half Black, I grew up in the National Children’s Home and Orphanage. Fascism meant hunger and war”.

Of the countless people born in Oxfordshire, few lived such an incredible life as Charlie Hutchison. Born in 1918, Charlie became the only known Black British man to have fought against fascism in the Spanish Civil War. He was also among the first to travel to Spain, one of the youngest, and also one of the longest serving volunteers. His life-long hatred of fascism would bring him to participate in many key events in history, including the Battle of Cable Street, the Dunkirk Evacuation, the liberation of France and Italy. During WWII he also took part in the liberation of Belsen concentration camp. Charlie spent 10 years fighting a bloody crusade against various fascist movements throughout Europe. Once returning to Britain he married the love of his life and started a family, living the rest of his life as an activist involved in anti-apartheid, nuclear disarmament, and trade unionism.

Despite all his achievements, his life story had gone entirely unnoticed by Oxford historians until very recently. When the Oxford Spanish Civil War Memorial was unveiled in 2017, Charlie Hutchison was not recognised among the 31 known people with links to Oxfordshire to whom the memorial had been dedicated to. Despite being overlooked by professional historians, his achievements were eventually made public knowledge in 2019 thanks to a project by London school children.

Note: This article contains never-before published photographs of Charlie Hutchison, provided by Charlie Hutchison’s daughter Susan Lilian Small and published on the Museum of Oxford website with her permission.

Marcus, Vish and Jim have the keys to your weekend on another edition of the Preview Show, sponsored by Betway!

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A crucial tool for library workers is a strong, updated collection development policy. If it’s been several years since visiting whatever is in place, it is more than worth it to pull it out and update it as your library continues to grow and evolve. It’s vital to keep this updated all the time, but especially during a censorship friendly era, as a collection development policy lays the groundwork for the materials being selected and de-selected and offers patrons a guide to what they can or should expect. But in addition to a strong and current collection development policy, something each and every library needs is an up-to-date, solid challenge policy (also known as a reconsideration policy)/book challenge form.

For decades, the American Library Association (ALA) has provided a reconsideration form template. It offers all of the basics, and gives those who wish to exercise their rights to contest material to do so. This is a good thing, not a bad thing. A healthy democracy encourages input from an array of individuals.

But in an era of increased censorship with no anticipated cooling in sight, it’s time that challenge forms and policies are overhauled across the country.

The purpose of a challenge policy is to protect the professionals within an institution and to protect the rights of those whose tax money funds those institutions. Challenge policies uphold the First Amendment rights of all individuals while providing a formal avenue to address concerns in a uniform manner. This uniformity and consistency is important, as the leading reason for book bans in school libraries right now is a district either choosing not to follow or ignoring their policies for challenges all together. PEN America reports that only 11 school districts have followed their own policies consistently and that doing so reduced the number of books banned in those institutions.

One of the weaknesses in ALA’s template policy and discussion of book challenge policies more broadly is that it allows informal complaints. Informal complaints could be anything from showing up to a board meeting to read offending passages out loud to a parent telling a librarian they are disgusted by a particular title being available. These informal complaints are to be treated the same as a formal complaint. That leaves the door wide open to interpretation from individuals, as well as for administrative overreach (as has been seen again and again).

There are a few immovable truths in the literary community. No two people will read the same story without diverging at least a little in interpretation. Battles between format purists will rage on. Depending on who you’re talking to, color-coding your books will make you either a style icon or a monster, there’s no in-between. And May is Short Story Month.

Here’s the thing: up until, oh, a few days ago, I had no idea why May is Short Story Month. My initial Google search showed nothing but very enthusiastic blogs and websites sharing their plans for the month: we’ll be reading this, reviewing that, and so on and so forth. But I only had to dig a little deeper to find the father of this idea. (Too grandiose? I really like short stories.)

What is Short Story Month?

This is pretty self-explanatory. Short Story Month is a month dedicated to the short story form. It is celebrated by readers and authors alike: the former set out to read as many short stories as possible, while the latter typically set a goal for how many short stories they’ll write. The overachievers often write a short story per day.

Why is May Short Story Month?

On April 7, 2007, Dan Wickett, founder and editor of the Emerging Writers Network (EWN), published a post titled “Short Story Month?”. Drawing inspiration from April being National Poetry Month, Wickett decided to devote the following month to one of his favorite narrative forms by reading and reviewing a short story a day.

Initially, this was meant to be only on EWN, but the book community surprised him. Within days, other blogs and websites had picked up the baton.

A good comic is a good comic, as much as a good novel is a good novel. But there are far too few books which offer the best of both worlds and this is particularly true in YA. It’s rare to find books that offer both a visual element and a narrative, without being either one or the other. Illustrated YA books are a fun twist on format and form, and they allow for pushing not only style boundaries but genre and narrative boundaries as well. They’re works of art in not only the sense that a book is itself a work of art, but also in the sense that they demand the reader consider both art and prose separately — and in conjunction. Why was the choice made to interweave both, rather than choose a more common format?

It’s a shame there are so few illustrated books that aren’t comics in the world beyond picture books, but they do exist. We live in a world that presents multimedia experiences daily, and illustrated YA books allow readers to experience a story in a fresh, creative way.

Let’s take a look at some outstanding examples of illustrated YA books. Some of these are going to lean into art more heavily than prose and yet still offer a reading experience wholly encapsulating of the teen years and all that adolescence has to bring. These books cross genres and category, inviting fiction and nonfiction readers something to seek out and enjoy. And bonus: for teen readers, most of these are developed in a common trim size, so they don’t look or feel like picture books, a common complaint about YA nonfiction prior to the last decade or so.

Note that this list is a little whiter than it should be. I suspect the work included here published by Reynolds and Acevedo will usher in more creative works blending art and prose in the coming years.

Illustrated YA Books That Aren’t Comics