Important to note that "banned" here means "a school chose not to have this book in their library".
It's an annoying abuse of language. "Banned Books" has historically meant people are getting arrested for possessing the books or stores are being prevented from selling it or publishers are being prevented from producing it.
This is essentially a clickbait title for "People disagree about what is age-appropriate content for a public school to provide to children".
>The report also found that challenges are becoming more coordinated and politically driven: 92% came from pressure groups, decision-makers or government officials, compared with 72% in 2024. By contrast, 2.7% were attributed to parents and 1.4% to individual library users.
So this isn't librarians, parents or even neighbours deciding something isn't appropriate.
The article also seems to refer to libraries in general, as opposed to school libraries alone, except on a specific paragraph.
The web site says: "The ALA defines a “challenge” as an attempt to remove or restrict access to a library resource, while a “ban” refers to the removal of materials from a library"
Page 10 of the report has a chart that breaks down what type of people are responsible for an 'attempt to remove' books from a library. Librarians themselves are not listed as one of the groups:
It seems they only count it as 'censorship' or a 'challenge' if it's someone other than a librarian taking the action.
If I've understood correctly, if librarians (alone or in groups) decide that certain books should not be procured, the ALA would count this as a censorship or ban.
> ALA defines a “ban” as the removal of materials from a library based on the objections of a person or group. A “challenge” is an attempt to have a library resource removed, or access to it restricted, based on the objections of a person or group.
Under that definition, it doesn't seem to me like it would be possible for a "ban" to happen without also being a "challenge".
Sibling comments have made their point. I'll just add:
“But the book was on the shelf…”
“On the shelf? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find it.”
“That’s the display department.”
“With a flashlight.”
“Ah, well, the lights had probably gone.”
“So had the stairs.”
“But look, you found the book, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” said Arthur, “yes I did. It was on a shelf in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.”
While true, that is the same reasoning when people said that it isn't censorship if government isn't one actor involved or it isn't censorship if you just de-platform people.
It fails to grasp the core issue, where some people have the ambition to act as a barrier to information. The implementation is secondary. You are correct that a school library is a very poor case or an invalid one of course. The general tendency for more censorship is probably real though. I wouldn't expect a Guardian article if the books were associated with different political leaning though.
I'd call that "not making publicly available" via the library system rather than banning. As parent said, you can still buy these books and share with or sell them to each other.
I'd call it "banning books from public libraries", since that's a clear description. Contrary to what GP claimed, this is indeed public libraries, not just school libraries.
Whatever you want to call it, IMO public libraries shouldn't ban books, especially based on some radical PAC's opinions about what jesus would want or whatever.
If I 'choose not to let you post on my website' would you consider this a ban? This reads like a really dishonest shifting of the goalpost for what is effectively censorship of literature. And, if you look at some of the books that were "chose not to have this book in their library" it overwhelmingly focuses on books that feature queer characters, or discuss these themes. Any honest observer knows exactly what is going on here, and as others have noted, this was not limited to school libraries.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-65794363
The author John Green who was top of a recent list said that the Bible was number 6 on the list.
As other comments have pointed out, a "ban" is where a library has chosen not to stock a book for reasons including response to a complaint. If school library serves children up to the age of 13, then certain explicit fiction is not appropriate and would be expected to be removed.
There's a political backlash because Fox News and some Russian propaganda social media accounts told people to get angry and they did.
We have mandates against leaded fuel and excessively tinted windows and for child seats. We have mandates for airbags and seatbelts and bumper heights and crumple zones and turn signals.
EVs are better than gas cars in every way - less noise, less pollution, less dependency buying oil from the Middle East. Our policies, regulations and incentive structures should mirror that.
If this statement was generically true, nobody would smoke, nobody would play lotteries*, we'd all eat plenty of fruit and vegetables, everyone who was able to would exercise.
And some of the issues for EVs, like availability of chargers, go away by automatic action of the market when there's a good reason (e.g. government mandate for more EVs) to expect more demand for EVs.
* except on the occasions where the rollover boosted the expected value above the ticket price, but this would never happen if nobody ever played lotteries.
I worry the narrative here is going off the rails.
A huge part of the Epstein saga was that he had connections to everyone, everywhere across finance, academia, entertainment, non-profits, etc and that he was constantly cultivating relationships, making and requesting introductions, giving and asking favors, etc.
Only a tiny percent of the connections ever had any interaction with sex workers or exploited girls. In many cases, Epstein was clearly using the girls as bait, to later blackmail or otherwise have leverage over men in positions of power.
The mere fact that someone interacted with Epstein shouldn't be treated as a smoking gun, if the emails are just related to regular business, fundraising, networking, etc, the odds are the person had no clue about Epstein's criminal activities and that they were in fact just 'marks' Epstein was using to grow his network of influence.
Obviously we all want the criminals to face judgement and the victims to feel justice has been done, but we can't accomplish that by just declaring the thousands of people who met Epstein to all be guilty by association.
When I was a kid the Detroit automakers bought air filters manufactured at a factory in Kenosha, Wisconsin and brake pads manufactured in Peoria, Illinois and lubricants from Fort Wayne, Indiana.
And the people working in those places provided the customer base for local and regional financial services, along with the rest of the commercial base that made small towns and provincial cities good places to live and raise a family throughout the 20th century.
And of course, a household only needed one person employed, so there was less pressure to move to a bigger city that could provide opportunities for two different careers.
> Remember that Musk grew up in Apartheid South Africa
And cited his opposition to apartheid as the central reason that he left the country as soon as he could, at age 17, because he didn't want to be a part of that system.
There are so many legitimate reasons to criticize Musk, but this isn't one.
You didn't mention how "opposition to apartheid" also meant avoiding mandatory military service. Interesting coincidence, I would say. Serious question: if one cared about ending Apartheid, wouldn't it be much more effective to do that from within South Africa than from across the ocean?
Considering who he is now, what he wants politically, who he supports and how he treats his employees ... is there really anything about him that makes it sound like a real reason?
Being a market maker doesn't provide any special information. I'm guessing someone misunderstood something like Level II quotes (https://www.investopedia.com/articles/trading/06/level2quote...) as being information that hedge funds / investment banks / pros have that retail traders don't... but it's just semi-public information that anyone can pay for access to.
Jane Street also isn't doing pump and dumps, they're not in crypto discord channels hyping some coin or running bot farms of twitter accounts to talk up some stock.
They run several different types of trading that might interact with other people attempting pump & dumps though, which could impact in either direction- plausibly they might do a momentum trade that follows the direction of movement or they might recognize a price discrepancy happening and trade against it.
More accurately, they have complex models pulling in many, many signals to inform trading, and I'm being a bit reductionist to categorize it as these two things.
That's not fringe at all. That was a claim made by anti-drug commercials that ran on TV across the US so frequently that it was satirized by South Park in 2002.
This seems like a lot of different people voicing different opinions and talking past each other. Roughly, I think you're jumping into the middle of a hypothetical conversation that went like this:
Person A: "It's bad that we throw people in prison for pot, and use possession of pot as a subtext under which to harass people, perform warrantless searches, etc. We should just legalize it."
Person B: "But it might be bad for children and teenagers if they get access to it"
Person A: "Okay fine, we legalize it for people over the age of 21, happy now?"
Person A could be said to have compromised or ceded-ground to person B here, even though they themselves might actually not even disagree.
It's maybe slightly less trivial to do, but still incredibly common to buy awards, recognition, press releases, positive reviews and commentary in publications.
You might be shocked to find out how much the performers being written about in magazines or discussed on TV shows is a direct line to the production company promoting them. Similar for awards.
> You might be shocked to find out how much the performers being written about in magazines or discussed on TV shows is a direct line to the production company promoting them. Similar for awards.
I mean Payola as a term literally came from bribing DJs on radio stations to play your / your artist's music.
It's an annoying abuse of language. "Banned Books" has historically meant people are getting arrested for possessing the books or stores are being prevented from selling it or publishers are being prevented from producing it.
This is essentially a clickbait title for "People disagree about what is age-appropriate content for a public school to provide to children".
reply