Category Archives: Censorship

Neil Gaiman’s Love Letter to Libraries

The Guardian recently published an edited version of Neil Gaiman‘s lecture for the Reading Agency.  The Reading Agency’s annual lecture series was initiated in 2012 as a platform for leading writers and thinkers to share original, challenging ideas about reading and libraries. The lecture is amazingly good. On the purposes of reading (and specifically reading fiction)… Fiction […]

Muffled Voices: Five Famous Authors of Banned Books

  This week is Banned Books Week in the US (as opposed to last week of February in Canada for some reason.)  Oh well – I’ll happily celebrate any week that celebrates banned books and pass along great articles profiling authors who’ve been banned. In 2008, when Phillip Pullman learned his novel, The Golden Compass, […]

Friday Fun Link – “Terms and Conditions May Apply” Documentary

Shea and I are watching a great documentary as I type this – you should too!  (Er, it’s on NetFlix and they’ll track that you watched it of course.)

A Couple Reasons I Really Like Doug Stanhope

Doug Stanhope is a fucking awesome comedian who is cool with people torrenting his stuff…   And “his stuff” includes brilliant material like this… And this…

Music Monday – “It’s our party we can do what we want/It’s our party we can say what we want.”

So everybody’s talking about the raunchy Miley Cyrus performance last night at the MTV Video Music Awards (including perhaps the weirdest MetaFilter thread ever where a discussion of whether the Miley Cyrus performance is pushing the “real” news about Syria off of front pages leads to a long parallel thread that jumps back and forth with people alternating […]

“The Book Thief” Movie Trailer

A great book that is “loaded with librarian appeal” is becoming a movie…

Misbehave With Me

A great commencement address to a group of baby librarians by Dorothea Salo… Now, graduates, I want you to remember that misbehaving comes in all sizes. I’ve been talking about great big misbehaviors, but depending on what the policies are like where you work, giving a homeless person a library card, waiving a fine for […]

Friday Fun Link – The Fucking Home Page

If you can get past the gratuitous swearing, the Fucking Home Page actually has pretty interesting content each new day.

Global Accessibility Awareness Day – May 9

Today is Global Accessibility Awareness Day. It’s a day to consider how people with disabilities experience the web, software, mobile devices, games and so on, targeted towards designers, developers, usability professionals and others without much experience with accessibility. There are public events scheduled all over the world, as well as other accessibility-related events. To participate on your own, […]

Two Tales of Crime & Punishment: Guess Who Comes Out Looking Better – The Cops or the Librarians? (Okay, It’s the Feds Who Look Bad…As Usual)

The police often get the short end of the stick in terms of public perception but stories like this one show there are definitely good cops out there. In my line of work, it’s not often that you can arrest somebody on multiple occasions and end up being friends with them. On the flip side […]