You Can’t Read That!

Event Details

Event Description

Ira Wells grew up in a bookish family, although he was not a bookish child. Sports, video games, and the usual teenage hijinks absorbed him until eventually, he found himself yearning for a more literary life, which led him to study English. As an adult, the value of books was self-evident. “I had lost (if I ever really had) the arguments to explain why books matter and why the banning and destruction of literature is so odious and socially corrosive.”

But now book censorship is on the rise—book banning in schools and public libraries, the takeover of school boards, novels that are no longer teachable on university campuses, publishers pulling or issuing bowdlerized editions of suddenly controversial classics, authors who face cancellation.

“Not all these phenomena constitute ‘banning’ per se,” writes Wells, “but they all fall under what we might call the new ‘censorship consensus,’ in which books are called upon to justify their existence through demonstrations of their moral value.”

Join Ira Wells in conversation with politics and culture critic David Moscrop in a robust discussion of public and private book banning. Is it wrong to embrace the books of people who do things we abhor? What is ‘equity-based weeding’? How can we know the true scope of book banning when according to a study by the American Library Association 82 to 97 percent of all library challenges go unreported? Do we have a national, communal history? If so, how can we best protect it?