The potential submissive here is Anastasia Steele, possessed of one of the great stupid romance novel names of all time, a virginal college senior who hopes to go into publishing. Her roommate, the editor of the college newspaper, inexplicably asks Anastasia rather than another reporter to fill in for her at an interview with an elusive industrialist who is a major university benefactor. The interview is outwardly a disaster: Anastasia falls down, gets flustered, asks Christian Grey if he’s gay. But as in Twilight, her incompetence ignites a possessive urge and an erotic obsession in Grey. He asks her to sign a contract to become his submissive, divests her of her virginity, and gives her an education in erotic spanking, riding crops, and handcuffs, then begins breaking all his rules and forging an emotional relationship with her as well. While Fifty Shades of Grey has references to all sorts of toys in what Anastasia refers to as Christian’s “Red Room of Pain,” and some discussion of dominant-submissive power dynamics, overall the novel reads as if author E.L. James did what Christian encourages Anastasia to do after proposing that she become his sub: hit up Wikipedia.

The novel, told from Anastasia’s perspective, consistently insists that Christian, who was born to a drug-addicted mother and sexually initiated by a dominant friend of his mother’s at fifteen, is interested in BDSM because it’s a way of containing and channeling his psychological damage. And Anastasia constantly insists that Christian is an unreliable narrator of his own life. She describes him as “A young man deprived of his adolescence, sexually abused by some evil Mrs. Robinson figure.” When she thinks about his experiences with Elana, his first lover, it’s with distrust and disbelief: “I just can’t picture it. Christian being beaten by someone as old as my mother, it’s just so wrong. Again I wonder what damage she’s wrought.” Some of her jealousy is the result of a sense of inadequacy. Anastasia wonders “Did she have the best of him? Before he became so closed? Or did she bring him out of himself? He has such a fun, playful side.” But mostly, Anastasia firmly believes that Christian’s interest in dominance and submission is the result of profound self-loathing, something that Christian can grow beyond to heal rather than a source of what he needs: “He doesn’t even love himself. I recall his self-loathing, her love being the only form he found acceptable. Punished— whipped, beaten, whatever their relationship entailed— he feels undeserving of love. Why does he feel like that? How can he feel like that?”

It’s a weirdly condescending perspective for Anastasia to take towards Christian’s understanding of himself. She’s jealous and confused that Christian could consider Elana a friend, that he’s in business with her, that they have dinner together. “It wasn’t like that,” he tells Anastasia. “Okay, it didn’t feel like that to me…She was a force for good. What I needed…She’s not an animal, Anastasia. Of course she didn’t. I don’t understand why you feel you have to demonize her.” A more sophisticated novel might have delved into the question of what Christian believes that he needs. Anastasia is convinced that, for Christian, domination and submission are about associating love with pain. But the book never examines the idea that a dominant-submissive relationship might be about providing Christian with relationships that have an extreme clarity and predictability to them after the chaos of his childhood before he was adopted, about knowing exactly what he’s supposed to do or expected to do or allowed to do in one arena of his life, or about guaranteeing that he has someone who will be receptive to his offers of love and pleasure. Giving more respect to his perspective could have moved Fifty Shades of Grey beyond the romance novel conventions that form its skeleton, and into a more serious consideration of what people want from their relationships and the fact that pop culture ideals of love and sex are not sufficient to everyone’s needs.

It’s not as if this is impossible to do in mainstream entertainment. I wrote about this a while ago, but in the Season 2 finale of Homicide “A Many Splendored Thing,” Detectives Bayliss and Pembleton work the murder of a woman who worked on a phone-sex line and is found strangled by a belt from a jacket the pair trace to a fetish shop. In some of the more interesting character work in that shortened season, Bayliss recoils when a cuffed male suspect tries to kiss him, a moment that’s less about homophobia and more about Bayliss’s feeling that his control of the situation has been violated. Later, the murdered girl’s friend brings him a jacket from that same fetish shop, and when he demurs, shifts her voice into a new tone as she orders him to put it on. Bayliss complies, and we get a sense of what’s buried below his psychological waterline, a desire to surrender control rather than lose it.

Christian offers a chance to experience that to Anastasia, telling her “If you were my sub, you wouldn’t have to think about this. It would be easy. All those decisions— all the wearying thought processes behind them. The ‘is this the right thing to do? Should this happen here? Can it happen now?’ You wouldn’t have to worry about any of that detail.” It’s a fraught scenario, a fraught desire, and I think it’s worth exploring, especially at a time when women are supposed to claim power these days, not surrender it.

Though that’s not precisely what’s at stake in Fifty Shades of Grey—I don’t happen to believe that BDSM is a recreation of the patriarchy—I’d be interested in a quality artistic defense of really profound female submission to male authority. To take Twilight, from whence Fifty Shades of Grey springs, while I don’t particularly share the fantasy, I do understand why that series is intermittently appealing. When faced with the pressure to have it all, it would be a relief if a group of people showed up in a packaged set to make you over, provide a rewarding adult society that teaches you to socialize and makes you feel sophisticated, and marry you, eliminating the need to date or risk heartbreak. Choice and the possibility of error can be paralyzing, and while I’d argue that means we need to better prepare people to know their preferences and to choose in their best intersts rather than restricting their choices, I can see the appeal of a bright, shining path standing out from all the others, illuminated by people who have your best interests at heart.

By contrast, Fifty Shades of Grey could have made a clear, eroticized case for domination and submission as separate from surrender to the patriarchy. The clearest signal that the book has failed to do that is that many negative reviews I’ve read are turned off by the sense that Anastasia is blindly submitting to terrible treatment rather than engaging in a relationship whose terms she’s negotiated, and that she gets as much from being a sub as Christian does as her dominant. You have to be able to have power in the first place in order to give it up, and Anastasia’s decision to submit could have, in the hands of a better, more sophisticated writer than E.L. James, been a demonstration that she’s gone beyond a woman’s gateway power to say no to sex and is exploring what choices lie beyond it, and what options are available to her as the person who fulfills Christian.

We’ll never know, because Fifty Shades of Grey doesn’t actually want to explore a formalized relationship between a dominant and a submissive. For all the discussion of the contract that Christian and Anastasia discuss endlessly and negotiate over as an early form of flirtation, Anastasia never signs it. The novel makes much of the idea that Anastasia doesn’t have a particularly submissive personality (which is not necessarily, given that domination and submission are about exploring power dynamics—a domineering person in public life may enjoy submission in private), something that draws Christian to her and is the foundation for a suggestion that Christian’s enjoyment of dominance may be a kind of delusion, the refuge of a scared and damaged little boy.

Christian’s “lifestyle” in Fifty Shades of Grey is the equivalent of a childhood loss of a parent or a broken engagement in another romance novel, a barrier to intimacy rather than something that can be conducive to it. And the toys that decorate what Anastasia calls the “Red Room of Pain” are just a substitute for corsets, a repurposing of Regency riding crops, accessories for spicing up a relationship rather than fundamentally reconsidering its dynamics. For all its naughtiness, the book would faint dead away at anything so racy as an actual challenge to gender roles and sexual politics. Fifty Shades of Grey is the literary equivalent of telling a woman to meet her husband at the door dressed in saran wrap.

*I’ve just read the first novel. I’ll probably read the others eventually.

-Oh, hey, maybe True Blood‘s new showrunner will make the show less insanely racist…after one more season of Alan Ball.

-What studios can learn from Battleship and The Avengers, which shockingly have one thing in common.

-I’ll have more on Bring Up the Bodies soon, but it’s true that it’s excellent.

Former journalist Edward Klein

In the Post’s excerpt, Klein alleges that former President Clinton called President Obama an “amateur” and desperately tried to convince Hillary to resign as Secretary of State and challenge Obama in the Democratic primaries this year. (The Clintons swiftly and forcefully denied the claims.) The article was prominently featured on the Drudge Report.

Although you wouldn’t know it from reading the New York Post, the Drudge Report or other popular right-wing outlets, Klein is a discredited author with a history of presenting falsehoods as fact. Here’s what you need to know about Edward Klein:

1. Klein’s last book, which was self-published, suggests Obama was born on foreign soil and is a practicing Mulism. Klein’s 2010 work The Obama Identity: A Novel (Or Is It?), co-authored with a former Republican congressman, is a compendium of Obama conspiracy theories. He had to self-publish the book.

2. Klein promoted a shameful conspiracy theory that Bill Clinton raped Hillary. In his 2005 book, Klein promoted an anonymous, hateful allegation supposedly made by two people who “claim” to have spoken with Bill Clinton about the circumstances surrounding the birth of the Clintons’ daughter Chelsea.

3. Klein repeatedly questioned Hillary Clinton’s sexual orientation. He has similarly disparaged Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, Jackie Kennedy and Katie Couric in previous works, leading the Washington Post to comment that Klein “has made a second career of leaving knuckle prints on famous women.”

4. Klein has a history of publishing demonstrably false allegations about Obama as fact. In a 2010 entry in The Huffington Post, Klein detailed President Obama’s “humiliation” of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netenyahu, claiming that sources told him of Obama leaving during a meeting with Netenyahu to have dinner with Michelle and their two daughters. One phone call would have revealed that to be impossible, since Michelle, Sasha and Malia were all in New York City at the time.

5. Klein’s book is being published by Regnery, a far-right imprint specializing in the promotion of conservative talking points. He was rejected by every respectable publishing house. In an interview, Klein claimed his difficulty locating a publisher was because Barack Obama was an “untouchable” subject. Yet several other books on the same subject, like Jodi Kantor’s The Obamas, set off a bidding war between the major New York publishers.

6. Even conservative critics view Klein as disreputable. Kathleen Parker, writing for the Tribune’s network of newspapers, described Klein’s 2005 book as “prurient tabloiding,” while New York Post columnist John Podhoretz said it was “one of the most sordid volumes I’ve ever waded through.” Peggy Noonan’s Wall Street Journal review said it was “poorly written, poorly thought, poorly sourced and full of the kind of loaded language that is appropriate to a polemic but not an investigative work.”

The nation’s top book reviews have all panned Klein and his work. The Boston Globe called him “an author devoid of credibility,” the New York Times described him as “smarmy and sleazy,” the Los Angeles Times called his work “bio-porn,” and the Tucson Citizen referred to it as “the literary equivalent of a backed up-septic tank.” (It got a grade of “F”).

Nevertheless, The Washington Post and Fox are reporting Klein’s latest allegations as if they were news.

One of the reasons Sendak’s work is so enduring is that it treats children like children rather than turning them into tiny adults, and captures the real sense of fear and smallness that children often experience. Max enjoys his time with the Wild Things because it lets him flout his mother’s rules, but the intensity of their emotions and the thought of being responsible for them is intimidating. The supper his mother’s kept waiting for him seems a feeble light to drive back the darkness, but it’s enough. Small certainties, which children are still sussing out even if their parents think they’ve been clear, can defeat amorphous terrors. Outside Over There, in which a girl rescues the baby sister she’s been caring for from goblins, is also about being overwhelmed by responsibility and a sense of parental abandonment. In The Night Kitchen may be a perpetual subject of controversy, but it also captures how unsettling our dreams can be, particularly at a time when we aren’t yet experts in our waking world.

Sendak lent his skills as an illustrator to other authors as well, among them Dutch children’s author Meindert De Jong, poet Randall Jarrell, and Ruth Krauss. Whether he was illustrating a young girl’s effort to lure a stork to her village or helping Krauss bring the natural world to life, Sendak made huge contributions to creating the visual world of children’s literature. Whether they know it or not, Sendak is the first artist many children are repeatedly exposed to.

And as a gay man and a Jew, Sendak was particularly aware of how frightening the world could be, even after children grow up and grow into adult power and responsibility. Though it’s a later work, I’ve always particularly loved Sendak and Tony Kushner’s collaboration on Brundibar, an adaptation of a children’s opera first performed in the Theresienstadt concentration camp. The story, about children who team up to chase a wicked organ grinder out of the town square so they can sing to raise the money to pay a doctor to attend to their sick father, is both an anti-Hitler allegory and in keeping with Sendak’s view of children as confronters of a large and sometimes frightening world. The opera’s survival is also a testament to the power of art in arming children for that fight, as fitting a summary of Sendak’s work as I could imagine.

-Alif the Unseen, G. Willow Wilson, Out on July 3: Alif The Unseen may not be the first major fictional take on the Arab Spring, but it’s definitely the first to examine what would happen to a censorious oil state if a talented young hacker of Indian-Arab origin, after having his heart shattered by the upper-class girl he’s in love with, goes on the run with his veiled neighbor and best real-life friend and a djinn. It’s a terrifically fun novel about the connections between literature and coding, magic and Islam, and the identities we create for ourselves.

-Shadow and Bone, Leigh Bardugo, Out on June 5: For all my YA readers of all ages in the house, Bardugo’s fantasy set in a Russia where the tsar’s advised by both a Rasputin-like holy man and a powerful wizard is the first part of a trilogy, and by the end of Shadow and Bone, you’ll be glad that’s the case. Fictional authoritarians don’t always pack the punch or capture the rot of unstable regimes, but Bardugo’s does. Plus magic and smooching and some super-scary demons.

-Bring Up the Bodies, Hilary Mantel, Out on May 8: Wolf Hall, the first book in Mantel’s trilogy about Thomas Cromwell, is one of my favorite books of recent years, a rich, strange volume that actually captures what it feels like to be inside a non-modern mindset. I’m excited for the HBO adaptation, if it ever comes to fruition. But I’m even more excited for this sequel.

-The Orphan Master’s Son, Adam Johnson: Johnson’s novel of life in North Korea has been out for a while, and at first blush, it might not seem like beach reading. But it’s gorgeously written, and a propulsive adventure, a reminder that life as we know it can be so strange as to approach magical realism. If you want a reckoning with American inability to comprehend the world beyond ourselves, this is one of the most innovative ways to have that conversation with yourself and a piece of literature.

-Are You My Mother?, Alison Bechdel: I feel like I shouldn’t even have to make the case for this graphic novel memoir, given how wonderful Bechdel’s meditation on her father, Fun Home, is. But for those of you who are unfamiliar, Alison Bechdel is a genius, and Dykes to Watch Out For, her long-running syndicated comic strip about a lesbian community, was fantastic, no matter what your sexual orientation.

When you started thinking about the novel, I’d be curious what kind of research you did into the mythology? I feel like Western readers are familiar with non-Western myths like djinns as they’ve been shoehorned into the edges of fairy tales, but they’re not often at the center of the frame.

In some ways, it’s two separate questions. What the research was going in was a hodge-podge. Growing up in Arab immigrant communities, my grandmother would, in halting Arabic, try to tell me stories. But [I also read] also translations of the Koran and stuff like that. Some of it was from my heritage. And some of it is integrating bits of, dare I say, Orientalist use of quote unquote Eastern mythologies…It’s very Arab-American novel in the mix of mythology that’s in there. And that made it easier to connect with a Western audience because there are a whole swath of things in there that nerds who read a lot of Western fantasy recognize.

The monster stuff, a lot of it’s my own stuff. The ghuls, which are the main creatures in there, they’re really just using the name. In actual Arab mythology, ghuls are sentient, and they’re dimwitted but cunning. They’re cannibals. I’ve had a lot of people in there use the zombie metaphor for them. They are these kinds of mindless hordes of creatures, but they’re not raised from the dead in the same way. They’re more like golems than anything else. There is probably some intra-Semitic mythology going on there…There’s definitely a take on the djenn in the later books…I’m interested in the theology issues that the Koran has with the djenn.

Similarly, a lot of fantasy relies on readers having some cursory knowledge of European history and geography, like George R.R. Martin’s use of the War of the Roses as an analogue for the concepts in Game of Thrones. What kind of knowledge did you assume on the part of your readers?

It’s a funny thing becuase so many aspects of this book, and discussing this book are counterpoints to European fantasy this and European fantasy that. Most people don’t actually know that much about European history, and most European geography. [In Western fantasy novels] where’s people’s terror of salvation, for instance? That seems like it would be a pretty big thing. I’m pretty much assuming nothing [about what people know]. In some ways, that’s freeing. This is very intentionally not historical fantasy per se, because it felt extremely constraining in ways I didn’t want to be constrained. The kind of straight-up analogues will start to come in more in later books. There’s a central Crusades analogue that will come up in books two and three. And the [series' version of the] standard trope of a dark army that’s on the rise where there will be the final clash will be the Crusader analogue. But hopefully I’m not just flipping the sides. In the Muslim world, [the story of the Crusades is that] there’s these savages that came. That’s not entirely accurate either. It’s proving thorny to write.

Dervishes are, of course, a real thing rather than a fantasy or cultural creation, but it’s not quite clear in the book whether your characters are Muslim or not, or whether they follow an analogous but not identical faith. How much did you want the novel to be directly tied to and function as a reflection on contemporary understandings of Islam?

That’s been probably one of the most interesting things that’s kind of been raised and discussed about this book. Some people reading the book feel like they’re mentioning God every couple of pages, it’s getting annoying. It’s a secular reading that wants an anachronistically secular reading of pre-industrial fantasy world. And there are some people who are reading it who say ‘I expected it to be more Islamic.’ It’s a secondary world. It’s a made-up world. It’s not Islam. It’s not the Middle East. It’s not Earth. It’s a made-up world in the way that Robert Jordan or George R.R. Martin, that most people writing today are writing in made-up worlds. It might look like historical periods in our own Earth, but they’re made up. And that’s very intentional. And I didn’t want to wrie a book that’s about Islam. I’m choosing to write a religion that looks like a religion that gets maligned a lot in the culture the book is being read in. At the end of the day, this is an adventure fantasy novel that can’t bear the weight of truly depicting Islam in such a problematic world on its little shoulders.

But I feel like we’re in the midst of a nice boom in fantasy set in the Muslim world, whether it’s Matt Ruff’s alternate history novel The Mirage, or G. Willow Wilson’s hackers-and-djinn novel Alif the Unseen coming out this summer. Do you feel like your work, and that boom, is responding to the broader cultural conversation into which that work is published?

I’m not that writer who will say I’m a mystery writer, or I’m a horror writer, but I happen to be black, or I happen to be Puerto Rican, or I happen to be a woman. I’m not that person. Being Arab and being a Muslim is part of my consciousness on a daily basis. You’re telling your story in a world where stories are always being told. There are small attempts in this flimsy form of an adventure fantasy [to say something different.]…

Not to say that there’s not all sorts of oppression that’s specific to Muslim women, but there are fears and hatreds that are very specific to Muslim men in our culture. And on the other side, there are these stories about genre heroes, and what men should be. And a lot of my fiction straddles that line. I’ve got a story where there’s a Muslim gunslinger. This book is about a badass Paladin with a sword, to use my Dungeons and Dragons history here. Part of the sadly radical gesture, that phrase about feminism being the radical notion that women are people, a lot of my work is about the fact that Muslims and Arabs and people who look Arabic are heroes.

I really loved your essay on race and Game of Thrones, a franchise I love but that just utterly falls down on this issue. Do you think there’s a way to make the Western fantasy tradition more diverse? Or is it just a matter of getting to a point where Westernized fantasy isn’t the default position when we talk about the genre? I’m often finding myself super-bored by the standard complement of knights and witches.

I have dear, dear friends, Elizabeth Bear who has just put out a novel called Range of Ghosts, Howard Andrew Jones has written Arabian fanstasy called The Desert of Souls. There are white writers writing diverse settings, and I think we need more of that. I also think we need more writers of color in this field. I’m one of a few guys of color and not many more people of color writing fantasy novels and getting them out to national markets. That’s kind of a problem…And even in the meat and potatoes fantasy, I’d like to see more range of skin tones…First, the Middle Ages was much more diverse than people understand. Second of all, these stories aren’t set in actual historical fantasies. There’s a whole tradition of fantasy that’s really not interested in historical details. But even to people to whom that is important, there are things they ignore. The physics of dragons, it just can’t happen. But somehow, that exception can be made, but some brown people here, that’s alarming…If you can have a setting where half your characters don’t have scroffula and aren’t worried about eternal salvation, you can make that exception.

Speaking of writing experiences that aren’t yours, you’ve spoken publicly about some of the challenges you’ve faced in writing women.

I’ve been thinking about it a lot very recently because I’ve gotten a couple of blistering reviews about the gender depictions. There’s some of it that I internalize and say yeah, that’s probably true. And there’s some of it where I say they don’t really understand. There’s that danger of mansplaining here. There are a whole bunch of cultural angles for me. When you start telling stories, the very specific stories about Arab and Muslim women, and about their relationships with Arab and Muslim men..There’s all sorts of constitutive mysoginy in Arab culture, as there is in American culture. But the fetishization of that story is something I am very, very reluctant to add to.

It’s why I’m practicing what I preach in creating warrior women and badass grandma alchemists. I punted to a degree in that the book spends more time thinking out loud about class and religion than it is about gender…I found that I had a fine line to walk in terms of depicting their fears in a preindustrial society they’d face that men don’t face. And I probably erred on the side of Xena. I like liking my characters, I like enjoying reading the book. I like going with the option that’s not purely grim.

“Our authors and readers have been asking for this for a long time,” said president and publisher Tom Doherty. “They’re a technically sophisticated bunch, and DRM is a constant annoyance to them. It prevents them from using legitimately-purchased e-books in perfectly legal ways, like moving them from one kind of e-reader to another.”

DRM-free titles from Tom Doherty Associates will be available from the same range of retailers that currently sell their e-books. In addition, the company expects to begin selling titles through retailers that sell only DRM-free books.

I don’t think that all DRM protections are inherently evil, though I think the limits on the number of devices on which you can consume content from Amazon and Apple could be higher to be responsive to consumers’ needs. But ditching DRM is a sign that Tor trusts its customers and wants to meet them where they’re at. More signals like that would be a welcome thing from the entertainment industry. Something like the movie industry’s Ultraviolet effort to bolster DVD sales by packing discs and digital copies together are sort of missing the point. They’re trying to create a new space rather than going to the cloud lockers and the means of distribution and consumption their consumers are already using day to day.

I think most people will assume that there isn’t a winner because the panel couldn’t get their minds around David Foster Wallace’s posthumously published and unfinished novel The Pale King. My regret is that Karen Russell’s Swamplandia! didn’t get the prize, and on a more personal note, I thought that book went down unusually earlier in the Morning News’ Tournament of Books. Swamplandia! is one of the most outstanding books I’ve read recently, a searing story about man’s attempt to reshape the land to his own desires, a family’s attempt to create and hold on to a grand mythology in the face of reality, and one of the most original young female protagonists in fiction in a long time, Ava Bigtree, who is half an orphan and possessed of a wild dream to succeed her dead mother as Florida’s most impressive alligator wrestler.

Swamplandia! is a magical realist novel. It features ghosts and spirits, and a miraculous voyage through the Florida Everglades. It’s also a picaresque, a novel that features a faux-Native American water park, a competing amusement park designed to replicate the experience of being in hell, casinos, miraculous rescues, and an enormous amount of teenage drama. But Karen Russell marshals all of those elements to tell stories about poverty, alienation from society, sexual maturity and sexual assault. Ava’s upbringing is decidedly unconventional: she’s grown up in a family that presents themselves as Native Americans even though they’re not, and that lives apart from mainland society. Ava, her sister Osceola, and her brother, Kiwi have never attended school. Their father is wildly unrealistic about their prospects of resurrecting the park after Ava’s mother dies, denying them their star attraction in a business that was ill-equipped to compete with modern entertainment anyway.

When their father abandons his children in promise of restoring their former glory, it’s meant to be a heroic quest that ends up revealing the rotten pillars that propped up a dream. Osceola takes up with a ghost who died as part of a quixotic government scheme to tame Florida’s swamps, conflating sexual and spiritual possession in a brilliant metaphor for the all-consuming nature of first love. And when Ava goes looking for her sister in the company of a mysterious man in whom she invests trust he proves to be manifestly unworthy of, her journey beyond civilization and to the gates of Hell are a powerful meditation on what it means to venture out into a world that refuses to abide by the rules you’ve been promised, and what it means to summon up the courage to survive trauma.

Pulitzer Prize-winning books are supposed to illuminate some aspect of American life. It would have been nice to see the committee give Russell some recognition for the kinds of American lives she chose to shine Everglades light on, and the mastery she brings to the task.

1)ttyl; ttfn; l8r, g8r (series), by Lauren Myracle
Offensive language; religious viewpoint; sexually explicit; unsuited to age group

2) The Color of Earth (series), by Kim Dong Hwa

3)The Hunger Games trilogy, by Suzanne Collins

4)My Mom’s Having A Baby! A Kid’s Month-by-Month Guide to Pregnancy, by Dori Hillestad Butler

5)The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, by Sherman Alexie

6)Alice (series), by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor

7)Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley

8)What My Mother Doesn’t Know, by Sonya Sones

9)Gossip Girl (series), by Cecily Von Ziegesar

10) To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee

Of course we’ve got the old favorites in there. We’ll probably know we’re a healthy, mature society when people stop calling for To Kill a Mockingbird, one of the most well-rounded, humane explorations of racism that exists, stops getting challenged. Brave New World‘s an illustration of how anxiously people can react to science fiction, in part because of discomfort it inspires about what the world might end up looking like. And calls to get Sherman Alexie out of classrooms always strike me as inspired by the same sentiments that suggest Bully might not be appropriate for teenagers—we have to protect children in fiction what other children and the world at large inflict on them in real life.

Of the more recent additions, some of the rationales for challenges are amusing. The challenges to The Hunger Games, for example, suggest that the series is “Anti-ethnic; anti-family; insensitivity; offensive language; occult/satanic; violence.” Almost all of those allegations are significant misreadings of the novel, which makes pretty clear that it would be delightful for its main characters to grow up in a world with an economy that allowed all parents to support their children without taking on extremely dangerous work, or people weren’t divided into districts that restricted their social and economic brutality. And I’d actually love to know what challengers interpreted as occult or satanist sentiments in the book, which depicts a world in which any form of religious belief is actually conspicuously absent.

I’d also suspect that Lauren Myracle’s Internet Girls series, Sonya Sones’ What My Mother Doesn’t Know (which is one of the most challenged books of the last decade) and the Gossip Girl books are challenged not just for their content, but because of what they suggest about how the Internet has changed children’s and young adult’s lives. If I were a parent, I might be anxious about the possibility that my child’s life was essentially unmonitorable, and that there was a whole frontier beyond the real world where they could get into trouble (and as someone who grew up in the beginning of that era, I know what I’m in for). Removing one source of inspiration may delay a discovery, but there’s no way to prevent it completely. Kids will poke around and get themselves in trouble online whether or not they’re inspired to start trashy gossip blogs or pick screen names that will haunt them in adulthood. Open channels of communication, whether it’s on books, or on bullying, will probably prove more effective in the long run than panics about individual books.

There’s a fascinating discussion in comments about the key event in the book. Julius, a somewhat depressed psychiatrist who is the main character in the novel, spends much of the book reconnecting with Moji, a girl he knew when they were both growing up in Nigeria. But towards the end of the novel, Moji reveals her real motivations for getting to know Julius as an adult: Julius sexually assaulted her when they were young teenagers, and she’s wanted to see if he remembers his actions and feels regret or remorse. Commenter Neighbors73 raises an objection that others brought up as well: “I guess I’m the only one who is still struggling with the idea of a 14 year old boy forgetting he’s a rapist?”

I can understand why some readers might find this jarring. But to be perfectly honest, I don’t. The power of that conversation between Moji and Julius lies in its dissonance, the fact that an event that was shattering for one person was forgettable for someone else. And this is the kind of thing that can happen when we don’t treat boys and girls equally about what consent means. It’s just as important to teach boys that no genuinely means no as it is to teach girls to say no in the first place. Putting sole responsibility on women is a sick joke when men can override their lack of consent.

And when we don’t teach boys what consent genuinely means, and why obtaining it is critical, this is where we get these horrendous differences in memory. I don’t think it’s unreasonable that someone would forget a one-time sexual encounter in a lifetime of them if that’s the way their lack of knowledge and empathy lead them to read an assault. And I find it all too plausible that a 14-year-old could rewrite what for a woman was a lifechanging sexual assault into a routine, and barely-remembered hookup at a party. Julius didn’t forget assaulting Moji because he’s a sociopath who can easily put a rape out of his mind—he forgot assaulting Moji because he doesn’t understood himself to have assaulted her in the first place. This doesn’t absolve him of moral responsibility, then or now. In fact, it shows him to be more globally detached and inconsiderate than we’d previously seen. It’s a revelation that forces us, and Julius, to revisit everything we’ve come to understand about him.

Why is the town so hot and bothered about what started as a self published e-book that flew under the radar until a Today Show segment and New York Times article turned up the heat? Those who don’t get it are scratching their heads and dismissing it as “mommy porn” and say while it will be aimed at the female demo that embraced Eat Pray Love and Sex and the City, these two go at it like rabbits in vivid S&M and bondage scenarios that will lead to a sure-fire R rating at least. Guys probably aren’t coming, and that rating locks out the young girls.

Those who do get it say that the author has tapped into a perfect storm of female sexuality and taboo romance with an unattainable man, themes common to works like Twilight Saga and True Blood. They say the book has stimulated an elusive zeitgeist hot button that every studio wants in a book to movie franchise. Guys might not get it, but it’s spreading like wildfire among females age ranging from young women to grandmothers.

I’m amused, but there’s something pretty pathetic about the fact that the entertainment industry is still surprised by the idea that ladies have erogenous zones, and sometimes like having them stimulated by pop culture. Have they ever been to the romance novel section of a bookstore? Or had an assistant who’s been to the romance novel section of a bookstore? I hope a lady executive lands this project and makes major bank off it. Though history suggests that even if that happens, her male counterparts won’t learn a damn thing from the experience.

To answer the second question first, there’s an extent to which television is the least flexible of the major media. While it’s absolutely true that the networks are becoming somewhat more flexible about season lengths—something like ABC’s found footage horror show The River is a good example of this—and cable channels and network do make miniseries, it’s true that the standard network season is 22ish episodes and the standard cable season is 13ish episodes. The episodes are of a relatively standard length: 22ish minutes for a sitcom and 42ish for a drama on the networks and non-premium cable channels, and closer to 30 and an hour on the premium cable channels.

Those are astonishing formal constraints for an artist, even a commercial one, to work under, and it’s worth pausing to appreciate that. Standard-release movie features features can run from 80 minutes to well over two hours, and you can make something substantially shorter or longer than that and still find mass-market distribution for it. Novels are bound by some constraints on what a publisher can physically bind, but there’s a great deal of range within those technical specifications, and within them, no one’s setting limitations on how long or short chapters have to be, or even what they’re expected to look like: David Foster Wallace and Jennifer Eagan have helped shake that up. And one can only imagine, especially given the rise of e-books that can incorporate video, graphics, or animation, that experimentation will continue. Most pop songs hover in the three-minute range, but once again, that’s not a formal constraint, and iTunes may have hurt the album but it also freed artists like Robyn from its limitations. Web television may yet shake the formal constraints of television, but we’re far from a paradigm shift. Television is the most restrictive popular art form in existence, and I’m constantly awed that people manage to fit stories neatly into the space allotted to them without too much filler or franticness. But those restrictions are more than some sort of technical exercise: this is a multi-billion dollar industry, not a writing workshop handing out a structurally tricky assignment to talented students.

And television is hardly the first serial medium, either, nor is serialization the thing that most draws a line between novels and television shows. Both Alexander Dumas and Charles Dickens made much of their livings writing serial novels, and Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Madame Bovary, and Anna Karenina were all published as serials. And while something like the Pickwick Papers can stand on its own, and you can drop into occasional chapters of The Three Musketeers and find a short story, most of these books are continuous narrative that occasionally require a chapter to act as connective tissue. The point in either form is to keep you coming back. And there’s room in that form for a pleasant and recurring visit to a group of friends you know well enough to anticipate the beats they’ll pass through, and for emotional journeys to unpredictable and constantly unfolding lands.

And this is the larger point: we focus on the serialized or episodic nature of shows because there are so few other ways to innovate within the limits of the form as it exists now. If we really care about shows figuring out what’s best for the stories we want to tell, our biggest concerns shouldn’t be about the gloss of serialization that takes up space in an essentially episodic show or the episodes in serialized shows that act as tendon rather than muscle, pulling us forward into the narrative sweep even if they aren’t utter gems in our own right. Instead, we need to champion flexibility that would let creators match the stories they want to tell with the formats that will best let them be told. Whether it’s Masterpiece releasing three 90-minute episodes of Sherlock at a time; a show like Revenge that seems like it could (though of course it won’t) spin itself out compellingly in a single season, we should be looking at experiments in episode orders, episode length, and number of seasons as the lab in which we finally figure out how to fit television’s form and function.

In other words, The Mirage is a provocative, timely, fascinating intervention in the way we think about not just the post-September 11 world but about American power and popular culture. The novel is full of funhouse mirror details like a television show with the tagline: “Shafiq: he’s Sunni. Hassan: he’s Shia. They fight crime,” where “episodes typically offered one or more moral lessons, the most common of which was ‘Respect the other People of the Book—even if you don’t like them very much.’” It’s an incredibly effective way of both exposing our debates and politics as ridiculous, and of forcing us to put ourselves in Muslims’ shoes by letting them stand in the footwear of the mostly white, mostly Christian cops, politicians and criminals we see on American television. And the magic, when it comes, is wonderfully lovely and inventive, the result of Ruff having researched not just geopolitics but fantastical belief.

I spoke to Ruff yesterday about breaking out of stereotypical images of Muslims in popular culture, how we decide which terrorist attacks to excuse and which to condemn, and how our beliefs about our ability to change history can lead us astray. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

I’d be curious how you decided which cultural phenomena would survive—or develop naturally—in your alternate history. Personally, I’m glad to hear that Oded Fehr’s still a huge star in the world of The Mirage.

For me, it wasn’t so much a matter of what to include but what to leave out. I’m a huge pop culture fan, so I had tons of ideas that I could have included. It was more a matter of picking and choosing things that were either short and clever and wouldn’t disrupt the plot, or would support it in some way. One obvious case was the Invasion of the Body Snatchers in an alternate version…it was a way of introducing the fact that Samir [one of the Homeland Security agents who works with Mustafa] is fighting his homosexuality…Another idea I had come up with that I didn’t use was the infamous Star Trek mirror world episode. I had thought to have that on TV in the background, the difference being that the Evil Spock would be clean-shaven.

I was also wondering if you could talk a bit about the decision to set the novel in Baghdad instead of, say, Saudi Arabia, and to marginalize oil politics in the novel. Are those resources democratized in the UAS?

There were a lot of specific nuts and bolts questions like that that I left unanswered becuase they didn’t fit what I was doing. The very first incarnation of the book, I had thought to set it in Riyadh. Riyadh became the federal district, it became the alternate Washington, DC, and to have it serve as New York didn’t work. What I wanted to do was offer central roles to people who suffered the real brunt of the War on Terror, so it made sense to make Baghdad Ground Zero because that is Ground Zero of the U.S. response to the War on Terror. These were the folks who I wanted to be in the center of the novel and have their turn on the other side of the looking glass…you’ve go the South representing the more religious vision of what Arabia should be, and then you’ve got Egypt as an alternate, more secular vision but they have lost out on the competition for where the capital should be.

The Mirage also has a vision of a decidedly more moderate global Islam: is there more we could be doing in politics and popular culture to be supportive of moderate interpretations of Islam?

If you give people freedom of conscience, you’re going to get more moderate versions of religion. It’ll take a while. Part of what drives extreme conservativism in relgiion is people are afraid to voice alternate views…if you can go to jail or be killed for voicing a unorthodox opinion… I don’t see anything incompatible in Islam, as I don’t in Christianity, with gay rights or women’s rights. It’s more do with people having breathing room.

Similarly, the way we talk about acts of terrorism committed by people inspired by their Christian beliefs is very different than the way we talk about terrorists who are inspired by Islam. Do you think we should be looking more carefully at things like attacks on abortion providers?

I think you always tend to be much more forgiving of the behavior, even the bad behavior, of people you are more familiar and comfortable with. I don’t think it’s an exact parallel, but the idea that the invasion of Iraq was a Christian war would trouble a lot of people. But obviously it was launched by George Bush, who was asked ‘who’s your favorite philosopher?’ in one of the debates, and he said ‘my favorite philosopher is Jesus Christ.’ People are going to assume that anything you do is essentially a Christian act. If you launch a war, even with the best intentions, that kills thousands of people, a lot of people are going to look at that as Christian terrorism.

A lot of it is being able to put yourself in the mindset of people on the receiving end of violence…[When Christians commit violence, people are able to think] ‘they’re bad, but they’re not representative of what Christianity is supposed to be.’ What are you familiar with? Who are your friends? Does the violence affect you and people you care about? And all of that goes into the calculation of what gets labeled terrorism?…Any religion that lasts for more than 1,000 years and flourished in hundreds of different cultures is going ot have to be pretty adaptable to local traditions and is going to have to speak to you in times of peace and times of war…To condemn an entire religion that way, or to do the other thing and say the violence doesn’t count because the real expression is when we’re being nice, that doesn’t work either.

I think part of the problem, too, with a lot of portrayals of Islam on television and in movies, is if you’ve only got one character who is meant to represent the beliefs of 1.5 billion Muslims, no actor is good enough to capture all that diversity. The only way to represent a religion organically is to having multiple characters practicing the faith each in their own way, and to go about their lives being Muslim. Which was part of what I was after. I didn’t want to have to say, oviously Osama bin Laden is a bad example of Islam. I wanted to be obvious that what sets him apart from other people in the story is he’s a mass murderer.

I’d love to hear how you developed your characters. One of the things I’ve found really frustrating about popular culture is how it’s essentially failed to provide a pushback to the stereotypical depictions of Muslims as terrorists, and how we haven’t had iconic representations of Muslims that are the equivalent of the Cosbys or tropes like the sassy gay best friend to defuse any anxiety people may feel about having Muslims as friends, neighbors, or even intermarrying into their families.

This was originally a pitch for a TV pilot. It came out of a more general desire to tell a story about 9/11 and the U.S. response ot it. I’m a big Buffy the Vampire Slayer fan, and I wanted to do something like that where you set up a genre universe where along the way you explore these different issues in a metaphorical or a less direct way, as part of telling a really exciting story. The other thing on my wish list was to give a more central role to the Iraqis who were bearing the brunt of the War on Terror, who got committed to sidekick status or not mentioned at all. I wanted to do this more organic portrait of Islam and get away from it as a problem religion. Because I’m also a big science fiction geek, I hit on this idea of turning the world upside down, and not just the geopolitical situation, but even the idea of who the center of the story should be. Who constitues a protagonist. This is a universe wehre not only are Muslims the center of the universe, but when you turn on TV, you’d expect the elite to be an Arab Muslim, you’d expect the Christians to be the sad sidekicks, the people who remind you that, yes the people in the third world are humans too.

I just started putting together the characters. I was creating the classic thriller setup. You’ve got your main character, Mustafa, who has the tragic marriage, but in his case because they have polygamy, he’s got more than one. His loveable sidekick, who is there for comic relief, is Samir…Amal is the scrappy new recruit who’s got to prove herself. That was the core of the story, and I built out from there.

One of the basic rules was that people’s characters would not be fundamentally altered. Osama in Laden would be more a respectable political figure who was doing dastardly things behind the scenes. Originally, Saddam Hussein was going to be more of a recurring character. But it made sense that he would be a gangster. A number of the biopics about Saddam tend to do the same thing, they portray him as the Al Capone. And of course the Muslim war on drugs would be a war on alcohol.

There was the central conceit of the mirage. Apart from being a neat twist that you could build off of [it was a reminder that] your place in history, at the top of the pyramid of power, is not assured. If the world is turned over once, it could turn over again, and you should maybe build your ethics on the idea that you’ll be on the bottom some day or you’ll be in need of mercy…If you took Americans and you put them in a position where they believe they should be at the top, and instead, had been humiliated and put at the bottom, the rage that would evolve from that is probably not that different than the rage that comes out of the Middle East. They’ve been on the receiving end for a long time. Certainly guys like [Ayman al-]Zawahiri are oppressed, they’re mad. The Mirage was part of the way at getting at some of that mindless violence.

Do you think significant culture change is possible? The book is a very funny, pointed warning for folks who think they can alter the course of history and civilizations easily, but I’m not sure that answers the question of whether those world-historical forces can be altered at all?

History is in part a series of human decisions, but it’s also a series of accidents. It’s not so much that we can’t change hsitory or affect it, but we overestimate our ability to do it and to do it quickly. Desire often gets ahead of reason…If you’re happy with the way your society works, it’s natural to assume this is the way it should work for everybody. Something that drives this adventure of we’ll go into Iraq, and take out the dictator, and democracy will flourish, and that’s the end point of history for everybody, that ignores that history works differently for everybody…It’s not that I don’t hope that Iraq and other countries will eventually have a robust democracy. But part of it is having a robust democracy for long enough that people don’t want to return to dictatorship. In America, we haven’t had a king for over 200 years, so if you tried to set up a monarchy, you’d be faced with a collective disbelief of 300 million people. That interia protects us from more obvious forms of despotism.

Someone worked really hard to make the language just right, just the way they wanted it. They were so sure of it that they printed it in ink, on paper. A screen always feels like we could delete that, change that, move it around. So for a literature-crazed person like me, it’s just not permanent enough…a sense of permanence has always been part of the experience…Everything else in your life is fluid, but here is this text that doesn’t change…Will there still be readers 50 years from now who feel that way? Who have that hunger for something permanent and unalterable? I don’t have a crystal ball. But I do fear that it’s going to be very hard to make the world work if there’s no permanence like that. That kind of radical contingency is not compatible with a system of justice or responsible self-government.

Then, in the same speech, he apparently voiced some skepticism about whether President Obama should be spending his time reading: “One of the reasons I love Barack Obama as much as I do is that we finally have a real reader in the White House. It’s absolutely amazing. There’s one of us running the U.S. [Although] when I heard he was reading Freedom I thought, ‘Why are you reading a novel? There are important things to be doing!”

Now, I’m obviously a big advocate of having a reader in the White House, both because I think consuming smart culture, whether it’s Freedom or Homeland can provide perspective on both issues and the national mindset, and because I think even presidents need a break. I’ve never particularly understood people who object to presidential leisure, within reasonable limits, of course. The presidency is an incredibly difficult job, probably too large for one person. But if we’re going to have one person do it, that person needs to be saved from burnout and insanity as best as possible, a process that means both vacations and reading things that are not giant briefings with check boxes attached.

On the larger issue of e-readers, I’m not sure I see Franzen’s point. Most e-readers don’t contain the option to alter the words of the text itself, only to highlight, add bookmarks, and marginalia and notes. Having a print copy of a book doesn’t guarantee that it’ll be treated with reverence, as any college student or deeply engaged reader’s marked-up texts can attest. The move from cotton paper to pulp-based paper actually means that our books are less permanent and lasting edifices than they used to be. Digital copies may last longer, and in more pristine condition, than our paperbacks of today do. That doesn’t mean that books can’t be fetish objects, or artwork, of course. But digital can offer its own interactivity, picture quality, etc., and so if you’re just critiquing the form in terms of its permanence, I think Franzen is barking up the wrong tree. The real question should be whether any innovation in the form brings in more readers and gets them to read more books. It’s still early, but research suggests that people who own e-readers are upping their book consumption. From both an economic and an intellectual perspective, that should make Franzen pretty happy.

My male friends are among the most important in my life. The friend I’m most in touch with from high school is a man, who introduced me to action movies and hung out with me after work and at debate team practices. There’s no question my love of campy movies like Starship Troopers and Hackers is a legacy of our friendship, and part of the reason I’m a critic. My best friends in college were the guys I worked on political campaigns with, lived with during my summer in New Haven (contra Flanagan’s domestic ideals, we survived mostly on fried chicken, pancakes, and deeply terrible takeout Chinese), and argued about movies and music with. It wasn’t that I didn’t have female friends — the women I met in college have been critical to my adult life — but there’s no question that these men were formative to my artistic, social, and moral development.

At one point during the interview, Flanagan says, “Girls are hugely interested in boys. That isn’t ever going to change.” But what she — and a lot of the culture she decries — misses is that there are a lot of different ways to be interested in boys. I would hope she’s raising her sons not just to avoid being sexual predators, but to see women as potential friends as well as lovers and wives. And I hope she wouldn’t see their adolescence as failed if they emerged from it with female friends who would last a lifetime instead of having had a bunch of girlfriends.

1. Paradise Lost, John Milton: Sure, this is supposed to be John Milton’s repentance of his republican apostasy, but what if red-blooded American kiddies get confused by the eloquence of that wily creature Satan? That whole “Farewel Remorse: all Good to me is lost; / Evil be thou my Good” thing could cause all sorts of kerfuffles and uprisings, like those darn video games my grandson is always playing.

2. A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens: It’s a short leap from Marquis Evrémonde to Mitt Romney, and we wouldn’t want to invite that comparison, now would we? Darnay is such an avatar of the politics of envy.

3. The Harry Potter series, J.K. Rowling: This one might be a squeaker. Sure, the hero advocates strongly against the anti-Muggle, Squib, and Mudblood race politics of Voldemort and his cronies. But that Potter kid is awfully disrespectful to the Minister of Magic and forms of authority in general.

5. Ender’s Game, Orson Scott Card: Pre-teens plotting an overhaul of world government and resisting the efforts of the military that’s recruited them to manipulate them. Total recipe for disaster. Especially now that blogging is an actual thing that kids can do. Nuke this one. And parents, shut down your kids’ Tumblrs just to be safe.

6. The Cat Ate My Gymsuit, Paula Danziger and The Day They Came to Arrest the Book, Nat Hentoff: Because the last thing a state that’s cracking down on curriculum needs is sympathetic novels about students who organize to fight a crackdown on curriculum or fighting a book banning, lining up civil libertarians against censorship-minded feminists and African-American students and parents. How will authority survive if challenging it is seen as reasonable? And how can tender-hearted children face the prospect of standing up for themselves and choosing sides in disagreements?

7. Am I Blue? Coming Out from the Silence, Marion Diane Bauer: Even though gay people, especially teenagers, are at risk of violence and discrimination, it would be far too dangerous to marginalize the people who hate them and to promote a sense of solidarity and mutual support within the community of gay people and straight allies.

8. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, Sherman Alexie:: God forbid anyone, particularly from a minority group that’s been demonstrably oppressed and damaged by the actions of the United States government, spend any time contemplating their own identity or doing anything other than instantly assimilating without looking back.

9. The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood: It’s critically important that we remind girls as early as possible to accept what the state has to say about their fertility without question, and to make clear that there’s never any point at which it would be justified that women break the law to retain control over their own health and bodies.

10. The Hunger Games series, Suzanne Collins: Again, a mixed bag. The heroine’s an awful rebel, but the series as a whole tends to endorse dropping out of the political process rather than continuing to participate in the furtherance of a revolution, so the net effect might be to neutralize those pesky kids.

Shawn Lawrence Otto’s Fool Me Twice: Fighting the Assault on Science in America is a fascinating look at the status of science in American society. Otto’s explanation of the climate change denial machine provides a compelling narrative that places the ‘controversy’ in the context of science’s slipping authority vis-a-vis political rhetoric and pseudoscience that passes for fact.  However, the book’s greatest merit lies in the analysis and resulting suggestions for positive reform – an effort that will require the contributions of politicians, scientists, the media, and the general public.

CSW caught up with Otto at the Union of Concerned Scientists Washington, DC, office for a discussion of Fool Me Twice last Thursday, December 1.

“Whenever people are well informed, they can be trusted with their own government.”  Wise and famous words from Thomas Jefferson imply troubling questions as the opening line of Otto’s publication.  Are Americans well-informed on important problems facing society?  If we are not well-informed (and even if we are), are we capable of creating and implementing policies to deal with these problems responsibly?  Otto’s book is compelling as it addresses the conflicting opinions on issues that Americans must sort through on a daily basis.

Debates over climate change are just the beginning, yet it is exemplary in that preconceived ideologies and political rhetoric are elevated to the point where they can confront peer-reviewed scientific findings.  And how has this happened? Otto outlines American society’s tumultuous relationship with scientific inquiry since the days of the founding fathers, coming to the conclusion that science has been gradually forced out of political discussion.  “American democracy relies on a plurality of voices representing economic, scientific, and religious perspectives to arrive at balanced public policy,” he maintains. “With the voice of science going silent in our political dialogue, America no longer has that plurality.”

Science has been ghettoized and pushed aside, Otto maintains, absent from policy debates despite the fact that scientific issues have such huge and lasting impacts on American lives. The cause of this unfortunate reality is attributed to an amalgamation of factors, the most prominent of which seem to be the pervasiveness of campaigns, motivated by monetary investment or a conflicting religious ideology, to subvert the value society places on scientific information.  The media’s tendency to seek out conflicting opinions, even opinions that are not scientifically legitimate; scientists’ tendency to operate as though their respective fields are not political; and the general public’s tendency to ignore the importance of science education, all play a part.

Science is political

Though science is not usually thought of as ‘political’, Otto asserts that “science pushes the boundaries of knowledge … pushes us to constantly redefine our ethics and morality, and that is always political.”  He argues that there is a need for scientists to use their expertise and authority to push for policy prescriptions to our societal challenges.  Without their influence, credibility, and authority, there is more room for pseudoscience and vested interests to exert their power, influencing policy in ways that may not be best for the American people as a whole.

But it is no wonder that scientists shy away from delving any further into the political sphere – take, for example, Senator James Inhofe (R-Oklahoma), who called for the prosecution of respected climate scientists by the Justice Department, attacking the integrity and character of these scientists because his political ideology does not match their findings.  (See what CSW has to say on this matter here).

However, without the scientific community providing expertise and authority in policy prescriptions, anti-science campaigns, driven by conflicts of values (as in evolution) to conflicts of investment and wealth (as in climate change) subvert real scientific knowledge, prevent the implementation of responsible policy, and put the future of our country in jeopardy.

To this end, Otto provides an excellent summary of American political controversy on climate change, and our inability to take any corrective action despite knowledge of the problem since Jim Hansen’s 1988 congressional testimony bringing attention to the matter.  We note that Otto references CSW director Rick Piltz’s whistleblower action in 2005 in his first chapter, as part of a concise discussion on anti-science in the Presidential sphere.  “Bush public relations appointees were muzzling scientists at other agencies, or altering scientific information in official agency reports to fit a preconceived ideological agenda,” Otto reports, with reference to a New York Times article detailing the actions of an oil industry lobbyist in the White House environmental office to manipulate goverernment climate research communication.

Beyond this reference, Otto provides a detailed chapter on the climate change denial machine, the contents of which CSW readers will find familiar.  Again, we are presented with the implications of the power of an industry with vested interests to manipulate public discourse on a topic, and push policy in a desired direction despite clear scientific evidence that these actions are neither sustainable nor in the long term public interest.  Scientists didn’t stand a chance.

Otto walks us through the “oft repeated five prong propaganda strategy of cloaking rhetorical arguments in scientific legitimacy in order to affect a desired policy objective.”  The consequences and ‘scandals’ resulting from these attacks are listed in a lengthy but informative narrative, united by the sobering fact that these tactics have so far successfully prevented any substantial federal action to address climate change. Otto explains Bush’s failure to sign the Kyoto Protocol, ‘Climategate’, Foxgate and the (minor) errors found in the IPCC reports, and Attorney General Ken Cucinelli’s crusade against climate scientist Michael Mann as defrauding taxpayers.  Otto then takes us through the failure of cap-and-trade as an originally Republican idea that is now ridiculed as experimenting with the economy, and the rise of proposals for geoengineering solutions such as sulfur aerosol injections – an idea that “is easily the riskiest suggestion in the history of human civilization,” which resembles “taking up a crack habit.”

Otto’s points out in this chapter that the controversy over climate change is exacerbated by the inadequacy of media coverage as an intermediary between scientists and the general public. CSW has long advocated for the need for objectivity (i.e., regard for empirical evidence), but not for neutrality (e.g., fake ‘balance’ of conflicting views without regard for evaluating the merits) in press coverage of science-related stores.  Indeed, Otto maintains that “Americans find themselves in an absurd and dangerous position: in a time when the majority of the world’s leading country’s largest challenges revolve around science, few reporters are covering them from a scientific angle.”

To restore science to a place in the American political realm, Otto contends that citizens must be better informed; that the media must work to connect the public, scientists, and policymakers in an objective, nonpartisan manner.  Scientific education must be improved. And, as he did during the 2008 presidential campaign, Otto advocates for holding a televised ‘science debate’ between the two presidential candidates in the 2012 election.  That could be a most interesting and illuminating event.  It would be an opportunity to push President Obama to engage in some forthright discussion of climate science before a national audience, which he has appeared most reluctant to do, and to go toe-to-toe with whatever ‘skeptic’ the Republicans put up against him.

If Americans are not well-enough informed to successfully tackle issues like climate change, Otto contends that seeing political leaders directly address the issues will foster greater public interest in the topics, help Americans distinguish scientific finding from rhetoric, and encourage our children to devote their education to the subject. “By putting science in its rightful place as an ongoing part of the policy discussion of the nation, parents can become educated in the context in which they are used to taking in information – policy decisions that affect their lives.”

CSW also believes that increasing scientific literacy is a necessary component to solving the political indecision surrounding action on climate change, and will contribute equally positively to the broad array of science-based dilemmas that face our society.  Getting science-based issues to the forefront with a televised debate is a simple yet powerful tool to encourage scientific literacy.  It could contribute to increased citizen involvement and advocacy for the creation of a comprehensive US policy on climate change.

At the conclusion of the book Otto asks, “will we take up the mantle of freedom and leadership that science gave us — the commitment to knowledge over the assertions of ‘but faith or opinion’ that led us to the disquieting idea of equality that is the foundation of our democracy?”  A worthy challenge.

– by Katherine O’Konski, in a Climate Science Watch cross-post

“Practicing yoga is Satanic, it leads to evil just like reading Harry Potter,” Father Gabriele Amorth said this week. Those seemingly “innocuous” Potter books convince kids to believe in black magic, he said. “In Harry Potter the Devil acts in a crafty and covert manner, under the guise of extraordinary powers, magic spells and curses,” said Amorth. As for yoga, it leads to Hinduism and “all eastern religions are based on a false belief in reincarnation,” the 86-year-old priest said.

In an odd way, I respect the honesty of this kind of statement, even as I think it’s ludicrous and somewhat paranoid to see the Harry Potter novels as anything other than a reaffirmation of the power of Christian theology. There’s a refreshing honesty in admitting both the power of ideas, and the fact that your doctrine may have trouble competing with other worldviews. I tend to want to be in the scrum, in part because I think well-articulated progressive visions tend to have a pretty good shot at winning the battle of ideas, and because I don’t think those ideas can survive only if they don’t face competition or opposition. But I do respect people who withdraw from the things they consider temptation entirely.

The problem for folks like Amorth is that abstinence, whether from sex or from generation-defining young adult fantasy series, isn’t likely to be a particularly effective pitch. And when you can’t convince people to abstain from culture voluntarily, bans or purges from libraries like the one instituted by a Catholic priest in a Massachusetts parish school in 2007, who said he was just instituting a “spiritual peanut butter ban on Harry Potter,” like rules that are meant to avoid exposing children to possible allergens, seem likely to result even if only on a small scale. But if I were a member of the Catholic hierarchy, I look at book bans as a fallback position rather than a victory. There are only so many enclaves you can carve out that are untouched by the larger culture. And settling for enclaves at all is an acknowledgment that your ideas have a limited appeal.