Coursera Providing Free Access to Its Course Catalog to Universities Impacted by COVID-19

in Current Affairs, Education | March 12th, 2020

FYI: If you work in a uni­ver­si­ty impact­ed by COVID-19, Cours­era invites you to lever­age their course cat­a­logue. The com­pa­ny’s CEO writes:

The spread of the coro­n­avirus (COVID-19) is the most seri­ous glob­al health secu­ri­ty threat in decades. In many coun­tries, restric­tions imposed by gov­ern­ment agen­cies have dis­rupt­ed dai­ly rou­tines for mil­lions, includ­ing stu­dents. Many uni­ver­si­ties in the impact­ed regions have sus­pend­ed face-to-face sem­i­nars, closed cam­pus­es, and are scram­bling to find a solu­tion to min­i­mize dis­rup­tion for their stu­dents.

We are for­tu­nate to have uni­ver­si­ty and indus­try part­ners, who have been at the fore­front of respond­ing to the chal­lenges human­i­ty has faced from time to time. Inspired by their sup­port and con­sis­tent with our mis­sion of serv­ing learn­ers every­where, we are launch­ing a glob­al effort to assist uni­ver­si­ties and col­leges seek­ing to offer online course­ware in response to the coro­n­avirus.

Start­ing today, we’ll pro­vide every impact­ed uni­ver­si­ty in the world with free access to our course cat­a­logue through Cours­era for Cam­pus. Uni­ver­si­ties can sign up to pro­vide their enrolled stu­dents with access to more than 3,800 cours­es and 400 Spe­cial­iza­tions from Coursera’s top uni­ver­si­ty and indus­try part­ners. These insti­tu­tions will have access until July 31, 2020, after which we plan to pro­vide month-to-month exten­sions depend­ing on pre­vail­ing risk assess­ments. Stu­dents who enroll on or before July 31 will con­tin­ue to have access until Sept. 30, 2020.

Over the past few weeks, Duke Uni­ver­si­ty has been using Cours­era for Cam­pus to serve impact­ed stu­dents at their Duke Kun­shan cam­pus in Chi­na. This effort has been swift­ly adopt­ed by stu­dents and wide­ly rec­og­nized by the broad­er com­mu­ni­ty. We believe that Cours­era for Cam­pus can be an effec­tive resource to help all high­er edu­ca­tion insti­tu­tions respond to the impact of coro­n­avirus.

As a glob­al com­mu­ni­ty of edu­ca­tors, we are hon­ored to be serv­ing fel­low insti­tu­tions and stu­dent com­mu­ni­ties dur­ing this cri­sis. Over the next few days, we will also hold webi­na­rs and share more resources, includ­ing expe­ri­ences from our part­ner com­mu­ni­ty, to help insti­tu­tions look­ing to tran­si­tion online dur­ing this cri­sis. Stay tuned.

Sign up for Cours­er­a’s Coro­n­avirus pro­gram here.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bun­dled in one email, each day.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

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How Schools Can Start Teaching Online in a Short Period of Time: Free Tutorials from the Stanford Online High School

in Current Affairs, Education | March 12th, 2020

Image by King of Hearts, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

A quick note: The Stan­ford Online High School–an inde­pen­dent high school that oper­ates ful­ly online–has cre­at­ed video tuto­ri­als designed for schools that may need to close class­rooms and piv­ot online. “All guid­ance is plat­form-agnos­tic, focus­ing on the essen­tial steps for prepar­ing to teach online in a short peri­od of time.”

In addi­tion to this videos, the Online High School will host a free webi­nar today at 2pm Cal­i­for­nia time. You can reg­is­ter here and learn more about the tran­si­tion to online teach­ing.

Note: Zoom–which pro­vides a turnkey video con­fer­enc­ing solu­tion–has made its prod­uct free for K‑12 insti­tu­tions dur­ing the COVID-19 cri­sis. This can help schools spin up online cours­es quick­ly. More on that here.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bun­dled in one email, each day.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

 

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Bill Gates Describes His Biggest Fear: “I Rate the Chance of a Widespread Epidemic Far Worse Than Ebola at Well Over 50 Percent” (2015)

in Current Affairs | March 11th, 2020

What are bil­lion­aires afraid of? A wealth tax? Uni­ver­sal health­care? Immi­grants from sev­er­al spe­cif­ic places in the world? Prob­a­bly. But if you ask one bil­lion­aire, Bill Gates—who has spent the last sev­er­al years spend­ing mon­ey to com­bat dead­ly epidemics—he’ll answer with a very detailed descrip­tion of a glob­al threat to every­one, not just the hand­ful of peo­ple in his (un)tax(ed) brack­et: Pan­demics like the 1918 Span­ish flu, as he told Vox’s Ezra Klein in the 2015 video inter­view above. The dis­ease infect­ed around 27 per­cent of the world’s pop­u­la­tion and killed tens of mil­lions of peo­ple from every social class.

Such events are high­ly prob­a­ble, and we should be pre­pared for them. “I rate the chance of a wide­spread epi­dem­ic far worse than Ebo­la in my life­time at well over 50 per­cent,” he says. In fact, Gates met with the pres­i­dent two years ago to urge fed­er­al action on pan­dem­ic pre­pared­ness. He was heard and ignored.

Now, as the CDC faces the spread of coro­n­avirus in major cities around the coun­try, it finds itself woe­ful­ly unpre­pared for the task. “The truth is we’ve not invest­ed, we’ve under­in­vest­ed in the pub­lic health labs,” direc­tor Robert Red­field told Con­gress in recent hear­ings. “There’s not enough equip­ment, there’s not enough peo­ple, there’s not enough inter­nal capac­i­ty….”

The sit­u­a­tion looks bleak, but Gates was “opti­mistic” despite his pre­dic­tions. And why shouldn’t he be? Klein wrote: “He’s one of the rich­est men in the world,” and he also “runs a foun­da­tion immersed in the world’s prob­lems” and “can mea­sure them get­ting bet­ter.” But a dead­ly pan­dem­ic remains “the most pre­dictable cat­a­stro­phe in the his­to­ry of the human race,” writes Klein. Maybe Gates should have urged the gov­ern­ment to pre­pare by explain­ing how it would boost the oil and hotel indus­tries.

For those who can be per­suad­ed by evi­dence of a pos­si­ble pandemic’s effect on human lives, Gates mod­eled how a dis­ease as dead­ly and infec­tious as the Span­ish flu would act today. “With­in 60 days it’s basi­cal­ly in all urban cen­ters around the entire globe,” he says. “That didn’t hap­pen with the Span­ish flu.” He explains fur­ther in the TED talk above how the “great­est risk of glob­al cat­a­stro­phe” doesn’t look like a mush­room cloud but like the spiky micro­scop­ic ball of the influen­za virus, or its equiv­a­lent. That may not be COVID-19, but what­ev­er it is, Gates has been warn­ing for years, we are not ready.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Inter­ac­tive Web Site Tracks the Glob­al Spread of the Coro­n­avirus: Cre­at­ed and Sup­port­ed by Johns Hop­kins

How to Pro­tect Your­self Against COVID-19/­Coro­n­avirus

Chi­nese Muse­ums, Closed by the Coro­n­avirus, Put Their Exhi­bi­tions Online

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Jim Lehrer’s 16 Rules for Practicing Journalism with Integrity

in Current Affairs, Media, Television | January 27th, 2020

In 1988, stal­wart PBS news anchor, writer, and long­time pres­i­den­tial debate mod­er­a­tor Jim Lehrer was accused of being too soft on the can­di­dates. He snapped back, “If some­body wants to be enter­tained, they ought to go to the cir­cus.” The folksy quote sums up the Tex­an jour­nal­ist’s phi­los­o­phy suc­cinct­ly. The news was a seri­ous busi­ness. But Lehrer, who passed away last Thurs­day, wit­nessed the dis­tinc­tion between polit­i­cal jour­nal­ism and the cir­cus col­lapse, with the spread of cable info­tain­ment, and cor­po­rate dom­i­na­tion of the Inter­net and radio.

Kot­tke remarks that Lehrer seemed “like one of the last of a breed of jour­nal­ist who took seri­ous­ly the integri­ty of inform­ing the Amer­i­can pub­lic about impor­tant events.” He con­tin­u­al­ly refused offers from the major net­works, host­ing PBS’s Mac­Neil-Lehrer New­shour with cohost Robert Mac­Neil until 1995, then his own in-depth news hour until his retire­ment in 2011. “I have an old-fash­ioned view that news is not a com­mod­i­ty,” he said. “News is infor­ma­tion that’s required in a demo­c­ra­t­ic soci­ety… That sounds corny, but I don’t care whether it sounds corny or not. It’s the truth.”

To meet such high stan­dards required a rig­or­ous set of jour­nal­is­tic… well, standards—such as Lehrer was hap­py to list, below, in a 1997 report from the Aspen Insti­tute.

  1. Do noth­ing I can­not defend.*
  2. Do not dis­tort, lie, slant, or hype.
  3. Do not fal­si­fy facts or make up quotes.
  4. Cov­er, write, and present every sto­ry with the care I would want if the sto­ry were about me.*
  5. Assume there is at least one oth­er side or ver­sion to every sto­ry.*
  6. Assume the view­er is as smart and car­ing and good a per­son as I am.*
  7. Assume the same about all peo­ple on whom I report.*
  8. Assume every­one is inno­cent until proven guilty.
  9. Assume per­son­al lives are a pri­vate mat­ter until a legit­i­mate turn in the sto­ry man­dates oth­er­wise.*
  10. Care­ful­ly sep­a­rate opin­ion and analy­sis from straight news sto­ries and clear­ly label them as such.*
  11. Do not use anony­mous sources or blind quotes except on rare and mon­u­men­tal occa­sions. No one should ever be allowed to attack anoth­er anony­mous­ly.*
  12. Do not broad­cast pro­fan­i­ty or the end result of vio­lence unless it is an inte­gral and nec­es­sary part of the sto­ry and/or cru­cial to under­stand­ing the sto­ry.
  13. Acknowl­edge that objec­tiv­i­ty may be impos­si­ble but fair­ness nev­er is.
  14. Jour­nal­ists who are reck­less with facts and rep­u­ta­tions should be dis­ci­plined by their employ­ers.
  15. My view­ers have a right to know what prin­ci­ples guide my work and the process I use in their prac­tice.
  16. I am not in the enter­tain­ment busi­ness.*

In a 2006 Har­vard com­mence­ment address (at the top), Lehrer reduced the list to only the nine rules marked by aster­isks above by Kot­tke, who goes on to explain in short why these guide­lines are so rou­tine­ly cast aside—“this shit takes time! And time is mon­ey.” It’s eas­i­er to patch togeth­er sto­ries in rapid-fire order when you don’t cite or check sources or do inves­tiga­tive report­ing, and face no seri­ous con­se­quences for it.

Lehrer’s adher­ence to pro­fes­sion­al ethics may have been unique in any era, but his atten­tion to detail and obses­sion with access­ing mul­ti­ple points of view came from an old­er media. He “saw him­self as ‘a print/word per­son at heart’ and his pro­gram as a kind of news­pa­per for tele­vi­sion,” writes Robert McFad­den in his New York Times obit­u­ary. He was also “an oasis of civil­i­ty in a news media that thrived on excit­ed head­lines, gotcha ques­tions and noisy con­fronta­tions.”

Lehrer under­stood that civil­i­ty is mean­ing­less in the absence of truth, or of kind­ness and humil­i­ty. His long­time cohost’s list of jour­nal­is­tic guide­lines also appears in the Aspen Insti­tute report. “The val­ues which Jim Lehrer and I observed,” Mac­Neil writes, “he con­tin­ues to observe.” Jour­nal­ism is a seri­ous business—“behave with civility”—but “remem­ber that jour­nal­ists are no more impor­tant to soci­ety than peo­ple in oth­er pro­fes­sions. Avoid macho pos­tur­ing and arro­gant dis­play.”

Read more about Lehrer’s list of guide­lines at Kot­tke.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Jour­nal­ism Under Siege: A Free Course from Stan­ford Explores the Imper­iled Free­dom of the Press

Jour­nal­is­tic Ethics: A Free Online Course from UCLA 

Han­nah Arendt Explains How Pro­pa­gan­da Uses Lies to Erode All Truth & Moral­i­ty: Insights from The Ori­gins of Total­i­tar­i­an­ism

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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An Animated Look at the Charade of the Global Elites: Claiming They Want to “Change the World,” They End Up Preserving the Unjust Status Quo

in Animation, Current Affairs, Politics | January 8th, 2020

From Peter Kropotkin to Leo Tol­stoy to Noam Chom­sky, some of the most revered anar­chist thinkers have exhaust­ed page after page explain­ing why pow­er over oth­ers is unjus­ti­fied, no mat­ter how it jus­ti­fies itself. To those who say the wealthy and pow­er­ful ben­e­fit soci­ety with char­i­ta­ble works and occa­sion­al­ly humane pol­i­cy, Tol­stoy might reply with the fol­low­ing illus­tra­tion, which opens Time edi­tor Anand Girid­haradas’ talk above, “Win­ner Take All,” as ani­mat­ed by the RSA:

I sit on a man’s back, chok­ing him and mak­ing him car­ry me, and yet assure myself and oth­ers that I am sor­ry for him and wish to light­en his load by all means pos­si­ble… except by get­ting off his back.

The author of Win­ners Take All: The Elite Cha­rade of Chang­ing the World, Girid­haradas doesn’t make the case for anar­chism here, except per­haps by the slight­est impli­ca­tion in his choice of epi­graph. But he does call out the “win­ners of our age,” no mat­ter how much they deter­mine to make a dif­fer­ence with human­i­tar­i­an aid, for being “unwill­ing to get off the man’s back.” Unwill­ing to pay tax­es, close loop­holes and tax shel­ters, pay high­er wages, or stop lob­by­ing to slash pub­lic ser­vices. Unwill­ing to rein­vest in the com­mu­ni­ties that made them.

“What does it look like to imag­ine the kind of change,” Girid­haradas asks, “that would involve the win­ners of our age step­ping off that guy’s back? Or being made to step off that guy’s back?” Here, he leaves us with an ellipses and moves to cri­tique the idea of the “win-win” as a means of mak­ing change, rather than just exchange.

The mar­ket econ­o­my has import­ed the cri­te­ria of exchange into pol­i­tics and social action. Every­thing is trans­ac­tion­al. But in order to address the gross inequities that result in peo­ple fig­u­ra­tive­ly sit­ting on the backs of oth­ers, some must gain more pow­er and oth­ers must have less. The par­ties do not meet in a state of ceteris paribus.

One might take issue with the very terms used in “win-win” think­ing. Rather than win­ners, some would call pow­er­ful cap­i­tal­ists oppor­tunists, prof­i­teers, and worse. (The term “rob­ber baron” was once in com­mon cir­cu­la­tion.) To claim that good works and good inten­tions obvi­ate mas­sive pow­er imbal­ances is to pre­sume that such imbal­ances are jus­ti­fi­able in the first place. Answer­ing this the­o­ret­i­cal ques­tion doesn’t, how­ev­er, address the prac­ti­cal prob­lem.

In the cur­rent sys­tem of cor­po­rate mis­rule, says Girid­haradas, “when every­thing is couched as a win-win, what you are real­ly say­ing… is that the best kinds of solu­tions don’t ask any­one to get off anyone’s back.” Unfet­tered cap­i­tal­ism has brought us the “pri­va­ti­za­tion of pub­lic prob­lems.” That is to say, com­pa­nies prof­it from the same issues they help cre­ate through pol­lu­tion, preda­to­ry schemes, and undue polit­i­cal influ­ence.

You don’t have to be an anar­chist to see a seri­ous prob­lem with that. But if you see the prob­lem, you should want to imag­ine how things could be oth­er­wise.

via Aeon

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Saul Alinsky’s 13 Tried-and-True Rules for Cre­at­ing Mean­ing­ful Social Change

Noam Chom­sky Explains the Best Way for Ordi­nary Peo­ple to Make Change in the World, Even When It Seems Daunt­ing

Teach­ing Tol­er­ance to Activists: A Free Course Syl­labus & Anthol­o­gy

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Ronan Farrow’s Catch and Kill Podcast: Stream a Gripping ‘Audio Companion’ to His Bestselling Book

in Current Affairs, Media, Podcasts | December 19th, 2019

In late 2017, Ronan Far­row was on the verge of blow­ing open the sto­ry reveal­ing the Har­vey Wein­stein sex­u­al abuse alle­ga­tions. But then exec­u­tives at NBC News killed the sto­ry, Far­row claims. Bewil­dered, he took his report­ing to the New York­er, which then vet­ted and pub­lished his report­ing. Fast for­ward two years, Far­row has won a Pulitzer and Har­vey Wein­stein is now using a walk­er and get­ting ready to go on tri­al.

In his 2019 best­selling book, Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Con­spir­a­cy to Pro­tect Preda­tors, Far­row delves into “the sys­tems that pro­tect pow­er­ful men accused of ter­ri­ble crimes in Hol­ly­wood, Wash­ing­ton, and beyond.” That sys­tem includes media exec­u­tives, tabloids, high-priced lawyers, under­cov­er oper­a­tives, pri­vate intel­li­gence agen­cies, and even, it appears, offi­cials with­in our own legal sys­tem. A com­ple­ment to his book, Far­row has now pro­duced The Catch and Kill pod­cast, whose first episodes you can now stream online. Find it on Apple, Spo­ti­fy, Stitch­er, and oth­er plat­forms. You can stream the first three episodes below.

Episode 1: The Spy

Episode 2: The Pro­duc­er

Episode 3: The Wire

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The Prado Museum Digitally Alters Four Masterpieces to Strikingly Illustrate the Impact of Climate Change

in Art, Current Affairs, Education, Environment, Science | December 16th, 2019

Accord­ing to the Unit­ed Nations’ Inter­gov­ern­men­tal Pan­el on Cli­mate Change, glob­al warm­ing is like­ly to reach 1.5°C above pre-indus­tri­al lev­els between 2030 and 2052 should it con­tin­ue to increase at its cur­rent rate.

What does this mean, exact­ly?

A cat­a­stroph­ic series of chain reac­tions, includ­ing but not lim­it­ed to:

–Sea lev­el rise
–Change in land and ocean ecosys­tems
–Increased inten­si­ty and fre­quen­cy of weath­er extremes
–Tem­per­a­ture extremes on land
–Drought due to pre­cip­i­ta­tion deficits
–Species loss and extinc­tion

Look to the IPCC’s 2018 Spe­cial Report: Glob­al Warm­ing of 1.5°C for more specifics, or have a gan­der at these dig­i­tal updates of mas­ter­pieces in Madrid’s Museo del Pra­do’s col­lec­tions.

The muse­um col­lab­o­rat­ed with the World Wildlife Fund, choos­ing four paint­ings to be altered in time for the recent­ly wrapped Madrid Cli­mate Change Con­fer­ence.

Artist Julio Fala­gan brings extreme drought to bear on El Paso de la Lagu­na Esti­gia (Charon Cross­ing the Styx) by Joachim Patinir, 1520 — 1524

Mar­ta Zafra rais­es the sea lev­el on Felipe IV a Cabal­lo (Philip the IV on Horse­back) by Velázquez, cir­ca 1635.

The Para­sol that sup­plies the title for Fran­cis­co de Goya’s El Quitasol of 1777 becomes a tat­tered umbrel­la bare­ly shel­ter­ing mis­er­able, crowd­ed refugees in the sod­den, makeshift camp of Pedro Veloso’s reimag­in­ing.

And the Niños en la Playa cap­tured relax­ing on the beach in 1909 by Joaquín Sorol­la now com­pete for space with dead fish, as observed by artist Con­spir­a­cy 110 years fur­ther along.

None of the orig­i­nal works are cur­rent­ly on dis­play.

It would be a pub­lic ser­vice if they were, along­side their dras­ti­cal­ly retouched twins and per­haps Hierony­mus Bosch’s The Gar­den of Earth­ly Delights, to fur­ther unnerve view­ers about the sort of hell we’ll soon be fac­ing if we, too, don’t make some major alter­ations.

For now the works in the +1.5ºC Lo Cam­bia Todo (+1.5ºC Changes Every­thing) project are mak­ing an impact on giant bill­boards in Madrid, as well as online.

#LoCam­bi­aTo­do

via Colos­sal

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Glob­al Warm­ing: A Free Course from UChica­go Explains Cli­mate Change

Cli­mate Change Gets Strik­ing­ly Visu­al­ized by a Scot­tish Art Instal­la­tion

A Cen­tu­ry of Glob­al Warm­ing Visu­al­ized in a 35 Sec­ond Video

Per­pet­u­al Ocean: A Van Gogh-Like Visu­al­iza­tion of our Ocean Cur­rents

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Join her in NYC on Mon­day, Jan­u­ary 6 when her month­ly book-based vari­ety show, Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domaincel­e­brates Cape-Cod­di­ties by Roger Liv­ingston Scaife (1920). Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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Prisons Around the U.S. Are Banning and Restricting Access to Books

in Books, Current Affairs | November 26th, 2019

“We live,” wrote philoso­pher Alain Badiou, “in a con­tra­dic­tion.” Dehu­man­iza­tion must be nor­mal­ized in order to keep the econ­o­my going. “A bru­tal state of affairs… where all exis­tence is eval­u­at­ed in terms of mon­ey alone—is pre­sent­ed to us as ide­al.” Yet the mar­ket that promis­es free­dom just as often strips it away, in pub­lic-pri­vate part­ner­ships that bring cen­sor­ship and rent-seek­ing into hap­py sym­bio­sis.

In recent years, free mar­ket oppor­tunism has tak­en hold in the most unfree places in the U.S., the country’s pris­ons, which hold more peo­ple pro­por­tion­al­ly than in any oth­er nation in the world: a huge, pre­vi­ous­ly untapped mar­ket for sales of hygiene prod­ucts and vis­its with fam­i­ly. “Like the mil­i­tary,” writes Adam Bluestein at Inc., “the cor­rec­tions sys­tem is a big, well-cap­i­tal­ized cus­tomer.”

One recent com­mer­cial encroach­ment on pris­on­ers’ free­doms arrived this year when the West Vir­ginia Divi­sion of Cor­rec­tions issued inmates tablets, under a con­tract with a com­pa­ny called Glob­al Tel Link, who charge them by the minute to read books online. One might make the argu­ment that forc­ing inmates to pay for basic needs sat­is­fies some ide­al of pun­ish­ment. But to restrict access to books seems to dis­pense with the pre­tense that prison might also be a place of reha­bil­i­ta­tion.

“Any inmates look­ing to read Moby Dick,” reports Rea­son, “may find that it will cost them far more than it would have if they’d sim­ply got­ten a mass mar­ket paper­back.” Katy Ryan of the Appalachi­an Prison Book Project, which donates free books and mate­ri­als to pris­ons, points out how lim­it­ing the scheme is: “If you pause to think or reflect, that will cost you. If you want to reread a book, you will pay the entire cost again.”

West Vir­ginia is not ban­ning print books, pur­chased or donat­ed. It is, how­ev­er, charg­ing inmates for already free mate­r­i­al. The books they pay per minute to read online are all on Project Guten­berg, the open plat­form for thou­sands of free eBooks. That the pro­gram amounts to a kind of eco­nom­ic-based cen­sor­ship may hard­ly be coin­ci­dence. Oth­er states around the coun­try have begun lim­it­ing, or out­right ban­ning, books in pris­ons.

The Wash­ing­ton State Depart­ment of Cor­rec­tions has pro­hib­it­ed all books donat­ed by non­prof­its, pre­sum­ably because they might be used to smug­gle con­tra­band. Prison offi­cials at the Danville Cor­rec­tion­al Cen­ter in Illi­nois made clear what they con­sid­ered con­tra­band—books about black his­to­ry, 200 of which were removed from the prison library—including W.E.B. Du Bois The Souls of Black Folk and Har­ri­et Beech­er Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cab­in—after they were deemed “too racial.”

These are only a few exam­ples of a wide­spread phe­nom­e­non PEN Amer­i­ca details in a new report, “Lit­er­a­ture Locked Up: How Prison Book Restric­tion Poli­cies Con­sti­tute the Nation’s Largest Book Ban.” Para­dox­i­cal­ly, some restric­tions can seem at odds with mar­ket demands—such as lim­its on inmates’ abil­i­ty to order books from online retail­ers. But like many con­tra­dic­tions in the sys­tem, per­haps these also serve a larg­er goal—preventing pris­on­ers from edu­cat­ing them­selves may ensure a steady stream of repeat cus­tomers in the huge­ly prof­itable carcer­al indus­try.

Relat­ed Con­tent:  

Inmates in New York Prison Defeat Harvard’s Debate Team: A Look Inside the Bard Prison Ini­tia­tive

On the Pow­er of Teach­ing Phi­los­o­phy in Pris­ons

Artist is Cre­at­ing a Parthenon Made of 100,000 Banned Books: A Mon­u­ment to Democ­ra­cy & Intel­lec­tu­al Free­dom

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness.

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