Books :: Censoring Culture: Contemporary Threats to Free Expression

Censorship is xxxx xx xxx. A new anthology looks at how we silence others and ourselves. By David Moisl. San Francisco Bay Guardian. “The ultimate dream of censorship is to do away with the censor,” says Svetlana Mintcheva in Censoring Culture: Contemporary Threats to Free Expression, a collection of essays, interviews, and roundtable discussions whose contributors range from Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig and hacker-culture explicator Douglas Thomas to fiction writers J.M. Coetzee and Judy Blume.

. . . In “Market Censorship,” New Press founder André Schiffrin discusses the situation of booksellers: “The market, it is argued, is a sort of ideal democracy. It is not up to the elite to impose their values on readers, publishers claim, it is up to the public to choose what it wants — and if what it wants is increasingly downmarket and limited in scope, so be it. The higher profits are proof that the market is working like it should.”