Episode 179: Transcript
Episode: 179: Cute Body Horror
Transcription by Alexander
Charlie Jane: [00:00:00] Annalee, if you could have one science fictional medical procedure, what would you get?
Annalee: [00:00:07] So, this is going to be kind of a deep cut from 1990s nanopunk fiction. For those of you who remember, there was a wave of nanotechnology books. And one of the ones that I loved is by Lynda Nagata and it's called Tech Heaven. And the reason I was thinking about it in response to your question is that there's a moment when the main character who has aged a lot throughout the course of the book gets this nanotech treatment for like everything.
[00:00:39] It's basically like she just starts like drinking all these different vials of stuff. And they're doing things like repairing her joints, like repairing her muscles, like restoring her collagen. And I've just been having a lot of joint pain. I just started lifting weights. And so I was just like, I want the nanotech.
[00:00:59] I don't need to like look young. I just want my joints to feel amazing. I never want to feel joint pain ever again. So that is my wish. What is your wish for what sci-fi medical procedure you get?
Charlie Jane: [00:01:13] First of all, Lynda Nagata, incredible. Yeah, I mean, I thought about this a lot. And honestly, I just I have to go with, you know, there's this Robert A. Heinlein short story that got turned into the movie Predestination. And don't read the story. Just watch the movie. The story sucks. The movie is great.
[00:01:29] Basically, it's Robert A. Heinlein back in like, I want to say the 1950s, imagining like gender reassignment surgery. But like in his world, you basically just get like a completely different body. Like, you know, in the movie, Sarah Snook, who is most known for his succession now, turns into Ethan Hawke. And it's just like, well, you know, that's what happens is, you know, she gets a totally new body and is able to like go back in time and impregnate herself and give birth to herself.
Annalee: [00:01:58] Which is like the main use case for trans identity, I think.
Charlie Jane: [00:02:04] Oh, my gosh. I mean, yeah.
Annalee: [00:02:05] In any sci-fi.
Charlie Jane: [00:02:06] You know, I've impregnated myself three times today. But yeah, no, that that kind of like super like mega advanced gender reassignment surgery where you just like get all the new plumbing, you get all the stuff.
Annalee: [00:02:19] I mean, go ahead and try it out. But like with the option to return is what I would say.
Charlie Jane: [00:02:23] Anyway, I feel like I'd like to try that. I think I'd like to try Robert A. Heinlein's like super fancy gender reassignment surgery treatment where you just like, boop, now you've got like all the other stuff. I don't know.
Annalee: [00:02:35] Yeah, it reminds me of John Varley. He's kind of the generation after Heinlein, but he has a series of books where same thing, where you just like get a new body. People are just constantly getting gender reassignments. It's just a normal part of life.
[00:02:51] One of the books that's kind of a spin off from his main series, the first line of the book is “The penis is obsolete.” And that's not because no one has pieces. It's just because anyone can have a penis. And that's kind of delightful.
Charlie Jane: [00:03:08] You know, that's our new slogan. Forget Medicare for all. It's penises for all.
Annalee: [00:03:11] Penises for all. Exactly. And have a couple of backups.
Charlie Jane: [00:03:14] Yeah.
Annalee: [00:03:15] It's not just one.
Charlie Jane: [00:03:16] Sometimes you need a couple. As you're kind of gathering, we're talking about bodies and bodies being weird and just like medical stuff being weird.
[00:03:27] So you might realize you're listening to Our Opinions Are Correct. The podcast that went to the hospital to get an appendectomy and came out with a couple of extra heads.
Annalee: [00:03:37] Yay.
Charlie Jane: [00:03:37] I'm Charlie Jane Anders. My soon to be released book is called Lessons in Magic and Disaster. And it's about a young trans woman who teaches her mom how to be a witch.
Annalee: [00:03:50] And I'm Annalee Newitz. I'm a science journalist who also writes science fiction. I also have a book coming out same month as Charlie Jane in August, and it's called Automatic Noodle. And it’s about a group of robots that just want to open a noodle restaurant, and all of the difficulties they face.
Charlie Jane: [00:04:08] I love those robots so much. OK, so today we're going to be talking about one of our favorite TV shows of all time, but especially lately, The Second Best Hospital in the Galaxy. We're going to be talking to the show's creator, Cirocco Dunlap. And later in the episode, contributing host Maggie Tokuda-Hall will be talking to Kelly Jensen about how Project 2025 is already affecting libraries and other vital cultural institutions and how we are fighting back.
[00:04:36] And on our mini episode next week, we're going to talk about like Pride season and why in 2025, celebrating Pride feels way more important than ever before. OK, so let's get admitted to the Galactic Hospital.
[00:04:50] [OOAC theme plays. Science fictiony synth noises over an energetic, jazzy drum line.]
Charlie Jane: [00:05:21] And now we're so lucky to be joined by Cirocco Dunlap, the creator of one of our favorite new shows, The Second Best Hospital in the Galaxy. Welcome, Cirocco.
Cirocco: [00:05:31] Hello.
Annalee: [00:05:32] Hello.
Charlie Jane: [00:05:34] Yeah, so we love this show so much. And, you know, I've been reading up on it. I read that you came up with the idea for this show when you were watching the movie Groundhog Day and you thought about like, what if there was a hospital where Bill Murray could go to cure his time loop, which actually is the thing that happens in season one of the show. Can you tell us more about that? And also, were you prepared for how weird this show ended up becoming?
Cirocco: [00:05:59] I don't know that that's exactly where the idea came from, but it was one of the many contexts that sort of made the show make sense to me. I was sort of thinking of it as every bizarre protagonist in a show would be a tertiary character on this show, like everyone who was in their own arc. Yeah, exactly. And so that was just one of the things that appealed to me.
[00:06:23] And as for weirdness, I got my I guess I started I came up doing comedy, but where I really started to sort of develop the kind of voice that I'm currently still exploring was I did New Yorker essays for the New Yorker and they're all very surreal. They're really weird. And I try to make them they're usually based on some sort of emotion I can't get rid of - some sort of rumination that I can't stop having. And so they're surreal, but they also have some of my own personal shame or pain in them. And so I was not surprised, I guess.
Annalee: [00:07:00] So the first season is about Klak using a brain worm to treat anxiety, which is connected to issues she has with her mom. And then in season two, we have Sleech who has another kind of it's kind of like a disability slash mental health issue where she's trying to hide her shape shifting disease, which is also connected to her mom and a lot of issues around her mom. We would just love to hear your thoughts about anxiety, dissociative identity disorder and why you decided to kind of build it around the stuff and about like mother daughter relationships.
Cirocco: [00:07:33] I'm so glad that was evident, the dissociative identity disorder sort of relationship, not that that was exactly the model. But I mean, in case you didn't notice, there's a lot of mommy issues in this show. And who knows where that came from.
Annalee: [00:07:52] Hard to say, hard to say.
Cirocco: [00:07:53] But yeah, my mom is a wonderful, complicated person who is very, very, you know, mentally ill. Hi, mom, if you're listening. And, you know, it runs in the family, but it's very, you know, there are times when I'll talk to her and her eyes will be rounder than other times. And there are times when, you know, her voice will be slightly different. And it's not I don't know, there's not any diagnosis at the root of all of it is deep anxiety throughout my family line. But there's also a lot of like, you know, she's an alcoholic. And so there's a very big difference in personality. And it all felt very real to me in a way that I think everyone can relate to. Yeah, the specific becomes ideally the universal.
[00:08:39] And so like the first season is sort of my own experience with finding Lexapro, really, and realizing that I had had severe anxiety my whole life and didn't even know it really. I mean, I as soon as I… Because Lexapro fortunately does work for me, I feel very lucky. I mean, I think unless there's something else in 10 years that I start and I'm like, “wow, I had no idea.” But I feel I feel like as soon as I started taking it and as soon as I started feeling a sense of peace, I was just really blown away by how I had been living for most of my life.
Charlie Jane: [00:09:17] Wow. And so, you know, getting a little deeper into like the ways that you're using these things as metaphors for real life mental health issues. Like we were trying to describe the aesthetic of the show. We kind of came up with the phrase “cute body horror,” kind of because it's very cute, but it's also very body horror. There's a lot of bloody guts. It's just it's such a delightful show. And like, how does that aesthetic of cute body horror kind of give us a window into some of these challenges? And also, why is having a body so weird?
Cirocco: [00:09:49] I love that description so much. Cute body horror feels perfect. I worked so intensely with Robin Eisenberg, who's now one of my best friends. She's the she's the person that I first went to about what the art style would look like. And she worked like very closely with Tyler Rice, who was our art director. But Robin really had a massive say in how it looked. And she's got a lot of very sexy, beautiful art that's so cool and stylized. And then when she meets my art, it's like, and let's add a lot of disgusting blood. Not that I'm particularly into gore, but I feel like having a body is such a disgusting thing.
Charlie Jane: [00:10:34] It really is.
Cirocco: [00:10:35] I don't know how you guys felt about The Substance, but I loved it so much. And I will never watch it again.
Charlie Jane: [00:10:44] Same and same.
Cirocco: [00:10:45] I just felt like as a human and especially as a woman, there is nothing not gushing out of us at all times. Like something's wrong. Some things I don't know. And we walk around. I don't know how really to describe this, but I have this thought all the time that we're just kind of like I imagine monkeys with nail polish. And I'm like, that's what we are. We're just walking around pretending that we don't have all these bodily things going on all the time.
Annalee: [00:11:15] We're just always leaking.
Cirocco: [00:11:17] We're always leaking. There's nothing not leaking. We've got so many leaks.
Annalee: [00:11:22] So why did you want to use that kind of like aesthetic landscape to tell the story? Like where anxiety is sort of embodied in like a worm. And, you know, we have all of these things that are kind of feelings, but they become like objects in the show.
Cirocco: [00:11:41] Yeah. The anthropomorphization, kind of? I'm not sure that it was something I really consciously did, but it felt right. And I feel like there's a visceralness to the intenseness of anxiety and to the fact that you get paralyzed when you're in a ruminative state or the fact that you sweat or you can't leave your house or whatever the things are. It feels like your body is sort of a prison in a way.
[00:12:10] I feel like some of the, I don't know, the explosions or the physical, like there's a body that's a bomb. I feel like these are kind of, you know, and I guess and the body that's a bomb is kind of, you know, we're all going to die. There's something about it that felt really real to me and very honest. And I think as someone who lives so much in my head, exploring that through the visuals of bodies was a very interesting thing because I find a lot of the time I'm disconnected from my body. I had a friend who once said to me, the body is not a horse to be driven by the mind.
Charlie Jane: [00:12:48] Yes! Thank you.
Cirocco: [00:12:48] I thought it was really good. And then actually that same friend said another beautiful thing to me, which is when you're depressed and he said soul, but soul means whatever you want it to mean. He said, sometimes your job is just to be a body that carries your soul to the time when you no longer feel this way. And I just thought that was so beautiful.
[00:13:09] So, I don’t really know that there was an intentionality behind it, but it's so baked into how I think and I don't know, the feeling of a body and the mind and how they come together and how they rip apart. And it just felt also true to the story of, you know, surgery. And there's a relation between emotion and the body and the mind and, you know, like the spirit or whatever. I'm really not religious.
Charlie Jane: [00:13:38] Yeah.
Cirocco: [00:13:40] If you come away with anything, that’s my…
Charlie Jane: [00:13:41] Yeah. I mean, you know, one of our things on this show is we always like to poke at the idea that there's a split between your body and your mind because that is just not true. One thing I love about this show is just like how absurd it gets. And like when I tell you sell people on the show, I'm like, there's an episode where there's a sexually transmitted infection that makes you look like whoever you had sex with last, which is such a cool concept. There's like the time dilation hotel. I love that so much. There's like, it's just such it's such a cute, silly show.
[00:14:10] But also, the characters are like, I would kill for Sleech and Klak. Like, I feel like they're the combination of like hyper competent, like they're both super competent and incredibly messed up in different ways. And, you know, how do you go about creating something that's so emotionally grounded and has such well-developed characters in the middle of so much absurdity and weirdness and silliness?
Cirocco: [00:14:33] Yeah, that's one of the hardest things to do, I think, in anything genre or surreal or I don't know, I feel and comedy in general. So I got my start in Late Night. I was writing for Late Night with Jimmy Fallon and I came up at UCB. I did like very traditional sort of comedy route. And there was a point when I was like, this feels like lobotomized comedy because you're just doing the jokes without the pain. Not that humor always necessitates pain, but for me, I like I feel like I came up in this insane household. And a lot of it was is a gallows humor that's a defense mechanism, right?
[00:15:11] And so in making this show and in my view of comedy in general, I don't think you have humor without really grounded pain. I feel like I like the stories to come from the characters themselves. I like the comedy to come from actual emotional resonance. And I feel like one of the most important things you can do when you're writing something ridiculous or absurd is make sure that your emotional story is like is strong.
[00:15:38] Not that, you know, I always do or always succeed, but that is always the goal is that you want it to be a story first and foremost. And then the silly fun stuff is a way to heighten it or help it get told rather than, you know, you don't want to start with the silly or the wacky.
Annalee: [00:15:57] Yeah. I mean, speaking of the emotional parts of the story, especially in the second season, there's these really great romances which are like genuinely beautiful. And like honestly, as Charlie Jane and I were watching it, we were like, oh, “no, they're going to all end up breaking up at the end, because like they're dysfunctional.” And then, well, anyway, spoiler, there's kind of a happy ending. I mean, we love Zypha and Plowp. We love Sleech's possibility, maybe with Flynn.
Charlie Jane: [00:16:23] There's a bit of a love triangle.
Annalee: [00:16:24] I love that there's so many invertebrates in the show. It's delightful. Like that's how I've been selling it to like my science friends is like “it's all about invertebrates.”
[00:16:34] So I guess like the question I have is really Sleech and Klak are kind of the romance, the heart of the show. You know, how do you think about that? Like is it are they going to be able to balance that or is this always going to be an unstable thing where like the romances are taking away from their central friendship?
Cirocco: [00:16:52] I think they're going to at this point really trust them to grow and give each other the space to figure this stuff out. Like I think they'll have really uncomfortable moments where they don't know what's going on. But at the end of the day, I think the only thing that actually threatens them is their own sort of insecurity or around an ability to be loved and feel loved because they love each other so much.
[00:17:15] And it's really a story about found family, you know, because they both have these mommy issues. They find in each other this like person who nurtures them and makes them OK and sees them as they are and loves them for that, not in spite of it, you know. And so I trust that they can figure it out. But I do also believe there there will be a lot of growing pains for whatever those things are.
Annalee: [00:17:42] It's going to be messy, literally and figuratively.
Charlie Jane: [00:17:46] Yeah, I was going to say it's going to be like actually messy if there was a bodily fluids doing this show. Yeah. And like I'm team Plowp. I think Plowp deserves Sleech. I think that they they deserve each other. I don't know. I want to see how third puberty affects. This is spoilers. I'm sorry.
Annalee: [00:18:03] I mean also, they can be polyamorous.
Charlie Jane: [00:18:05] They could be polyamorous. Like they why not? Why not both? You know, like I think that could be really nice.
Cirocco: [00:18:11] It's so interesting. I actually wanted more different sort of relationship types in Klak's backstory on her home planet. This is nowhere in the show, but it is in a family portrait. She has four parents and so she has two dads and two moms because I think that's a binary gender planet. They're always different. They're all different. I think of it a lot like Star Trek. Have you read The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin?
Charlie Jane: [00:18:39] Of course.
Cirocco: [00:18:40] I was reading that when I was writing this and I came up with like Azel. I wish we could have done this in animation, but it was like very, very challenging. And then also called into question like what is feminine and masculine and all these like visual things we didn't necessarily want to do.
[00:18:56] But I just loved and I wrote into the original script, this idea of you look at Azel and they just be fluid in the way that the Ursula K. Le Guin characters are. Like she looks at them and you're just like, like it's just the character, you know, and I thought that was so cool and beautiful. And I still think there's somewhere someone should do that at some point, perhaps us all in the future.
[00:19:16] But I just really love that there's things we can't even conceive of. But yeah, I want more different relationships.
Charlie Jane: [00:19:25] I'm obsessed with Azel. I love Azel.
Annalee: [00:19:27] Yeah. Azel is so amazing. And I love that in like, I feel like it was in the last episode, it was like Azel was actually wearing an outfit that I could imagine on Sam Smith. And I was like, okay.
Charlie Jane: [00:19:39] Yeah.
Cirocco: [00:19:40] Yeah. We definitely thought about that when we were doing the Gala episode when they were all in their Met Gala clothes.
Charlie Jane: [00:19:47] That was such a great moment.
Cirocco: [00:19:48] Oh, my God. Those outfits really made my day. You know, I think there is a wonderful place for them and they are beautiful. But the stories of like the struggling queer person in a show, it's like, can they not just all like exist? There's room for it all. But I just really want to see like, like Klak and Zypha is just such a joy to me to see. I just rewatched two of three, the one, the time dilation hotel, and I was just like...
Charlie Jane: [00:20:13] Oh, my God, I love that episode so much.
Annalee: [00:20:15] That was so great.
Charlie Jane: [00:20:17] The cute ambulance. I'm like, I want a whole show about just that ambulance.
Annalee: [00:20:21] I know. I love when we get the ambulance POV. I was just like, thank you. I really was wondering.
Charlie Jane: [00:20:27] So good.
Annalee: [00:20:28] Yeah, I like that it's animistic so often in the show.
Charlie Jane: [00:20:33] So you came from Russian Doll kind of to this show all bit. And like, obviously, Natasha Lyonne is involved in both shows. And like, you know, it feels like Russian Doll kind of deals with some of the same themes. It's got the mom stuff. It's got like, trauma and isolation and kind of absurd situations. But Russian Doll feels more grounded, maybe. I mean, it's not a cartoon.
Cirocco: [00:20:54] It's live action.
Charlie Jane: [00:20:56] Did you learn stuff from Russian Doll that you brought to this show? Did you? Were there things that you carried over, like consciously or unconsciously?
Cirocco: [00:21:03] I'm sure. I mean, Natasha and I, I think that's why we've worked together well and for a long time. It's because we have sort of similar backgrounds and similar tastes. And so I think I was hired to that show for like, I love surreal stuff. I love genre stuff. I love sci-fi. You put time travel in it and I'm obsessed. You know, like anything like that.
[00:21:26] And also, like we've talked about anything that has this emotional heart and anything, especially with mommy issues. And I'm like, yes, I can talk about this for years and have and have paid to in therapy.
[00:21:40] So every time I work on a show like that, I'm always reminded to keep the gravity, you know? And like, I think that is a more more grounded show because it is real people, because also it's, you know, it's Natasha in New York, which is just what a dream, you know, and it really is her. And so this is a different sort of it's just a different vibe. I wanted it to feel warm and comforting also, in addition to being emotional. And I think that show ultimately is, but it's also got harder edges, which I think is really cool and also makes sense when it's set in New York, you know, and it deals more with… That shows active suicide and this shows passive suicide.
Annalee: [00:22:25] Yeah, I like that you were saying you feel like Second Best Hospital has like this comforting element or like, I think that's part of the ambient queer feeling in the show, you know, where it's just like, it's not being queer doesn't stand out because it's like, well, what's queer in a world where people have like five, you know, six legs or like their head explodes or like, you know, and that's just part of their life cycle. It's like, it's comforting to be in a zone where like all of that stuff is possible and permissible.
[00:22:51] One of the things I've been really curious about was were you thinking of any other hospital shows when you were putting this together?
Cirocco: [00:23:00] Yeah, I watched like a hundred seasons of Grey's Anatomy.
Charlie Jane: [00:23:04] Oh, my God.
Annalee: [00:23:05] Okay. So Grey's Anatomy is in there.
Cirocco: [00:23:07] It is so good. I love it so much. I mean, I don't think it was intentional, but the Meredith and Christina friendship is one of my absolute favorites and Sleech and Klak are so similar.
Charlie Jane: [00:23:20] Oh, that’s so interesting.
Annalee: [00:23:20] Yeah.
Cirocco: [00:23:22] They're so like, I think that show is just so important to me in terms of like these two ambitious women who were just completely supportive of each other, but also like really flawed. I don't know. I think Christina Yang is one of the best characters.
Annalee: [00:23:39] I know. I love her so much.
Cirocco: [00:23:41] Hospital shows. I recently watched The Pit too. I don't know if you guys have seen that one, but it's so good.
Charlie Jane: [00:23:45] Yeah.
Annalee: [00:23:46] I'm sort of I'm almost done with it now. And it was funny to be watching that simultaneously with season two of Second Best Hospital. It was like, huh? Wow. All right. Very different visions of care. With The Pit, like it's kind of in a weird way lurking in the background. They wish that their hospital would impregnate itself and like, you know, become a better physical place.
Cirocco: [00:24:11] I forgot about that flat line.
Charlie Jane: [00:24:14] Just watch that last one.
Annalee: [00:24:17] I was just curious to finish up. Like, are there any plans for continuing the show or was it kind of because it felt like very self-contained the two seasons?
Cirocco: [00:24:25] I think my guess is that it's pretty self-contained and finished here, I would imagine. I mean, if they, you know, if they demanded another, I'm sure we'd do it. But I feel really good about getting to tell both of their stories and sort of seeing why they are the way they are and letting them see each other's stories and be witnesses for that. You know, it feels like we concluded something there.
Annalee: [00:24:47] Oh, yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:24:48] I need Plowp's third puberty. I need to know.
Annalee: [00:24:51] I mean, whatever.
Cirocco: [00:24:55] So do I.
Charlie Jane: [00:24:58] Just a Plowp spinoff. Just like a mini series about Plowp.
Cirocco: [00:25:00] Oh, my God. And his brothers. Those are all his real brothers.
Charlie Jane: [00:25:03] I know.
Annalee: [00:25:04] Yeah, that is wild.
Cirocco: [00:25:05] It's a dream. It's a real dream.
Annalee: [00:25:08] Yeah, they can have a spinoff. And I want like a Azel spinoff.
Charlie Jane: [00:25:12] Oh, yeah.
Annalee: [00:25:14] You know, Azel is dealing with like all the oligarchs behind the medical technology and like…
Charlie Jane: [00:25:21] The Unium oligarchs.
Cirocco: [00:25:22] You know, like Young Sheldon, you could see a young Azel coming to the city.
Annalee: [00:25:29] Yeah, exactly. And then like striking this bargain with Unium. Oh, man. Well, thank you so much for spending the time to talk with us. Do you have any stuff coming up that you want people to know about and to check out?
Cirocco: [00:25:44] Just this. This just came out a couple of weeks ago. So listen and watch the dance. I'm very good at promotion, as you know.
Annalee: [00:25:55] Yes, no. So, yes, definitely check out Second Best Hospital in the Galaxy.
Charlie Jane: [00:25:59] Yeah. Thank you so much, Cirocco.
Cirocco: [00:26:01] Thank you so much. I really appreciate it. And I'm so happy that the show meant something to you. There's so many people worked on it.
Annalee: [00:26:09] Yeah.
Cirocco: [00:26:10] It was a labor of love.
Charlie Jane: [00:26:13] It's an incredible show.
[00:26:15] OOAC session break music, a quick little synth bwoop bwoo.
Charlie Jane: [00:26:17] So by the way, did you know that Our Opinions Are Correct is not funded by Unium or any other giant, like, intergalactic corporations. It’s only on one planet, and it’s only funded by individuals through Patreon. And so, you know, if you support us on Patreon, you’re helping to keep this podcast going. You’re helping to keep the wind in our sails, the anti-matter in our engine containment pods, and just everything. And you get to be part of the Our Opinions Are Correct community.
[00:26:50] You get to join us on our Discord, where we’re just constantly talking about everything and anything. And you get mini episodes every other week when we don’t have a regular episode up. So just think about it. All of that could be yours for just a few bucks a month – whatever you can spare. A few bucks, twenty bucks, a hundred bucks, whatever you can manage. Anything you give us goes right back into the podcast, and you can find us at patreon.com/ouropinionsarecorrect. Okay. Back to the show.
[00:27:18] OOAC session break music, a quick little synth bwoop bwoo.
Charlie Jane: [00:27:22] Now we're so lucky to be joined by our contributing host, Maggie Tokuda-Hall, who you've heard on the podcast before. Maggie is a children's and young adult author and founding member and national leader of Authors Against Book Bans, which I'm also a proud member of.
Annalee: [00:27:38] Me too.
Charlie Jane: [00:27:38] Maggie is talking to Kelly Jensen, an editor at Book Riot and an author and editor of Young Adult Fiction. And Kelly has been covering book censorship and book bans for over a decade. Welcome, Maggie and Kelly.
Kelly: [00:27:52] Thank you so much.
Maggie: [00:27:53] Thank you for having us.
Charlie Jane: [00:27:54] Our pleasure.
Maggie: [00:27:57] Kelly, I'm so excited that you're here with me today. I have been on this podcast before to talk about book bans because I love to be a stone cold bummer for everybody. But when I'm really looking to just have my soul carved out, I just open your newsletter.
Kelly: [00:28:09] It's great, isn't it?
Maggie: [00:28:10] Yeah, because you really do have the best beat in the country of kind of what's happening in censorship just up and down the board. And I thought to kind of update people, because last time we recorded about book bans was about a year ago and a lot has changed in that year. I thought it would be good to move from bad news to good news so that we can really just ruin people's days and then give them like a little bit of hope to cling to. Does that sound good to you?
Kelly: [00:28:37] That sounds good to me. When I put together my newsletter, every week and I'm pulling like all the news stories, my method is to just like pepper the good news in there so that people are surprised. You know, they read like 12 bad stories in a row and then there's one good story.
Annalee: [00:28:53] I want to like just break in to ask, what is the name of your newsletter so everyone can subscribe?
Kelly: [00:28:57] Yeah, it's Literary Activism. And if you go to bookriot.com, you can look for the Literary Activism newsletter. It's free. Sign up.
Annalee: [00:29:02] Amazing.
Maggie: [00:29:03] So obviously in the last year, we have seen a regime change and we have seen the adoption of all of the goals and ideals held by Project 2025 starting to be implemented. However, the grand work for all of that was already very much in place, which is something that I felt like you had a really strong understanding of.
[00:29:22] But Kelly, I wondered if you could talk us through some of the much more timely stuff. Like just in the last couple of weeks, we've seen a Fifth Circuit court ruling out of Texas. And I wonder if you could tell us about that.
Kelly: [00:29:33] Yeah. So out of Llano, Texas case out of the Fifth Circuit is the case of Leila Green Little et al. v Llano County. Lila Green Little is a librarian and she is also a library user in Llano County. She sued the county library when 17 books were pulled from shelves without being like properly weeded. They're pulled for the content that was in them.
[00:29:59] Of course, it's the content that you would expect it to be LGBTQ content, anti-racism content. And also, I think it was four books on farts and butts. But you know, they're the books that kids read.
Annalee: [00:30:12] I love farts and butts. What do you mean?
Kelly: [00:30:14] Okay, adults too, sure.
Annalee: [00:30:17] Can't believe they're taking away our farts.
Maggie: [00:30:19] And your butts.
Charlie Jane: [00:30:20] I feel like we need to know that everyone poops. That's an important piece of information.
Kelly: [00:30:24] Also a commonly banned book.
Annalee: [00:30:26] Yeah.
Kelly: [00:30:27] So she had taken her case through the system and she had won at every stage along the way. She gets to the Fifth Circuit, though, and the majority of the judges, this is an en blanc decision to all the judges, created a ruling here, decided that library books are not protected by the First Amendment because they are government speech. This is a devastating blow. But right now it is only applicable in three states. That would be the Fifth Circuit states. So Texas, Missouri, and Louisiana.
[00:31:00] And it was also really worth noting that the majority opinion here was not a majority opinion. There was a minority within that majority. So they didn't all sign on to the opinion. I think it was seven of the 17 signed on, but it was a 10-7 split in the judgment. So that gives some potential opportunity, yes.
Maggie: [00:31:20] So like two things that was really interesting to me out of this case. First of all, the whole concept of government speech is insane. And is the same justification that's being used right now to pull like something like 600 books off the shelves in Hillsborough County in Florida right now. So it may be that the Fifth Circuit states are the ones affected by the this ruling, but that logic is contagious…
Kelly: [00:31:42] Oh, totally.
Maggie: [00:31:43] And passed elsewhere.
Kelly: [00:31:44] Yeah, it’s going to be applied elsewhere.
Maggie: [00:31:45] Oh, for sure.
Annalee: [00:31:46] So the idea is that if a book appears in a library that has federal funding or state funding, that that magically converts those books into government speech.
Maggie: [00:31:56] You got it.
Kelly: [00:31:56] Yeah. And that means so for those who've been around for a long time with the censorship stuff, Matt Krauss started to circulate a list in 2022, I believe, maybe in 2021. He was a legislator in the state of Texas. He had about 850 books that he deemed inappropriate and demanded that all libraries remove. Under this ruling, they would have to remove those books.
[00:32:19] And so it sets up a whole series of questions of like, who is actually in charge of the books in the library now and who gets to say this would never happen. But what if for some reason, Governor Greg Abbott disagreed with some of the books that were on the Krauss list? Whose word goes?
Charlie Jane: [00:32:33] Right.
Maggie: [00:32:34] That is super unclear. But also the idea that the First Amendment is there to protect the government as opposed to protecting people is a wild transference of power that I don't think that anyone should take lightly.
[00:32:48] The other thing that was really informative to me about this case was the idea of unfriendly jurisdictions. I think a lot of the times for a lot of our battles, we want to kind of like, “hey, Siri, the courts” and just be like, hey, we we need our rights back. You can give it back to us. Right. And we forget that there are all of these like Republican appointed judges and that there are entire swaths of the country.
Charlie Jane: [00:33:09] Oh, yeah.
Maggie: [00:33:10] That make these places unsafe to bring these cases. This is not a reasonable decision to have been made by even a slim majority of justices. You have to have a pretty hardened sense of what your ideals are that are not in step with the Constitution. I think especially in book bans, because we’ve seen a lot of success in litigation. A lot of people are just sort of like, “we’ll just sue”, and it’s like, “well, you can’t”. That cannot be the solution to everything. It is expensive, it is slow, and it’s also not a done deal, and this is the perfect case to kind of make that point.
Charlie Jane: [00:33:42] Yeah. When I hear the term Fifth Circuit, I always just clench up immediately.
Annalee: [00:33:46] Yeah.
Maggie: [00:33:47] Yeah.
Annalee: [00:33:48] Sort of famous.
Kelly: [00:33:49] I mean, something that we need to take into consideration here, too. Two things, really. And they're tied together. The first being that we got to stop with First Amendment being the thing that our rights hinge upon when it comes to books at this point, because clearly there are some judges who don't believe that that's the case. And so that argument's only going to hold up so far.
[00:34:09] And when we look at this particular ruling, that's going to have an impact on these anti-book ban legislation and anti-book ban legislation and bills that are passing at the state level, because if they are hinged upon the First Amendment, they're not going to hold water either if the circuit court is saying that there is no First Amendment right to books and libraries.
[00:34:31] So I will say I was a little surprised that they had had so much success up until this point. The case can go to the Supreme Court, but the justices have to vote on whether or not they take the case.
Maggie: [00:34:42] I just never liked the idea of putting my hopes in Brett Kavanaugh's hands. You know what I mean? That's not a place where I'm like, “hmm, I feel confident and perky about it.”
Kelly: [00:34:53] No.
Maggie: [00:34:53] So in the theme of unconditionally terrible news, we have also seen the destruction of the IMLS. And Kelly, could you talk us a little through that and what the IMLS is and what it means to have funding taken away from it and to have its destruction?
Kelly: [00:35:09] Right before our eyes?
Maggie: [00:35:11] Yeah.
Kelly: [00:35:11] So the IMLS is the Institute for Museum and Library Services. It is the only agency dedicated to public libraries and public museums. I want to be clear, there's a museums component here. I'm not as familiar with that because I know that there are experts who could talk about that side better.
[00:35:26] So the Institute for Museum and Library Services, one of their biggest things is providing grants to the states. This grant money goes to state libraries and then state libraries use that money for any number of services and functions throughout the state. For example, they might send Illinois X millions of dollars. Illinois uses that money to help support various programs throughout the state. So this could include things like digital media services. So your digital audio books are accessible through your library. It can cover inter-library loan services that get books from one library to another in the state. It can include programs that help people get their high school diplomas. That's a big one in California that they can do it through a library service.
[00:36:12] Without the IMLS funding, though, they can't do these things. And so in some states, this is going to be a way worse situation than in others. For example, Iowa really screwed if IMLS money goes away. Illinois, well, the rural parts of Illinois. We've already seen in South Dakota, for example, they stopped inter-library loan services for a month. They're going to come back or they just started coming back. So it's a lot of money that was a lot of good.
[00:36:41] When the IMLS was gutted, two lawsuits hit pretty quickly. Twenty one state attorneys general filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration and then ALA and Ask Me the Largest Public Sector Union filed a lawsuit against Keith Sonderling, the acting director.
[00:37:03] Both of these cases have had good results for libraries in the courts. However, both have been appealed. That's not going to be a surprise. So hold that thought in your head while I go to the second part.
[00:37:16] The 2026 budget, as is being discussed right now, we have known is going to make a major cut to the IMLS. What we didn't know until the actual supplement with the numbers showed up, how bad it would be. That showed up last week and it took the agency, which had I think it was like a three hundred and thirteen million dollar budget, so really not a huge budget item, down to six million because that six million is being used to shut the department down. This is going to close all operations.
Charlie Jane: [00:37:49] Oh, man.
Kelly: [00:37:49] Yeah. So if this budget passes, that means as of October 1st this year, there will be no more IMLS because there will be no funding for it, which means let's go back to that first piece. Whatever happens in the court doesn't matter. Trump's administration is going to keep appealing this because the longer they can kick that can down the road, the more opportunity they have to just defund the agency and it doesn't matter what happens in court.
[00:38:13] And so what's happening? Big question mark. What's going to happen with the budget? Big question mark. When we know what happens with the budget, we'll have a better sense of what is happening in the courts and how it will impact the agency, whether it will even exist anymore or not.
Maggie: [00:38:27] OK, I do feel like that is the worst news that we have to share.
Kelly: [00:38:31] Yeah, maybe. Yeah.
Maggie: [00:38:32] So everyone can like unclench your butthole very slightly. The rest of the news will only be kind of devastating.
[00:38:40] New Hampshire has passed House Bill 324, which is a book banning bill in the state with the slogan “live free or die.” And if you live in New Hampshire or if you family or people in New Hampshire, we hope that you ask them to call the governor and ask them to veto the bill because it's a bad bill.
[00:38:57] But we talk a lot, I should say, about Florida and Texas, which have sort of historically been the book banning capitals of the country.
Kelly: [00:39:05] Yeah.
Maggie: [00:39:05] But no more. There are new kings in town. Kelly, can you tell us a little bit about South Carolina and Utah and also Tennessee.
Kelly: [00:39:16] So all three of these states have in their law, the mechanisms to institute bans on individual books statewide. It differs for each state. Tennessee has not done this yet. Doesn't mean that they won't do it.
Maggie: [00:39:30] They're gonna.
Kelly: [00:39:31] Oh yeah. They're gonna. Yeah, they just haven't yet. South Carolina and Utah have been going at it. They operate in two different ways.
[00:39:39] Utah’s bill has stated that if three school districts in the state ban a book, it's automatically banned for every other public school district in the state. You will be not surprised to learn that 80 or 90 percent of the books currently banned statewide came from bans in two districts. So two districts are deciding what students statewide have access to.
[00:40:04] And another component of this bill and one that I don't think gets talked about enough is that students can’t even have their own personal copies of these books at the schools.
Charlie Jane: [00:40:13] What?
Kelly: [00:40:13] Yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:40:14] What?
Maggie: [00:40:15] They're not allowed to carry them.
Annalee: [00:40:16] So if they bring them to campus, they get in trouble.
Maggie: [00:40:18] Yes.
Kelly: [00:40:18] Yes.
Charlie Jane: [00:40:19] How do you justify that? That doesn't even make any sense.
Kelly: [00:40:22] It doesn't. But they… Don't worry. They have a guidebook for how you can talk to students who have these books on them, how you can deescalate the situation. You know, students are carrying contraband. So you have to approach them gently and thoughtfully to get the books off campus.
So again, their personal property, they cannot have if the book is banned. And right now there are, I believe it's 18 in Utah that are banned. Yeah. 18 books total. They used to be the leader, but then South Carolina.
Maggie: [00:40:51] South Carolina is coming in hot, baby.
Kelly: [00:40:52] Yeah.
Maggie: [00:40:52] Sorry. One more thing about Utah before we move on. The books that were previously in those school libraries that got banned were not allowed to be redistributed.
Kelly: [00:41:01] Yeah.
Maggie: [00:41:02] There was like a stipulation. So it was our first official book destruction bill.
Kelly: [00:41:06] Yeah.
Maggie: [00:41:06] Or book burning bill, if you're feeling cheeky about it, where they were not allowed to even donate those books or put them in little free libraries or the librarians were not allowed to just take them home and enjoy them.
Annalee: [00:41:18] These books had to just be abolished completely.
Maggie: [00:41:21] Yes.
Kelly: [00:41:21] Yep.
Maggie: [00:41:21] Yes. And like that level of follow through on the censorship is pretty Nazi. Nazi vibes.
Kelly: [00:41:31] And it should be mentioned to 15 or 16 of the books on that list are by women. And most of them are queer authors or queer content. Not surprising, but noteworthy. You can almost see what they're going for here.
[00:41:47] And so South Carolina's bill is a little bit different. Anybody in the state can complain to the State Department of Education about a book. And the State Department of Education has a committee that reads these books and makes a recommendation about whether they should be banned or not. And then the full State Department of Education votes on that decision. So this means in South Carolina, there are, I think it's 21 books that are banned right now.
[00:42:10] Most of those have been decided by two people in the state. One of those individuals earned her reputation as the person who tried to ban a hundred books from Beaufort County schools, was unsuccessful in those bans. So what did she do? She went to the state and has been successful in getting those books banned, not just in Beaufort County schools, but across the state.
Charlie Jane: [00:42:34] I feel like anytime there's a book ban situation, it's always like one or two busybodies.
Maggie: [00:42:37] Oh yeah, it is.
Kelly: [00:42:38] For sure it is.
Charlie Jane: [00:42:39] There’s never just a grassroots… There's just always like one person with too much time on their hands.
Annalee: [00:42:43] Well, that's why they designed these laws to favor the minority, right? The idea is like, o”h, but if two people said it or two school districts or three school districts, it must be,” you know, that's pretty much like a majority if you think about it.
Maggie: [00:42:57] There was a report that the Washington Post did like a few years ago about how most, like 90% of book bans come down to like the same 11 people countrywide. But if there's anything that I hope Kelly and I can impart to you today, our understanding of this fight is it is no longer those wackadoodles. 72% of bans, according to the American Library Association, are coming from the government now.
[00:43:20] So those little wackadoos have done their job and they no longer need to really be as active and that understanding of it is outdated. Now we need to understand that it is the government that is doing these bans.
Annalee: [00:43:32] I'm wondering if with the South Carolina rule, is there like a hotline that people call or someplace that they email?
Kelly: [00:43:40] Yeah, they submit forms to the State Department of Education.
Maggie: [00:43:44] Kelly, Tennessee has also been up to some fun out of Knox County specifically. If you could tell us a little bit about that.
Kelly: [00:43:52] Just a little bit. They're not the only one. The last month and a half, I believe there's been two districts in the state. I think Oak Ridge is the other one that have banned dozens and dozens and dozens of books. Now, Knox County is interesting because they have gone through waves of just banning lots of books.
[00:44:08] That provision in the state law that would allow for statewide book bans hasn't been pulled. But something that has been happening in districts in Tennessee is that these schools have gone to the state and said, “what do we need to ban to be in compliance?” And they've had to generate their own lists. So this is like a Knox County generated list and basically like pulling what they can to be in compliance because they're not getting the answers that they would really like.
Maggie: [00:44:35] I just would like to personally interject that Squad is banned in both all Oak Ridge and Knox County schools now. Thanks a lot. Fuck you.
Kelly: [00:44:42] Yeah, I was going to say my book Body Talk was banned in Oak Ridge. That's how I knew that one off the top of my head.
Maggie: [00:44:47] Yeah.
Kelly: [00:44:48] You know, because we can't have a book about the body. That would be way too fucking scary.
Charlie Jane: [00:44:51] I feel like Victories Greater Than Death was banned somewhere in Tennessee. I actually don't know where. It's hard to get that information. I can never actually find out.
Maggie: [00:44:59] It is really hard to get the information. I think one of the things that if I were going to tell publishers how to do their jobs, it would be to have them do a better job of communicating to their authors when their books have been banned.
Kelly: [00:45:13] They would have to communicate at all.
Maggie: [00:45:14] I know.
Charlie Jane: [00:45:14] This drove me nuts because I got an email from my publisher last year being like, by the way, in addition to Victories Greater Than Death, also All the Birds in the Sky has now been banned somewhere.
Kelly: [00:45:23] You guys have gotten notifications of this?
Maggie: [00:45:25] Only when it's a big news item.
Charlie Jane: [00:45:27] Well, I got an email and they were like, for banned books month, we want to just feature a video of you talking about this. I was like, great. Can you tell me where All the Birds in the Sky has been banned? And like, can you tell me details? And they were like, we'll try. And then nothing. They couldn’t come back to me with details. I was like, I still have no idea where it's been banned. It just has.
Maggie: [00:45:45] And that's really common for most authors. Like either you don't know it all and you find out because some random teenager DMs you on TikTok, which has happened to me more than once.
Charlie Jane: [00:45:53] Oh, my God.
Maggie: [00:45:54] Like I got one that was just like, hey, they took a copy of The Mermaid, the Witch and the Sea out of my hands because it's queer and they're not allowed to have it at school anymore.
Charlie Jane: [00:46:01] Oh no! I love that book so much.
Annalee: [00:46:03] Me too. And non-binary.
Maggie: [00:46:05] It is my most banned book banned from the Department of Education, too.
Annalee: [00:46:08] There's also the whole issue of librarians just not ordering a book in the first place, because now a lot of libraries require acquisitions to be justified. You have to like write a little card about like why you're acquiring it. And I definitely heard from librarians with my last book, Stories are Weapons, saying like, I'm not even going to bother trying to acquire this because it's all about racism. And like, we just don't talk about that anymore.
Maggie: [00:46:33] Yeah. I mean, one thing that drove me crazy and Kelly, I'm sure it drove you a little crazy, too, with ALA's last report about book bans, is that they reported that the number of bans were down, but that isn't reflecting the amount of quiet censorship exactly like what you're talking about, Annalee, where it's like, yeah, because they're reacting to the year 2023 where things were so much more violent and terrible in terms of the threats that librarians and teachers were receiving about these books.
[00:46:59] I'm sure that there are less of the books that would be banned on the shelf to begin with because they don't want to have those fights. And that's not reflected in the numbers. And so reflecting any kind of decrease is not reflective of the reality that we're facing right now with this problem.
Kelly: [00:47:14] It's also not reflective of the fact that the ALA Office for Intellectual Freedom that puts it together is teeny tiny and for a while didn't really have a staff. So they couldn't keep track of everything. They couldn't take record of all this information. So like their data collecting is already skewed in a way that is not representative of the whole. They can only give you so much of a snapshot. They only have so much staff power. So many people have stopped reporting to them because they can't do anything.
[00:47:42] It's a useful metric to kind of get an idea of the scope. And I guess it's useful for folks who like have no idea what's going on. But in general, it has become less and less helpful for folks who have been doing this work for a long time because there are so many. “OK, but OK, but OK, but”.
[00:48:00] I know that there are folks on the ground at the state level trying to figure out how they can capture what silent censorship looks like. Obviously, there are a million challenges to that, including like what people will be willing to share. But there are efforts to at least get more information about this in different ways.
Maggie: [00:48:20] Man, my fingers are crossed for them because that's like impossible to quantify.
Kelly: [00:48:24] It is. It is. But they can try to get something. And I think that that's better than nothing at this point.
Maggie: [00:48:29] For sure.
Kelly: [00:48:29] So we'll see. One of those efforts is in California. So it'll be interesting because in general, people think of California as the liberal blue good state books aren't banned, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You know, and anybody who's been doing this knows that's not true. But it will be interesting to see if that perception holds when it comes to asking librarians to be honest about their quiet censorship.
Maggie: [00:48:51] Mm hmm. OK, that's our crushing terrible bad news. From here, it is slightly uphill. And one thing that has given me a sliver of hope is good legislation that has been moving forward or passing this season. I know, Kelly, you have more complicated feelings about it, but it is a move at least baby steps away from fascism, which I love for us.
[00:49:14] There was recently an anti book banning bill that was passed in Colorado that authors against book bans and particularly our Colorado state leadership was really involved in helping get passed. And we were really proud of it. However, it is not as complete a bill as I think any of us would have liked. Kelly, could you speak to a little bit about what these bills mean and what they are missing?
Kelly: [00:49:37] Yeah. So these bills - there are really two kind of camps of these bills. And you see this play out when you see states sometimes have multiple bills that are called anti book ban bills or intellectual freedom bills.
[00:49:51] One bucket looks at whether or not books can be banned based on personal beliefs, you know, partisan ideals, et cetera, et cetera. And you'll often see in those bills things like, you know, books can't be banned based on politics. They can't be banned by the school board based on these criteria.
[00:50:10] There's also then the camp of anti book ban legislation that protects librarians. So this is where librarians do not have to pull the book if they're told to pull the book and their job is protected. You see some bills that combine them, some that are separate. There's a lot of ways that this has been done.
[00:50:27] These are good bills. Like, I don't think that these are bad, but I don't think that they're good in the sense that I don't know how much they actually end book censorship because book censorship has four components.
[00:50:38] There's removal. That's what these bills go for. But there's also restrictions. So whether or not people have access to collections or whether some require a permission slip, there's redaction or the editing of books. And then there is the
Maggie: [00:50:53] Relocation.
Kelly: [00:50:53] Relocation. Yeah. So moving a book from one area of the library, like where it belongs to another area of the library.
Maggie: [00:51:00] Could I interject about relocation? Because that's something that's happening a lot right now. And it'll be things like taking every single queer book out of the young adult collection and moving it into the special issues parenting section where kids won't even know where to look for it.
[00:51:14] In some cases, it'll be like books about grief, like books to give your child if their dog dies or if, God forbid, something happens to someone in their family are no longer kept in the picture book nonfiction section where kids could find them, they're moved to the adult section about grief.
Kelly: [00:51:30] Yeah. These bills don't cover those other three Rs. These bills are also only as good as they're enforced and they're not really well enforced. Illinois's bill is set up so that it ties a pool of money to intellectual freedom in library collection policies. And so librarians have to certify with the state that they have this thing in there and then they get a small pool of money.
[00:51:52] And the thing is this small pool of money can be really helpful in libraries. They can squeeze so much out of a dollar. So for them, it's really beneficial. But what does that do for the libraries that just choose not to? They don't really lose out. They can continue doing that.
[00:52:06] I think that the thing that is most important about these bills and the thing that gives me a lot of hope with them and why I like them is it gives you a sense of what legislators are on the side of libraries.
Maggie: [00:52:16] Yes.
Kelly: [00:52:16] And so I think that that can't be bolded enough that you know who your allies are at state level. And those are the people that you really want to be in touch with and you want to keep on and keep pressuring them and keep telling them like, we need more. Because clearly they already have some kind of stake in libraries and understand how important they are.
[00:52:35] So as unimpressive as these are, like in terms of what they can do legally, they provide a lot of sense of the reality that there are people fighting for libraries. And sometimes it can be hard to remember that that's the case, but they are. There are people who are fighting and we can look at them as people we turn to again and again and like stay on top of this stuff.
Maggie: [00:52:57] Well, and even with these bills that are not as thorough as like I think any of us would want them to be a lot of the time because they get stripped as they move through committees of all of these things. This is not always the fault of the person who wrote the bill or the people who supported it. It is very much something that kind of like happens over the process of getting these bills passed.
[00:53:17] It is also just from the Authors Against Book Bans perspective, absolutely trained us on how to do this. And so a lot of people who are brand new to this space, like our Colorado leaders are an incredible example of this, had no experience doing this kind of work and they became experts within a matter of months from doing this. They are then able to train other people about what they were doing.
[00:53:38] And so, I don't know, every win to me is a win. And I'm just going to take them and hug them close because we need every little like sliver of hope that we can get.
[00:53:49] And to that end, I feel like we should move into the just like straight up good fucking news because you know what? We've earned it. It's been a hard year.
Annalee: [00:53:58] I'm ready. Fill my brain and heart.
Charlie Jane: [00:54:01] Take us home with some good news.
Kelly: [00:54:02] Yeah. So let's do this like, I don't want to say quick style, but like kind of Round Robbin style. I put down two in a row. The first being that a lot of the elements of Iowa's Don't Say Gay Bill were blocked in federal court. This is great.
[00:54:15] This bill would require any books in school libraries to be pulled if they had sex acts in them. Listeners may remember the story of a school district in Iowa used AI to put in a list of their catalog and then say books that have sex acts in it and pulled out however many books that came up as having sex acts in them. It's complicated, right?
[00:54:39] I talked to the person who did this and they were in the position where like, how do they go through thousands of books to pull books to being compliant?
Maggie: [00:54:48] They don't.
Kelly: [00:54:48] Look, I know. I know. But now a lot of that has been blocked. So good news there.
Annalee: [00:54:56] Yeah. That’s great.
Maggie: [00:54:57] It's great news, honestly.
Kelly: [00:54:58] Yeah. More good news. There were a ton of terrible bills in Alabama this year. They've always been kind of a leader in some of these really terrible bills. None of them passed this year. Much of that is due to the work of Read Freely Alabama on the ground efforts.
Charlie Jane: [00:55:15] Yay!
Kelly: [00:55:15] Yeah, exactly. And so I think it's really important to shout that out. You know, you'll see stories about these bills didn't pass. But like, the story is that on the ground activism works, that these people got the job done. And that's not nothing. That's huge.
Charlie Jane: [00:55:29] That's amazing. So it's Read Freely Alabama. That's an organization people want to support. OK, great.
Annalee: [00:55:34] When people are pushing back, are they doing like physical protests like at the libraries? Is it more like they're going to have council meetings and library board meetings?
Kelly: [00:55:42] All of the above.
Annalee: [00:55:44] Good to know. Yeah.
Maggie: [00:55:44] You can also call like your legislator, ask for a meeting with the legislative aide and talk to them about the different things that are on the docket and talking to all the different reps that are available. Letter writing campaigns can help. Public scrutiny can help. A lot of people don't realize this stuff is going on or what it means.
Annalee: [00:56:03] It's very under the radar, it feels like.
Kelly: [00:56:04] Yeah. And I feel like that actually segues perfectly into the bills that died in Florida this session.
Annalee: [00:56:11] Kill, kill. I mean, yay.
Kelly: [00:56:12] Yeah, it's like a little wonky for a sec. So it was House Bill 1539 and Senate Bill 1692 in Florida. And they were the same bill just coming up through the House in different prongs that would seek to undo the burden of the Miller test.
[00:56:27] A lot of people don't know what the Miller test is, but it's basically like the legal understanding of what is obscene in our country from like from that perspective. And it has really broad protections for artists and scientists and sociologists and people who do, you know, work of understanding people and telling the truth by design. Like that's on purpose so that we can do our work.
[00:56:50] These bills sought to undo the burden of the Miller test and to move it from in schools from the educational statute into the criminal statutes for evaluating books.
[00:57:02] For me, the Miller test and its undoing is one of the things I have on my checklist of it's time to leave the country because when that is done, that is when I will know I'm no longer safe.
Annalee: [00:57:12] Yeah.
Kelly: [00:57:13] The protections for me are no longer available and that I could be tried as a child, you know, sex offender, like all these kinds of things. And so the Miller test is like very serious.
[00:57:25] And so from Authors Against Book Bans perspective, we threw the fuck down on it in partnership with the Florida Freedom to Read Project, who, if you have a spare dollar, if you have a spare $10 or a hundred dollars and you want to give it to somebody who is fighting the fight really hard, Read Freely Alabama or Texas Freedom to Read Project or the Florida Freedom to Read Project are great places to send your money because they do the work.
[00:57:49] They were giving marching orders to groups like Pen America, American Library, Association, Authors Against Book Bans. Like all of us are just following their lead. So please give them money.
Annalee: [00:57:58] Awesome.
Kelly: [00:57:59] And we had, I think we did at different points as it moved through different committees and was being heard by different groups of senators, state senators and assembly members in Florida, we sent it to probably six or seven different letter writing campaigns from in state and from out of state.
[00:58:19] We would tell like every author in Massachusetts to write a letter saying, you know, like I”'m the author of this book. Here's why this bill is so worrisome to me.” We held a press conference with Judy Bloom and Jason Reynolds and Alan Gratz and Lauren Groff to try to help people understand what this bill would do. Because when you say the Miller test, it's like a little wonky. It doesn't make a ton of sense.
[00:58:41] And we got really excited because the bill died in the Senate and we were like, “we got this.” And then the House Republicans passed it and we were like, “oh no.” But then the Senate didn't vote on it. Like they didn't bring it to a full floor vote and the bills died. And I ordered myself an ice cream the size of my head and I ate it by myself and had a little cry.
[00:58:59] So I was like, okay, I'm safe in this country for like, what, six more months maybe. I like it. So that was like a big victory. And again, thanks to the Texas Freedom to Read Project and the Texan Freadom, as an F R E A D O M, there was a near clean sweep on school board elections in Texas where only four of the book banners who were defending their seats kept them.
Annalee: [00:59:23] Nice.
Kelly: [00:59:23] Out of, I think it was like 85 elections or something. Like it was a huge amount of elections. And in one of them, the book banner was supported by one of these, you know, right wing wackadoo groups with like $50,000 worth of financial support. And he still lost.
Charlie Jane: [00:59:40] Yay! Oh my god. Amazing.
Kelly: [00:59:41] I can't think of better good news to end on than they spent too much money and they still lost.
Annalee: [00:59:48] Yeah, that should be the lesson to all oligarchs and rich people supporting this kind of crap. Also $50,000 doesn't sound like a lot when we're like thinking about big elections and we hear about like millions of dollars, but this is a school board election.
Maggie: [01:00:02] So according to Run For Everything, a normal school board election costs about a thousand dollars, which is like, it's still not nothing, but it's like, that's the kind of money that you get running a little go fund me with your friends and family.
Annalee: [01:00:15] That's like Xerox money, you know, like Xeroxing a few pamphlets or whatever.
Maggie: [01:00:22] Go shake your neighbor's hands a bit. Like you can, you can drum up that money, but most of us can't fundraise $50,000 at the drop of a hat. And that is becoming common in places like Texas, Virginia, Florida. These elections are becoming extremely expensive from one side.
Charlie Jane: [01:00:39] I feel like there should be a rule that if you spend that much on an election, I should get to come live in your house. Just like…
Annalee: [01:00:46] It's like a special carve out just for Charlie Jane Anders.
Charlie Jane: [01:00:49] You have that much money, just like give me your house.
Annalee: [01:00:54] Only part of their house, just like their bathroom and like maybe their living room, like just areas that they really want to use.
Kelly: [01:01:02] I do want to throw out like two more things. The first being a book recommendation for anybody who wants to understand what's actually happening like in school board elections and some of these groups that are like pouring tens of thousands of dollars into these elections and why and how they're doing it. Mike Hicks and Boz, They Came for the Schools is an excellent read set in Texas so you can learn the landscape there and what's going on.
[01:01:29] And then the second thing I wanted to say is like, this is a piece of good news that I keep thinking about and keep enjoying more and more the longer I think about it. Oregon has proposed a bill that would allow 16 and 17 year olds to vote in school board elections.
Annalee: [01:01:48] I love that.
Maggie: [01:01:49] I know.
Kelly: [01:01:50] I think this is genius because this impacts their everyday experience, right? And it teaches them the importance of civic engagement. So it's like, it's a win-win bill, right?
Maggie: [01:02:01] Yes.
Charlie Jane: [01:02:02] I love that so much.
Kelly: [01:02:03] I would love to see that passed. Like that's the only election they'd be able to vote in, but it's the one that directly like impacts their lives.
Annalee: [01:02:12] They're literally constituents.
Kelly: [01:02:13] Exactly. And, you know, it's got that like learn about what it is to be a civic, you know, civically engaged, all the same stuff that we hear from certain parties about, you know, rights and responsibilities. Well, here it is. And I bet you 16 and 17 year olds would have some opinions about what's going on in their schools that don't align with some of what's actually happening. So that'll be a good one to watch. And I would love to see it replicated elsewhere.
Maggie: [01:02:41] Yes.
Kelly: [01:02:42] But yeah, that's Oregon.
Charlie Jane: [01:02:43] All right. So Maggie and Kelly, where can people find you online?
Maggie: [01:02:51] Well, you can find me, Maggie online on Bluesky, Maggie Tokuda-Hall on Bluesky and on Instagram and on my website, prettyokmaggie.com. But most importantly, you can find Authors Against Book Bans at authorsagainstbookbans.com. Or on Blue Sky or on Instagram, also Authors Against Book Bans.
Kelly: [01:03:15] I'm on Bluesky at HeyKellyJensen. Same on Instagram. You can follow my literary activism newsletter on Book Riot. And I also have my own newsletter that is buttonedown.com/wellsourced as any librarian or former librarian believes in being very well sourced in anything you write. That's where I'm at.
Charlie Jane: [01:03:37] Well, thank you for your service. Thank you both of you. This is amazing.
Annalee: [01:03:40] Seriously. Thanks so much for Authors Against Book Bans. And thank you, Kelly just keeping track of all this stuff and filling your head with all this crap in order for us to be updated. And I know it's hard, but we really appreciate it.
Maggie: [01:03:53] Thank you for having us.
Kelly: [01:03:54] Thank you for having us both.
[01:03:56] OOAC session break music, a quick little synth bwoop bwoo.
Charlie Jane: [01:03:59] Alright, thank you so much for listening. This has been Our Opinions Are Correct. You can find us wherever you find your podcasts. If you like the show, please leave a review. Please subscribe. Do all that stuff.
[01:04:11] You can find us on Mastodon, on Patreon, on Instagram, on Bluesky, in all those places where either Our Opinions or Our Opinions Are Correct.
[01:04:19] Thanks so much to our incredible, heroic producer and engineer, Niah Harmon. And thanks so much to Chris Palmer and Tacha Lopez-Nichols for our music. And thanks to you for listening. We'll be back in two weeks with another episode. But if you're a patron, we'll see you in Discord. We'll have a mini episode for you next week. And either way, have a wonderful time.
Both: [01:04:41] Bye!
[01:04:43] [OOAC theme plays. Science fictiony synth noises over an energetic, jazzy drum line.]