Author: Maren Williams

New Manga Crushed by Tokyo Ordinance

A new manga series was cancelled last week just days before it was to debut online, apparently because the publisher was concerned it might clash with Tokyo’s Youth Healthy Development Ordinance. Creator Arisa Yamamoto said on her blog that editors…

Pasco County Response on Paper Towns Falls Short

Yesterday we told you about the letter from the National Coalition Against Censorship, signed by CBLDF and other anti-censorship organizations, urging Florida’s Pasco County School District to restore Paper Towns by John Green to an eighth grade summer reading list.…

CBLDF Joins Call to Restore Paper Towns in Pasco County

Following last week’s news that John Green’s Paper Towns was removed from a summer reading list in Pasco County, Florida without due process, CBLDF yesterday joined a coalition calling on the school district to restore the book and to follow…

Delaware School Board Removes The Miseducation of Cameron Post From Reading List

Yet another school district, in Delaware this time, has removed a book from a summer reading list without following its own procedure for reviewing challenged materials. The Cape-Gazette newspaper reported today that the Cape Henlopen school board voted on June…

Florida School District Removes Paper Towns From Reading List

Florida seems to be the place for unilateral book bans this summer. A few weeks after a Pensacola high school principal cancelled an entire summer reading program rather than let students read Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother, now a Tampa-area school…

The Sims Prove That LGBT Characters Are Family-Friendly

For a long time, the common wisdom among publishers, movie studios, and other gatekeepers of content has held that LGBT characters are verboten in mainstream all-ages material. LGBT content is a frequent target of censors, and as we saw in…

Pakistani Political Cartoonist Mourns Free Expression

Pakistani political cartoonist Sabir Nazar is lucky. He’s currently in Washington, DC for a six-month fellowship at the National Endowment for Democracy, just as extremist attacks against journalists are ramping up in his home country. A few days ago he…