PEN America is reeling from shock and horror at the word of a brutal, premeditated attack on our former President and stalwart ally, Sir Salman Rushdie, who was reportedly stabbed multiple times while on stage speaking at the Chautauqua Institute in upstate New York, we can think of no comparable incident of a public attack on a literary writer on American soil.

Suzanne Nossel

To advance from a nuanced dissent to a compelling vision, progressive policymakers should turn to the great mainstay of twentieth-century U.S. foreign policy: liberal internationalism... (which) should offer assertive leadership - diplomatic, economic, and not least, military - to advance a broad array of goals.

vision military goal

The whole world has become a crowded theater. You could say something here in New York and have it be heard in Afghanistan and potentially trigger riots and it may be something that to you was innocent or was in jest or was satirical and it's taken out of context. I mean, a joke, a tweet or a blog post can make it halfway around the world before the context gets its boots on.

taken mean world

You can get an audience, you can get followers all over the world and there's great power and excitement in those connections but there also is grave danger of misinterpretation, sometimes something can be incendiary and we also see what I think of as an arms race between these new technologies that allow for expression and communication and then new methods of surveillance and suppression.

communication technology thinking

We're still really in catch-up mode in terms of alerting people to the risks of social media, to the kind of consciousness that you need to have when you do publish something. It used to be such a deliberate and elaborate process to get to publication with many steps and phases and editors and you know, now it's instantaneous and it's wonderful, you know, the immediacy and the power of that but it also can be dangerous.

social-media risk people

Having championed global efforts to defend Internet freedom and fend off threats to religious liberty, the United States should take the lead to save the lives of these bloggers who face the very real risk of being murdered for the crime of expressing their views online.

world

Parents and community members play an important role in shaping what students learn in school but this goes far beyond organic expressions of concern or the normal give-and-take between parents and educators in a healthy school environment, these groups have made it their mission to undermine educators, sabotage students' freedom to read and stoke divisive battles that distract from teaching and learning.

While we think of book bans as the work of individual concerned citizens, our report demonstrates that today's wave of bans represents a coordinated campaign to banish books being waged by sophisticated, ideological and well-resourced advocacy organizations.

This is a red herring, what goes on in schools is no secret. Children bring things home. They share what is happening.

People are in ideological camps and sort of the information, the narratives that you absorb are dictated by the ideology that you adhere to.Traditionally publishers, but also bookstores and libraries, have been places for all comers that offer a wide variety of ideas to choose from.