Books about sex, science, and politics were among the works selected for "Banned in Boston (and Beyond)," a Houghton Library pop-up exhibition that coincided with the American Library Association's Banned Books Week. "I think you'll find very few librarians for whom the freedom to read and the freedom of access to information isn't a very important topic, and that's a reason I really wanted to do something about this subject," said John Overholt, who organized the exhibition. "Because it means a lot to me."
Winner of the Palme d'Or at this year's Cannes Film Festival, Jafar Panahi's gripping It Was Just an Accident may well mark the start of a new chapter in the celebrated Iranian director's career. Since his 2010 imprisonment and subsequent ban from filmmaking, Panahi has been making meta-cinematic movies starring himself. Shot clandestinely in tight and/or remote spaces far from the prying eyes of the authorities, these films (which include Closed Curtain, , and the masterpiece
In case you've missed it, Jim Rodenbush, the director of student media and an adviser to the Indiana Daily Student, was fired this week. This decision came after disagreements between the paper and the university's leadership about what information gets published in the special print editions of the newspaper. The university insisted that no news content would be in the print edition. Instead, breaking news would be on the IDS's website.
One of the things that disgusts me is a statement made by Kevin Bakhurst not too long ago when somebody said, there's no comedy on RTÉ at the moment. And he went, 'Oh, well, you know comedy, it's hit and miss'. And basically that was an admission of total defeat. And I'd never heard a head of a TV station saying that before that they actually gave up on making comedy.
The most extraordinary thing about Chinese director Lou Ye's An Unfinished Film (2024) is how ordinary it is, considering the attention it has garnered globally. In semi-documentary style, the 106-minute flick follows a film crew as they try to resurrect a 10-year-old project, and find themselves quarantined at a hotel near Wuhan, China, in the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.
The poster showed the lead actor holding a bottle of beer and smoking a cigarette; unsurprisingly, the board nixed both elements and rejected the compromise of erasing them while leaving smoke still trailing out of the star's mouth. In the end, the buyer was provided with an image of the hero on a motorcycle with his love interest, a misleading visual he declined to convert into a bait-and-switch display standee.
The measure is part of a trio of regulations that Kim Ilhyuk, a North Korean defector, calls the three evil laws. They were implemented during the Covid pandemic lockdown and intended to impose even stricter control on the population of the country, which Kim Jong Un, North Korea's supreme leader, rules with an iron fist. The focus, to a large extent, was on young people and their interaction with foreign cultures.
TikTok will soon have new American oligarch overlords. If Donald Trump is to be believed, Lachlan Murdoch, Michael Dell, and Larry Ellison are potential investors in a deal to keep the social-media giant in the United States. Trump has been actively thwarting legislation, signed into law under Joe Biden with bipartisan majorities, to force a sale to the U.S. because TikTok is currently owned by ByteDance, which has close ties to the Chinese government.
Kamel Daoud arrives for his interview in Berlin in a black limousine, accompanied by two men dressed in black who never leave his side. The Algerian writer, who now lives in France, is under police protection: his latest book not only won him France's most prestigious literary prize, the Prix Goncourt it has also put him in grave danger. "Houris" is a novel that recounts the massacres and torture that took place during the Algerian civil war.
The logic then follows that the CCP would also implement similar controls over the U.S. version of the app, and there's long been speculation that Chinese officials could use this power to seed censoring anti-China narratives.
A former Meta executive who wrote an explosive expose making allegations about the social media company's dealings with China and its treatment of teenagers is said to be on the verge of bankruptcy after publishing the book. An MP has claimed in parliament that Mark Zuckerberg's company was trying to silence and punish Sarah Wynn-Williams, the former director of global public policy at Meta's precursor, Facebook, after her decision to speak out about her time at the company.
The atmosphere was exuberant on September 6, when six young women in tight outfits took to the stage in Istanbul's sold-out open-air venue Kucukciftlik Park: A cheer went up from the crowd of 12,000 people who had joined in the dancing to the beat in the late summer heat. The musicians Mina, Esin, Zeynep Sude, Emine Hilal, Lidya und Sueda are the members of Turkish girl band Manifest, which was formed in February following a talent show.
