The internet is filled with mockery of the Trump administration’s list of forbidden words that have been being edited out of government documents. Government employees are second-guessing whether this barrier on the use of a particular excluded expression might put them at risk of losing their privileges, and perhaps even their job. Oh shit! That last sentence has FIVE forbidden words: Barrier, excluded, expression, at risk and privileges! I'm doomed!
The list of words in The New York Times article (free link) These Words Are Disappearing in the New Trump Administration is so long that it’s tough to screencap, but here is a portion:
The above terms appeared in government memos, in official and unofficial agency guidance and in other documents viewed by The New York Times. Some ordered the removal of these words from public-facing websites, or ordered the elimination of other materials (including school curricula) in which they might be included.
In other cases, federal agency managers advised caution in the terms’ usage without instituting an outright ban. Additionally, the presence of some terms was used to automatically flag for review some grant proposals and contracts that could conflict with Mr. Trump’s executive orders.
It is truly insanity. The words ‘female’ and ‘woman’ are on the list, but their counterparts ‘male’ and ‘man’ are not. For the Trump administration, it is not only official policy that there are only two genders, but also that only one of those genders need to be eliminated from public discourse (and oops...’genders’ is a forbidden word.) ‘Black’ is verboten, but ‘hispanic’ isn’t, unless it is combined into the phrase ‘hispanic minority,’ which is a no-no. Evidently, Blacks must be erased from public discourse, but Hispanics are okay for the time being, as long as they don’t get all uppity about being a minority. And don’t dare bring up ‘disability’ or ‘indigenous community.’ We don’t want to see it, hear it or speak it. Feeling ‘underappreciated’, ‘underprivileged’, ‘underrepresented’, ‘underserved’ or ‘undervalued’? Here, have a pair of bootstraps and shut up.
Orwell would be proud.
for some reason ‘gay’ doesn’t appear on this list, but that doesn’t mean the word isn’t being erased. There was this ridiculous story:
x
The military is plans to scrub photos of the Enola Gay, one of the bombers that dropped an atomic bomb on Japan, from its website as part of its purge of diversity content.
It's among more than 26,000 images that the Pentagon plans to delete.
apnews.com/article/dei-...
— Brad Heath (@bradheath.bsky.social) 2025-03-07T03:01:42.239Z
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1990s culture wars: We’re cancelling the Enola Gay exhibit bc veterans and historians can’t agree whether we should celebrate its role in ending WWII or critically assess the decision to use nuclear weapons
2020s culture wars: We’re cancelling the Enola Gay bc “gay” is a no-no word
— Nicole Hemmer (@pastpunditry.bsky.social) 2025-03-07T03:32:39.568Z
It’s bad enough that government is doing stupid things, but what is worse is that they are doing their best to make sure these words and ideas are erased from the educational system as well. Children need to understand that the today’s world was made by and made for white Christian men, and there is absolutely no reason to ever doubt or challenge that. Here’s an article from Publishers Weekly: Library Futures Investigates Content Bans in Research Databases.
Library Futures, a nonprofit organization that addresses library policy and digital access, has released a report on the censorship of e-resources used by students for classroom research. Neo-Censorship in U.S. Libraries: An Investigation Into Digital Content Suppression details the targeting of educational databases and the rise of legal challenges against libraries, reminding readers to look beyond the print books that are the tangible symbols of the freedom to read.
According to Library Futures, false or unsubstantiated accusations of obscenity leveled at libraries foment fears of legal risk, sometimes resulting in the so-called soft censorship of e-resources, in which digital content providers or libraries apply system-wide filters and “stopwords” that block results from a user’s search….
According to the Neo-Censorship report, this resulted in content providers implementing “local controls” on databases, particularly related to health and race. “Under even the smallest of threats, the companies have provided the tools or have secretly put on the tools—we don’t know—that apply the content blocking on these systems,” Halperin said. “It’s more wide-reaching than banning a list of books” because a stopword may be assigned to an entire database and restrict every student from that term.
Well, on to this week’s books...
THIS WEEK’S NOTABLE NEW NONFICTION
- Voice for the Voiceless: Over Seven Decades of Struggle with China for My Land and My People, by His Holiness the Dalai Lama. In this unique book offering personal, spiritual, and historical reflections—some never shared before—His Holiness the Dalai Lama tells the full story of his struggle with China to save Tibet and its people for nearly seventy-five years.
The Dalai Lama has had to contend with the People’s Republic of China for about his entire life. He was sixteen years old when Communist China invaded Tibet in 1950, only nineteen when he had his first meeting with Chairman Mao in Beijing, and twenty-five when he was forced to escape to India and became a leader in exile.
Now, almost seventy-five years after China’s initial invasion of Tibet, the Dalai Lama reminds the world of Tibet’s unresolved struggle for freedom and the hardship his people continue to face in their own homeland. He offers his thoughts on the geopolitics of the region and shares how he personally was able to preserve his own humanity through the profound losses and challenges that threaten the very survival of the Tibetan people. This book captures the Dalai Lama’s extraordinary life journey—discovering what it means to lose your home to a repressive invader and to build a life in exile; dealing with the existential crisis of a nation, its people, and its culture and religion; and envisioning the path forward.
My wife and visited Dharamsala, home in exile of the Dalai Lama in India, where we attended a ten day teaching he was offering. We also took two trips to Tibet in 1998 and 2000. I wrote this story for Daily Kos in 2021 about those experiences. There are many pictures taken by me throughout the story. Enjoy! Happy birthday, Dalai Lama! My visits to Dharamshala & Tibet (Photo Diary).
- Rot: An Imperial History of the Irish Famine, by Padraic X. Scanlan. In 1845, European potato fields from Spain to Scandinavia were attacked by a novel pathogen. But it was only in Ireland, then part of the United Kingdom, that the blight’s devastation reached apocalyptic levels, leaving more than a million people dead and forcing millions more to emigrate.
In Rot, historian Padraic X. Scanlan offers the definitive account of the Great Famine, showing how Ireland’s place in the United Kingdom and the British Empire made it uniquely vulnerable to starvation. Ireland’s overreliance on the potato was a desperate adaptation to an unstable and unequal marketplace created by British colonialism. The empire’s laissez-faire economic policies saw Ireland exporting livestock and grain even as its people starved. When famine struck, relief efforts were premised on the idea that only free markets and wage labor could save the Irish. “Rot brilliantly blends economic, social, and environmental history to deliver a stunning new account of one of nineteenth-century Europe’s most shameful tragedies. Padraic Scanlan joins clear-eyed, comprehensive research and analysis to deliver a persuasive indictment of faith in free markets.”—Maya Jasanoff, author of The Dawn Watch
- Warbody: A Marine Sniper and the Hidden Violence of Modern Warfare, by Joshua Howe and Alexander Lemons. Alexander Lemons is a Marine Corps scout sniper who, after serving multiple tours during the Iraq War, returned home seriously and mysteriously ill. Joshua Howe is an environmental historian who met Lemons as a student in one of his classes. Together they have crafted a vital book that challenges us to think beyond warfare’s acute violence of bullets and bombs to the “slow violence” of toxic exposure and lasting trauma.
In alternating chapters, they cover the whirlwind of toxic exposures military personnel face from the things they touch and breathe in all the time, including lead from bullets, jet fuel, fire retardants, pesticides, mercury, dust, and the cocktail of toxicants emitted by the open-air “burn pits.” They also consider PTSD and traumatic brain injury, which are endemic among the military and cause and exacerbate all kinds of physical and mental health problems. Finally, they explore how both mainstream and alternative medicine struggle to understand, accommodate, and address the vast array of health problems among military veterans.
Warbody challenges us to rethink the violence we associate with war and the way we help veterans recover. It is a powerful book with an urgent message for the nearly twenty million Americans who are active military or veterans, as well as for their families, their loved ones, and all of us who depend on their service. Think about how Trump, Musk and the GOP are slashing veteran's medical benefits as you read this book.
- Pushback: The 2,500-Year Fight to Thwart Women by Restricting Abortion, by Mary Fissell. Attitudes about abortion cycle between long periods of widespread tolerance, to repression, and back again. What accounts for these pendulum swings? From ancient Greece to the modern West, historian of medicine Mary Fissell argues, abortion repression springs up in response to men’s anxieties about women’s increasing independence.
In Pushback, Fissell shows that, across centuries and continents, abortion has always been commonplace, and persecuting women for ending pregnancies has been about controlling their behavior. As Protestantism de-emphasized celibacy, new abortion restrictions policed unmarried women’s sex lives. Nineteenth-century men unsettled by first-wave feminism hoped to establish medicine as a male profession, and so advocated for abortion bans to undercut women’s new roles as physicians. Fissell presents this history through the hidden stories of women committed to reproductive self-determination: holy women of the early Catholic Church whose ability to end pregnancies was considered miraculous, midwives accused of witchcraft or criminal conspiracy, and everyday women whose pregnancies threatened their livelihoods—and their lives.
- Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism, by Sarah Wynn-Williams. In a gripping and often absurd narrative where a few people carelessly hold the world in their hands, this eye-opening memoir reveals what really goes on among the global elite. Sarah Wynn-Williams tells the wrenching but fun story of Facebook, mapping its rise from stumbling encounters with juntas to Mark Zuckerberg’s reaction when he learned of Facebook’s role in Trump’s election. She experiences the challenges and humiliations of working motherhood within a pressure cooker of a workplace, all while Sheryl Sandberg urges her and others to “lean in.”
Careless People is a deeply personal account of why and how things have gone so horribly wrong in the past decade—told in a sharp, candid, and utterly disarming voice. A deep, unflinching look at the role that social media has assumed in our lives, Careless People reveals the truth about the leaders of Facebook: how the more power they grasp, the less responsible they become and the consequences this has for all of us.
- On Breathing: Care in a Time of Catastrophe, by Jamieson Webster. A few moments after birth we begin to use our lungs for the first time. From then on, we must continue breathing for as long as we are alive. And although this mostly happens unconsciously, in a society plagued by anxiety, climate change, environmental racism, and illness, there are more and more instances that “teach us about the privilege that is breathing.”
Why do we so easily forget the air that we breathe in common? What does it mean to breathe when the environment that sustains life now threatens it? And how can life continue to flourish under conditions that are increasingly toxic? To approach these questions, Jamieson Webster draws on psychoanalytic theory and reflects on her own experiences as an asthmatic teenager, a deep-sea diver, a palliative psychologist during COVID, a psychoanalyst attentive to the somatic, and a new mother.
The result is a compassionate and timely exploration of air and breathing as a way to undo the pervasive myth of the individual by considering our dependence on invisible systems, on one another, and the way we have violently neglected this important aspect of life. "Thoughtful, poetic . . . Through closer attention to the practice of breathing, Webster believes that we can rebuild broken and fractured connections with our bodies and with each other." —Booklist
- Close to Home: The Wonders of Nature Just Outside Your Door, by Thor Hanson. We all live on nature’s doorstep, but we often overlook it. From backyards to local parks, the natural places we see the most may well be the ones we know the least. In Close to Home, biologist Thor Hanson shows how retraining our eyes reveals hidden wonders just waiting to be discovered. In Kansas City, migrating monarch butterflies flock to the local zoo. In the Pacific Northwest, fierce yellowjackets placidly sip honeydew, unseen in the treetops. In New England, a lawn gone slightly wild hosts a naturalist's life's work. And in the soil beneath our feet, remedies for everything from breast cancer to the stench of skunks lie waiting for someone’s searching shovel. “From natural science experiments to the search for new species, Hanson reminds us that awe and wonder are as close as our own backyard. With Hanson as our guide, a walk around the block becomes an opportunity to explore, to conserve, to ask questions, and to broaden our horizons.”—Amy Stewart, author of The Drunken Botanist
- The Franklin Stove: An Unintended American Revolution, by Joyce E. Chaplin. The biggest revolution in Benjamin Franklin’s lifetime was made to fit in a fireplace. Assembled from iron plates like a piece of flatpack furniture, the Franklin stove became one of the era's most iconic consumer products, spreading from Pennsylvania to England, Italy, and beyond. It was more than just a material object, however—it was also a hypothesis. Franklin was proposing that, armed with science, he could invent his way out of a climate crisis: a period of global cooling known as the Little Ice Age, when unusually bitter winters sometimes brought life to a standstill. He believed that his stove could provide snug indoor comfort despite another, related crisis: a shortage of wood caused by widespread deforestation. And he conceived of his invention as equal parts appliance and scientific instrument—a device that, by modifying how heat and air moved through indoor spaces, might reveal the workings of the atmosphere outside and explain why it seemed to be changing. With his stove, Franklin became America’s first climate scientist. "The very best histories remind us of how different people were back in the past—and yet how relevant their lives might be to our own. Gifted historian Joyce Chaplin does exactly that, positioning Benjamin Franklin and his circle in an eerily familiar moment of climate crisis, scientific experimentation, technological innovation, energy transition, and political upheaval." —Philip J. Deloria, Leverett Saltonstall Professor of History at Harvard University
- On Air: The Triumph and Tumult of NPR, by Steve Oney. Founded in 1970, NPR is America’s most powerful broadcast news network. Despite being overshadowed by the larger and more glamorous PBS, public radio has long been home to shows such as All Things Considered, Morning Edition, and This American Life that captivate millions of listeners in homes, cars, and workplaces across the nation. NPR and its hosts are a cultural force and a trusted voice, and they have created a mode of journalism and storytelling that helps Americans understand the world in which we live. In On Air, a book fourteen years in the making, journalist Steve Oney tells the dramatic history of this institution, tracing the comings and goings of legendary on-air talents (Bob Edwards, Susan Stamberg, Ira Glass, Cokie Roberts, and many others) and the rise and fall and occasional rise again of brilliant and sometimes venal executives. It depicts how NPR created a medium for extraordinary journalism—in which reporters and producers use microphones as paintbrushes and the voices of people around the world as the soundtrack of stories both global and local.
- We Tell Ourselves Stories: Joan Didion and the American Dream Machine, by Alissa Wilkinson. In this riveting cultural biography, New York Times film critic Alissa Wilkinson examines Joan Didion’s influence through the lens of American mythmaking. As a young girl, Didion was infatuated with John Wayne and his on-screen bravado, and was fascinated by her California pioneer ancestry and the infamous Donner Party. The mythos that preoccupied her early years continued to influence her work as a magazine writer and film critic in New York, offering glimmers of the many stories Didion told herself that would come to unravel over the course of her career. But out west, show business beckoned.
We Tell Ourselves Stories eloquently traces Didion’s journey from New York to her arrival in Hollywood as a screenwriter at the twilight of the old studio system. She spent much of her adult life deeply embroiled in the glitz and glamor of the Los Angeles elite, where she acutely observed—and denounced—how the nation’s fears and dreams were sensationalized on screen. Meanwhile, she paid the bills writing movie scripts like A Star Is Born, while her books propelled her to celestial heights of fame. “A vital new take on Joan Didion’s work, exploring the ways Didion traced the gradual, and increasingly dangerous, merging of Hollywood and its gorgeous fictions with politics, with the uppermost ranks of power, and, perhaps most sweepingly, with the way we understand the world and ourselves.” — Megan Abbott, author of The Turnout
- Care and Feeding: A Memoir, by Laurie Woolever. In this moving, hilarious, and insightful memoir, Laurie Woolever traces her path from a small-town childhood to working at revered restaurants and food publications, alternately bolstered and overshadowed by two of the most powerful men in the business. But there’s more to the story than the two bold-faced names on her resume: Mario Batali and Anthony Bourdain.
Behind the scenes, Laurie’s life is frequently chaotic, an often pleasurable buffet of bad decisions at which she frequently overstays her welcome. Acerbic and wryly self-deprecating, Laurie attempts to carve her own space as a woman in this world that is by turns toxic and intoxicating. Laurie seeks to try it all—from a seedy Atlantic City strip club to the Park Hyatt Tokyo, from a hippie vegetarian co-op to the legendary El Bulli—while balancing her consuming work with her sometimes ambivalent relationship to marriage and motherhood. “Care and Feeding is literary proof that the lives and stories of women so often pushed behind the scenes are always so much more interesting, dynamic, and delicious than the stories we’ve been sold. Woolever's voice, representing women born into a particular kind of world that required shapeshifting and quiet transgressions, is now loud and clear and heroic.” — Lisa Donovan, author of Our Lady of Perpetual Hunger
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Waiting on the Moon: Artists, Poets, Drifters, Grifters, and Goddesses, by Peter Wolf. Peter Wolf grew up in the Bronx, a child of “fellow travelers” whose artistic inclinations influenced both his love of music and his initial desire to become a painter. Stories of his loving and sometimes eccentric parents complement scenes depicting a very young Bob Dylan as he arrived on the Greenwich Village folk scene. Reflections on Wolf’s studies in Boston—where he shared an apartment with David Lynch—are braided with accounts of first love, an untraditional literary education, and early musical influences such as Muddy Waters.
After Wolf joined the J. Geils Band as their front man and his musical fame grew, he rubbed shoulders with other notables who left significant impressions on him, including members of the Rolling Stones, Sly Stone, Tennessee Williams, Alfred Hitchcock, and Van Morrison. Wolf’s marriage to Faye Dunaway is presented in a clear yet balanced and nuanced light. "Nobody, and I mean nobody, has had more close encounters with interesting people than Pete. As if being in one of the most exciting rock ‘n’ roll bands in history wasn’t enough? Who else gets driven home by Peter Sellers? Has Muddy Waters sleep on his floor? Has Alfred Hitchcock trying to get him drunk? Has Bob Dylan give him his pants? And commiserates on the subject of love with Tennessee Williams? You want to read this book."—Steven Van Zandt
All book links in this diary are to my online bookstore The Literate Lizard. If you already have a favorite indie bookstore, please keep supporting them, but If you’re able to throw a little business my way, that would be truly appreciated. I would love to be considered ‘The Official Bookstore of Daily Kos.’ Use the coupon code DAILYKOS for 15% off your order, in gratitude for your support (an ever-changing smattering of new releases are already discounted 20% each week). I’m busily adding new content every day, and will have lots more dedicated subject pages and curated booklists as it grows. I want it to be full of book-lined rabbit holes to lose yourself in (and maybe throw some of those books into a shopping cart as well.)
We also partner Libro.fm for audiobooks. Libro.fm is similar to Amazon’s Audible, with a la carte audiobooks, or a $14.99 monthly membership which includes the audiobook of your choice and 20% off subsequent purchases during the month. Note that the DAILYKOS coupon code is only for the bookstore, not for the audiobook affiliate.
I’m adding more books every week to my RESIST! 20% off promotion. The coupon code RESIST gets you 20% off any of the books featured there.
READERS & BOOK LOVERS SERIES SCHEDULE
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