What Makes Censors Tick?

[...] a “censor is one who seeks to exert control over the culture through law, based on the idea that he or she, speaking for the community, has a right to draw the boundary lines for speech.” The censor is convinced that “some forms of expression are so vile or dangerous that they should be restricted, or so valuable that they should be compelled.” Consequently, censors “claim the moral sanction to speak for the collective, either by enforcing ‘community standards’ against evil expression or by mandating speech that they believe serves the ‘public interest.’” Stephen Rohde, LARB

di fatto Stephen Rohde cita un paragrafo di un libro sulla censura uscito alla fine dello scorso anno, Robert Corn-Revere, The Mind of the Censor and the Eye of the Beholder: The First Amendment and the Censor’s Dilemma (Cambridge University Press)

un altro libro curioso, uscito alla fine dell'anno scorso, è quello di  Jonathan Purkis, Driving With Strangers: What Hitchhiking Tells Us About Humanity (Manchester University Press)

The earliest known written account of hitchhiking was by a student named Charles Brown Jr, who in 1916 described his 800-mile journey from Fort Wayne, Indiana to New York City. He got rides from, among others, a priest, an artist, a teacher and a doctor, the last of these so fascinated by Brown’s adventure that, despite being en route to a medical emergency, he overshot his destination by ten miles.  Mike Jay, LRB