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Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell
The Atlantic
Excerpt: A decade ago, when the government of Singapore announced its decision to pulp every copy of our picture book, And Tango Makes Three, in the nation’s libraries, we felt profoundly lucky. Not for the pulping—that was alarming—but for the fact that the First Amendment guaranteed that this could never happen in America.
We’re not feeling quite so lucky anymore. In 2023, our book was one of thousands pulled from library shelves around the country, and as we write, an evolving legal strategy being used to defend many such bans threatens to upend decades of precedent preserving the right to read. The danger this doctrine poses to free speech should worry us all—even those who would rather their children not learn about gay penguins.
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The protests that greeted Department of Homeland Security General Counsel James Percival a UCLA School of Law in April were not surprising. Law students, especially at highly ranked schools like UCLA, have become notoriously intolerant of disfavored speakers coming to campus — and few institutions are quite as polarizing as DHS in the “Abolish ICE” era. It was striking, however, that the students who organized the interruptions of Percival’s presentation — with heckling, hacking coughs, cellphones, and the occasional profanity — did exactly what “snowflake” students have been ridiculed and denounced for doing when encountering someone they don’t agree with.
What happens when an entire profession can’t see what’s hiding in plain sight in its own data? That puzzle animated Stony Brook University sociologist Musa al-Gharbi’s keynote at the Heterodox Academy 2026 West Coast Regional Conference, held recently at UC Berkeley.
The deeper problem, he contends, is not bad-faith activism but a structural one: peer review, editing, and committee deliberation only correct for bias when the people doing the correcting actually differ from one another, and the academy and the press increasingly do not. His full speech is transcribed below.
Two years after protests over the Israel-Hamas war roiled college campuses, resulting in the arrests of more than 3,000 students and faculty, a new study finds that students generally oppose punishing “objectionable speech,” unless they consider it “highly harmful.”
The study, conducted by researchers from the Universities of Pennsylvania and Colorado and Stanford and Columbia Universities and published in April in Science Advances, also found that students’ views of objectionable speech depend largely on whom it is targeted at.
