Katha Pollitt writes:

When W.W. Norton decided to cease distributing Blake Bailey’s biography of Philip Roth after several women accused Bailey of rape and other outrages, I called up my local bookstore and reserved a copy. When Amazon stopped selling When Harry Became Sally, which argues from a conservative point of view that it is not possible to change your sex, I went to Alibris.com and bought a used one. I would have bought the Dr. Seuss books withdrawn from distribution by their publisher, too, but I was too late: the few copies for sale online are going for hundreds of dollars. That these books had become “controversial” made me more curious about them than I otherwise would have been. I’m a grown-up, I thought to myself; I can make up my own mind about them.

These books were taken out of circulation for different reasons. Bailey’s book was discontinued by the publisher because of its author’s alleged wrongdoing. The Dr. Seuss case involves the business group that owns all his rights. When Harry Became Sally is just about one bookseller’s right to choose its wares, but it’s a bigger deal because of Amazon’s size: its sales account for more than half of all books sold in the United States. What these cases share—along with the successful drives to get Hachette to de-accept Woody Allen’s memoir and Simon & Schuster to cancel plans to publish Josh Hawley’s The Power of Big Tech—is that the challenges come from the left, broadly defined: trans activists, feminists, anti-racists, anti-Trumpers.

The left’s new enthusiasm for getting bad books taken off the shelves is a mistake. It’s in everyone’s interest, but especially the left’s, to have as broad a discourse as possible. [Continue reading…]