I'm Italy Mo and this is The Slowdown.

Just recently, a Missouri school board voted to ban Tony Morrison's novel, The Blueest

Eye, and a Tennessee school board banned mouse, the graphic memoir of Art Spiegelman

about his own family's experience in the Holocaust.

Book banning infuriates me.

We are banning books to keep our children safe, but we can't pass gun laws to protect

our children from school shootings.

In today's urgent poem, we see the speaker wonder what it might take to value the safety

of all children.

Let me tell you, it's not banning books.

The wrong question, more than once, by Matt Donovan.

For most of the shift, it was more about not looking bored of wanting to seem invisible

behind the ER desk, while nothing much happened at all.

A cubs banner twitched in the air vent, a nurse wearing a welcome to the madhouse t-shirt

described a stick figure meme.

Someone wanted to know why a drunken John Doe had pissed in the supply closet, and

a man half-hidden behind a triage curtain never stopped staring me down.

Half-rhythm pings from somewhere chased a pulsing beep that made it seem as if something

had gone wrong.

I asked, and then later asked again, nothing was ever wrong.

And because the shift would be ending soon, I asked the question I was there to ask after

reading about a surgeon who'd claimed our gun problems could be solved if only we'd

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