Hey there it's J. V. L. On the secret show today Sarah Longwell was out and I sat down with Bill

Crystal and we talked about a whole lot of deep dark stuff. It's a journey. Here's the show.

So I want to talk.

So I want to talk, is we're reporting on Friday, September 1, and I want to talk is so we're recording on Friday September 1 and I want to talk about a

peace in the New York Times in the op-ed section by a woman named Bridget X-Men and

she is a assistant superintendent in Iowa who has written an op-ed

explaining their

to remove books from their school libraries in her district.

And what, it's a fantastic piece,

I will put a link to this in the show notes people should go and read it

but which says is like Iowa just passed a parental rights bill and at the end of May it went into effect July 1, and it told school teachers administrators that

school libraries may only contain age-appropriate books free of any descriptions or visual depictions of a sex act.

And it holds individual teachers and school librarians legally accountable for any violations found.

And so all of this is done with, again, as all these laws are done,

incredibly broadly written, The State Department of Education refused to give any guidance to individual school districts and so teachers had basically

eight weeks and teachers administrators to go through all of their libraries, which includes not just the school system libraries but individual classroom libraries and another provision of the law, I'm going to find this here for, is that the teachers had to have read every book in their libraries and be able to recall details of every book in libraries.

So this puts another layer of accountability

and accountability, air quotations on it.

And so among the books that they had to pull they had to pull the color purple

They had to pull beloved they had to pull I know why the cage bird sings the

handmaid's tail and it's it's pretty bad I think and what she says is that they wound up using AI to try to

narrow the list of books that they really had to look at, which is what they got sort of briefly famous for.

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