Perhaps the most maddening thing about banning, censoring, making things secret, is that it is always about privilege: I can know, but you can’t. You can’t handle the truth. Adult to child version: this is for your own good. (You don’t need to know about sex.) The powerful, the elite, the wealthy, the educated, the military, and the underworld all say, “This is...

Today’s “books” are so different from what we used to call “books” that it’s hard to understand what “banning” them means. How does one burn an electronic book? How can it be suppressed at all? How can issues like pornography be pursued when books are no longer local, which is the locus of most obscenity laws for the simple reason that it’s different...