What Happened Today: February 21, 2023
Dahl’s bowdlerized books; Iran plots to kill Jews abroad; A cure for stroke paralysis?
The Big Story
Hundreds of passages in new editions of Roald Dahl’s children’s books have seen the author’s language replaced with new language written not by Dahl, but by a team of sensitivity readers hired by the book’s U.K. publisher, Puffin. The author of classics including James and the Giant Peach and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Dahl had fraught relationships with his editors over changes to his text before he died in 1990. Yet Netflix, which purchased the company that oversees Dahl’s copyrights and trademarks in 2020, seemed to have no concern for respecting the integrity of Dahl’s books when it decided to rewrite them to keep up with current political fashions—a move that the author Salman Rushdie called “absurd censorship.”
Driven, it would seem, by a desire to make more money on versions of Dahl’s books that have had the sharp edges removed so as to make them as inoffensive as possible, the sensitivity readers felt the need to change even the most innocuous phrases. All appearances of the word fat have been taken out of Dahl’s books, and the words father and mother have been replaced with parents or family. The Oompa-Loompas, once described as “tiny men,” are now called “small people,” and one witch who once tried to disguise her identity as “a cashier in a supermarket” has been changed to “a top scientist.”
“The problem with taking license to re-edit classic works is that there is no limiting principle. You start out wanting to replace a word here and a word there and end up inserting entirely new ideas (as has been done to Dahl’s work),” Suzanne Nossel, chief executive of PEN America, wrote on Twitter. “Those who might cheer specific edits to Dahl’s work should consider how the power to rewrite books might be used in the hands of those who do not share their values and sensibilities.”
In the Back Pages: Writers of the World, Denounce!
The Rest
→ Number of the Day: 80%
That’s the percentage of all American Jewish adults who say antisemitism has worsened over the past five years, according to new research from the American Jewish Committee. Carrying out a pair of studies at the end of 2022, researchers found that more than 1 in every 4 American Jews had been the target of either an online or in-person physical attack motivated by antisemitism. Anti-Jewish sentiment was front and center over the weekend at a girl’s high school basketball game between Shalhevet Firehawks and the Buena Park Coyotes, with Shalhevet players retelling several episodes of antisemitism to the Jewish Journal. “My friend was standing across the gym by the other team when she texted me and told me they were chanting Kanye West at her the entire game. They were shouting at her and yelling that they were going to fight after the game,” one player said. “When our girls were shooting foul shots, some Buena Park students held up pictures of Swastikas on their phones to distract them.”
→ “We’re a court. We don’t really know about these things. These are not the nine greatest experts about the internet,” Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan said on Tuesday during oral arguments in the first of a pair of landmark cases on internet regulation, which she suggested would ultimately have to be decided by Congress.
Under review is Section 230, the law that grants legal immunity to social media platforms that host content shared by third parties; it’s become the bedrock for the modern web. If the Supreme Court were to strike down or scale back the law, companies like Google, Facebook, and Twitter would have to significantly limit the types of content hosted on their platforms.
Yet the two cases, which were brought against Google and Twitter, could be dismissed by the justices because of how the underlying plaintiffs’ claims run afoul of the existing Anti-Terrorism Act, thus leaving any changes to Section 230 to legislators.
Though there’s widespread support for legislative overhaul of the law across the aisle, partisan divides about both the problems and the solutions for Section 230 have led to a stalemate over revisions.
→ Thread of the Day:
Editor of The Jewish Chronicle Jake Wallis Simons highlights recent coverage confirmed by British Security Minister Tom Tugendhat that Iran had begun to map the location of “Jewish diaspora for an assassination campaign that will be triggered if Israel attacks its nuclear facilities.” The startling campaign included targeting high-level Jewish figures that one source said were picked by Iran so that “the diaspora would have a very nasty surprise.”
→ A new train in northern Spain cost $275 million, but the 31 cars ordered are too big for the special mountain tunnels. Now the trains will be delayed until engineers can fix the mismatch. The new train cars were initially set to replace an aging fleet in the northern region of Cantabria. President Miguel Ángel Revilla said that “heads must roll” after the “unspeakable botch” was brought to light by local media outlet El Comercio. Two of Spain’s top transport officials have since resigned over the ordeal, and Spain’s rail operator, Renfe, announced it will redesign the new cars for the unique mountain tunnel dimensions.
→ Video of the Day:
Turkey was rocked by a 6.3 magnitude earthquake on Monday just two weeks after a massive set of earlier earthquakes led to more than 41,000 killed in the region. Rescuers are still finding survivors among the initial rubble and destroyed buildings 261 hours after the initial quakes—one of the survivors is seen here in this video on a call to his brother, who is hearing for the first time that his sibling is still alive, soon after he was rescued.
→ Map of the Day:
In the past three years, at least 129 people have been shot and 14 killed in the vicinity of Temple University’s Philadelphia campus, with the latest victim a campus police officer. Over the weekend an 18-year-old suspect was taken into custody and charged with the murder of officer Christopher Fitzgerald. Authorities say video footage revealed that Fitzgerald, 31, had fallen while pursuing the suspect related to a criminal complaint near the campus. The suspect then stood over Fitzgerald, shot him in the head, and rummaged through his pockets before moving on to carjack an Infiniti from a nearby driver at gunpoint. The suspect was picked up by his mother and taken home, where authorities eventually apprehended him.
→ Police in Columbus, Georgia, were still looking for suspects after nine children between the ages of 5 and 17 were injured in a shooting at a gas station over the weekend. Authorities haven’t determined a motive but believe the victims were hit by shooters engaged in a fire fight that had spilled over from a nearby house party. Counted as the 82nd mass shooting in the United States this year by Gun Violence Archive, all of the children are expected to survive their injuries.
→ A novel treatment that involves surgically implanting thin electrodes into the necks of patients who’ve been partially paralyzed by strokes led to promising results, including one woman who was able to open and close her hand for the first time in nearly a decade. “We were all in tears,” the patient told The Wall Street Journal. “I get chills just thinking about it.” It could take several more years of larger studies until this technique, which was discussed in a new paper published this week in the journal Nature Medicine, is made widely available. Yet neurologists remain optimistic that the treatment, which delivers low-current electrical pulses to the spinal cord, could lead to dramatic improvements for a wide swath of stroke survivors.
→ Congratulations to Tablet’s Deputy Editor Jeremy Stern for winning a spot in the Mercatus Center’s 24th Emergent Ventures program, which will come with a grant to write a book.
Read More: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2023/02/emergent-ventures-winners-24th-cohort.html
TODAY IN TABLET:
China’s Future Ain’t What It Used to Be by Josef Joffe
20 years after the Goldman report, the BRICS are floundering
Finland Takes Another Look at Youth Gender Medicine by Leor Sapir
A recent interview with the country’s top gender expert shows how out of step the American medical establishment is with its European counterparts
SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.
Writers of the World, Denounce!
Progressive activists repeat the sins of the past
Perhaps the most enduring of communism’s many ignominious contributions to Western intellectual life is the collective letter of denunciation.
In 1958, after the writer Boris Pasternak won the Nobel Prize for Literature, the presidium of the Union of Soviet Writers voted unanimously to expel him in a move that was reported on the front page of the New York Times. According to this governmentally-controlled body, the author of Dr. Zhivago had committed “treason with regard to the Soviet people, the cause of socialism, peace, and progress paid for by a Nobel Prize in order to intensify the Cold War.” Articles in Literaturnaya Gazeta, an official organ of the union, denounced the Jewish author as a “Judas” and likened him to a “snake” that had emerged from the “poetical dungwaters of lyrical manure.”
In 1969, the union expelled another author whose work challenged the Soviet regime, Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, for “antisocial behavior.” The following year, Solzhenitsyn, like Pasternak before him, won the Nobel. In an angry statement, also reported on the front page of the Times, the union decried how “works by this writer that were illegally taken abroad and published there have long been used by Western reactionary circles for anti-Soviet aims.”
In 1973, an open letter signed by 40 members of the Soviet Academy of Sciences denounced the physicist Andrei Sakharov for his criticisms of Kremlin human rights abuses, which, they alleged, had found favor with “the most reactionary imperialist circles” abroad. Sakharov, too, won the Nobel Prize (for Peace) two years later, only for 72 members of the Academy — a full third of its membership — to sign a florid statement declaring that the award was “of an unworthy and provocatory nature and is blasphemy against the noble ideals cherished by us all of humanism, peace, justice, and friendship between peoples of all countries.”
The pattern of denunciation by committee was repeated in countless cases across the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact. Though the totalitarian states of the Eastern bloc could not prevent the emergence of individual truth-seekers and dissidents like Pasternak, Solzhenitsyn, Sakharov and Vaclav Havel in Czechoslovakia, the public shaming rituals served a broader purpose: to dissuade the great majority of the people from following their own consciences by making them witness the high cost paid by others.
Systems of government may come and go, but habits of mind persist. Over three decades after communism was relegated to the ash heap of history, a new group of progressive writers are embracing the language and tactics of their ideological forebears. Importing the methods of East Berlin to Brooklyn, they seek to enforce intellectual conformity on one of the most contentious issues facing America today by denouncing their colleagues for deviating from the party line.
The exemplar of this effort is an open letter sent last week by the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) to The New York Times lambasting the paper’s “irresponsible, biased coverage of transgender people.” Signed by over 100 “leaders” and organizations including filmmaker Judd Apatow, actress Lena Dunham, purported comedian Hannah Gadsby, and a host of state-level LGBT rights organizations, the letter is written in the language of an irate undergraduate, featuring many of that genre’s by now tiresome tics and catchphrases, such as the use of CAPITAL LETTERS to denote anger, promises to “educate” the troglodytes who hold incorrect beliefs, and instructions that they “do the work.” Among the Times’ alleged sins are its decision to give “noted cisgender heterosexual Pamela Paul space for her unfounded thoughts” on the op-ed page, where her offenses have ranged from lamenting how so-called trans-inclusive language (“pregnant people,” “menstruators,” and “bodies with vaginas”) erases women to questioning why the word “queer” has supplanted “gay” and “lesbian.” The letter also takes the Times to task for hiring Never Trump conservative David French as a columnist, citing his previous work for a Christian legal organization that has filed lawsuits to prevent natal males from participating in women’s sports. (Though French, like Paul, is a “cisgender heterosexual,” apparently he’s not a “noted” one). Oddly for a letter so seized with the plight of the gender nonconforming, French gets no credit from GLAAD for his controversial defense, on First Amendment grounds, of public libraries hosting drag queen story hours, a principled position that earned him a massive amount of grief from polemicists further to his right.
While faulting the Times for spreading “inaccurate and harmful misinformation about transgender people and issues” in “article after article, page after page” for “more than a year,” the GLAAD letter does not point to a single factual error in the paper’s coverage other than the temporary misgendering of a trans woman in a story about a shooting at a Colorado gay club last year. Published in the immediate aftermath of a deadly incident while news was still developing and facts were difficult to ascertain, and “relying on a first-person account,” the article initially identified the woman as a “drag dancer.” After confirming that she was in fact transgender, the Times fixed the mistake. A statement GLAAD cites from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), issued in response to a lengthy Times article concerning the debate within the medical community about the provision of puberty blockers to gender dysphoric children, does not dispute any facts in the paper’s coverage but rather faults it for promoting “inaccurate narratives.” The Times did not issue any corrections to the piece.
“We could spend paragraphs listing every anti-LGBTQ and every anti-trans article the Times has printed in just the past year, but we would rather focus on action,” the letter states, before proceeding, as these missives always do, to a series of ultimatums. GLAAD issued three demands, listed under the headings “STOP,” “LISTEN,” and “HIRE.” To avoid GLAAD’s continued wrath, the paper must “Stop printing biased anti-trans stories” (deadline: immediately), “Hold a meeting with transgender community members and leaders, and listen throughout that meeting” (deadline: within 2 months), and “Hire at least 2 trans people on the Opinion side and at least 2 trans people on the news side” (deadline: within 3 months). It then concludes with a suggestion that the paper of record look to Vox, John Stewart, and John Oliver for how to cover transgender issues.
GLAAD parked a billboard truck outside the paper’s Eighth Avenue headquarters (“DEAR NEW YORK TIMES: STOP QUESTIONING TRANS PEOPLE’S RIGHT TO EXIST & ACCESS TO MEDICAL CARE”) and coordinated the release of its letter with a separate one signed by hundreds of the paper’s contributors. What the GLAAD communiqué lacks in subtlety, the letter from Times “contributors” (some of whose claims to that distinction consist of a single letter to the editor) makes up for in self-righteousness. “As thinkers,” the signatories haughtily declare, in a text that singles out a number of Times reporters and columnists for obloquy, “we are disappointed to see The New York Times follow the lead of far-right hate groups in presenting gender diversity as a new controversy warranting new, punitive legislation.” The sudden prominence of transgender issues in the West can absolutely be described as a “new controversy,” a characterization which GLAAD and its allies implicitly acknowledge by engaging in a well-funded, well-organized public relations battle against the most influential newspaper in the country. (So controversial is the transgender question that it played a major role in bringing down Scotland’s long-serving leader earlier this month). And while the Times has covered many aspects of this controversy — including but hardly limited to the appropriate age at which to administer puberty blockers to gender dysphoric children, concerns by parents that schools are hiding their children’s gender transitions, and the participation of transgender women in women’s sports — categorizing the paper’s coverage as giving aid and comfort to the mortal enemies of transgender people is absurd.
But not to the letter’s signatories, who believe that the traditional values of American journalism — objectivity foremost among them — should be replaced with advocacy. “The natural destination of poor editorial judgment is the court of law,” they write, mentioning a legal brief filed by the Attorney General of Arkansas in support of a bill that would make it illegal to provide puberty blockers to children, and which cited three Times articles. But the ways that politicians make use of Times reporting should not be a concern for the paper—its role is only to report the truth. Holding the Times responsible for what elected officials do with the information it uncovers is like the Union of Soviet Writers complaining that the works of Pasternak, Solzhenitsyn, and Sakharov deserved to be denounced because they were cited approvingly by “imperialists” and “fascists.” (That the Times, through its measured coverage of transgender issues, “wants fascism,” is an accusation that one of the letter’s signatories has made). “I believe that there are editors at The New York Times who believe that they are covering this issue properly, that it's in the public interest to present both sides,” says the ringleader of the letter, for whom only one side is worth hearing.
Contrary to GLAAD and the thousands of people who have since signed onto the two letters attacking the Times, the science concerning transgender issues is far from “SETTLED.” Indeed, with regard to the debate among medical professionals, the timing of GLAAD’s campaign could not have been less fortuitous. The week before the letters were published, a former case manager at the Washington University Transgender Center at St. Louis Children’s hospital published a harrowing account in The Free Press of her four-year stint counseling children with gender dysphoria, many of whom were rushed into gender transitions without “formal protocols for treatment.” The situation, she concluded, was “morally and medically appalling,” with vulnerable young people essentially treated like lab rats. A few days later, The Times of London published a blockbuster report exposing the downfall of England’s Tavistock gender clinic, where a large portion of the patients were gay young people who tragically came to see transitioning as a way of overcoming their unwanted same-sex attraction. According to one former employee, Tavistock was implementing “conversion therapy for gay kids,” with some clinicians darkly joking that, at the rate their work was going, there would be “no gay people left.” Last fall, The Guardian (hardly a right-wing outlet) described “the lack of consensus within the medical profession about how best to proceed if a child experiences gender dysphoria,” a simple statement of fact that, by the lights of GLAAD and its journalistic auxiliaries, constitutes hate speech. (Along with the U.K., Finland and Sweden have issued new guidelines drastically limiting the “gender affirming” medical interventions GLAAD assures us are beyond reproach). Understandably fearful of the bullying that invariably greets those who question the dogmas of radical gender ideology, every source from the U.K. National Health Service interviewed by the Guardian did so on the condition of anonymity.
Three years ago, when The New York Times published an op-ed by a sitting United States Senator that was unpopular with many of its staff, the paper’s leadership crumbled to the mob, publicly disavowing the piece and forcing the editorial page editor to resign. Fortunately, in reaction to this latest contretemps, the Times brass have responded rationally this time. Last week, showing the spine that his predecessor Dean Baquet lacked, Executive Editor Joe Kahn sent a tersely worded memo to staff stating that the paper does “not welcome, and will not tolerate, participation by Times journalists in protests organized by advocacy groups or attacks on colleagues on social media and other public forums.”
A leaked portion of a conversation in the Times #LGBTQIA Slack channel illustrates what Kahn is up against. “I don’t think a public forum and a coordinated campaign with advocates is the way to [improve the paper’s coverage of transgender issues],” a reporter, who has worked at the Times for nearly three decades, writes.
“Ok, understood,” responds a news assistant who graduated from college in 2016. “So, what do you want to do to help queer and trans folx get true respect and feel safe?”
A software engineer in the paper’s cooking section chimes in. “You are free to do that in spaces that are appropriate. I don’t think this one is. This is a community for queer people”
“I’m a lesbian, folks,” the reporter responds, “so maybe I am queer?”
Much will depend on whether the Times upholds the principle of journalistic objectivity against those who would trash it in favor of agitprop. About few other subjects are Americans more afraid to express an opinion today than transgender issues. The chief reason for this phenomenon is the bullying which one side habitually employs — exploiting the language of emotional blackmail to intimidate skeptics into submission — whenever its shibboleths are subjected to the slightest scrutiny. Insisting that anyone who questions novel medical treatments being administered to children opposes transgender people’s very “right to exist,” citing misleading statistics to claim that gender dysphoric youth will commit suicide unless their cross-sex self-identification is instantly confirmed, and denigrating journalists who dare to report on these issues, are not the argumentative methods conducive to liberal democracy. They smack of Pavel Morozov, the mythical 13-year-old boy transformed into a posthumous hero by the Soviet Union for informing on his parents.
For all the bombast, America’s contentious debate over transgender issues has very little to do with the plight of actual transgender people, a miniscule portion of the population whom a large majority of the public supports protecting from discrimination. What we’re really arguing about are not civil rights and legal protections but, rather, a set of far more expansive propositions like whether the biological concept of sex is a construct, whether people with penises should be allowed into rape shelters and housed in women’s prisons, and whether irreversible medical interventions are appropriate for minors who express discomfort with their gender identity. For the aspiring commissars who joined the collective denunciation of the Times, the vast majority of whom are neither transgender nor medical professionals, staking an extreme position in the “trans” debate is a signifier, a means of conveying that one is on the right side of history in the way that supporting marriage equality for gay couples once did. This is why they compare, ludicrously, the paper’s careful and sensitive reporting about transgender issues to its past coverage “demonizing queers.” Like the Marxist-Leninism of yore, radical gender ideology offers its believers a sense of righteous purpose, moralistic mantras, and devious enemies to despise (with J.K. Rowling fulfilling the role of Emmanuel Goldstein).
The signatories to the open letter protesting The New York Times for its “transphobic” coverage are not the “thinkers” they presume themselves to be, but rather modern-day equivalents of Vaclav Havel’s proverbial greengrocer, the shopkeeper in a communist society who dutifully places signs in his store window asserting various party-approved slogans such as “Workers of the world, unite!”
He put them all into the window simply because it has been done that way for years, because everyone does it, and because that is the way it has to be. If he were to refuse, there could be trouble. He could be reproached for not having the proper decoration in his window; someone might even accuse him of disloyalty. He does it because these things must be done if one is to get along in life.
Describing the scale of the damage wrought at England's Tavistock gender clinic, staff made comparisons to one of the great medical scandals of the 20th century: East Germany’s mass doping of athletes in the 1960’s and 70’s. Decades from now, when we look back at our present transgender moment, the writers at the Times whom the letter condemns will be remembered for their professionalism and scrupulousness in covering a highly complex issue. Those attacking them for thought crimes will be seen as the epigones of their predecessors in the Union of Soviet Writers, as small-minded enforcers of absurdities that were bound to one day fall apart.
Yay Jamie! Great piece.
There's an American analogy for the quack treatments of young people suffering from gender dysphoria with hormones and sterilization: it's the craze for quickie lobotomies in the 1930s, 1940s, and early 1950s, including mobile lobotomy vans. Eventually the states and Feds shut these down, but not before a lot of damage was done.
It's amazing how far down a rational path the European countries mentioned (not just Scandinavia, but Holland and the UK as well) have gone, compared to their direction 10 or 15 years ago. And it's shocking how the conformity machine prevents any rational discussion here. It was similar here versus there with COVID, no? Masks, vaccines, etc.