Jun 13, 2023
Editor's Note: Following a backlash so mild it hadn’t even cracked Twitter, Elizabeth Gilbert, the bestselling author of Eat, Pray, Love, initiated a dramatic, public self-cancellation, and removed her latest ‘offending’ work from publication. The crime? Her unreleased novel, which followed a family’s struggle against Soviet communism in the 1930s, was set in Russia, which a small group of actual crazy people on the internet apparently believe forbidden. Gilbert’s was a wild act of self-censorship, which set a dangerous precedent. But mostly… nobody cared, and it was all kind of just embarrassing. Vibe shift? Confirmed.
Kat Rosenfield is a culture writer and author of five novels; her most recent book, You Must Remember This, was released in January. Today she guests for Pirate Wires with a dip into the Gilbert “scandal” that nearly wasn’t, and definitely didn’t need to be.
-Solana
google maps changed the name of “lake ontario” following direction from… the u.s. government. threads users aren’t taking it well.
a history of the most important social phenomenon of the late 2010s: the campaign to censor dissident speech on every major platform, and the end of the open internet as we knew it
dsa victories across the country have sparked a national discussion: what do socialists actually believe? i enrolled in ‘socialism 101’ on reddit to find out