C. Alex Smith's Blog

  “This is a dangerous time for readers and the public servants who provide access to reading materials. Readers, particularly students, are losing access to critical information, and librarians and teachers are under attack for doing their jobs.”   Deborah Caldwell-Stone, director of the American Libraries Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom The Literary Community comes together each year in the last full week of September to honor our freedom to read and share ideas — even unpopular ideas.  Banned Books Week  spotlights historic and current attempts to  censor  literature in schools and libraries. Every year  Flagstaff Writer's Connection  and I join the  American Library Association  to celebrate banned books by reading banned books, and making the public more aware of the problem of censorship. Despite this annual event, book banning has become more prevalent in the last few years. This year, I will be bringing you dai...

Welcome to Gilead There's a reason Margaret Atwood, author of The Handmaid's Tale ,  set Gilead in the United States instead of her native Canada. America has a long history of sexism and misogyny. Studies show the MAGA movement draws on those deep seated feelings of contempt. One study shows that  voters’ measures of hostile sexism and actual racism correlated much more closely with support for MAGA than economic dissatisfaction after controlling for factors like partisanship and political ideology: Another study   found that measures of chivalrous sexism — more traditional, views of women and men’s proper roles in society — didn’t correlate closely with support for Trump. But measures of hostile sexism did. This suggests that MAGA sexism is more about hostility toward women than old-fashioned views of gender roles. That seems to correlate with how the conservative extremist justices on the Supreme Court see women. Idaho vs. United States The Supreme Court just posted...

  Introducing My New Vella Empire is a story told in episodes about a nationalist take over of the United States. I'll be creating episodes into November. The First 10 episodes are free.  Come by, read an episode, and leave me your thoughts.