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In contrast to Twitter, there was no name-calling, biting, or eye-gouging.
Instead, the audience got a reasoned debate about everything fromGreen BooktoThe WiretoPortnoys Complaint.
The gatekeepers have their detractors, but they know how to play nice.
The panel was both decorated and diverse.
To PENs credit, the elephant was acknowledged and interrogated.
Morris pressed Buruma on his decision to publish Ghomeshis piece.
After all, theNYRBis supposed to represent independence of thought and free-spiritedness.
Even in those cases, said Buruma, nobody got fired.
One of Morriss main points of the evening was that people want art that reflects their experience.
It is a completely legitimate thing to observe something shifting in the culture, he said.
That led to somewhat stickier terrain.
There is the practice ofsensitivity readings, nowcommon in YA literatureand the source of several recentbookcancellations.
Prose invokedPortnoys Complaint, which had massive pushback from the Jewish community when it was published.
Ive really come to despise the phrasecall out, she said.
In a way, were living in a time of plague.
Prose said that writing shouldnt affirm the readers ideas; it should challenge them.
And Im kind of astonished by that because I never thought that was the point.
I never thought that was my job or anybody elses job.
He said that if his work had initially been subjected to sensitivity readings, it would have been flagged.
Ive been writing critique of my American-Muslim, Pakistani-Muslim community for ten years.
Kang and Talusan were considerably more sympathetic to the callers-out and the guardians of representation.
In some cases, minorities need to be loud so that be heard.
There are a lot of instances in which a lot of people are unjustly accused … People and minorities, especially if theyre marginalized often have myths about themselves.
For Kang, being called out or canceled isnt as dire as the self-appointed free-speech crusaders make it seem.
And when its done well, people generally dont complain.
