 We're gonna talk about something that isn't related to the to the broader American economy children's books Specifically we're gonna talk about weird children's fantasy novels by the author Roald Dahl Which were recently subject to edits by sensitivity readers. There were words removed Phrases changed in some cases whole sentences added to make dolls work supposedly less offensive Obviously, I'm gonna call this segment the horse you rolled in on Dahl, of course, is the famous author of books like Matilda James the giant peach He died decades ago and his works are now owned by the Roald Dahl publishing group which in 2021 announced they would proceed with a number of adaptations on Netflix this year dolls publisher puffin books worked with an outside Consultant a group called inclusive minds to make changes to the text of his book the edited versions Removed words like fat ugly and crazy in other cases small details were changed in the witches For example women characters were who were became top scientists and business owners Previously, they had been cashiers in a supermarket these the edits made gender specific terms gender neutral They omitted references to mothers and fathers and in general focused on descriptions related to weight gender race and ethnicity Robbie, I know you have written and and thought an awful lot about these issues This is just the latest example of so-called sensitivity readers Being brought in to edit works intended for young readers give us some background here Just ground us in what's going on. How pervasive is this? How does it play out behind the scenes? Does it worry you? It worries me greatly and it also worried Roald Dahl himself. I want to read it to you a quote from him He said this I've worn my publishers that if they later on so much has changed a single comma in one of my books They will never see another word for me never ever and he said when I am gone if that happens Then I'll wish mighty Thor knocks very hard on their heads with his Mjolnir. That's the hammer if you've seen the Marvel movies I've seen them all the statement was made before the Marvel movies or Yes, or he says I will send along the enormous crocodile to gobble them up This is the fate Roald Dahl thought should should await the sensors of his material How would the sensitivity readers rewrite that? a Can we say enormous because we can't say fat so maybe we can't say enormous a hefty crocodile a crocodile of size. How about that? So this is this problem of the sensitivity readers really is quite pernicious So many new writers young writers are subjected to this Ridiculous a group of people who purport to have expertise pertaining to identity race gender sexuality, etc But oftentimes they have no expertise whatsoever. They just they just happen to fit that category cat Rosenfeld It's a wonderful writer. She's a writer of young adult fiction. She also writes for reason on occasion She had a great piece for us on this on describing the plight of this young author who is writing a book about an African-American man who had been Formerly incarcerated or prosecuted just fiction book trying to make it at a university and the author was assumed to be black But it turned out he was Filipino. So the publisher at the last minute was like, wait, wait, you're not black Okay, we have to have someone who's black read this book then and they got like a lady who was British Who was black but like she has no understanding of an incarcerated young African-American adult It makes no sense to have her weighing in on this and this is what awaits so many authors now is having these people who for Totally surface reasons supposedly should be able to weigh in on this Lionel Shriver another author Who has a written for reason or bit you Catherine? You did a great interview with her a while back author of the book What to do we need to talk about Kevin? That was what it's called. She has written so persuasively I think about why this is a bad thing for free expression for for intellectual diversity Forcing authors to only narrowly write about their own experience I mean, that's a that's an attack on the very idea of writing and journalism and all of it You're supposed to persuasively write About other people's experiences with some knowledge, of course if you do a bad job of it You should be criticized But that should be up to the authors not these not these sensitivity readers even more than that I think it's an attack on empathy It's an attack on the idea that you can under that someone can understand an experience that is not their own My favorite story about sensitivity readers was the guy who worked as a sensitivity reader for a publication House and then he of course wrote his own young adult fiction novel which got unpublished Because of sensitivity readers who said no no you can't publish this so Nick I want to ask you here that this is the thing where I sometimes struggle with this issue as a libertarian We have seen authors like Selman Rushdie called this called the called the rolled-out doll edit censorship We've seen a general outcry about this sort of editing But this is a private company making changes to works where it owns the rights I understand the argument I in fact, you know I like in some ways like I buy the argument that it is a kind of censorship But also isn't it just a byproduct of property rights being passed down over the years I mean sometimes the guy down the block is gonna build an ugly addition on his house And it's gonna really make the neighborhood look terrible. Do you think this is fundamentally different? I don't think we're supposed to say ugly anymore P I also want to as I always do because I'm a rolled-all hater from way back I want to point out that he is a raging anti-Semite and it's kind of fascinating that this latest turn of events has kind of taken The light off of that but he if Robbie was quoting from him. Here's a quote that he said There's a trait in the Jewish character that does provoke animosity I mean there's always a reason why anti anything crops up anywhere even a stinker like Hitler Didn't just pick on them for no reason So and that would that came out that came out in the 90s I mean it was a roll doll by his own account was a tremendously awful human being and it doesn't change what's happening here Which is screwed up and I think is is not wrong because you're right This is his literary estate in the same way that dr. Seuss's literary estate can do whatever they want including not publishing things I think what is particularly disturbing about this is it's really memory-holding stuff And Cadre Rosenfield again who Robbie mentioned wrote a great essay for us about this and What there are stealth edits, you know, we we've written about the 1619 project where? Mistakes or changes get made without anybody knowing this kind of thing happens It happened, you know ironically to Ray Bradbury the author of Fahrenheit 451 The version of that book that most of us probably read if you grow up in the 70s Was a bolder rise to addition that he didn't know that his publisher changed words in it to make it more Palatable for high school audience. Yes, and he flipped specifically for school children Yeah, and he flipped out when he heard that and he made Valentine You know publish the actual book when he found out about it and what's interesting here and again This isn't a direct contradiction of what we're talking about here But when you as we shift to a electronic media and Cadre Rosenfield has talked about this We you don't actually own the media in the same way It's one thing if you downloaded a song or a file onto your computer But if you're reading it through Kindle or through a variety of other things You are licensing the right or you're buying a license to read that through that But Amazon owns it and Amazon actually can completely vaporize your collection of works They can change things and update texts with all sorts of things without telling you and Cadre Rosenfield has talked I think very persuasively about this that that may or may not be a good idea in any given circumstance But the fact that we're not aware of it or thinking about it or noting it is Troubling because you know this without going full Orwell or a full Bradbury You know it's a it's a good idea to understand the editing process because we're constantly revising ourselves the stories We tell about ourselves the stories that we share with our children, etc And one of the issues here is that it's not just that books are being censored or edited after the fact it's that authors are Self-censoring and there is a chilling effect here in which authors feel like they can't write about certain topics They can't write in certain ways Catherine. I actually want to ask you the mom question now We're gonna be like that get there eventually you have kids in the Target age range for road doll books, right? So how do you think about this as a parents our sensitivity readers actually? Protecting kids from anything because I just recall sensitivity readers weren't a thing when I was a kid but but like Sorious librarians and parents were and there were various adult authority figures that tried to hide age Inappropriate material from me stuff that I really should not have been reading and I will tell you it did not work at all So I actually think one of the best ways for kids to encounter troubling ideas is through the veil of fiction I think that when you're you know when you're processing something new that is scary I Know I learned a lot of things that I wasn't quite ready to think about as real in the context of Particularly the kind of fiction that rolls all right. It's like the ridiculous the absurd This isn't this isn't waiting for me under my bed or is it and that I think that taking that away from kids is Probably a mistake, but of course taking things away from kids is really always just the thin end of the wedge for taking it away from adults