“Poets,” Stanley Kunitz writes, “are not easily domesticated… and they can be outrageous; but they are also idealists and visionaries whose presence is needed… to clear the air of corruption and hypocrisy, to mock oppression, and to challenge [spiritual] apathy.” Poets, yes, and teachers and librarians along with citizens and artists of every stripe and kind. Everyone is invited to clear the air of corruption and hypocrisy, to mock oppression, to challenge apathy, leaning into the never-ending pursuit of new knowledge, novel insights, the complex, fugitive concept, “truth,” and the right to think at all. We’re remembering the brilliant artist, writer, and film-maker Marjane Satrapi who lived her life fighting for freedom in her native Iran as well as internationally—she “died of sadness” a few weeks ago, and we join legions of her admirers and comrades-in-arms in mourning her passing. Persepolis, her acclaimed comic book/memoir of a childhood and adolescence during and after the Islamic Revolution, was banned again and again in multiple venues. When a Texas state representative recently released a list of 850 books---including Persepolis—and advised school libraries to report whether they had any of the titles on his list, a school district in San Antonio removed more than 400 books. And when the McMinn County school board voted unanimously to ban the Holocaust graphic novel Maus from the school’s classrooms and library, a Tennessee pastor organized a book burning, live-streamed on Facebook, where books with “demonic influences”—including Persepolis— were fed to the flames. As Governors and Senators join the troglodyte choir, it becomes increasingly clear that as terrible as banning Marjane Satrapi or Art Spiegelman is in itself, the larger target is any third-grade teacher or high school English teacher anywhere in the country. The main victims of this galloping censorship are children and youth, of course, but it’s important to note that while truth-telling can and is being banned in schools by state legislators and local boards, it’s a wide, wide world out there, and repression activates resistance. Neither kids nor teachers are simply one-dimensional victims of ignorant policies. Teachers are launching Banned Books Clubs and after-school local history study groups at high schools around the country, and the message is clear: you need no one’s permission to interrogate the world. We’re joined by Jarrett Dapier, a librarian and champion of the right of free people to read freely, and the author of Wake Now in the Fire, a fictionalized graphic account of a series of true events when a community—teachers, students, and parents in Chicago—fought for and won the right to read Persepolis.

Debt is everywhere, and its demands are boundless—debt demands repayment, of course, and it typically demands interest on top of that. But debt’s visible and obvious demands are just the beginning. Debt’s sticky, spidery web demands, as well, fear and anxiety, distrust and dishonesty, guilt and shame—it demands insecurity and precariousness. The demands are financial, of course, and personal, but also psychological, cultural, political, and existential. We’ re joined by Kristin Collier, author of What Debt Demands:Family Betrayal and Precarity in a Broken System, part memoir and part research from the ground—a compelling journey through the matrix that debt has woven, and a vision of what it would mean to be bound to one another rather than to the state or to the banks.

Colleges and universities—and all educational institutions—are natural sites of struggle over fundamental questions: what knowledge and experiences are of most value? Who should have access to that valuable knowledge? What is the truth about this or that, and what’s the evidence? Where do we come from and what we hope to be? These questions are messy, full of conflict, even dangerous, and universities are both venues to discuss ideas, and stages where we put those ideas into practice, arguing and contending over the meaning of history, class, race, religion, gender, sexuality, and every other aspect of what it means to be fully human. We’re joined by labor historian Tom Alter, a tenured professor at Texas State University who was summarily fired this year for his political beliefs, and who is engaged in a fight about the right to think at all---a struggle that has implications for all of us.