There’s been a lot of dire news about literacy lately about the low rates of reading among men. The general concerns about literacy are merited. <a href="https://www.edweek.org/leadership/reading-scores-fall-to-new-low-on-naep-fueled-by-declines-for-struggling-students/2025/01">Eighth-grade reading scores</a> are at a 30-year low. Despite <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/07/nyregion/nyc-student-reading-scores-drop.html">millions of dollars spent on literacy programs</a>, one-third of fourth graders <a href="https://siouxlandnews.com/news/nation-world/more-than-a-third-of-us-4th-graders-cant-read-on-a-basic-level-test-results-show-recent-national-test-assessments-cognitive-scientists-brain-research-methodology-spelling-sounding-out-pronunciation?fbclid=IwY2xjawToPalwZG9mAWJyaWQRMVJ3WEJadXB6TFBqVm1LMEdzcnRjBmFwcF9pZBAyMjIwMzkxNzg4MjAwODkyAAEeTOuW8MStKZXTYrfmhP5pj0KaGqobsngjoGyEfgO7ZR4x60dkFyjCIaWjJYc">have not achieved a basic reading level</a>. College students, even at elite schools, are showing up <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/11/the-elite-college-students-who-cant-read-books/679945/">unable to read long-form</a>.
And it’s no wonder: Every demographic surveyed reports <a href="https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12496190/">a decline in time spent reading for pleasure</a>. That means 4th-grade, 8th-grade, and college students’ parents. Nearly half of all adults <a href="https://www.statista.com/chart/32988/share-of-respondents-who-read-or-listened-to-books/">did not read a single book</a> in 2024. None of this is good. But the focus on men and their reading habits has taken a propagandist turn.
Much of it comes in the form of scolding, such as this <a href="https://www.the-independent.com/arts-entertainment/books/news/men-reading-fiction-douglas-stuart-b2993800.html">warning</a> from &#8220;queer, working-class Scottish novelist&#8221; Douglas Stuart about the “long-term hurt caused by men not reading” and numerous hysterical one-off essays like <a href="https://invernadero.substack.com/p/men-arent-reading-fiction-and-its">this beauty</a> titled “Men aren’t reading fiction and it’s hurting all of us” in which the author actually comments on the necessity of fiction for men because it could “change their downward spiral of hatred.”
Then there’s this New York Times Style <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/25/style/fiction-books-men-reading.html">wrap-up</a> of the topic that connects men reading fewer novels with “a variety of social maladies, up to and including deleterious effects on American democracy itself.”
It’s ubiquitous, this mainstream language about violence and &#8220;hurting&#8221; and hatred when it comes to stats about men and reading. Everything is framed in the lexicon of misogyny and toxic masculinity. Worse, I don’t believe the data that are being cited reflect the truth — where the alarmists bother to cite data, that is.
In fact, my own company’s data show the opposite trend. It’s men who are reading and talking about fiction. They’re doing it seriously, like it’s a job. The reason I believe the mainstream media don’t count them as readers? Many of the screeds like those above rely on these <a href="https://www.deloitte.com/us/en/insights/industry/technology/technology-media-and-telecom-predictions/2022/gender-gap-in-reading.html">2021 data points</a>: &#8220;A study by Nielsen Book Research found that, of the 10 bestselling male authors, readership was roughly evenly divided by gender, with 55% male readers and 45% female readers. In contrast, only 19% of the 10 bestselling female authors’ readers were male, compared to 81% female.&#8221;
In other words, men’s literacy is being judged according to the number of modern novels they buy (Nielsen data tracks sales measurement) and — in the case of the Guardian author and article linked above — the number of female authors they read.
What if men actually are reading? They’re just reading work that wasn’t written in the past decade by New York Times-bestselling authors (most of whom are women who write romantasy and domestic fiction, by the way). Did anyone ever consider that? Apparently not.
“So why don’t men read fiction?” <a href="https://invernadero.substack.com/p/men-arent-reading-fiction-and-its">asks</a> Natalia Albin Legorreta, the London-based director of a creative studio called Atarexia. “Well, and try not to gasp, one of the main reasons is misogyny. If we look at the numbers, more women being published in fiction means men are less likely to pick up a novel.”
The holes in her logic are Volkswagen-sized. Yet hers is a popular theory about men and fiction. The Margaret Atwood theory. I say it’s wrong.
A year ago, I co-founded a literacy platform with two partners. We were three open-school advocates from the Twin Cities in the pandemic years. We chose 13- to 17-year-olds as our target because they were arguably the ones who suffered most during the 2020-21 closures. Our goal was to help them love reading, starting with classic literature. On the advice of focus groups, we built in a social media discussion feature because it would appeal to teens.
In order to get to kids, of course, you have to appeal to mothers, so they were our secondary target. We drew up personas. A 14-year-old girl and her 45-year-old &#8220;CEO of education&#8221; mom. We worked with advisers in the ed tech space, even moving to northern Kentucky, where a group of entrepreneurs had set up shop to grow startups like ours.
Then we launched. It was June; traditional school had just gotten out. But first lady Usha Vance was launching her summer reading program. And homeschool groups assured us they were reading year-round. We had a list of interested mother/teen pairings, plus some education experts. Librarians, rec center coordinators. We released our product, and uptake was slow.
No time! 80% of our beta group said. On vacation! Kids at home! There was one phrase we heard over and over: Too distracted! 
But there was one small group of users that signed on that first week and never let up: men.
We’d loaded the app with “Little Women,” “The Secret Garden,” and Oz books. Seeing the data, we shifted gears and published serialized versions of “Crime and Punishment,” “My Man Jeeves,” “Don Quixote,” and “David Copperfield.” Mark Twain, G.K. Chesterton, Herman Melville. The men, ranging in age from their mid-30s to 75, tore through these and commented. 
But they also read “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” by Anita Loos, “Frankenstein” by Mary Shelley, and, charmingly, the Oz books. I got half a dozen messages from manly family dudes who wanted to discuss Ozma and the wizard. Whatever we put up, these guys read. They debate with humor and invite friends to join.
We’ve had two users get so engaged in the app that they’ve taken literacy on as a crusade, leaving breadcrumb comments for younger users and uploading new stories for us.
“These are the men who want meaning,” one of our partners (the father of such a man) put it. “They’re the young, <a href="https://www.thefp.com/p/meet-americas-newest-catholics">newly Catholic</a> family men who really want to do things right. They spent a decade playing video games. Now, they want better.”
They’re the husbands who grocery shop and prepare the meals; middle-aged managers who’ve realized that career is ephemeral; or retired guys who aren’t into golf and want to exercise their minds. They’re courtly and curious, and I’ve learned a lot from what they have to say.
None of us is giving up on young or female audiences, but for the sake of our enterprise, we’ve had to concentrate on the group that loves us. Men. Those &#8220;misogynists&#8221; have temporarily abandoned their &#8220;downward spiral of hatred&#8221; to leave mordant comments on Jane Austen and “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.”
I can’t speak to the world of men, of course, only to our small corner. But these are people who came to us organically, through word of mouth and random social media posts. They’re quietly reading the classics and hurting precisely no one. But that doesn’t sell Rebecca Yarros&#8217; titles or make for breaking news.
***
Ann Bauer is co-founder of <a href="https://www.storyaliz.com/">Storyalīz</a>, a serial publishing platform and literary community.
This article is part of <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/topic/upstream" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Upstream</a>, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.

GettyImages-888806174

How Leftist Critics Turned Men’s Reading Habits Into A Cultural Crusade

Books

Reading

Upstream

This is the third installment of a series on lesser-known books conservatives should know about. First, we did <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/the-books-mainstream-publishing-wont-push-are-finding-an-audience-anyway">thrillers</a>, then <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/what-happens-when-fantasy-escapes-the-gatekeepers">fantasy</a>, and now we&#8217;re taking a look at science fiction. Last time, I complained that fantasy books were too long. This time, two out of my three entries are book-bricks. What can I say? At base, I&#8217;m a science fiction kind of guy.
&#8220;Red State Mars&#8221; by Travis Corcoran
In 2126, a settled Mars is divided between Chinese and American domes, which have amicable trading relations until the Chinese government goes all in on caste-producing genetic engineering and changes its laissez-faire policy toward Chinese Martian colonists who fled Earth to avoid such enhancement. Wouldn&#8217;t you know it? The new regime gets heavy-handed with the American colonists too, and suddenly there&#8217;s a shooting war that, if it doesn&#8217;t kill the colonists off entirely, might just shake up their whole political situation.
We&#8217;ve seen future wars aplenty, but Travis Corcoran&#8217;s take is inspired by &#8220;Albion&#8217;s Seed,&#8221; which points out the different contributions made to America by the Cavaliers, Puritans, Scots-Irish, and Quakers. &#8220;Red State Mars&#8221; uses that lens as well as that of neoreactionary thought (religious theonomists, nationalist ethnats, and building-minded techno-commercialists) to bump different kinds of right-wingers up against each other, getting frustrated with one another in ways that feel familiar to anyone who&#8217;s spent time in or paying attention to conservative subcultures from fringe to mainstream.
Most science fiction books are painfully naive about politics and the difficulties of trying to get a group of people to agree on anything at all. But Travis Corcoran isn&#8217;t just an author: he&#8217;s an elected official who knows those challenges all too well and builds tension with the heroes carefully watching who&#8217;s talking to whom to figure out how a vote may go. And as for the battle scenes, there are some terrific fights on the ground and in space, climaxing with perhaps the most audacious attack you&#8217;ll read in a novel this year and a thoroughly satisfying conclusion. 
Travis Corcoran is a friend, close enough that it feels weird calling him &#8220;Corcoran&#8221; as a reviewer does, and he knows his limitations as an author. So he won&#8217;t mind my calling out a few. One is that while the voices of his family-linked factions are clearly drawn and distinguished, many individuals within those factions are less so. This is most notable with the rambunctious Atkins clan, who all speak with the same voice. There&#8217;s one notable bit of set-up and payoff that doesn&#8217;t quite work (the bad guys are caught trying to do something sneaky, so you expect this to be somehow turned back on the bad guys, except the bad guys get away with it later anyway). Also, while he can write the heck out of engineering plot lines or a procedural manual for a hobby farm (see his homesteading manual &#8220;Escape the City&#8221;), you are not looking for stirring prose in a Travis Corcoran novel except in the form of musings on Martian geology. (Spoiler: There are musings on Martian geology.) 
But will you be dissuaded by that? No, you will not, and you shouldn&#8217;t be. Travis Corcoran&#8217;s &#8220;Red State Mars&#8221; brings to mind the early works of science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein, and that&#8217;s an itch that&#8217;s hard to scratch these days. There&#8217;s a promised sequel or two in the works, but &#8220;Red State Mars&#8221; stands well on its own. And I&#8217;d be remiss if I didn&#8217;t note that Ark Press&#8217;s hardcover, of which I was sent a review copy, is an absolutely gorgeous bit of production: great cover, fantastic dust jacket, and terrific endpaper maps in a package to delight the hand and eye.
&#8220;Theft of Fire&#8221; by Devon Eriksen
If &#8220;Red State Mars&#8221; is early Heinlein, &#8220;Theft of Fire&#8221; is late Heinlein: goofier, more emotional, and hornier. The premise is simple: Genetically engineered anime girl ice princess Miranda Foxgrove, desperate to make her own mark and distinguish herself from her wealthy family, shanghais a ship belonging to asteroid miner Marcus Warnoc, who is vulnerable to a hostile takeover because, strapped for funds, he has descended into piracy. Her goal: force him to take her to a space discovery that she expects to change everything. Will these two crazy kids butt heads but eventually appreciate each other? Will they! Does the ice princess melt and the crusty miner soften as they find new footing with each other and with the mysterious cargo she smuggled aboard? Do they! Does the genetically engineered anime girl need help getting into and out of her skin-tight space suit? Does she ever!
&#8220;Theft of Fire&#8221; is essentially a book in two acts. The first is a lengthy stage play about two characters butting heads in a spaceship while they negotiate their social situation. The second is an action-packed chase and fight; much of it involves the arduousness of extended travel under high-g acceleration. Eriksen takes a lot of care to show off his characters&#8217; personalities and give his protagonist a variety of small-scale objectives, which keeps the power dynamic and the evolution of the characters&#8217; relationship in steady motion. The structure is a bit clunky; the first act runs long, and the second act feels a trifle padded because the nature of the situation means there are limits to how much evolution Eriksen can provide.
The ending provides a meaningful conclusion for its characters but doesn&#8217;t deliver the satisfaction readers want, leaving several threads dangling for a promised sequel (&#8220;Box of Trouble,&#8221; delayed by a family health crisis but reportedly well on the road to completion). As the Hugo- and Dragon- nominated author Kit Sun Cheah fairly <a href="https://kitsuncheah.com/?p=7589">noted</a>, the book&#8217;s generally hard science softens selectively for dramatic purposes, meaning that it operates on the level of a mostly but not overly realistic TV series.
But that&#8217;s still a solid space to operate in, and on a scene-by-scene level, Eriksen writes his tail off. &#8220;Theft of Fire&#8221; got readers&#8217; attention from heavy social media promotion and an indefatigable spousal marketing campaign, but it kept them because Devon Eriksen can build tension, create suspense, and write an enjoyable conversation. His characters have strong, distinctive voices. They feel alive and colorful. Maybe there are too many negotiation scenes, but most of them are quite fun. Maybe there&#8217;s too much banter, but it&#8217;s entertaining. The excess is sufficiently enjoyable that one can see how it would be hard to cut. Devon Eriksen starts from a much, much stronger place than almost all other first-time authors. It&#8217;s hard to see him not getting better from here.
&#8220;Legionnaire&#8221; by Jason Anspach and Nick Cole
Several people recommended I review this one or another by the same authors. I&#8217;ll be honest: I was reluctant. The advertising copy I had seen excitedly billed each installment in this book&#8217;s now-25-book-long series as an essential part of an interconnected whole, which made it sound like work (&#8220;Want to read our book? You&#8217;ll have to read 25 books!&#8221;). Also, I&#8217;d bounced off their military-vs-fantasy-creatures series starter &#8220;Forgotten Ruin,&#8221; which many people like, but I found too padded and repetitive. 
But &#8220;Legionnaire&#8221; was a pleasant surprise: It&#8217;s a zippy little war-on-terrorism-inspired future war tale that sees a bunch of legionnaires on the ground in hostile territory trying to accomplish a mission that&#8217;s not been particularly well-thought-out by their chain of command. When things go awry, a violent attrition of manpower renders the protagonist abruptly in charge in the face of a rapidly unraveling tactical situation and internal wrangling from an infuriating political officer who claims that he was actually put in charge (these claims aren&#8217;t exactly accurate). The combat action plays well, and amid the action and adventure, Anspach and Cole turn both an appreciative and a jaundiced eye on the legion itself: the honor of the service, the regret that it&#8217;s often not actually in service of all that much, and the doomed sense that those who serve will serve anyway.
&#8220;Legionnaire&#8221; isn&#8217;t groundbreaking, but that&#8217;s fine. The ending drags; while it&#8217;s supposed to be an exciting tale that entices you to get the next book, it suffers from its framing as a story told by an old legionnaire in a bar. But &#8220;Legionnaire&#8221; is a perfectly good hammock read, and if you like it, look up other people&#8217;s favorites in the series to see the next book you should try.
***
David Hines has a background in forensic science and international human rights, has written for the Federalist and the American Conservative, and loves books. Possibly even yours.
This article is part of <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/topic/upstream" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Upstream</a>, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.

Gemini_Generated_Image_oqr7maoqr7maoqr7

Three Wild Sci-Fi Books That Refuse To Play It Safe

It is deeply perverse to think that artificial intelligence could learn from the great literature of past times by destroying the books that contain it. It is no surprise that booksellers, collectors, and all others who are concerned about the preservation of cultural history have been angered by <a href="https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/ai-companies-destroying-rare-books">reports</a> that AI companies are purchasing huge numbers of used books, scanning them, and then discarding the original copies. This worry is especially strong when the books in question are rare, old, or otherwise irreplaceable.
But this controversy raises a significantly more complicated question than whether AI should be allowed to read old books. Simply put, it should. If we believe that artificial intelligence is going to become one of the most important intellectual technologies of the coming century, then it is difficult to argue that we should deliberately deprive it of humanity&#8217;s greatest literature. 
An AI trained exclusively on the disposable &#8220;slop&#8221; of the modern internet would be an intellectual disaster. There is immense value in having these systems encounter Shakespeare, Austen, Dostoevsky, Dickens, Homer, Dante, and the thousands of lesser-known writers whose works have accumulated across centuries.
The problem is not that AI wants to learn from the past. The problem is that we have become so careless about possessing the past that we are willing to destroy its physical record to make a digital copy.
The Italian Futurists understood the danger of treating cultural inheritance as something that exists merely to be worshiped. Filippo Marinetti, in his famous 1909 “<a href="https://designmanifestos.org/f-t-marinetti-manifesto-of-futurism/">Futurist Manifesto</a>,” declared, “Museums: cemeteries!” He raged that the Italian obsession with preserving the past was a kind of cultural paralysis, arguing that art existed to propel humanity forward rather than leave it permanently staring backward. 
Marinetti was right: Culture is not alive just because it has been preserved in an untouched, physical state. A book sitting on a shelf, unread, is technically being preserved. But if nobody ever reads it, learns from it, argues with it, writes in response to it, or carries its ideas into the future, then preservation has become little more than embalming. The book is dead and useless, no matter how old or rare it is. We should not want museums that are mausoleums. We should want living libraries.
That is why there is something almost fitting about artificial intelligence becoming one of the newest readers of humanity&#8217;s oldest books. The machine does not need to replace the reader, but it should become another reader. It can expose forgotten works to people who otherwise would never encounter them. It can help translate, search, compare, and contextualize texts that have spent decades or centuries inaccessible to anyone who did not know where to look.
But that possibility makes the physical destruction of books more troubling, not less. A digital copy is not the same thing as the original, and history has given us plenty of reasons to be suspicious of the idea that digitization automatically means preservation. Once information exists primarily as a digital file, someone has to control that file.
We have already seen what happens when cultural works are revised to accommodate the sensibilities of a later generation. In 2023, Steven Spielberg <a href="https://nypost.com/2023/04/26/steven-spielberg-blasts-revising-old-films-for-modern-audiences/">acknowledged</a> that he made a mistake when he altered the 2002 re-release of “E.T.,” replacing the guns carried by federal agents with walkie-talkies. Spielberg eventually came to regret changing his own film, admitting that “E.T.” was a product of its era and that he should never have “messed with the archives” of his own work.
Roald Dahl&#8217;s books provide another, more <a href="https://www.npr.org/2023/02/21/1158347261/roald-dahl-books-changed-offensive-words">insidious example</a>. New editions altered the language from the original texts to make them conform more closely to contemporary sensibilities. Words were changed, descriptions were softened, and new language was inserted, long after Dahl had passed.
The point is not that every digital archive is necessarily untrustworthy, but that a physical copy gives us something a digital copy cannot: an independently existing record. If you own an original edition of a book, nobody can push an update to it. Nobody can change a word while you sleep or aren’t looking. Nobody can alter the file on a server, revoke your access, remove it from a digital storefront or decide that your particular copy no longer complies with the prevailing cultural consensus.
That matters enormously in an age when so much of our intellectual life is moving behind centralized digital systems.
The same principle applies to the increasingly familiar argument over “banned books.” Much of the contemporary political rhetoric surrounding book bans <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/the-real-book-ban-no-one-talks-about">obscures</a> the distinction between restricting access to a book in a particular institution and making a book literally unavailable. But the technological future presents a much more serious version of the latter possibility.
If a book exists only as a digital file controlled by somebody else, its availability is ultimately conditional. It can be deleted, it can be locked, it can be altered, and it can be disappeared. A physical copy sitting in someone&#8217;s private library is much harder to erase — barring the future envisioned in &#8220;Fahrenheit 451” coming to pass.
This is why the response to AI-driven book scanning should not be an anti-technology crusade. It should be a renewed appreciation for private ownership. We need people to own books. Not merely institutions, corporations, or governments. People.
Private collections, family libraries, used bookstores, church libraries, university archives, historical societies, and collectors all provide redundant repositories of cultural memory. The more copies exist in the hands of ordinary people, the harder it becomes for anyone to erase a work from existence.
That does not mean every book needs to be locked behind glass; quite the opposite, the best form of preservation is use. Read the books, give them to your children, loan them to your friends, and write in the margins. Argue with the great ideas.
The Internet Archive offers a useful model. As outlined last week in <a href="https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/08/heres-a-balm-if-the-idea-of-destroying-books-to-train-ai-breaks-your-heart/">Ars Technica</a>, its scanners have deliberately favored slower, more careful processes for fragile and rare books because the purpose of digitization is preservation, not merely extraction. The goal is to create the digital copy without sacrificing the physical one. That process is less efficient, but it is more civilized.
AI companies are engaged in a technological race, and nobody should be surprised that they are looking for the fastest and cheapest ways to acquire the enormous quantities of high-quality text required to train increasingly sophisticated models. But there are some things for which efficiency is not the only relevant metric. A 500-year-old book is not merely a container of tokens. It is an artifact.
Destroying that object in the name of preserving its contents digitally is not necessarily immoral. Sometimes the trade-off may be justified, but it should never be regarded as inconsequential.
There is also a larger lesson here for those of us who are enthusiastic about the future. Futurism does not have to mean amnesia. We can embrace AI, industrialization, automation, and every other technology that makes the future stronger and more capable while simultaneously becoming more serious about preserving the things worth carrying into that future. Indeed, the two projects should reinforce one another.
Let the machines read the classics. Let them help us discover forgotten authors. Let them translate ancient works, compare texts across centuries, and make the world&#8217;s accumulated knowledge accessible to the people.
But while the machines are reading, let us keep the books, not as museum pieces, not as sacred objects that nobody is allowed to touch. As living things. The purpose of preserving a book is not ultimately to ensure that a particular physical object survives for another thousand years. The purpose is to ensure that what is inside it survives, and the only way to guarantee that the past actually has a future is to keep reading it.
***
This article is part of <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/topic/upstream" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Upstream</a>, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.

GettyImages-1496431966

AI Should Read The Classics. We Should Keep Them Too.

Artificial Intelligence

banned books

Literature

Media

Roald Dahl

Steven Spielberg

Former President Barack Obama will have a new project on his plate during the final stretch of the midterm elections: talking about books. 
The 65-year-old announced this week that he’s launching a six-episode Audible <a href="https://www.audible.com/about/newsroom/president-barack-obama-to-host-a-great-book-on-audible?srsltid=AfmBOopP848zJuv-3RMZ-_qAIvpbux4zovLmEB18P8BdLCViebY7wH6P">podcast</a> on September 24, less than six weeks before voters head to the polls in November. The announcement comes as Democrats battle for control of Congress, and Obama remains an influential campaign surrogate and fundraiser for the party.
“At a time when fewer people are able to sit down with a book, it’s important to remember the joy and power that can come from reading. And some books don’t just tell a story — they change the way we see the world,” Obama <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/Db3QizRuKvM/">said</a>. “A while back, I revisited a few of the books that made an impact on me as a young man, influencing how I think about family, faith, race, politics and America.”
Titled “A Great Book With Barack Obama,” the podcast will explore six books that helped shape the former president&#8217;s leftist worldview: The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin, Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison, All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy, Gilead by Marilynne Robinson, All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren, and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John le Carré. 
Each episode will feature Obama discussing one of the books with a guest to “explore why they resonate, how they can shape our understanding of ourselves and each other, and why literature matters now more than ever.”
“I hope listeners will be inspired to discover or rediscover books that change the way they see themselves and the world,” Obama said in an <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/Db3QizRuKvM/">Instagram post.</a> 
The timing puts the podcast&#8217;s launch squarely in the home stretch of the midterm campaign, as Obama continues to play a pivotal role in Democratic politics, picking up the phone to help heal wounds left by divisive primaries and hosting fundraisers ahead of November.
<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/el-sayed-shrugs-off-hasan-pikers-9-11-comments?author=Jacob+Wheeler&amp;category=News&amp;elementPosition=10&amp;row=0&amp;rowType=Vertical+List&amp;title=El-Sayed+Shrugs+Off+Hasan+Piker%E2%80%99s+9%2F11+Comments">The Daily Wire </a>previously reported that Obama personally called Michigan Senate Democratic candidate Abdul El-Sayed following his narrow victory over establishment-backed Rep. Haley Stevens (D-MI). Obama did not endorse either candidate in the race.
Obama is also expected to <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/obama-to-headline-dem-gerrymandering-fundraiser-in-posh-marthas-vineyard?author=Drew+Berkemeyer&amp;category=News&amp;elementPosition=undefined&amp;row=0&amp;rowType=Vertical+List&amp;title=Obama+To+Headline+Dem+Gerrymandering+Fundraiser+In+Posh+Martha%E2%80%99s+Vineyard">headline a Democratic fundraiser</a> later this month on Martha’s Vineyard to benefit the National Democratic Redistricting Committee (NDRC), as Democrats continue to grapple with financial challenges at the national level.
The event, hosted by former Attorney General Eric Holder, will feature “dinner and a discussion” with the former president, according to an invitation first obtained by <a href="https://punchbowl.news/article/campaigns/obama-ndrc/">Punchbowl News</a>.

Former President Obama Joins NYC Mayor Mamdani On A Visit To Child Care Center

During Midterm Home Stretch, Barack Obama Will Launch New Podcast… About Books

Democrats

Michelle Obama

News

obama

podcasting

Politics

President Obama

In 1999 there was a popular song that I learned all the words to when I was way too young to know what I was actually saying. The chorus to “What Would You Do?” by the band City High included a line that said, “What would you do if your son was at home, crying all alone on the bedroom floor ‘cause he’s hungry / and the only way to feed him is to sleep with a man for a little bit of money?” 
At the time I didn’t think much about the message behind the pop song. But I can’t say the same holds true after slogging through 656 pages of Kathryn Stockett’s latest historical fiction release, “The Calamity Club.” This was the author’s highly anticipated follow-up to her runaway hit in 2009, “The Help.”
Stockett used way more words to say essentially the same thing as the brilliant lyricists behind “What Would You Do?” The entire book is a defense, and an unrealistic portrayal, of “ethical” prostitution that’s as predictable as it is exhausting. The author tries to convince the reader that having sex for money is fine if it’s for a good cause. 
The extra-long book, which is currently holding strong at #2 on the New York Times <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/books/best-sellers/combined-print-and-e-book-fiction/">bestseller list</a> in the fiction category, was most certainly a calamity. It was also sorely lacking an editor — not to mention a reality check.
It’s interesting how the book’s description doesn’t explicitly mention the gist of the novel, which paints prostitution in a sympathetic light. I can’t say I’m privy to the marketing agenda of publisher Spiegel &amp; Grau, but my guess is that the team was intentionally vague to attract a larger audience. Even in the age of OnlyFans, <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/the-onlyfans-success-story-thats-missing-a-dark-reality">explicitly glorifying sex work</a> is a hard sell for most readers.
“In 1933 Oxford, Mississippi, Prohibition is on the wane, and the Great Depression is tightening its grip. Poor and rich folks alike have fallen on hard times, even as the old social order remains. For women on the margins, the options are few and the price of dignity and self-determination is unbearably high,” the book’s synopsis <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/228820257-the-calamity-club">says</a>. 
The wokest among us will call it female empowerment, of course. But what’s even more baffling is how Stockett tried to convince the reader that the female characters would line up to sell sex for quick cash and, even worse, that this was all inevitable. 
The action takes place in 1933 as the Great Depression wreaks havoc on the nation. Stockett repeatedly mentions well-to-do families who lose everything, including the millionaires down the road and the main characters themselves, who are hoodwinked by a lying husband/son who is both terrible at investing and secretly gay. 
Women have the right to vote but lack the ability to purchase mass quantities of condoms without being shamed or outright denied. The implication is clear: These women are oppressed, and their only recourse is to sell their bodies for money. What would you do if your son was at home, crying all alone on the bedroom floor? What would you do if you were about to lose your childhood home? Your daughter? Your sanity?
There is pushback from the main character, the wise spinster sister Birdie, who is painted as being more clever and level-headed than anyone else in the book. But eventually she caves to the pressures of Charlie, who was previously arrested and thrown in prison for solicitation, or possibly just for speaking to a black man, it’s not exactly clear which. Charlie thinks a short-term brothel is the answer to all their problems. And she has enough life experience to put it all together.
Spoilers ahead. The main conflict in the book is financial, but it’s also about sex-based discrimination. The women are painted as being resourceful, but they are also products of their time and therefore unable to earn living wages on their own. Given that the men in their lives are useless, they are forced to take matters into their own hands. Which, in this case, means resorting to the world’s oldest profession.
Charlie becomes the madam of the temporary brothel, and Birdie is her skeptical accomplice. They are always one step ahead of getting caught: by the police, by the homeowner whose mansion they are using to entertain customers, and by the overtly religious busybody in town, Garnett Pittman, the hypocritical chairlady of the local orphan asylum who becomes president of the Anti-Vice League for the state of Mississippi.
It’s worth spending some time on the novel&#8217;s primary antagonist. Garnett is cartoonishly evil and is the one who pulled strings to have Charlie sterilized and institutionalized to protect Garnett&#8217;s husband&#8217;s secret — that he fathered the now 11-year-old Meg during a one-night stand when Charlie was 17. Garnett punishes Meg at the orphanage for her parentage and conspires to keep her mother locked away forever.
Modern fiction is chock-full of hypocritical Christian characters just like Garnett. It’s almost a given that once devout Christianity is mentioned, that person will be one of the bad guys. Meanwhile, the true virtuous people are always the ones questioning religion, questioning authority, and generally ditching traditional moral virtues for a “do what I want” existence.
It sounds a lot like the modern day progressive party, come to think of it.
Stockett says during the “Author’s Note” section at the end of the book that she was inspired to write the story because of a law passed in 1928 that allowed the sterilization of women deemed to be “imbeciles,” including “promiscuous women.” She felt compelled to speak out against these atrocities, but instead of arguing against eugenics, she wrote a book that essentially says short-term prostitution is a great way to solve financial hardship.
One of the downfalls of the book is that the brothel never gets busted. The homeowner, a well-to-do older woman who would ostensibly not agree to her family home being turned into a house of ill-repute, goes along with the plan after she figures out what’s going on. So do the maids and Birdie’s bank manager boyfriend. This kind of behavior from all the main characters would be far-fetched in 2026 and feels even more so in the mid-1930s.
As a reader, it feels like the whole 600-plus page story is barreling toward disaster. But then in the end there’s just nothing. The women make a lot of money. The homeowner pays off the mortgage and keeps her home. Charlie gets her daughter back. The cops bust a different, more corrupt brothel instead. The women involved get in, get out, and then move on to live the rest of their lives completely unscathed by their actions. 
As popular as it was, “The Help” became controversial because it centered on a white savior narrative, marginalizing the voices of black domestic workers, as the critics said. “The Calamity Club” has so far been embraced by mainstream critics because it does none of that. Instead, it presents a problem and provides a solution that’s free from legal or moral consequences, despite how ludicrous that is in the real world. 
But why would the critics take issue? They’re a lot more scandalized by racial narratives than they are by prostitution for a good cause.
Last year, OnlyFans creator Sophie Rain went viral for <a href="https://x.com/sophieraiin/status/1932540900749758841?lang=en">chastising Bonnie Blue</a>, a pornographic film actress, for “the trauma she’s causing herself and so many women.” Rain was upset that Blue’s stunts of sleeping with thousands of men in a single day were turning her profession into a laughingstock and said her antics meant it was “no longer about female empowerment.”
Rain’s issue is not realizing that being a little bit of a porn star is not possible, just like Stockett’s version of prostitution doesn’t make it morally acceptable. It doesn’t matter if the women only slept with men for money for a short time. It doesn’t matter that they paid off their debts. In this book, the ends do not in fact justify the means. 
Blue’s antics do the world a favor because they are honest. Her line of &#8220;work&#8221; is gross and seedy and should be seen as such. Stockett is never able to make a case for “ethical prostitution” any better than a vegetarian can justify ordering Big Macs from a McDonald’s drive-thru. 
“The Calamity Club” is moral relativism at its finest, which is probably why the leftists are fawning over it. 
***
This article is part of <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/topic/upstream" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Upstream</a>, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.

GettyImages-2288230963

This Bestseller Turns Prostitution Into ‘Female Empowerment’

Book Review

Prostitution

Jane Austen fans eagerly await yet another adaptation of &#8220;Pride and Prejudice,&#8221; which is due for <a href="https://www.netflix.com/tudum/articles/pride-and-prejudice-cast-photos-release-date-news">release by Netflix</a> this fall. Certainly, this most beloved of Austen’s novels — about first impressions and their limitations, as experienced by protagonist Elizabeth Bennet and her eventual husband, Fitzwilliam Darcy — offers plenty of food for thought about love and marriage. But the truth is that many of Austen’s precepts in &#8220;Pride and Prejudice&#8221; apply narrowly to her own time and make only a clumsy transfer to ours. 
In Regency England, with its system of primogeniture, nearly all women needed husbands to achieve any measure of independence or financial security. To remain unmarried was, for most women, to exist on the charity begrudged them by male relatives (as the Dashwood sisters and their mother do at the start of Austen’s &#8220;Sense and Sensibility&#8221;). This is why Charlotte Lucas, Elizabeth’s best friend in &#8220;Pride and Prejudice,&#8221; marries the insipid, detestable, self-important Mr. Collins. Such a storyline is inherently dated. Today, of course, Mr. Collins would either shape up or become an “incel.” 
That’s partly because 21st-century women in first-world nations are, by and large, fortunate enough to be in the position of the final Austen heroine who debuted within the author’s lifetime: the financially independent heiress Emma who declares near the beginning of Austen’s eponymous novel that she will never marry. 
So, if we’re going to search for modern lessons about marriage in Austen’s 19th-century corpus, we would do well to focus our attention on &#8220;Emma.&#8221; Austen’s depiction of a woman who eschews marriage because she does not need to be a wife for material reasons is as prescient and prophetic as it is unflattering. 
The lessons Emma learns — that she is not as capacious, insightful, or charitable as she would like to believe and that her ostensibly disinterested conception of romance and marriage is shallow, self-important, and transactional — are ones that many of today’s young women desperately need. 
What makes a man husband material?
To pay attention to dating discourse today is to recognize that, for a host of reasons, young men and young women are increasingly <a href="https://www.research-live.com/article/features/healing-the-rift-understanding-the-growing-divide-between-men-and-women-/id/5135613">fed up with</a> one another. Fewer and fewer Americans are <a href="https://ifstudies.org/report-brief/state-of-our-unions-2026-the-dating-recession">dating</a>, <a href="https://usafacts.org/articles/state-relationships-marriages-and-living-alone-us/">marrying</a>, or <a href="https://ifstudies.org/blog/the-sex-recession-the-share-of-americans-having-regular-sex-keeps-dropping">having sex</a>. 
Apparently, the battle of the sexes has become something of a cold war. 
Males’ <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/author/elizabeth-grace-matthew">extended adolescence</a> and failures to launch no doubt play a central role here. So does the reactionary misogyny evinced by the so-called “manosphere,” where disgruntled <a href="https://www.slowboring.com/p/yelling-at-ambitious-young-women?r=1g6s4d&amp;utm_medium=ios&amp;triedRedirect=true">young men</a> pine for the days when the Charlotte Lucases were compelled to marry the Mr. Collinses against their own inclination. I am not discounting either of these left-coded explanations for falling rates of coupling up; there is truth in them. 
That said, many college-educated women’s disdain for non-college-educated men in particular has less to do with those men’s failure to grow up than it does with their failure to conform to left-coded elite pretensions and pass various ideological litmus tests. Thus, our ever-increasing political polarization both reflects and serves to perpetuate the growing gulf between the sexes, as more young women attend college and veer hard Left while more young men eschew college and lean Right. In this context, of course, fewer young men seem, to many young women, like plausible life partners. 
Austen has no brief for this kind of female arrogance. 
When Emma manipulates her less fortunate friend Harriet into rejecting a marriage proposal from an honorable farmer (and persuades her that she is in love with a smarmy clergyman instead), she does so out of nothing but self-important prejudice. Emma is sure that a man who works with his hands (and is ignorant of some of the finer manners she is accustomed to in gentlemen of her own class) could never be <a href="https://nypost.com/2024/03/07/lifestyle/nyc-womens-insanely-high-dating-standards-are-screwing-them-over-expert/">good enough</a> for her friend. Of course, Emma’s unwarranted meddling nearly wrecks Harriet’s happiness. Meanwhile, Austen throws her heroine’s myopia and solipsism into sharp and unforgiving relief. And, indeed, Emma learns some humility and gains some valuable perspective. 
Unfortunately, many of today’s <a href="https://thedispatch.com/article/bridget-jones-25-dating-young-women/">similarly situated women</a> seem determined to put incomplete, infantile notions of what makes a marriageable man ahead of both their own and others’ well-being. 
Is marriage just another transactional negotiation?
Emma’s perennial insistence that she has no interest in marriage herself falls by the wayside when her former governess’ stepson comes to town. Frank Churchill is dashing and intriguing. His admiration and love would be a feather in Emma’s cap. That fact, more than anything about Frank himself, piques her interest — until she learns that Frank is flirting with her only to maintain the secrecy of his engagement to someone else. 
Emma’s shallow interest in romance as self-aggrandizement finds its modern echo in popular videos from internet influencers who declare that they won’t date men who don’t get them an <a href="https://cheezburger.com/46295557/new-york-woman-demands-first-date-order-an-uber-to-pick-her-up-sparks-debate-when-he-refuses">Uber on the first date</a> or <a href="https://nypost.com/2025/07/02/lifestyle/womans-money-relationship-opinion-divides-because-youre-a-man/">reflexively pay</a> for luxury versions of everything. That is, they won’t deign to date a man unless he essentially portends and embodies a full-life “upgrade.”
As if the upgrade to being a married couple weren’t enough. Which, to these sorts of women, it isn’t. 
When women relied on marriage for financial security, independent wealth like Emma’s obviated the presumed need for nuptial partnership. Now that nearly every young woman earns (or could earn) an income to support herself, marriage writ large has become a want (or not) rather than a need.
Do today’s women want the right thing? Too many of them, it seems, do not. 
Emma’s ultimate partnership with her neighbor Mr. Knightley is as fine a portrayal of the egalitarian, companionate marriage as one could hope to see. Both must admit a degree of fault in how they thought about the romances of others. 
Only, unlike in the case of Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy, the greater fault — and therefore, the greater need for character growth — lies with the woman. Emma learns that marriage is not only a vehicle for the upward mobility of which she has no need, but a context for the happy embrace of the holistic responsibility to which she is called.
&#8220;Pride and Prejudice&#8221; may be the Austen novel we want. But more than ever, &#8220;Emma&#8221; is the one we need.
***
Elizabeth Grace Matthew writes about books, education, and culture, including <a href="https://elizabethgracematthew.substack.com/about">on Substack</a>.
This article is part of <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/topic/upstream" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Upstream</a>, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.

GettyImages-173369902

Jane Austen’s Most Uncomfortable Lesson For Modern Women

Was a public school counselor in Oregon participating in hate speech when he displayed two kids&#8217; books about the gender binary? That&#8217;s what a federal appeals court ruled last month.
The court determined Roderick E. Theis II violated hate speech legislation by showcasing the books “He is He” and &#8220;She is She.” It also ruled that displaying these books, which affirm the gender binary, was not protected under the First Amendment.
In the wake of the unreasonable ruling, the books&#8217; coauthor, Ryan Bomberger, spoke to The Daily Wire about the case and the work conservative Christians must do to save the country. He didn&#8217;t hold back.
The gender binary isn&#8217;t evil
Bomberger said “He is He” and “She is She,” which he cowrote with his wife Bethany, are rooted in love.
“We wanted to take this insane pronoun issue and just make something that spoke truth about the human condition and celebrate what it means to be a boy, and celebrate what it means to be a girl,” he said. “It celebrates motherhood, fatherhood, the means by which all of us exist. So, what&#8217;s more inclusive than a book that speaks to the &#8230; heterosexual self-identity of more than 90% of Americans? How is that not inclusive?”
Bomberger rejects the idea that the books could be seen as harmful in any way. 
“The books are so beautifully illustrated. They are diverse. As someone myself, I&#8217;m mixed white, black, part Asian, part Native American. I&#8217;m a mixture of all things,” he said. “It&#8217;s laughable that the school sees these books as being hostile in any way, shape, or form.” 
The school district isn&#8217;t just being unreasonable here. It&#8217;s hypocritical. Bomberger pointed out that many of the teachers showcased BLM or LGBT propaganda, which he called “highly discriminatory against the nuclear family, against fatherhood, against black conservatives” and “anti-science,” respectively.
“What&#8217;s laughable to me is this is the same school district that pushes things like &#8216;How To Be An Anti-Racist,&#8217; which has an animus toward white people, [and says] in fact, the only way to deal with past discrimination is present discrimination,” Bomberger said. “So that book violates Oregon&#8217;s law.”
<blockquote class="instagram-media" style="background: #FFF; border: 0; border-radius: 3px; box-shadow: 0 0 1px 0 rgba(0,0,0,0.5),0 1px 10px 0 rgba(0,0,0,0.15); margin: 1px; max-width: 540px; min-width: 326px; padding: 0; width: calc(100% - 2px);" data-instgrm-captioned="" data-instgrm-permalink="https://www.instagram.com/p/DbGcUbSPRjf/?utm_source=ig_embed&amp;utm_campaign=loading" data-instgrm-version="14">
<div style="padding: 16px;">
&nbsp;
<div style="display: flex; flex-direction: row; align-items: center;">
<div style="background-color: #f4f4f4; border-radius: 50%; flex-grow: 0; height: 40px; margin-right: 14px; width: 40px;"></div>
<div style="display: flex; flex-direction: column; flex-grow: 1; justify-content: center;">
<div style="background-color: #f4f4f4; border-radius: 4px; flex-grow: 0; height: 14px; margin-bottom: 6px; width: 100px;"></div>
<div style="background-color: #f4f4f4; border-radius: 4px; flex-grow: 0; height: 14px; width: 60px;"></div>
</div>
</div>
<div style="padding: 19% 0;"></div>
<div style="display: block; height: 50px; margin: 0 auto 12px; width: 50px;"></div>
<div style="padding-top: 8px;">
<div style="color: #3897f0; font-family: Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 14px; font-style: normal; font-weight: 550; line-height: 18px;">View this post on Instagram</div>
</div>
<div style="padding: 12.5% 0;"></div>
<div style="display: flex; flex-direction: row; margin-bottom: 14px; align-items: center;">
<div>
<div style="background-color: #f4f4f4; border-radius: 50%; height: 12.5px; width: 12.5px; transform: translateX(0px) translateY(7px);"></div>
<div style="background-color: #f4f4f4; height: 12.5px; transform: rotate(-45deg) translateX(3px) translateY(1px); width: 12.5px; flex-grow: 0; margin-right: 14px; margin-left: 2px;"></div>
<div style="background-color: #f4f4f4; border-radius: 50%; height: 12.5px; width: 12.5px; transform: translateX(9px) translateY(-18px);"></div>
</div>
<div style="margin-left: 8px;">
<div style="background-color: #f4f4f4; border-radius: 50%; flex-grow: 0; height: 20px; width: 20px;"></div>
<div style="width: 0; height: 0; border-top: 2px solid transparent; border-left: 6px solid #f4f4f4; border-bottom: 2px solid transparent; transform: translateX(16px) translateY(-4px) rotate(30deg);"></div>
</div>
<div style="margin-left: auto;">
<div style="width: 0px; border-top: 8px solid #F4F4F4; border-right: 8px solid transparent; transform: translateY(16px);"></div>
<div style="background-color: #f4f4f4; flex-grow: 0; height: 12px; width: 16px; transform: translateY(-4px);"></div>
<div style="width: 0; height: 0; border-top: 8px solid #F4F4F4; border-left: 8px solid transparent; transform: translateY(-4px) translateX(8px);"></div>
</div>
</div>
<div style="display: flex; flex-direction: column; flex-grow: 1; justify-content: center; margin-bottom: 24px;">
<div style="background-color: #f4f4f4; border-radius: 4px; flex-grow: 0; height: 14px; margin-bottom: 6px; width: 224px;"></div>
<div style="background-color: #f4f4f4; border-radius: 4px; flex-grow: 0; height: 14px; width: 144px;"></div>
</div>
&nbsp;
<p style="color: #c9c8cd; font-family: Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 17px; margin-bottom: 0; margin-top: 8px; overflow: hidden; padding: 8px 0 7px; text-align: center; text-overflow: ellipsis; white-space: nowrap;"><a style="color: #c9c8cd; font-family: Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 14px; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 17px; text-decoration: none;" href="https://www.instagram.com/p/DbGcUbSPRjf/?utm_source=ig_embed&amp;utm_campaign=loading" target="_blank" rel="noopener">A post shared by Ryan Bomberger (@ryanbomberger)</a>
</div>
</blockquote>
<script async src="//www.instagram.com/embed.js"></script>
Battling in court
The fact that a scuffle over his commonsense books made it to court, he says, was by design. Reports said Theis, who worked for the InterMountain Education Service District for over 15 years, was fired after a teacher recorded him showing the books to some eighth graders. Bomberger says that the whole situation was a setup.
“There was one complaint from a teacher who only saw the covers. This teacher never even read the books — only saw the covers and objected to the covers,” Bomberger explained. “That teacher is the one that set up the two 8th graders who came and insisted on reading the books. It was not genuine interest. It was set up. That was the teacher that actually recorded the whole interaction, where Rod allowed them because they kept pressing him to read the books.”
Bomberger expressed sorrow about the recent ruling, arguing that it will set a bad precedent in the West Coast.
“My hope is that Alliance Defending Freedom does appeal it,&#8221; he said. &#8220;They have a very strong case.”
Though Theis’ appeal was rejected by the court, ADF lawyers have <a href="https://www.foxnews.com/media/fired-school-counselor-loses-again-after-free-speech-fight-over-gender-themed-books-his-office">promised</a> to “continue to defend Rod’s First Amendment freedom to express his views like other employees.”
Bomberger said the lower court misunderstood the case Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, in which the Supreme Court ruled that public schools could not stop a football coach from kneeling midfield to say a quiet prayer.
“They said that [Kennedy’s prayer] was a private, personal thing. It wasn&#8217;t private. It was very public,” Bomberger said. “It was during his duty and his role. So simply based upon that, I think they have a case and the fact that the First Amendment doesn&#8217;t get stripped from government employees when they walk onto taxpayer-funded property.”
When woke fights back
Bomberger also argued that the recent case shows that wokism is not dead, but simply has been rebranded, hiding in the shadows while it grows stronger.
“We need to be forever vigilant about where this stuff goes,” Bomberger said. “The public school system is so deeply rooted in ideologies that are anti-American, that are anti-science, and certainly in many cases that are anti-truth. So, we have to be aware that this is not something that&#8217;s going away anytime soon.”
The Left’s goal is to fake outrage, foster ignorance, and silence dissension, Bomberger said.
“Well, honestly, we hear the phrase all the time: &#8216;Ignorance is bliss,&#8217; and apparently, it&#8217;s a goal. It&#8217;s a virtue of the woke Left,” Bomberger said. “They want to pretend that they are in some sort of fascist society where they can&#8217;t get [their favorite] books.”
While Democrats hand-wring about book bans, they don&#8217;t seem to care when librarians make explicit material available to kids.
“They&#8217;re feigning outrage about fake book banning, but [they&#8217;re fine] when it comes to completely inappropriate content for children that is sexually explicit, that is violent and violent and gory, I mean the list goes on and on,” he said. “But it&#8217;s perfectly fine if it could be categorized as a diversity book — diversity being LGBTQ/DEI.”
Bomberger ended by calling on his fellow Christians to stand up and not be afraid to speak the truth.
“The most important thing, as a Christian, I see this first and foremost as a spiritual battle, not just this book battle, but the battle for objective truth,” Bomberger said. “First of all, don&#8217;t despair. There is always hope, but we have to be vigilant. We cannot leave the major influence of our children up to &#8230; the education establishment. We can&#8217;t leave it up to Hollywood, and we often do.”
“We&#8217;re called to love every human being, not every human doing,&#8221; he added. &#8220;So as Christians, we have to see the world differently, and we have to react differently.”
***
<div class="css-1kja2d9">
<div id="post-body-text" class="css-1tho4p7">
<div class="eu6cqno0 css-jpqt6g" data-narration-container="true">
This article is part of <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/topic/upstream" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Upstream</a>, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.
</div>
</div>
</div>

Gemini_Generated_Image_zbdmj8zbdmj8zbdm

How This Conservative Author Is Fighting A Real Book Ban

LGBT

Maybe it’s just that I’m planning a mid-August vacation this year, but it seems to me that a lot of people are waiting until the final month of summer to hit the beach, hop a flight, or just delete Slack and spend a week pretending to be an unbothered billionaire.
If you’re among the many planning a late summer getaway — or if you’re just hoping to get those Goodreads numbers up before football season completely nukes your nights and weekends — here are nine books to keep you busy.
Daikon by Samuel Hawley
What if the Allies planned to drop a third nuclear bomb on Japan? What if the plane carrying that bomb crashed somewhere in Japan and the bomb didn’t detonate? That’s the premise of Hawley’s novel, one of the most exciting books of 2025. “Daikon” largely tells the story of Keizo Kan, a physicist whose wife and daughter have been lost to Imperial Japan’s increasingly futile war efforts. Blending military history, science, and suspense, “Daikon” is the kind of page-turner begging to be tossed on a sandy towel.
Workhorse by Caroline Palmer
I’m genuinely shocked this book isn’t at the top of everyone’s list. Imagine if “The Devil Wears Prada” had a baby with “Gossip Girl,” and that baby then grew up to work in journalism and go through alcohol-induced psychosis. “Workhorse” tells the story of Clo Harmon, a striving editorial assistant at a prominent New York fashion magazine, who falls into the orbit of her wealthy desk mate, Davis Lawrence. Palmer, a former Vogue editor and Manhattan socialite, paints a darkly funny picture of New York’s literati in this exceptional debut, equal parts shocking and delightful.
The Last Kings Of Shanghai: The Rival Jewish Dynasties That Helped Create Modern China by Jonathan Kaufman
You didn’t think this list would be just fiction, did you? Come on now! Kaufman explores two centuries of history through the interlocking stories of the Kadoories and the Sassoons — two Iraqi Jewish families who sought new opportunities on the Chinese frontier and, in the process, helped create Shanghai and Hong Kong and, in many ways, laid the foundation for our globalized world. “The Last Kings Of Shanghai” takes readers through the tumult of the Opium War and the glamour of the Roaring Twenties, climaxing in the stunning tale of how the rival families joined forces to save 18,000 Jews from the Nazis.
Harlem Shuffle by Colson Whitehead
Colson Whitehead earned critical acclaim for “The Underground Railroad” and “The Nickel Boys,” two novels dealing with the African American experience in the Antebellum and Jim Crow South, respectively. Those are fine books, but a bit too serious for the lazy, crazy, hazy days of summer. So save them for the winter and instead reach for “Harlem Shuffle,” the first in Whitehead’s now-complete Harlem Trilogy. Ray Carney is a furniture salesman and family man whose part-time work fencing stolen goods has left him “bent, not crooked.” Things bend further when Ray’s scheming cousin Freddy enlists his help in robbing the nicest hotel uptown. Turn the AC down, and you’ll feel transported to the steaming Harlem of the 1960s.
Hope I Get Old Before I Die by David Hepworth
This is one of the coolest books I’ve ever read. Hepworth sets out to answer the question that many of us have pondered in passing: How did we wind up with this glut of aging rock stars, and are they even having any fun? Weaving history and pop-culture criticism together with ample British wit, Hepworth explains exactly how rock and roll and the music industry evolved and shaped each other, and how the end result — impossibly priced arena rock concerts headlined by septuagenarians — both explains and shapes the state of our society. 
A Man In Full by Tom Wolfe
Can you have a reading list without a Tom Wolfe book? Not in this house. You can’t go wrong with anything the white-suited wonder wrote, but this is his best novel. Don’t let the 742-page doorstop deter you: You’ll fly through this portrait of late-90s Atlanta, a satirical odyssey that weaves together politics, class, race, and college sports. Charlie Croker is the titular man in full, an aging football star and struggling businessman who’s found himself on the wrong end of a collector’s notice. His attempt to claw his way back to the black puts him at odds with the social-climbing Raymond Peepgrass, the downtrodden Stoic Conrad Hensley, and plenty of other colorful characters. Bonus: The Netflix adaptation is pretty good.
In The Shadow Of The Sword by Tom Holland
As with the aforementioned Tom, you’d be safe plucking any of Mr. Holland’s volumes off the shelf. A popular historian who doesn’t neglect actual history, Holland has written excellent books on the Roman Empire and the rise of Christianity. But this volume, on the rise of Islam, is, if not his best, then his most original. Using careful textual analysis, Holland casts doubt on the standard account of the rise of Islam, questioning the accuracy of Muhammad’s story while showing how early Muslims expanded their religion through war and conquest. It’s like the nonfiction “Satanic Verses.” It’s actually pretty crazy he doesn’t have a fatwa against him.
Fleishman Is In Trouble by Taffy Brodesser-Akner
A recently divorced Manhattan doctor is navigating dating apps, parenthood, and professional neuroses when his wife disappears. Dazzlingly written, funny, and occasionally shocking, Brodesser-Akner’s debut is a probing portrait of modern life that doesn&#8217;t pull punches with its protagonists. You’ll laugh, you’ll wince, you’ll be glad you don’t live in New York. If you like it, skip the Hulu adaptation starring Jesse Eisenberg — fine, but not worth it — and pick up Brodesser-Akner’s truly deranged but breathtakingly brilliant second novel, “Long Island Compromise.”
Football by Chuck Klosterman
I can’t really describe this book because Klosterman’s writing defies description. If you’ve read him, you know what I mean. If you haven&#8217;t, you should rectify that as soon as possible. He is insanely smart and incredibly droll, and he thinks differently from anyone else in the world. This book, his latest, is a love letter to the American game, an encomium to TV broadcasts, college ball, all-star quarterbacks, and more. Pull this one out when the heat and humidity get really oppressive, and you find yourself yearning for a crisp weekend with football on TV.
***
This article is part of <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/topic/upstream" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Upstream</a>, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.

GettyImages-1665325999

Nine Books To Bring On Your Late Summer Vacation

Former Rep. Katie Porter (D-CA) says she is stepping away from electoral politics after two failed statewide campaigns, announcing that she is &#8220;done for now&#8221; with campaigning — and instead plans to focus on becoming a book influencer on social media.
&#8220;I’m done for now with politics and campaigning,&#8221; Porter said in a <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/Da1Lp0dxPFs/">video</a> posted to Instagram last week. &#8220;Stay tuned for book recommendations, book ideas and author content.&#8221;
The former California congresswoman has rebranded one of her Instagram accounts as &#8220;Katie Porter Turns the Page,&#8221; complete with the hashtag &#8220;#Bookstagram,&#8221; saying she plans to devote the page to book recommendations, author interviews, and literary discussions.
Porter later told the <a href="https://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article316551216.html">Sacramento Bee</a> that she is &#8220;closing the door&#8221; on running for office. &#8220;I am closing the door on being a candidate,&#8221; Porter said. &#8220;I cannot foresee that path back.&#8221;
Porter first rose to national prominence after flipping a Republican-held Orange County congressional district in 2018. A former student and protégé of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), she became known on Capitol Hill for using a whiteboard during congressional hearings to grill executives from major banks, pharmaceutical companies, and other corporations.
Rather than seek re-election to the House in 2024, Porter launched a bid for the Senate seat previously held by the late Sen. Dianne Feinstein. She finished a distant third in California&#8217;s all-party primary behind eventual winner Adam Schiff and Republican Steve Garvey, failing to advance to the general election.
She then entered California&#8217;s gubernatorial race but fared even worse, finishing fifth in this year&#8217;s primary with less than 5% of the vote after initially polling as one of the leading Democratic contenders. Porter&#8217;s gubernatorial campaign was dogged by questions surrounding her temperament after reports highlighted allegations of abusive treatment toward staff members.
During the campaign, a video obtained by <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/2025/10/08/katie-porter-tears-into-staffer-new-video-00598942">Politico</a> showed Porter screaming at an aide during a virtual event while serving in Congress. &#8220;Get out of my f*cking shot!&#8221; Porter <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/democrat-spins-her-profane-rant-against-staffer-into-campaign-ad">shouted</a> after a staffer briefly appeared on camera before attempting to correct one of her statements.
The incident followed earlier allegations that Porter had berated staff members, including reports that she blamed one employee for contracting COVID-19 in 2022, while she was still in the House.
Porter later apologized for the outburst shown in the leaked video but argued that criticism of her demeanor reflected a double standard applied to female candidates.
&#8220;I don&#8217;t know what I could have said or done other than be a man,&#8221; Porter told the Sacramento Bee. &#8220;We&#8217;ve also seen it is not hard to come up with female candidates for whom the term temperament has been used.&#8221;
Despite stepping away from campaigning, Porter said she still plans to remain involved in public policy debates and civic education while focusing much of her public attention on books. &#8220;It’s partly a reference to a new chapter in my life, to change, but also to something I do a lot, which is turn the page when I’m reading,&#8221; Porter said of her new social media venture.

Senate Candidate Forum

Katie Porter Puts Politics On Hold To Focus On ‘Bookstagram’

California

influencer

Katie Porter

Sexism

My preteen daughter came home from day camp the other day complaining about some of the girls in her bunk. She used an interesting phrase I had never heard before, calling them &#8220;phone kids.&#8221; They were children who, even without their phones in hand, seemed wired differently.
It was a fascinating and surprisingly astute observation, and one I was reminded of while reading a chilling cover story in the August <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/08/reading-crisis-postliterate-age/687618/" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/08/reading-crisis-postliterate-age/687618/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1784674628621000&amp;usg=AOvVaw2vjDB3Nm2eMR35ATnnPit0">issue</a> of The Atlantic. In &#8220;The End of Reading Is Here,&#8221; staff writer Rose Horowitch chronicles not just how reading for pleasure and schoolwork has fallen off a cliff since the advent of smartphones and social media, but how those changes are rewiring our brains.
Horowitch writes, &#8220;Americans are probably reading more words than ever before. What has changed is what they read, and how. People are bombarded with emails, text messages, X posts, Reddit threads, Instagram captions. This explosion of textual fragments has come at the expense of devoting sustained attention to longer written works that convey rich and complicated information. Maryanne Wolf, a cognitive neuroscientist at UCLA, argues that people are losing the ability to think deeply about writing. That doesn&#8217;t mean they are forgetting how to decode individual words. Rather, they are losing the higher-order abilities of comprehension and synthesis. America, in other words, isn&#8217;t illiterate. It&#8217;s postliterate.&#8221;
It was that idea of rewiring that made me think back to my daughter&#8217;s remark about &#8220;phone kids&#8221; and wonder whether they really are different.
Over the course of nine years, I gave birth to six babies. What people say about &#8220;pregnancy brain&#8221; and &#8220;baby brain&#8221; is real, and for the better part of a decade, it felt as though my own brain had turned to mush. When <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Stolen-Youth-Innocence-Indoctrinating-Generation/dp/B0BWNQYLHQ">my book</a> with The Daily Wire came out, I was two months postpartum, with a toddler and a sleepwalking preschooler at home. During one interview, I went spectacularly viral when my brain simply stopped working. Asked a basic question about the central premise of the very book I had written, I completely blanked.
Over the past year, as my youngest turned two, I decided it was finally time to pull myself out of that dreamlike fog and force myself to become a reader again. I recognized in myself many of the habits Horowitch described and didn&#8217;t want to become a phone zombie. As a homeschooling mother, I realized — to my embarrassment — that my children were better read than I had been for nearly a decade.
I made one obvious mistake at the outset. I tried to catch up with my preteens by diving straight into a difficult translation of Plutarch — a bit like deciding to run a marathon after spending 10 years on the couch.
No, what I needed was a couch-to-5K program, but for reading.
It turns out the experts agree. Horowitch writes, &#8220;Reading books is a workout for the attention span. The more you read, the easier it is to read, and the more you&#8217;re rewarded with new understanding. Eventually the process is more pleasurable than it is challenging. But as with physical exercise, the converse is true as well: The less you read, the more difficult it is to read, and the rockier the path to acquiring knowledge.&#8221;
The first place I turned was, somewhat counterintuitively, the internet. More specifically, my friend Brielle Persun, a lifestyle and bookish <a href="https://www.instagram.com/bybrielleann/" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.instagram.com/bybrielleann/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1784674628621000&amp;usg=AOvVaw1iT-8PW2fvOGzSVGMEDVyR">content</a> creator. Following her introduced me to an entire ecosystem of readers reviewing and discussing books. Before long, I found several creators whose tastes aligned with mine. If they loved &#8220;East of Eden&#8221; and &#8220;One Hundred Years of Solitude&#8221; as much as I did, I figured I could trust their recommendations on everything else.
&#8220;One of my favorite things about BookTok and online reading communities is how they&#8217;ve made reading feel social again and, honestly, made reading cool again,&#8221; Persun told me. &#8220;The internet has introduced millions of people to books they may have never discovered otherwise, while creating spaces where readers can connect, discuss, and genuinely celebrate stories together. As a creator, I&#8217;ve watched books spark conversations, friendships, and even help people through difficult seasons of life. It&#8217;s a reminder that reading has always connected people, and the internet has simply made that connection more accessible and exciting than ever.&#8221;
Social media doesn&#8217;t just spread book recommendations; it helps sell books, too. Josh Centers, publisher of <a href="https://chapter.house/" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://chapter.house/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1784674628621000&amp;usg=AOvVaw1FsRhX42KCb1CCqoGs02io">Chapter House</a>, which produces beautifully designed editions of classic works for the next generation, told me, &#8220;Despite its many evils, social media has been an essential channel for spreading the word about our books. We have been blessed with many thousands of followers, but we ultimately want our accounts to be off-ramps. If someone sees one of our posts and closes the app to go read to their children, that post did its job.&#8221;
It&#8217;s no surprise, though, that the biggest breakthrough in rebuilding my reading habit came from disconnecting entirely.
On the Jewish Sabbath, known as Shabbat or Shabbos, my phone is off. As my children have grown older, those quiet hours have increasingly become time I can spend reading for myself instead of rereading Dr. Seuss and &#8220;Go, Dog. Go!&#8221; to my children for the hundredth time.
The inspiration for spending the Sabbath reading came from my friend David Bashevkin, who <a href="https://www.wsj.com/opinion/the-sabbath-is-a-chance-to-read-again-d64c3af2" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.wsj.com/opinion/the-sabbath-is-a-chance-to-read-again-d64c3af2&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1784674628621000&amp;usg=AOvVaw0r8cDMVgyB0I2__09zLY-F">started</a> an online community called &#8220;Shabbos Reads,&#8221; where people share on social media what they read over the Sabbath. The goal, Bashevkin told me, is to advertise &#8220;both the beauty of Shabbos and the beauty of reading, that I think go hand-in-hand. In the Internet world, we&#8217;re always trying to maximize efficiency. But what Shabbos and reading are trying to train our minds and hearts to do is to sit with long-form ideas, thoughts, and experiences and let them unfold in our lives.&#8221;
During the week, I set aside screen-free moments as well. When I&#8217;m putting my younger two sons to bed, I leave my phone out of their bedroom. When I&#8217;m sitting in their room for 20 minutes waiting for them to fall asleep (and policing their horseplay), I sit with my hardest reading: a <a href="https://www.ou.org/nach-yomi-starts-again-in-february-2026/" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.ou.org/nach-yomi-starts-again-in-february-2026/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1784674628621000&amp;usg=AOvVaw1EYic44sufdPE5wuzeQ50e">daily</a> Bible study and my frenemy, Plutarch. These short bursts of harder reading help with my stamina for the material that is more uphill than a mere novel.
<div>
Several months into this experiment, I&#8217;m happy to report that I&#8217;m well on my way to a 5K. Maybe I&#8217;m still riding a scooter toward the finish line, but after finding a more accessible translation of Plutarch, I may even be able to call myself a reader again.
***
Bethany Mandel (<a href="https://x.com/bethanyshondark" target="_blank" rel="noopener">@bethanyshondark</a>) is a homeschooling mother of six and a writer. She is the bestselling co-author, with Karol Markowicz, of “Stolen Youth: How Radicals Are Erasing Innocence and Indoctrinating a Generation.”
This article is part of <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/introducing-upstream-a-lifestyle-and-culture-section-of-the-daily-wire" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Upstream,</a> The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.
</div>

Gemini_Generated_Image_v4iogkv4iogkv4io

The Habit Quietly Stealing A Generation’s Ability To Think

Internet

Smartphones

Move over, Leonardo Da Vinci. There’s a new Renaissance humanist on the block — at least, <a href="https://x.com/eve_bouff/status/2075978772629835994">according</a> to the internet. You might know her as the global pop star Dua Lipa, and she wants you to read banned books.
This past week, the &#8220;Levitating&#8221; singer <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/DaX7tuJjAKN/?img_index=6">unveiled</a> her new “Manifesto Library” in Portugal, which features hundreds of books she claims were once banned or otherwise controversial. Posing with a copy of Margaret Atwood’s &#8220;The Handmaid’s Tale,&#8221; a book that has now <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/margaret-atwood-handsmaids-tale-new-memoir-60-minutes/">sold</a> more than 10 million copies worldwide, she tells her 650K+ “Book Club” followers that her initiative opens up “conversations around censorship, resistance and the importance of preserving voices that challenge power and refuse to be silenced.” 
There’s only one problem. None of the books in her library were ever “banned” or &#8220;censored&#8221; in the first place. 
Among the <a href="https://vogueadria.com/dua-lipa-banned-books-library/">other titles</a> in Dua Lipa’s library are George Orwell’s &#8220;1984,&#8221; a book that has <a href="https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/what-does-george-orwells-1984-mean-in-2024-180984468/">sold</a> over 30 million copies as of 2024, and J.D. Salinger’s &#8220;The Catcher in the Rye,&#8221; a novel that is read in virtually every single high school English class across the country. I don’t necessarily disagree with Dua Lipa that we all should read these great books, but calling &#8220;1984&#8243; and &#8220;The Catcher in the Rye&#8221; “banned” books is like calling &#8220;Game of Thrones,&#8221; one of the world’s most widely watched TV shows, a “banned” show.
As I <a href="https://x.com/pensandpoison/status/2076800465040195947">pointed out</a> the other day on X, you can call anything a “banned book” as long as it was removed from an elementary school library that one time in 1978. 
That hasn’t stopped the political Left from co-opting the term “banned books” to create an imaginary controversy around censorship. Slapping the label onto virtually any novel with a remotely political bent, the Left frequently pretends conservatives are responsible for instituting Nazi-era book bans and for silencing leftist voices. Walk into any indie bookstore in a blue state, for instance, and you’ll immediately be met with a “banned books” display featuring carefully curated titles promoting a certain political agenda. One such <a href="https://x.com/TheMuppetPastor/status/2077019394907996560/photo/1">display</a> making the rounds on X contains Frantz Fanon’s &#8220;Black Skin, White Masks&#8221; (a far-leftist call to violence against “colonizers”), Sally Rooney’s &#8220;Normal People&#8221; (a novel she herself has <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1S5bOdJq3U">called</a> “Marxist propaganda”), and Maia Kobabe’s &#8220;Gender Queer&#8221; (I will let that one speak for itself). 
Nor is the “banned books” trend a recent invention. Back in 2023, for example, the American Library Association referred to an effort to remove sexually explicit content from school libraries as a demand to “censor library books.” These books, meanwhile (the aforementioned &#8220;Gender Queer&#8221; among them), contained “graphic depictions of how children can masturbate,” as well as “cartoons of homosexual activity,” according to a Daily Wire <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/library-group-frames-removal-of-graphic-sexual-content-from-school-libraries-as-record-number-of-book-bans">report</a>. And while these titles were removed from certain school libraries, they remain widely available for purchase on Amazon or your local bookstore.  
One can only conclude that the “banned books” trend is nothing more than a convenient way for leftists to promote books with certain ideological messages over others. 
Because the same people crying so vehemently about “banned books” when the books promote leftist ideologies are the very people quietly banning conservative-leaning books from ever hitting our shelves in the first place. 
You can lament the removal of &#8220;Gender Queer&#8221; from an elementary school library all you want, but the fact is that the novel continues to enjoy mainstream institutional backing. The same goes for Sally Rooney’s Marxist BDSM fantasy &#8220;Normal People&#8221; and Caro Claire Burke’s &#8220;Yesteryear,&#8221; the internet&#8217;s latest literary fad <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/the-new-book-that-treats-traditional-wives-like-the-enemy">attacking</a> conservative Christian “tradwives.” Other recent celebrated titles include Pulitzer Prize finalist &#8220;Stag Dance,&#8221; which <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stag_Dance_(novel)">depicts</a> a “Vegas transfeminine gathering” and NPR’s best book of the year &#8220;Bellies,&#8221; a trans romance that everyone’s favorite celebrity Elliot Page has <a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/1335490884?lv=shuf&amp;channelId=500&amp;plpRedirect=mhFallback">called</a> “smart, hilarious, and deeply moving.”
I am not here to argue that these books shouldn’t be published in the first place. But it is undeniable that the publishing industry consciously prioritizes far-leftist stories, creating a homogenous reading culture in which contemporary fiction has become synonymous with far-leftist ideology. 
Don’t believe me? Publishing professions can tell you themselves. 
Before a book reaches the shelves of your local Barnes and Noble, it must first go through several stages of the editorial process, the first of which entails the procurement of representation from a literary agent. While several non-fiction literary agencies still (thankfully) devote themselves to conservative authors — someone has to publish Ben Shapiro, after all — the fiction world has become so ideologically captured by the “banned books” mob that it is now virtually impossible to get a book with a more “traditional” message published in the first place. I’m not even talking about books with overtly Christian themes or Zionist protagonists, though those are most certainly no-gos. Literary agents now explicitly <a href="https://manuscriptwishlist.com/mswl-post/claire-draper/">declare</a> that they will not even consider “dated ideals of partnership or relationship.”
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
How come the &#8220;banned books&#8221; advocates are the same people making these lists that effectively ban certain books&#8230;? <a href="https://t.co/aW3JNcnxFP">pic.twitter.com/aW3JNcnxFP</a>
— Liza Libes (@pensandpoison) <a href="https://x.com/pensandpoison/status/2077410105797071155?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">July 15, 2026</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.x.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
I don’t speak leftist very well, but I’m pretty sure that means that this agent won’t look at a book that positively depicts marriage between a man and a woman. 
One could argue that if these were just the preferences of a single agent, then we wouldn&#8217;t have a problem on our hands. But when an entire literary establishment begins declining certain morals and themes, then an entire publishing institution effectively institutes a soft ban on certain books. 
Indeed, other agents <a href="https://manuscriptwishlist.com/mswl-post/thais-afonso/">decline</a> to review “copaganda,” “protagonists who are <a href="https://manuscriptwishlist.com/mswl-post/rebecca-matte/">aligned</a> with American police or military,” or even “<a href="https://manuscriptwishlist.com/mswl-post/caitlin-white/">morality stories</a>.” Meanwhile, one independent press <a href="https://manuscriptwishlist.com/mswl-post/samiha-hoque/">warns</a> that book submissions “must have a Muslim protagonist,” while a children’s editor at Hachette <a href="https://manuscriptwishlist.com/mswl-post/erika-turner/">requests</a> books that “center marginalized voices, especially related to queer women and femmes.” Editors at Macmillan’s <a href="https://www.flatironbooks.com/staff">Flatiron</a> — the same imprint that publishes Elliot Page and Joe Biden — request “contemporary fiction that centers Black and queer voices” and “literary fiction that explores music and art, friendship, gender, and progressive politics.” 
A single editor’s “preference” for progressive fiction and antipathy towards traditional messages does not constitute a book ban, but when large swaths of literary agents and editors across an entire industry begin parroting the same message, then it becomes clear that conservative fiction — or simply books with traditional moral messages in the vein of &#8220;The Brothers Karamazov&#8221; or &#8220;Anna Karenina&#8221; — are no longer welcome on our shelves. 
The irony is impossible to ignore: the same people who have built an entire cultural identity around &#8220;banned books&#8221; are often the very people deciding which books never get the chance to exist in the first place.
No, conservative books aren’t being banned in public squares or ritually burned at the stake. They are simply being filtered out long before they ever get the chance to find an audience in the first place. 
Banned books are in. But they’re not the banned books that Dua Lipa wants you to read or the books that do not belong in elementary school libraries. They are the books with great moral messages that we once venerated as a society but whose contemporary iterations will be forever lost on us because they never made it to our shelves.
That’s the book ban that should worry us the most. 
***
Liza Libes is a writer and the founder of Pens and Poison. She holds degrees in English from Columbia University and writes about literature and culture at <a href="http://pensandpoison.org/" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=http://pensandpoison.org&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1784347615882000&amp;usg=AOvVaw2GAA5qwHERjxoFhiQFN_lD">pensandpoison.org</a>. Follow her on X <a href="https://x.com/pensandpoison">@pensandpoison</a>.
This article is part of <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/introducing-upstream-a-lifestyle-and-culture-section-of-the-daily-wire" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Upstream,</a> The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.

Gemini_Generated_Image_r4nbnnr4nbnnr4nb

The Real Book Ban No One Talks About

A new bookstore has opened in my Oxford <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2026/jul/06/inside-the-uks-first-romantasy-shop-bad-girl-books">neighborhood</a>. Given the academic reputation of this city of dreaming spires with its medieval colleges and historic libraries, one might think such a bookstore would cater to a highbrow and scholarly readership. But no, it exclusively stocks “romantasy,” a fusion of romance and fantasy literature, and the <a href="https://edition.cnn.com/2024/02/28/style/romantic-books-fantasy-romantasy-booktok-cec">fastest-growing sector</a> of the global book trade.
The literary genres of romance and fantasy have been popular for centuries, but their fusion into romantasy is relatively new. Many argue that the 1983 novel by Marion Zimmer Bradley, &#8220;The Mists of Avalon,&#8221; which upended traditional Arthurian mythology, started the trend. This was followed by Diana Gabaldon’s &#8220;Outlander&#8221; books, blending historical adventure, time-travel fantasy, and an emotionally central romance. These books established the template: fantasy as a stage for romantic destiny, psychological intimacy, and female-centered moral stakes. 
Since the turn of the millennium, the formula has been replicated at scale. Self-published authors began producing romance-fantasy hybrids that traditional publishers had overlooked. According to industry analyses, romantasy has become “the single biggest growth engine in global publishing,” with sales in the U.S. and more recently in the U.K. either tripling or quadrupling over the past five years. Prestige publishing houses remain cautious, but with such astonishing sales figures, one wonders for how long. 
The opening weekend of my local romantasy bookstore, Bad Girl Books, reflected that popularity. Even with pre-booked tickets, there was a line down the sidewalk of excited fans, among whom I waited in some trepidation. Once inside, I discovered there are many sub-genres of romantasy, ranging from “Cosy Romantasy,” where characters bake cookies and muffins to woo and enchant each other rather than fighting battles, to the “Reverse Harem” or “Why Choose?” stories, in which the girl ends up with all the guys. (Imagine a gender-swapped “Mormon Wives” and you get the idea.) As one of the more memorable sub-genres, “Monster Smut” (I won’t elaborate) suggests, sex is a big part of the attraction. The degree of explicit content in books is indicated through a “spice” rating, which was illustrated in the bookstore via the relative number of chili pepper icons on shelves, rather like one might find on the menu of a Mexican restaurant to denote how hot a particular dish is.
Fans of the genre are quick to challenge suggestions that the appeal of the books is their “fairy smut,” even if the available <a href="https://badgirlbooks.co.uk/products/read-smut-tote-bag?variant=53057230799180">merch</a> might suggest precisely that. These books are about self-actualization, their defenders claim, about seeking one’s destiny and achieving empowerment of a predominantly female variety. Yet the sex in modern romantasy stories is vastly different from the way sex was treated in the OG romantasy stories, the Arthurian romances that had a similarly popular appeal throughout medieval Europe. 
Arthurian literature is a storytelling tradition built around King Arthur, his knights, and the mythical kingdom of Camelot. It began as an oral Celtic legend in Wales and Brittany and circulated for centuries before being written down. By the late Middle Ages, authors such as Chrétien de Troyes and Sir Thomas Malory had turned these tales into great romances, establishing the themes we still recognize today: the noble quest, the testing of virtue, the tension between love and duty, and the tragic fall of a once-ideal kingdom.
Two of the most famous written versions anchor the tradition. &#8220;Sir Gawain and the Green Knight&#8221; explores chivalry, temptation, and moral testing through a single knight’s ordeal, while Malory’s &#8220;Le Morte d’Arthur&#8221; gathers the whole cycle into a sweeping narrative of Arthur’s rise and fall. 
In these Arthurian stories, adultery is not just about knights and queens swept up in forbidden passion. Rather, it becomes the place where personal desire collides with the hard work of building an ideal society. When those Arthurian lovers Lancelot and Guinevere or Tristan and Isolde give in to desire, they are not simply breaking a marriage vow but are shaking the foundations of loyalty and duty that hold Camelot together. Lancelot, formerly the most heroic knight of the Round Table, fails in his quest to find the Holy Grail and must slaughter his fellow knights and closest friends to save Guinevere from the punishment her adultery brought down upon her. In contrast to such a tragic story, Sir Gawain manages to reject the seductive advances of the wife of the Green Knight. His reward for staying loyal to his values is moral clarity, public honor, and the respect of his fellow knights.
In medieval struggles between right and wrong, the ultimate battleground is the invisible human soul, where a person wrestles with temptation, pride, and sin. But how do you make a silent, internal, spiritual struggle visible and dramatic for an audience? You externalize it through magic. Magic in Arthurian literature provides the moral framework within which temptation, deception, and testing can occur. Enchantments, shape-shifting, and illusions create the narrative conditions for characters to confront their moral vulnerabilities. Magic is used as the stage for an ethical trial: characters must discern truth from illusion, loyalty from seduction, virtue from glamour.
The modern term <a href="https://www.oed.com/discover/revision-glamour/?tl=true">glamour</a> comes directly from this medieval positioning of magic; the word originally meant an illusion or enchantment that makes something appear more beautiful or desirable than it truly is. In Arthurian romance, glamour is not decoration but moral danger, and the shimmering surface tests whether a knight’s inner virtue can withstand the world’s deceptions. By using this magical frame, medieval authors could show how sin rarely presents itself as ugly; it presents itself as enchanting, beautiful, and magically justified. The knight’s task was discernment: piercing through the magical illusion to see the objective moral reality underneath.
The celebrated author of the Narnia books, C.S. Lewis, who himself taught medieval literature at Oxford, positioned magic in precisely this way in &#8220;The Silver Chair.&#8221; The more beautiful and appealing a character was in that story, the more dangerous and dishonest they turned out to be. Undergoing a moral trial like that of the medieval Sir Gawain, the children in the story must resist the temptation to follow a beautiful illusion by choosing to do their duty, however unappealing it feels at the time.
Modern romantasy treats magic differently from the old Arthurian world. In the medieval stories, enchantment was a test. But in romantasy, magic becomes a superpower, a personal strength that expresses identity, desire, and emotional intensity. It is something a heroine “comes into,” something a couple “unlocks together,” something that grows as they grow. That shift matters. Once magic becomes a form of self-actualization rather than a moral hazard, the whole ethical framework of the story has changed. 
Alongside that reorientation, sexual consummation becomes the narrative&#8217;s highest aspiration, and the surrounding moral world must thin out to make room for it. Duty, sacrifice, and communal responsibility have no logical place now that personal fulfillment is the story’s guiding star. Honor becomes the first casualty of this new storyline; the quest is no longer to uphold a kingdom, but to complete the self.
The move away from the ideals of Arthurian altruism has been a slow and subtle constant across the 20th century, from T.H. White’s &#8220;The Once and Future King,&#8221; a retelling shaped by his own pacifism during World War II, to the later habit of casting the Kennedy political dynasty as a modern Camelot. Given the uniformly <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/02/books/review/maureen-callahan-ask-not.html">unchivalrous</a> treatment of women by the Kennedy men, the only point of connection with the Arthurian origins seems to have been physical hotness. The mushy 1995 movie &#8220;<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hq6DJ3JF3iI&amp;t=3s">First Knight</a>&#8221; even portrayed Sean Connery’s Arthur, on his deathbed, blessing Guinevere and Lancelot’s union. 
Romantasy is purely the latest manifestation of a broader cultural shift away from duty and toward self-fulfillment. But has this jettisoning of moral absolutes in favor of expressive individualism made us happier? More fulfilled? More free to be our true selves? The statistical evidence suggests not. Data from long-term scientific studies such as <a href="https://midus.wisc.edu/">MIDUS</a> and the <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0165032725008687#ks0005">Dual-Continua Model</a> now show what earlier generations intuited: that when self-expression becomes the highest good, psychological resilience tends to collapse. One recent <a href="https://research.birmingham.ac.uk/en/publications/virtues-as-protective-factors-for-adolescent-mental-health/">research paper</a> from the U.K. even “explores the decline in adolescent mental health and the weakening of traditional moral frameworks, positing education in the virtues as protective of mental health due to the intrinsic link between moral/existential wellbeing and psychological health.” Well, yes. Quite.
Modern scientific data simply confirm what the compilers of the original Arthurian romances instinctively knew all along: that a strong sense of duty — committing oneself to a community, a code, or a purpose greater than the self — acts as a psychological buffer against mental health crises. A truism familiar to previous generations was “virtue is its own reward.” This is the neglected message of Arthurian romances and a moral truth that all the chili peppers in the world cannot replace.
***
Bridget Riley studied modern history at Oxford and completed a Ph.D. in medieval history at the University of Reading. She writes on history, culture, and the philosophy of religion.
This article is part of <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/introducing-upstream-a-lifestyle-and-culture-section-of-the-daily-wire" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Upstream,</a> The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.

Outlander Season 2, ep 201

The Moral Shift Hiding Inside Today’s Hottest Books

romance

Menu